Mike Adams, “Health Ranger” recently wrote a piece about Bitcoin. You can read that article here. In case he chickens out of the criticism and deletes his article, here is a copy in PDF.
I normally respect Mike Adams and what he has to say, but this article is way off on a number of areas.
“The bitcoin infrastructure is subject to the whims of just one person…” This statement is morbidly incorrect. While Mt.Gox may be under the control of Mt.Gox, the Bitcoin infrastructure is not centralized. The Bitcoin infrastructure is the miners, and they are everywhere. Including my apartment. So, sorry. Even the implied definition of ‘bitcoin infrastructure’ in this article is coming from some other planet.
There are many other exchanges out there besides Mt.Gox. And anyone who has been paying attention for the last year has known about problems with Mt. Gox. Their closure is hardly “without warning” as the article claims, and it does not come to a surprise to those people who are actually paying attention in the Bitcoin community. Some people have even admitted that they knew Mt.Gox was going down, but didn’t get their Bitcoin out because of their own laziness.
Another thing this article fails to mention is that Bitcoin itself, even with the failure of Mt. Gox is actually showing very strong signs of resiliency. If Mt. Gox really was the be all end all this article claims, it’s value would certainly have plummeted. However, today, even with the Mt. Gox failure, Bitcoin is still valued at over 10x it’s value one year ago. But, then again, Mike Adams “called the crash *again*”. He obviously didn’t consult any actual data in his claim. See http://bit.ly/1bTD2ye for some actual data.
The statement in the article that “You are a fool if you believe anything now coming out of the “bitcoin cult.” Is so criminally ignorant, I am astounded that it was written by someone for whom I had some degree of respect.
Certainly, what happened with Mt. Gox is unfortunate. Yes, people did lose their investment. However, this does not reflect any fundamental flaws with the Bitcoin protocol itself. There are many other ways to trade Bitcoin that don’t require you to put your trust in a central authority or website. The failure of Mt. Gox is a growing pain and a lesson learned for Bitcoiners, but it does not spell the end. Mike Adams has a lot to learn about Bitcoin before he writes another article about it, that’s for certain.
The only saving grace for this article, however is that yes, you should be prepping with a homestead and securing/storing potable water. In a time of crisis, FRN, Gold, Silver, Bitcoin are not worth anything if there is no food to eat or water to drink. The law of supply and demand reigns here. Everyone should have a year of storable food, no less than 2 weeks worth of drinking water, and enough firearms and ammunition to protect your stash from the zombies.
I use Worldcoin because I believe it has characteristics that I believe users will turn to when cryptocurrency begins to really take off. Right now it is limited to the word-of-mouth in the freedom movement so the buzz about Bitcoin has given it a higher rate of adoption. I use Cryptsy exchange so MtGox is so irrelevant to my life that I can’t even believe I’m commenting here, except to say the the level of irrelevance proves that the “too big to fail” mentality is just plain false, it was false when Bear Stearns tried to claim their failure would destroy the rest of us, and it’s false now that MtGox has failed while failing to destroy us. My confidence in Bitcoin is such that I didn’t even bother to read the articles about MtGox failure, I thought to myself, so what? After much hype I finally checked the value and, sure enough, barely a blip. When you can’t even look at the chart and pick out a day when the alleged “crash” might have happened, there wasn’t a crash. Period.