You're right. Those jobs eventually won't exist, because they'll be automated. Instead, other - easier, higher paying - jobs will exist as people desire greater and greater comfort in their lives and hence start wanting tiny, really easy things done.
Proofreading my comments here for readability takes a few extra seconds/minutes. Shall I hire someone to do it? How about hiring someone to adjust the feng shui of my sentence arrangement? Perhaps, as mentioned above, I'll simply pay someone a satoshi to get out of my way since I'm in a hurry. Maybe someone to follow me around at a distance with binoculars to periodically make sure there's nothing embarrassing stuck in my hair or on my face/clothes.
The problem is that in my dystopia, you might be willing and able to pay for such services, but if so you'd be part of the new aristocracy, the lucky few. The vast majority of people would not be able to spend money on such frivolous expenses, and therefore there would be few oppurtunities to earn money that way. It's assured by basic economic logic. If nothing needs doing, it's because, well, nothing needs doing. No one wants for anything. Lack of economic demand doesn't equate to lack of human need. Demand is a function of price - in economic terms you can only contribute to demand for a good to the extent that you have the means to purchase it. Lets look at this another way: My fear is that this world will result in a massive increase in inequality. Essentially, there will be two classes of people. Those who contribute to creating and operating the automated systems, and those that don't. The economic value of the latter class will be negligible compared to the economic value of the former. EDIT: And in the long term the latter class is invevitably the majority. And in my dystopian future (not the only future, but I fear the most likely) the majority are living in poverty. roy |
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I can understand why you would want to get into mining, but I don't understand why you would choose BFL as the company to buy your miner from. That's like throwing your money away.
Because BFL wasn't always like that. In the beginning they had no bad record and they were pretty much the only company to develop ASICs. They fucked up with their 60nm product like, a lot. Ordering from them the second time was mostly due to their marketing trick and I figured that maybe they learned their lesson and now they will actually deliver in time. Also, if you have shit load of new wealth due to ongoing outrageous Bitcoin rally, you most likely act irrationally with it anyway. Emotions, you know  Well, every BFL product line has been severely delayed. The FPGAs were very late, the 60nm ASICs were very late, and now the 28nm ASICs are very late. But at least they had a track record of shipping a product - eventually. And a product that worked, and broadly speaking, that worked reliably. So the choice was, gamble on BFL being quicker in their product development than last time, or gamble on an unknown quantity. Sure, with hindsight, picking KNC would have served me better. OTOH, if I'd picked Hashfast I'd very possibly have lost my money. It's a gamble - no one knew which horses would come in, but there really weren't any clear winners back when we were all preordering. So you take a guess and spend a few coins. (I did also subsequently preorder a Coindesk Bitmine Coincraft Desk device, BTW. That's been happily hashing away for a few months.) roy |
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Just like most people in first-world countries (third-world countries are third-world because they're much farther from the "problem" of technological unemployment) can get by now working a low-wage part-time job if they don't mind having no electricity or running water, in the future you'll be able to get by on a low-wage part-time job if you don't mind living exactly as you are now.
What makes you think those low wage part time jobs will still exist? It's highly likely that they'll increasingly be automated out of existence. Yes, the world you describe is certainly one possible outcome, but I don't believe it's in any way assured. I fear a dystopia in which the jobs just don't exist, because there is virtually nothing that needs doing that still requires any human labour in order to accomplish it. Actually, I was probably wrong to suggest that scarcity will cease to be a problem. Scarcity of natural resources (metals, oil to make plastics, energy, etc) will be with us for the forseable future. Only scarcity of labour will cease to exist (due to a massive drop in the demand for labour). So the rate of pay for labour will collapse much more rapidly than the cost of goods. I fear the result will be business as usual, and a market economy which excludes an increasingly large proportion of society from meaningful participation in society. Followed by a bloody revolution. I hope I'm wrong, but I fear the transition to the world of plenty won't be quite as smooth as you seem to anticipate. roy |
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Or put another way. The market economy (or indeed all economies, as we understand the term) are all about managing scarce resources.
No one has yet figured out how to organise society when the main task is to manage plentiful resources.
EDIT: Indeed, the reason that money has to exist is ulimately as an arbiter of who gets access to what share of resources, given there isn't enough to just say that everyone can have as much as he or she wants. If we ever lived in a society where scarcity of resources ceased to be a significant determinant of what we can do, then it seems likely that money would take on a very different role, if it existed at all.
