Erittäin hyvä artikkeli! Siinä puhutaan paikallisrahoista ja Bitcoinista syvällisesti. Suosittelen lukemaan sen kokonaan, mutta jos ei jaksa niin tässä Bitcoiniin liittyvät olennaiset pätkät:
[i]"Traditionally, money is tied to a locality, printed by a nation-state, and handled either as physical cash or by for-profit financial institutions – banks – but that is no longer the hard and fast rule. In the age of the Internet, all you need to “print” a currency is a number of computers tied to the same network and a group of people who want to buy and sell goods and services using an agreed-upon means of exchange. Enter Bitcoin, a currency that is backed by peer-to-peer computing, which engages a network to make sure that the total number and location of “Bitcoins” are managed not by a central clearinghouse, but through a parallel network. BitCoin promises security without monopoly.
The best way to understand BitCoin is to think of it as something like a gold standard. Unless you decorate state capitol domes for a living, nobody really needs gold – but it is tangible and limited, though you can mine more if you happen to be really motivated. BitCoin is like that, without the rare metal aspect. There are a limited number of “BitCoins” – fewer than nine million at press time. Like precious metals, each BitCoin can be exchanged directly for goods and services, if you find someone who will take the trade, but it also trades to the U.S. dollar (around $5) and other world currencies.
Why go to the trouble of making a currency backed by peer-to-peer computing? To hear BitCoin Consultancy co-founders Amir Taaki and Donald Norman tell the story, they wanted a monetary system that was secure yet free from the corruption that comes when a few financial institutions have the power to set the prices for transactions. “We were walking around Amsterdam a few years back, and we got a call from a friend in the U.K. who needed a wire transfer quickly for an emergency,” Taaki told me over Skype. “We needed to send him 1000 pounds or so, but there were only two ways to send the money, Western Union or Money Gram, both of whom take 20 to 25% out of the transfer in fees, currency spread and what not. We were incensed by the usurious cost of the transaction, but also that there were only two institutions to handle a simple transfer of information – there was no free market competition at all. We then decided that the hacker community should step up and help this societal problem.”
BitCoin is rapidly gaining adoption, now accepted by a variety of companies selling everything from socks to web server space, and is inspiring several startups to trade the currency and consult on how to incorporate it into your business plan. On the dark side, some critics of BitCoin say that the system can be gamed by speculators, or used for such nefarious purposes as drugs or sexual services because the currency is difficult for national governments to track or account for – though it should be noted that the same is often true for a stack of 20 dollar bills…
… Heather Schlegel, an organizational futurist for SWIFT, the group that coordinates international transaction standards on behalf of the world’s top banks in the world, believes that all of this innovation at the level of local communities is completely logical, and will likely increase in the years to come.
… Thanks largely to information technology, these systems of payment can be decentralized and democratic rather than tied to big, central institutions. Some innovations are truly spontaneous, based around the needs of communities more than policy makers or investors. Said Schlegel, “The one thing you see with BitCoin or local currencies is that people rarely ask permission from the central organizations. They just start behaving in new ways, and they do so by expressing their values through money.”
These micro-currencies aren’t meant to knock down the globalized economy, but rather to exist along side it. “This isn’t going to be about BitCoin taking the place of dollars or something, or even becoming the standard for digital currencies. As communities begin to realize the possibility of expressing themselves through money, I expect you’ll see hundreds of BitCoins, or something similar – or something we haven’t even thought of yet,” she said. But unless the world’s big economies turn some corner and suddenly becomes quite stable, more of these smaller systems are likely to continue appearing, to meet the needs of communities.
With all this innovation going on, one big question remains: what does this mean for paying the tax man, who wants a single currency to represent all of the activity so he can measure it and take his bite? The national revenue services of the world may need to start innovating themselves if they want to come up with the answer."[/i]
Tuossa oli varmaankin 1/3 koko artikkelista, aika syvällisestä artikkelista tosiaan kysymys. Oli pakko boldata tuo viimeinen kappale, siinä ollaan sen verran vahvasti asian ytimessä.
