The fee you pay on fiat cash is the taxes combined with banking fees.
Everything has a production and processing fee in it. It's just hidden in different ways.
BTW: Aren't tx fees actually a bit too low (I don't mine, so it doesn't really bother me, but wouldn't a µBTC or so be a little more sensible especially with the generation revenues being halved soon)?
Really there isn't a market for transaction fees yet. Most of the "fees" paid now are really anti-spam measures that just happen to use the fee mechanism. But the system is inching closer and closer to supporting price discovery via market forces. Soon TM... |
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Here's a thought: it's impossible to save money without lending it. Imagine that you take a $100 bill and stick it in your safe for a year. It's true that when you do so, you're not lending that money to a specific person, but you are lending the purchasing power of that money to the overall economy. That's exactly right. All currency can be modeled as a series of informal loans, which means every transaction involving any type of currency requires a lender and a borrower. Factory workers loan their labor to their employed and don't truly get paid for it until they consume products and services with their paycheck. Their production happens before the corresponding consumption which makes them lenders. The factory itself consumes the productivity of its employees first before producting a valuable product and getting paid by its customers. In this case the factory is the first in a series of borrowers that correspond to the workers' loan of productivity. The debt flows through the economy via the transfer of currency and is extinguished when the workers finally spend their paychecks (or is defaulted on in the case of inflation). Note this form of informal, decentralized debt has only a superficial resemblence to "long-term interest bearing instruments". For more on this topic, take a listen at What is Money by Frederick Bastiat, as hosted by Cypherpunkd. |
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it really depends when you'd get it and where the difficulty is by then. if difficulty goes up by a factor of 10x, then that Singe SC at 40gh will be making the same money, roughly, as 4gh today. which isn't bad at all, and definitely profitable. now, if difficulty goes up 100x....
and that's the rub right now. we can guess and estimate for weeks on end (as we have done in various threads) what the difficulty will be in 6 months or more, but in the end it's still just a guess.
I'm currently estimating a medium-term increase in difficulty by a factor of 30. Target is around 70-75 million difficulty. My comparison is currently that a BFL Single SC is hoped to deliver about 30 times as many hashes/sec per dollar as a typical GPU gives today. Some of the other ASIC ventures are hoping for roughly that same performance level, so it seems plausible. |
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However, it's not a straw man at all.
With a currency that doesn't inflate or deflate, anything above 0% (after calculating for risk) makes sense as an investment. With a currency that deflates at 3%/year, the investment has to make more than 3% (after calculating for risk) to be profitable. Therefore, in a deflationary economy, we lose out on all investments estimated to pay back 0%-3%, after calculating for risk. This results in a smaller, less productive economy.
You are confusing the real return with the nominal return. To see it, just continue your idea. If 3% deflation means that investments with a nominal return of less than 3% are pointless, and 0% inflation/deflation means that any nominal return is good, then in 3% inflation, any investment with a nominal loss of less than 3% is good, right? Didn't Zimbabwe recently inflate itself into prosperity by inflating enough to include these otherwise unprofitable activities in their economy? Yes - it would be better to invest in something that loses 2%/year than to hold fiat that inflates at 3% per year. I do not see how this conflicts with my idea. But it does go to prove my point that an inflationary currency can encourage bad investments. You say that an economy based on a deflating currency necessarily rejects some investments, and is thus less productive. An economy that is neither inflating nor deflating is also rejecting some investments, those with a negative nominal return that would be possible under inflation. And an inflating economy is smaller than one that is inflating a lot. And so on. Clearly, we need an infinite rate of inflation to allow the maximum possible range of economic activities. Worked for Zimbabwe, right? P.S. You are still confusing real and nominal. Well, my argument is that the optimal amount of investment is made at the point where a currency neither deflates nor inflates. An inflationary currency encourages too much investment - that is, investment in opportunities that lose money. Over spending/over lending is also a problem, and ends up causing the sort of economic trouble that we see in the world economy today. I am adding real and nominal interest rates together because both of them need to be considered from an investor standpoint. Please provide more specific direction if you still believe I am confusing the two. Show the maths.  What math? Just ignore the nominal return and concentrate on the real return. |
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However, it's not a straw man at all.
With a currency that doesn't inflate or deflate, anything above 0% (after calculating for risk) makes sense as an investment. With a currency that deflates at 3%/year, the investment has to make more than 3% (after calculating for risk) to be profitable. Therefore, in a deflationary economy, we lose out on all investments estimated to pay back 0%-3%, after calculating for risk. This results in a smaller, less productive economy.
You are confusing the real return with the nominal return. To see it, just continue your idea. If 3% deflation means that investments with a nominal return of less than 3% are pointless, and 0% inflation/deflation means that any nominal return is good, then in 3% inflation, any investment with a nominal loss of less than 3% is good, right? Didn't Zimbabwe recently inflate itself into prosperity by inflating enough to include these otherwise unprofitable activities in their economy? Yes - it would be better to invest in something that loses 2%/year than to hold fiat that inflates at 3% per year. I do not see how this conflicts with my idea. But it does go to prove my point that an inflationary currency can encourage bad investments. You say that an economy based on a deflating currency necessarily rejects some investments, and is thus less productive. An economy that is neither inflating nor deflating is also rejecting some investments, those with a negative nominal return that would be possible under inflation. And an inflating economy is smaller than one that is inflating a lot. And so on. Clearly, we need an infinite rate of inflation to allow the maximum possible range of economic activities. Worked for Zimbabwe, right? P.S. You are still confusing real and nominal. |
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However, it's not a straw man at all.
