Not paypal, no. They've forbidden the selling of bitcoins. And even for those who don't care, selling bitcoins for paypal is somehow dangerous since paypal transfers are reversible while bitcoin transfers are not.

I have a very good and a bad news about this subject.

The good news is: The Seasteading Institute will accept bitcoin donations!
They send me their address by mail: 1FexWDptSXFWsZvdLoBckZgVFWytHjsSu8
I've asked them to add it to their donation page so you don't need to trust my word only.

The bad news is about the account I had opened in November in MyBitcoin to store the donations. It had received 50BTC from one donor. But that was a while ago, and I just cannot remember the password. Yeah, I know, shame on me!
I tried creating another account in order to ask them help to recover this money. I sent them two messages but got no answer, and since a few days they have this message on their site:
Note: We are experiencing growing pains. Support will be degraded until we are able to upgrade our systems. Thank you for your patience.

I hope to be able to contact them once they are reachable again and recover these 50BTC. I apologize to whoever did that donation, I'm really sorry.

Como você pretende balancear oferta e demanda no seu site?

Digo, se você usa a cotação em dólar, e não uma cotação própria, você pode ter dificuldades se o volume de vendas não for igual ao volume de compras. Caberia a você trazer ou mandar as bitcoins para fora. Você vai ter gastos com transferências internacionais, conversões de moeda etc.

Se você fizer sua própria cotação, de acordo com a oferta e demanda por bitcoins no seu site, aí outras pessoas ajustarão automaticamente o preço quando ele desviar muito do preço de outras exchanges, você não precisaria se preocupar. Tenho a impressão que você poderia ter menos custos e riscos fazendo assim.

Not being a democracy by itself is not a problem. It seems things in Singapore work better than most places in the world.
The only bad thing I heard is that they have some draconian laws regarding behaviors... like, throwing garbage on the street may put you in jail. Drugs, prostitution etc are severely punished and so on.

There are important changes since that version, including bug fixes. I recommend you updating, but as said above, make backups of your wallet always.

I wonder if anybody has ever calculated the chances of a vote making any difference in elections. I bet the chances are compared with those of winning a lottery, if not worse. You probably have much more chances of dying in your way to the voting center than of having your vote making any difference.

This is just a matter of definition. Originally the words inflation and deflation were used only for the monetary offer, but eventually people started to confuse it with price changes, and today it is the most common meaning of the word.
Trying to fight that is like trying to fight the distortion the word "liberal" has suffered in US, saying that leftists are not liberals.

Just specify "monetary inflation" when you're talking and avoid issues.

You have two options:

• Convert all or most of your salary right after receiving it, and then during the month spend the bought BTC. This allows you to lose less with dollar devaluation since you hold it for very short periods only. It would be particularly interesting when dollar inflation rates start to be measured monthly instead of yearly.
• Just use BTC as a savings account. You don't need to spend it often, just when you want to spend your savings. Pretty much like many people do with gold or other investment assets.

I really don't think it's much a problem of loss of faith. In Brazil, from 1980 to 1994, the monetary base expanded 2.303.797.693.883%. Yes, more than two trillion percent. There is no faith that could have kept the value of such money...
@chodpaba, the M1, in the same period, expanded a lot less - 1.656.853.722.660% (1,6 billion)-, meaning that the multipliers we were talking about decreased considerably. They actually prevented the damage from being worse, in a certain way.

I did not read the article, but, at some extent, yes, inflation does intensify economic inequalities. It's not difficult to see it actually. Don't you think the variables "level of income" and "percentage of owned assets in the form of government currency or an equivalent" have any sort of relation?
In general the most poor are those who lose the most with inflation.

The new money is not distributed equally. Banks, for instance, receive it before most others.

@Chodpaba, most of the time these multipliers are constant, and even when they change, the amount of inflation they can cause is limited, if they go too high, the system collapses, and those who pushed those multipliers too far go bankrupt. What doesn't have hard limits is the amount of new money the central bank can create.

It doesn't matter if each new dollar created by the Fed will become $10 or $100 or $1000 new dollars when passed through all multipliers. What matters is the relative growth of the monetary offer, if it is 1%, 10% or 100%. And this relative change to the monetary offer is the same relative change the Fed does to the monetary base when all multipliers remain constant.

