Bitcoin News

Forbes contributor and Bitcoin Foundation (@BTCFoundation) board member Jon Matonis (@JonMatonis) considers the impact a government ban on Bitcoin would have on the fledgling currency.  Excerpts:

“The demand for an item, in this case digital cash with user-defined levels of privacy, does not simply evaporate in the face of a jurisdictional ban.”
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“Ironically, the ban would create something like the Streisand effect for Bitcoin generating an awareness for entire new demographic groups and new classes of society.”
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“[Bitcoin is] a bet that career mobility and independent contractor businesses will eventually outstrip the growth of the corporate wage-slave population.”
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“[The government’s] best response to Bitcoin is irrelevancy, or failing that, extreme gold-like market manipulation for as long as possible. The end game for the State is perpetuating the fiat myth — their fiat myth not the populace’s cryptographic Bitcoin myth. They have always known that faith in money is a mass illusion, however they never considered that they wouldn’t be in charge of the illusion.”

 - http://onforb.es/112nF0u
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=139516.0 (Further discussion of this article)

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Excerpts from Jon Matonis (@JonMatonis)’ latest contribution on Forbes:

“Bitcoin is about preventing monetary tyranny. That is its raison d’être.”
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“A powerful instrument is needed to prevent a corresponding repression — State monetary supremacy. That task has fallen to an unlikely open source project that is based on cryptography protocols and peer-to-peer distributed computing.”
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“Essentially, bitcoin is a reaction to three separate and ongoing developments: centralized monetary authority, diminishing financial privacy, and the entrenched legacy financial infrastructure. An alternative money provider that was centralized would probably not survive long in any jurisdiction. The emergence of Bitcoin was baked into the cake already.”
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“[Wired’s] Zetter writes,  ’At e-gold’s peak, the currency would be backed by 3.8 metric tons of gold, valued at more than $85 million.’ E-gold founder Doug Jackson wanted to solve the world’s economic woes, ‘but instead got an electronic ankle bracelet for his trouble.’”
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“The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) has been written about many times on these pages and also in The New York Times. Other countries around the world would not even contemplate such a brazen endeavor that imposes a costly withholding and disclosure regime on sovereign foreign entities and financial assets. Furthermore, they see it as American arrogance and American hegemony run amok.”

- http://onforb.es/T3Jrw4
- http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=115445.0 (Further discussion of the article.)

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