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As to technological unemployment, it is indeed a good thing. Nay, a fantastic thing. A world without a demand for anyone to work except those who are highly technically skilled would clearly be a world of plenty.
With our market economy as it stands, the world you describe would be a world of plenty for the technologists only. The masses, whose labour would no longer be needed, would have no money with which to buy these plentiful goods. Just think about it: no one needs anything non-technical done; that means no non-technical need is going unfulfilled: no one is hungry, because if there were any shortage of food there would be demand for farmers.
Needs would still go unfilled, because people without jobs would not have the money to pay for them. That would be paradise, a situation where you don't need to work at all and you can still experience a higher standard of living than you do now.
The question that has intriqued me for some time is how we transition from a market economy to the paradise you describe. Because although the paradise you describe is one possible future, another is that only the 0.01% who are needed to maintain the machines live in a paradise, and the remaining 99.99% are destitute. roy |
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I'm not going to cash out until BTC reaches $10. Which we are assured will happen by the end of June. * Roy Badami taps his watch and thinks, "hmm, the date display must be stuck" EDIT: OMG, I never knew that typing /me actually worked LOL |
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I do get 'force majeure' but please don't tell me there are actually paragraphs that include a wording like 'act of god'
It's a standard legal term which used to be very common but is probably used less now - I believe you could loosely translate it as 'natural disaster', i.e. storm, flood, earthquake, etc. It was a common exclusion on many insurance contracts, but of course the reality is that pretty much all natural disasters are insurable, but they might be quite expensive - particularly if you are trying to insure against an eventuality that is not that unusual in your part of the world... IME most modern insurance policies tend to spell out what they exclude in plain language, but YMMV. roy EDIT: And actually, in modern insurance policies, some of the exclusions that are hardest (but not impossible) to avoid are very clearly acts of man. War, riot, and terrorism would be obvious examples of things that most (but not all) policies exclude from their cover. |
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- An arm of the government of Finland confiscated all my assets once for 7 months, no charges, no compensation
Risto, would you be willing to say whether this was related to Bitcoin transactions? I'm sure we all fear the possibility of taking profits from our Bitcoin (or Monero) investments, only to trigger a SAR and have our fiat accounts frozen while the authorities investigate the transaction... I'm scrupulous about record keeping so that I can prove that everything is above board should the need arise, but that doesn't stop the huge inconvenience that results from investigations like this.... roy |
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Also, remember, China will ban BTC next month. Again. And anyway, whatever happens, everyone in China will dump all their coins that they don't have anymore because they dumped them last time we had this story. Again.
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A question to you rpietila, did any of the above mentioned names influence you in your decision to support Monero? How did you find Monero from the very beginning?
Several people contacted me, and I also found out that the big names were, and are, flocking to Monero (in way greater numbers than in any shitcoins, and in higher numbers than the other 2.0 coins). For me, this is a very important factor when deciding where to invest. I'm not sure I'd damn XMR with the '2.0' moniker. AFAICT the '2.0' name is being used to describe the 'platform' coins like Mastercoin and Ethereum whose primary purposes are supposed to be to enable all sorts of other applications, rather than simply to act as currencies. XMR is, fundamentally, simply a coin that tries to be currency (and nothing more than a currency) - albeit the only serious contender in the currency sphere with any interesting technical innovation over BTC. (And for the avoidance of doubt, I'm very wary of the whole 2.0 scene, and the above is not intended in any way to be critical of XMR - quite the contrary!) roy |
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Yes indeed. Satoshi's real genius was to create a system with the right incentives, at all levels.
Amen. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Mining decentralization has been the most persistently obvious weak point. As I said, this is still a "thought in progress". But I worry less about the evil SHA-256 ASIC plant then about the evil NSA CPU cluster.
This +1000. The government actor is the only substantive challenge Actually, "evil NSU CPU cluster" was intended just as a flippant example of an organisation that is believed to have a lot of CPU power. If governments wanted to shut to cryptocurrency, they'd most likely do it through the courts... I agree that the nature of cryptocurrency regulation is a big unknown, of course, and how this pans out could certainly affect values a lot... roy |
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Congrats OP for being a little less dumb about your finances.
You are not new, why did you "preorder" at BFL?
