Some thoughts and links about Bitcoin
Bitcoin is a new digital currency with a twist. The twist is that there is no central authority, no bank, etc. It is based on peer-to-peer networking just like bittorrent. The advantage is that just as governments have been unable to shut down bittorrent, they have no way of identifying, freezing or stealing bitcoin accounts (if you are careful). Here is an article explaining more about bitcoin.
Here is a nice simple article that explains agorism. It doesn’t explain the relationship between bitcoin and agorism but once you understand something about both of them the relationship becomes clear.
Further exploration of the archives of the Bitcoin Weekly lead me to an article about how an online community could choose to incorporate the taxes it’s members freely consent to right into its currency. One of the criticisms of the state’s central bank’s power to increase the money supply – i.e. inflation – is that it really is a form of taxation. Well, recognizing this, and obtaining consent to using it for this purpose, could be a noncoercive means for funding the community’s common endeavours.
For trading in the Bitcoin currency Trade Hill has been recommended by some.
Bitcoin is awesome, but ever since that 25,000 bitcoin (valued at ~$500,000 at the time) theft around June of this year, the value of bitcoin has been dropping fairly consistently. People need to reminded that bitcoin is just like cash and it needs to be protected for the same reasons. The guy that was robbed admitted he did nothing to prevent his bitcoins from being stolen.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=16457.0
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/06/15/close-to-us500k-stolen-in-first-major-bitcoin-theft/
Very true. It should be kept in mind that the theft was not the result of anything wrong with the Bitcoin system itself. It was a security failure by a company offering its services as a Bitcoin bank. If you keep your Bitcoin on your own hard drive rather than in an online bank it is as safe as anything else on your drive – back it up though.