It's like analyzing the complexity of functions in computer science. Constant multipliers don't really matter, what you have to look is the format of the curve, if it's N, N^2, 2^N etc. And in the realm of money, it is the central bank who shapes the curve.

OK, I grant you that, you may be right. I've never read such texts from the imperial family.


But not this. Labor laws do no good, and the stronger they are, the more damage they do. Labor is a contract between parties, nobody else has anything to do with how these parties do it, pretty much like marriage actually.
The CLT was always a problem, it's a quite authoritarian set of labor laws.


That's a pessimist view, but you might be right. I just hope it doesn't get to that point.... if it gets, well, I am screwed! I've already criticized government so much out on the open of the internet, that I would probably go to jail the day I step in a Brazil "more strict than the military [dictatorship]".

People asking for more free lunches. I wonder when they will understand that there's no such thing...

No, the situation does not require that the government keeps releasing hell on its victims. It can stop printing. It will "only" have to find another way to fund its activities, as well as re-index its debt if it's indexed on the hiperinflationary currency.
And regarding the toilet paper example, if there's no money printing, prices will adjust, and you would be able to buy it.

As Mises said, in the long run, any quantity of money is enough.


Welcome!

I don't know any example of hyperinflation which hasn't being caused by massive increase of the monetary base... I lived in hyperinflation when a kid, and the cause was pure money printing... can you cite an example when people just lost faith in government's currency, without this one printing it like crazy before?

Massive withdraw of money from the fractional reserve system would most likely cause deflation of the monetary offer, with banks going bankrupted and all the M1 created by them vanishing...

All monetary aggregates are multipliers of the M0. If the M0 remains constant, these aggregates can only cause inflation/deflation if the multiplier changes, for example, if the compulsory decreases, that will increase the M1. But that's the only way and it's a limited effect. These aggregates multipliers are most of the time constants. And when they are constant, the only way the monetary offer can increase is if the monetary base increases. That's the true source of inflation.

But eventually most of them do stop. It just takes them a while - and lots of misery and suffering from the people they control - to accept reality. Stop printing means they either have to cut expanses or increase taxes, probably a strong mix of both.

I think the only example of government that did not stop was Zimbabwe, at least the only one I am aware about. They printed so much the people themselves abandoned the currency, and the government couldn't enforce its use any more.

Yeah, he was so much for freedom he kept the majority of the population as slaves... Brazil was one of the last countries to abolish slavery, and the monarchy has its fault on it.


No, it was not. Take the military dictatorship for ex. They were control freaks, central planning at its ultimate level. Most of Brazil huge inefficient state companies were created during their time. The "economic miracle" was nothing more than lots of government spending fueled by debt - which Brazilians have to carry until today - and money printing, which basically destroyed the country economy during the 80s with the hyperinflation it caused. Brazil income discrepancies are a fruit of the hyperinflation: http://www.mises.org.br/Article.aspx?id=313


Do you mean Vargas, that fascist criminal who cursed Brazil with... the CLT!?


Yeah, they suck... but at least those corrupt parasites kind of protected the country from PT. Imagine if PT had absolute majority...


I agree with that. Actually most of the late 20 years economic improvements the country has lived are due to the changes promoted during the period of that crook, plus the end of hyperinflation of course.


You'll find this in France, I can say for experience. But there may be places that suit you better. The guy that answered that you have to see for yourself is correct.

You mean the best times were when most of the population was enslaved (monarchy), or when government authoritarianism and central planning would make the current socialistic government look like a libertarian dream?

Geez man, not that things are nice now, but they were way worse on those times.

Now, about your question, I don't know if I can answer it, since I don't know you well enough. I don't think you really want to go to northern Europe... it's frozen!! But less cold parts of Europe may be interesting if you want to run away from the violence. I live on the south of France, and the winter here is not that harsh. Ordinary violence barely exists, and when something happens, is normally a theft done hidden, never a quick kidnapping as standard in Brazil.

Now, if you want to make money, probably Europe is not the best shot. How far are you willing to go? Have you looked Singapore? Their government is somehow authoritarian on behavior standards, but not as much as Dubai for instance, and in Singapore the economy is impressive. I read somewhere that 16% of its population are dollar-millionaires.