*shrugs* I'm waiting for a Monarch and I knew exactly what I was getting into pre-ordering, having ordered a Single SC, and an FPGA Single before that. But if you refuse to mine, you can't cry about mining having become too centralised. You don't mine because mining is free money (it hasn't been for years). You mine because mining is good for Bitcoin. It effectively a donation to securing decentralisation of the network. (And, selfishly, what's good for Bitcoin is also good for my and your investment in Bitcoin). And also, you mine, because it's cool to have cool miners :-) Just my two bitcents. roy EDIT: I have no problem with the sentiment of this thread - I'm not going to complain if there's a major rally  |
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Thoughts, anyone?
I don't think you can trust the ASICs in the way you suggest. The ones already delivered and paid for in the hands of customers, perhaps. But chip production costs are usually quite low, especially for mature processes with high yield. Manufacturers constrain their production volume in order to achieve a high selling price (or if they are mining themselves, to maximize profitability by not driving up difficulty) and recoup NRE. But consider the same economics from the point of view of a rogue ASIC-developer. He can run off 10x or 100x as many ASICs at only modestly increased cost, and then use them to attack the network instead of for mining. Yes, indeed, you could be right. I've certainly considered that scenario. But isn't the CPU scenario worse? There's a huge pool of CPUs already out there and assembled into machines. The only real protection from this risk seems to be that it is usually more profitable to mine than attack.
[...]
Satoshi said something along these lines in his paper. [...]
Yes indeed. Satoshi's real genius was to create a system with the right incentives, at all levels. As I said, this is still a "thought in progress". But I worry less about the evil SHA-256 ASIC plant then about the evil NSA CPU cluster. I think there are enough producers churning out SHA-256 ASICs as fast as they can (certainly including many we don't know about, that are just mining for their own benefit rather than selling miners) that the attack you describe is actually becomeing pretty unlikely. roy |
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But the fact of the matter is that BTC is in the enviable situation that there is no one bigger that it using the same mining hardware. You are not in that situation, and nor are we. [EDIT: And unless we change our PoW, we will never be in that enviable situation unless/until there are custom Cryptonight miners. And unless you change your PoW you will never be in that enviable situation unless LTC fails - or you grow bigger than it.]
Perhaps both will happen I don't know anything about Bitmark, so I don't have an opinion on how likely it is to eclipse LTC. As for whether Monero will ever have custom miners? I think probably, but I haven't thought about this deeply. I doubt we will have Cryptonight ASICs any time soon in an analagous sense to SHA-256 ASICs. But then, custom designed machines that miner more efficently than a PC or graphics card? Very likely. And in the long term, will such devices use ASICs to assist the process? Probably. But my belief is that the factor by which the custom hardware improves the hash per dollar over PCs and GPUs will be way lower with Cryptonight than with BTC. And therefore I think out network will be less secure that it could have been. My guess is Scrypt has the same problem in being worse than SHA-256 in this regard, but that Scrypt is better than Cryptonight. (Except, as I said, I wouldn't use scrypt, because there is already a big established scrypt coin which will be difficult to displace) |
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no coin can start with ASICs, but ASIC mining ultimately creates stability and makes it harder, not easier, for someone to rapidly attain 51% of the network, at least if you can create an ecosystem where you by far outnumber other users of the ASIC.
We have started with scrypt, and almost all miners are smaller ASICs, the network is stable. Sorry, what I should have said was, no coin can create a new PoW funciton and start with a network that ASIC mines it. I read what you say, and as I said, I don't think this is a big deal. I'm not going to stop investing in XMR because of it. But the fact of the matter is that BTC is in the enviable situation that there is no one bigger that it using the same mining hardware. You are not in that situation, and nor are we. [EDIT: And unless we change our PoW, we will never be in that enviable situation unless/until there are custom Cryptonight miners. And unless you change your PoW you will never be in that enviable situation unless LTC fails - or you grow bigger than it.] roy |
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OK. I've been thinking about this for a while. And this is still a "thought in progress". But... On ASICs, and ASIC-resistant PoW. Ok, I'm an XMR holder and bullish XMR. But the one thing I don't like about Cryptonote is the ASIC-unfriendly PoW. I'm, admittedly somewhat tentatively, coming to the opintion that ASICs (or at least custom hardware miners of some sort) are essential to the long term stability of a cryptocoin network. Look at it this way. Which coins have a reasonable assurance of a stable hashrate? - Bitcoin. There is a huge amount of ASIC hashing power pointed as Bitcoin, and no matter whether the owners get RoI on it or not, most of this hashing power is not going to get switched off until the value of the coins is less than the cost of the electricity. It's unlikely that a significant portion of this hash power will defect to another coin (there aren't really any major SHA-256 altcoins anyway) but perhaps more importantly there is almost certainly no serious (i.e. comparable with the Bitcoin network) pool of SHA-256 hardware doing something non-Bitcoin (whether altcoin or something entirely unrelated to cryptocurrency) that could be pointed at the Bitcoin network at a moment's notice if someone felt it worth their while
