Could be *shrug*

In tests I have found that 6 and 7 year olds can use it quite quickly without much instruction other than "send 0.001 to her".  Also note that systems such as e.g. wechatpay, which from a UI perspective works almost exactly the same, come without instruction and are adopted easily by billions.  Food for thought. 

Yes, what Deisik said.  Also bear in mind that as (not if) the dollar continues its fall, it becomes harder for the dollar issuers to rob the dollar users of their wealth.  Ending the massive hemorrhaging of wealth will hardly be what I would call "a collapse".  It will lead to a rejuvenation in a phenomenon known as "jubilee".  

Lol let me get this straight..  the fact that some people who call themselves "governments" or "banks" also claim to have some modicum of control over the issuance of a no-cost private issued note --  is an assurance that nothing will challenge it?  By the same logic, I claim to control all snails.  Therefore nobody will be faster than a snail. 

Actually you got it reversed.  It's fiat that can't be regulated, as it is issued in private -- this means nobody really knows how much is issued / printed.  Corruption is inevitable.  Public coins like bitcoin on the other hand - are regulated perfectly and can have the regulation verified by any participant. 

Just search for "bitcoin wallet" in your APP store.  It's totally intuitive, most 2nd graders can figure it out.. that is, the basics of how to use a wallet on a hand device.  OK it's just a start of course of learning but this is imho more likely to be a pathway for noobs than something on a laptop with a video. 

Take a look at the thread: 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1692890.120;topicseen

You could also stop by and chat in #woodcoin on freenet irc  

Interesting.  You could post it in a dpaste or pastebin and we could try and see if any of our clients will broadcast it. 

Fight fight!

Hehe, well most of you figured out this was more of a "who will be online at the right time and get lucky" kind of contest.  Poorly thought out on my part really, my apologies.  Another issue here is that technically we will never know the winner!   There is still a chance of a long chain reorganization to another branch in which the winning block is a different one.  OK, so the chances of that grow exponentially smaller with every passing block but hey - we're here now, might as well learn what we can from this.  

So because we will never know, I'm not going to send the prize.  

Just kidding!  I sent the prize to Vertlim.  447351 appears to be the magic first wood block with a timestamp later than the corresponding btc block's timestamp.  In case you were wondering the prime factorization of this is 3*41*3637.  Anybody else wants to ask for a consolation prize, complain, or compliment me on my beard - stop by and say hi on freenode IRC at #woodcoin.  

Thanks for playing!    

A quick check and it looks like Vertlim the noob has it with 447351.

However BrailleReadee guessing 447350 hours beforehand deserves a prize as well. 

Sadly this all goes to heck at this point as I can't tell if posts were post-facto edited. 

Please get me your addresses, winners, and the floor is open for protests in the meantime. 

I also thought like that occasionally, some years ago.  "All this was built by fiat" I would say, sweeping my arm majestically at the financial center of London or New York.  But this is a comic absurdity.  We might as well cut one toe off at birth of all people, and then say "All this was built because we cut one toe off at birth of all people" .  The logic is simply not there.  Logic shows that there is NO theoretical superiority of a money supply adjustable by discretion of individuals.  Theoretically and experimentally this can only be utter and complete economic disaster.  The only reason it has sustained itself is due to the incredible increases in production and efficiency over the last century.  Looking at the increases due to improved utilization of land, automation, communication, and transportation - one would estimate the standard of living should be at least 10 to 100 times higher than it was 50 years ago for everyone.  Instead, we have diverted these gains into destruction and waste through a system of kakocracy and cleptocracy enabled by an adjustable money supply.  It will take the world a long time to recover from such madness.  That educated persons such as ourselves might consider defending the madness makes it clear - this is going to take a long time to eradicate. 

 

The delta is now less than 400 blocks...  guess soon! 

These guesses are looking good but who knows, woodcutters have been quite variable in their habits. 

We also had an hour long bitcoin block wait yesterday.

 

My credentials might or might not impress you but that is hardly the point of such a conversation as this is it   The main differences I like to point out:

1)  Public vs. Private

Public coins (like bitcoin) are created publicly.  Everyone can see how much and when, and verify the totals.  Private coins like the dollar, pound, and yuan are issued in private.  Who gets to know how much, and when, and in which accounts specifically is always an EXTREMELY carefully guarded secret and is NEVER verifiable by the public. 

2)  Discretionary vs. Deterministically

As you say: "meet a bank's criteria for loaning to them".  Of course you mean meeting the criteria of employees of a bank who have the job of selecting who gets to have money and at what rate.  One person might want to approve a loan for a forestry project.  Another might prefer a school.  Dress properly and speak with the right accent of course when you apply.  Bitcoin isn't really like that is it? 

