MoneyPaks are good, easy, and fairly fraud resistant. I've probably bought $1500 worth of them so far. Their only downside is that in order to deposit more than $200 or something into Paypal, the receiver must give them a bunch of information. There are a few traders on #Bitcoin-OTC who have jumped through those hoops and accept MoneyPaks though.

Most importantly, in a free market, banks cannot stretch their reserves too thin, otherwise they are putting themselves at risk of a run. Contrary to popular belief, bank runs are a good thing, they keep banks honest.

A must read: What Has Government Done to Our Money?

How would one pay with Bitcoin, I don't see anything on your site that indicates the option.

Incidentally, I think some forum users are working on a Bitcoin plugin for WHMCS.

Is it rational to reward anti-social behavior?

I think the only reason that b2c made that dig was because tom implied that those who didn't play the game his way were not smart. (see bold above)

I disagree. Time preference is a fundamental aspect of human psychology, which happens to manifest itself in our economic dealings. Would you rather have $1000 now, or $1000 later?

Yeah, the wallet sucks right now. Do you need public keys, private, or both? I think Keefe was going to add a JSON-RPC method to get the public key of an address.

I haven't watched the video yet, but is that an upside-down Voluntaryist logo I see?

Basically, humans tend to prefer things now rather than later. This preference causes people to buy the things they want, even though they could buy them cheaper in the future (due to price deflation). An example of this is in the field of information technology. Computers are always getting faster and cheaper, yet people still purchase them now.

Time preference also accounts for interest rates (I prefer money now rather than later and am willing to pay for that privilege) and many other economic phenomena.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference#Austrian_School_views

Cool, thanks for the clarification.

Regarding the use of the word "fiat"...

People are using the same word to mean two different things.

The first definition, and the one I mean when I use the word, is "money that has value only because of government regulation or law".

The second, and the one that I disagree with, is "money that has value only because people value it".

The second meaning makes no sense to me, as gold does not have intrinsic value, it's only useful as money because I know that I can trade something I have for gold, then trade gold for something I want.

My understanding is that Bitcoin uses ECDSA, which is only able to sign, not encrypt. Is it as easy as using those keys in an EC algorithm to encrypt messages?

Bitcoins are not deflationary. There are ~7200 Bitcoins found/created every day.

The dollar inflates at a much faster rate. Even if demand for Bitcoins was constant, the mismatch of inflation rates would cause Bitcoins to be worth more dollars over time.

Is gold worthless? Gold has and will exchange for more and more dollars as time goes on.

I'll just leave this here...

The Virtue of Hoarding

The line drawn by Keynesian between saving and hoarding is arbitrary. What to me is saving, to you is hoarding. Who is the best just of the use of my money? You or me?

Additionally, saving or hoarding money does, as you say, remove it from the economy. However, when that happens, the purchasing power of all the other money increases. That means that when I hoard, everyone else can purchase more things.

edit... One more thing. Here's a short (but good) introduction to Austrian business cycle theory. If you understand and accept that, it should be obvious that saving (aka hoarding) is a good thing.

http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/business_cycles/

That's correct. You only have to access your savings wallet to spend coins, not deposit. Though, you're not storing anything in the vacuum of space, just the block chain (essentially, other people's computers).

I'm pretty sure technical analysis is more complicated than looking for spikes on a chart.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_and_resistance

What if we created a simple web site to match up participants? That would fix the anonymity problem, as well as automating data collection. It could accept donations, and perhaps act as a faucet alternative in addition to collecting valuable data...

While reading the other thread, I was thinking that what people think they would do, and what they would actually do are often two different things.

Are you saying that you would react exactly the same in the two different scenarios?

That you feel there would be a difference in the reactions of others makes me believe that you would react differently as well, but you consider yourself to be more rational (for some - your - definition of rational) than others.

xf2_org == jgarzik?


Why does this need to be human readable?

Click this link in my sig to donate!


Now, how would you interpret 5,005? Is that five thousand and five bitcoins, or five and one two hundreths of a bitcoin? It depends on the locality of the user who created the link.

When did Jgarzik say this? It seems to me that he just does not like Luke pushing tonal.

You're not understanding that the URI being human readable has little purpose, but it definitely has to be computer readable. How else do you propose that Bitcoin (or whatever software) parse it?