Bitcoin Forum

I'd just like to say I guess I'd be a libertarian if I had to label myself and don't really buy into the left right paradigm of things. 

Anyways I brought up the topic of bitcoins to her and she said she's heard of it but its not a viable currency because there is nothing backing it. 

I asked her what was backing up the dollar and she said gold. lol.  She was amazed when I said.. um no its not.

This is someone who is hardcore into the democratic party in minnesota, her mom is in the congress there. 
 
I just thought it was interesting how oblivious some people are about the money system, even the ones who are totally immersed in it.

That is all.

Most people don't want to consider the possibility that the monetary system is a total fraud.  Frankly I don't blame them.

I had a similar experience this weekend. I was talking to my brother about bitcoin, when my grandparents overheard us and asked about it. After a brief explanation they decided it was a scam, since nothing was backing it. I ask them what they think is backing our currency. Their response - gold...

Yup, theres a lot of dumbasses out there.

The easy explaination is that, if everyone knew what you knew, they would be just like you.  There is a give and take with diversity.

Whats interesting about this though is that a lot of people feel that their currency is backed by something, they just dont know what. When questioned, gold is the first thing that comes to mind. It was a real mind job for me when I learned that our money isn't backed by anything (except force of government) and that, worse, it can be created and destroyed at whim. Thats what got me interested in money, which eventually led me to Bitcoin.

Which is exactly my point.  Almost everyone who ventures down that rabbit hole ends up in pretty much the same place, intellectually speaking.  If you tell someone who doesn't already know that currency isn't backed by anything more than faith, they will either reject you out of hand and forget about it, or check your facts and eventually end up just like most of us on this forum.  Even the bitcoin detractors who spend their lifespan here arguing against Bitcoin (or it's particular features) know that basic fact.  It's almost like a entry qualification.

People might be weakened and beaten but they are usually never stupid.

Amen.  I can honestly say that I've known very few truely stupid people, but truely ignorant people are f'ing everywhere I go.

Yeah i'm not really hating on her or anything.  I was pretty oblivious to where money came from not too long ago.  Hopefully our little conversation got some wheels turning and she can start researching. 

I'll give old people some credit on this.  When they actually learned this, it probably was true.

Sheesh, do people think there is some office somewhere that hands out gold for dollars at $35/oz or something?

Every bitcoin adopter talks about bitcoin to your closest friend and persuade them to trust this new idea, and it will be globally accepted eventually.

I call 'em as I see 'em. If Someone cannot admit when they are wrong and just simply contradict themselves, they are stupid. Willfully ignorant people are just plain stupid.

for the most part, i am a democrat (and a social democrat at that). that said, i also have some veiws that are considered conservative (heavily pro gun and pro defense), and i believe in a few libertarian principles as well (im against eminent domain and against criminalization of victimless crimes)


but none of this has anything to do with BTC.

no single political veiwpoint has a monopoly on the truth or on BTC.

that is all.

Believing the falsehood of our money being backed by gold has absolutely nothing to do with (R) or (D).

It is not a crime to be ignorant.

In fact, most of humanity is ignorant of programming. Programmers may be force multiplier and harbringer of extreme efficiency, but we have to relies on auto mechanics, laundrymat owner, and nail saloon for our girlfriends.

We bitcoiners are specialist in bitcoin but will be ignorant about pretty much anything else, except perhaps programming and some entrepeneurship.

exactly.

good place for a question i raised on a different thread:


me, i'm very political - but party-less.  voted for reagan twice; and on the first wednesday of november 2012, i will have voted for our current president twice.

i wouldn't even consider voting on a single issue - and if i did, Bitcoin wouldn't be it.

but still...  the way things get done in this part of reality is to pick a side and go with it.  seems to work as well as any other totally dysfunctional aspect of the US political system.

so...  which side?

Libertarian.

they won't win anything major.  not for several elections, if ever.

and the tiny numbers in the Bitcoin community are meaningless, when looking at the possibilities of national influence.  no offense - but let's stick to the art of the possible...

Well, if you must stick to the official red/blue us/them narrative, The republicans are usually the ones worried about money.

