Hi, On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 2:36 PM, Randy wuller <[email protected]> wrote:
I have listened as long as I can to this discussion of Bitcoin by a > community of those alleged technical people (ie scientists) on a email list > devoted to for the most part "Cold Fusion/LENR". > I know of two or three scientists on this list. The rest of us are engineers, software developers, lawyers and perhaps a poet or two. If we are alleged to be knowledgeable when it comes to the science behind LENR, the person doing the alleging probably does not know much about physics or chemistry. For the most part we are hopeless amateurs chattering away, waiting for the next snippet of LENR news or weird science to come through. Most of the people on this list who would know something about the physics behind LENR watch from the sidelines. Bitcoin isn't valuable because it has a limited supply, it is in essence > worthless for that reason. > I agree. Bitcoin's built-in deflation is its Achilles heel. James will surely disagree with me on this one, but I'm happy to go along with modern economics on the question of deflation. Keep in mind in this regard that bitcoin is just one among a number of cryptocurrencies; there are other cryptocurrencies that do not have built-in limits. Although bitcoin has some fatal flaws, as a representative member of a new class of currencies it is very interesting. It takes a shift in perspective to see this, sort of like the one needed to appreciate Twitter. At first I thought Twitter was solely the domain of narcissists. Then I saw the Green Revolution in Iran and after that the Arab Spring, and how people were making heavy use of Twitter for organizing protests. That indicated to me that there was something more than meets the eye with Twitter, and that we were looking at something new in the world. I see something similar going on with the new cryptocurrencies. The thing I'm most excited about at this point is the possibility of cutting out the middlemen and the fees they can charge; for example, 40 dollar international transfer fees that are extracted as rent by banks because they can do it. Cryptocurrencies make it possible to think about a few software developers working in a garage coming up with a way to bypass these rents altogether. Eric
