Quote from: Dopeboy on December 17, 2011, 08:46 amQuote from: anarcho47 on December 17, 2011, 07:22 amBut the last hurdle is what will be its undoing, unless someone can come up with a way to merge tangible with decentralized and instantly transactableTangible is the problem. Tangible is how people gain power and control, and why wars are waged. Tangible is why we still use oil rather than sunlight (you can't control the sale and distribution of sunlight). We are going to need to move away from tangible if we want to give power and control back to the masses, and bitcoin seems to be a step in the right direction. Anyone can manufacture bitcoins and transfer them without a bank or government. I bet within the next 5 years we'll be seeing apps on Iphones that will let us transfer bitcoins (or similar crypto-currency) at the grocery store, etc.I'm not saying I don't hope your last statement is true.  I do, because I support any voluntary association, including a non-tangible currency. But to argue that tangibility automatically centralizes power has no historical precedent - this is only the case when tangibility and a nation-state (violent institution) marry. When you are looking at a voluntary market, as soon as a tangible money is over-hoarded, people just stop using it and it loses its prized value-premium for playing its role as money. There are many instances of this being the case throughout history. VIOLENCE centralizes money of all types, which centralizes power (especially when violence is used against people doing what a market normally does in reaction to hoarding - use something else).What bitcoin is fighting against is about 5,000 years of recorded history and human nature that spans virtually all cultures and locations. And when we do revert back to a historically precedented money, bitcoin will lose a lot of its appeal. It is not a good store of value, it can be destroyed easily and forever with simple carelessness (as opposed to lost and found). It has the proper monetary attributes to act as a unit of exchange and account, and as long as the rest of the world is using legal-tender monopolized currency, it will probably hold up pretty well. But it does not hold up as a store of value (how many bitcoins have been permanently lost already?), and its longevity against a substance that cannot be destroyed is going to be tenative, at best. Unless someone finds a way to take either bitcoin or another digital currency and decentralize tangibility and retain bitcoins ability to instantly transact.As to your comments I hope you are actually joking. In order to generate electricity from sunlight, TANGIBLE GOODS must be used to create products that can harness this. I have no problem with solar power - I think it's a brilliant concept, but to assert that solar power is "free" is crazy. You might not be able to control distribution of sunlight, but you can control distribution of any and all products that are able to generate power from it. Solar innovation has slowed to a crawl for the past 5 - 10 years since nation-states got on the (completely fale) idea that mankind is turning this planet into a hot oven (meanwhile long, cyclical warm periods have been eras that brought on immense prosperity to the human race). Or is it climate CHANGE now? What about "global cooling" and the next "ice age" of the 1970's? Well since everyone is on the bangwagon and rah rah peak-oil is the norm of the day, all of those industries who have received massive subsidies (put a gun to my head, rob me of my money, give it to a solar company) have pretty much done fuck all for innovation. They have built massive business models around subsidies and subsidized consumers.I would love to see solar take off, but real competition is needed again, not to mention the raw force of a voluntary customer base without distorting incentives is a must-have. If these things come back (they will as nation-states go bankrupt), we'll probably see another boom era in solar, especially as innovations in the general electronics field translate into other, laterally related fields.