Bitcoin Roundup: Buy More With It, ATMs Spreading, Better than Credit Cards, China Has Reason to Fear It, Krugman Thinks It’s Evil, Cowen Thinks It’s Overpriced

Some stories and speculations from the Bitcoin beat:

•Attempts on the part of the Chinese government and banking
system to restrict free trade in Bitcoin is happening for a very
good reason, if you are the Chinese government,
Daily Reckoning points out–for all the same reasons a
normal human being would love the cryptocurrency:

China tightly regulates all the money flowing in and out of the
country. You can’t just bring a bunch of cash into the country, in
part to prevent people from buying up the local currency (which is
generally believed to be deliberately suppressed). And China makes
it hard to get money out of the country as well….

Bitcoin offered/offers an even quicker way to get your money out
of the border. Buy 10,000 yuan work of bitcoins on a site like BTC
China, transfer those bitcoins to a wallet outside of the country,
and then sell those bitcoins in some new currency in a different
country. Voilà, your money is liberated!

•Supposedly great economist Paul Krugman thinks that Bitcoin,
because it has such rich opportunities for liberating money holders
from government control, is private, non-inflationary, has the
potential to damage the interest of government central banks, and
not backed by violence and force, is for all those reasons
obviously evil.

• Bloomberg News reports that
merchants accepting Bitcoin have tripled in number in the past
month.

• Entrepreneur magazine on the spread to dozens of
countries, and competition in the market to make,
Bitcoin ATMs.

• Timothy Lee in the Washington Post explains how use
of Bitcoin and Bitcoin like protocols
can solve the frustrating problems of credit card companies
preventing you from making international transactions you want to
make because they suspect fraud. Like with anyone in the Internet
age still trying to make a living being a middleman, conventional
credit card companies should be a little nervous.

• Economist Tyler Cowen thinks that market competition in alt
currencies means the price of Bitcoin in dollars must plummet,

and plummet a lot, down to approximately the marketing costs of
alt-coin competitors. Bob Murphy thinks his logic is similar to
saying that quarters
will outcompete dollars in the market since you can get more of
them for less.

Reason on Bitcoin.