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I created this thread: http://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/38170-the-future-of-bitcoin/ and I was somewhat disappointed with the response, and in revisiting the thread I think I realized I wasn't addressing the topic in the right way and asking questions. Thus, I decided to revisit the topic, but re-vamp and address things from a slightly different angle, which should make a higher quality post and, hopefully, provide a better discussion around bitcoin's future. The Money Regulation Algorithm Bitcoin has produced an amazing thing by creating a system that eliminates the idea of state inflation and money regulation. Money instead is regulated by math. Math tells you that 2 + 2 = 4 every time. A politician tells you that, “If you vote for me, for 2 + 2, I can get you 5” but he doesn’t tell you that in order to get 5, you have to pay 2 more later in the year, and your progeny will owe 5 in debt. A banker tells you, “I can tell you what 2 + 2 equals and let you use it, for a fee.” When you can create an algorithm that replaces a function, you get a ton of resources that are freed up and a lot of savings in money as the old system becomes obsolete. Altcoins and Metacoins Based on bitcoin, there are several things that are being practiced. Altcoins are cryptocurrencies that are somewhat based on bitcoin that try to provide a different service of some kind. Litecoin allows faster transaction times and would be great for buying a candy bar where waiting around for several minutes for a transaction to confirm would be arduous. Namecoin can help to create an internet that is resilient to censorship and outages by using new domain name creation. There are many types of altcoins. Some of them are not going to stick around because they are just pump-and-dump (the creators mine a bunch, then tell people, then cash out on the hype) or they have great features where if they are successful, they will just integrate them into bitcoin. However, some make changes that bitcoin cannot replicate without creating an entirely new system in itself. Metacoins are coin apps that users can create on top of the bitcoin application. I will be able to use a Mastercoin-like service to create the WesleyMetaCoin. These coins can be used in any way that I want them to be used, whether it is shares for a company, or “I owe you’s” for people, or investors in a project where the coins are a badge of honor, or even a donation certificate given to supporters of a charity. Further Replacement Thus, I have talked about before how these coins could be used to replace contract law. Ownership and contracts are determined by mathematical hashes rather than any state-run arbitrator. Ownership can be simply determined by a private key, and contracts can be signed in a similar fashion. This would provide further obsolescence of the state as a complex service that can be simply replaced by an algorithm. Experimentation I want to see even more experimentation with this. Why don’t people try to come up with a coin that has built-in welfare allocation that allows these social programs to become obsolete. Maybe bitcoin in itself already allows this as a per-unit gift in USD vs Bitcoin has a large efficiency gap. Why don’t people create inflationary currencies in which the inflation goes to provide some service to the user. Even voting can be done using “coins” that can be allocated in a certain way and would provide better features and accountability than any system that the state may run. Results and Questions Thus, the state no longer would exist as it currently does. Slowly, more and more gets replaced by math, computers, and entrepreneurs rather than the arbitrary cloud of opacity surrounding the hero-worship of arbitrary words and theory. Welfare and charity can be done in a voluntary and transparent way and a million different solutions can be tried until a solution is decided upon by enough people as to become the standard. Maybe with all of these other "services" being replaced, welfare wouldn't even be necessary in the long run. People can choose what coins to use, and it becomes a simple protocol that is open-source and voluntary in nature. What other “state-run services” can be replaced by bitcoin? Or, more importantly, do you think that anything can’t be replaced by bitcocin? Why not? If you think there is something that can't be replaced, maybe someone else can come up with a way that it can be. Slowly, bitcoin will wear away at bits of the state and become more popular while entrepreneurs are creating more features and more solutions in the background. Maybe the DRO gets replaced entirely by math? Maybe it can't be, but so many of the services we currently view as state services can be that the DRO becomes a much smaller entity than was previously thought, with much aid from bitcoin, altcoins, and metacoins so that they operate in a much more efficient manner. It is certain that the future of bitcoin will make major impact on how we view rules and laws, bringing them from the government into voluntary rules that are driven by math which is always consistent. The implications are intriguing.