If that support doesn't hold, then I think it is all over for bitcoin.

I still would be diversified...  NO ONE[except Armstrong's computer model] can predict the future.

Cyclical Symmetry

I have written before how strange symmetry seems to unfold with the names like the last Roman Emperor having the founder Romulus and the first Emperor Augustus. The same in Byzantium and even the forecasts for Popes. I have explained that it made perfect sense that the first Sovereign Default should be Greece for that is where Western Civilization began. Athens was the first Financial Capital of the World in the West taking that from the Persians.

The first banking failure in 1931 that set in motion the Great Depression took place in Austria. It was the failure of Credit Anstalt, which was partly owned by the Rothschilds, that set off the banking panic.

Well now, the first European bank collapse is also in Austria. The creditor participation in the Austrian Heta bank could mean up to 50% loss for the holders of bonds. The biggest problem of the Austrian model lies in the great temptation for states to abuse their extensive rights and thereby do great harm together with buyers of bonds.

As always, where it begins, it strangely ends. I really cannot explain this one. It is merely an observation.

Consumer Credit Moving Higher into 2015.75

Subprime consumer borrowing — encompassing auto loans, credit card loans and personal loans — climbed to $189 billion in the first 11 months last year, the highest total since 2007, according to a study compiled for The Wall Street Journal by Equifax. This is precisely what I mean about living with the cycle. People will spend when they SEE everyone else spending. This provides the foundation to consumer confidence. This is why the rich are important. If they are driving around in flashy cars and going out to dinner, not only are they spending, they are creating the impression everything is OK and this becomes the contagion that spreads as consumer confidence. If they spend nothing and save, the rest of society will follow. It is an interesting leadership role.

This is right on time. We should see the peak in debt on a private level whereas when the economy turns down [after 2015.75], governments will be desperately trying to borrow more and more.

The 0.0001% (one in a million) need a class just below them.  Which they would pay pretty well.  Their Squires if you will.

Middle management counts...  Tenured professors...  Lobbyists...

EDIT: Anyone touting "global warming" should be automatically inducted into the Socialist Class.

Government spending is around 40% of GDP and that number will only climb with time.

The United States has no collective control over production and distribution.  The government is completely captured and under the control of a very narrow group of private interests.  Anyone can see that.


Using this definition, a feudal system is socialism!

USA votes to tax and steal the internet (but they thought they were voting "for the Internet" dumb ass sheeople).

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/25/technology/path-clears-for-net-neutrality-ahead-of-fcc-vote.html

Decadence. USA to kill the goose that laid its golden eggs. High tech will run from the USA.

Tough to take anyone seriously who applies the term "socialism" to the current political setup in the United States.

Europeans apparently don't have a clue since they will repeat their megadeath from the 1940s again in the next decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

Socialism in its generative essence is any system where the government is a very large percentage of the GDP, because implicitly it is in control of the economy and directing the redistribution of resources not for free market profit but for the "benefit of the society".

Europe precisely falls into this most generalized essence of socialism. As well you can factor in the Universal Health Care (not for profit but for social benefit), the strong political power of the debilitating unions, the government bailouts for example for Peugot, banks, etc..

Please stop wasting my time. I am busy programming for profit and don't have time for your ignorant bliss.

That's the ticket:

Do we (the US) scale back our innovative/entrepreneurial spirit in favor of restructuring the broken (or soon to be) architecture of America and returning to the fundamentals?

OR-

Ramp it up even more, riding the tidal wave all the way to the shore where we enviably crash into the beach suffering an economic depression as great as the 1930s or worse?

This is the Council on Foreign Relations publication. It generally predicts five to twenty years out institutional changes and what is on the horizon before it happens. The topics addressed are issues of concern to the CFR and not necessarily reflect official position or consensus among the elite, but .

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143162/paul-vigna-and-michael-j-casey/bitcoin-for-the-unbanked

There is a clear split. The central banks dont like Bitcoin, the tax authorities are neutral because it is so heavily centralized on Coinbase and Bitpay that it can be taxed automatically. The income is "matchable" if it goes through bitpay/coinbase.

The upper tiers support Bitcoin and vaguely hope it may be able to reign in the FED or generally believe it will promote justice in the world. They see banks seizing houses they dont own and selling them without even pretense. They understand the FED and financial sector group is too powerful to be restrained by law...

There is a sincere intention that technologies like Bitcoin may get the poor or anyone with a cell phone onto the global financial system.

There is a split between the interests...

Bitcoin is really a war of the 1% against the 0.00001%.

- If B disappears, then A will get their coins back after the lockup period. B cannot steal the coins without signature or private key from A.

The brave new world of weak demand and frenzied speculation

Last week I had drinks with one of my former Peking University students and we discussed some of the ways the global economy might react to a world adjusting from a global crisis with weak demand and excess liquidity. In no particular order and very informally these are some of the consequences we thought were likely or worth considering:

With their highly diversified financial systems and incentive structures that reward innovation and entrepreneurialism, the US, the UK and perhaps a handful of “Anglo-Saxon” and Scandinavian economies, in their different ways, are especially good at this. Much of Europe and Japan are not. The latter should take steps to increase the amount by which they will benefit from many more years of high risk appetite among investors.

Normally, developing countries only benefit indirectly from periods of abundant capital and excess risk taking because abundant capital tends to lead increased investment in developing countries and higher commodity prices. This, however, is perhaps the first time that excess liquidity has overlapped with a period of crisis and contraction, so it is hard to know what to expect except that the days of historically high hard commodity prices are well behind us (food may be a different matter). I suspect that developing countries are going to lag economically over the next few years largely because of high debt levels.
Why? Because one of the ways the market will probably distinguish between different types of risk is by steering away from highly indebted entities. Excess debt is clearly worrying, and while there will always be investors who are willing to lend, in the aggregate they will probably discriminate in favor of equity-type risks unless policymakers create incentives in the opposite direction.

