Bitcoin Banking, Solving ID Theft, and Why Regulators Should Love Pasties

UK readers may have been too busy drinking beer and playing bingo with their pensions to notice, but this week's Budget statement had one little snippet tucked away that may do more to promote bitcoin than if Newsweek revealed Satoshi Nakamoto was really Stephen Fry in a kimono.

The rest of us? Hmm. So, one more positive vibe for the bitcoin concept of being your own bank.

It might seem a bit previous, given all the recent publicity for bitcoin heists and exchange implosion, but the techniques exist for perfectly secure online walletry.

It doesn't need much of a leap of faith to see that the bitcoin ecosystem will evolve to be more generally secure than the current mash-up of financial services, banks and other electronic money handlers.

This won't happen overnight, and bitcoin is a long way from being stable enough in value to be a secure repository of too much of your personal wealth.

The right magic for security, both cyber and value, may not even happen with bitcoin itself: the key lies in the underlying technology, not this year's implementation.

Bitcoin provides just this, by merely existing in a certain place.

A lot of the current regulatory indigestion is because bitcoin is called bitcoin and cybercurrencies are called cybercurrencies.

The Australians are closest to the truth - bitcoin is number - but that's about as useful as saying gold is a metal.

Bitcoin - and many of the concepts with it - is a new quantum physics of money, and you shouldn't be surprised that the old words from which its name is built are in themselves part of the problem in understanding what it is and how to use it.