I do realize that there is a cost associated with printing and minting money now. But that can be taxed progressively so the poor sot with 2 dollars to his name isn't stuck with the bill. Any susc system would need a public service where the transaction is done for no more than cost, at least as a last resort. Otherwise we are back to annointing private concerns with the right of taxation.

I also know that bills are serialized. However, unlike bitcoin, keeping track of those serial numbers is purely optional for each step in the transaction and in practice, nobody does. When they check those numbers, they're just looking for known bad money. Assuming the bill you hand over isn't on that list, it just goes in the drawer. Tomorrow, they won't be able to say where that bill came from. With bitcoin, a particular value can be back traced all the way back to the miner that first generated it,

But I think you're starting to see the point. Smartphone may be nice for people who have one, but many do not and unless they can carry money around somehow, they never will. Meanwhile, Bitcoin likely isn't the answer, but we don't actually know what the answer is beyond a list of desirable traits some of which Bitcoin has.

Smartphone was YOUR suggestion, you don't get to blame me for it's shortcomings :-)

The current solution (cash) has the advantage that you don't have to spend money just to be able to have money. If absolutely all else fails, you can carry it in your hand. True enough, credit cards weren't ubiquitous at one time, but they didn't need to be since we had cash which was legal tender for all debts.

To actually replace cash, whatever carries the replacement will have to be available at no cost. It will need to not have transaction fees. Note that currently Bitcoin doesn't typically carry a transaction fee, but it is expected that it will once it is 'mined out' in order to maintain an incentive to compute block chains.

The other downside to Bitcoin is that it actually is traceable. That problem may prove harder to solve than the wallet problem.

But the person you called a hater rattled off a fair sized list of what was wrong.

No, my concern is that you seem not to understand that in the UK, not handing over the password is a crime and so requires the higher standard of proof. Part of that is that you have to prove the defendant even possesses the key (you can't hand over what you don't have).

A secondary concern is how often courts in the U.S. and seemingly in the U.K. have employed sophistry in an attempt to lower the standards for a conviction in general. In some cases by claiming something that looks exactly like a criminal conviction in every way is somehow something else.

BTW, criminal law is SUPPOSED to be unbalanced in favor of the defendant. The consequences of jailing the innocent are worse than the sonsequences of not jailing the guilty.

Interesting persuasion tactic there. I'm convinced now that Bitcoin advocates are oversensitive clods who fart out their mouths. You could do the whole concept a favor by stitching your fingers together and your mouth shut.

You also sound awfully callous about actually kicking poor people completely out of society.

So you propose a currency that will only work if you own a working smartphone that is only accepted by a small percent of online vendors? How will I buy gas and food with that?

Helicopter parents are so last year. We have drone parents now.

So why replace it with banks that launder money for terrorists and drug cartels and dodge taxes? Normal human beings do need to not pay what are effectively taxes to corporations. If they knew how much the credit cards were taking on the merchant side (that shows up in their prices), they might clamor to pay cash more often.

Not really. If we devalue the dollar, the equation shifts and local manufacturing begins to make more sense than offshore. American made goods also start to look more attractive on foreign markets, again to the benefit of American workers.

When domestic goods go up in price it is not because of a devalued dollar since all of their expenses are also in devalued dollars.

It's not as unlikely as you think. You forgot the urban homeless population, for example. There's the homeless you see and then there's the squatters you may not see (or recognize).

But it''s not getting anywhere near as cheap as dealing in cash. It's also not getting as risk free as cash. A bank can't decide that their security problem should be my problem and revoke the $20 bill someone paid me.

And people will switch to Tide as a currency (it's already happening!)

Personally, I find the idea of being 100% dependent on the finance industry to carry out a 'legitimate' transaction to be at the very least distasteful.

Do we really want to give banks the power of taxation?

You should also be better able to manage sharing airspace with a properly operated drone.