Bitcoin Forum

Revolutionaries!  Activists!  Those are fed up with being a slave! 

Listen closely for the love of all that is good!

I predicted this Bitcoin collapse a while back (you can go look and see that I was right).  It happened just like I thought it would.

This system (things modeled like Bitcoin) can't work and are as unworkable as the 'systems' that are proposed by the 'resource-based-economy' folks over at the Zeitgeist movement.  I believe I've already explained why in the long-hand version, but I'll make a quick, bullet point summary here:

1)  Bitcoins or any crypto-currency (CC) doesn’t fundamentally represent useful work.  Dollars and fractional reserve currencies have their problems in this area but by and large they do represent useful work – to the extent that they don’t is much a cause of our present economic crisis.  Earning CC for securing the network is the same as everyone printing money and saying that they are preventing counterfeiting, no labor was performed to acquire the CC and therefore it has no inherit value.  When people say that the US dollar is backed by nothing they are wrong.  It is backed by the output capacity of the USA.

2)  The amount of crypto-currency must be either issued: A) By an algorithm that only allows for a fixed allotment at certain intervals.  B)  At someone's discretion.  If it is "B" then you are back at where you started with the problem that resides in central banking - that it is at someone's discretion to grow (or shrink) the money supply.  Disregarding the fact that this is something that can work toward the public interest as it did with the 1st and 2nd Banks of the US under Hamilton and Biddle respectively, this is something that would have to be controlled by legal recourse as an only way to secure the network.  Obviously, this isn't the idea of anyone here, nor is it even worth discussing further.  With regard to "A" the problem that arises is that the demand and supply will seldom match each other with regard to the issuance of the CC "money supply".  If the supply roughly correlated with the demand for CC you'd see relative price stability.  What we saw with BTC was these two things having no rough correlation at all, where the price would be going up and down like a roller coaster.  So setting the creation of the currency at a fixed rate has the inescapable problem of never being able to manage the wild increase and decrease of its demand with regard to any price stability.  And that's fine if you want to have 'free market experiments' but you'll never be able to attract a large body of merchants with such a system.

3)  The fact that Moore's law exists.  In order to set a certain fixed growth of the money supply you need to tie it to a certain amount of algorithmic work performed.  Herein lays yet another problem.  Moore's law says that hardware performance increases at a certain rate, meaning that the difficulty of the block chain must evidentially hit a virtual ‘wall’ where the best hardware available cannot create enough coins to pay the power bill.  There is also an issue of 'opportunity cost', but I’ll get to that later.  There was one ‘solution’ for the problem of the price of BTC being too low to justify mining, and that was Transaction Fees.   But for this fee structure to work it requires that there be a bustling economy in the CC world.  Since the CC ‘market’ has this problem and the other inherent problems numerated, each alone that would (and did) destroy the CC project as a viable alternative to other currencies, no ‘bustling market’ was ever forthcoming, only some very small market operations.

4)  Opportunity Cost and CC Distribution.  It would be impossible to fix the amount of currency issued even close to the demand of the currency, much less be able to compensate for the fact that you are going to always have to deal with the eventual conflux of the block chain difficulty hitting the Moore’s law wall.  The fact that in a system such as this Moore’s law will always provide a much tilted structure for CC distribution due to Opportunity Cost.  When any CC emerges the difficulty must be low in order to entice people to join the project as a means of furthering it for financial gain and ideological reasons.  It couldn’t start out by requiring that the people buy $500 video cards in order to make a small amount of CC, if it did the project would never get off the ground.  It must start with almost $0 opportunity cost, which is what we saw with Bitcoin where people were earning large quantities of Bitcoins by running the program on laptops with Celeron processors.  It must evidentially become harder for the system to mine CC as it goes on or else the first-comers have no reason to begin the project and sacrifice the time in building it all up.  Here is where another problem occurs; although it is necessary to have this structure in order to spread the systems popularity, like a “gold rush”, it causes the total amount of the CC to be very unevenly distributed.  In fact the Bitcoin inequality and mis-distribution makes our existing wealth disparity in this country (USA) look like some Marxist Utopia. 

