My friend's trip was from Chendu to around the giant Budda area.  At least a several hour drive.  She says it used to be about $50 and is now about $100.  When I visited Beijing shortly before the Olympics, the Great Wall, and the 'better' part which was a little farther away.  I don't recall exactly how much I paid, but it seems like somewhere around $30 sticks in my mind.  I did take public transportation down to the Peking Man site mostly just to find out for myself what it was like.  The rate was extremely low and I'm sure it must have been highly subsidized.

I do sense that the government controls things (like fuel prices) in a fairly hands-on manner, and also that the government tends to favor Beijing (to the chagrin of Shanghai in particular) and have read such.  I did not get any farther outside of Beijing than that, and have not yet been back.

I was quite amazed at how cheap food was.  It blew me away that a fish could be raised to a decent size, brought to the city alive, and cooked all for a few bucks.  The economics didn't seem to be there, but I never did really get my mind around people doing so much work for so little money.  We in the US are quite spoiled.

As a user of the USD, I just don't see it in the economic numbers or in real life.  If anything I see continuing deflation since I've been interested in the real estate market lately, and my wages are such that food and fuel are not a large fractions of my expenses.  I really only detect devaluation because gold prices are going up so fast.

In contrast, my friend who is visiting China right now took a bus out of Chendu because the taxi fare has doubled since she was there a few years ago.  She tells me that the price of pork in Guangzhou is about the same as in the US and people's wages are really not up nearly that amount.

One hell of a lot of USD are being created so there is a clearly devaluation going on, but I think that the money creation is getting sucked into the shadow banking system and exported overseas so we on Main Street USA are not yet seeing it in a major way.  I do expect it to wash in like a tidal wave at some point however.  That is part of the reason I am interested in Bitcoin.

See coincula!  That's how it's done.

As with most complex phenomenon, and in fact most simple ones, there are often a number of factors.

CIYAM:  I take some issue with the 'stability' of the RMB.  My friend reports that the inflation rate is alarming and is having a significant negative impact on a lot of people.

"The Chinese internet"?  The ghost of Ted Stevens lives on!


  http://bitcoinstatus.rowit.co.uk/

I'll surprise you with some cool math to boot:

10,000 / 300,000,000 = .0033 %

500 / 1,000,000,000 = .00005%

.0033 / .00005 = 66

So Americans appear to be around 50 times more likely to have Bitcoin clients running than Chinese.

Now why don't you (finally) surprise me with a hypothesis.  There is no requirement for it to have any basis in truth.  It's just an idea which could play a part in explaining the phenomenon and which can be tested against various observations that come up.  There are a multitude of them.

If there were one non-violent African to every million violent Africans, I might entertain your hypothesis.  Or at least seek some explanation (and without feeling a lot of guilt in doing so.)

I await your hypothesis about why so few Chinese, as a percentage of the population of the country, seem to have an interest in Bitcoin.  Perhaps it is simply their low inflation rate and general satisfaction with the leadership's stewardship of the economy that makes them highly ambivalent to non state sponsored alternatives.  You think?

It looks to me like the Chinese authorities have destroyed Bitcoin (in China) before it was invented.  Seems that fewer than one in a million souls in that country have the combination of capability and mindset to employ the solution.

One Chinese I know fairly well is vehemently and viscerally opposed to Bitcoin on principle and steadfastly refuses to learn or understand anything about it.  I have to hypothesis that whatever factors effect her perception are at play with a healthy percentage of the rest of the population.

Just a guess, but I would imagine that most GPU's and FPGA's are cultivated in fields which are distinctly in the Chinese sphere of influence.

FPGA's, at least, have been at one time contemplated as a device who's use had national security implications (although not for hashing.)  In the (seemingly unlikely) event that hashing became a matter of national security, I have little doubt that availability of GPUs, FPGA's, and eventually ASICs could and would be controlled to the extent which would be as effective as deemed necessary.

Here's an update on my experience with Bitcoinica.

It does appear that a monkey hammering on a keyboard can double it's money if they choose the correct binary answer to which way the market is going.

I funded with BTC but withdrew all by 8 BTC since I decided I had no real use for Bitcoinica at this time, but wanted to piss a few away for fun.

I had been futzing around losing money in seconds from about 2.20 to 2.33.  At around 2.33, I put in a 25 BTC 'buy limit order' for 3.1314 (which was actually an accident because I wanted to 'sell high'.)  After a time I did something to 'execute' iirc, and it converted immediately and automatically into a 'position'.

Within a few days my target had been met, but the lower end of the spread never reached the 3.1314 price, then the market dropped.  Just recently the lower end of the spread exceeded my 3.1314 target and what happened was...not a damn thing.

So I manually 'liquidated' and Bitcoinica credited me with around 20 USD (not BTC to my surprise.)  So now I have another problem in how to get things back to BTC.  Maybe I'll just try again to lose all my money so I don't have to worry about it.

Yes.  I find it more likely that there will be a crack-up before 1/1/2012 than after 12/31/2012.


Thanks!

I find the most compelling argument against this eventuality is that there is still a chance that it could transpire in 2011.

The account is on someone else's computer systems.  Therefore it is their account and their money.  That is contributing to the difficulty you are having gaining access to it (I would posit.)

I've always considered the value I hold with my Bitcoin exchange, and even my mainstream banks, to be disposable.  This has a distinct cost in terms of convenience and fees and such, but I can balance these costs against how soundly I wish to sleep at night.  What Bitcoin offers is the certainty of assets which have no counter-party risk and the convenience of electronic transmissions.  I hope for a day when I can be more compfortable keeping a fair portion of my assets in Bitcoin and do a bulk of my financial transactions using it.

