Bitcoin is an interesting idea, which may attract the pyramid scammers (or already has) and worry governments for being out of there domain.
Currency is an interesting idea, and even currencies backed to a commodity run into problems – a good example of this was when in 1918 boats where being sank between the us and europe and the us dollar (backed by gold) could not be transported (my blog) since it might not get there and be deposited on ocean floor.
The other issue of a currency being backed to some thing was quite well done in the overlong book cities in flight by James Blish. In that book the commodity that made the universe work crashed in value.
Back to 1918 - made the dollar as a currency worthless to any risk averse umbrella salesman [think banker] so that made the dollar a very iffy prospect for banks until some human promises where made. With publicity you cannot buy for bitcoin i decided to try this and found that on Linux i could not run it as i had the wrong compiler.
I then move the binaries on to a debian server – no joy either, Compiling on either seems a bit of a mystery as there be no config file in the src directory, and well seems to need a fair amount of stuff just to run on anything not ubuntu 10.10.
Sure i could probably install the version of the compiler it needs. but some detailed technical instructions would be nice and i know that the existing complilers on both the debian and linux desktops i use work.
Could try harder Bitcoin – we dont all run Ubuntu 10.10.
