# Last edited on 2014-01-30 17:37:07 by stolfilocal

I generally do not care much for e-commerce or cryptography, so I
generally ignored Bitcoin until Rick Falkvinge (founder of the Pirate
Party) tweeted about it in absolutely glowing terms. He said that he was
putting all his savings into it, and almost, but not quite, advised his
followers to do the same.

That was before the nov/30 crash. During the crash he tweeted very
angrily after he discovered that Mt.GOX was replaying the same price
data and the same set of transactions, several times in a row, while the
price was in fact falling through the floor.

A while later he basically withdrew his endorsement of Bitcoin when he
concluded that it will not really prevent governments from monitoring
your money transactions.

Actually very little remains now of the optimistic claims that were
current a few months ago. We had various practical demonstrations that
crypto-coins may be inflated and virtually multiplied like old-fashioned
currencies; that they can be stolen, and that governments can trace,
seize, ban, restrict, and tax them as they wish. We have learned that we
cannot trust our money to unregulated and unaudited exchanges created by
"someone from the community"; indeed we learned that there can be bad
apples even among the most prominent leaders of the movement.

The cryptocoin price history of the last two months should make any
would-be investor to look elsewhere; and the proliferation of
alternative coins, for one thing, trashed the long-term price
predictions based on commercial trade volume and the limited supply of
bitcoins.