Or there might be a correlation between those who have the analytic aptitude to understand brain science and those who have a liberal bias.  That would match the general observations I have made in some of the environments I have been privileged enough to have been a part of.

I won't say what I put as a %, and it is not very accurate anyway, but I will say that it is dwarfed by PMs.  My BTC percentage of net worth would be higher had not the value of BTC dropped significantly from the $16-ish level.

That said, as time goes by and the Bitcoin network remains non-exploited, my confidence in it grows.  Additionally, as Bank of America makes shifts to co-mingles their derivatives wing with FDIC wing, as MF Global blows up and steals customer accounts, as the US Fed intervening to save counter-party banks in Europe, etc, etc, my desire to be rid of anything which can be easily stolen increases and so to the amount of my net worth that I am willing to risk with Bitcoin (which I consider to be very risky, but a very useful thing to have in the event of bank holidays and capital controls.)

I've had bad luck on E-Bay lately.  Three things I have bought have ended up being one of 1) not in the possession of the seller after all, 2) wrong item sent, or 3) lost (or something) in the mail.  The total is around $850.

I will get all of my money back even of the flaky sellers would prefer to just keep my money.  This is because I am using paypal.  I will continue to prefer paypal unless a Bitcoin merchant will send me the item and accept my Bitcoin transfer after I have received the item and am satisfied with it.

I advise anyone considering doing business with Bitcoin to not get to glassy-eyed about the nicety of 'no charge-backs' because it is not necessarily a desirable thing to everyone in all situations.  I also expect that 'no charge-backs' are especially interesting to people who, for whatever reason, may be particularly prone to getting hit by them.

I find that Nagle actually brings up some good points that are really worth considering from time to time.  Proudhon? ummm...'not so much' (to understate things just a bit.)

I made reference to it as a 'different' form of blacklisting early in this thread.  Different than blocking certain transactions or addresses.

I have mentioned the idea of having 'block level blacklisting' ready to go in the client once or twice on other threads.

I'm actually mostly interested in 'alternate currencies' which derive their value from being backed by 'real' Bitcoin.  This would reduce the strain and need for complexity in the 'real' Bitcoin and let it scale without the load of supporting the entire 'vertical' from central bank type operations down to 1,000,000,000 people buying skittles.  One of the main reasons this is of significant interest to me is that I fear a future where bitcoind needs to run on specialized hardware or networks.

As importantly, this could provide a variety of sub-currencies which are 'tuned' to different kinds of use-cases and could provide a better end-user experience for them.  One thing (of thousands) which could be designed in would be a value-level black/white listing.  If it gave people something they wanted, it would prosper.  If not, it would die.

I think one of the places I mentioned 'block level' blacklisting (meaning ignoring a block or set of blocks which would otherwise be considered valid) was on a thread where I rambled on about 'BTC backed alternate currencies.'

I an not fully understanding what you are saying I think.  Here's the situation which concerns me:

Say that at a certain point in time, some threat requiring activation of an 'internet kill switch' pops up.  Suddenly, for all intents and purposes, all networks are off-line.  Fairly soon critical infrastructure would be wired back in, but that would be large corporations, and there would be significant packet level filtering.  Consumer grade connectivity may be out for a long time.  Months.  And as it came back on-line it would also probably be carefully analyzed and regulated.  I could even imagine a situation where encryption was only allowed between authorized endpoints (like people and their banks.)

Obviously such a scenario would spur interest in mesh networks and the like, but the technologies are extremely immature and untested, and anyone deploying them would likely be labeled a 'terrorist' which would complicate development.

Bitcoin seems to be developed under the assumption that peer-to-peer communications are available in a wide-spread and relatively reliable manner.  I fear that Bitcoin could fail if that happens to not be the case, particularly if it were actively exploited by competent attackers during such a time of limited connectivity.

So, I would envision the 'block level blacklist' capability of Bitcoin being useful for a situation where there was a very obvious and very clear need to simply black out the entire economy for as long as needed in order to save it.  Actually, in such dire (and probably far-fetched) circumstances, it might be fairly tenable and make the most sense to simple upgrade the client software in order to get going again.

I doubt it.  Honoring such a black list would be effectively halting Bitcoin and all the transactions at a certain point in time and starting it back up again when it is safe to do so.  It would not be a practical solution to anything but a terminal attack on Bitcoin.  At least that is the way I would design and implement it.

You are probably not questioning my 'block level' idea, but I'll answer that anyway (as it is formed in my mind.)

The most obvious people to trust would be the development team of Bitcoin itself since they already require a fair amount of:
 - trust
 - watching
 - adopting bits from
by virtue of working on the code.

But generally, I would suggest that anyone can put up any list they like.  If a majority of people choose to honor it, it becomes a close to 'the law' as things get in an open-source world.  That's basically what happens with the code base itself.

And again, I would suggest that just having such a thing which could be credibly deployed would avoid any need to actually deploy it.  That would be the point.

I kind of like the idea of a block lever blacklist.  Or more accurately, a built in mechanism for the user to optionally choose to honor a blacklist set of their choice in a straightforward manner.

The main goal would be discourage anyone from attempting to contaminate the blockchain in some manner.  I could imagine that when the 'internet kill switch' is well entrenched, there could be some sort of an 'internet 9/11' event which would require connectivity to be severally disrupted for a significant period of time.  My concern is that Bitcoin may not be robust against such a situation, particularly if dedicated efforts were made to damage it in such an event.  A usable blacklist framework, if it were pre-installed and available to be democratically selected might make it so that such damage were unlikely to succeed (and thus unlikely to be attempted.)