Branson is generally accepted as one of the most successful entrepreneurs/businessman of our time; to have his personal endorsement of bitcoin is huge. It's probably the most meaningful single endorsement so far.
I'd agree, he's rich for a reason - he takes risks others shy away from, and judges those risks CORRECTLY. Him endorsing Bitcoin just says he's done his homework and finds the underlying risks to be acceptable. I'd be sitting up and taking notice if I were responsible for managing large sums of money, not only have the Venture Capitalists jumped in, but one of the richest men on the planet. But of course, when we fall from the sky of this exponential rally - I'm sure all the online publications will declare Bitcoin "dead" again. Just like they did last time. Its really hard to get these people to see outside their little box. |
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Good.
If you know anything about Cramer, he's the best contrarian indicator ever. If he says that Bitcoin should be shut down - then he's against it, and that's just fine. Being the guy that said Bear Stearns was "fine" the day before they went bankrupt, I'd say that is the most bullish endorsement ever of Bitcoin.
He's such a blowhard, its hilarious.
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Just to be sure, I had a friend read this over who understands Chinese. He said that it seemed there was more than a cautious nod, more like the knowing acceptance that Bitcoin is going to be important for the future. Perhaps it is just the subtleties of language, I don't know. The best part is that the person commenting on bitcoin is highly placed at his Bank, which just speaks to the visibility of bitcoin in general.
I think there's more to the China story than meets the eye, and we've yet to hear all of it. Overall, really bullish long term.
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Cool, it will divert funds into altcoins so I can get some more Bitcoins before they're all spoken for  |
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Perhaps I'm missing something, but what is inaccurate about that statement? It's actually kind of refreshing to see an article point out that the 21 million supply cap isn't a real issue because coins can be divided.
Because there is a current limitation to how many times it can be divided. Any change to that would require the tacit support of EVERYONE running the new client, which given the world-wide spread of Bitcoin, wouldn't be an easy thing to do, if it was even possible in the first place. Bitcoin valuation would have to be VERY high for us to even contemplate it, and frankly, even with BTC at some crazy number like $1,000,000 USD a coin, a satoshi is 1 cent in value. So, even if we went an order of magnitude higher the lowest unit value would be pretty small still. |
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It's all great in theory, but not until more work is done to reduce the size of the blockchain growing. Adding all these extra things in will only serve to bloat the chain faster.
Yeah, I know - but since everyone is hell-bent on giving the blockchain a good rogering instead of carefully monitoring its expansion, I doubt that attitude will change unless we have some disruptive forking. It boggles the mind. Everyone encourages blockchain abuse, because it would "happen eventually". I've always considered that to be a bankrupt argument, but nobody can see past their profit-blinders to admit it. There's such a thing as growing a system mindful of the limitations versus a pell-mell rush to fork the client every chance we get to fix something. Its "Tragedy of the Commons" being played out every day, and nobody seems to care. |
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Every old-timer goldbug always brings up the "what if the internet goes away" argument. Then they triumphantly crow that gold is used for thousands of years, blah blah blah blah.
Well, guess what, we had a "trial run" of that gold superiority in the Philippines after the typhoon. I didn't see any local businesses selling food for gold coins, or someone trading gold for a plane ticket out of there. There was no infrastructure remaining, no food, no water. About as "hell on earth" as you can get when prior to that you had all three.
That is the problem with that scenario. Food will rise in cost until it is worth more than gold or anything else. I have some bread, and I NEED it, so fuck you and your gold coins buddy - because I'll eat it and outlast you, then I'll take your shiny metal from your dead fingers.
As for the whole "internet down" scenario, I can only shake my head. That's the best you can do? The ENTIRE WORLD has to be fucked for Bitcoin to fail? Trying too hard, aren't you? It just boggles my mind.
Goddamn dinosaurs.
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The "what if powerful interest bought all the Bitcoins" trope always gets pulled out when we're rallying like this. Its idiotic, because the people usually echoing this sentiment have no idea how real trading works. You don't get "free money" by buying something and then dumping it. There are transaction costs, fill slippage, your cost basis of your position (assuming you averaged in), and other factors.
Equally so when you decide to liquidate - what ends up happening is there's a cost 'burn' on both sides, and you'd never show any gains at all, while the actual traders of Bitcoin would love the hell out of the swings and make impressive gains.
But no, its supposed to be the "end" of Bitcoin if they do it.
Idiots.
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I'd love to have a job as an economist. I could pull numbers out of my ass and be wrong for my entire career - all the while racking up some impressive $100K+ annual income.
The only thing more useless than a economist is a politician.
