I've been ignoring this latest nuke debate because I don't think that it has merit, but this one needs to be addressed.  Sociopathy does not imply irrationality.  Usually the contrary, sociopaths can be very civil & rational people, and still not care a lick what happens to anyone else.  This is exactly why sociopaths who do not tend to have other mental issues are over-represented among both political classes in every Western democracy and the top leadership of major international corporations.  It's also related to the fact that sociopaths that do have other mental issues tend to end up in a prison cell for a violent felony at some point.

Yes, we likely agree.  BDD is an excellent economic metric, a very useful tool for analysis.  And one that has no corrolary in fiat currencies.  Velocity of bitcoin is most useful as a comparison tool against other currencies and across time.  BDD is a very useful tool for comparing one period of time against another, from within the bitcoin economy itself compared to itself.

No, that would just mean that velocity had no relationship to value.  But we already know that is not the case here, so it's a moot point. The kinds of transactions that should not be included in velocity, that would be included in BDD, are transfers between a person's own addresses (and any other kind of valueless transfer), exchange price speculation, and probably in-kind donations.  The problem is we can't work this out of our data set, since there is no way to know why the transfers are occuring.  This is generally true with fiat currencies as well, but it's entirely possible that these kinds of transfers represent a much larger share of bitcoin's "GDP" (which is a meaningless metric, in the context of a global economy that can't realisticly be separated from the national fiat economies in particular regions).  Of course, it's also likely that these same types of transfers will become an decreasingly significant portion over time, if Bitcoin continues to grow.  At some point, the variations in velocity metrics for bitcoin and fiat currencies become small enough that they can be ignored, and the velocities themselves compared against each other to determine a relative understanding of velocity.  Velocity of currency is always a unitless metric, and has no real meaning outside of the context it's being used.

Your welcome to your opinon on the relative merits of any particular metric, but my point ws that velocity under bitcoin should be easier to estimate than under any other currency.  BDD is realy very similar a metric to velocity, because if your volume is high but your overall BDD is not this means that a small number of people are moving the same bitcoins around rather quickly.  This is a high velocity by definition, although it's without context, and velocity is a useless metric without context.

Honestly, it shouldn't be.  We already have a similar metric that is very accurate, called bitcoin-days-destroyed.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Days_Destroyed

With a few cavets, namely the difficulty in seperating out transactions that only involve owners moving their bitcoins around from one address to another for whatever reason, Bitcoin-days-destroyed-overall is a very good indicator of the actual velocity of bitcoin at any given time.

EDIT: To be specific,  the rolling average of (Bitcoin-days-destroyed-overall-today divided by the daily-transaction-volume) should give a consistant ratio to a real velocity for bitcoin.  The problem I see is that we don't yet know what that ratio might be, or if it will change in the future as bitcoin's economy grows and changes.

That would work right now.  Just look at what M-pesa has accomplished.  If a bitcoinspinner style client could be introduced to that low end kind of cell phone, perhaps with some kind of bu.mp app to identify counterparties, that alone would do great things to stabilize bitcoin itself.

While I can't falut your analysis, I think that you are overlooking something very important.  All things equal, and increas in velocity implies a decreasing time preference, meaning people in general are more inclined to spend now than wait for a better deal.  Right now, the time preference is very high in bitcoin, as many of us have been sitting one some considerable funds for moneths to years.  While this is bound to lower as the economy grows, the increases in velocity would tend to cancel out the price increases that a growing economy would otherwise imply.  And this leads to my final point; for all practical purposes the velocity of US $ is limited to the rate at which the middle class worker is paid for his labors.  SInce the average worker is paid weekly, this effect slows down $ velocity overall and drives consumers towards credit to improve the interval; but even credit can't cycle as fast as Bitcoin is capable of, since bitcoins can be respent roughly every hour.  So, theoriecally, a bitcoin can be priced an order of magnatude lower than $ (with an equvialnt monetary base, which we don't have) and move the same value in the same time frame due to the very real possibilty that employers could pay employees for work on a daily, or even hourly basis, using funds spent at POS the very same day.

Depends upon what we are talking about.  If you mean small tweeks such as the block interval or hugely disrputive changes such as last-most-difficult-hash which can be achieved with a parrallel blockchain, then yes the developers aren't keen on playing games with a system that just works.  Besides, there is test-net for that kind of thing.  If you mean something disruptive, but truely innovative that cannot be practically implimented without a breaking change, then maybe.

You just don't go around breaking a running system to try out your theories.

I've got another one for you, if you have the extra honey.  You can bottle some honey mead.

http://www.stormthecastle.com/mead/index.htm

I've never had mead before, but I'd be willing to try it.

