What are Russians doing at the moment with their money?

Sanctions might be getting worse and fast, due to the airplane.  If I was in Russia I would be converting all my disposable money into Bitcoin - Bitcoin shouldn't change that whole much but the Russian economy could be in the gutter if big sanctions are placed against it.

Governments and merchants seem to think crypto currencies will be $1+ trillion plus within years, so may as well get on the band wagon.

Problem is that Wall Street and main street hasn't exactly jumped on board yet.  Wall street generally doesn't like throwing money at things with 'low volume' (low for them) and lack of regulations.  Many people on mainstreet don't understand Bitcoin yet.

Tom Leykis on the radio was talking about Bitcoin this last friday and he absolutely hates Bitcoin due to Satoshi's anonymity, Bitcoin not representing anything and volatility (his words not mine) and compared it with Tulips.

Major Jim Grant served in Afghanistan and he and his team often went "native" as per the picture above.   It's a long tradition going back to Lawrence of Arabia who posed as an Arab and led all the Arabs to fight the Turks.  There's no magical DNA thingy which stops you from dressing up like an Afghan or an Arab.


This is in compared to a lot of photos I have seen about ISIS which feature white men.  You might say they are Chechens or Tajiks but I've read testimony months ago from Iraqis in Mosul who said these guys could neither speak Arabic or Chechen or couldn't identify the language the men were talking in.


Guy on the left may as well be Sylvester Stallone (Rocky Movies), the guy in the middle Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead) and the guy on the far right Damian Lewis (Band of Brothers / Homeland).    Looks like they rounded up a bunch of white guys from America or England and sent them into Iraq to lead the insurgency.







110% sure this guy is from Florida or Alabama.

I'm running on the theory that the Sauds and the West are financing the Sunni Rebels (ISIS) and even sending in advisors / officers from America and Britain to lead them.  Might explain why a bunch of Toyotas (pickup trucks) have been defeating Iraqi tanks and seizing entire military bases and airfields.


The west and the Sauds are afraid of Iran and the Shiites.  Iran (Shiite) controls Hezbollah and Syria as proxies and is said to control most of Iraq.  The West is responding now by leading a Sunni insurgency.

I've flown on air baltic and yeah I recall them tacking on all sorts of miscellaneous fees.  There's a lot of low cost air lines where, if you check a bag, that's an extra $50 they tack on.

That comes down to the scarcity model.  If Bitcoin was theoretically better distributed then it might be worth less or wouldn't had gone anywhere (as it would had been dumped to death). .  It's only a guess as we've not really seen an egalitarian or a fairer distribution model exceed yet.

Well the most recent photos show that Koreans are eating better.  I've even seen photos of fat infantrymen.

The Korean starvation is no different than the Cuban near starvation - the USSR was done in the early 1990s and both North Korea and Cuba were left isolated in the global trading network and it took them time to adjust.  The results would had been no different if European countries decided to go Autarky in the early 1990s.

Technically speaking very few countries in the world are food independent and must import to make up the gap.  In Europe, if I recall, France is the only country which is self-sufficient in food production and the rest have to import their food from North and South America.

Didn't they used to smash grapes with their feet in wine making?

At least the only dirty Shawarma is presumably the stuff on the very top.   

No Russia sold them SU-25 (CAS).  

These are the same SU-25, a month ago, which the Iraqi Government reportedly paid $500 million for. 

Litecoin is just reaction form jealous guys who missed the train.  Get over it.  Bitcoin is still cheap.  Distribution is not over!

So I disprove your FUD with simple proof and you retort with that?  NEM's distribution is better than anything out there unless you think POW is good distribution (maybe back in 2009 or 2010 when everything was pre-ASIC and pre-GPU but nowadays a small group of hardware kings dominate all the new mining coins).

I don't understand the point in your hypothetical ramble.

NEM is already being traded on the asset exchange and it hasn't been dumped to death, neither has NXT.  There's a difference between handing out coins to investors / pseudo-investors and then giving something out to everybody (Aurora).

It was not equal distribution between 73.  There was a 1.5 BTC limit and only 20 people invested the limit, and without any taint analysis we don't know how many of those said 20 were socks.   We also don't know if those 20 people had any crony or nepotism connection with each other.  The other 53 or so people got the scraps.  For people who claim freeloading is an issue in NEM - there's NxT whales with 40+ million coins who haven't logged in months and don't contribute to coding, discussion or even funding.


A distribution of 3000 isn't intended to be a planetary distribution.  We know Aurora tried to give coins to every Icelander and its' value plummeted when the first batch were selling their coins for beer and salted herring.  Ironically, it echoed the original "air drop" that was the privatization voucher of the FSU in the early 1990s (which people promptly sold to door-to-door salesmen and used the proceeds to buy liquor.  

"So most people immediately sold their voucher on the street for about seven dollars. You could get two bottles of cheap vodka for the price of one voucher." are the results you can see on Google.  Some salesmen even traded chocolate snicker bars for vouchers.  A lot of the salesmen who acquired those vouchers later became very rich).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voucher_privatization


The distribution was to weaken the influence of any whales, sockpuppets or incidents of cronyism.  To match the power of an early NxT investor one would have to create 160 sockpuppets in NEM back in January (160 times of bypassing taint analysis which was only revealed later, 160 times of dealing with the anti-spam restrictions on this forum, 160 times of creating socks for a worthless coin, et cetera) and creating 160 socks for a worthless coin was beyond any normal person's patience.

It was $1500 when NxT was over 6 cents.  Now it's floating around $1050 - $1100 as NxT went down to 4 cents (NEM's value is highly dependent on the $Fiat value of NxT).  If NxT were to hit 11 cents again then a NEMstake would be worth close to $3000.

That's also not counting the possibility that the NxT value of a NEMstake can increase along with the $Fiat value, which I think it's almost a certainty the closer we get to launch.  

Which huge effect are you talking about?  NEM at Sell is 25K NxT.  When NEM was at 26K - 30K that was euphoria (hype buying) from the alpha, imo.  

NEM's $Fiat value is highly dependent on NxT's $Fiat value and NxT went from 8-9 cents in June down to 4 cents in July.  There's a possibility NxT could drop even lower.

Get in before you miss out!  Monero will likely hit $40 million and then die a slow death.

You're making the assumption that the NxT community was ever friendly.  They've been bullying and harassing people on that forum for an extremely long time, it's part of the reason why I never moved onto the newer forum and why some people are still active on the old one.    

It doesn't matter if something is free or not.  There's a lot of dumpers in cryptos who sell everything as soon as they get even the smallest return.

There's no equivocation in my argument.
Your retort with an ad nauseum and an accusation of semantic arguing is not a counterargument but a red herring.

You keep on spewing lies about NEM and clearly ignore that NxT has severe flaws.  If you don't like logic or choose to ignore it then let's look at the math.  NxT, before the public knew about it's terrible distribution, was $0.09.  NxT, after the public knew about the distribution and started planning forks, went down to $0.025 by April 2013.

NxT's main rhetoric is that it's innovative but at the same time it's flawed rhetoric as there are multiple coins as innovative as NxT and/or the mainstream user does not care about innovation beyond a marketing point (as people almost never use the complete functionality of their smartphones, computers or websites like Facebook).

No need for straw man arguments.  NEM's distribution was never about distributing something to all 7 billion people on the planet.

It's to ensure that the coin's distribution wasn't divided in a cronyism fashion and to ensure stability by preventing whales.  



If we take NxT's example - only 20 accounts invested the 1 BTC but we don't know who those 20 accounts are, it could just be 10 people and 6 of them are BCnext and/or his friends.