This mostly sums up my feelings on it with regards to the negative consequences for the poorer members of our economy, but the warnings about it becoming more monopolistic seem alarmist.  I don't know how the current currency system can get more centralized than it already is. There is no competing authority to challenge the centralization of cash currently, it's already as centralized as it can get, and eliminating cash isn't likely to lead to any more centralization there. But acting as a drag on economic growth and challenging small businesses are likely accurate consequences of eliminating cash in my view.

It would be useful to know, but there's no way to centralize this type of information. We would be dependent on private merchants supplying information about how much goods/services they've traded for crypto. There's no way to look at blockchain and identify which transactions are of a business purpose as opposed to which transactions are attached to purely speculative intentions. People can call Bitcoin a currency all they want, but it's just not going to get there. It's a speculative asset, and it's used to gamble or attempt to enrich yourself by trading in and out of fiat to realize gains. And any vehicle like that has actual currency-use stacked against it.

Perhaps if you're unable to follow the thread, you should stop quoting and responding to it. It's quite clear if you read it I'm responding to the questions you wrote at the end of your post. "Obviously the liquidation value of Bitcoin is zero for pretty obvious reasons, but is it the same with the stocks of these companies?" "No, the difference being..." and so on. Or perhaps you're mistaking answering the questions you posed as an argument? That's your fault, I can't help you with that.

"Rich" and "poor" are relative terms. They are relative comparisons to everyone else in an economy. Therefore, looking at what you can buy for a million dollars is meaningless to whether someone is rich or poor; you have to compare it to what others are able to buy to have any concept of whether someone is rich or poor, and it just so happens that having a million dollars puts you substantially ahead of the vast majority of people in America. Just because it doesn't fit some undefined expectation of yours doesn't make it not "rich."

I don't know how deeply you want to parse "a whole magnitude," but it's certainly not close. You've identified two very broad data points over a long period of time (which smooths out volatility and just becomes a trend) and that tend to support your claim, but if you drill down with any specificity you will see that it doesn't hold up. Bitcoin volatility crushes oil volatility as a rule in any specific period (monthly, weekly, daily), and in number of overall periods with significant swings. I've drilled down on monthly data below, but the disparity only grows larger the shorter you make the time frame (and since time is a component of volatility, shorter time frames equal higher volatility).

Average monthly price change Nov 2012 - June 2017

• Oil 6.23%
• Btc 29.33%

Number of 10% monthly changes:

• Oil 12
• Btc 36

Number of 20% monthly changes:

• Oil 3
• Btc 20

Number of 50% monthly changes:

• Oil 0
• Btc 6

There's no denying oil experiences volatility. But it's not in the same league as btc. Shorten the time frame and the volatility disparity is even more pronounced.

Yeah, there could be a lot of factors influencing the payouts: the particular monero pool's payout rate (income generated minus fees), the payout rate of whoever hosts the browser hashing software (wetsuit in this case- I'm assuming he takes a cut of the proceeds from our mining efforts for including it as an option on this site, which I'm fine with), luck in the pool (that is, how quickly your hashes help solve blocks above the average, which generates into higher revenue per hash), and conversion rate from monero to btc.

All of those factors will affect the sat / hash rate you experience on this website, and that's just off the top of my head. There's likely more factors. So really, the only way to get a good indication of the payout rate is through many data points, and then you can make reasonable comparisons with anyone else providing similar services if you're hunting for efficiency. Unless someone is really blowing this site out of the water in terms of efficiency, I'll prolly stick here, because wetsuit has always proven a stand-up guy who's built up a lot of goodwill.

Except nobody is using bitcoin to pay for stuff online. The vast majority of bitcoin is held as a speculative investment. There is an investment thesis that bitcoin will increase in value because it will become indispensable to future commerce, and it in no way is playing out that way. Bitcoin has become a hype machine, and the higher it climbs, the more the hype builds. People see new highs as validation that they're investing geniuses for recognizing this trend, when in fact, they're just piling on a bandwagon with little economic regard for the consequences or thoughts of utility. And the issue of utility is an important one, because without it, bitcoin is a bubble. When momentum runs out, the bubble bursts. So the best thing for bitcoin would be people using it as a currency and not a speculation vehicle, and in order for that to happen, it has to stop being so volatile, which is what has drawn so many people into it in the first place. It's a Catch-22.

