Not only that but the mining rate was not fixed.  Where it is progressively harder to mine Bitcoin, or the PoS coins where there is no mining, the amount of gold mined was unpredictable and this resulted in periods of severe deflation and inflation.

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

Probably the same.  Houses in every country remain on market for years, even decades, until they find some sucker to buy it off them.  Eastern Europe is full of terrible homes that are listed for $500K+, like it's a joke. 

US's broke, no money to bomb Syria and the US "help" to Ukraine is laughable, considering the Canadians sent more aircraft and advisors.

US can't fight a war with anyone - the Empire is gone, it's like the British Empire back in the 1950s.

I'm not familiar with any of those studies, at least on a global basis.  I think the studies you refer to were conducted in impoverished neighborhoods in the US where single mothers and/or divorce is prevalent and a lack of family is being blamed for being the cause in crime and social upheaval (chicken before the egg hypothesis).

In Japan's case - you have a huge generation of "Grass Eaters" now, men not in relationships, not married and without kids and there's no explosion in crime.

At least with the oil towns that I know about - while the stories of crime and cocaine are exaggerated, on a per capita basis (percentage) they're generally no different (if not slightly safer) than normal cities.  There's many cities in the United States like Chicago which are "no go zones" for normal humans, how could oil towns be worse?

Though you are correct about the tax base.  The biggest economic spenders tend to be women and thus they're overrepresented in consumer tax and real estate tax revenue and those two would plummet in a hypothetical bachelor society (hence why some countries in the past had "bachelor taxes" to make up for the loss).  As well, without women and children, men can also retire earlier and thus that's a loss in overall income tax base.

No, as I said before most of Africa is too expensive in relative to China.  To live first world and second lifestyles can be extremely expensive in third world countries.

Though the 1200 males for every 1000 females is nothing - we've had those conditions in the west for very long times, especially in blue collar mining towns and mining towns haven't had any noticeable unrest in eons (if there's unrest then it's over work conditions, not a lack of p00sy).  Supposedly there are cities in China with a gender imbalance and there's no doom.


  No wives means more disposable income so the guys would just spend their money on hookers, drugs and ATVs.  It's what guys are already doing in Perth and Edmonton.  I think you all underestimate how expensive children and *especially* wives can be.

The women always cause the most.    Eating out, shoes and purses adds up..

As long as there is property tax - you don't own the land.  We regularly boot out 70+ year olds because they undergo some sort of dementia, underpaid their property tax (probably which only went up due to inflation) and then were evicted from properties they have lived for decades in.  For the thousands of years we've had human history, our predecessors would laughing at us for this.


I can understand paying for something like natural gas but the idea of taxing land is dumb.  So is any notion of vacant land or property ownership (adverse possession has been the norm in human history)

I don't think China will eat anyone up.  There's money to be made but I doubt any Chinese want to live in Africa or Russia in the long term.  There's areas of China more developed than Russia now.  It's like convincing Americans to goto Guatemala for work.

 There are many Chinese who came to America, Australia and Canada in the 1970s / 1980s and many of their children are now returning to Hong Kong and other Chinese cities - why?  There's more opportunity in China for educated people and more things to do.  Economy is sucking hard in Australia / Americas and all you do is get fat in the suburbs.


Chinese living in Africa?  You do know that Angola is more expensive than China?  Launda is more expensive than Hong Kong (never mind China has tons of cheap cities with good jobs these days).

 What living space?!  A Chinese standard of living is more expensive in Africa than it is in China.  

Mind you it's a Communist Government, maybe they'll chain the Chinese labourers to poles in the cargo holds like it's the slave trade but in reverse.    

There were a lot of tragic experiments in that area.

Little forgotten but if you thought the Poles were a monster with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, they were serious about the Polish-Lithuanian-Moscow Commonwealth and almost succeeded.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Lithuanian%E2%80%93Muscovite_Commonwealth

Technically it did occur in history when the Tsar was crowned king of Poland, but it could had happened centuries earlier.   End result?  Maybe colonization of the Pacific North West and Australasia (Courland did, supposedly, pursue the latter).  Maybe the Ottomans, Swedes and the Germans would had teamed up on huge Poland-Lithuanian-Moscow Union.   

No idea. . Closed alpha has not yet begin. .

If this is 5 BTC to 10 BTC, then how do I afford to buy more stakes?     My personal budget was like $500 per stake.   

What you describe is assimilation to the state culture and it rests on the assumption that the state can continue to exert that influence.  It's really no different than this 'multiculturalism' in the west.  I see it as a losing proposition since it's a natural development for cultures to shift and evolve.  Not long ago there was no difference between the Dutch and the Germans, but the former descended when they revolted from the Holy Roman Empire and fought off the Hapsburg.

 If Russia itself was a marginal state or the Cossacks were independent then they would frankly stop caring about any 'Russian' identity.  

We all know what the west would do if they invaded Russia, would likely revive forgotten states like Novgorod and the locals there would be heavily propagandized, like the Estonians and Latvians, into thinking they are Nordic and would cease being Russian within 25 years.    Quarter the Novgorodian women would end up as whores in Czech / German brothels and the quarter the men would be building condos and fixing toilets in Britain.

