I never claimed that patents would be eliminated any time soon. I just saying that the government is the source of all the problems and it is. The health care system would work just as efficiently as the electronics industry in a free market environment.

Sure, price fixing may help, but it's just treating symptoms without curing the disease.

I don't ignore this fact, I'm just saying that the patent itself it one of the problems. If you make a law and then a consequence of that law is that you must fix prices, then you really need to rethink the viability the original law.

It's the same with deposit insurance. The gov guarantees deposits, eliminating risk of bank runs, then it needs to "fix" reserve requirements to stop the banks from creating infinite loans.

It's just making laws to fix the problems created by other laws. The gov removes risk and removes competition, which are natural market regulating mechanisms and substitutes it with it's own misguided regulations. Just let the market work!

So do you not agree that any of the interventions I mentioned drive up the price?

You think that the cause of high health costs is the fact that there isn't enough price fixing? nothing distorts the market more than screwing with the price mechanism. Price fixing always results in shortages (if too low) and surpluses (if too high). If price fixing worked, we'd all be speaking Russian right now.

You ignore the intervention that caused the high prices and then advocate more intervention to cancel out the first. How about removing the cause instead of treating the symptoms.

"Government is good at only one thing. It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, 'See if it weren't for the government, you couldn't walk.'" - Harry Browne

Ever listen to Stefan Molyneux? He's always talking about how sociopaths and criminals are almost always people with abusive childhoods. The government run prison school system doesn't help.

I'd pray for you Americans, but I don't believe in a deity.

Shit is gonna get ugly.

Duality: If everything is perfect, then there is no such thing as perfect. If everything is yellow, then what is yellow?

A stateless society would be great though ;-) hopefully Bitcoin will get us closer.

The government mandates that employers provide insurance to employees. People can't choose what they're covered for. They'll claim on things they otherwise wouldn't have just because they're already paying for it. It also reduces competitiveness in insurance.

Malpractice legislation means that doctors have to raise their prices to cover the risk of being sued.

Medical research is heavily regulated. Instead of just bringing a viable product to market, companies have to pass a ridiculous set of expensive, overkill double blind studies for many years just to get fda approval.

Patents grant a monopoly on drugs leading to monopoly prices.

Medicaid and Medicare hides the true cost of medical insurance from the consumer. socializing the cost is a tragedy of the commons situation, which leads to poor resource allocation.

God know what other laws are on the books that I don't know about.

So yes, “it’s the prices, stupid.”, but the prices are the governments fault. What America and basically every socialist country in the world needs, is a competitive free market in health care. Voluntary trade results in a vastly more optimal allocation of resources than any violence based solution the government can come up with.

Explain to me why electronics keep getting cheaper, but health care keeps getting more expensive.

Also, another take on this:
http://mises.org/daily/4434

good thing ben is there keeping the money supply nice and stable for us.

High health care costs are 100% the fault of government intervention. why should it be different from any other industry? computers get cheaper every year because the government doesn't have it's tenticles all over it; distorting resource allocation. The market in health care is far from free, that's the problem.


related:

John Stossel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WnS96NVlMI

Peter Schiff
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6eIBvrMY5w

Can't we easily solve this problem by convincing all honest nodes to reject 1tx blocks?

If this happens, the MM has to include at least one other tx to make any BTC at all. This will force him to engineer some sort of solution to verifying transactions (supposedly he isn't verifying now due to the cost of managing the blockchain). Either he will give up or he'll start including transactions.

thoughts?

And they got that wealth by controlling the money supply.

Basically, you're just bothered by the fact that some people are insanely rich? Should the title of the OP then be: "convince me that the bitcoin early adopters won't become really rich". personally, I don't really care as long as they can't rob me by printing money.

As Hazek has already pointed out, the power of the Rothschilds etc. DEPENDS heavily on the centrally controlled monetary system. This is why they are so intent on setting up central banks across the world. You really have to understand this point.

Bitcoin is decentralized, can't be printed arbitrarily, market controls interest rates. The fact that early adopters may have huge hordes of bitcoins doesn't really matter. They can only manipulate the supply (in circulation) until their horde runs out. Where as banks can print forever.

Also, bitcoin forces the state to tax in a more honest way (no inflation). This puts a democratically enforced limit on the amount they can plunder for wars etc. Both the voters and the market will reject %300 sales tax on all goods, but no one sees the inflation tax.

There is a big difference between holding a bunch of currency and controlling central banks.

Yeah, I totally get this!

The point is to reduce the scope of government so that there is less influence for corrupt interests to bid for. Sure we need some government to protect property rights, but everything else can be eliminated.

For every government department that goes, so does 10000 lobbyists. Get rid of the FDA: no more pharmaceutical companies influencing policy to protect their patented, toxic drugs. Get rid of FINRA: no more brokerage firms writing laws that shut out small competitors. Get rid of the EPA: no more special interests shutting down "undesirable" business ventures with the excuse of some bogus environmental disaster scenario. In fact, get rid of any government influence in any form of economic activity whatsoever and establishment type corporations nothing to bribe politicians to do, because it's not in the scope of the government. Get it?

Yes, they will still have military, taxes etc. But isn't smaller still much better? That's why the constitution is there, so that they can't create any arbitrary legislation. The American public just has to re-learn their founding principals.

You can never stop bribery. There are thousands of ways to pay some one without "paying" them.

But isn't this a deflationary spiral? I thought everyone was supposed to stop spending because the value of their money was going up?

I think his point was not to ridicule the legitimacy of the attack, but the idea of the attack itself, real or not: Bitcoin is as impervious to such threats as Linux. The Microsoft case that you mentions is exactly what the PP was alluding to.

It would certainly change the incentives of miners to accept transactions. A miner will have to add some value to the block otherwise no one else will build on it. He might also reject low fee transactions to put upward pressure on fee prices. These two opposing forces will set a market price for fees, which may also address this problem: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6284.200

It's also a trivial change to implement, although It may be infeasible at this point to alter the existing system. So far it seems to me like a positive alteration to bitcoin. More debate would be appreciated.

I only skimmed over the paper. Looks interesting.

I raised the issue of nodes withholding transactions earlier in this thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5024.0
Some concluded that the market would produce transaction relay subscription services.

On a related note; what if the fees were changed so that the miner solving the block is rewarded with the fees from the block that he builds on instead of the block he mined? This would remove the incentive to withhold transactions, because the miner's reward is no tied to the transactions that a miner accepts.

So your case isn't against the wealth pyramid, but actually with the lack of investment? Hoarders don't stop anyone from investing! Go and invest yourself if you think it's worthwhile or stop complaining that no-one else is investing.

Now, if the economy isn't growing due to lack of investment then the price will stagnate == no incentive to hoard. If the economy is growing (and the price of bitcoin with it) then clearly there is a sufficient amount of investment going on. So who cares if people are hoarding. What's the problem?

This is the same self-contradicting deflationary spiral argument in different clothes: the economy can't grow because it's growing too fast.

I suppose you'll just hide behind your faux "strawman" accusation to excuse yourself from making a counter argument.

your point: hoarding is bad because of low liquidity.

How does hoarding impact liquidity? If everyone stopped hoarding, the price of bitcoin would just go down. then it's trading as usual.