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Free market is a tautology. It is not Fairy Godmother. Free market doesn't magically make good stuff succeed and bad stuff fail.
Unless you believe in the Lizard People, free market is responsible* for every economic system on Earth, including those with central planning, exorbitant taxation and draconian regulations.
TL;DR: Saying "free market will decide" is saying "whatever will be will be"--NOT interesting.
*If only by failing to prevent.
Hmm I do not agree... besides markets have rarely been allowed to be actually free... Allowed by whom? What, other than the free market, allowed the [obviously undesirable] "not free market" to happen? Our masters The Lizard People?
Figure it out....and also the free market does not make good stuff succeed, and bad stuff fail... it is the other way around good stuff in a free market has a chance at succeeding and bad stuff in a free market is free to not be supported by customers and to fail... there are other factors in play of course... apart from for rigged markets..
Sure. Bad stuff, like not_free_market, is free to be unsupported. Unfortunately, it obviously was supported--after thousands of years free market dialectic, it's finally with us  Things changebesides surely then by your logic then... the "bad stuff" in this case being centralisation specialisation of BTC mining in this case ,being the "bad stuff" or making BTC "bad stuff" then it will not magically make BTC fail then according to your logic? because the free market doesn't magically make good stuff succeed and bad stuff fail.
Where have I suggested that free market would make bitcoin fail? I even left a TL;DR: for you, TL;DR: Saying "free market will decide" is saying "whatever will be will be"--NOT interesting. I was not sure what you meant, you state that BTC will become irrelevant , so the next question should make sense.... Or are by saying "irrelevant" are you more talking about what BTC had written on the tin when it first popped up? as opposed to it failing?
Not sure what you're asking.
I am asking what you mean by irrelevant... if it is not that BTC will fail, what does it mean? that it will just no longer be important? no longer be desired ? no longer be used? no longer be the solution to "centralisation" ?
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... I'm not disagreeing with you. My slant on this is the question is not what we believe, but how we act on those beliefs. Bitcoin, at the outset, rejected centralization. Individual miners using their spare CPU cycles to mine etc., etc. That's history. The real mining is done by megafarms, the remaining small miners point their rigs at megapools. Some don't even buy gear, just "invest" in "cloud mining." You gotta admit, already not much of the original decentralisation left. Miners don't care about the voice that they have, my guess is most wouldn't know how to go about using it. Empty concept. They distribute the risks--paying a central entity (pool) to increase the odds of having a steady paycheck. Bitcoiners invest in "Bitcoin banks" (NeoBee), no matter how absurd such a thing is. Bitcoiners ape *everything that we once wanted to leave behind*, including centralization. Christianity, and other utopias like Communism, are also all wonderful blueprints to live by--at the conceptual level. The problem is, just like Bitcoin, they tend to get corrupted, rot on exposure to IRL, and, eventually, become irrelevant. Tell me you can't already see this happening with Bitcoin  [/grumbling] TL;DR: All the signs are pointing to Bitcoin becoming progressively more centralized and, therefore, irrelevant. Sad but true. Important word= Competition , in this case between miners/new hardware operating on the network.... but also from ....... Other Cryptocurrency.... If Bitcoin for whatever reason falls out of favour, then the market can decide if it is now irrelevant, or not... if it is, and the free market is allowed to operate, then users and maybe miners, are free to decide and move on.... as long as the free market is allowed to make the decision, and there is no enforcement then either centralisation, or maybe more accurate specialisation can do its worse... OR Bitcoin, and the network will solve the problem (free miners dished out with aount of BTC, dual use technologies, or even a hardfork to render farms useless idk but not the point) Point is if the free market is allowed to operate, then consumers/users get to decide, and then the market will do , what the market wil do.. and with it the Bitcoin price. Free market is a tautology. It is not Fairy Godmother. Free market doesn't magically make good stuff succeed and bad stuff fail. Unless you believe in the Lizard People, free market is responsible* for every economic system on Earth, including those with central planning, exorbitant taxation and draconian regulations. TL;DR: Saying "free market will decide" is saying "whatever will be will be"--NOT interesting.
*If only by failing to prevent. Hmm I do not agree... besides markets have rarely been allowed to be actually free... and also the free market does not make good stuff succeed, and bad stuff fail... it is the other way around good stuff in a free market has a chance at succeeding and bad stuff in a free market is free to not be supported by customers and to fail... there are other factors in play of course... apart from for rigged markets.. besides surely then by your logic then... the "bad stuff" in this case being centralisation specialisation of BTC mining in this case ,being the "bad stuff" or making BTC "bad stuff" then it will not magically make BTC fail then according to your logic? because the free market doesn't magically make good stuff succeed and bad stuff fail. Or by saying "irrelevant" are you more talking about what BTC had written on the tin when it first popped up? as opposed to it failing? |
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think I might wait for the next one... |
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The Bitcoin applications and their security can (and will eventually) exhibit the same amount of security (or lack thereof) as those tied in with the banking system. That part is obvious, because the Bitcoin protocol doesn't address the security of this layer in any way.
