Anyone notice that as soon as I put a Bitcoin-begging widget in my gutter over to the right the Bitcoin market tanked? Fraud, hacking, theft, corruption. Who would've guessed that an unregulated on-line "currency" market would be subject to such problems?
My putting that up was more an inside joke than anything. Wisdomie and I have been having a vigorous back-and-forth about this matter for months.
Fiat currencies—that is, government back monies like the U.S. dollar—can be pegged to a discernible valuation: a basket of commodities such as oil, orange juice, sow bellies, gold, e.g.—and are backed by the full faith and credit of their issuing nations. That is to say, they can send in their armies to support and sustain them.
These anarcoins®© or anarcurrencies®© are the darlings of libertarians and anti-government activists. Also, money launderers, drug dealers, sex traffickers, and other unsavory characters. They have no muscle behind them. Their only valuation is the price a willing buyer will pay a willing seller at a given transactional moment. Unfortunately, the knowledge market is skewed. There is no way to mark them to the market because there is no underlying value.
Pump and dump schemes like the currency has experienced over the past few weeks victimize the ignorant, the trendy, the vulnerable. The people who have hordes of Bitcoin have been trying to drive up the price so they can dump them on the unwitting before the market crashes even further.
Forewarned is... well, you know the rest.
This is good.
ReplyDeleteOTOH, watching what our masters of the universe are doing to us isn't much consolation, either.
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