Done right, it could...
We're doing it wrong! Especially that Norwegian guy with his 3 million % profit. The fools that we are.
we should commandeer it from the radicals and make it work for the rest of us
We can make Bitcoin our own by building on top of it.
ORLY? Sounds like Wired should get into Mastercoin, that's the coin for them.
One solution to the price fluctuation problem is relatively straightforward, albeit imperfect: Don’t hold bitcoins for very long.
What, like the Norwegian guy with his 3 million % profit? That's not imperfect advice at all!
It’s time to empower a central authority to help regulate Bitcoin as it grows. There’s already some precedent for such a move: Just this past summer, a group called the Digital Asset Transfer Authority formed to establish guidelines for digital currencies, including safeguards against money laundering.
I bet that's been successful at stopping people launder money with Bitcoin.
And leadership, despite all the rhetoric about decentralization, has already proven crucial to Bitcoin’s survival. Last spring, when a software update accidentally caused the block chain to split in two, a handful of the protocol’s core developers convinced merchants to stop processing transactions while they steered the community back to a common ledger.It’s not out of the question that superusers could endow a sort of Bitcoin central bank that intervenes when the price fluctuates too wildly.
So there's a lack of centralization, and also wrong type of centralization? Oh, and a proposed central price fixer! Like what the central bankers have, right? Don't they get into trouble for doing that, isn't it against the rules, as well as against the concept of capitalism? They get a slap on the wrist only? How odd!
Would the die-hards go along with this? Probably not. If they don’t, though, there’s always the nuclear option. A group of business-minded cryptocurrency experts could simply take the Bitcoin source code and start over, creating a Bitcoin 2.0 that uses the elegant settlement system, improves the mining process, and adds a layer of oversight.
Bring your business-minded cryptocurrency "experts", let's see what they come up with for "Bitcoin 2.0". I wonder how the mining process could be improved by a shiny new central authority handing out permission to mine to it's "trusted partners"?
This currency, like all currencies, needs to inspire trust to succeed. Bitcoin is going to need leaders and institutions that stake their reputations and money on guaranteeing that the system works. To make the decentralized cryptocurrency a true force in the global economy, it needs a touch of—gasp—centralization.
Let's make the over-arching model for the new currency paradigm the same as the old one!
Labelling Bitcoin as-is as "weird politics" is a dead giveaway. Why don't you take your CentralPlanningCoin to communist China, they love ideas like that, don't they? You did? They didn't? That
is strange, even the Chinese are into this weird politics stuff. Could it just be a new concept that some technology "journalists" don't grasp properly yet? Well, good luck with stopping the runaway train, Wired.com.
