I think it's kind of good to see government's getting involved in the currency and it'll be interesting to see how they continue to interact with it down the road. In my mind, I think it gives the currency some mainstream legitimacy and makes it less underground. At the same time, I tend to think the more often than not government involvement in the market in general and currency in particular acts as a much needed support to keep things from falling apart.

The Swiss bank account analogy is a good one and kind of fits how I viewed things. Personally, I peg it a bit more on the "worse" side of the scale, but that's due to personal perception and hangups and I readily acknowledge that.

The one thing about cryptocurrency that confuses me is that I literally don't see its value nor why it's rising (in fact, I thought there was less than $100 in cryptocurrency). The way I understand it is, mining bitcoin involves your computer doing math, you're sharing math with other people, then you get bitcoins. What the hell is that math for? Why is it worth anything to begin with?

When I think about real money (let's not bring fiat into this, unless absolutely necessary because damn that shit's confusing and looking at it makes me understand why some people want to go back to the gold standard), I think of it in terms of physical goods. I know how much standard goods such as flashdrives, bags of dogfood, etc. cost. I can compare them to bigger things, such as a new television is x number of flashdrives, a new car is x number of televisions, and a new house is x number of cars. I can compare those values to time, I have to work x hours to buy a television or a month's worth of rent is worth x dollars. I can even use that information to compare my wealth to the wealth of others, whether I'm comparing my living arrangements with theirs or my monthly pay to theirs or whatever. In fact, I often do, then I get all salty about social stratification and rant on Hubski about it whenever the topic comes up.

On the other hand I see something like bitcoin or ethereum or something, and I have no baseline to compare it to other than what someone else says it's worth. If someone says 1 Bitcoin is worth $2,000 I'd think that's weird, because as best as I understand it, it doesn't do anything. It just sits there. It'd be like someone bringing me a stick from my own backyard and saying that's worth $2,000. Seriously. That's really fucking weird. It doesn't do anything. It's just a stick.

When you combine my non-understanding of its value with a perception of lawlessness and instability around it, I'd like to hope it's understandable why I find this whole experiment really sketchy.

I hope you don't think I'm dogging on you guys or cryptocurrency. It's just, I read your answers this morning and this whole thing has been tumbling in my mind all day. I'm on Wikipedia now trying to figure shit out.