Another claim we don’t agree with is that Bitcoin is as free of counter-party risk as gold. What we have seen with Ethereum, another nascent cryptocurrency, is that these virtual currencies ultimately have a master key. With Ethereum, that key is controlled by a council that decides its future inflation rate; with Bitcoin, that key is controlled by Gavin Andresen, an engineer based in Massachusetts. There’s no guarantee that they won’t change the source code for the Bitcoin blockchain in the future, and when you “own” a Bitcoin you simply refer to the blockchain - a distributed ledger that tells you what and how much you own. In this regard, we don’t agree that Bitcoin does not have custodial or counter-party risk; the blockchain itself is the fat tail.