Digital currency fascinates a lot of folks, including me. A lot of folks also don’t trust it, including me. I have no reason that I can easily articulate why I don’t trust it. Mostly, I think it’s because I don’t understand it very well, and that, in turn, is because I haven’t put in the effort. Or, perhaps it’s more that I don’t really understand the implications of money, in general. It really is a most un-natural idea, when you come right down to it. It’s just a token that represents agreements among people within this other crazy thing that we have invented, called government, that legislates a monopoly on the creation of this un-natural substance (money). I’ve heard lots of horror stories about hyperinflation in countries that start generating lots of money (I do know that this is impossible with digital currency), and this in turn leads to people not wanting to accept the currency, which feeds into some kind of feedback loop until the whole thing (government, currency) comes crashing down. So, unless people really understand this new thing (digital currency), will they accept it? Will they trust it? I don’t know.
Somewhat pertinent to the thread about Ecuador that I started a couple of weeks ago, Ecuador is strongly pushing its own digital currency. It claims that all of it will be backed in the central bank by American dollars (which it adopted in 2000). As part of the legislation to introduce its own digital currency, it also made it illegal to use any other digital currency, e.g. Bitcoin. Some see it as a way of a backdoor exit from the dollar. I have many unanswered questions myself, including whether the software to generate manage the currency is open source, and if not, has the government somehow added a back door for creating more. Here <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/26/ecuador-digital-currency-dollar-rafael-correa> is one of many articles in English about this. On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 12:30 PM, Merle Lefkoff <merlelefk...@gmail.com> wrote: > http://www.coindesk.com/coin-center-bitcoin-advocacy-launch/# > > > > -- > Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D. > Center for Emergent Diplomacy > Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA > merlelefk...@gmail.com > > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >
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