With a currency that doesn't inflate or deflate, anything above 0% (after calculating for risk) makes sense as an investment. With a currency that deflates at 3%/year, the investment has to make more than 3% (after calculating for risk) to be profitable. Therefore, in a deflationary economy, we lose out on all investments estimated to pay back 0%-3%, after calculating for risk. This results in a smaller, less productive economy.
You are confusing the real return with the nominal return. To see it, just continue your idea. If 3% deflation means that investments with a nominal return of less than 3% are pointless, and 0% inflation/deflation means that any nominal return is good, then in 3% inflation, any investment with a nominal loss of less than 3% is good, right? Didn't Zimbabwe recently inflate itself into prosperity by inflating enough to include these otherwise unprofitable activities in their economy? |
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Why would I invest in said business with my money to make 2% per year, when I could just keep the money in my pocket and make a certain 3% per year?
Because 5% > 3%. If you are earning a sum of 2% in a currency that increases in value by 3%, you reap the benefits of both. In a way, yes. But you're missing out on what that investment could have been making had you just held on to the money. I'll do some maths. Nope. You need better maths.  If you have X units of something, and their value is increasing by 3% per year, if you don't invest, then after three years you will have a value of X*1.03 3. However, if you do invest at 2%, after three years, you will have X*1.02 3 units, each worth 1.03 3, for a total value of X*1.02 3*1.03 3. In the investment case, you'll end up with a value of 1.159611, but if you had simply held them, you'd have a value of 1.092727. Ah, I was afraid I wasn't explaining it well enough. To put it simply, the investment value does NOT rise with the 3% purchasing power increase. If I buy a building for 10,000 BTC, and deflation hits at a rate of 3%/year, then my building is only worth 9,700 BTC the next year (and maybe the rental income was the 2%, so I'd have 9,900 BTC instead). If I had held that BTC instead, I'd still have 10,000 BTC. I cannot think of an investment that would also gain value along with value gains of the currency itself. If you can think of one, please enlighten me. Ahh, ok. You are saying that you'd end up with X*1.02 3*0.97 3, which is of course lower. And no one would do that. But that seems to be a straw man. The numbers 2% and 3% aren't dictated by the market, you just made them up. Saying that 2% < 3% is hardly controversial. What you need to do is show that the market causes x% to be necessarily less than y%, where x% is the market rate of return on investments (beta) and y% is the rate of deflation. No one would make the purchase that you are using as an example. They would either purchase things with a yield higher than the deflation rate, or they would make loans where they get interest in addition to the return of the principle. Or they would do nothing. |
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Why would I invest in said business with my money to make 2% per year, when I could just keep the money in my pocket and make a certain 3% per year?
Because 5% > 3%. If you are earning a sum of 2% in a currency that increases in value by 3%, you reap the benefits of both. In a way, yes. But you're missing out on what that investment could have been making had you just held on to the money. I'll do some maths. Nope. You need better maths. If you have X units of something, and their value is increasing by 3% per year, if you don't invest, then after three years you will have a value of X*1.03 3. However, if you do invest at 2%, after three years, you will have X*1.02 3 units, each worth 1.03 3, for a total value of X*1.02 3*1.03 3. In the investment case, you'll end up with a value of 1.159611, but if you had simply held them, you'd have a value of 1.092727. |
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((...snip...))
Post an address, and I will cause a 3rd party to send a transaction to it in such a way that it can not be returned to me.
Are you describing a scenario where your bitcoin wallet (private keys) is controlled by a third party? Or perhaps (for example) One could "withdraw" from their GLBSE balance to someone else's bitcoin address (to make a patment from them) perhaps mtgox and/or other "in the cloud" wallet providers... I can only speculate. Only ever used official satoshi (bitcoinqt / bitcoind) wallet. Yes. I have at least three accounts with services that will send coins at my command, but will not come from a key that I control, or is otherwise associated with me in any way. A return to sender on those payments will go either to the service provider, or to a random user of that service. And that's just off the top of my head. I bet that if I looked through my password safe, I'd see plenty more accounts that I've totally forgotten. And that's not all. Say you are making a major sale, and you want the proceeds to go into a P2SH multisig account where most of the keys are offline, or under the control of an authentication service. You get the payment and check the list, see that the coins are "tainted". Now what? You don't have the keys available to return them immediately. Oops. |
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Cool! Are you following BIP10? I didn't know about this BIP. I looked at it and at first glance it seems good: there is a transaction that needs to be signed. But I don't think it will work for this use case: every user wants to add transaction inputs to this, not just sign them. And they need to be signed using "anyonecanpay". I would talk to etotheipi about this, and try to use essentially the same format. The details are slightly different, but the idea is very similar: you are collecting signatures for later combination. |
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Yes the coins are lost forever. No amount of hash-power that we could reasonably posses will ever find all or even a few of the priv keys.
