On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 1:08 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote:

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 11:56:06AM +0200, Alfonso De Gregorio wrote:

...

I'd better rephrase it in: expectation to have "money backed by bitcoins" exhibiting all the desirable properties of a perfect currency (ie, stable money) are greatly exaggerated.

The question is not whether it's perfect, but whether it's good enough.

The acceptable distance from a stable currency, as the concept of good enough, depends again on what you are trying to achieve. As a digital currency, and distributed system, Bitcoin is nothing less than truly ingenious. I'm enthusiast about it. However, Bitcoin it's neither local nor should be confused with a system ready to be a sound alternative to the gold standard. And in the debate was rised a question about the eventual effect of having money backed by BTCs instead of gold. My argument stems from there. Btw, there's a nice article published few weeks ago by Nathan Lewis on Forbes: A Return To Basics: What Is Stable Money? http://www.forbes.com/2011/06/30/stable-money-gold.html

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org

alfonso _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE