Almost 100 years ago to the day, Henry Ford predicted an energy currency like bitcoin.

bring back the GOLD STANDARD and there will be no money printing, wars, hyperinflations etc. FFS

He was a brilliant guy, and a brave supporter of Hitler.

Looks like he meant oil or gas.

There isn't enough gold to back the demand for money.

There's plenty. That's not the real problem with gold. The price of gold in human currencies is arbitrary, so no matter how much or how little, the base rate can be set and adjusted to whatever you like as long as everyone agrees.

The real problem with gold is that its not decentralized, permissionless or fast in its transactions. Proof of work currencies like Bitcoin and DASH maintain the properties of gold while adding features that make them useful as money. You can't really transact with gold, for example. Cryptocurrencies are always available and can be sent anywhere the internet is.

And coins like DASH have instant transactions for instant settlements, while less developed cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash have long wait times for a transaction to be confirmed (around 1 hour). That makes it just as bad as gold for transacting at the checkout counter.

He wan't talking about a bunch of 1's and 0's virtual currency like bitcoin

Yes he was. Those 1s and 0s are uniquely configured and paid for via direct conversion of energy into work. There is nothing more efficient than a one way conversion of energy into money. Fiat currencies rely on an ever depleting resource (oil) to back up a currency whose units are always being revalued and devalued relative to a single unit of that resource.

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Last Edited by Lazy Monk on 05/08/2022 10:24 AM

And providing a decentralized, permissionless and easily verifiable record of ownership is definitely valuable. So using energy to create new Bitcoins is the perfect idea. There's really a lot of innovation in cryptocurrencies that is missed.

Using energy as a backing source, converting that energy 1 way into new cryptocurrency money, distributing that new money in a decentralized, fair manner through mining (and 45% going to Masternodes and 10% going to proposals to be voted on in DASH), relying on the internet to decentralize this network, all of these things and more are major innovations on their own, yet cryptocurrencies have them all together.

And with DASH, you also get instant transactions which means that its even more perfect than Bitcoin was, since DASH doesn't sacrifice any of Bitcoin's principles to achieve this instant finality. No where else in the world are the latest and greatest innovations so heavily concentrated as in cryptocurrencies.

And this is all the more important these days. A title from this morning on another website :

"Apple & Google Payment Systems Block Russians, Causing Chaos In Moscow Metro System"

That can't happen with good, proof of work cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and DASH.