Seeing that the social agreement system and issuance process of what is accepted as money has varied & endured centuries or millennia. How is bitcoin worse than any other form of money?
How is it better? Just some thoughts....
The idea of fiat (inherently worthless) money isn't terrible (e.g. bitcoin is just digital information and dollars/pounds/euros/yen are just pieces of worthless paper with numbers)... IF.... the agreement of it's usage can be widely accepted, well secured and made easy to exchange. Fiat money isn't bad because it's just a way of measuring & proving labour performed that can be exchanged for some item or service that is also fairly quantifiable in terms of labor. A kind of proof of work. One might say gold or precious metals are considered worth money but show no labor value, but that is not correct because of the time it takes a person to search [read: labor] for such things.
If any of you have not seen the documentary "Money Masters: How International Bankers Took Control of America", then find time to watch it. It's three and half hours, and is FAR more interesting than the title leads. It describes the history of money and the problems with our current system since the central banks (i.e. Federal Reserve) have taken control of the issuance of our money supply. It also provides a practical solution to the problems with it to include ending 'fractional reserve' lending. BTW: Few presidential candidates understand these problems with our monetary policies. However, there are those like Ron Paul that carry hope that we can perhaps unshackle the people from these banking cartels.
In the above named documentary, the speaker claims that perhaps the most successful form of money was called the "tally stick" system in England. Lasting, I believe, about four hundred years. The basic way it worked was like so: The king of the land had sticks from tree's that were like rods & cut with notches in the stick to denominate it's value. The sticks were then split down the center. One half of the stick was stored in a vault, and the other was spent into the economy. It was acceptable because the king deemed it so, secure because forgery was impossible (i.e. no two sticks have the same growth patterns when you split them..and the notches could not be changed..unless there was an insider) and it was easy to exchange between people (perhaps in some cases lighter than carrying it's value in gold around). Sadly, if I am not mistaken, it was a new central banking system in England that did away with that most successful tally stick system - go figure.
After looking over the bitcoin system, and as far as I can see..so far.. the bitcoin concept seems very similar to tally sticks. This is interesting to me since the tally stick system was considered the most successful form of currency in history. There is the distinction that there is no king or leader that deems it as good for exchanges. However, the collective of people can perhaps deem it so for themselves.
Despite that nuance.... the similarities are striking.....
Secure. As far as I can see, the security of the system is practically the same. The impossibility of forging a sticks ring patterns is replaced with it seems something as strong as a 32 character strings. Like I said, that is far as I can see. I'm a newbie here after all
With a 32 character string, you have a 42^32 number of combinatorial possibilities. The 42 coming from all characters {a...z} + {A...Z} + the digits {0...9}. These are the kinds of numbers that it seems are used to determine the unique accounts when you are assigned on by bitcoin.exe, but I suspect at least as much is required for securing the coins (preventing a type of forgery). So, not knowing the details yet, it seems to be at least as improbable of forging a coin as 1 out of 42^32...or 1 chance in 8.79 x 10^51. Which does not include any other securing layers that may exist to secure coin transactions. How big is that? Well, one estimate regarding the observable part of the universe suggest that on the order of 10^40 nuclei of an atoms would be needed to fill it. The number 8.79E10^51 is a 100 Billion times larger in magnitude. I think it's fair to say the bitcoins are secure...unless one thinks it likely to pick a single point in the observable universe within the radius of one atoms nucleus.
As for ease of exchange. I think that is quite obvious in this day with the internet. Though, a solution may eventually be needed to make bitcoin transactions in the physical world. And this seems quite possible as people carry around mobile devices like iPods or mobile phones capable connecting into the the Internet.
So, I think bitocins are perhaps the closest we can find to the tally stick system. In fact, it is far better in ways, such as ease of exchange. After all, carrying around a bunch of sticks isn't nearly as easy as point and click.
I don't know all the intricacies of how bitcoin works..so, I will leave it with that caveat. Some skepticism, but also very exicted about the possibilities of eliminating a central banking system that can profit enormously from maipulating the value of money through the cycles of easy and hard money or inflation and deflation.
The international banking cartels will probably vehemently oppose this currency. That is my main concern. Perhpas, moreso than governments. Since they have immense financial resources to influence politics & media, and are apparently driven by an evil love of money - a greed that destroys and cares nothing about the well being of mankind.