5)  The hack-ability of the client.  As this is effectively eCash on your disk drive that only requires read access to steal from anywhere in the world, there will always be a large drive to crime in any area this easy to illegitimately make money.  At its peak it had roughly a $200 million dollar market cap, if a CC system ever had a $200 Billion market cap (where you could literally have thumb drives with billions of dollars on it), can you imagine the underground crime syndicate that would grow up around this market in trying to steal and hack everything CC related?  What is your recourse if your money is stolen from an employee?  If your key is destroyed?  Etc? 

Once again, all this is fine if you want this to be an “experiment”, but be aware that it will never be anything more than an experiment if it doesn’t overcome these challenges.

Seeing as all of this –actually, any of this, totally ruins the potential for a CC to ever supplant a national currency, at least until REAL solutions are created for each of this failings then any CC project that doesn’t learn from Bitcoin’s demise will mimic its failure.  I’ve spend a lot of time on Bitcoin and it taught me an incredible amount for the thousands of dollars I lost in speculating with it.  I consider the money I lost well worth what I’ve learned.

Seeing as the above is incontrovertibly the case to all those who aren’t wearing Bitcoin-Cult-Blinders would anyone who would like to make positive change help me with regard to the OWS (Occupy Wall Street) movement?  I’m up in the Portland Oregon area and could use help distributing fliers (already distributed 2000+ of them and they are proposing the best and most well organized system compared to all the other ideas floating around out there) and implementing all manner of ideas I have around something that has real potential to make a positive difference.   Just reinforcing for you (that is if your mind is open to reason) that Bitcoin is terminal and dying, and all your energy would actually yield something worthwhile if it were vested in something that has potential, and OWS appears to be that thing if we can interject the right programmatic changes to the movement before it gets hijacked by other political players.

If you want to get hold of me to help the OWS movement please email me at "revolutionmeow@gmail.com". 
I’ll post my economic recovery plan in the next post.  If you’d like to help me further this plan then please let me know; many hands make light work, and it is going to be impossible to avert us going off a financial cliff without people like you and the help you have the power to contribute.  I need people that can understand good economic principles when they are put in front of them, people with web experience, people with marketing skills or ability to do research projects and gather information.  If you read any economic books you can get your hands on, like myself, or much better actually have worked in finance or have an advanced degree in economics or related fields please get in contact with me, it could be the beginning of a beautiful collaborative relationship.  If you have anything to offer please hit me up as I have all manner of ideas and limited time and resources to implement them.

Bitcoin is dead? How?

Below is what I've put together for the Portland Occupy protests.  The below ideas aren't meant to be original, only pragmatic and effective in uniting the 99% against the forces of Wall St., the Federal Reserve and finance capital in general.  If you agree with even a majority of these ideas it is in your best interest to help me further them.  I've blanketed the Portland protests with my fliers and nearly everyone camped there is intimately familiar with them.  So far, the 1st demand has made it on to their list of the major demands that they are calling for.  This is it folks.  Mass protests and perhaps strikes are on the horizon.  This is your chance to make a difference.  We are living what will be future history.  Either join now in making that history or be damned.

Once again.  Email me at "revolutionmeow@gmail.com" (All email addresses associated with PDX + revolution were taken.)

==================================================================================================


1 :: Student Loan Amnesty

Today it is common for graduating seniors to carry $50,000, $75,000, or even $100,000 of debt. Add the costs of an advanced degree in teaching, law, or medicine, and the debt burden becomes astronomical. The exorbitant cost of a college education reflects the increasing immiseration of the United States over the past 40 years, as the overall standard of living has declined by two thirds or more in terms of real wages and other considerations. These debts are owed to the same bankers who cashed in on the Bush bailout of 2008, and the even larger loans issued by Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve over recent years. This is a system of brutal primitive accumulation against the life chances everyone who knows that they need a college degree to be employable in the 21st century. Total students loan indebtedness is now approaching $1 trillion. This grinding debt is destroying the futures, the lives, and the hopes of college students and recent graduates. When a debtor country like Greece is unable to pay its debts, it is normal to hear talk of a haircut for the bondholders and bankers. It is time for the Wall Street banks to take a haircut on student loan debt. Most of this debt cannot be paid off, but an entire generation can be ruined by a futile attempt to pay it back. A leading demand must therefore be a total cancellation of all outstanding student loan debt, meaning a total and immediate forgiveness of all payments of principal and interest coming from this category of borrowing. This is also the best stimulus program possible.



