[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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