"usually never"????   You can't qualify an absolute statement.   It's sometimes always retarded.

that's true.

unfortunately, they are usually worried about money on behalf of the financial community, and their wealthiest donors.  i don't see that as ideal.

the dems, of course, want to control the pie - rather than splitting it up for their masters (spare me schumer - a rogue operator).  also not ideal.

i suspect that targeting specific politicians could be the way to go - there are plenty of rather odd alliances forged in the heat of battle.  for example: ron paul and barney frank co-sponsoring the legalization of weed...

consider how amazingly successful the take-over of san francisco by the gay community has been.  my hat is off to them.  not my cup of tea, but a most encouraging political success story.

yeah, the money of their corporate handlers.  everyone else in the country can fuck off as far as the repubs are concerned.

 

Which is why I said Libertarians. You might be able to convince a paulite by comparing it to electronic gold. I think I've seen somewhere Ron Paul brushed BTC off, though.

i understand.  and i do believe that if someone sat ron paul down for a few hours and ran it all by him, he might change his mind.

on a national level though, i don't think that would matter.

as i said (almost), politics is the art of the possible.

I read it to mean "The majority of them are never stupid", which makes perfect sense.

Asking what is bitcoin backed by is like asking what is gold back by. Gold is not backed by anything. It doesn't need to be. And neither does bitcoin.

I have been promoting Bitcoin among libertarians (including paulites) and with quite success (discount the people stuck with "only gold can be money", these people infuriate me and I am a goldbug...).

But at the end, I dont think its useful to target a political group for Bitcoin. I think its better to create useful applications. That will attract people no matter their ideology.

Consider the uncle of one of my best friends. He is a social-democrat and he talks about the need to pay taxes and accuses the people who dont of being selfish and inmoral. Well, one day my friend explained to me that his uncle was telling them how cheap he got his new TV. It turns out he bought it through the Internet from a shop in Andorra, which is a little country that has very low taxes. So basically he got it so cheap because he avoided paying taxes. When my friend pointed him that and asked him if that was inmoral, the uncle dodged with excuses. A lot of people have ideologies as a selfish way to feel good, not to help others (even if they claim so). 99% of the people will use whatever is useful and cheaper.

Conclussion: Build useful applications with Bitcoin (and I would not bother looking at political groups).

Gold is backed by being, relatively rare, pretty and being useful in some technological applications.  If gold jewelery were not desirable then it's value would be far less than it is today.   

Gold is again being used in semiconductor packaging due to it's unique material properties.  But then again semiconductors use even rarer and more expensive materials too. 

What else it bitcoin used for?

Bitcoin is relatively rare aswell. No person can suddenly and rapidly produce a large amount of bitcoins as to drastically alter total supply.

I explained Bitcoin to my 72 year old father several weeks ago.

His response?

He bought 1000 of them.

Smart man.

Let me guess: "Gold, the government can't take away? Where do I buy?"

Almost.  He read Satoshi's paper and was in awe of the solution to the double spending problem.

He reckons that alone is worth a "couple of hundred million".

He wants everyone to hurry up and build a decent client program before the next iteration of the concept is implemented by some mega-corp.

He fires up KeePass, then fires up TrueCrypt, mounts his drive then runs Bitcoin, then routes Bitcoin via Tor when he buys something....

He's been using computers since 1978.

I'd say believing that falsehood has everything to do with (R) and (D). Both parties are the reason the country is so ignorant.

How many (L's) would make such a silly mistake? Fewer.

Yes, that's quite common.  Many people in the USA believe the dollar is backed by gold, or at least the gold at Fort Knox.  No one has independently checked on the Fort Knox stash since the 1950s, so who knows how much (if any) is still there.

There are three things backing the US dollar:
1. Trade in oil.  Need to have dollars to buy it (although that's now less so than in the recent past)
2. USA is the world's largest economy.  You'll get dollars for your goods.
3. Guns.  Lots of guns.  With nukes on top.  World's best military buys a lot of respect.

I would say that ultimately reason #3 is the part that is holding all together. Without the army the dollar would collapse. Oil is still sold in dollars because the USA has the biggest military, and the USA economy is still working after so much abuse only because it has the world reserve currency that again is thanks to the military. There is a reason why the USA has bases all over the world and the rest of the countries dont.

Democrats are cute.  Fuzzy little naive children.  They are like kittens.  They want to be progressive and stand for something but they identify themselves with a party so milktoast and flaccid that they get pushed over by a minority party in congress while having a majority in congress and 'their' president in office. 

