Bet 611
Duration 2 years (02011-02013)
PREDICTOR
Roger K Ver
CHALLENGER
Unchallenged
As mentioned in my original offer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfydIbhduu0 Bitcoins are the world's first peer to peer, distributed electronic currency. This means that they can be sent directly from person to person over the internet, without needing anyone's help or permission. They are free to send, receive, or to store, and they can be as public or anonymous as you want them to be. With bitcoins, a person in California can send $20,000 USD worth of value to a person in Russia in a matter of seconds, for FREE. In comparison: Paypal would cost about $600, and take a few seconds. Credit card would cost about $600 and take a few days, to a week, or more. Bank wire would cost about $40, and take one or two days. By all of the traditional payment methods, any government can block your transaction for any arbitrary reason. Because Bitcoins are peer to peer, no one can block your transaction for any reason, ever. A recent example of this property of Bitcoin being put to use, is with the online gambling industry. Recently the USA Federal government blocked credit card companies and banks from being allowed to process gambling related transactions. Since then, numerous online gambling sites that use Bitcoins have launched. Because Bitcoins are sent over a distributed, peer to peer network, governments are powerless to stop them. With traditional government issued currencies, politicians are always tempted to just print more whenever they have a budget short fall due to the most recent war, bailout, or “stimulus” package. When governments do this, all the citizen’s savings lose value in real terms. With Bitcoins, governments can never take the value of your money in this way. Because the software is open source, we know that there will never ever be more than twenty one million Bitcoins. No one will be able to provide themselves with additional bitcoins by decree, as happens so often with traditional government issued currencies. Bitcoins are also resistant to government tracking or seizure. With just a few steps, anyone can store their bitcoins in such a way that governments or other theives are powerless to access them without the correct password. Bitcoins may also make paying most taxes voluntary since governments will lose the power to track or control who sends bitcoins to whom. The IRS, DEA, Customs and Border Patrol, and other agencies will no longer be able to seize peoples money at will. Bitcoins may also bring an end to war. Currently governments force all of their citizens to pay for war efforts whether they are in favor of the war or not. Once Bitcoin use is wide spread, the people in favor of the wars will no longer be able to force the people against the wars to pay for them. If suddently, the half the population who does not support the wars stop paying for them, it will quickly become much more expensive for the suppoters of war to continue funding it. I suspect that many people who claim to be in favor of the current wars would change their mind if they had to pay for all of it themselves. Because Bitcoins are limited to 21,000,000 and they have so many advantages over traditional government issued currencies, once even a small percentage of the economy begins using bitcoins, the price will quickly soar to thousands of dollars per Bitcoin or more. In short, I believe bitcoins are the most important technological revolution since the invention of the internet, and because of that, their price will skyrocket in comparison with Gold, Silver, the US stock market, and US Dollar.