Excepting that, as I mentioned, the current addresses don't store floating point variables, but integers instead.  So the decimal point for BTC are actually near the middle of a 64 bit integer for convience, and a single address can thus hold the entire 21 million BTC with room to spare and never create a buffer overflow error.  An address with a floating point variable would be able to store fractional satoshis, but wouldn't necessarily be able to store the entire monetary base.  This should never happen anyway, but it's more of a security/code issue than an economic one.

I'm growing concerned...

No, not the same at all.  It's easy enough to prove that gold exists, if you can find it.  You can't prove that I have any bitcoins at all, even if you have a copy of my wallet.dat.  Because it's encrypted also.  You have to have me and access to my computer.  If you have me, then it doesn't much matter because you can use rubber hose crytography.  But if I have gold in my safety deposit box, I may be able to evade capture but not if I return for my gold.  With bitcoins and an Electrum neumonic wallet, I could flee to just about anywhere and recover my bitcoins using a borrowed laptop if I must.

Yes, but clients cannot use more than 8 decimal places because of a technical limitation.  Specificly, the value of any address is stored as a 64 bit integer.  All bitcoin addresses store only satoshis, not BTCs, and the clients  present the totaled values to the user with the decimal point added for human readability.  The decimal point doesn't actually exist in the current address structure, but the protocol permits new kinds of addresses to be created for any number of reasons.  The first ascii character of your bitcoin address denotes the address type, which is why all currently valid bitcoin addresses start with a "1".  The addressses designed for testing features on testnet are identical except that first character is different.  I believe that it's an "a" IIRC.  An address that used a floating point variable for the value could store sub-satoshi values.  Future address versions could also use different encryption algos than is currently used, or be different in a number of other ways.

I certainly do.  The real question is, "why is there a limit?"  The simple answer to that question is that Bitcoin was designed as a digital approximation of a finite natural resource, such as gold.  Actually, precisely as gold.  Every decision concerning an arbitrary metric within the bitcoin protocol was intentionally biased to approximate the mining of gold as best as was reasonablely possible.  My point was that the limit isn't a problem in the same manner that a limit on a fiat currency would be, because a BTC is (potentially) infinately divisable, so there cannot ever be a liquidity crisis as a result of a limited currency base.

They'd just declare bankruptcy and stiff the exchanges that permitted them the credit to run naked shorts.  We have nothing to gain by permitting holders of US $ to short bitcoins naked.  They can short fully covered, like the rest of us, and still lose their shirt just fine.  I should know, I lost nearly everything.

There actually isn't one, it's an arbitrary number.  Actually, we come to 21 M because of how the block reward subsidy is issued.  50 BTC per block for the first 4 years (10.5 M BTC) and then it halves, and continues to half until it's too small to represent with a 64 bit integer.  No matter how long that takes, the total number of bitcoins issued will always approach, but never quite reach, 21 M BTC.

But that's actually inmaterial.  It could have been any number, as long as it had a maximum.  Bitcoins are infinately divisable under the protocol, and are presently divisable to eight decimal places.  It's really just a reference point.

Actually, we can take a good guess based upon the floating market value of silver.  Since silver is a commodity that is currently used by industry (unlike gold) a portion of silver is "consumed" by the production of consumer products.  Meaning that some amount of silver is incorporated into consumer products, and the recovery of much of that silver is (presently) difficult and expensive.  Silver mining has failed to keep up with industrial demands for decades, so the "above ground" stocks have declined over the past decade or two despite ongoing silver mining projects.  Silver, however, no longer has much of a monetary premium, if at all.  It's simply not what most people think of when they think of 'hard money'.  Currently, there are fewer above ground troy ounces of (economicly recoverable) silver stocks than that of gold. 

Yes, gold is more abundent in a mined and refined form than silver in our modern world. 

So if gold were to suddenly and completely lose it's monetary premium the world around, it's safe to assume that it's exchange value would seek a market value at or below that of silver over time.  As it does so, more industrial uses will become economicly viable until it finds a new place as an industrial metal just as silver & platinum have already.

To some degree, gold is already used in very niche industrial products, but only where it's use outweighs the cost and difficulty of developing a cheaper alternative material input.  I have no doubt, that if gold were less than silver per ounce, we'd see gold plating on ocean ships quickly.  It's immunity to saltwater corrosion would not be of small value.