When people say money is "created through loans" what they are trying to say is that newly issued currency is often immediately loaned out.  It is often loaned out to lenders.  But not always.  M0 paper for example isn't usually associated with a loan when it is minted.  How many M1 accounts are created with no required payments?  Again a bit of empathy in this field goes a long way.  Put yourself in others positions and ask how you would run the operation. 


Counterfeiting is my word for an "adjustable money supply".  An effective counterfeiter is one who competes in minting (see e.g. Newton and the Counterfeiter) It's exactly the same thing, lets call it issuance.  There is the question of public vs. private issuance, but I know of no public currency which allows for discretionary issuance.  It would be easy to make such a thing, basically one could just build bitcoin with a separate clause "any coinbase signed with the following keys can create as many coins as they like at any time".  Do you  think such a project would be worthwhile? 

But hey you already know my opinion.  A floating (adjustable) money supply has but one purpose - to confiscate the wealth of the people using it.  Claims otherwise often made by those in the employ of the counterfeiters are usually tedious, comical, and easy to spot.  I'm sure you are familiar with the relevant quotes on the topic from e.g. Henry Ford, Herr Rothschild, John Calhoun, Louis T. McFadden, and various others.  Thanks I will check out more Taleb

This doesn't make any sense to me, sorry.  We need to have something before we can loan it out.  Money is not "created through loans", it is issued (at no cost in the case of fiat) and THEN - loaned out to people lower in the interest rate apartheid food chain.  Money given to people (or created and loaned) at the discretion of the issuers or the next people down the chain is by no means the same decentralized manner as public coin.  Private coin is an unverifiable hierarchy of secrecy at each step.  How do we figure this is much the same as a public verifiable system with no preferred decision makers? 
 

Well some of us consider it a feature not a bug.  The inability to counterfeit it annoys those who think that certain individuals should be able to counterfeit all moneys, perhaps thinking that certain individuals are more knowledgeable and might know when and where it is needed.  Others of us prefer that which cannot be counterfeit by anyone.  I for one enjoy seeing the competition between these in the marketplace.  Gresham's law as a spectator sport


In this case you know something I don't because I'm not sure the question you refer to.  One such question might be: what do you mean precisely by "the economy expands"?  Some indexes like some ways to calculate a fiat GDP also are dependent on how much new fiat is being issued, hence - the feedback, which leads to these indices losing their utility at some point in the fiat "business cycle" you began describing. A perhaps still more interesting question would be what is "real wealth".  I doubt any two people would agree on the answer to that one   Thankfully businesses and individuals now can choose whether they wish to be at the mercy of those deciding "whether the economy is doing well" (and whether they will have their economic tokens destroyed) - or they could use a public verifiable system that nobody can interfere with.  My bet is that more and more people will choose the latter.   


It might be worth asking how some potentially worthwhile system couldn't be specified (aka done algorithmically).  Anyway thanks for pointing me to Gosplan material, interesting reading.  cheers - 

Hehe well I'm all ears in regards to some kind of feedback loop mechanism based on "size of economy".  The idea seems to be a nonstarter but perhaps we can work on it and give it wings. 

First of all we'd have to have some metric of what we are trying to do.  Why would giving miners / issuers more or less return for their work at a given time be helpful?  Changing the absolute number of tokens in existence changes nothing - just like a stock split changes nothing.  However changing the distribution (who has what fraction of the total) could in theory make a difference..  but to what end?  Would the goal be a more even distribution?  A distribution that favors people with a certain ability?  These are possibilities.  For your idea to move we need to state clearly the quantity we are trying to maximize or minimize with our variable money supply.  Who needs to get these dynamically issued tokens and in order to do what?  It seems to me this could only cause problems, but I'm open to suggestion. 

Then, we need to figure out some way for the relevant quantities to be verifiable and public.  Without this we are back to the stone ages of rule-by-counterfeit and deceit.  If you want to have the mining reward go up if there are more birds, for example, then you need a public verifiable method of counting the birds.  I don't see this as being possible.  If you want token issuance tied to agricultural production, then you need a way for the public to verify agricultural production.  Even absent any reason for doing this, how could we do this? 

To paraphrase: 1) why would we want to adjust the mining / issuance schedule?   2)  How could such adjustment be verifiable? 