2 :: Stop Foreclosures

In the area of home foreclosures, the bankers have trampled on the law to seize millions of homes, some of which never had a mortgage, and many of which were current in their payments. The banks have used corrupt robo-signers, robo-cops, and robo-judges to carry out these fraudclosure thefts. The answer is to make foreclosure a federal crime for the duration of the economic crisis, so that anyone who throws an American family out on the street will end up in prison. Again, the bailout receiving Wall St. bankers can eat the losses, which are unavoidable in any case. This is not an impossible demand: under the New Deal, the Frazier-Lemke Act stopped all foreclosures on homes, provided only that the owners could get a minimal payment plan approved by any judge in any court. With the help of popular pressure and public opinion, foreclosures virtually came to a halt. This is what we need to be demanding today.


3 :: Defend & fund the social safety net

Wall Street and Washington elites agree that the American people ought to be subjected to genocidal austerity – cuts so draconian that they will kill people. The goal is obviously to fund bigger and better bailouts of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase when they go bankrupt the next time around. Real unemployment in the United States is now about 25%, meaning that 30 million people cannot find work, and many have been looking for years. Therefore, we need to extend jobless benefits to all unemployed, including those who have been out of a job for 99 weeks and more. 46 million Americans are now surviving thanks to Food Stamps, but the reactionary Republicans are demanding savage cuts, and Obama is more than likely to cave. We also need to defend programs that specifically help children and young. These include S-CHIP, which gives health care to poor children; Head Start, which provides breakfast and preschool for poor kids; and WIC, which provides high-protein meals for pregnant women, nursing mothers, and infants. Older people have special problems, including that Wall Street speculators have destroyed the value of their 401(k) and IRA retirement plans. This means that Social Security pensions should be increased, and not cut. The best healthcare would be to open Medicare to all Americans, while making the investments needed to maintain quality. Medicaid gives healthcare to poor people of any age, and these payments must be maintained.


4 :: Pay for Healthcare and social services with a 1% Wall Street Sales Tax:

How these programs can be paid for is simple: the Tobin tax or Wall Street sales tax. Today the total financial turnover of the bankers in terms of buying, selling, and other trading comes to well over three quadrillion dollars yearly – that’s more than 3,000 trillion dollars. The rest of us pay sales tax on most purchases, often including the groceries, but Wall Street bankers and hedge funds pay absolutely zero on that colossal sum. The most unfair aspect of the entire US tax system is that Wall Street pays virtually no taxes. It is time for the bankers to cough up 1% of every stock, bond, and derivatives transaction, be it program trading, high frequency trading, or computerized flash trading at the rate of one million transactions per second. The total revenue could be split between the federal government and the states, and would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps even trillions. There is nothing impossible about this demand: the federal government had a financial transaction tax from the time of World War I to 1967. And even today, the largely right wing governments of the European Union are about to enact their own Tobin tax. It must be done here as well.


:: 5: Nationalize the Federal Reserve:

Simply “Ending the Fed” will not break the power of Wall St. The Federal Reserve is owned and controlled by Wall St. not the other way around. The creation of credit is something that should not be done in secret at the whim of unaccountable and unelectable clique of predatory bankers; the size of the money supply, interest rates, and approved types of lending must be determined by public laws passed and debated openly, passed by the congress and signed by the President. Institute 0% federal LENDING with preferential treatment for tangible physical production and manufacturing of goods and commodities, to include industry, agriculture, construction, mining, energy production, transportation, infrastructure, public works, and scientific research, but not financial services and speculation. Issue successive tranches of $1 trillion federal loans as needed to create 30 million union-wage productive jobs and attain full employment for the first time since 1945, reversing the secular decline in the US standard of living. Provide 0% credit to reconvert idle auto and other plants and re-hire unemployed workers to build modern rail, mass transit, farm tractors, and aerospace equipment, including for export.


