Seems like they want to implement something that is already available, aka. Bitcoin. Funny how the keep missing this important piece of information. One would think its a godly intervention
Of course they wanna cut, this is standard operating procedure for Catholicism. You are aware that Gutenberg came from a family of ecclesiastic minters, right? Basically, the idea at the time, was that any gold that hadn't been "purified" by the papacy was impure and not fit for the hands of a stock sinner commoner. They had to spend lots and lots of time to come up with enough golden soul saving coin, so that they'd have a decent furni setup in heaven. It's the same game played by the SS/Treasury, video 'game' card vendors, and copyright dealers.
To summarize RAW, "How come the mob can print a higher quality dollar bill, but the US Treasury gets to wave a magic wand over theirs and make it golden? Who falls for that shit?" -- I personally believe that the US Treasury is more then excited to watch, observe, and eventually integrate any technology that proves itself. I'm somewhat surprised that they haven't issued a statement or arranged a house committee on the subject already. They get free stuff to make their job easier, BTC stakeholders will know to come to a hearing on the subject and should be more then able to handle themselves. These problems and grievances should be aired in a public forum. There will be a generic showing of 'the old guard,' who will be mocked by young representatives, and revered by the older ones; but in the end, a high quality trading system in a free market will prevail (I know I"m certainly not the judge of that, if I were, I'd be taking a 1% tax in 'indulgence fees' on all your backs).
While I do think it is important for people to be able to interact with token economics trading without endless validity concerns, and they should be able to voluntarily invest in third & fourth party authentication of their tokens, I am unsure how I'd feel about that being a major political, breeding and food bank decision maker. Not only did the printing press create massive waves of literacy across the planet (the first self replicating machine, some say); it began interstate trade as we know it. People were no longer bound to their township salvation dealers for the eucharist. This has happened many times with decent paper, and continues to this day. The biodiversity issues in the gene pool alone should have been enough to get the monotheists to stop controlling information flow (remember the plague?), but it has been shown time and time again that absolute power is nothing more then evil.
The problems associated with a Papal Bank are exactly the kinds of problem that the Treasury would be mandated to stop, so any form of relationship between BTC and the 'pope' would be completely insane here in the US; I don't give a damn about the generic religious freedom response. As is, the only critique that, I believe, the US Treasury could possibly have regarding BTC is for out of country transfers; and we do need to decide if we want to continue to regulate trade with foreign partners after 70 years of world banking. We've passed laws against product dumping, for instance. We have given the powers of weights and measures to NIST (who is always welcome to feedback, I've found). If we want BTC to remain a completely 'free' currency, we will have to re-evaluate issues like this, because we're the ones paying to give the power to regulate... It may really only be worth maintaining for 'digital type' goods, because our average (very low) literacy rate is below the threshold of understanding that they cannot actually authenticate a value to a printed good. It would be like the IRS maintaining an Art Department... Oh wait, they just did, nm.
Either way, we don't get to make any of those decisions when the only form of dispute resolution involves the use of panic from the unknown (fear of death). Or maybe God's just pissed because you memorized your privkey, made it past St. Peter, and were able to start waging your own wars on earth with Chance. It's simply never going to be a rational discussion, AND YOU'RE GOING TO HELL FOR MENTIONING IT.
