>Uh oh. Remember Paycoin, with its "Prime Controllers" and "guaranteed minimum value". That didn't end well. The whole point of all this cryptographic machinery is supposed to be to eliminate the need to trust some central party or parties.

Personally, I'd compare this to Ripple; semi-centralized transaction timestamping seems to work ok for them.

>It's conceptually elegant, but the process is complex and delicate. Lots of things can go wrong, and it needs "challenge periods" of about a day during which things get sorted out.

I agree.