I like that the new thing he discovers about bitcoin isn't that it's decentralized, but that it's not pegged to the dollar. I mean, there's never been anything not pegged to the dollar, but decentralized payment systems...pft, those are everywhere.
Decentralized doesn't mean anything to half the geeks and nothing to rest of the population.
It's a great piece. In fact, I think it's quite accurate.
...Bitcoin, an attempt to create a sort of private cybercurrency...Bitcoin, rather than fixing the value of the virtual currency in terms of those green pieces of paper, fixes the total quantity of cybercurrency instead, and lets its dollar value float. In effect, Bitcoin has created its own private gold standard world, in which the money supply is fixed rather than subject to increase via the printing press...The dollar value of that cybercurrency has fluctuated sharply, but overall it has soared. So buying into Bitcoin has, at least so far, been a good investment...What we want from a monetary system isn’t to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that’s not at all what is happening in Bitcoin...the Bitcoin economy has in effect experienced massive deflation...incentive to hoard the virtual currency rather than spending it...it reinforces the case against anything like a new gold standard – because it shows just how vulnerable such a standard would be to money-hoarding, deflation, and depression.