If any of your readers are keen, I have a ready supply of such notes at very reasonable prices. Rid yourselves of ‘debt’! (I.e., rid other people of their obligations to you, by transferring them to me.)

“Gold has been usable as money almost everywhere …including during intervals when civilization went missing.”

It occurs to me that this an important point… If the $hit ever hits the proverbial fan, is it reasonable to expect the power grid and the nodes of the Internet to function smoothly? When I was in Chennai, India in January, the power (and the Internet) went away for two hours every morning, just because keeping the grid going is difficult in normal times. January is the cooler season. In the hot season, the power situation is much worse.

When unrest hits a country, the governments seem to be able to trivially take their nations offline. Not to mention that much of the world hasn’t really gotten online in the first place.

And don’t HBD aware reactionaries think that keeping all power grids and all computer networks up in the future will be a challenge for our diverse society?

Right now, the dollar is strong because it seen as better than many other alternatives. For instance in India and Latin America, people flee to the dollar because it is better than their local alternatives.

Kind of like the story about two friends in the woods who come upon a grizzly. The first one laces on his running shoes. The second one mocks him… “you can’t outrun that bear.” “But I don’t have to” the first one responds.

As long as there are weaker currencies about, the dollar is protected. The electronic trading mob gets its fill of fresh meat.

Bitcoin, aside from its other problems, is limited in size and thus if you tried to use it as a currency, a medium of exchange, it would be highly deflationary. It may have use as a wealth reserve asset – something you store money value in, like paintings or land or gold – but it would not have use as a currency. We have no need of it for that. Dollars, euros, etc work just fine as a medium of exchange as well as providing governments flexibility. So, you could store some of your wealth in Bitcoins, but why put anything significant into that untried asset when you can use the premier wealth reserve asset used by all governments and the super-wealthy, gold? It has an unmatched track record as a wealth storage asset. That’s why I said Bitcoin is a solution in search of a problem. We already have fiat and gold. We don’t need Bitcoin – unless you want to transfer money internationally to avoid taxes or sell things illegally, and as I argued, the government can crack down on that in the case of Bitcoin much easier than it can with gold.

So putting your bitcoins into an account with Magic The Gathering Online Exchange was not a good idea.

(Of course, if you never try to spend your BItcoin, your exposure to counterparty risk is greatly reduced. The technology works perfectly, for spherical cows in a vacuum.)