I guess you're not familiar with Stock Generation. This looks like the same setup. You pay 20% per month for a few months using your deposits to fund the payouts and strongly encouraging reinvestment. Then, you close down all the funds with guaranteed high rates (or just don't offer them), offering people to either get into non-guaranteed funds at no loss or to take the 75% haircut to cash out. Either way, you make money. Then you just tell everyone in the non-guaranteed funds that you're very sorry but they lost everything. As was made clear, it's risky.

In effect, this can be a Ponzi scheme and can take everyone's money without ever breaching one promise they made. All they've promised is that you might make a lot of profit and that your losses are capped at 75%. It's basically like a casino -- all they're saying is that you might make money and you might lose money. The difference is, they've made no clear disclosure of under what conditions you make and which you lose. It's probably safe to assume you make money when that's profitable for them and you lose money when that's profitable for them.

You will continue to make money so long as their deposits continue to increase. Then they'll buy everyone out for just 25% and keep around 75% of current deposits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_Generation

The folks at Stock Generation lost in court due to a very slight miscalculation. If these guys learned from that, they can probably run this entire scam (keeping about 50% of total deposits) without breaking any laws.

The giveaway to this is that the investments are said to involve risk with no clear explanation of what the risks are and under what circumstances they lose money. This is what separates something like Stock Generation from a classic Ponzi. (If you read carefully, they can keep most of your money for no reason at all other than that they want to and not break any of their own terms.)

Also, the guy was tricked by dishonest manipulation. If such videos don't exist where Muslims are converted to Christians, one could just as well conclude that Christians aren't as willing to use deception to gain converts as Muslims are. (Though it doesn't matter. That guy will probably be a Jew next month and a Scientologist three months later.)

We can actually do a bit better than that. Rather than picking the most likely answer, we can simply accept that we have a variety of possible answers with varying likelihoods. While we may have to pick one course of action, we never have to pick one explanation. We can pick the single likely best course of action without accepting that the explanation that justifies that action is necessarily correct.

Right. And, ideally, we always keep our conclusions tied to the facts that justified accepting them and the extent to which we accepted them. That way, if we discover new information or discover our old information was in error, we can correct our beliefs appropriately.

You needn't do that. You can believe everything true to the extent the evidence justifies that belief. You can even believe that conflicting possibilities each have significant chances of being true.

Well that's the question, isn't it? "Nobody can perfectly prove anything so I can believe and do whatever I want" isn't rational.

Say you hold $40 worth of Bitcoins today and they go up to $1,000. You've made $960 over that time period. You got $1,000 at the end since you have $1,000 worth of Bitcoins. But you gave up $40 today, since you could have sold them for $40.

Say you have no Bitcoins today. You buy $40 worth of them. They go up to $1,000. You've also made $960. You got $1,000 at the end. But you gave up $40 today, since you used them to buy the Bitcoins.

So it basically makes no difference who holds them today.

Sure, that solves the problem for people who have enough wealth stored that they can stash the money to pay all their future rent when they enter into the rental agreement. However, for ordinary people, having their rent suddenly cost twice as much of their income would be devastating.

Are you even reading what I'm writing? Seriously.

Yes, it does, and I explained why. You can either address my argument or not, but please don't pretend to address it when you haven't. There is no rational way to decide what to believe in without evidence. If you endorse believing only some things without evidence, that's not even coherent.

So the fact that you can come up with something just as evil as faith means ... what? Nothing at all.

No, that is simply not true. The people who hijacked airliners filled with people and flew them into buildings did so because of their faith. The faith was a cause of their actions and led directly to them. If you support their faith, you either have to endorse hyprocrisy (you shouldn't do what you believe is right) or you have to support their actions.

Look, I can make any argument, call it X. You can respond, "Some crazy person can say 'X therefore I will kill you all'". But that misses the point. While any view can be distorted to support suicide bombing, some views actually in fact endorse suicide bombing. Suicide bombing is the logical consequence of some beliefs, such as the belief that if you think (without any rational evidence) that god wants you to do something, you should do it. We should condemn the latter, not the former.

The difference is that one is an evil attributable to faith. Faith is the evil that caused the former. If we got rid of faith, would other evils still cause evil actions? Of course. This argument is kind of like "why put murderers in jail, child molesters will still abuse children".

I don't think I will ever fix your crazy misconceptions. When you read or hear something, you are reading it with your own eyes and hearing it with your own ears. You are actually experiencing things. There aren't different types of experience -- it's all sensation and it's all (in principle) equally direct and equally indirect.

No, I'm saying that people who believe what he believes should be condemned. And I not only said it but I presented a reasoned justification of it. There's plenty of room for reasonable disagreement among people. However, there is no room for "it's a virtue to believe that god wants you to do things, with no rational justification at all, and then to go do those things", because that justifies any imaginable evil.

If so, then he deserves as much condemnation as honest men can heap upon him. I believe that giving people what they deserve is a virtue -- justice. So I will do my part.

I believe so.

I agree. To some extent, the price of a bitcoin is a measure of the success of bitcoins. (Though indirectly.)

If we are in fact making that mistake, then our perceptions would be accurately reporting that mistake. It wouldn't be inconsistent or incorrect.

But then those formulas would be correct because the inconsistency they were based on was a fact of reality. Your calling it an "inconsistency" is just a senseless label. It is actually just a fact, like any other fact.

Because you are open minded about things that have been clearly explained to you as pure evil. I condemn those who are "fair" to what they know, or should know, is evil. You get no points in my book for willful blindness.