Ideally, something about the size and shape of a Campbell's soup can.  In fact, a soup can would be perfect, because I'd be able to put the can into the car on a hot day to calmly melt and recool once I've drilled enough holes into it that it needs reforming.


EDIT: A top would be ideal, however.  Otherwise it'll get dirty at my work, and might attract bugs.

No, drilling into the wax will leave a hole in the solid wax, but also a portion of the wax will be stuck into the groves of the drill bit.  As one drills into the workpeiece, teh tip of the bit heats up and as that heat spreads down the bit, small amounts of wax melt and trickle down onto the workpiece.  I've tried it with old candles, but that parrafin wax used in commercial candles tends to crumble away from the bit and sling away as I drill.  The beeswax will do some of this, but it seems to cling to the bit better.  Sticker, I guess.  I haven't had any beeswx to use in this manner in years, and I only recently remembered this trick while doing some repair work, and I thought of you guys.

Yes, keep your mouth shut unless and until you have permission to disclose.

I have a product suggestion.  Once upon a time, I worked in construction, and using a drill bit to cut steel with cutting oil was effective but messy.  There was this oldster that had a cardboard tube of beeswax that he would drill into before drilling steel.  The beeswax would cling to the bit groves and melt as the bit heated up and dribble into the workpiece.  His bits stayed sharper for longer than most.  I've never seen anyone since use this technique, and I don't know how he got the beeswax into the cardboard tube.  Maybe he bought it that way, but the tube just looked like the kind you would end up with after emptying a roll of paper towels.  Perhaps half of a towel tube.  It's been a while. 

Anyway, I'd like a tube of beeswax for this purpose.

Good thing you acknowleged your misconseption.  I was ready to label you as a troll for making obviously contentious and offensive claims without any support.

Canada is a much more continuous culture, being primarily a colony of the British Empire; while the US is the result of 200+ years of global immigration, most of which was not from the British Empire after 1880.  We have the Italian 'mafiso' culture, both directly from Italy and indirectly from other European & colonized cultures affected by 'mafiso' culture themselves.  We have 300+ years of an independent 'frontiersman'/'cowboy' culture that developed here.  We have Jews, Christians, Catholics & Mormans; all of whom have had their own periods on both sides of violent persecution.  We have native & imported aboriginal cultures, some of which are so deeply intergrated into the local population even the US government doesn't bother to note a distinction. (http://www.yuchi.org/ is just one example, since they still exist where my wife's family is from, another is the Black Wolf Cherokee tribe of Kentucky, which was, according to my grandmother, my great-grandfather's family)

I'm sorry, but there is no culture quite as diverse in this world as the US, and diversity often leads to tension and conflicts that would not likely occur within a more uniform national culture.


At least I can site websites that actully support my claims.  The Swiss often need a permit to buy ammunition, but what says that they have to keep it disassembled?   And who is going to be checking to make sure that a father of three has his Sig in teh proper state of storage?


As noted, like the Swiss, Israel is a militia state.  Therefore all able bodied citizens, that are not convicted criminals, physically impaired, mentally unstable or contentious objectors are members of the extended state military structure, somwhere along the scale of fully enlisted and active miltary service to inactive reserve status.  (BTW, this is also how the USMC treats it's relationship with retired marines; as one I am a marine till I die)  Unlike the Swiss, this includes women over 18; whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, (although they give mulsims a pass if they want it, in practice).  Once again, the fact that their milita is well regulated does not undermine my position.  Regardless of what the laws say, the weapons are both present and distributed across the population.  The fact that Israel does not permit guns that they don't issue to the population is functionally irrelevant.

Cops are not militia, they represent the state as a matter of occupation.  As bitcoinchemist noted, you don't seem to know what a militia actually is in this context.  It has nothing to do with survivalists drinking beer and shooting up trees waiting for the UN invasion.

Canada is an unfair comparison.  The culture is so dramticly different as to make any direct comparisons difficult.  Which is true with pretty much every nation, so I don't put much stock in such comparisons anyway, but I used that to point out the fundamental error of Rarity's premise.  Gun control does not lead to reduced incidents of violent crime within that culture.  In every nation that has an outright ban on civilian owned handguns, the rate of all forms of violent crime have increased over a period of years since.  I'm not trying to compare Britain to the US, I'm comparing Britain before and after.


Are you really kidding here?  The Swiss have a national milita that trains annually with firearms that they are required by law to keep in their homes with ammunition.  That would be every single adult & able bodied male citizen between 18 and 45.  Do you really think that the Swiss need CCW?  Do you think that an intruder is going to think "hey, they can't shoot me because their magazines are sealed"?


Another milita nation, not a anti-gun culture.  The only nation in the world that requires all women to serve in the military & in combat positions.  Again, CCW is inmaterial in Israel.


