| >USA dollars are not "backed by courts and police" (what does that even mean?). >Property cannot be null or void, so a government decree as such would be meaningless. Sorry for writing in shorthand and not making the meaning clearer. It's not the property that's nullified but the transaction of that property. Ok, you agree to buy a car or domain name from a seller for 100 bitcoins. After you pay the 100, the seller keeps the keys/title/domain. You go to court to help recover your "money" -- aka bitcoins, because it was a fraudulent transaction. The court doesn't recognize the transaction because it doesn't recognize bitcoin as legal consideration. Case closed. You then try to go to the police/sheriff to seize "your" property. The police ask for the court order. You don't have one. If the government wants to pass a law stating that bitcoin transactions are not recognized, it can do so. It doesn't have to pass such a law at the moment, because bitcoin transaction volume is trivial. >In the US, government power is derived exclusively from the people, by the people. Did the "power of the people" stop FDR from confiscating gold?[1] Gold was even more entrenched than bitcoin is today. Did the "power of the people" direct the government to take their 1980 dollars and reduce its purchasing power to 1/3rd in 2016?[2] There's a difference between repeating the ideals of "government of the people, by the people, for the people" from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and the reality of how government actually exercises its power _against_ the people. If Bitcoin activity got so large that it threatened the USA government's power to manipulate its Federal Reserve Notes to pay debt obligations (at least in nominal terms) or inflate the money supply to pay for Social Security & Medicare, it will make all bitcoin transactions null and void by decree. Therefore, I disagree with paavokoya that Bitcoin will make fiat currencies like US Dollars and Euros "obsolete". Bitcoin doesn't have that power because Bitcoin doesn't come with its own courts, police, aircraft carriers, etc -- a.k.a. all the apparatus of government. It's the backing of government that enabled the US Dollar to become a global reserve currency. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 [2]http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1000&year1=1980... |
I don't understand what this means. Courts don't only consider cases where you pay ordinary money for an exhcange of goods. Contracts exist for purely material exchanges, so I don't see "give me bitcoin for X" wouldn't count.