What you gain: Instant stability, long-term growth...
Bitcoin is stable enough, that is if you're willing to look past the market makers. |
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It is important to note that, in the case of bitcoin, the 21mil bitcoin supply is just a monetary base. The total potential BTC money supply (in the smallest bitcoin unit - a.k.a. "satoshi") is 2.1 quadrillion. Also, when talking about the US dollar, for example. Do we measure the monetary base in dollars and the money supply in pennies? Because that's what you just did with Bitcoin. Keep in mind that inflation/deflation in a fiat-based economy is deflation/inflation in a bitcoin-based economy. That's why one should use "satoshi" to arrive at the potential money supply for the BTC economy. Now, what everyone should be thinking about is what does it take to create and maintain deflation in the BTC economy? |
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It is important to note that, in the case of bitcoin, the 21mil bitcoin supply is just a monetary base. The total potential BTC money supply (in the smallest bitcoin unit - a.k.a. "satoshi") is 2.1 quadrillion. |
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Instead of assigning a budget to the project, let's use this opportunity to establish BTC-denominated prices for various types of skills needed to pull it off successfully. What I'm proposing is to solicit quotes per hour for various tasks (architecture, programming, testing, etc.) rather than quotes per milestone. Doing so would open up the bidding between all kinds of walks of life.
In a way, it will be a test of bitcoin's viability as a medium of exchange, rather than a speculative digital asset (or perishable gold, if you will). Most importantly, as the project begins to take form (one piece at a time), I have no doubt that some BTC miners (not to be confused with the gold-rush miners) would gladly make the necessary donations just to see the project completed. Who knows, this could become the very first open source project where every contributor gets paid in BTC. Think of the hype it may create in the media circles.
What do you say @theymos?
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So far you are only giving slogans without any explanation to support them.
I guess I should wait for the full paper. But until then I do not accept your claims.
"Trust me I will explain later" doesnt work for me
While I'm getting ready to unveil my conclusions, feel free to play around with the quantity theory of money. And this post (translated from Russian) discusses how to apply that theory specifically to bitcoin. It should give you some feel of what bitcoin may be worth today. |
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Because it does have a specific use... Unfortunately, the gold-rush miners are postponing that use.
But not for long -- I think I've figured out the mechanics of BTC economy. And it's a beauty, I tell you! Best of all, it does not rely on the market makers.
Interesting. Although I disagree about the specific use, I am curious to hear what you have to say. Just need some time to put everything into words that make just as much sense to others as they do to me. :-) Here's an outline. |
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If BTC drops to 2-3$ again - the miners are screwed, they don't have an option to sell even if they see it coming - especially the ones who are buying FPGAs.
Perhaps the gold-rush miners (not to be confused with BTC miners) should take bitcoin for what it really is—a unit of account—and buy something with it rather than selling it via "market makers". If bitcoin today was treated more as a currency and less as a "perishable gold" (more on that in some other time), the transaction fees + bounty per block would keep the costs of mining well below $1.00 per bitcoin. Bitcoin really is whatever people want it to be. Why try to pigeonhole it by suggesting it has a specific use? Because it does have a specific use... Unfortunately, the gold-rush miners are postponing that use. But not for long -- I think I've figured out the mechanics of BTC economy. And it's a beauty, I tell you! Best of all, it does not rely on the market makers. |
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If BTC drops to 2-3$ again - the miners are screwed, they don't have an option to sell even if they see it coming - especially the ones who are buying FPGAs.
Perhaps the gold-rush miners (not to be confused with BTC miners) should take bitcoin for what it really is—a unit of account—and buy something with it rather than selling it via "market makers". If bitcoin today was treated more as a currency and less as a "perishable gold" (more on that in some other time), the transaction fees + bounty per block would keep the costs of mining well below $1.00 per bitcoin. Are you aware that mining cost is proportional to the difficulty, which is proportional to the total computation power of all miners, which is influenced by the profitability of mining? So if mining is too profitable, more people will mine, making it less profitable? It's a self-balancing adjustment mechanism. What makes you think that I'm not aware of that? Is it because I've suggested that without the gold-rush miners in the game, the cost of mining would be less than $1.00 per bitcoin. All I'm trying to point out is that there's NO gold in bitcoin -- it's only a general ledger that is yet to be filled with valuable transactions. |
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If BTC drops to 2-3$ again - the miners are screwed, they don't have an option to sell even if they see it coming - especially the ones who are buying FPGAs.
Perhaps the gold-rush miners (not to be confused with BTC miners) should take bitcoin for what it really is—a unit of account—and buy something with it rather than selling it via "market makers". If bitcoin today was treated more as a currency and less as a "perishable gold" (more on that in some other time), the transaction fees + bounty per block would keep the costs of mining well below $1.00 per bitcoin. |
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But bitcoin is not paper money, and as such, its mechanics are different, and the logic too. what exactly makes it different? how this difference affect the logic? what is the logic? you need to be more specific with statements like this... Will provide the details in the near future (perhaps as new threads and/or blog posts). In the meantime, see this and this as a general/raw overview of my conclusions. |
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One thing for sure, Bitcoin is going to cause economists to take a second look at their belief systems about money, commodities, and currency.
I already did... Will be presenting my conclusions/findings in the near future (merely waiting for more bitcoin speculators to join the game). |
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If you were a farmer for how much BTC would you sell me a chicken? an egg? wheat? sugar? if you could not trade BTC for another currency.
