Bitcoin vs. the Banks

[markus_d]

The only thing you can really do to harm banks is withdrawing all your money.
I already did this.
Changed it all to bitcoins.
Of course somebody else has the euros now, but I am glad not to have them anymore as they are worth less and less. As ALL fiat money in the world.
And I have all my bitcoins on an account that is not an exchange. otherwise the exchanges could do the same as the banks do right now.

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[Boussac]

The only difference is that with Bitcoin nobody has the ability to offer unlimited bailouts to cover unbacked credit.

Yes, this is the crucial difference: FRB + elastic money is a deadly combination.

FRB with gold backed money was common practice so there is no way bitcoin can be immune to excessive FRB.
However, with gold, bankers were using the difficulty of moving around gold inventory as a lame excuse for opacity and fraud.
Conversely, a bitcoin bank could not pretend it cannot deliver bitcoins: that's one of the two reasons a bitcoin banking system will be safer and less prone to excess than the current "debt based" banking system.
The other reason is that a bitcoin banking system rides on top of a p2p system: one can always fall back to being one's own bank.

[cryptoanarchist]

The only thing you can really do to harm banks is withdrawing all your money.
I already did this.
Changed it all to bitcoins.
Of course somebody else has the euros now, but I am glad not to have them anymore as they are worth less and less. As ALL fiat money in the world.
And I have all my bitcoins on an account that is not an exchange. otherwise the exchanges could do the same as the banks do right now.

The good news is that with Bitcoin exchanges, if they run off with people's money, they get crucified, and not bailed out. (Bitcoinica)

[d'aniel]

The only difference is that with Bitcoin nobody has the ability to offer unlimited bailouts to cover unbacked credit.

Yes, this is the crucial difference: FRB + elastic money is a deadly combination.

FRB with gold backed money was common practice so there is no way bitcoin can be immune to excessive FRB.
However, with gold, bankers were using the difficulty of moving around gold inventory as a lame excuse for opacity and fraud.
Conversely, a bitcoin bank could not pretend it cannot deliver bitcoins: that's one of the two reasons a bitcoin banking system will be safer and less prone to excess than the current "debt based" banking system.
The other reason is that a bitcoin banking system rides on top of a p2p system: one can always fall back to being one's own bank.

My hope is that something like Mike Hearn's 'Distributed bond markets and pay-to-policy outputs' https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=92421.0 will turn the bank-as-middleman-in-lending into dead weight/an unnecessary liability, and thus prevent widespread FRB from arising in the first place.

[LightRider]

Explain.

Efficient markets save energy, obviously.  But gold can also be used to produce energy.

Saving energy is not the same as producing energy. Gold is not a fuel source to my knowledge.

[justusranvier]

People who ascribe magical properties to gold would be better served by a more standard religion.

[cryptoanarchist]

People who ascribe magical properties to gold would be better served by a more standard religion.

Gold is valuable for its use in electronics, jewelry and industrial applications.

[adamstgBit]

People who ascribe magical properties to gold would be better served by a more standard religion.

Gold is valuable for its use in electronics, jewelry and industrial applications.

The world consumption of new gold produced is about 50% in jewelry, 40% in investments, and 10% in industry

from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold

[BTCurious]

Jewelry itself can be considered a speculation though, since people only wear gold jewelry because gold has a status of "valuable".