Re: [projectvrm] Bitcoin + Swift

[Kevin Cox < >]

Bitcoins have a value in and of themselves otherwise why mine them and why does their value rise and fall?  The concept is the same as using gold as a currency and gold in and of itself has value. Money is fundamentally credit or debt and it is the trust that the borrower will honour the debt that is important.  Bitcoins, dollars, gold, are all artefacts to make the concept of debt scalable.

Kevin

On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 2:03 AM, Jim Bursch < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

"Unfortunately bitcoin tokens have value in and of themselves"

Bitcoins have absolutely no value in and of themselves. I think you are confusing exchange value. The fact that you can exchange x bitcoin for x dollars does not give bitcoins value in and of themselves any more than the fact the you can exchange dollars for yen would give dollars value in and of themselves.

"trust comes from the trust one party has in the other party to a transaction"

When we are talking about the social construct of currency, we are not talking about trust between parties in a transaction. We are talking about trust in the social construct, and that my trust is congruent with the collective trust. A currency exchange is a minute-by-minute measure of the social construct and the relative value that people are collectively placing in various currencies. In the case of bitcoin, a key component of that trust is the technical integrity of the bitcoin protocol, just as the human integrity of policy makers at Federal Reserve is a key component of trust in the dollar.

Bitcoin was specifically designed to eliminate the need for trust in any human being to operate as a medium of exchange. I think that a personal identity protocol would also have to be designed to eliminate the need for trust, which would, ironically, make it trustworthy.

Jim Bursch
310-869-5340

 
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@jimbursch

On 5/23/2013 12:06 PM, Kevin Cox wrote:

From a technical point of view bitcoin looks attractive as a currency. Unfortunately bitcoin tokens have value in and of themselves.  Tokens for currencies should be zero value.  Read Zaralenga's book "The Science of Money" to see the history of currencies where the tokens have value in and of themselves.  What we want are tokens that are trusted to represent value reliably.  Currencies are a social construct and trust comes from the trust one party has in the other party to a transaction.  Personal Clouds are about trust in the Identity of the other party.  Payment Systems work because of trust - not because we give  money tokens value.  Giving money tokens value means we have to worry about the trust in the token as well as the trust in the parties.  Trust in the transmission of a token can be handled quite adequately with our current encryption technologies.

Kevin

On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 11:20 AM, Mark Jeftovic < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Joyce Searls wrote:

Appears to be a bad link. This should be it. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2013/05/20/bitcoin-comes-to-swift/

On May 22, 2013, at 5:25 PM, Doc Searls< " target="_blank"> >  wrote:

 From Forbes:

http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml

For those of us who have an interest in bitcoin (a form of fungible data) and SWIFT. Interesting stuff.

Doc

I've been meaning to post here about bitcoin for awhile because I think there is a natural alignment with VRM.

A guy named Joe Cascio is working on a concept called "collateralized identities" or as some call it "bit ID" - but it's basically imbuing a bitcoin address with value as a method to vet an identity.

http://joecascio.net/joecblog/2013/03/25/collateralized-identity-using-bitcoin-to-suppress-sockpuppets/

But in my opinion the big idea to come out of his work is using bitcoin to transmit meta data about identities, reputations and other scoring systems, and it would be completely under control of the end user.

- mark

--
Mark Jeftovic < " target="_blank"> >
Founder & CEO, easyDNS Technologies Inc.
+1-(416)-535-8672 ext 225
Read my blog: http://markable.com

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