[ExI] Bitcoin

[Gordon]

Mirco Romanato <painlord2k at libero.it> wrote:



> The point is "Why implement and accept any alternative digital currency
> over Bitcoin?"

The market seems to treat these alternatives as if they have value, even if ~0 actual commercial transactions are taking place in them. So I defer to the market. Either 1) the market anticipates that the alternate currencies will become transactional, or 2) the market is valuing them for their scarcity alone. 

> It is you come to me and say: let use Zimbabwean $ or Egyptian £ or
> Swedish Crowns. What I should use them if they are managed the same as €
> and $? Just for the sake of making my life more complicated?

I have not investigated all the alternatives, but Litecoin is a relatively minor variation of the BTC system, based on the same code. In the end (if I remember correctly) there will be four times as many LTC as BTC. Because they are so similar, I see them not as currencies of different countries, but rather more like different denominations of the same global digital currency. It's helpful to call them by different names, but it seems to me that the names mean little. They're all Digital Currency. 


Imagine a world much like ours in which rare, shiny metals have value. This hypothetical world differs from ours in that there is no limit to the number of rare shiny metals that can be mined. When we start finding gold and silver and the rest difficult to mine, a new shiny metal is discovered. We continue discovering and mining more shiny metals. In the long run, we have a vast multitude of shiny metals. But this devalues all of them as a group, as it amounts to nothing more than inflation in shiny metals. 

Gordon    
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