Monday, April 01, 2013
More misplaced paranoia
It's always fun to watch the 'paranoids' failing to be paranoid when it counts. Consider the popularity of Bitcoin among Randian and hi-tech types.
They believe it's an honest medium of exchange. Nope, it's just another bubble. Proper currency, whether metal or paper, represents the value of labor in a somewhat stable way. Any currency that can zoom up in value in response to news is not proper currency. Somebody is making big money from the zoom, and it's probably the same somebody who started Bitcoin.
They believe it's 'untraceable'. Nope. Very simple test: If Bitcoin were untraceable, drug smugglers would use it. But they don't. Mafias have huge resources and deep connections, and mafias are completely unsentimental. In any subject they find interesting, mafias operate on the basis of observed solid facts. You can trust their opinion far more than you can trust the opinion of columnists and TV personalities; and in this case mafias prefer good old green rectangles. Admittedly green rectangles are traceable to some extent, but a private exchange of paper leaves vastly less evidence than anything running through the Web. When you run a transaction through the Web, you're running it directly through the NSA. That's fact, not paranoia.
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Later update: Well, the seizure of the SilkRoad indicates that I was wrong about the lack of BitCoin usage among criminals... but it proves my main point. Cops were able to trace everyone quickly and easily using digital trails. Green rectangles don't automatically leave trails.
¶ 9:26 AM 
