Wednesday, July 30, 2014

So far Around the Circle They Meet: Bitcoiners Reach out to Goldbugs

On the spectrum of currency ideologues, gold bugs and Bitcoin enthusiasts occupy equal but opposite positions. They’re both suspicious that governments are going to meddle around with normal money so much that it becomes useless—it’s just that one group thinks math is the antidote and the other believes in hoarding metal bars.

This week has seen the emergence of two separate plans to have the best of both worlds. Ripple, a digital payments network that allows people to transact in a range of virtual and traditional currencies, said it had developed a way for people to transact in a digital form of gold. The announcement on Tuesday came on the heels of a company called Anthem Vault saying it had created its own virtual currency backed by gold, known (inevitably) as Independence Coin.

Anthem Hayek Blanchard, who runs Anthem Vault, believes the time has come to convince believers in the gold standard that Bitcoin is more than a Ponzi scheme. Finally the two armies can join forces! “We don’t need to fight. We can coalesce,” he told Bloomberg News on Monday.

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