... I'm wondering if that's the only way of seeing the problem. I agree with the above, but... ...the security of conventional banking applications is not the only security layer for the end users of those applications.Case in point: If my bank's ATM or webportal gets hax0rd, I don't lose a cent. If that happens with my Bitcoin wallet/app, I do. True. But this falls (imo) under my 2nd point then: security through central authority. In other words: if the ATM is hacked, you don't lose funds because you are not the de facto only owner of your funds (in the way that you are with extremely high likelihood the only owner of your funds if you are holding the private keys to you bitcoins). The same mechanism that prevents you from losing funds if the ATM is hacked (or a bank is robbed) however also enables an even higher authority to take (parts of) your funds during a banking crisis bail-in or through inflation. Which is why I said in my post: we will eventually come back to first principles. Do we believe that a central authority protects us from harm more often than it causes harm to us. I am okay with agreeing to disagree on this point. I'm not disagreeing with you. My slant on this is the question is not what we believe, but how we act on those beliefs. Bitcoin, at the outset, rejected centralization. Individual miners using their spare CPU cycles to mine etc., etc. That's history. The real mining is done by megafarms, the remaining small miners point their rigs at megapools. Some don't even buy gear, just "invest" in "cloud mining." You gotta admit, already not much of the original decentralisation left. Miners don't care about the voice that they have, my guess is most wouldn't know how to go about using it. Empty concept. They distribute the risks--paying a central entity (pool) to increase the odds of having a steady paycheck. Bitcoiners invest in "Bitcoin banks" (NeoBee), no matter how absurd such a thing is. Bitcoiners ape *everything that we once wanted to leave behind*, including centralization. Christianity, and other utopias like Communism, are also all wonderful blueprints to live by--at the conceptual level. The problem is, just like Bitcoin, they tend to get corrupted, rot on exposure to IRL, and, eventually, become irrelevant. Tell me you can't already see this happening with Bitcoin [/grumbling] TL;DR: All the signs are pointing to Bitcoin becoming progressively more centralized and, therefore, irrelevant. Sad but true. Important word= Competition , in this case between miners/new hardware operating on the network.... but also from ....... Other Cryptocurrency.... If Bitcoin for whatever reason falls out of favour, then the market can decide if it is now irrelevant, or not... if it is, and the free market is allowed to operate, then users and maybe miners, are free to decide and move on.... as long as the free market is allowed to make the decision, and there is no enforcement then either centralisation, or maybe more accurate specialisation can do its worse... OR Bitcoin, and the network will solve the problem (free miners dished out with aount of BTC, dual use technologies, or even a hardfork to render farms useless idk but not the point) Point is if the free market is allowed to operate, then consumers/users get to decide, and then the market will do , what the market wil do.. and with it the Bitcoin price. |
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Pretty much everyday you spend in the UK is like bending over to pick up the soap in the showers in a prison full of lifers... you get royal screwed in the ass over and over and over  in a financial sense I mean... in many ways this little island totally rocks.. the weather well.... this summer as been amazing... but we did not have one for the two previous years... just drizzle and rain.... it rains a lot... oh what is that ? you want to drive a car to stay dry ? well better pick up that soap. Yup. Something like 80% of the price of petrol in the UK is tax. Glad I got out. Though I mostly left because of the weather. Three years of overcast summers failed completely vs a warm sunny day in November in Florida. True that is.... and worse luck winter is coming  Hope sunny Florida is treating you well |
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omfg we are so fucked.
No. We have Bitcoin. There will still be fluctuations of course and we'll probably all be driving flying electric cars but it probably means that a gallon of gas in 2020 will cost about the same mBTC as in 2070 |
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whao pretty crap start to my day here.... anyway...
anyone notice the price of gas today? unbelievable, they have been running out of gas since 1970, and then they killed the electric car, only to bring the price of gass up Up UP, because they can. "they" are true asholes. I will buy all the bitcoins that will show them HA!
Have the prices been going up? Or...  omfg we are so fucked. damn it! nominal gas price graph looks a bit like the hype cycle bubble graph.... (dare I mention it) you're right, on second thought, the inflation adjusted graph is nearly at a 100 year high, price of gas should come down, like maybe under 1$ / L ( all i know is the metric system ) wow, i did maths and i found out that price of gas here is 3.78541 * 1.48 = 5.6 / Gallon or 5.15USD / Gallon ha in the UK it is £5.86 a gallon and so =$9.56 and i thought i was getting ripped off... Canada being america's bitch has its adv. i guess. Pretty much everyday you spend in the UK is like bending over to pick up the soap in the showers in a prison full of lifers... you get royal screwed in the ass over and over and over in a financial sense I mean... in many ways this little island totally rocks.. the weather well.... this summer has been amazing... but we did not have one for the two previous years... just drizzle and rain.... it rains a lot... oh what is that ? you want to drive a car to stay dry ? well better pick up that soap. |
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whao pretty crap start to my day here.... anyway...
anyone notice the price of gas today? unbelievable, they have been running out of gas since 1970, and then they killed the electric car, only to bring the price of gass up Up UP, because they can. "they" are true asholes. I will buy all the bitcoins that will show them HA!
