"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

You know, when I clicked on this thread, I was expecting something on the order of Bitcoin becoming self-aware and placing a monolith on the moon.

And what I got instead was "oh noes deflation!"

Smeagol doesn't trust filthy minersess...  always trying to take my precious.

All signs point to "no".

Lots of big banks these days don't pay much in the way of interest, half a percent or so.  And their loan business is crap.  They make money on credit cards and transaction fees.

Many US states are libertarian in different ways.  The Free State Project's research is a good starting point.  Just remember that one of their criteria was that they were looking for a small state that could be influenced by an influx of people.  Texas, for instance, is libertarian in a lot of ways.  Michael Badnarik and Ron Paul, Libertarian Party presidential candidates, are from Texas.  But Texas would never be considered ripe for libertarian take-over.

Yes of course.  What a silly question.

Ich bin ein Bitcoiner

The long term prediction of Marx was that capitalism would inevitably go through periodic crises as labor became obsolete, and that socialist institutions would be erected as a fig-leaf to allow capitalism to continue even as society as a whole became more and more collectivist.  In my view, long term predictions were the only thing Marx got right.

The average English-speaking website visitor is probably white.  The average internet user is probably introverted.  The average forums poster is probably male.  The average cryptographic financial open source programmer is probably intellectual.  And young people are disproportionately unemployed, so probably post more.

That's an interesting observation.

e: could be Germans?  (they all get up way too fucking early)

The Bitcoin "society" grows in fits and starts.  What happens is that newbies don't jump in right away.  They wait and lurk until they feel comfortable.  Then they see a reason to buy in -- their peers start to do so, or there is some press exposure, or some opportunity, or just general optimism.  Then they all jump in at once, and the price skyrockets.  Rising price triggers early-adopters to cash out, or to make purchases, and new miners to join.  Purchases attract new vendors to open shop.  And the Bitcoin society steadily grows, a little at a time.

That's true, and actually that's what happened over the past decade or so with the derivatives market.  The problem with private credit, though, is that it acts as a 'dark pool' and distorts the value on the open market.  A currency that fails to capture private credit markets fails to give an accurate view of the real economy.  With the dollar, of course, this was by design, since the derivatives represented a bunch of toxic debt that was hidden from foreign investors.  With Bitcoin, no one need worry about this since there is no government telling us that Bitcoin is the final arbiter of value within any particular region in the first place.


Since deflation is the appreciation of the price of Bitcoin in relation to everything else, Bitcoin wouldn't technically 'collapse'.  The threat of deflation is that it would stop being used as currency.  And the risk of this happening is offset by the fact that Bitcoin can be forked, and built upon, and has several competitors.

Hmm I somehow missed this.  Open Transactions seems promising.

"Open-Transactions Financial Crypto System and Bitcoin Integration"

I might want to make the trip to Dallas.  One of the projects I'm interested in would be easier to do in Texas, actually.

This is part of what doesn't make sense to me.  You want a lower difficulty, to enable CPU mining.  Yet there will be 10x the number of transactions.  So, that's contrary to your formula C here.

Currently, there is no real per-transaction cost.  It is more of an "all or nothing" type of fixed cost.  You're saying that difficulty should be proportional to the number of transactions?

It is somewhat absurd in the context of any modern economy.  But in the absence of force or fraud, markets tend towards efficiency.

LOL labor theory of value.

Well then I hope you learn that an economy is not proportional to the number of transactions.

Uh-huh.  And, then what happens instead if they lend money to buy a dot-com company, or an insurance derivative, or a house that goes down in value?