Craig <cchayniepub...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The only thing that bugs me about your statement is that you think > bitcoins are not secure against theft. They are, in fact, as secure as you > make them. It's not a Bitcoin flaw. Oh yes it is. The problem is built into the BitCoin origin in Libertarianism. I know nothing about BitCoin software, but I do know about banking, ATMs, credit card transactions and so on. Long ago I wrote software manuals in those apps, just after the Wild West days when programmers could steal money by reprogramming the software in the salami technique, or printing checks with one number in machine readable form, and another in human readable form. (Those were the days!) Here's the thing. Real money, in real banks, is nowadays tied up in many meters of red tape. There are laws, regulations and standards galore protecting electronic assets. Banks in all countries get together with big software companies and government regulators. They pound out huge standards documents regulating every single aspect of it. The system may resemble a battleship in motion with its complexity and overhead . . . but it works. Banks are very secure. Credit card transactions . . . not so much. A lot of problems there, as everyone knows. You said: "as you make it . . ." My point is, you don't "make it" in a bank. You follow elaborate rules or they arrest you and close down the bank. BitCoin was designed to give the finger to big government. Quote: "BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind--to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions." http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want-bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html That is the agenda. I am familiar with it. This sure looks like something put together by oh-so-clever people working outside the system. I doubt they have approval or a shelf full of standards reviewed by drones and detail obsessed programmers in every major government bank regulator's office in the world. If you do not have that level of security, you are vulnerable to organizations such as the Russian Mafia and the Japanese gangsters, because those people have money and talent. They can outwit any collection of Ayn Rand devotees. They are in a different league. By the way, I agree with that author, and this statement: Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying assumptions about human behaviour which are unfortunately wrong). - Jed
