Agent Orange Cooper wrote: I wrote: 
Here's the crux of the issue: the dollar is public; bitcoin is private.
Wrong, absolutely wrong.
The dollar is privately issued. The 'public' has zero say over its creation (inflation schedule), and less than zero say over its distribution. We don't even know anything about its distribution, except that it doesn't go to us. All we get is the effects of their inflation, destroying the value of our savings. As Jack Mallers put it in that video I posted up above, under the monetary policy of the last however many decades, the average person operates their life at a loss if they aren't getting a 20% raise every year to keep pace with inflation (true inflation, not the phony CPI)
Wrong, absolutely positively—and legally—wrong! If you mean the notion that the Fed is "privately owned" and not part of the government, forget it. The Fed is a public institution—which means
owned by the public. Legal ownership is the last word, and the courts have affirmed ownership of the Fed by the US federal government. The Fed is a tool created by the Congress, who can, and does, tell the Fed what it can and can't do, and, at times, what the Fed
must do; the Fed
must comply. If you mean the bank shareholders of the twelve regional Fed banks, they have no traditional shareholder power—no voting rights, no policy, no power. The Federal Reserve Act was a compromise, not a conspiracy: commercial banks won the right to continue creating money for profit by making loans, but it would henceforth be all US government dollars; the rest of us got a faster and more reliable payments system.
The system is far from ideal, there's a lot of out-dated rubbish in it, and as I've said, I would basically make commerical for-profit banks obsolete by replacing them with branches of the central bank, and/or other
public banks, all of whose lending could be 0% interest or
less—and user-owned credit unions (which are private, but private
collectives). In this context, public means owned by the public, collectively.
Agent Orange Cooper wrote: Then there are legal issues. An important idea is that the entity who makes the laws governing credit & commerce should be the issuer of the unit of account.
Important to whom?
Important to the polity, to The People, to
us—whose lives should never be forced to depend on profit-seeking money lenders—i.e. money
creators. Anyone who takes out a bank loan or uses a credit card is participating in dollar created. You can look at the appropriations by Congress to see who gets it. Some of it goes to me. It's not that mysterious.
Agent Orange Cooper wrote:Bitcoin is no more private than the Internet is private
Well, guess who created the Internet, it wasn't private. Bitcoin is created by private entities (or have governments gotten into the act?). I read that it costs a
lot to get set up, plus the electricity costs.
Agent Orange Cooper wrote:You'll have to define the 'public purpose' for me—it's very vague and I don't speak collectivist.
I think we're just having two different conversations about two different things. My encounters with bitcoin promoters have all reflected this complete lack of even
any conception of a public purpose. You might also call it the "general welfare." I think what most bitcoiners are excited about is getting rich, and trying to remove the government from the commerce equation will be impossible.