Too bad very few heeded my warnings about Obama.  The "I told you so" just doesn't do it for me.

Dude, if you could make a youtube vid explaining bitcoin to people, that'd be great.

Better yet, have him help you make a vid explaining bitcoin to his generational peers.  Retirees control an outsized amount of investement income as compared to the Internet generation that dominates this forum. 

True but if you present "us" with something new we will try to understand it so we are not as ignorant anymore.

The stupid masses on the other hand will look at a topic, shake their head because it so complicated/does not fit into their reality  and listed to another idiot who will explain the issue to them. Problem is that the "other idiot" tends to have ulterior motives so stupid people  will stay ignorant.

I explained bitcoins to my mother. :)

I have been ordered to run 2 GHash for her >:(

She might not get the freedom side of it but she sure hates banks. ;D


Every friend of mine (that has a GPU) is now installing GUIMiner and some that don’t are just having a dabble for fun trying to buy high sell low and doing a good job of it atm lol bad time to start playing with it I guess.

I fell down that dam rabbit hole and I didn’t look for it. I'm sure as hell going to drag as many as I can down it with me.

Gold a silver yep that what all the others seem to think that I talk to ouside of my close freinds.

Legal tender law creates a monopoly for the dollar. The law is enforced by guns. You are correct.

Welcome in the rabbit hole brother. First goes the current monetary system, then comes monetary reform, then you abandon all hope that government will ever not sell out to the banking system. Then goes gun law, then goes eminent domain, then goes the war on drugs, then the one on terror.

Eventually you understand the pricing mechanism and how a the truly free parts of the market are what builds things like cars and develops medicines and assigns resources more efficiently than any central plan could over the long run and the final vestiges of socialism appear to you as nothing more than envy based ranting.

I'll see you when you get there :)

I just want to lulz at you Americanos for a bit. I'm not even from your country and I've seen what the federal government's finances look like.

Social security is broke and broken as are the medical programs. The official debt in your country is now so high that if the interest rates were to begin to rise the total federal tax income could soon be spend on nothing but interest payments, no cops, no military, no nothing else. Your politicians seem like children playing with matches on top of a mountain of dynamite.

You folks need to snap out of calling each other names before you start a nuclear war with yourselves as your government turns on itself and on your people! The situation is EXTREMELY dire!

Yup, yup...

While the situation of the USA government is bad, the affirmation that the income tax will all go into paying the debt is heavily misleading. In fact that is not a problem at all. WHAT?!?!? Yes, its not a problem and its easy to understand why: The bigger holder of USA gov debt is the Federal Reserve. And the interests payed to the Fed are returned to the government, so in reality those interest dont matter. The government pay them and then gets them back. No big deal. The interests that you have to look at are the rest of the interests (always discounting the interest payed to the Fed).

The federal government wont default. As long as the government can keep printing money (the fed monetizing the government debt) it wont default. Its impossible. What will happen is that the monstruous monetization that is needed to wash up the debt will create heavy price inflation. The people will pay the government debt by higher prices.

I mention your interest payments to tax income situation because if it were to return to its historical level it will break you. It will not because as you say the fed will credit the government. It is already doing this for about 33% of the entire budget! Why are you not terrified!? Funding 33% (then 50% then 90%) of all government spending will not lead to heavy price inflation, it will lead to a total loss of confidence and hyperinflation.

Social security payments go to fund federal expenditure items. Social security holds an astronomical amount of treasury debt as a result. The govt can not pay social security in worthless devalued dollars (1/10th to 1/1000th its current value) without a very adverse reaction.

The government has lost control and it must bow out and let the economy fix itself. If it is not going to go willingly then you must not be under the impression that something unpleasant of historical proportions is about to happen.

1. Im not from the USA.

2. You are 100% right in this second comment. The problem is not the debt payment, because that can and will be monetized, the problem is the price inflation that will produce (and the possibility of hyperinflation, although I think it wont happen). This is exactly what I wanted to point out.

Cool then we are agreed.

Hyperinflation however is a loss of confidence event when currency becomes a hot potato no-one wants to hold.

three types of deefault:

1 Hard default where the load is simply repudiated. not paid back at all.
2. Soft default where the loan is involuntarily restructured and lender takes some kind of haircut.
3. Stealth default where the debt is monetized and therefor expensive dollars (or whatever) are repaid with cheap dollars.

