15 Jan 2014 / Fox News – The big online retailer Overstock.com now accepts payment in Bitcoin. That’s good news for lovers of liberty because Bitcoins give us an alternative to government-controlled money. Bitcoins are a currency created by anonymous, private tech nerds, not by government.
Governments don’t like competition, and our government sometimes bans competing currencies. But as more of us use Bitcoins, and more businesses accept payment in Bitcoin, it becomes harder for government to dismiss the currency as illegitimate, or ban it.
‘Bitcoins are not controlled by anybody.’
– Mercatus Center senior research fellow Jerry Brito
There are two advantages to Bitcoin.
First, it’s harder to trace transactions back to people who make trades. I don’t particularly care about that, because at the moment, I don’t hide anything from my government. But I do fear government destroying the value of my dollars by printing more of them, the way governments in Germany before World War II and in Zimbabwe in recent decades did, forcing people to make trades using wheelbarrows of nearly worthless bills.
Given how my government spends money, and the way the Fed enables this by buying trillions in government bonds, I fear my dollars may someday be worth pennies. So I bought Bitcoins. Bitcoins are digitally created — or “mined” — at a slow, fairly predictable rate. An incomprehensible (incomprehensible to me, anyway) computer algorithm limits their number….. Read more
