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But, I still have my Bit Wallet.
It's like the Lord loves us sometimes.
Where would I store them for safe keeping?
Why the fuck can't I read? I thought that said botcon and got excited. I love me some botcon...
If the last two weeks have taught us anything, it’s that there is nothing magically transformative at all about Bitcoin. Mt. Gox’s woes impelled Japan’s financial authorities to announce that they will now start regulating Bitcoin. The founder of the online drug emporium Silk Road, once cited as proof that Bitcoin enabled resistance to the powers that be, is now in jail. The geeks and dreamers who founded the first Bitcoin institutions are being replaced by Silicon Valley start-ups. There is no room for libertarian utopia in this scenario.
The irony here, though, is that a good argument can be made that doomsayers are overstepping when they write Bitcoin off as a complete failure. Good programmers and successful start-ups learn from their mistakes — they iterate, to borrow a popular piece of Silicon Valley jargon. Serious investment is now at play in the Bitcoin world, and there is every reason to believe that the institutions that store and transfer and exchange Bitcoin will become more secure. Bitcoin’s true value may turn out not to rest in its potential to liberate mankind from central bankers and government autocrats, but in its ability to achieve the much more prosaic task of moving money around the world more cheaply than it is currently practical to do so. Think of Bitcoin as the 21st century version of a Western Union money order and you might not be far off. The model train importers of the future may end up revering Satoshi Nakamoto as their savior. No more big fees for international transfers.
But governments and bankers and Wall Street money men will still be around. Neither Satoshi Nakamoto nor Bitcoin ever stood any chance of operating outside the bounds of conventional society. There will be regulation, there will be consumer protection, there will be rules and taxes, and criminal prosecutions for those who break the law. Bitcoin isn’t cyberpunk fantasy and it isn’t a Thomas Pynchon novel. It’s dull. The thrill is gone. And that’s why people are so mad.