- Litecoin. At least once scrypt ASICs start to dominate the hashrate, Litecoin will be in a similar (but far less strong) situation to Bitcoin. Less strong, because Litecoin is smaller and because there are far more scrypt altcoins below it
What of the other SHA-256 coins? Well they will always be at risk of huge hashrate fluctations even if only a tiny proportion SHA-256 ASICs out there gains interest in them or loses interest in them. And what of coins using neither SHA-256 nor scrypt? The CPU and GPU coins? Well, CPU minable coins, such as our XMR, have the problem that we have to worry about not just cryptocurrency mining power, but all CPU power in the world that could mine. What if all idle CPU power in the world suddenly started mining Monero? What if someone subverted AWS and pointed all Amazon's hardware at Monero? Could they mount a 51% attack? (Extermely unlikely, I know, that anyone will subvert AWS, but the point is we now need to worry not about someone having 51% of the SHA-256 ASICs, but simply somone having more CPU than the Monero miners). GPU minable non-scrypt coins are in a similar situation - and might have an added shock from a massive switch of GPUs away from scrypt as ASICs start to dominate scrypt coins. And, of course, we're a GPU minable coin, too. Bottom line: no coin can start with ASICs, but ASIC mining ultimately creates stability and makes it harder, not easier, for someone to rapidly attain 51% of the network, at least if you can create an ecosystem where you by far outnumber other users of the ASIC. I think it's clearly ideal for any serious long-term new coin to create a new hash function (living in BTC's or LTC's shadow is too dangerous). But the goal should be to move to migrate to an ASIC-based ecosystem over a number of years once the coin gains enough success. I therefore believe that while the Cryptonote designers were right to choose a novel PoW, they were wrong to pick a strongly ASIC-resistant PoW. Put another way, I think we've moved beyond Satoshi's "one CPU, one vote". I'm much happier with "one SHA-256 ASIC, one vote". That's because there are far more CPUs in the world in hands that i don't trust than there are SHA-256 ASICs in the world in hands that I don't trust. And we have a fair amount of transparency as to the total SHA-256 hashpower in the world (because to a first approximation, it's all hashing Bitcoin. We have no transparency as to the total CPU power in the world.) Thoughts, anyone? roy EDIT TO ADD: This certainly isn't fatal for XMR. I'm not sure it's even particularly seriously damaging. It is non-optimal though, IMO. |
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Monero seems to be quite unstable. What's wrong with the price?
Actually, it is remarkably stable since start, no large pumps and dumps along the way. Mean average price rising since may. What is the total range of XMR trading ever, including all outliers? I gather it should be about 0.00039 - 0.01110. If so, these are only 28x apart from each other  For any other coin, it's more. With Bitcoin, the range is 0.001 - 1,236; difference being 1,236,000x.  I'm interested to know your source for 0.001. Lowest price I've seen documented is 0.003 on Bitcoin Market in April/May 2010 (EDIT: which is the earliest data I have. Do you have earlier, Risto?) roy Sirius has told in multiple occasions that he sold 5000 (or 5050) bitcoins for $5, making the record for the floor price. Ah, thank you! I guess I was thinking of price data from exchanges, rather than private transactions. |
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Monero seems to be quite unstable. What's wrong with the price?
Actually, it is remarkably stable since start, no large pumps and dumps along the way. Mean average price rising since may. What is the total range of XMR trading ever, including all outliers? I gather it should be about 0.00039 - 0.01110. If so, these are only 28x apart from each other For any other coin, it's more. With Bitcoin, the range is 0.001 - 1,236; difference being 1,236,000x. I'm interested to know your source for 0.001. Lowest price I've seen documented is 0.003 on Bitcoin Market in April/May 2010 (EDIT: which is the earliest data I have. Do you have earlier, Risto?) roy |
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Hard to see it rally big time when the market cap already 8B.
8 billion is not a large market cap at all for something like bitcoin. When you realise that all the bitcoin in the world would not be enough to pay the fine that's recently been imposed on BNP Paribas, you realise just how small bitcoin is in the financial world. roy |
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It is POSSIBLE for mods to merge the threads. We will see if they will.
Looks like Risto has edited the OP. I don't think anyone will have too much difficulty finding their way here :-) |
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