Amusing parody from Ledra Capitol: what if government and media
looked at paper money the way they do at Bitcoin?
Excerpts, though the whole thing is comedy gold if you are a
Bitcoin maven:
Bizarre Shadowy Paper-Based Payment System Being Rolled Out
Worldwide
World governments announced a plan today to allow citizens to
anonymously carry parts of their wealth on their person and
exchange it with others using small pieces of colorful paper
printed with nationalistic and Masonic imagery along with numbers
that purportedly represent the amount of wealth each piece of paper
represents (if the paper is not a counterfeit). These pieces of
paper are formally a “note” from each nation’s central bank,
but they are also called “cash” by many – this is a technical
matter that is too complex to cover in our basic primer; Suffice it
to say, that it is representative of the complexity and
user-unfriendliness of this new system….In what will come as a surprise to generations who have grown up
with calculators and computers, ‘bills’ only come in fixed
denominations, requiring users to maintain a large number of these
pieces of paper that must be aggregated to execute a transaction
and then re-aggregated to ‘make change,’ a complex process of
returning to the payee the excess of the payment using yet other
bills. (Don’t worry if this sounds complex, we had trouble
understanding it ourselves at first and it is certainly not ready
for the average consumer in its current form.) …The launch of cash has provoked an immediate reaction from
law-enforcement agencies worldwide that universally condemned the
development.“Cash is a 100% anonymous and untraceable payments
technology. It is like a weapon of mass destruction
launched against law enforcement,” said Mike Smith, the recently
confirmed FBI Director. “It is the perfect payment mechanism
for criminals, drug cartels, terrorists, prostitution rings and
money launderers….Banking Superintendent of New York State, Mike Smith had the
following to say: “I can’t think of any reason that a law-abiding
individual would want to use cash. At a bare minimum, we believe
there should be a licensing procedure for individuals or businesses
that plan to use cash, a ‘Cash-License’ as it were….”Others have concerns about forgery and counterfeiting.
“Ultimately, even with all the fancy inks, cash is just a piece of
paper. We fully expect criminal groups and rogue nation
states to print fake cash in order to profit or to disrupt the
economies of their enemies,” said Mike Smith, an analyst at
Stratfor. “In the interim, we are certain that cash will
trade a discount in the real-world, given the risk to a
counterparty of accepting a forged piece of paper; no doubt cash is
a huge step back from the modern cryptography in place throughout
our current financial system.”…..Though hard to imagine, cash operates with no consumer
protection at all. If your ‘bills’ are stolen or lost,
they are gone forever….
Sure, some people may market “wallets” that will supposedly
protect your cash, but:
But some early adopters have reported that the hardware wallets
have security flaws. “I was out in Bangkok two weeks
ago at a bar and I forgot my Gucci wallet there,” said Mike Smith,
a visiting tourist. “When I returned the next
morning, my wallet was there but my cash was gone!” We
contacted Gucci regarding this hacking attack, but a spokesperson
would not comment “about confidential customer financial
matters.”Even criminals have not been immune to the risks of
cash. The notorious “Silk Road” drug-dealing
marketplace, where vendors and customers left envelopes full of
cash (on which they had very clearly written their names) in an
anonymous drop-box that managed the exchange, mysteriously closed
last week, citing ‘theft of the cash due to a bug in the envelope
sealing process.’ ….’In what might be most unusual limitation on cash, it only works
for payments within 36 inches or less (or the so-called “arm’s
length transaction” as hackers in the community have colorfully
titled it) as it has to be handed from one (human) party to another
to execute the transaction.This requirement is widely thought to be a fatal flaw of
cash by traditionalists.Mike Smith, VP of Retail Banking at Chase said: “A form of
payment that cannot be used at a distance, cannot be used for
e-commerce, cannot be used by mobile devices, cannot be used for
machine based transactions, cannot be scripted or programmed,
cannot be thought of as a payment system….Remarkably, if you attempt to use cash in a different country
from the one that issued it, it will categorically be
rejected….Economists are flabbergasted that lawmakers have allowed cash to
be adopted….Environmentalists expressed concerns about the impact of cash on
the environment. “You would have thought that in 2014,
we would have moved beyond pesticide and water intensive cotton
farming [retracted: cutting down trees], treating the cotton with
dangerous inks and transporting it with fossil fuels, only to
represent a value like “20” that can be represented electronically
at effectively no cost…..
Bonus Bitcoin links: Derek Khanna
defends Bitcoin and digital currencies from the hidebound
opposition of the likes of paper money mavens Alan Greenspan and
Paul Krugman, analogizing them to people opposed to phones in an
age of telegraphs; Cathy Reisenwitz on
the “social issue” benefits of Bitcoin, when it comes to access
to both credit and charity for the world’s poor.
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1jOG3YF
via IFTTT