I don't think Bitcoin is made at will out of thin air like flat currency routinely is. You can still argue that this is not a problem with flat currency itself, but the problem is, unlike Bitcoin, the laws regarding printing and production of flat currency are not governed by hard-to-break math.
Not even remotely. Everyone is China is acutely aware that the government can print their money into oblivion. That's why they're rushing to dump it into anything. Hundreds of millions have been through this in other countries in recent years.
> Piggybacking on the electrical grid to turn "fairness" into "how much electricity you can afford"
Piggybacking doesn't mean what you think it does.
> How is that fair?
Fair doesn't apply in the world. It's hard to cheat and thus predictable and that's all it needs to be.
fwiw, fiat isn't fair either. Nobody came by to give me my share...
I see no reason why an arbitrary rate is better than a rate chosen to minimize inflation and deflation.
Bitcoin basically is a fiat currency, except no government forces people to use it.
It's not about the rate, but about the EXACT rules being agreed upon up front by the MAJORITY of the network and actually enforced by a proven algorithm, rather than people's conscience alone.
This is a gross oversimplification of how the vast majority of central banks(ie: the ones that matter) handle their fiat currency. In theory, yes, they could just print money, in practice, they don't "just print money".
There's nothing they can do that gets rid of your bitcoin though. That's the "math" point. As long as they're on the main chain the rules (expressible as math) prevent arbitrary creation or destruction of coins.
In either case it's not relevant to the article.
