Wired contributor Dan Kaminsky (@DaKami), the security researcher who “broke the internet” some years back, opines on Bitcoin. Excerpts:
“The internet has proven to be a pretty big deal for global society, and Bitcoin could basically be thought of as the Internet, applied to Money.”
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“Bitcoin is about as friendly to [regulation] as the rest of the internet is — not very. To put it another way: Bitcoin’s a dollar bill, with a teleporter built in. We can just poke in a few coordinates and poof, off it goes, with the ease of posting to some forum somewhere. That’s somewhat new.”
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“But its real value proposition is as a medium for transfer. It really works. And keep in mind, if we’re just holding the currency for a few minutes, we don’t care about the absolute value.”
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“Bitcoin’s resilience comes from a property I refer to as Too Big To Regulate. Put simply, it’s easier to tell ten people to behave, than ten thousand. So if we want a system that’s impossible to regulate, get the power in the hands of ten thousand rather than ten.”
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“In Bitcoin, because everything’s backed by cryptographic keys, one can actually prove s/he has access to a certain amount of Bitcoin. We are either able to sign messages linked to the private keys, or we are not.”
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“I don’t really see the volatility declining in the present model. But this is an experiment. And it continues.”
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“Short of an all out war on technological innovation, it’s just really tricky to see how to even try to stop Bitcoin. The internet was not the first time networked communication was tried, but it was the first time a major network became available that didn’t have gatekeepers everywhere.”
- http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/05/lets-cut-through-the-bitcoin-hype
- http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=194554.0 (Further discussion of the article)
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