[Cryptography] What has Bitcoin achieved?
Bill Stewart
billstewart at pobox.com
Thu Jun 5 02:48:54 EDT 2014
The biggest threat that Bitcoin had to overcome was "Nobody uses your stuff".
They did enough with UI and models of usage that they got past the
early phases of that one.
At 02:47 PM 6/4/2014, Jerry Leichter wrote:
>You're taking a remarkably ahistorical view. In the US, the power
>to create coinage (out of materials that carried their own value -
>silver and gold) was restricted to the Federal government, but
>states and many banks issued their own paper currency until after
>the Civil war.
That's somewhat backwards. States weren't allowed to declare
anything to be legal tender other than gold and silver, because the
authors of the Constitution had experience with Rhode Island doing
fiat money. The Feds could still do anything they wanted, if they
could get Congress to agree on it, so we ended up with an odd
bimetallic system where the official ratios of silver and gold didn't
always match the real ones.
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