[panarky]

> their parents operated in a world based on centralized authority subject to rent-seeking corruption

Krugman is surely correct that it's silly to waste resources digging gold out of the ground only to re-bury it in a bank's vault.

And if Bitcoin was just another currency, it would be equally silly to waste compute resources mining it.

But if crypto-currencies could disrupt even a small part of the centralized, rent-seeking, mafia-economy, then the cost of mining dwindles to insignificance.

It's not about intrinsic value. It's about changing how people transmit value over distance and time. It's about freeing that process from the gatekeepers who control it and extract rents from the labor of others.

[hackinthebochs]

>It's about freeing that process from the gatekeepers who control it and extract rents from the labor of others.

And do you think these gatekeepers are going to relinquish their power quietly? There are many ways that the entrenched powers can stall or even kill bitcoin. One declaration by China saw a loss of 50% of bitcoins value in a day or so. The claim that bitcoin is disruptive to the system is vastly overblown. Guns still rule in meatspace as well as cyberspace.

[panarky]

No, the gatekeepers and rent-seekers will not fade quietly away.

Just as they fought tooth and nail against digital networks and strong cryptography, they will try to smother crypto-currencies in their crib.

But decentralization, pseudo-anonymity, and free software are powerful forces, maybe even more powerful than men with guns.

[eru]

> Just as they fought tooth and nail against digital networks and strong cryptography, [...]

In what universite did that happen?

[baddox]

You could say the same thing about copyright infringement. The governments, with all their guns, still lost that battle, despite very real and high profile lawsuits and crackdowns. When something is extremely easy and completely ubiquitous, it becomes very difficult for government to scale its enforcement. You could say the same thing of something offline, like marijuana in the US (although with that one I would argue that there is no sincere desire on the federal level to eliminate marijuana or even reduce marijuana access and use).

[hackinthebochs]

The problem is that the stuff of copyright infringement is purely virtual. For a currency to be useful it must be exchangeable for physical goods. And this physical commerce creates the endoints that allow governments to exert its influence even in the face of a distributed currency. The battle control of the monetary supply will not be a parallel.