Developing countries almost never benefit from the high tech boom that typically accompanies periods of excess liquidity because they tend to have limited technology capabilities. Policymakers should consider nonetheless how to take advantage of what capabilities they do posses.
India for example has a vibrant innovation-based sector, but it suffers from low credibility and from regulatory and red-tape constraints that will make it hard for Indian innovation to benefit from global investors’ high risk appetites. New Delhi — and perhaps local state capitals — should focus on addressing these problems. If Indian technology companies are given the regulatory flexibility and if investors find it easy to put money into (and take it out of) Indian technology ventures, we might see India capture some of the benefits of what may be a second or third wave of information technology.

Brazil is another large developing economy with pockets of tremendous innovation but which overall also suffers from low credibility and distorted incentive structures — and way too much debt. I am neither smart nor knowledgeable enough to propose specific policies, but policymakers in Brazil, like in India and in other very large developing economies — and they must be large in order that their relatively small technology sectors can achieve critical mass — must develop an explicit understanding of the institutional constraints and distorted incentive structures that prevent the development of their technology sectors, and take forceful steps to reverse them.

China is weak in high -tech innovation largely because of institutional constraints, including education, regulatory constraints, distorted incentive structures,and a hostile environment for innovative thinking (defying attempts to separate “good” innovative thinking from “bad”).  Overly-enthusiastic American venture capitalists, Chinese policymakers, and Chinese “entrepreneurs”, many of whom have almost become Silicon Valley caricatures will disagree, but in my experience most China, and certainly those involved in technology, are very skeptical about Chinese innovation capabilities. For example, when I taught at Tsinghua University, China’s answer to MIT, my students regularly joked that the only way to turn Tsinghua graduates into high tech innovators was to send them to California.
The main reason for its weak track record in innovation, I would argue, is that in China, like in many countries, there are institutional distortions that directly constrain innovation, as I explain in my blog entry on “social capital”. There are also indirect distortions, most obviously extraordinarily low interest rates and the importance of guangxi, that made accessing credit or developing good relationships with government officials infinitely more profitable, and requiring far less effort, for managers than encouraging innovation.

It is politically too difficult to resolve many of these institutional constraints nationally. In fact we are probably not even moving in the right direction — for example Beijing has recently sharply reduced internet access within China for domestic political reasons, and it is a pretty safe bet that this and other attempts to secure social stability will come at the expense of a culture of innovation.

But if Beijing is reluctant to relax constraints at the national level, it might nonetheless be willing to do so in specific local jurisdictions. If there were pockets within the country operating under different legal, regulatory, tax and cultural systems, and much more tolerant of the political and social characteristics of highly innovative societies, China might see the creation of zones of innovation that would benefit from the favorable global environment. I am skeptical about the impact of the Shanghai free-trade zone on trade or investment, for example, but it could become a more credible center of Chinese innovation under a very different legal and regulatory system  — much as Shanghai was, by the way, in the 1920s and 1930s. China has benefitted in the past from special economic zones, with different laws and regulations, dedicated to manufacturing. It might benefit in the future if it turns these into special “innovation” zones, also with very different laws and regulations —  and above all a far greater appetite for the “bad” things that are always part of highly innovative cultures, including a wide open internet and tolerance for any kind of discussion.

The Chinese spit and defecate along the road. Japanese are very conforming society and more like cats than the Chinese who are more like dogs. Japanese sip tea and have many formalities of social behavior. The Chinese gets things done any way they feel like it (did you read about them putting straw in the concrete to save money so the bridges collapsed, the Japanese would never do that!).

A double spend occurs when a malicious user spends the same BTC twice. A payment that initial appears successful could be reversed at a later date. This is counteracted by waiting for the transaction to be included in the blockchain and reaching a number of confirmations. 6 confirmations is generally considered safe for high value transactions.

Validate the transaction confirmations in the callback script by checking $_GET['confirmations'] parameter. It is recommended you acknowledge the transaction at zero confirmations but only trust the transaction after one confirmation. For example, if purchasing a product, we would show the order as successful at zero confirmations, but only ship the product when 6 or more confirmations are reached.

hide your assets

End Game, Gold Investors Will be Destroyed
Commodities / Gold and Silver 2010
Jun 15, 2010 - 02:33 PM GMT
By: Shelby_H_Moore

Previously I have warned that the DAX would press higher as the object of capital flight within Europe. The problem we are facing is that the DAX could peak-out with this ECM turning point. If this were to unfold with a high in the DAX to the day of the ECM, this will be the kiss-of-death for Europe and it would be the strongest possible warning that a dollar rally will create massive deflation ahead. We can see our Energy Models are pointing to a run-up that is more indicative of a serious high forming rather than just a temporary high.

Grrr...  I had a wonderful long post nearly completed and just lost it, "fat finger error", grr...

I am considering learning Python, a computer programming language.  Python appears to be relatively easy by programming standards and also appears to be friendly to math & statistics programs I am interested in (to learn more about our company's sales data).  This (of course) will not be easy...  But, I can take my time, and just learn what I need and/or want.

Python might be of some use to me to learn more about Bitcoin, perhaps even the newly hot topic of placing data on the blockchain (via OP_RETURN operations).  Most of the "guts" of Bitcoin and the blockchain are black boxes to me, I know next to nothing about how they work under the hood...*


* Sorry for all of the bad metaphors  

What's interesting is how the US operated in the 1800s roughly before the police were invented. According to many reports, there actually wasn't a lot of crime or anarchy.