Honestly, I really didn't care.  Such a revelation neither harms nor improves my personal opinons of him.  And since I'm ethnicly part-Jewish, I've grown accustomed to disagreeing with the liberal wing of my greater relations anyway.

I'm also ethinicly part-"native American", and the Office of Indian Affairs can stick it up their arse, too.

Krugman is Jewish?

We won't kill your account.  We don't really give a sh*t.  I don't disagree with the current fee policy, and think that it works well enough to not screw with it.  You can lobby for whatever you think is best, but I would suggest that you actually learn what the fee policy is, and why it's that way, before you proceed.

Heh!

The publicly accessible roads in my home state have never been built by governments until very recently, and even now only at the county & city levels.  There are plenty of roads, mostly in the countryside, that are still privately owned.  I was recently looking at buying a 10 acre wooded lot that used to be part of a larger farm.  The road frontage, which is gravel, is shown to be 1/2 owned by the owner of that plot and 1/2 owned by the owner of the opposite side.  In other words, four or five feet of gravel is owned by one person and the other four or five feet is owned by the other person.  The only deed restriction is that the owners of those properties cannot deny the owners of properties further up the road "innocent passage" (English Common Law legal term, just look it up).  Likewise, as an owner of undeveloped land in the state of Kentucky (technically a commonwealth) I can't deny anyone innocent passage across my land as long as they are on foot, don't intend to cause harm and are not intending to hunt on my property (not harvesting my wildlife against my wishes, which would be a 'harm') and are not walking after dark.

Not that most rednecks would know that I have an old right of 'innocent passage' across their fields, nor would they consider such hiking to be 'innocent', but still.

This is not true.  It should be relayed just fine.  It'd just sit in the miners' transaction queues until it's old enough.

The part I highlighted is absolutely correct; the latter part is probably also correct, but is irrelevent to the core issue.  The specualtion about the reasons why are simply value judgements.  Political perspectives infecting the conversation again.  Again, it's not that I'm disagreeing with your speculations; just that they aren't really material to whether or not money "works for society" or not.  Unless, of course, one considers collectivism to "work" for society, so perhaps I just contradicted myself.

I'm sorry, I assumed since you still had an economics textbook to refer to, that you were a student.  Learning that you are at least 40, and posses an economics textbook (presumedly from 20 years ago?) completely alters my mental image.  In my defense, most of the economicly uneducated in this forum are young and impressionable.

You're probably just too old to change your mind.

I stopped right here....

" but they never mention the rather important point that deflation and debt deflation were clearly factors in the economic and social turmoil that saw the fall of the Roman Republic in the first century BC and its replacement with the despotic Roman empire (for a timeline of Roman Republican history, see below)."

Because this is a strawman setup.  Of course "debt deflation" (as it's commonly defined, usually by Kenyesians) had significant effects upon the course of the breakdown.  That's freely acknowledged by most Austrians.  What your lot seems to misunderstand is the praxelogical effects of debt itself that leads to these ends.  It's not the debt deflation that is the root of the problem, it's the debt fueled boom that proceeded it.  The debt deflationary period is called a "correction" for good reasons.


Go right ahead.  If you honestly beleive that money is a tool intended to "work for society" then there is nothing that I can do to change your mind.  Nor would I care to try, you're as free to be wrong as the next guy.  And yes, I want a tool that works for me, for I am the only person that I can trust to best handle my tools.  The prisoner's delima doesn't apply to free market trades in the absense of third party coersion, so in a free society wherein the vast majority of economic interactions occur in the absence of such coersion, it's literally impossible for the collection of individual interactions (presumedly favorable to both sides of the trade) to be a net negative for society.

Think, young man, think.  Think for yourself, not just how your professor expects you to react.

Politcally and socially, sure.  Economicly or mathmaticly, not so much.


You're missing the point.  Credit availability is a problem for whom?  I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'm trying to be a better economics professor than you apparently have been exposed to thus far.  The classic method involves asking questions of the student, in order to lead them to a deeper understanding of the topic.  Economics is more than mathmatics or statistics, it's people, so both the who and why does matter.

