Sami Sunsong

#bitcoin

In the late 70s We were living in Santa Fe selling pyramids (um... yeah) when we met Sami Sunsong, an itinerant monk of indeterminate order. Sami laid on us a copy of a revelation ... I still have it in my "filing system" somewhere ... that came through a Ouija board or magic 8-ball or something. Sami thought it was Important that we see it.

A big part of this "revelation" was escaping currency tyranny through alternative digital money. Key to the system was that it had to grow so fast and quietly that. before Big Money realized the threat, it would be too big to stop.

At the time, I was still several months away from purchasing my first home computer, had only a rudimentary knowledge of programming and networking and cyber-security, but I thought I could see great potential in the idea, but thought I could several weak points.

One weak point, it seemed to me, was,

"Like all other popular forms of on-line hedging and gambling systems, clever abusers of the system will extract real-world value from what starts out as theoretical on-line credits, and the inevitable result will be law enforcement action." -Blacksheep at April 10, 2013 07:10 AM

Another weak point I imagined was

"That assumption is that bankers have ignored BTC up to this point and have not infiltrated the network as agent provocateurs that are posing as honest people that support the BTC model. If bankers have already infiltrated the BTC network, then BTCs have counterparty risk just like fiat currency because bankers can now defraud people. In addition, if assessing the above statement, 'if a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes,' who is greedier and has more resources than bankers?"
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-04-09/bitcoins-or-gold-part-i

I dont think Bitcoin is as good in principle as the loose Ouija ideas from 1978, but I see it has similar, obviously-predictable problems. Especially, no matter what form economy takes, the simplest bartered exchange, tyrants will try to tax it or take it over.