The Bitcoin Bundle

must look different in my browser or something, page I went to only had white on dark gray background, and some light orange highlights(also on the dark gray background)?

I've seen worse on optimum's homepage(white on very light teal). or that stupid white and pink thing geekologie tried to become awhile ago(hot-pink headings on a white background, ect and that crap seemed to be something that was getting pushed as good design awhile back, in both cases their old site was much better)

It is tied to and backed by government. Since you need to pay (at least taxes and for food) with it, there will always be usage and value keeper of real money. Bitcoins? No more use than pretty monopoly toy banknotes naive people agreed to consider valuable for a while. In the end, gold is at least pretty, bitcoin is useless since it has ZERO use/demand of bitcoins other than entirely artificial one to keep it valuable.

First off, money is just the means by which goods and services are traded, they're not what you trade goods and services for. In other words, money simply represents wealth, it is not actually wealth. In this respect money doesn't actually need to be backed by something with intrinsic value. And the 'value' of money is never dictated, it's the result of supply/demand market forces just like any other commodity. Money has worth because people want it, ultimately deriving from two things: people want to trade for goods and services with money, and the government demands taxes be rendered with money. If money was so worthless would you throw away your wallet? Of course not, because this abstract concept can be traded in for real things.

Yes, it's arbitrary, and yes money has value because people think it does. But look at everything else in society. Are laws valuable? They're just a bunch of rules people agree to adhere to. Is government valuable? It's just a bunch of dudes we allow to run things. Are cultural values valuable? They don't put food on my plate. Social constructs exist because though they may be abstract, they do enable, limit, and streamline the cooperative existence of people so that all can benefit more than they could individually. The use of common units of exchange (i.e. money) removes the need to barter directly for everything one needs or wants. It allows for specialization of work, which actually benefits society as a whole due to comparative advantage. It also provides a security against situations like when all you have is salt but the beef guy only wants wheat.

Hell, gold itself is not valuable either. It's pretty rocks with little unique practical function. And yet for thousands of years it was the basis of exchange, because it was durable, portable, easy to standardize, etc. It was money not because people need it but because it simply made a suitable medium of exchange for things people actually did need. They didn't want gold because hey, gold is awesome, but because they could then trade gold for something else.

Also, fact checking: most money nowdays is digital, not paper, and most of that is created by the private banking system, not the government. Fractional reserve banking, making your money worthless since bankers realized they could lend more than they actually had because no one else had access to their vaults.

hyperinflation? let it have a fall in value, and everybody selling them.
The two "only problems" are what made it useless.
Most people wouldn't consider it portable and identifiable. Please leave Trantor some day a year.

Bitcoins are not portable. Please imagine you have a vallet that can be stolen if someone looks at it - unless you equip it with padlock that instantly burns contents once someone enters wrong password. Why would anyone use it? Oh, look, that is "portability" of bitcoins - either you put really strong password on them, or they can be stolen easily by bruteforcing or guessing. And if you forget the password, they are gone. Forever. "Durable"?

More secure than normal money? I bet currency printing press, special paper with metal strips and paints are a bit harder to obtain than access to network of computers needed to crack password on coins or mine them.

"Not widely accepted" Well, duh, they are not backed by anyone. That's what you need to be "accepted", otherwise it's just a fad.

It will never suffer from hyperinflation, but it already suffers from hyperdeflation due to idiot making them limiting total amount. Deflation is much worse than inflation, economy grows, as people make new stuff similar amount of money needs to be added to system to make everything run smoothly. This alone would instantly disqualify bitcoin in the mind of any serious economist.

Another thing - I can use money to buy bread in shop down the road. Let's assume country adopted bitcoins - how I pay with them then? Shopkeeper needs to have internet-equipped computer, I ask for bread, go home, send him mail with coins, go back to take bread? How is that portable? Also, bitcoins rely on exchange websites - there is about 20 of them, and they can be easily blocked by DDoS attack. Once you do it, for duration of attack bitcoins cease to be liquid. Imagine someone can turn a banknote into strip of white paper in random times - would you want it as currency?

land won't work, the government is going to decide they own not only all the water(so they can tax your wells(sounds made up but in maryland they already tax you for runnoff caused by your roof and driveway preventing rain from soaking into an empty field)) but eventually that they own all the land and you only buy the revokable rights to use it(like steam)(or like japan). and even before that actually happens if you're sitting on something valuable and a big corporation wants it(at least by connecticut's current interpretation(read abuse) of the eminent domain laws) they can take it from you to give to them because they'd generate more taxes from it "therefore its for the greater good".

He's one of the few respectable multimillionaries. Thanks for the text, what he says it's acceptable but only part of the reality. Investors have difficulties to find something in which they can trust that won't value less on one year. That's what made some of them invest in Germany at negative rates.