Yes, you do.  To some limited degree and term, you must.  We all must, as there is simply no way to avoid it.  We can deliberately choose to limit that kind of exposure, but it's impossible to completely avoid it. And do you know who can least avoid it?  The poor.

This reminds me of a quote...

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

-― Friedrich von Hayek

Just because that was the idea, son, don't mean that is what actually happens.  I question whether or not that was the true design, or simply propaganda to cover the scam, anyway.

Before Bitcoin, there was nothing truly detatched from fiat currency systems to invest into.  You betray your own though processes; as investing into regulated industries is investing into areas wherein the government has deliberately limited your choices, and then taxes you upon any successes that result despite them.  Even investing in gold is taxed here in the US; both up front (sales tax) and on the back end (capital gains tax).  The best way that I've found to invest without taxation is to use a Health Savings Account, but governments limit my choices there in other ways, and there is zero chance of fiscal privacy regarding one of those accounts.  There is also zero chance of investing in anything not dollar denominated.  It's acctually illegal to invest such funds into physical gold, for example.  An ETF, sure; but not actual coins.


You say that it's not a viable alternative to credit based fiat.  Okay, that's your opinion.  What is it good for then?  Again, why are you here?  Are you trying to convince us, or yourself?

Think, young man, think.

Someone comes up with this idea, or something like it, about every six months or so.  The answer to "why not" is that we don't need to.  There are other solutions to the size of the blockchain, most notablely the one that was proposed by Satoshi himself in his whitepaper.  The blocks were designed to be "pruned" of long spent transactions, if the user desired that, but never to require such an action.  That's why the internal block structure uses a Merkel Tree instead of a flat file format.  Including special blocks to update a running list of non-zero balance addresses would not only require breaking the current system, it would also eventually be blocks of such massive size as to be counter-productive. 

There is no full client that utilizes pruning that I know of, but there is nothing preventing you from coding that yourself if you have the skills and believe that pruning is a near term need.

Furthermore, anyone who desires to avoid the blockchain altogether can simply use a light client, such as BitcoinSpinner or Electrum.

Search the forum for "pruning" of blocks, light clients, and "Stratum" for more information.

The only "example" I can find there is a reference to the Great Depression, which is only considered an example of a deflationary spiral because there exist no better examples.  The Great Depression was cause by a number of events in concert, most of which are actually bad political and international trade policies.  The example of the Panic of 1920, and the fact that it's nearly identical to the first two years of the Great Depression, is evidence enough that a deflationary spiral is, at most, a minor contributing factor to the depth of the Great Depression.  I say that it's a false theory.


Easy peasy, since I get to choose the time frames.  Any society that has ever existed upon a gold standard, prior to that same society's move towards currency debasement.  You're getting your cause and effect wrong, The Roman Empire didn't collapse because they used a deflationary currency (gold, silver, salt, nails) they debased that same deflationary currency because they were in the process of multi-generational collapse.  Money is simply a tool.

It's not better, nor worse, for society at large.  That's actually impossible.  The "market cap" of an economy is simply a reflection of the total wealth of that economy.  It doesn't matter so much who happens to possess that wealth, from an economic perspective.  Central bankers inflating a fiat currency is a hidden tax upon the entire currency userbase, as it transfers purchasing power from those who earn and save in a currency to those who create and have first access to that currency.  Said another way, every person who earns a paycheck is taxed in order to support the central banking system itself.  Since most central banks in our modern world are arms of governments, it's those governments that benefit from such inflationary policies at the expense of pretty much everyone else in the country.  However, governments are part of sociey, as it's usually defined, so such transfers are akin to removing water from one end of a pool and pouring into the other end.  Sure, you've moved some molecules around, but you have no hope of affecting the water level.

Furthermore, one would have to define "society" in the context of economics, otherwise you're just advocating a political perspective with broken math.


Not till now, but that's exactly why Bitcoin exists, to present a real alternative.


Where did you get that idea?  I'd just prefer that governments not make those choices for me, nor limit my choices.  They limit my choices all the time.


And it's your choice also, now that Bitcoin exists.  I suggest that you choose to invest elsewhere.  Bitcoin is, after all, a very risky investment for which you seem to have zero faith.  Why are you here?  Do you want us to convince you of your errors, or are you trying to convince us of ours?  In the case of the former, all the benefit is your own; in the case of the latter, your task is futile.