:: 6: End Free Trade:

30 years of “Free Trade” policies have wrecked the US economy and middle class and done nothing to raise the global standard of living where Billions survive on less than a dollar a day. Free Trade is a Race to the Bottom. Free Trade gives rise to incredibly powerful, unaccountable, trans-national corporations that have no vested interest in any given country – regardless of where they put their “Headquarters”. Set up a 10% tariff to protect domestic reindustrialization. Re-launch the US industrial sector by first rebuilding collapsing US infrastructure to modern standards. Rebuild the rail system to 21st century standards including the most advanced maglev rail possible. Stop the attempted privatization of USPS, public utilities or other state run sectors. Encourage unionization. Use our advanced technological sectors and revitalized industrial sectors to close the trade deficit. Work in building a national coalition of nations dedicated in shutting down the various international tax havens that are used as a primary means of the 1% dodging taxes, covert economic warfare and money laundering.  


:: 7: End the Wars:

Empire isn’t good for the world and it’s not good for Americans. Bring the troops home. Begin selling military bases on foreign soil. In the modern age it is not only wasteful and immoral to be ‘saber rattling’, encircling and antagonizing other nations, it is plainly stupid as the escalation to nuclear war is a very real possibility. Protect and expand veteran and active-duty benefits. There will be no shortage of jobs and education for returning soldiers in helping reindustrialize the US. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq alone have cost trillions of dollars, much of which is a feeding trough for the Military Industrial Complex and privatized branches of the armed forces. Claw back money from the M.I.C. through auditing and investigations into war profiteering.


:: 8: Seize Wall St. Banks & Implement Regulations:

All the major Wall St. banks are leveraged to the hilt with off-balance sheet derivatives liabilities. The estimated total of these off-balance sheet derivatives is at 1,500 Trillion (which is over 100 times the amount of our National Debt). No amount of 0% credit from the Federal Reserve or bailout money can make these banks solvent. You can’t bail out a black hole. Make them put those liabilities on their balance sheet thus exposing their insolvency then seize them and liquidate them through chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings. This includes but is not limited to: JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America. Other individual banks balance sheets will speak for themselves. Reinstitute Glass-Steagall to separate savings banks, investment/speculative banks and insurance companies. Make off-balance sheet liabilities or assets illegal, markets cannot function with the value, liabilities and assets of banks and financial institutions being secretive. Set up a 15% reserve requirement for all OTC derivatives. Set a 10% maximum rate of interest on credit cards and payday loans. Re-regulate commodities markets with 100% margin requirements, position limits, and anti-speculation protections for hedgers and end users to prevent oil and gasoline price spikes. Enforce labor laws and anti-trust laws against monopolies and cartels. Restore individual chapter 11.

Were you the guy at the Portland OWS that was interviewed on the bench holding the Bitcoin sign?

EDIT: (LOL) My original post was going to be: You're lucky Atlas is no longer here. But I opted to ask a serious question, for I'm not one to dispute your logic. But I'm beginning to believe that Atlas is still part of our family. Going to read your second post, niemivh.

Bruno

This isn't a debate.

I can't spend my time educating people on this forum any more.  If you'd like to help further OWS then email me, if not then please start reading some books on economics and don't stop until you realize the absurdity of what you're saying.

That goes for anyone else wanting to respond to this post.  I don't have time to check this forum any more as I'm incredibly busy actually getting stuff done with regard to OWS and creating and furthering a social movement and building alliances.

Cheers!

I want to read you second post, but this post stopped me in my tracks.


Me: Father, tell me some more about God.
Priest: Would love to son, but I'm busy at the moment. Got to go see some boys.