I love how the response seems to always be gold. Like we're living in the middle ages... Bitcoin is supposed to be our way out.

He never said it was a crime to be ignorant and all you did was prove that everyone is indeed ignorant in some way. The thing is though that people shouldn't be ignorant of something that they put so much of their life's and trust into.

Bitcoin has no FDIC equivalent.  The disadvantages of a centralized currency are largely mitigated by the fact someone's looking over your shoulder for up to $100,000 in deposits per FDIC-insured institution.  If someone hacks the personal-I'm-my-own-bank or your house burns down with all of your backups, you're owned.  If someone copies your wallet and manages to drain your account, no cops come to help, no federal investigation.  You're screwed because you got outsmarted.  Who offers bitcoin wallet insurance?  Answer: no competent businessman.

I personally love watching huffy-tuffy anti-fed libertarians whine when someone runs off with $1000s of their bitcoins and then state "O DER WILL BE FEDERAL INVESTIGATION & I GONNA CALL POLICE" - LOL!!! YOU are your own security.  YOU are your own FDIC with bitcoin.  That's one of the major unappealing components of bitcoin that makes us more mainstream people that invest in equities, mutual funds, property, bonds, etc. kind of shy away from bitcoin. And, regardless of how secure bitcoin is, if you're hacked, there's no recourse.  No fed to help.  No Big Brother to rescue you.  No insurance company that would willingly cover your wallet. The coins are just... gone.  That's why it's BETA, and that's why any of you putting more than a fraction of a percentage of your net worth into the current version of bitcoin, designed for 2-5 cent valuations per coin, are clueless when it comes to asset management.  I don't care how secure transactions are - that component of bitcoin is great. The actual logical coin storage application is so poorly-designed and so insecure that it's hard to see this as more than a beta.

Libertarians forget that Big Brother watches over you in a good way 99% of the time. The system is designed to help you out when shit goes down. You can't deny it.  Someone steals your cash?  Call the cops.  They're here to help.  Someone murders your significant other?  You've got one hell of a system behind you to find the perpetrator. Your bank account gets screwed up?  $100k in guaranteed FEDeral insurance (yeah, let me rub that in.. FED FED FED FED - imagine if Allinvain had kept his assets in USD in three different bank accounts - 100% of his assets recovered).  Granted, there are some minor problems with our system (helped not by libertarian morons fighting any regulations whatsoever) like a corrupt healthcare system (we have fantastic doctors - I made a trip to the ER just a few days ago and they had their shit together - but I was lucky with my health insurance coverage, the average guy would pay $5k for what happened to me because Liberdumbs and Republidumbs fight the logic that is a public healthcare system), and a corrupt military-industrial complex that feeds propaganda to the GOP in order to sustain itself.  Systems are a good thing.  Regulations are fantastic and prevent things like a bank signing off on a home loan to you with your crappy credit and fraudulent application (LMAO@ libertarians whining about foreclosure or job issues due to the recession.... a recession created entirely as a consequence of deregulation of the futures, commodities, CDO, CDS, and MBS market).

Damn I love this anti-libertarian tangent I'm on!

Ok, Ill answer the troll:


There are no Bitcoin banks yet, so there can be no insurance for leaving your bitcoins in the bank. You got that one right... in a way. In the future we will see.

I wonder what happens with the dollar if you get robbed in the street. Oh yeah, you loose them. The dollar is so useless...  ::)


No shit, libertarians are against theft?!?!?! This must be new or something.


Yes, the federal government imposes a monopolly on justice and security, and libertarians have no option but to use that monpolly tfor security and justice. Are you propposing that the government should not provide justice and security and there should be private companies doing it?


Oh, we are talking with more mainstream people. Ohhhh.... How does it feel to be as mainstream as you? Im sure you get all the girls.


This is poor quality trolling. The previous trolls were better.


You have a point in the last part, but the solution is almost ready.


Keep sucking the man cock, youll like the reward.


You can get a song out of this.


Actually, you got this one wrong. FDIC takes care if your bank goes bankrupt, not if your bank screws with you.


Sorry I got tired of answering your trolling but you are low quality. Try again.