Well Steve Jobs is dead, so he's not still working. But I doubt any of these tech titans continue to work because they're afraid of their billions becoming mere millions. It's more likely because they've built a thing that has taken incredible personal sacrifice and continue to be driven to improve upon it. There's also risk in seeing your life's accomplishments turned over to someone who might not share your vision, so there's a control element. Also, Bill Gates no longer works for Microsoft. He's still involved with the business, but he was able to let go of that when he found a more important purpose, and that's running the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is seeking to eradicate certain diseases and improve living standards in the developing world. He's no longer working towards capitalistic ends, but he has put all his drive into something just the same, and none of that drive has anything to do with maintaining his wealth.

So I've run two sessions, a very brief session and a days-long session, and here is the data I've recorded:

Short session: 50,036 hashes, 12 satoshi in earnings; 0.24 satoshi / 1k hashes (240 satoshi / 1M hashes)
Long session: ~6,440,000 hashes, 1572 satoshi in earnings; 0.24 satoshi / 1k hashes (244 satoshi / 1M hashes)

Now I only have two data points, but it's interesting to me that the rate has held pretty constant. I would set my baseline expectation to be 240 sats per million hashes, with the knowledge that variance for price and conversion are likely.

Puerto Rico is a good example of the perils of a completely cashless system, and they're not even completely cashless. There's just a shortage of physical currency, and large power outages that make electronic payments impossible. So you have people only willing/able to conduct transactions with physical currency, and a shortage that leaves not enough currency to transact all the business that needs to occur, at a time when people are vulnerable after the hurricane. For those who are pure bitcoin proponents, note that bitcoin solves none of these problems.

People keep their savings in USD because it's the most stable currency on the planet right now. Gold is more volatile, bitcoin is WAY more volatile. The point of saving is to retain value over long stretches of time. Without a stable currency, saving is impossible. Bitcoin will not replace the USD because it's not more stable than the USD. Stability is the most important function of any currency.  Everyone uses bitcoin to speculate, or to try to get more USD. This is the biggest hindrance to bitcoin ever supplanting the USD in any regard.

Stability allows value to be stored. If the base currency is not stable, there will be no reliable store of value and no savings. Fiat like the USD currently provides that and it is the system everything is denominated in. It's where the stability is. Speculation is the search for alpha above the zero point (which fiat represents since everything is denominated in USD). Without a stable system first, there would be no ability to speculate, because the underlying assets themselves are too unstable to make speculating above that worthwhile. It would be piling risk on top of risk. You don't take on more risk if your base currency already provides all the risk you can stomach. It's only through stability that the appetite for risk grows. Places where there is high inflation, USD is in high demand because it's a stable store of value. Venezuela right now has the highest inflation in the world, and people there are turning to mining bitcoin and ether to supplement income. Interestingly, no one is interested in using bitcoin to speculate or store value because they're too busy trying to survive in an economic crisis. It's simply an income vehicle. Mine, liquidate, survive.

There's no way to guarantee money investing in anything. Everything carries some risk to it. A risk-free investment violates the laws of economics. So no one can be sure they will profit, but there are degrees of risk that make it reasonable to expect not to take losses in certain situations. Trading is a specific animal and there are strategies you can employ using technical analysis to mitigate risk. Everything in investing is about managing risk and looking for the highest return relative to the risk you take on. Trading is no different. "Educated guessing" is one way to look at it; it's not wrong. But it's much more sophisticated than just guessing.

Thanks, I plan to try and get some ballpark data on it, but I'll have to shut down the browser miners and wait for stats to sync for awhile, and that's not something I want to do right now. I've got several running and might as well wait until a prime stopping point when I can shut them all down together and then let the stats sync up. Then I'll get data points from a couple concurrent browser miners at the same time that will have different hash rates.

