Peter Schiff had a massive comeback.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=0L7SOPDOvvITurns out he believes in digital gold too. He wants it to happen. But bitcoin isn't gold.
Digital gold was E-Gold, backed by physical gold.Digital gold would be a currency that is backed by the commodity that is used in jewelry, medicine, electronics, nanotechnology, space travel, catalytic converters. Like paper money backed by gold.
Looks like all the gold-bugs should be investing in an electronic gold structure. I know I will be looking at coding a prototype in Assembly x86, buying some equipment and working with some chip designers to ensure integrity. I'm thinking of taking the mintchip idea and sponsoring my own prototype and then partnering with a non-profit group.
Either way I have a lot of time on my hands as I am retired. I've seen a lot of things change in this world, and after I leave this planet, more will change. At the moment I'm thinking of using machine learning techniques to do proof of stake, i.e. you will have to physically deposit gold at a place to receive a share which can then go through a bitcoin system. The owners themselves would have no control or ability to manipulate fictional amounts. Although, when E-Gold was around, we didn't see Douglass Jackson just printing money for himself. Either way for confidence there will need to be a system for this. Unless I team up with the Mint, but I'm not sure they will accept the proposal as it would require worldwide acceptance with all the other mints. We would be effectively creating the gold standard again.
No need to mine, with servers located around the world. No transaction fees. The only startup costs would be the chip or software which should realistic only cost $25 like the raspberry pi. Servers will be funded by donations wikipedia style. All transactions will be publicly published unlike E-Gold. If you get scammed, you will be able to identify and sue the party on the other side. It's going to work. Either way, best to have something in the making in case bitcoin fails. Hopefully ASIO won't knock on my door.
I look forward to creating a thread and/or forum to discuss this soon. The one thing I believe mintchip did wrong was not backing it by gold. There were no benefits to using digital cash because we already have digital cash in the form of debit cards.
What we don't have is a good trusted low transaction fee digital gold. We have some gold wallets, but their fees are too high. E-Gold was big and had relatively low transaction costs, bullion storage costs were low due to economies of scale. I should know, I used it a lot until it was taken down. If an old grandma like myself can get involved in e-currency, then I'm hoping others with less skill will use proper digital gold.
I also hope to exceed bitcoin's R&D budget due to the lack of need for mining. Lots of money going into bitcoin R&D was actually going into GPUs, FGPAs, and then ASICs.
None of it was going into developing the actual coin. The developers aren't even bothering to sell their coins to fund further development. Either way, bitcoin has taught me a lot of why some things fail. Knowing how to fail, let's you know how to succeed.