Pete Storey
Aug 8, 2017 · 1 min read

“Decentralized. So no one government entity can quietly mint money for their own purposes and have access to your transactions, accounts, etc”

Surely the absolute opposite is true — _everyone_ can see all your transactions, accounts and so on, as scammers trying to use bitcoin to get payment for scams are discovering. It’s fairly easy to look at the transactions for an account and try to work out who it belongs to — especially as you have to use exchanges to turn it into actual money you can (realistically) spend.

These currencies are the ultimate fiat currency — except without any sort of implicit backing (in the case of the US dollar, in effect the backing of the ability to tax the work of 300 million odd reasonably productive people).

Since there’s an awful lot of trading, and hardly any actual spending in these currencies, plus at the moment enormous centralisation with some early miners having huge stocks of “wealth”, it would take very little for the whole thing to collapse. People are buying Ether on the offchance the whole contract thing can become a serious reality, _and_ if it does, Ether will be it — the latter part being doubtful.

It’s a huge bubble — to an earlier post of yours, “if you don’t understand how the money is being made, it’s time to get out” — quite.

    Pete Storey

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