My point is, you can build some alliances here. You took all the time to pen the work above, I like it, then read you have no time for us and heading out to build alliances. I can't get my head wrapped around that logic. What gives?

Who ever says bitcoin is dead, is an idiot :)

you dont understand economics, money or bitcoin.

I would have loved to go in detail, but unfortunately im very busy and have got shit to do.

I don't see how any of these things stop it from being a useful way for people to make anonymous transactions online -- which was ostensibly the original purpose of the currency. The fact that it doesn't meet your criteria as a national currency or a viable platform for future speculation is probably a good thing for those of us who are interested in simply having a payment option that (a) we don't have to pay third parties to use and (b) isn't regulated by a government.

I was interested in hearing what this boy had to say but all I got was arrogance.

Dude, you forgot the facepalm:

http://www.funnydogsite.com/pictures/Cover_Your_Eyes509.jpg

You're lucky he won't be back for he said he doesn't have time to monitor this thread.

That said, let's tear apart the manifesto. I'll start with the Tobin tax.

That would include taxing every Bitcoin transaction on the Bitcoin exchanges. But at .5%, I guess that wouldn't be to bad.

LOL at the entire post. I love how he recommends to "end free trade" as if trade were a policy.

What he means is, "fine and imprison people who voluntarily transact goods and services across national borders."

How dare those Mexicans sell us things! How dare the Indian's buy our goods! We must stop the Brazilians from ruining our economy by providing our consumers with things they want at prices lower than our less-efficient producers make them!!

To the OP - Read Bastiat's "Candlemaker's Petition" and then review your thesis.

Oh no, bitcoin has died again, for the 500th. time.

Is this a joke? 1% tax on every transaction would kill liquidity and destroy the economy.

OP works for the FEDs

It isn't dead you dumbshit, btc price in fiat is irrelevant.

Also this was the best
 

Um, I'm one of those, and I'm finding a lot of issues in your claims  :-\ For instance, with the moores law claim, if the best hardware won't be able to pay for itself, won't production just scale back down to the level where it can, followed by difficulty adjustments to bring it back to break even levels?

Introducing "Rock Paper Scissors 2.0":

ROCK PAPER SCISSORS SPOCK LIZARD
http://www.samkass.com/theories/RPSSL.gif

But then everybody will choose Spock, therefore negating the additional two choices in order to reduce the number of ties!

Bitcoin is not dead. 

Sorry if this is too long to read. I wanted to explain as much as I could instead of just "you're wrong"


I'm one of those with $75,000+ of debt. Student loans are owned by the banks and the government, but in turn, through stocks and bonds, are owned by the people. Amnesty for all student loans will result in a lot of 99% losing their retirement funds, and the government going into much further budget deficit. (Also, don't forget, the banks have paid back most of the bailout money.) This situation is closer to that of Italy, where the debt is actually owned by all of us, as opposed to Greece, where the debt is owed to outsiders. Forgiving loans could also set up a precedent where no bank or organization will ever risk giving out a student loan again out of fear of losing their entire investment.



All for keeping tabs on banks to make sure they don't foreclose illegally (aka literally steal someone's property they have no right to). As for stopping all foreclosures, until the banks clear the bad assets off their books, this recession will continue. (and, again, they paid back most of the bailout money). Best course of action is to have them keep foreclosing (LEGALLY) as fast as possible until all this is cleared out. Like it or not, economies still heavily rely on the banking/finance system, and the sooner we clean that up, the sooner we can get our economy growing again. Also, coming from countries where it's normal to see whole families living in the same house/apartment, and where it's normal to move out, into an apartment, only once you are married (countries being entire ex-soviet block and much of Europe), I have no sympathy for the people being foreclosed on. Move back in with your family until you can truly afford a house without relying on someone else's financial trickery. The whole "american dream/owning your own house" propaganda and subsidies have actually been rather disastrous for the US economy for the last century.



