So far the US reaction has been positive. The CIA is paying BitCoin members to give talks about it. As someone pointed out in a Bitcoin forum, unlike Liberty Dollars or E-Gold, Bitcoin could prove to be a useful way of securely and anonymously paying people off
Personally, I think assassination markets could be a net benefit (think of the bounties on someone like Kim Jong-Il), but then, I like them enough that I write stories about them so I'm biased: http://www.gwern.net/fiction/The%20Ones%20Who%20Walk%20Towar...
"think of the bounties on someone like Kim Jong-Il"
Did you ever think of the bounties on anyone inconvenient to governments or big businesses? The founders of The Pirate Bay, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, BP whistleblowers, environmental activists and climate scientists – would society be better off with them all dead?
One Kim Jong-Il is worth all of Pirate Bay combined, and heck, throw in Assange & Manning as well (they've informed the public, helped out the historians a lot, and caused some irritation, but I see few concrete changes to stack up against hundreds of thousands of dead).
Pennies is a bit extreme. The risk in the enterprise is pretty high, expert assassins rare, and amatures likely to get caught.
While an expert assassin may take a job on a random Joe for on the order of a hundred dollars, an amateur with any sense will not, and therefor the price will be rather high.
And, even if assassinations of pedestrians becomes realistically common..On the order of car crash mortalities, its at least a cause of death that may make people consider how they act toward one another.
e-gold was a centralized system. When they got shut down, you no longer had the ability to receive value for your holdings.
Bitcoin is decentralized. The ability to spend is protected by the private crypto keys in your wallet stored locally (assuming you store your bitcoins on your own computer.)
As long as there is a network of nodes out there ( current view: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=https://smsz.net/btcStats/bitc... ) and your software can reach one or more of them means:
1.) you still have the ability to spend your bitcoins at any time
2.) the recipient has the ability to know that those coins were not spent previously
Shutting down e-gold involved taking down the center. Bitcoin has no center, no "master node" -- only peers.
The most central aspect of bitcoin is found in the exchanges. Those worried about an e-gold situation happening again do not have amounts of any significance (either USD or bitcoins) held by an exchange.
yeah; this is what scares me more about bitcoin than e-gold.
With E-gold, the government went after the owners, and they were able to shut the whole operation down; I lost maybe two hundred bucks worth of gold.
Now, when the government decides to shut down bitcoin, what happens? there is no central 'off switch' - just like drugs, they will have to go after the users, or like illegal information, they will have to go after the viewers.
I mean, I think I'm being a little bit paranoid here, but I just don't see the government leaving a system that works so well for money laundering in place, and all the things I can think of the government doing to dismantle bitcoin seem like they would be quite unpleasant for the users, over and above just losing the money invested.
Trying to go against users is hard, the government is not as dumb as the music industry, to play whack-a-mole versus grandmothers and kids. My guess is they would attack exchanges trading BTC <-> USD. There are fewer, and separating the BTC economy from the USD one would make the currency significantly less attractive. Even the threat to do so would crash its USD price.
>the government is not as dumb as the music industry, to play whack-a-mole versus grandmothers and kids.
I think the war on drugs would be a counterexample to this statement. Especially considering that legitimate bitcoin use is largely confined to nerds, I don't think the government would have a hard time painting bitcoin users as people who ought to be punished.