A Quote by Alan Greenspan
I do not understand where the backing of Bitcoin is coming from. There is no fundamental issue of capabilities of repaying it in anything which is universally acceptable, which is either intrinsic value of the currency or the credit or trust of the individual who is issuing the money, whether it's a government or an individual.
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The available supply of gold and silver being wholly inadequate to permit the issuance of coins of intrinsic value or paper currency convertible into coin of intrinsic value or paper currency convertible into coin in the volume required to serve the needs of the People, some other basis for the issue of currency must be developed, and some means other than that of convertibility into coin must be developed to prevent undue fluctuation in the value of paper currency or any other substitute for money intrinsic value that may come into use.
Government, possessing the power to create and issue currency and credit as money and enjoying the right to withdraw both currency and credit from circulation by taxation and otherwise, need not and should not borrow capital at interest as a means of financing government work and public enterprises.
Government should stand behind its currency and credit and the bank deposits of the nation. No individual should suffer a loss of money through depreciation or inflated currency of Bank bankruptcy.
Bitcoin is a currency, bitcoin is a network, bitcoin is a technology and you can't separate these things. A consensus network that bases its value on the currency does not work without the currency.
The United States of America was originally an experiment. But it was an experiment in recognizing God-given individual liberty and creating a government in which we no one is deemed better than another. And in which all of us are equal. Not equal in abilities, but equal in intrinsic worth and value.
Bitcoin is valuable as a currency because of the economic efficiencies the bitcoin network is already creating as transactions flow over it. As with the Internet, more applications will flourish which will make the bitcoin network, and thus bitcoin as a currency, valuable.
At bottom, the battle has been waged on moral grounds. The country has debated whether a society for which the dignity of the individual is the supreme value can, without a fundamental inconsistency, follow the practice of deliberately putting one of its members to death.
What bitcoin does better than the current financial system is it's a better stored value globally. There are a lot of countries that really don't trust their banks or their currency, and bitcoin is an alternative.
With few exceptions, democracy has not brought good government to new developing countries. What Asians value may not necessarily be what Americans or Europeans value. Westerners value the freedoms and liberties of the individual. As an Asian of Chinese cultural backround, my values are for a government which is honest, effective and efficient.
It's a bubble. It has to have intrinsic value. You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. I haven't been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can.
It's completely reasonable, even if some Bitcoin currency purists wouldn't like it, to have credit and debit card payments denominated in Bitcoin rather than dollars, and net settled on Bitcoin instead of on Fedwire.
Growing up, it was uncool to admit that your family had any money. And then, instantly, money was cool. In Reagan's parlance, it was about freedom of the individual, which was freedom to be greedy... individual versus society. There was a weird seduction in that, which I still feel.
The new century will see unimaginable levels of wastefulness and extravagance, but it will also be an age in which the individual human being acquires a true and universally recognised value.
Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.
My view is that the bitcoin is in its very early days, and it is an artificial currency. But whether it is creating new money, whether it is sustainable, whether it would survive - I have many questions about it.
The government, in my judgment, cannot create money; the government can give its note, like an individual, and the prospect of its being paid determines its value.
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