It's not widely publicized that it's a distributed transaction ledger that uses proof of work to distribute trust in a mutual distrustful network.
But even if it was ... when I pay you in bitcoins, it's not too far from the situation in his analogy! Sure, the ledger is updated, but no one knows who I am and who you are, so we may as well have been in a dark alley. The analogy breaks down only in that the dollars can be counterfeited or printed by governments, whereas bitcoins cannot (at least, it's not feasible to do so).
But as far as anonymously exchanging money without recourse, it's actually a pretty apt analogy. It's a bit like off-the-record messaging. You can see that a transaction has taken place, you can even see how much money has been transferred, but you don't know who the parties were. (That last part is not strictly true yet.)
It's not widely publicized that it's a distributed transaction ledger that uses proof of work to distribute trust in a mutual distrustful network.
But even if it was ... when I pay you in bitcoins, it's not too far from the situation in his analogy! Sure, the ledger is updated, but no one knows who I am and who you are, so we may as well have been in a dark alley. The analogy breaks down only in that the dollars can be counterfeited or printed by governments, whereas bitcoins cannot (at least, it's not feasible to do so).
But as far as anonymously exchanging money without recourse, it's actually a pretty apt analogy. It's a bit like off-the-record messaging. You can see that a transaction has taken place, you can even see how much money has been transferred, but you don't know who the parties were. (That last part is not strictly true yet.)