You make a good point there.
That's not easy, as we can see by this topic.

Maybe we should start with libertarian communities.
I wrote a text for a Brazilian libertarian site, talking about bitcoins. Here's the automatic translation of it: http://tinyurl.com/38llgfq
I could make a "human translation" if the some English (or French) libertarian site wants to publish it.

It would be really nice if we could get a libertarian institute like the Mises or Catto Institute to write something about bitcoins, or even better, to accept them on their online shops. If an institute of this importance start accepting bitcoins, other libertarian institutes might do as well.

Once several renamed institute are accepting btcs, maybe it would be easier to convince "geek" sites like ThinkGeek to accept them. And once many geek and libertarian sites are doing it, it gets easier to convince general purposes sites to do so, since bitcoins do have short term advantages like low transaction fees and anonymous transfers...

Forget about generating, you'd better buy them. Generate them if you want to help the system by increasing the difficulty factor.


That's controversial. Banks will use your money what pushes the inflation rate. Your money then loses value, not to mention the economic cycles that such practice creates... USA and Europe are living the consequences of such system right now, many other countries were economically destroyed by it.

Bitcoin inflation rate is hardcoded in the algorithm, and in a couple years it will slow down considerably. In the mid term, it will be slower than any fiat currency in this world.
Bitcoin emission is not controlled by any authority. That's the biggest point you're probably missing.

Regarding your safety concern, there are already services that backup your bitcoins online. And, well, you can do it yourself, it's not that hard. It's much harder and more dangerous to protect physical money on your own.


The possibility to be anonymous as well as the low transaction fees are interesting, particularly the latter.

Also, the low inflation rate will be particularly interesting for those who keep bitcoin reserves.

When I click on your tinyurl link I end up on www.amazon.com.
Is this normal?
Maybe your offer is only valid for those in US?

That will probably happen spontaneously if someone make a client (or add the option to the current one) that allows the user to charge transaction fees for the blocks it generates.

Could you fix an interest rate in chickens as well? I lend you 10 chickens today, you give me 11 chickens (or their equivalent in dollars) next year.

Is such contract legal?

I remember having read something on this forum saying that transfers to self are signed differently, what would allow to identify them.
But I don't know if it's true.

Oh yes, and I forgot, currently the client demands transaction fees for big blocks. So, if you try this, you'll have to pay for it.

I suppose that as soon as transactions fees start to be demanded, that might become "expensive" to do.
And I think the only reason such fees aren't charged right now, it's because the only client that exists doesn't give the user the option to demand them.
So, if bitcoins ever get popular, I believe all transactions would have to pay a fee. Maybe tiny, but something.


Maybe to merge/split your money among different addresses.

Or another more practical example, suppose your laptop is stolen, and your wallet.dat is in it. If you have a backup, you'd better use it soon to transfer everything to a new address of your own, which is not on the stolen wallet.dat, before the thief does it.

I didn't read all answers, so sorry if I'm being repetitive, but...


I tend to argue no. I find bitcoins better than gold, even if gold could be made "digital". That's because one day bitcoin inflation rate will be lower than gold.
I read somewhere that gold inflation rate is around 2% a year. I don't know when bitcoin inflation will decrease to such rate, but one day it will.

Something better than bitcoins, however, could come out, yes. Then people would slowly migrate, I suppose.

Great work, misery!

Oh, come on, no need to cover all possible distros. Just debian and rpm repositories should be fine. 


That's what I meant by "automatic update"... normally they always ask user confirmation.
They just spare you the work of going to the webiste of each software you have installed to check for new downloads.

Wouldn't an automatic update be better?
For linux distros at least, it should not be that hard to do it I suppose.

But hugolp, currently bitcoins are at a very fast monetary inflation rate, maybe even faster than the dollar.

And trebonics, you're talking about price variation, sometimes called price inflation/deflation too. That's the measurement of a price index through a currency.
I think the person you quoted was talking about monetary inflation, which is actual money creation.

I hadn't noticed it was old news.

Wow, that means there has been a great increase in the price of bitcoins then.

Thanks!

Amazing news!

This should indeed be added to the Trade Section, with a explanatory comment if necessary.

Forgive my ignorance, but what is $8 Mills ?

Which cryptocurrencies of the past?

+1

I didn't manage to follow this whole discussion, but since the beginning, actually from the wikipage itself, it's possible to see that this whole idea of universal dividend is just a form of income distribution. Income distribution is a kind of subsidy, it's subsidizing the poor. Like all all subsidies, the more you subsidize something, the more of this something you get. The more you subsidize "poverty", i.e., the lack of means to produce enough to have a decent life, the more you end up with people that lack such means and depend on this subsidy.

Anyway, if done voluntarily, I have nothing against it. I'm just practically sure it wouldn't work, for the reason others described.

If done trough the force of the state, then, of course, it's unethical and worse than a free monetary system. Sure, it would be much better than the current monetary system we live in, since there would be only "simple inflation" at a controlled rate and not inflation to manipulate the interest rates. But even a forced gold standard would be less bad, I guess, than a forced income distribution through inflation.

I don't see how can the receipt verify whether it is a double-spent or not.

If the same coins were spent in another encrypted transaction, to another address, none of these different receipts would be able to know that another one has also received it.

Maybe I didn't understand very well your idea...

No, value is not inherent. Value is attributed to things by people, subjectively.
Having a value is not an attribute of stuff. It's the "opinion" of people about stuff. And it may changes as people change their "opinion".

Read what I wrote right after:



No they don't, as anything else doesn't. It's people who value them.

Have you read the text I indicated? Had you done it you wouldn't be asking such questions.


Don't say bullshit. Self-ownership was never respected in Latin America.


There is no such a thing as a "collective" capable of taking decisions. Only individuals and, by extension, institutions can make decisions. The "collective" can't make a decision.
If you can't make decisions, you can't own anything.

There is no such a thing as "public property". There is only "state property". And if you assume that the group of people that is in the state is the owner of everything within a certain imaginary line called "country", you are not respecting the basic idea of every individual having the same set of universal rights.
Just read the text I linked, it explains better than I can.


Taxes are theft. I've already wrote about "collective goods".


You seem to really believe in the dictatorship of the majority. That's not only unethical as any other dictatorship, as it has some horrible incentives in it you probably don't see.
Every law that does extreme good for a little bunch of people and that harms just a little a wide, big and disperse group of people will always be approved, even if the net balance is way negative. No wonder why the current monetary system is so awful, no wonder all these financial laws etc


Again, collectivity isn't going to decide anything. Governments, they might. (but I don't think they'll manage to stop bitcoins that easily ;-))

Regards