This is an opinion piece. Which is to say don't go in expecting to either learn something new or even to expect a single coherent theme to emerge.<p>It is just a bunch of random pieces of information spliced in with random pieces of information specifically about bitcoins, throw in a link-baity title, and that is this article.
> A pallet of $100 bills that disappears in Iraq is a socialized loss against everyone who holds dollars.<p>What? That was tax money. Further, a true destruction of those bills would not be a loss, it would be a gain to everyone else with dollars.
> Bitcoin’s got its issues. But it is not competing with perfection.<p>Possibly the most salient and eloquent quote I've ever heard regarding bitcoin.
> There’s only a few parties that turn bitcoin (which teleports) into dollars (which buy stuff).<p>They are unnecessary if vendors directly accept bitcoin, at which point you can have your wallet, you can be connected to arbitrary nodes in the network, and you can spend the money from that wallet in transactions with any other wallet and verify against only ~8 nodes in the network to verify with reasonable certainty.<p>> It’s all fiat.<p>This is very true, and a lot of people ignore it. Props to the article for making a deal of it. Gold is not worth a thousandth its current market value if people didn't treat it as a scarce shiny valuable and instead treated it as a good conductor or flaky metal.
Makes me think of Wired's cover story "The Web is Dead".<p><a href="http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/</a>