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So these are Scrypt-enabled ASICs? I find it highly amusing that a group supporting Litecoin, who originally were promoting it as a haven for people who wanted to put their GPU's to work, are now adopting the technology that they decried as "centralizing mining power". Wow, what a bunch of hypocrites.
And that isn't even addressing the massive scalability problems that Litecoin will have if they attempt to get it anywhere near the total network size that Bitcoin is right now.
What a clowncar of an alt-coin.
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Don't be so quick to think the party is over just yet.
The exchanges being the wet paper bags they are simply fragmented when the pressure was on. This looks more like an interruption than an outright cancellation of the rise we're going through.
Wait and see...
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The cost isn't a deterrent at that level. It would only foster pushing fraud to the edges, stealing enough to "sacrifice" yourself a new identity.
How is this better, at all?
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Disastercoin isn't even implemented yet. They're having problems with the transactions, and the limitations of stuffing everything and the kitchen sink into a small byte-space. That won't stop them though, they're convinced since they've found enough people willing to throw their money away, that they must be "right" and on the track to enriching themselves, which is what this is all about - it has nothing to to about adding features.
If it was about adding features, they'd be doing code submissions to the core bitcoin protocol, not trying to ham-handedly stuff a three-story townhouse and a swimming pool into the space of a narrow alley, by comparison. But don't worry, I'm sure their centralized escrow system will be invulnerable to any problems, in addition to their laughable "verification of order type" that they are proposing a web API for.
Oh yes, a centralized API for a supposedly decentralized 'coin'. And the laughs keep on coming.
Whatever will they think of next, I wonder?
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Which post are you talking about? I didn't delete any posts in this thread. It's not even self moderated.
Someone did, here's the timestamp: Deleted Post « Sent to: TraderTimm on: November 18, 2013, 07:23:07 PM » If you didn't - fine, I still stand by what I've said concerning politics and technology. |
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Well, seeing how Mike Hearn has deleted my previous post about his back-bending "discussions" about certain topics, perhaps this one will survive the Hearninator's "DEL" key.
You can use technology to surpass and route around politics. The ones claiming otherwise are either co-opted already, or have insufficient capacity to understand that rule of law and politics are formed by the citizens themselves. We are not beholden to any given system, rather, the system is supposed to conform to what the public wants.
When it doesn't, that's where things get messy. So by suggesting that we just "take it" and not try to achieve precisely what we want to, all I can hear is someone making excuses because they're too deeply dependent on the system in general. That will always disqualify you in my book, because it means you didn't have any principles worth standing up for to begin with, since you're so eager to cede them to political pressure.
So, if you can take the truth - let this post stand. If you can't - delete it like the others Mike, and I'll make sure people know that you did.
Your choice.
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The overriding point that none of these articles want to make - or even acknowledge - is that Bitcoin isn't just a "new issue" or some currency pulled out of a politician's backside. Its a completely new way to have a medium of exchange that at the same time is its own payment processing network.
What we're seeing is two forces at work - one, the immediate gains being fueled by the periodic parabolic rallies we've all come to know very well, and second - we're tracing the even larger arc of a massive S-Curve which is "Hyper-monetization" as fiat flows back into something that will actually maintain/increase its spending power.
Think of it as a small hole in a submarine, deep under the ocean. The ocean - is bitcoin's potential. The hole is all the exchanges and local bitcoin traders, ATMs, etc.. It starts as a small leak, then it gets bigger, then the pressure is such that it eventually overwhelms the entire structural integrity of the sub, and rushes in all at once.
That's why when the USA or other foreign authorities focus on the exchanges, they're already too late - they should've killed Bitcoin back in 2009 - 2010 before it had a chance to build any distributed hashing power at all.
We're headed for $1,000+ by early December - and even if we fall from those heights in the usual fashion, we'll recover at higher valuations than the last parabolic to 266 and keep on going. Such is the strength of the network.
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You have a point, but lets be honest- disastercoin is going to blow up in a very 'relative' sense. I'm not worried. That said, Bitcoin is going to have to figure out how to handle ungodly amounts of data volume very, very, soon. Kicking the can down the road won't help. Nor will picking on disastercoin for blowing up the Blockchain traffic because it's easy to pick on their project versus the hundreds of millions of people we hope to have onboard bitcoin in the coming years.
The blockchain has got to grow, we've just got to live with that. disastercoin wasn't the first blockchain bloater, and it won't be the last.
The last time I heard counter-arguments like this was when Satoshi Dice was crapping all over the blockchain, leading to a hard-fork. Perhaps we could avoid jamming the accelerator to maximum to ensure the "passengers" make it to the destination, eh? It would be nice to have some careful consideration of consequences instead of the mad-dash to pile up maximum profit. |
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What's the purpose of disastercoin?