nothing that we could possess TODAY. Technology marches on If we built a Dyson sphere around the sun and captured all its energy for 32 years, without any loss, we could power a computer to count up to 2192. Of course, it wouldn’t have the energy left over to perform any useful calculations with this computer. But that’s just one star, and a measly one at that. A typical supernova releases something like 1051 ergs. If all of this energy could be channelled into a single orgy of computation, a 219-bit counter could be cycled through all of its states. These numbers have nothing to do with the technology of the devices; they are the maximums that thermodynamics will allow. And they strongly imply that brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space. Bruce Schneier |
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@kjj
huh? why not?
Are you saying you can spend someone else's coins despite not having access to the private key for their address(es)?
Edited to add:
multi-input transactions require private keys just the same as single-input. I'm not sure what you're referring to.
A rather direct, simlpified implication is that if coins are sent, the private key(s) used to generate the transaction script(s) is controlled by the sender.
Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Post an address, and I will cause a 3rd party to send a transaction to it in such a way that it can not be returned to me. |
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Bitcoin transactions do not have a sender address. They have one or more input txouts, each of which may or may not have an identifiable address it was previously sent to. Relying on this information is not portable, as it is client-dependent. If you need a refund address or some payout address, ask for it. This also prevents reuse of addresses, which is bad for Bitcoin's privacy model (not just of those whose addresses are involved).
PS: since 0.7, you can find this information using the raw transaction API.
really? 1) Are you sure that there are transactions without an identifiable sender addresses? I've never seen a single transaction like that in the blockchain. 2) "coin taint" all the way back to the original generated coin(s) in question has always been fully traceable whenever I've attempted. 3) Coin control is a desired / requested / needed feature. The ability to control which source coins are spent in transactions and whatnot. 4) there is no four. except maybe "please qualify your assertion as I've addressed in #1" What you have is the last address that received those coins. This is not the same thing as a sender address. Things get even more silly if you think about transactions with multiple inputs and/or outputs. |
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Part 1. Clients should have the option to block tainted coins -- coins that have passed through specific transaction ID's. If this option is turned on and A receives payment from B that contains blacklisted coins, these things happen:
- The blacklisted coins are immediately sent back to B.
No, this is impossible. - A's client indicates that he did not receive the full payment, that some of the received coins were stolen and were sent back.
No, this is a lie. |
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Even if not delayed this thread has so raised people's expectations that anything short of a government accepting Bitcoin for paying tax is going to be a disappointment. Whatever Gavin comes up with is bound to be met with lots of "oh, that's all?". Ahh, yes, the Segway effect. |
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Cool! Are you following BIP10? |
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I am totally out of my element when it comes to Tor, but symmetric encryption does not affect the size of the payload, so unless Tor uses some kind of padding scheme (which it certainly might), that is not protection to just say "it's encrypted." However, I believe if someone happens to be watching both ends they can make some very educated guesses about where data is going to and from. But unless it's a honeypot site, they won't know what that data is. However, since most bitcoin data is very similar in bandwidth, I don't think they will ever be able to make a strong correlation in this scenario. Again, I am not a Tor expert, take it with a grain of salt. Some of this may depend on whether or not it's an onion site or in the clearnet, but I think we're talking about onion sites here.
What about in my case, I use a SSH tunnel to a server that serves hundreds of other SSH tunnel users, and my SSH tunnel is what I use to connect to TOR, I think this set up is 100% untraceable, as even if somehow the government cracked TOR and traced to my SSH server, they still have to determine who am I among hundreds of users. Is TCP port 113 open on that shell box? Are there logs? |
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First dip gold in water to find the amount of displacement.
as written above, this is pretty hard. second, and as an additional point why this doesn't work: you can mix the tungsten with small amounts of some other very cheap element to get the exact density of gold. then, both parts (pure gold, and the tungsten+something mix) have exactly the same density. Heh. No. |
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+1 what hazek and kjj said
-1, coz no usefull info were provided. You said you wanted to "increase emission of new dollar banknotes". This is something that congress already does to you today. If you aren't happy with the current rate of emission, just wait a few minutes and it will be higher. |
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Since some of it is real gold, the bar will weigh roughly a half gram more than it is supposed to, on a 311 gram bar.
well, if it says 311 gramm, it will weight 311 gramm. what they change is most likely the size! i.e. a fraction of a mm on a non-even surface (where the embossed numbers and letters are) is impossible to notice. therefore, one has to measure the actual volume, which is pretty hard. But does Pamp Suisse guarantee that their bars are 10.00000000000000000000 troy ounces exactly? Surely there is a tolerance, such as + or - .001 troy ounces Or .01 troy ounces. No, they are cast into a form with a nominal weight, then measured very accurately. They are then sold at their actual weight, not the nominal weight. |
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