As most of us know, you are supposed to ASSERT regulatory authority, if given the opportunity, whether you believe you have the authority or not.

You cannot regulate something that does not really exist or have anything real backing it. The last thing we want is to give it credibility. Let the UN decide if it wants to, and then decide how do regulate something that is basically less substantial then air.

I see bitcoins as nothing more than a pyramid scheme used to help build the blackmarket trade industry and money laundering. Everything I have read on this (and I have read alot) truly makes this seem shaky at best and the 'currency' of choice for criminals and tax cheats.

The only thing our federal government should be doing is investigating the fraud behind all of this. I think there are alot of dimwitted Americans who think they are somehow going to get rich quick because on paper their bitcoins are worth thousands of dollars and in the end they will find out they lost everything.

The reason we regulate banks is because they have a history of crashing the economy. Should Bitcoin ever get big enough that it causes major financial chaos we will damn-sure regulate it, thereby "legitimizing" it. I'm not saying I'm in favor of that outcome. I'm saying that if Bitcoin ever reaches its true financial potential then it WILL cause major damage sooner or later and we WILL step in to do something about it, rightly or wrongly.

Who is going to lose a job because of bitcoin? I think he fears damage to banking itself, cutting out the man.

.......then its potential for economic destruction would become the equal of any weak and poorly regulated currency. Should it ever become a common medium of exchange in everyday life then the businesses and people who accept it as payment would end up stockpiling large quantities of Bitcoin just by the nature of how markets work. Any crash in its value could obliterate those savings and potentially destabilize the financial system.

Create enough victims that way and they'd become a political movement of the wealthy demanding action from Congress. Congress never ignores it when large numbers of wealthy businesses and individuals get crushed. They would take action because those are exactly the sorts of voters who get the most attention on Capitol Hill.

The reason there's little interest in regulation today is because very few people have been harmed by the recent Bitcoin crashes. Swell the number of victims to a very large scale and the political calculus changes. The risk could become reality solely by Bitcoin gaining wide acceptance. We have every reason to root for its failure as currency right now while it's still small. I'm not sure it will play out that way. The only thing Bitcoin needs to do to make it a truly destructive force is for it to go mainstream.

Banks themselves are a Ponzi scheme because they can never give ALL the money back to depositors on demand. When an illegal Ponzi scheme collapses it's really the same thing as a big run on the banks. We just choose to say that one kind of scheme is legal while another is not. Any way you slice it, you can never give EVERYONE their money back all at once even if they have a legitimate claim. It only works so long as everyone continues to have confidence in it. That's a Ponzi scheme. That's a bank. They're really not so different.

A Ponzi scheme pays returns to its old marks from money paid in by new marks, rather than through profits earned by the enterprise.

A bank pays returns to its investors through profits it earns by charging interest on loans and fees on everything else.

Its not recognized a currency, and it is traded MUCH more like commodity anyway.

Personally, I say let it alone. Some people will get rich. Others will lose lots of money. it's a voluntary action.

It wasn't even developed in to he US.
A Japanese programmer originated the algorithm, I think.

The only control the US could attempt would be to make it illegal to buy within the US like they try to prevent people from going to offshore gambling sites.
A waste of time essentially.

So there is really no proof as to its origin.