I think that there's a certain amount of truth to this - countries are able to shape their currency according to their interests. For example, China deliberately keeps the yuan weak in order to stay competitive with exports. This tends to benefit the elite and dick over the poor. However, I think that a cryptocurrency is a bad alternative to this, due to the next point:
> These banks then operate through violence to guarantee peoples assets to falsely make the currency look more secure than it is, by threatening you if you don't pay the taxes to recoup the losses of risk in storing your money with someone else.
Having a system of enforcing contracts is essential to having a working currency. You are basically saying that banks are being evil when they repossess and foreclose on property, but if they weren't allowed to do so, they wouldn't lend money in the first place. And like it or not, credit is essential to the functioning of a society; it's been around in some shape or form since the ancient Egyptians. We've come a long way from having a private army come to your house to sell your family into slavery, but it's the same thing in principle - we sign contracts and are held to them. These contracts need to be regulated with the force of the government. There's a large web of mutual obligations here - the government forces banks to lend responsibly, and in turn the government guarantees through the courts and the police that it will enforce these contracts.
Bitcoin doesn't have any of this. And that's why it's so volatile and why speculation drowns legitimate transactions.
>Bitcoin doesn't have any of this. And that's why it's so volatile and why speculation drowns legitimate transactions.
I don't understand. Bitcoins are just an asset so they have all of this under the law. You can't steal people's bitcoins legally anymore than you can steal someone's tv or gold or whatever.
And no, central banks are awful. That is one of the myriad reasons distributed compute power is what makes bitcoin strong. And ironically, central banks are autocratic and blockchains are democratic, while the systems that consistently produce the former are purported republics, and blockchains just come from no ideology or power structure, I guess anarchy.
> My prediction is that at the end there will be an epiphany that our real world currency system is constructed the way it is for a reason. It may not be perfect, it certainly has some major flaws but at the end of the day it's still better than the alternatives.
The current system is giving a monopoly on printing money without any backing store of value besides the confidence in the printer to a select few easily exploitable and corruptible appointed heads of central banks with no mechanism for the fair distribution of new funds. These banks then operate through violence to guarantee peoples assets to falsely make the currency look more secure than it is, by threatening you if you don't pay the taxes to recoup the losses of risk in storing your money with someone else. Is it an arms throw from the worst possible system, which would be the absence of any confidence at all, and it is only with systemic manipulation such a system still works at all. That, and the US dollar is the compulsory international currency for oil, which everyone craves like a cocaine addict without a fix.