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Comment by Jd | Hacker News Reader

What additional properties do you think are necessary to have a "digital currency which makes it into use as a global exchange mechanism." ? (full disclosure: I work on such a project)

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Personally I think it requires identity verification and secure reversible transactions, and probably some central point of control rather than a distributed network (so that confirmation can be almost instant). That's what I get with current fiat currencies and I wouldn't want to give it up.

I also find the deflation built into Bitcoin worrying, esp. accompanied by the unquestioning cheerleading from many proponents of it.

I had a look at your website, and it looked really interesting - http://evr.gr/.

That's basically what passed through my mind a year ago when I started working on my own project. It seems crossing the channel from "good idea" to secure, trusted payment mechanism is more difficult than I thought, but I'm still convinced it's the right way forward. Feel free to email me for more details if interested.

"Personally I think it requires identity verification and secure reversible transactions"

Aren't those two just a layer on top of bitcoin?

If they are built separately, as I said in the OP, there isn't much point in the cryptographic nature of bitcoin. If you require people to trust those holding the ledgers of transactions you could just use any unit of account, as we do with national currencies.

Bitcoin would permit bridging of trust networks.

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