I'm all for social safety nets, but how much longer should we keep paying for unemployment, and with who's money? Don't forget, those big banks are owned by the same people who have been saving for retirement, and making the banks pay is almost like asking for people who have pensions and 401k's to pay. Forcing Wall Street to pay will only hurt those older people's destroyed 401k's further. If the problem is unemployment, then focus on fixing the problem instead of patching the symptom. Unemployment is high because the amount of unskilled labor is high, and number of unskilled jobs available is low. On the other hand, demand for skilled labor is very high, but the number of skilled employees is always low. In today's economy, just like during the Great Depression, it's really hard to find good help. Unemployment rate for college educated people is in the 4% to 5%, the way it's always been. So either make our unskilled labor more competitive with the rest of the world by lowering minimum wage, or use the money going for unemployment to make specialized job training mandatory and increase our pool of skilled people.



Ugh, horrible idea! Considering A LOT of securities have returns of only 1% to 3%, having to pay sales tax both ways will instantly cut 2% off of all gains. You are also, again, forgetting that bankers aren't the only ones doing the trading. Everyone who owns pensions or 401Ks will be hit by this 2%. Like minimum wage, this tax will make certain types of investments (jobs) not possible (profitable), such as more secure and stable treasuries, bonds, or certain Large Cap stock investments. As a result, everyone will end up having to invest in much more risky securities in an attempt to stay above the 2%, resulting in much more risk in the economy overall.


Few problems here: First, the government works way too slow, so by the time they finish bickering and increase/decrease the money supply, it will likely be too late to help. Second, why is it the government's job to determine who can lend money and to whom? And finally, I'm all for putting upper limits on interest rates to limit predatory lending, but actually determining interest rates, or setting them at 0%, is a bad idea. Interest on a loan is very literally a price for taking on risk. Not all risks are the same, and thus some risks cost more than others. The #1, main, and biggest, reason we had the market crash in '08 is because the price for the risk was set way below the actual cost of the risk. Very short version: thanks to credit default swaps, high risk activity (subprime mortgages) that cost a lot in risk, were sold as zero risk. Once the cost of the risk surfaced, no one had the money to pay for that risk, since everyone assumed it was zero. (don't want to get into technical details, but can if you ask). The government giving out 0% loans is essentially throwing away free money, too, in a sense that they will get back WAY less than what they give out, even if all the loans are eventually paid back.


That is ENTIRELY untrue. Places where "free trade" is allowed to enter, such as Mexico, China and India, have seen very rapid wage growths. Note that we first outsourced to Mexico, but that got too expensive so we went to China and India. At this point that is also getting much too expensive, and next places will likely be south Asia and parts of Africa. Ask those three countries mentioned if they are better off now than they were 30 years ago. Free trade exports money to other countries and teaches people more specialized skills. Once those people learn those skills, they can, and do, demand higher wages. That's the reason outsourcing to India and China is getting more expensive: companies are finding shortages of cheap employees, whereas before they has lines of thousands at the gates. So, contrary to popular belief, Free Trade is not a "Race to the Bottom," but rather the propagation and teaching of skills around the globe, and a race of those at the bottom up to the top. People hate it because lower skilled workers here have to compete with desperate lower skilled workers in other countries, and for now the "bottom" is so low that it's bringing the rest of us down. But, personally, I would rather get brought down at the expense of bringing the other people's lives up (by giving them jobs and skills), then use protectionist policies to keep us up, and leave the rest of the world's poor living in cardboard boxes and doing things like working quarries by hand, working in horrid sweatshops for only local customers, or resorting to prostitution and crime.
Also, tarrifs actually don't stop free trade. They just make the stuff we buy more expensive. They are an indirect tax on us consumers, not a tax on importers.



No arguments here... although we already do "sell" military bases on foreign soil. A lot of countries (Germany, Japan, etc) actually pay for us to keep our military there. That way they can do their stuff without having to worry about keeping up a standing army. So, empire and useless wars suck, but our military isn't all just a waste of taxpayer money, and is one of our biggest income-producing exports.

You predicted that the price would drop after it skyrocketed to speculation fueled unmaintainable levels? What should we call you oh great one? The Oracle of Bitcoin?

I'll take any of those useless Bitcoins that you want to get rid of.