Is Bitcoin the most dangerous open source project ever?

Oh fuck, Calicanis is on the bitcoin-promotion train now.<p>Now here's a note to the other bitcoin article-spammers. Watch Calcianis and learn. He's done everything right for memetically engineering the kind of article that gets upvoted.<p>1. He's asked a provocative question, the kind which makes people want to argue with it ("Why no, I'd say that such-and-such is the most dangerous open source project ever").<p>2. He's used attention-grabbing words like "dangerous" and geek-friendly terms like "open source".<p>3. And almost the entire article is made up of point-form lists. Everybody loves point-form lists.

Completely unrelated to this site, but did anyone else panic and think their monitor was covered in smudges while reading this site? Worst background ever: <a href="http://launch.is/storage/launch_bg.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://launch.is/storage/launch_bg.jpg</a>

I'm not sure it's 'dangerous,' unless you're seeing through the eyes of a government, credit card company, or financial middle-man. Bitcoin empowers people, and removes companies or governments out of simple value transfers.<p>It's as though someone has created another Napster, except everyone's a 'node' and music isn't transmitted, 'wealth' is. Bitcoin is only as revolutionary or 'dangerous' as you want it to be.<p>HN folks may be interested in some of the discussions going on in Quora: <a href="http://www.quora.com/Bitcoin" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Bitcoin</a>

If you're left wanting a high-level technical explanation, the Wikipedia page seems to be a decent one <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Technology" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Technology</a><p>(Answered some fairly obvious questions I was left with after reading like "how do they aim to stop someone from spending the same coin everywhere and then disappearing before anyone else notices?")

Why is it that any time the subject of private voluntary human interaction comes up, so many people immediately think of the risk of mass death, horror, and self-destruction? What a dismal state of mind. I look on the bright side, because I know that human life <i>depends</i> on private voluntary human interaction, and is ultimately impossible without it.

why would this lead to prosecution by world governments? well, ok, maybe it will for a while, but if the tech really were to take off, it would just end up being taxed in the end anyway. Taxing it isn't harder than taxing cash transfers.<p>this is all very cryptonomicon to me.

My only gripe is it's quite difficult to find a way to transfer real-currency to BTC easily, and fast. I have to pay $25 - $50 for a bank transfer if I only want to get 10 BTC?<p>It was easy and useful to use PayPal, until everyone started getting banned.

So I have a couple of questions. First, the claim is that it cannot be taxed. Has the IRS said that exchange of Bitcoins for, say, labor, cannot be taxed?<p>Further, does anyone remember the Liberty Dollar? I remember a famous hacker exhorting "Don't mess with the Eagle".<p>Just askin.

I don't think (m)any of Jason's projections will come to fruition. We've seen this movie a number of times before (Digicash, et al) and I don't see why today's environment is any different. They all had the exact same early momentum as we are seeing with Bitcoin and all, of course flamed out hard with zero government action (while PayPal thrived spectacularly). The fact of the matter is that digital money is appealing only to a teensy, tiny group of people.

Bitcoins breach the divide between the physical and digital worlds, and it seems that when that happens the old guard throws a fit (cf. digital music/games).

To answer your question: yes.