The Future of Cryptocurrencies 221
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the start-mining-Americoins-and-Mexicoins-and-Coinadas dept.
from the start-mining-Americoins-and-Mexicoins-and-Coinadas dept.
kierny writes "Today, Bitcoin, tomorrow, the dollar? Former Central Intelligence Agency CTO Gus Hunt says governments will learn from today's crypto currencies and use them to fashion future government-protected monetary systems. But along the way, expect first-movers such as Bitcoin to fall, in a repeat of the fate of AltaVista, Napster, and other early innovators. But the prospect of fashioning a better, more stable crypto currency system — and the likelihood that Bitcoin may one day burn — is good news for anyone who cares about crypto currencies, as well as the future and reliability of our monetary systems."
Re:Is that so? (Score:4, Insightful)
Except iTunes 1.0 didn't come out until the same year Napster was shut down.
I didn't support iPod's until after Napster was gone too. (probably because iPod's didn't exist then)
so:
Napster -> iTunes, Bitcoins -> something that doesn't exist yet, not Dogecoin. Dogs don't need currency.
Expect it to fall our flourish? (Score:4, Insightful)
AltaVista was merely one search engine in a pool of many.. Yahoo, Hotbot, and Lycos were all around at the time and they did not all fail.
Napster only failed because the government/court system took them down. If it weren't for Napster being forced to close up its business, there were no indications that people were leaving it. Napster was a disruption in the industry and major players moved in unison to take it down.
A direct contrast to this comparison is TCP/IP. Since the creating of TCP/IP, there have been numerous (arguably better) protocols. However, the whole Internet runs on TCP/IP and it does not look to be going away any time soon. Like most new technologies, I would guess that the first virtual currency to be widely adopted would be the virtual currency that becomes the standard. Any new currency has a huge uphill battle in trying to become more mainstream than Bitcoin at this point.
Bitcoin is designed so that governments or other entities cannot take it down. The fact that governments, corporations, or single powerful individuals cannot control it is a feature - not a flaw. Gus Hunt, along with every other powerful well-established individual, would naturally be against the adoption of Bitcoin. But, saying to expect it to fail looks more like wishful thinking on their part.
Valueless? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Value" has no meaning other than in relationship to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human—"market value" is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible. [...] This very personal relationship, "value", has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him."i/>
-Lt. Col. Jean V. Dubois (Ret.), pp. 93-94 [Starship Troopers]