Laws, maybe.  That's debatable.  Gun culture, no.  LEt me see a NYC militia march in the parade some time, and if they aren't booed I'll concede you might have a point here.

Then let's please revisit one of my links that you obviously didn't bother to read..

http://gunowners.org/sk0703.htm

     4. Fact: British authorities routinely underreport crime statistics. Comparing statistics between different nations can be quite difficult since foreign officials frequently use different standards in compiling crime statistics.
<snip>
 
        * Underreporting murder data: British crime reporting tactics keep murder rates artificially low. "Suppose that three men kill a woman during an argument outside a bar. They are arrested for murder, but because of problems with identification (the main witness is dead), charges are eventually dropped. In American crime statistics, the event counts as a three-person homicide, but in British statistics it counts as nothing at all. 'With such differences in reporting criteria, comparisons of U.S. homicide rates with British homicide rates is a sham,' [a 2000 report from the Inspectorate of Constabulary] concludes."16

    5. Fact: Many nations with stricter gun control laws have violence rates that are equal to, or greater than, that of the United States. Consider the following rates:


    High Gun
    Ownership Countries
       

    Low Gun
    Ownership Countries

    Country
       

    Suicide
       

    Homicide
       

    Total*
       

    Country
       

    Suicide
       

    Homicide
       

    Total*
    Switzerland    

    21.4
       

    2.7
       

    24.1
       Denmark    

    22.3
       

    4.9
       

    27.2
    U.S.    

    11.6
       

    7.4
       

    19.0
       France    

    20.8
       

    1.1
       

    21.9
    Israel    

    6.5
       

    1.4
       

    7.9
       Japan**    

    16.7
       

    0.6
       

    17.3

     

    * The figures listed in the table are the rates per 100,000 people.
    ** Suicide figures for Japan also include many homicides.
    Source for table: U.S. figures for 1996 are taken from the Statistical Abstract of the U.S. and FBI Uniform Crime Reports. The rest of the table is taken from the UN 1996 Demographic Yearbook (1998), cited at http://www.haciendapub.com/stolinsky.html.

Your worldview is not based on facts.  In every society that has banned handguns for citizens, violent crime rates have increased.  None have decreased since their ban.

http://gunowners.org/sk0703.htm

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1223193/Culture-violence-Gun-crime-goes-89-decade.html

http://reason.com/archives/2002/11/01/gun-controls-twisted-outcome

http://rense.com/politics6/britgun.htm

http://libertycrier.com/u-s-constitution/english-warning-to-americans-dont-give-up-your-guns/

I'm not the one making shit up.  Note that I'm teh one who posted the Wikipedia link that says that there was one possible case of a US soldier being shot, but that can't be confirmed, while there are multiple cases of protestors being shot by US agents.  There is no credible historian of the era that would claim that the protestors provoked the encounter, they agree that the tax collector is responsible for that.  Washington sending in troops was very likely due to receiving a one sided report of the events, along with his tendency to trust officers of his administration over stories of government violence and overreach.

As as for lawbreaking, you commit an average of three felonies per day.  That's just as much an excuse towards action today as it was then.

Whether it was just or not was a matter of perspective, and considering that it was one of the core causes of the rise of the Democrat-Republican party (which eventually split ways after the Whigs faded away) and elected Tom Jefferson to repeal it, it obviously wasn't as popular a perspective as you seem to believe.  And yes, a couple hundred men 'attacked' a tax inspector by public humilation known as 'tar and feathering'.  They did him no permanent physical harm, and certainly didn't shoot at him;(apparently they did, after one of his men shot & killed one of the rebels, that's what happens when you shoot first) this after said tax collector had been using strong arm tactics to extract those taxes in his region.  You can't win this, the facts are that the tax was uneven, unpopular and enforced with violent zeal by government agents from afar.  This is why the tax revolt happened, and in reality the tax never did raise the revenue that Alex Hamilton promised that it would, in part because it was so commonly evaded.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion)  The only people known to perish during this whole episode were tax protestors, not government agents of any flavor.

The Whiskey Rebellion is an great example of exactly what I'm talking about.  Those men were being directly targeted, and had a fair gripe.  They were too far from the markets on the East Coast to do anything other with their surplus corn than make whiskey with it, and suddenly they were being heavily taxed for their relatively rare form of income after fighting a war of independence that was, at it's root about the uneven and oppressive taxation imposed upon them by a distant authority.  They were ignored through normal channels, so when they refused to pay the taxes that the new government demanded of them, the revered President Washington sent the US military into a soveriegn territory to force compliance.  Do you think that the officers & enlisted men of that army unit considered the ramifications of their actions?  Do you?  The very fact that we refer to it as "The Whiskey Rebellion" in history books is propaganda, because it wasn't a rebellion in arms until the army showed up, it was a tax revolt.