Faith is what motivated suicide bombers. There is nothing good about it at all -- it's just an excuse to believe, and act on, whatever you want to believe and act on. It's like flipping a coin to decide whether to kill someone. There is no rational way to decide what to have faith in. If you can look this evil in the eye and say "Ahh, I'll stay neutral", then you deserve all the condemnation I can heap on you and then some.

Sorry, I'm just a very judgmental person. On the bright side, at least you think about these things. Most people don't even bother.

If you mean "wrong" in the sense that we may draw erroneous conclusions from them, then I agree that they are "wrong" in this sense. We *do* integrate with trial and error. We *do* use machines to augment our perception. Nobody needs to start over because this is what we've all been doing all along.

Nobody, except perhaps an infant, assumes that because something looks small it must be small. We have all learned from trial and error that things can look small for a large number of reasons and are all fully open to the possibilities that we can draw the wrong conclusions from our perceptions.

It is a fact that we cannot see outside the visible spectrum. Thus not seeing outside the visible spectrum is an accurate reporting of this physical limitation. If we saw outside our limited spectrum, that would be an error hiding from us the fact that our vision is limited in the spectrum it can see. And yes, we all know we have a limited spectrum. We've figured that out through a process of reason. Could there be other limits and errors, sure. Do we try to figure them out, yes. Of course.

Our perception is 100% consistent with reality because reality is all there is. The idea of an "inconsistency" with reality is meaningless.

You stand with the suicide bombers and against reason. That's your choice, but I will condemn you for it as harshly as I can.

This seems remarkably similar to Stock Generation. I was kind of sad to see that go, so this has a pleasant nostalgic feeling to me.

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

Basically, you've just said that science is limited to gathering information through all of the means we have of gathering information. That doesn't sound like a limit to me.

Our perceptions are, by definition, how we perceive them. There's nothing to prove.

An "erroneous perception" is an oxymoron. Say, hypothetically, I could actually have an erroneous perception. In that case, the erroneous perception would be accurately reporting to me the true fact that I'm actually having that particular erroneous perception. Hence it wouldn't be erroneous at all. An "erroneous perception" is a self-contradiction.

A "false perception" is impossible. If I had a false perception, it would be the actual truth that I was having a false perception. The false perception would accurately report this fact to me. The accuracy of perception is axiomatic and definitional.

A mountain appears small when you are far away from it. But this is not a perceptual error, it is a perceptual fact. If a mountain appeared the same size no matter how far you were from it, then it would be in error, hiding from me the actual fact that mountains appear small when you are far away from them. Our perceptions are just as much a part of reality as everything else and how our perceptions work and what they mean are just as much subjects of study and analysis as everything else.

But let's assume you're right. Let's assume our senses are somehow fundamentally broken. Let's assume all of our reasoning is wrong. Let's assume everything we sense is somehow unreal and erroneous. What would that change? Would that mean anyone was perfectly justified in believing anything they want and acting on it? Would that make all actions, eating food or eating poison, equally good and valid?

Use as a medium of exchange is critical to Bitcoin's long-term success. Instability in value makes a currency harder to use as a medium of exchange. Imagine, for example, if you placed a large purchase on a Bitcoin credit card and the value of Bitcoins doubled. Or imagine if your rent was in Bitcoins and then the value of Bitcoins doubled.

The same thing would happen with dollars. Like anything else, their value is dependent on the supply and the demand.

The only way a rational person should come to accept anything is to discover evidence that justifies accepting it. Broadly speaking, the only source of information we have about the world is sensory.

Say we constructed a machine that processed that information. By what means would we acquire the results that machine had gathered? If not by our senses, then how? So any mechanism you can imagine, ultimately, would reduce to sensory evidence. Senses are the only way the mind gathers information about the outside world.

You look through a microscope with your eyes. You hear a metal detector with your ears. Fundamentally, there is no difference between building a machine to gather data and moving something out of the way to see what's behind it.

I don't understand what you're saying. The point is, whatever proof you're imagining here doesn't yet exist.

I totally don't understand what this has to do with what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that rational people should reject faith and should only believe things and act on them in the presence of evidence. Otherwise, you are equally justifying being a good person because you think god wants you to and being a suicide bomber because you think god wants you to.

Plus, how is "you have to evidence to justify believing something" lazier than "you can believe whatever you want without having to justify it"? Faith is the lazy way to avoid having to actually understand the world.

All atheists necessarily have in common is a lack of belief in a deity. But if there were an overriding philosophy behind atheism, it would be this: Almost all of the world's major religions have in common the doctrine of faith -- that people should believe things in the absence of any rational justification and then act on those beliefs. The problem is that there is no rational way to decide what to believe and act on in the absence of any rational justification -- rationally, one belief is equal to another if they both have no rational justification.

I have no rational justification for believing that god wants me to be a good person. I have equally no rational justification for believing that god wants me to kill you. If you accept the doctrine that belief without rational justification is permissible and one should act on those beliefs, you are equally justifying the terrorist who chooses to believe god wants him to kill people as you are the Jew who chooses to believe god wants him to help his fellow men.

That is what atheism stands against, to the extent it stands against anything.

You can leave the printing presses on all night and print an extra billion copies of any book, but books are a commodity.

If scientists got together every Sunday to re-affirm their conviction in the validity of the theory of evolution, I'd think they were pretty insecure about it.

This makes no sense at all.

Consider this hypothetical: You open an account with some service. I hack your account and use the service to buy 1,000 copies of Mein Kampf which I leave on the doorsteps of Holocaust survivors. There's a public outcry over this event and the purchase is investigated. The service publicly announces that your account was used to buy those 1,000 copies of Mein Kampf, which embarrasses you. You receive death threats, harassment, and so on. When you respond that you didn't buy them and that someone else must have hacked your account, does that let the service off the hook for the privacy violation? After all, it wasn't your transaction.