
I've written on this subject before (and intend to do so again), and I'm used to seeing Bitcoin discussed in terms of: whether a currency is viable without a central bank behind it; whether criminal usage invalidates a currency; whether upward volatility presages downward volatility. What I haven't done is move away from the financial community, which is looking at crypto-currencies exclusively as a potential trading pair with the US dollar, and visit the development community.
It's not that there are exchanges, but that there are people discussing crypto-currencies purely in terms of their day-to-day utility. I think it's interesting, as we all drone on about the financial recovery, austerity, blah, blah, that there are people who have given up on waiting for the patient to recover. They're the young-ish people building the modern world, the IT and the infrastructure and the social media and all the rest of it, and they're working out their own methods of paying each other.
When the (un)employment statistics come out, particularly youth unemployment, I like to glance across at the numbers of young people setting up their own businesses. They're not waiting for us to help them. As the grown-ups drone on about problems that never seem to get solved, the next generation is shedding all that stuff like a snake sheds a skin.
Employers, politicians, bankers and other would-be authority figures don't have the role that they think they have in the next generation's lives.