Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto

Care to make a wager? I'll lay 2:1.

It's only considered voting against your own interest when a poor person does it. When a relatively well off person is campaigning for higher taxes, voting against their won interest, then it's a principled stand.

Even the creators are at the mercy of the mining collectives, though.

Once the Bitcoin generation rate falls to a level where the miners' primary incentive is transaction fees I expect we'll see an aggregation around a handful of big collectives, which will be the Bitcoin equivalent of Visa and Mastercard.

And what will they say?

Want your transaction processed? No matter if you're Satoshi himself, pay the fee.

> I am aware of the usage of like in the simile context. Thank you for your concern however.

First off, apologies if you took that as an insult, it wasn't meant that way, I just didn't want my words to be twisted and lose the original meaning that I was making a comparison to a value increase of a given stock or commodity, using an IPO as an example.

> I don't believe that there are any currencies, which when launched, were purely floating without any bands or a peg.

I understand the point and I believe it to be correct, but only to a point (national currencies, BitCoin is not one of those). This is why I was mentioning commodity currencies. See gold isn't backed by anything, we use it because of historical significance. I understand you may say, it has value because of its conductive properties and use in chips but originally we actually used it as a currency because it a) was useless to make tools out of as it is a soft metal b) did not oxidise like other metals at the time c) was scarce.

Once we abstracted value to gold (or other precious metals), we used it to solve the coincidence of wants problem and that is what a currency does. Obviously I know you know about the gold standard that followed and how it was subsequently abandoned but it is important to note that I can still a) store value in gold b) exchange gold for goods and services.

Take South Africa (where a third of the gold ever mined comes from). They mint KrugerRands (gold) and they mint their national currency (Rands). Rands might depreciate in value due to low international demand and KrugerRands might appreciate in value due to high international demand (for gold) but both are a currency and South Africans can pay their taxes with those KrugerRands (using the spot price of the gold value converted to Rands). The same applies to Federally minted gold coins, they have value all over the world as a medium of exchange (based on the gold value) and I can pay taxes in the US with them as they are legal tender.

There is no peg for these gold coins, they are worth what the market says they are worth. Should you have gotten in on the ground floor with gold, you would have been a very rich man using something that was considered interesting but ultimately useless some time before. Obviously that wasn't really an option as this story unfolded over a very long time, but we know that is no longer the case in an ever connected world. Changes that once took centuries can happen inside of a decade now (interestingly enough, although valuable at the time, the fortune gained by Mayer Amschel Rothschild with gold in the late 18th century was not the largest fortune ever gained, once the gold standard was adopted in the 19th century, it was probably the largest fortune in the modern world, by far. Something his descendants still benefit from to this day).

> Continuing the question, are there any currencies that are pegged to a basket which includes commodities?

Yes. I think we are confusing currency with national currency though and I have beaten that dead horse already.

> I'm not sure if you were referencing the Kuwaiti Dinar as one of those.

I was referring to the Kuwaiti Dinar being a success in terms of value fluctuation. I used it as an example because I made money with it once and it is regarded as the strongest national currency (although not a major currency). It was pegged to the pound originally and the pound devalued 6 years after. The value appreciation is nothing like BitCoin but to me, BitCoin is closer to gold than a national currency, as I said.

> Very sorry if my English was not clear enough to express my question in the initial format. In the future I'll be sure to elucidate the question better rather then assuming the reader is able to follow along with the simile from the parent comment.

I think you mean "than" :p (just kidding, don't get offended).

All jokes aside, I think one thing that is missing from all these discussions is that the value of BitCoin (at least as it seems to me) isn't that you use it as a primary national currency (although I suppose it could serve that purpose in some places), but rather that it might be a contender for an international currency that mitigates inflation risks (which in recent years is what China[1][2] and Russia[3] have been pushing for, since 2009, year of BitCoin's inception) because right now the USD as a reserve currency seems a bit unfair to people outside of the US (and a few other nations). Say I want to buy barrels of oil, most of the world oil is denominated in USD. That is great for Americans because it keeps the dollar strong but if I am in say, Indonesia, it ultimately decreases demand for my currency, putting me at a disadvantage just to keep my economy running.

All that is not to say I believe the success of BitCoin is guaranteed (far from it), or that this is the role BitCoin will take, but key players have suggested it has been China's intention all along (by buying more gold than any other country on the planet), to create (or at least push) a new supranational currency. This century is almost certain to have a supranational currency adopted as a standard (SDR's don't really satisfy that niche).

[1] http://www.bis.org/review/r090402c.pdf

[2] http://www.vancouversun.com/Business/asia-pacific/China+yuan...

[3] http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/06/16/bric-medvedev-curr...