>>We live in a great retirement community in the sticks and are getting ready to retire so the affect on us should be minimal. But it will be terrible for people who are not in our situation.

This is of course one of the complaints against the boomers - that they're sitting pretty sipping cocktails feeling sorry for those reaping the seeds that the boomers sowed.

As I observed to Bill a while back, somebody retiring in 2013 will have consumed far more from the public purse than they contributed, while somebody born the same year can expect to pay $400K more to the public purse than they get back. This is opposite the direction it's meant to go in a democracy- each generation is supposed to leave things better and brighter than they were, but personal greed has taken over. Not just in the US, either. So now there's a groundswell of opinion that those expected to shoulder $400K debts should decline the opportunity to play in such a dirty sandpit, and simply build their own. Bitcoins are the precursor to the fall of national currencies and taxation so that those who resented tax all their lives may well get what they wished for- as per dystopian science fiction novels from the 1960s and 1970s that confirm how long these trends have been obvious to people paying attention.