Of course, but if you add more altcoins, then your reasoning applies to previously created altcoins as well (not just bitcoins).  So it's not proportional.   Basically, you can indeed add as many altcoins as you want, but they won't have as many supporters and their price will therefore not be infinite.

Indeed when people prefer to use altcoins rather than bitcoins, it does reduce the value of bitcoin, but same as when people prefer to use gold, silver, freshly printed dollars or whatever.  Just creating altcoins does not ensure any success selling those altcoins.   And I doubt PR is that effective in making people think as you would like them to think.

Again, there is a convention in bitcoin which states that the valid chain is the one which has the most enclosed proof-of-work (I simplify).  All altcoins have lower proof-of-work and are therefore dissmissed as inferior by all true bitcoiners.   You can create as many altcoins as you want, this will not change.

Amazing quotes.  Unfortunately, you know what people say about quotes on internet, right?

I do not pretend my prediction is necessarily better than others.  It's just mine.   Also FYI, I'm a former goldbug.


Not sure I get your point.  Could people decide to start an other blockchain because they think bitcoins are just too expensive?  Of course it's possible.  It's basically happening with altcoins, if you ask me.  I just don't think it's a threat in any way.  It's even healthy, imho.  As far as I'm concerned, I'll just stick to bitcoins.

I don't understand why I should count this as an extra.  It's not the same currency.  Otherwise, should I consider that Bernanke also debase bitcoin whenever he prints dollars?  Does not make sense.

I mean that I suspect they are happy showing a 39% crash but would be reluctant to show any increase.

I suspect they will update it whenever bitcoins goes back below 75.51$ (if it ever does)

Bitcoins have been evolving aside with an altcoin ever since the very beginning:  the test chain is the oldest altcoin, and I don't fear it hurting bitcoin in anyway.

Also, every time the blockchain forks (here I'm talking about the "normal" forks, due to simultaneity of block discovery from different miners), some kind of an alt coin is created.  Yet it does not matter because we all agree to consider only the longest chain.

What I mean is that for the same reasons that people agree to consider only the longest chain as valid, people will agree on considering only bitcoin and not altcoins.  Well, at least I will, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Altcoins are fine though.  If people prefer them to bitcoin, I have no problem with it.  I just don't share their preference.  And that's all good.

That's great, but I'm looking forward to see them actually update their data, because I've never seen anything but



on this page.

I have a great idea in order to do something that would have the same effect.

Instead of encouraging people to spend their money, let's spend it for them!  So here is the idea:  we steal a bit of everybody's money, and we use it to fund all sorts of stuff.  What we do does not matter much.  We can just build stuff like roads or schools.  Those things are always useful so nobody will complain.  If there are already roads, schools or hospitals, we'll just destroy them and build new ones.  We'll just say they were too old and needed replacements.  And if we still need to spend more, then we'll just hire young people as soldiers and we'll send them to war abroad.

How does that sound?

The blonde girl says that she would not like to hold bitcoins because they are not insured.  There is nothing preventing an insurance company from offering an insurance for bitcoin holdings.  There is nothing preventing a bank from holding her bitcoins and be regulated in exactly the same way as it currently is when holding US dollars.  All of these are merely a matter of laws and insurance services.  It's just a decision that can be taken, or not.

So what I mean is that those concerns are not idiosynchratic to bitcoin.   Pretty much everything the current banking system does, bitcoin could do it as well, except letting a minority of people secretly mess around with the total amount of money in circulation.

Seems complicated, but also looks like serious work.  I will need some time to understand it.

It seems to me they overestimate the need for full anonymity, though.

I wish someone could make a study on how much energy and/or money is spent with the bitcoin network as opposed to the current monetary system.

Among the factors that should be included are the wages of the banking staff, banks real estate and basically all these resources that are used to have humans do a work that machines do in the bitcoin network.  I'm not sure bitcoin will lose the comparison.

It's not really about showing that he did not made himself rich (he did actually, as you noticed).  Showing that there are no pre-mined blocks is a way to prove that Satoshi does not hold a "destruction key", i.e. a secret unknown longer chain (it's quite unlikely today but it would have been a possibility earlier)

Is that the website of the newspaper that was quoted by Satoshi in Genesis?

PS.  Good article, btw.

Try to remember though that any exchange system is debt-oriented.   A Mt-Gox account for instance is a measure of Mt-Gox's debt to you. That's why Ripple is useful imho:  you can't avoid debt completely.

This is not a problem because they bought these bitcoins from people who sold them voluntarily.  Blame these guys if you want to blame someone.

Also, manipulating a market is much more difficult than you seem to think, especially when you don't have a printing press.  Central banks would need much more than 1% if they wanted to do it.

They don't "own" the market.  Sure, right now there are lots of people who own a lot of bitcoins, but there is nothing we can should do about it if we want to respect economic freedom, and normally it should get more and more difficult to acquire lots of bitcoins as the market expands.

I have no issue whatsoever with these guys buying bitcoins.  They did not steal them, did they?

Also, I did not know about them before I saw this article, but a quick read of their Wikipedia bio and their arguments about why buying bitcoins let me think they are basically the same as us, only much smarter and richer.

It did reflect economic information, from the Cyprus crisis to the fragility of the bitcoin exchange markets.

If it is completely open source as promised, a fork will emerge with a different way of preventing spam (since the ripple as a currency is designed just for that, if I understand correctly)