Have the prices been going up? Or... omfg we are so fucked. damn it! nominal gas price graph looks a bit like the hype cycle bubble graph.... (dare I mention it) you're right, on second thought, the inflation adjusted graph is nearly at a 100 year high, price of gas should come down, like maybe under 1$ / L ( all i know is the metric system ) wow, i did maths and i found out that price of gas here is 3.78541 * 1.48 = 5.6 / Gallon or 5.15USD / Gallon ha in the UK it is £5.86 a gallon and so =$9.56 Talking of oil and the UK =
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Yamamah_arms_dealcan you say supertanker? |
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whao pretty crap start to my day here.... anyway...
anyone notice the price of gas today? unbelievable, they have been running out of gas since 1970, and then they killed the electric car, only to bring the price of gass up Up UP, because they can. "they" are true asholes. I will buy all the bitcoins that will show them HA!
Have the prices been going up? Or... omfg we are so fucked. damn it! nominal gas price graph looks a bit like the hype cycle bubble graph.... (dare I mention it) |
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ITT: We bitch about JorgeStolfi's manipulative appeal to authority ...
The reason that I referred to Jorge's "professor" status in a snarky way is because it does (and should) NOT matter whether one is a professor or a snotty nosed 5 year old in order to post decent ideas in this forum.... ...because he stuck his PhuD in our faces ...
In the beginning, he displayed his credentials rather prominently in his posts...
...we learn that he didn't ...
If so, I was wrong.
...so now we want him to ...
are you tenured prof? /s
 tbh mine was a somewhat sarcy question.... |
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Also, maybe it is time to restate the obvious. Bitcoin 'ownership' is the knowledge of the private key. Bitcoins can't be 'stolen', but the private key can. This is a technically unsolvable problem. Not only for bitcoin, but for everything. To make it clear for kids and professors alike, let's consider a Retinal Scan authentication system. You can't practically brute force access to it, but of course you can take the eye of another.  A victim of the evils of retinal scan authenticationsexy |
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That is how I always buy a car... I download a contract from the internet... and wait for the car to come through the modem/G4 connection. always worked so far.... and car garages have always just sent me the car without ever setting eyes on me... simples
Come on, I used "car" to suggest a sizable amount. Replace it with "plane tickets" or "home theater" or whatever if you wish. But isn't bitcoin supposed to be used to pay for everyting through the internet, from chewing gum to a mansion in Bali? (And if you buy a gold-plated Rolls Royce from a reputable dealer 1000 miles away, why would he not deliver it to your home -- after he got your check and cashed it?) A couple of weeks ago, some famous bitcoin guru (Matonis?) explained in an article how in the future one would walk into a car dealership, choose a model, point the smartphone to the QR code on the windscreen, and drive out, without interacting with a single person. He did not mention satoshi-testing, air gap, brainwallet -- or what the client would to if the sticker on the windscreen turned out to be fake. Right.. however the reality of it is........using as you did , cars as an example.. then the answer "sales contract" is the simple way... and most cars are infact sold in person most of the time.... But if we are talking other high ticket value items, that are sold online, then there are other solutions..and looking into the future a trusted and reputable third party escrow style service/some sort of multi sig/ protocol based decentralised(?) set up.. that is trusted by both parties (ie general public, and business) in the event that there could be any "confusion/gaming" as you suggest , that could easily solve the problem. Also Jorge... you must surely realise that , yes you can come up with theoretical problems, and good for you (it would be better if you propose solutions too but you know that all depends on how useful you want to be) but how many of them are practical? and how many of them will be solved or are being solved as we speak? Also does money , paper money, and electronic money have problems too? paper money/electronic money gets stolen each and everyday in a million different ways, there are many weaknesses in the traditional forms of money, always have been... and will continue to be... It seems that the lady doth protest too much, and also that you have a very static or linear point of view... try coming up with solutions to problems you think are real, and looking forward rather than backwards all of the time. Just a thought. |
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I also posted a lesson on how to double your money without leaving your desk; but that does not translate well into English, unfortunately (and it was done well before I heard of bitcoin, which has made it obsolete): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9i6XwhH_joReally really splendid stuff.... I can see how this fits with the other highlights of your career. "Jorge was a tireless worker and would spend long hours at the lab. Rumor had it that he lived on a clock that had 26-hour days, so he would precess and shift his sleeping time from day to day. As far as I know he spent ten years in California without ever learning how to drive, and his wife Rumiko would come to pick him up. I have many memories of coming to the office in the morning to find Rumiko waiting for Jorge to come down and go home. Jorge combines deep mathematical intuition with remarkable programming skills – many people have one or the other of these capabilities, but the combina- tion is rare. