After reading Anna’s blog about political environment needs to update with the new technology, I realized that the regulation is becoming one of the most important constrains for making the new technology for everyday usage. A few hot topics such as auto-drive car, realistic game, hyperloop and bitcoin. Government even doesn’t know it’s legal or not, so it’s impossible for them to advertising and raising the public awareness.
Bitcoin is definitely an new technology that facing the legal issue. Basically, it is an algorithm to calculate one unique ID that is called one bitcoin. It can be made and traded like real money, and the good thing for bitcoin is that it’s secure and it doesn’t have any inflation, no government can control it. It will reach the total number of 2,100,000 and no more bitcoin is available after that. To some content, it’s even more ideal than gold.
The price of bitcoin is raised from $65 at January this year to nearly $900 yesterday, and some people even so optimistic that they predicting it’s value will go up to 40,ooo a coin! Many website accepts bitcoin as one of the paying methods, but for daily usage, it’s still not as convenience as cash or credit card. For this large value of one virtual property, there must have some laws to protect people’s property but actually their aren’t. FBI recently seized 600,000 bitcoin from one under-table trading website called silk road, this is a huge amount and it’s value is up to 540 million. If the virtual property is not protected by law, bitcoin still has risk for public usage. What if one day, US government announced that bitcoin is a fraud, all website is banned, then all your money will be seized by government.
Bitcoin is really a good product for public use, it’s purchase power will never decrease. However, without the protection of law, now I would say it’s more like a financial tool rather than currency. People are just buying and selling for making money, but in this case it will finally destroy this great idea.