"If you work hard like me then you can have this too" 

An ideology is all rhetorical propaganda and a rehash of an older time tested system.  This "Neoliberalism" you spoke of is largely a contemporary descendent of the Plutocracies we saw in Ancient Greece / Rome and then the Medieval City States.  It wasn't a bad economic system either - you were better off in a classical Plutocracy than in most classical Autocracies (Kingdoms).

What can replace is?  Karl Marx answered your question a long time ago.  We'll essentially see away with the withering of the state and a reversion into a Tribal Society, which Marx himself considered to be 'Primitive Communism'

 (more accurately Communism was supposed to be a modern Tribal Society but real life Communism post-Stalin / post-Mao became a rehash of bureaucratic despotism.  What is this term?  The Directory of Revolutionary France or the strong bureaucratic rule we saw in Chinese history).

Albeit a name, as I said, is all rhetorical propaganda and it wouldn't be called Communist or Anarchist as these are loaded terms which make people crap their pants in fear.  

More likely we'll see a society where there is no government but the internet is the interconnecting medium which handles commerce, justice, laws, et al - in other words, you'ld end up with a contemporary Tribal Society but under a name we don't know yet.  Had Occupy Wall Street succeeded then it would had been "Occupyism" or "Anti-Consumerism"

It's the same in the US military.  While no documented study has been done, I'm going with the assumption that gangmembers and Neo-Nazi make for better soldiers than teenagers looking for tuition telief / uneducated youth who went with the military because it pays more than a McJoB.

Alexander Mozhaev (famous bearded militiamen) admitted on camera that he from the Russian Federation, and doesn't have Ukrainian citizenship.  Truckloads of illegals from the Kuban, such as the aforementioned Mozahev, are coming into Ukraine to fight.

These guys may have Russian sounding surnames but almost all of them are admitting to be Kuban Cossacks or from that area, these guys are all pretty much ethnic Ukrainian who are extremely Russophile and even knock down Russian on the census form but history shows they only became Russian in the 1930s.

Who's rooting for Putin to get involved in this?  It's all Ukrainians fighting each other.  Who wants Moscow to be bombed because some 'Mother Russia' types in the Kuban want a bigger backyard?

That is a map of trade volume, not production and internal consumption.  What I said, previously, is correct.

http://paulgregorysblog.blogspot.ca/2010/09/mystery-of-russian-grain-exports-its.html

There are other links which I can dig up.  The Russians consume more wheat than they domestically produce.  The reason Russia has export volume in wheat is from reselling wheat (purchased abroad) to the Chinese / Japanese who pay a premium for it.

There are no Russians in Ukraine anymore - Crimea was the only real area populated by ethnic Russians and it's been re-annexed into Russia.


Your people idea of "Russians" are these ethnically Ukrainian Kuban Cossacks mercenaries who are correctly fighting the Ukrainian Army, but fail to realize that these people are all ethnic Ukrainian.  Kuban Cossacks descend from Zaporozhye Cossacks who were predominately ethnic Ukrainians from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The war here isn't Russians versus Ukrainians.  It's Europhile Ukrainians versus Russophile Ukrainians, between whether to join the European Empire or the Russian Empire.  Things are more complicated when ethnic Ukrainians from Russia, therefore with Russian citizenship, are illegally migrating into the country to fight in this conflict.


Don't ask for me a comment on which is better.  Baltic countries lost 25% of their population, suffer from poverty & unemployment and are reduced to colonies under the EU, samething happened with most Eastern bloc European countries.  

Versus Russian Empire which may give you real jobs & economy but probably suppress your culture.  I'm going with Russia being the lesser evil so far but this is all hypothetical discussion since Putin probably doesn't want more Ukrainians in his country.   A lot of Russians can be upset with Sochi as it is, $50 billion dollars to appease crypto Ukrainians (who scratch Russian on the census form but only as long as the money keeps flowing in).

Sanctions had no affect on Italy, before WW2.  Likewise Iran and North Korea still stand to this day.

The USSR was fairly autonomous during the Cold War, except in agriculture and that was due to scale.  That still largely reigns true today but Russia's wheat import is diversified and most of it is coming from other continents.

It's easy to conclude that Darkcoin is a 'pump of the month'.  When Bitcoin enters a stagnation period then money seems to coincidentally pile up on a low capitalization coin and sends it, temporarily, into the stratosphere.

Here are past examples

Aurora
Mint Coin
Vert Coin
Black Coin

We'll have to wait and see if Darkcoin maintains its' capitalization (or goes higher), I'm thinking no.

The infrastructure is not something that can disappear - if Bitcoin crashed down to $0, the computers and hardware themselves have some salvageable material cost to them and you'ld still have the network of professionals.  If Bitcoin was replaced by another coin - all it would take is weeks (months) to patch in new code and move onto the next coin.

The merchant argument is a poor argument - some of the 'high notice' merchants for Bitcoin are starting to accept Litecoin and Dogecoin.  In a hypothetical scenario where Bitcoin is supplanted by an alternate, all the merchants and infrastructure would follow ~ there's more loyalty to $Fiat (profit) than to any particular coin.

Although this thread deals in a lot of hypotheticals.  Litecoin is a fork of Bitcoin, Dogecoin is a fork $hitclone meme.  NxT has terrible distribution.  Darkcoin is supposedly 50% premine by the developer and it's a 'pump of the month' (flavour of the month). So I forsee Bitcoin remaining King but it still makes an inferior investment compared to investing in infrastructure.