 

     

Thanks for your reply.  Yes I should be more clear about efficacy of regulation, I refer to the ability to regulate the money supply.  If you look through documents describing what various regulators with names like Comptroller of Currency and Federal Reserve Board are supposed to be regulating, it is precisely this.  And how well do they do?  Well the outlook is grim as there's no way for us to even measure.  Clearly the supply rises exponentially as issuers take their profits and support projects they approve of but by how much?  All we can do is look at increases in housing prices and make our own inferences.  With bitcoin we know *exactly*  and every person can precisely verify that the money supply is regulated according to specification.  This difference is clear and we can make the obvious statement that bitcoin supply is far more regulated than privately issued coins, do you agree? 

By the way what do you mean by feedback loop?  Do you refer to the difficulty adjustment?  A supply which is adjustable at no cost by people who have personal reasons to adjust it will without a doubt adjust.  Put yourself in the shoes of a private currency issuer and ask how you would manage it. If you are going to argue that this is anything other than catastrophic to the economy as a whole, I'd be very interested to hear how you figure. 

Yes, I believe the prices would go up.  Also the spreads.  Just like gold in India now.  Or alcohol in 1920s Chicago.  This would just be a blanket funneling of assets into the hands of criminals, just like all other prohibition of goods.  What on earth would "manipulation by rogue Chinese miners" mean?  Bitcoin doesn't care about your passport or what language you speak..  a miner is a miner..  and manipulation is just like any other market - performed by market makers.

Cheers --     

Thank you Protokol, you are exactly right here.  +1

"Excuse me sir you appear to be bleeding profusely are you all right?"
"Get out of here you Trump supporting neocon, I'll never listen to your kind"

 

A specific precedence, yes, that is my argument.  Precedence in terms of efficacy.  Public, precise, and verifiable specification actually works in regulating the money supply.  A selection of people in private with no possible oversight - won't work effectively.  The difference is akin to replacing the voltage regulator in your car with a group of bickering robots all who would benefit from charging their own batteries with the voltage passing through.  Which is a better regulator? 

As to the other topic you bring up..  can you think of an example where prohibition DECREASED the price of something?  The only example I can come up with is the 500 rupee note in India, and that isn't quite fair because prior to the prohibition the prohibiters were accepting the things in trade for e.g. tax receipts.  The psychologists among us might also point out that prohibition could even further increase the already increasing adoption rate. 

Another problem with prohibition of public coins is that it is even more impossible to carry out than prohibition of scheduled drugs (which can't even be kept out of prisons).  Public coins can be stored in anything, from inside your own head to steganographed in facebook photos to hidden in the text of this post.  Such a prohibition would be akin to saying "you can't speak swahili" - solely a carte blanche for facists to prosecute anyone they like - meanwhile of course the fascists doing so will be taking bribes in bitcoin.  Regulatory capture again. 

You could indeed claim this, with regards to the laws of nature, and you'd be exactly right.  The Earth's orbit is regulated by gravity, weather by physics, sure.  

However the context here is more specific.  As you say: "What people are allowed to do with their bitcoins".  Well for one, they aren't allowed to issue them in private at no cost - fiat currencies are issued in private in arbitrary amount at no cost.  If you understand the phenomenon of "regulatory capture" you can see clearly how the precise and complete regulation of bitcoin issuance and transactions FAR FAR outweighs in efficacy any so-called regulation by e.g the office of the comptroller of currency or the federal reserve board.  Perhaps it is cherry picking to call a spade a spade.  If so, I am guilty as charged.  

If you are worried about the rule of law with regards to bitcoin users, I really don't see any relevance here.  "But your honor I had bitcoin in my pocket" is always irrelevant in a criminal proceeding.  If wrongdoing is proven, you face consequences, at least to the same extent as when any other exchange commodity is involved. I'm not claiming the justice system works in any sense here, just that it doesn't care what economic tokens are involved.

This whole "bitcoin is unregulated" nonsense has always been a total farce - the only value is in pointing out the compete lack of knowledge on the part of anyone saying it.  The only other meaning I can see is if we are to take "regulated" as a euphemism for "corruptible", in which case sure - bitcoin is less regulated. 



  

  

Thank peeps, and happy new year to you all!

This will be a big year public currencies and LOG, no question. 

Lets make it happen. 

In a thread filled with broken English and even more broken economic understanding, i should probably only take the time to reply to one.  So I picked yours  

Bitcoin is the most regulated and orderly currency ever conceived.  Every transaction - every newly issued token - is publicly auditable and verifiable.  Imagine if you asked fiat issuers to be so regulated and orderly.  Lol right?  No chance.  

Saying that "we rely on fiat" is exactly saying "we rely on being robbed".  Rely on being robbed for what?  We rely on the sun shining, on arable land, on fresh water, amongst other things, for life.  Do we "rely" on having a large chunk of our wealth constantly being taken by people issuing economic tokens at no cost to themselves?  Sure, the same way prisoners rely on the prison guards to make sure they won't escape.