On the one hand, it is a truly revolutionary technology, but, on the other, it is a truly useless one so far. Which is to say it is a virtual currency nobody buys thing with…What is the problem then? Well, the same thing that makes the miners want to get bitcoins also makes nobody want to use them — their scarcity…But it’s not just that bitcoin’s very nature makes people want to hoard them. It’s that bitcoin would not be worth using, anyway. The whole point, remember, is the currency is supposed to make it cheaper to send things online. That’s not what’s happened. Even with its rather limited number of transactions, bitcoin’s restricted number of coins means you do, in fact, have to pay fees…That, as I have said before, has become a Ponzi scheme for redistributing wealth from one libertarian to another. Actually, I would like to amend that a little bit: Bitcoin has now graduated to being a Ponzi scheme for redistributing wealth from one person to another.
Eulogy made by Matt O’Brien
