Tuesday, May 17, 2011

The Quora debate on BitCoin is pretty informative.

2 comments:

Scribe said...

Definitely. For me, my interest in Bitcoin is partially academic - it's a good opportunity to witness economics at a small, open level - and partially practical - e.g. micro-upwards payments with no transaction fees. Also imagine a currency with its own API and you can start to see how BTC is the first real-value (i.e. convertible to GBP) 'programmable currency'.

I suggest checking out places such as http://www.witcoin.com/ and http://www.bitbills.com/ for ideas on where this could go. I don't think BTC will be huge, mainstream. But I do think they have a future amongst geeks - maybe a kind of supplementary, low/no cost, highly automatable value store. That, as things become faster and more virtual, more networked, is a powerful idea.

Ben said...

Doesn't seem like a particularly good idea to me. The deflation issue seems to be particularly insurmountable and it's telling that in the debate linked here the pro bitcoin folk don't seem to understand what that is and why it might be a problem.