http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ClNCOSS4nGs#t=766sMax Keiser talks to David Hales about ending top down Central Bank imposed financial and economic systems with peer to peer economics
Allright, David Hales, peer to peer currencies, p2p currencies, like ripple, what are they? Are they similar to bitcoin? How do they operate? How could they alter the financial ecosystem as we see around us?
Ok, well, many people are familiar with bitcoin, you mentioned it on your show previously. Bitcoin is a system which maintains a kind of centralized trust trhough a distributed algorithm in order to limit the amount of currency - bitcoins - that can be in circulation at any one time.
So, what's special and neat about bitcoin is the distributed algorithm, which is very difficult to hack, which means that it's very difficult to forge bitcoins. In fact you need to take over the majority of the bitcoin network to do this.
However, this is a particular function, so bitcoin's useful for a payment or transfer of value function, but other kinds of p2p systems are looking at different kinds of functions that are currently supplied by, say, banks for example...
EDIT: rough summary: due to the loss of trust in traditional banking system and central banks, there will be a new currency/banking competition flourishing.