Rip, you may compare
Tally Sticks to Bitcoin ; Tally Sticks history is fascinating.
What makes Bitcoin
Bitcoin is described in Satoshi Nakamoto
original paper.
It seems that for a
currency to be a physical manifestation of
money, it must have these properties (at least) (
source) :
- Medium of Exchange.
- Unit of Account.
- Store of Value.
So far, Bitcoin cannot be considered a Medium of Exchange like the dollar is. Try to go to a random groceries store and buy things in Bitcoin. You cannot.
It cannot be considered a Store of Value because its value measured by the exchange rate against the dollar is not
stable in time : you cannot tell its value is a year of even 6 months.
That a Bitcoin has intrinsic value or not seems irrelevant.
Then, Bitcoin is not a
currency.
What's usually left implicit is that behind
every currency there is a government.
The reason is obvious: governments need a way to extract some amount of value from people ; and they need a currency to do that.
So far, no one government is behind Bitcoin which makes your point about guns very accurate.
As far as I know, it's the biggest flaw behind Bitcoin: no one government is behind it.