A
Devcoin wiki contained a link to
money history hosted on xat.org
xat.org seems to be recovered from backup maid by browser. Only few pages left, the main and money history. But there was more than that. XAT was a project to establish alternative currency and direct democracy, and these pages are missing. The Web Archive failed to provide a previous version of any page (due to machine serving this file were down). I've Google hard and found a working copy
here. I've copied the contents, fixed the URLs (they were absolute, still referring to xat.org) to a relative ones, commented out all the dynamic links (search boxes, forum, and the essential XAT CGI scripts; remember, XAT was an alternative currency experiment). And so I have
http://xat.toom.su/ . One can download a 7zipped backup of this website. BTW, the Web Archive now serves this website again.
I thought the restored pages can pose some interest to forum members. While XAT currency design is far from BitCoin design, the webpages have some interesting examples and historical references.
And, regarding BitCoin, let me quote some paragraphs:
The money changers were pressing for a gold standard because gold was scarce and easier to have a monopoly over. Much of this was already waiting in their hands and each gold merchant was well aware that what they really had could be easily made to seem like much much more.
To cause high prices all the federal reserve board will do will be to lower the re-discount rate..., producing an expansion of credit and a rising stock market; then when... business men are adjusted to these conditions, it can check... prosperity in mid-career by arbitrarily raising the rate of interest.
It can cause the pendulum of a rising and falling market to swing gently back and forth by slight changes in the discount rate, or cause violent fluctuations by greater rate variation, and in either case it will possess inside information as to financial conditions and advance knowledge of the coming change, either up or down.
Stack in front of you the biographies of all the Wall Street giants, J.P. Morgan, Joe F. Kennedy, J.D Rockefeller, Bernard Baruch, and you'll find they all marvel at how they got out of the stock market and put their assets in gold just before the crash.
As soon as Central Banks can control inflation and deflation they can get richer (including BitCoins) by selling and buying in the right time and making other poorer by making them selling and buying in the wrong time since they can't predict economy climate changes equally well. BitCoin might become an enslaving instrument similar to gold.
So, BitCoin is good in the sence we have no ugly restrictions on cross-country payments (PayPal), and there are no legal issues preventing attaching BitCoin to filesharing application, or a CDN, hosting and so on services running on user computers with user having profit from running a serice on their PC. I can also imagine a paid WiFi access point accepting BitCoins only. Legal issues prevent people from doing something like this using non-digital currency. However, BitCoin doesn't protect from Central Banks. As soon as they want they will be able to get enough BitCoins and remain in control of things.