To enrich yet another pre-mined scheme that tacks on a centralized "escrow" feature, all the while the developer gets an income from donated funds, rubber-stamped by their "board". Its like the worst parts of an alt-coin and a virus stuck together, added in with a bit of investor mania and get-rich-schemes. Any criticism is cast off by the lead people involved, because it would interfere with them being responsible blockchain citizens. They prefer to exploit the miners and full node users of Bitcoin instead. Why? Just because they can. Wonderful bunch, all around - they should work as government lobbyists with those kinds of ethics. (ie., We'll do anything as long as the check clears the bank.) |
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@ffssixtynine
I see you like government involvement, or at the very least - you think that there's no use in resisting it. With your little crafted example of Bin retard, for instance. Fear as a tactic? Its working for the DHS rather well, isn't it? So naturally you adopt this stance and say "Well, look - we can catch bad people if we do X, Y and Z" without stopping for one second and looking at the principles being violated.
Personal freedom and financial freedom are worthwhile, no matter how many horrible counter-examples you can give. For every system there are positives and negatives, and I'm not going to give up this fight just because someone is scared the "bad guys" will abuse it.
As for the "Bitcoin Foundation", all they've done is raise Bitcoin's visibility towards the very forces that can cause us harm (Depending on where you live, I guess.). Thanks a load, guys, you're really pals. Entertaining or "just discussing" these issues with government aren't helping anyone, at all.
All they'll end up achieving is crippling U.S. involvement with Bitcoin, and then other countries will take the torch and leave them in the dust.
This is simply idiocy.
Can I just clarify that no no no I'm not in favour of any of it. I have said that several times However, some form of regulation is going to happen. It doesn't matter what you say, what I say, what the foundation say, it is going to happen. Just like with KYC with exchanges. Refusing to discuss it internally, let alone externally, is folly in the extreme. You'll then have people like yifu having the regulator's ear instead. That would be an utter nightmare - there would be no balance. They haven't raised Bitcoin's visibility in this respect - this is being discussing heavily at regulators world wide and multiple companies are working on how they can make money by getting in bed with the gov at our expense (some may even believe it's the right thing to do). I've known this was under discussion in the UK and US since July. It only takes a few contacts to know what's going on, plus enough has been said in public, and many other people here know this too. The only people with their knickers in a twist over a simple discussion are people here. Let me make clear the difference between something being discussed to as to know how to deal with questioning, which is absolutely essential, and coming out and saying at we should do x. It's important to recognise the difference. In order to counter arguments for black green grey etc listing, you need to have discussed it, including technical approaches. Not doing so means being caught with your pants down. Regulators are not necessarily your enemy, but governments and law enforcement certainly can be. Regulators are the guys in the middle. It's all rather more complex than you seem to realise. Btw This issue goes way beyond the US. Most certainly the issue is beyond any given national border - I agree. Thank you for asserting that you don't back the "governance by fear" technique, it gives me hope in humanity in general. Here's the real problem that I think the non-elected-by-majority-of-bitcoin-users Bitcoin Foundation is causing: They are operating under the assumption that the U.S. Government will play fair. The government in this case has already proven that they will not play fair, in fact, they'll utilize whatever they can grasp to get their will imposed upon any nation-state or system they choose. By going up to the government, and essentially baring Bitcoin's throat saying "You could kill us by cutting our jugular, but we know you won't because you're a good bunch" is such an extreme example of niave thinking, that it has stunned us all. That explains the reaction, and it most certainly explains why all these "mere discussions" about the "inevitability" of regulation are happening in the least-transparent way possible. History is a harsh judge, and upon the Bitcoin Foundation, it will be the harshest of all. |
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What the hells happened to this forum?!?. People making massive wild assumptions which reach the point of somehow becomming fact, then turning into a fever and all kinds of negative "BURN THE WITCHES" threads popping up.
I had hoped there would be more adults here, ones willing to , you know, actually realise its mearly at the DISCUSSION STAGE, that being an adult is looking at a situation from ALL ANGLES, to discuss, debate, and THEN start forming strategys and conclusions.
This is very very early days still, and yet people here are acting like TEH BIG CONSPIRACY TAKEOVER HAS BEGUN!!
Gimme a break....
In the U.S.A. taxes were introduced as a "temporary" measure. In 1971, Nixon decided to "temporarily" remove the Gold fix for the US Dollar. In 2013, the Bitcoin Foundation is "just discussing" major issues with the US Government. See a pattern here at all? |
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