Evidently, the author of this ridiculous article doesn't seem to understand that a vast number of developers around the planet have cloned the original Bitcoin core code hundreds of thousands to millions of times, and have publicly forked it 34K times.[a] The author also doesn't seem to understand that any changes accepted by the repo's maintainers are visible to everyone, and become effective only if nodes representing at least half of the computing power adopt them. Regardless of what the WSJ's editors think about Bitcoin, they should be embarrassed by the low quality of this piece.
That would make Eve online, Second Life, and other games illegal since people trade their digital assets all the time
>Comparing Bitcoin to free software seems similarly disingenuous.
Bitcoin is free software. https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin
Furthermore, giving someone US dollars for something doesn't make that thing a "currency."
> Comparing Bitcoin to free software seems similarly disingenuous.
Bitcoin is literally FOSS.
Yes, and some of these tokens, like BTC, allow this since "crypto was built". You can clone and build https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin and set up your own wallet. Noone will touch coins in it if you're careful. They can lose their value but they will still be there.
If you trust someone else to hold your wallet, which is more or less a necessity when you trade/exchange your coins, that's whole other ball game. But having all your money in bunch of wallets kept by a single entity that is not you, is just plain stupidity.
By whom? There's nothing like that here https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
> and digital cash alternative
That was the case from the beginning but it hasn't worked out.
> Each bitcoin in circulation has a distinct history attached to it ensuring that 1BTC != 1BTC.
What? The value is the same. Paper bills also have a distinct history.
> While coin histories can be somewhat ofuscated with tools like CoinJoin, the fungibility of Bitcoin remains distinctly lacking.
What? How's 1 BTC is not fungible [to another BTC] unless you're wanna hide your bitcoin transaction history? Is this what it's all about? Sorry to break it to the author but he seems to imply that Bitcoin is a privacy oriented electronic currency. It has never been "private". The whole ledger is public. If you don't like it, don't use it. You have Monero, Dash and Zcash and Bitcoin mixers if you wanna deal with ecurrencies without anyone being able to trace you.