As a marketeer, I would NOT sell an hour of my time for anything less than 10BTC, applicable only to bitcoin-related projects (since I'm a supporter of bitcoin). For any other projects, the price would be at least 30BTC/hr. The way I figure, if it costs a competitive/efficient miner less than $1.00 to generate 1BTC, it is only fair that I provide $1.00 worth (minus maybe a fair profit margin, say less than 50%) of my service in exchange for the services of bitcoin miners. that is actually not fair: 1) miners are currently people with certain knowledge and have to be paid for their time , not just the actual cost of the mining itself 2) there are high initial costs for mining and some money is required for maintanance as well ( replacing failed HW) Wouldn't you say that a 50% profit margin on top of every $1.00 in expenses (which include: time, electricity, rent, depreciation, maintenance, etc) should be more than enough to thank the miners for their contributions to the bitcoin network? (Basically, by providing an hour of my services for 10BTC, I will be buying each BTC at $2.00 from miners whose costs are less than $1.00/BTC.) Keep in mind though, as bitcoin matures, mining as an activity will be akin to mass production - only the most cost-efficient miners will survive. Naturally, when that happens, it will cost more to mine/generate a bitcoin (as a bounty per block eventually will be reduced to zero)... and I will be ready to reduce my prices accordingly then. But we are not there yet... today we're mining at less than $1.00 in total cost (time, electricity, rent, depreciation, maintenance, etc). 3) according to this logic if any paper money's worth should be the cost of its production - most of the countries would be screwed (and the people printing a 50$ are not rewarded with 50$)
But bitcoin is not paper money, and as such, its mechanics are different, and the logic too. IMHO the value of money comes from trading and provided goods/services.
The value of a currency comes from expectations about the future economic activity it will support. What will be the value of all goods / services traded for bitcoin in 1,2,3 years from now? |
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If you were a farmer for how much BTC would you sell me a chicken? an egg? wheat? sugar? if you could not trade BTC for another currency.
As a marketeer, I would NOT sell an hour of my time for anything less than 10BTC, applicable only to bitcoin-related projects (since I'm a supporter of bitcoin). For any other projects, the price would be at least 30BTC/hr. The way I figure, if it costs a competitive/efficient miner less than $1.00 to generate 1BTC, it is only fair that I provide $1.00 worth (minus maybe a fair profit margin, say less than 50%) of my service in exchange for the services of bitcoin miners. |
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.....
P2Pool is a bit more complicated than traditional pool mining, but there are people willing to help, and it's not as difficult as it might seem... But the added work, lack of software that is P2Pool friendly, and variance expected with a smaller pool has kept some miners away.
.....
TL;DR: I'm asking for donations to the miners of P2Pool because it promotes decentralization of the Bitcoin network. If you think decentralization is important, but aren't a miner yourself, consider offering a small donation.
It seems that the focus of your plea should be on subsidizing the creation of a P2Pool-friendly software and so on, not the P2Pool miners themselves. |
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thus taking advantage of the utility of bitcoin but leaving all current bitcoin holders with a lesser used (and therefore lower value) currency?
If that were to happen, then control over the monetary policy would shift from financiers to citizens;... hence, goodbye economic waste (the source of wealth for most politicians). |
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Is it technologically possible to swim in BTC?
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Yes, it may indeed be the correction many have been expecting...
Gotta' love the optimism -- yes, it's only a correction... let's just wait it out, and then BUY, BUY, BUY!  It's just not true that Smart Money simply decided to take another stab at unsuspecting bitcoin speculators. I am optimistic as in the long run it appears that bitcoin will climb in price based on TA. Corrections and panic/manipulated sell offs come with the territory. Who is to say that TA was not concocted by the Smart Money as well? It can be said that in a small market like BTCex, such tactic is a no-brainer. |
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Yes, it may indeed be the correction many have been expecting...
Gotta' love the optimism -- yes, it's only a correction... let's just wait it out, and then BUY, BUY, BUY! It's just not true that Smart Money simply decided to take another stab at unsuspecting bitcoin speculators. |
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I'm more inclined to say that the creation of normal banks - as they are understood by the public at large - that offer the same kind of banking services that the public at large expects out of a bank - would be the answer to both the scalability issues and the learning curve. If you could walk into a branch - or click on a signup process - with an institution where there were some sort of formal auditing and accountability in place, it would be a whole different story. That's admittedly less possible, as all of the banking shenanigans that help banks be magically profitable are much more difficult when they have to deal with real units of account that can be fully audited and accounted for by anyone.
The child currencies would be totally unnecessary, because if you bank at bank A, and want to shop at a store that banks with H, a simple handshake between the two to ensure the transaction - denominated in BTC - settles off the blockchain - is all that would be needed.
This talk about establishing bitcoin-based banks is getting too old. It's time to look at bitcoin for what it really is rather than for what it should be. Enough trying to convince the public that bitcoin is just as conventional as fiat money. From the marketing perspective alone, mimicking the banking system is a bad idea. In order for it to succeed, bitcoin should be positioned as very different from the fiat money. It's time everyone realizes that bitcoin is only a protocol upon which new currencies can be built. |
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First the idea of adding additional data into the blockchain is probably good and as far as I know, very easy to do.
Therefore I think you should drop the idea of a trusted entity, drop the idea of price manipulations, and promote the concept of useing mastercoin as a way to add more data to transactions to give them the features you mentioned to bitcoin itself.
We can refer to that data as bitcoin annotations, or 'bitnotations' for short. I just love how many similarities there are between a tweet and a bitcoin transaction. |
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