You might find these statistics from the EIA interesting:


Utility scale power production by source, 2016

• Natural gas = 33.8%
• Coal = 30.4%
• Nuclear = 19.7%
• Renewables (total) = 14.9%

Of the renewables, it breaks down like this:
Hydropower = 6.5%
Wind = 5.6%
Biomass = 1.5%
Solar  = 0.9%
Geothermal = 0.4%

However, even though solar is such a small part of overall utility scale energy production, it is currently the fastest growing segment in the US, and not just on a percentage basis, but on an absolute power basis. In 2016, more new MW were deployed by solar than any other method:



I like the trend.

Blockchain has the potential to kill fees, but it's not going to accomplish anything significant until volatility is solved. Right now, I see crypto as a legitimate threat to some businesses like Western Union, or wire transfer services, which is a revenue generator for banks. Anything that can be accomplished with a quick sending of a significant amount of money and that can be quickly and cheaply converted back to fiat (so as to to serve as an advantage over sending through a bank), but for regular commerce, bitcoin is fairly useless and will remain so until volatility ends, if that's even possible, and I have serious reservations it ever will be.

Banks are just a centralization mechanism, and their main utility is lending in a crypto world (if we ever get there). From that perspective, I don't see banks being ruled out. We already accept as necssary various points of centralization in the crypto world, two major ones being mining pools and exchanges, with exchanges being the most important of the the centralized authorities necessary to make bitcoin work. As an individual, you don't have much ability to loan your crypto out and have any recourse if someone defaults on the loan. You will still be dependent on a centralized point to achieve any confidence there, like an exchange or a bank. That's why I don't see banks disappearing. What they will end up becoming is an interesting though experiment, but you have to believe that crypto can first stabilize and then mostly replace fiat in the economy for those to even be worth thinking about, and currently, I don't see it as likely.

I think we were a lot closer to wider devastation than anyone cares to admit. The only thing that stopped systemic failure was the US government massively injecting cash into failing banks to make up for all the defaulting going on between them. If people didn't have confidence that would fix the system, it probably would have failed since there were no other steps the Fed could take to staunch the bleeding. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy (in a positive way): it worked because we all expected it to work. Confidence was the only thing standing in the way of a cascade of ever larger systemic failures.

Peak oil is a given, it will eventually be achieved. At this point, I agree that peak oil is achieved because of technological innovation, not because of supply exhaustion. While the original authors might have envisioned peak oil being achieved through the latter, I don't think it ultimately matters. Peak oil is peak oil, no matter the cause. We would be able to see or project a drop in oil consumption or production (two different peak oils there) quickly, however it would still likely take years to know definitively that we passed peak oil for both consumption and production as they drop to the point where temporary fluctuations would be unable to push either past the old peak. That's why I said we won't know until years after the fact (with certainty, anyway) since it's not something that can turn on a dime. For several years after the first decline, I would suppose we are still within the ability to surge back past the old peak without vast new improvements to infrastructure. It reckon it would take several years of scaling down for that not to be the case.

That's because exchanges are portals between the traditional fiat world and the crypto world. While the crypto world for now largely operates in an environment devoid of regulation (for now), exchanges have one foot in each world, and the foot in the traditional world still has to deal with all the traditional regulations as far as KYC and AML prevention. As much as everyone wants to tout the decentralized nature of bitcoin and other cryptos, the truth is that it doesn't work very well without gatekeepers or points of centralization (i.e., exchanges), and at this point, people don't trust (and shouldn't!) exchanges that aren't regulated. The future is regulated, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

This is an interesting analog of a digital system. It doesn't get around the fact that the "coins" exist digitally though. As a technological innovation, it's perhaps the first legitimate analog I've seen that could potentially allow for physical transactions, but that's refuted somewhat by the fact that it needs to plug into the digital sphere to transfer ownership in the blockchain.  The ownership of the private key is the ownership of the coins in the blockchain, regardless of what wallet address they reside in.  But I don't think it's very likely to catch on. Porting a digital token to the physical realm is rather pointless. It still needs to be plugged in to verify a balance, and unless it's preloaded in exactly the value you need, you'd have to transfer coins off the drive to before turning it over physically to prevent over paying for anything.

Technologically interesting, but utility looks pretty low.