i haven't noticed that myself.

who refers to Bitcoin as a thought experiment?

lots.

and it doesn't take much to push them in either direction.

hence... the troll.

wouldn't it be nice if the concept of "self-correcting system" included the option to recognize and correct for on-coming disasters, in a non-political fashion?

yeah.

because everybody knows that actual, working climate scientists are all liars, and getting rich off a secret blockchain started by al gore.  have i mentioned that he's fat yet?

uh-huh.

this would be a true game-changer.

it appears a bit early yet - but i certainly look forward to updates.

the thing that comes immediately to mind is this:  what is the exchange infrastructure behind this idea?  because really - without an exchange, there's just a well-tested ATM box.  the box isn't a challenge at all, and is actually kind of irrelevant, no?

yes.  what a wonderfully complex and strange language it is.

i try not to be overly sensitive.  there's too many native speakers of other languages here, for one thing.

still, whenever i think it might be useful...

ho-hum.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

i believe you're looking for #12...

i offer a small mnemonic, learned in the US public education system of the 1950s...

an affect produces an effect.  the two are in alphabetical order.

"it affects".  "an effect".

an affect essentially refers to an externalality - and is easy to remember due to having the opposite leading vowel.

no offense intended - offered only as a useful memory jog...

i am willing to point out that i believe you to be completely mistaken.

public education created this country, and all of its wealth.

after our revolution, the only things the federal government paid for were the war debt, and our 'universal' (allowing for the varied bigotries of the day...) education:


~John Adams (as President)

we achieved the position in the world which we occupy - now declining, obviously - because we were, at one time, the best-educated country on earth.  without any question at all.  the corporatocracy saw this early, and the first attacks on education began in the late 50s:  they are by now almost complete.

we have been eating our educational seed corn since then.

in fifty years less than 1% of the population will be educationally fit to make a distinction between genesis and evolution.

i had a stop loss, a few weeks ago.

i put $1,600 into mining equipment in march, and i figured i'd hold 200 BTC on an $8 sell contract, just to be sure i could get the USD out.

but i got rid of that contract.  made no sense.

i figure i'm better off spending the BTC back into the community, to help it grow.

you're in or you're out.

gold is a lousy medium of exchange for all the reasons you're trying to gloss over, and a couple others.


yes, it does.  gold is simply not practically divisible.  $5.00 worth of gold to pay for that lunch is beyond our technical ability to mint as a denomination, and carry around without worry.  how do you carry around 1/300th of an ounce (0.0846 gm!!) of anything, without putting it into some (comparatively) massive support structure, like plastic or tempered-glass caddies?  and note that the caddy makes it easy to counterfeit:  who's going to pry open every 1/300 oz caddy to perform an assay?

how does one make change in gold for all the various price-points which exist in the marketplace?

the "physical properties which make it uniform, fungible etc." are exactly those properties which make it easy to counterfeit gold: i.e., alloy it.

one of the reasons gold coinage failed was the 'shavers':  the people who walked around with gold coin in a bag all day, jingling the coins together, and collecting the dust in the bag at the end of every day.  or who actually shaved bits off the coins with a knife.

i repeat:  gold is a lousy medium of exchange.  and not as good a store of value as most seem to think.

it's heavy, it's delicate, it draws violence like shit draws flies, it can't be hidden easily, it can't be transported across borders without being discovered, it can't be backed-up, and it can't be spent easily in any denomination.  frankly, just as a matter of simplicity, security, and convenience... i'd rather have USD.

still wondering about the correct upgrade procedure (for linux?)...


install 0.3.24, replace wallet.dat with the wallet.dat from the old (0.3.23) client, and -rescan?

or install 0.3.24, get a receiving address, and transfer all Bitcoin via the blockchain from old client to new?

yes.

and as you ponder your front-page ads in the wall street journal, Atlas - keep that in mind.  and this:

"the squeaky wheel gets the grease."

it was actually better than most.  quite factual, with little drama.

joss whedon - yes.  those sci-fi guys are always looking for something new to call the currency used in the worlds they create.

also... what about Serj Tankian?

it's a lousy goddamn point.

have you read this forum?

way to go, Pretense!

never.

but defending ones self from violence is always moral.

who is initiating violence?  i mean - the truth of global warming is clear - and only argued by people like Lord Monckton (who is not a Lord and has a degree in journalism, but has nevertheless been invited to testify before Congress - by Republicans like Inhofe, who is purely owned by Exxon), or Rick Santorum.

at this point, the people who are initiating violence are those who defend one more day's profits of big oil - and who are paid to do so, thinking they'll get to join the club.  they won't.  but they will create a billion climate refugees in the course of the next three to four decades.  where will they go?  how will they get there?  what will they eat?  violence, you were saying?

reading the posts above, the answer should be obvious.

it wouldn't.  it would dither.  it would slice and dice reality with polite legal and quasi-legal fictions.  it would assign blame incrementally, and feel bad about itself decrementally.  it would grant exemptions for wealth, while refusing to recognize that wealth was the cause.  it would politicize, and demonize.  it would deflect, and obfuscate.

it would do everything - and more - seen in the posts above.  posts in, arguably, one of the most purely libertarian sites around.

*

it would die.

*

here is the truth:

some very few things are so big that they transcend politics.  or national government.

global warming is one of them.

i wonder if this thing will have a passive backplane incarnation.  the whole thing, which is a motherboard of sorts, looks pretty self-contained and is only $130 USD, at what?  ...30-40 watts?

it's got 400 stream processors, which puts it into somewhere around 100Mh/sec territory.

a ten-slot backplane setup would net a Gigahash, at 300-400 watts, for under $1,500 - a bit higher priced than three 5850s (if you can find them) in a three-PCIe slot motherboard with CPU etc., but much lower operating costs.  the 5850s would draw almost 600W just by themselves.

interesting.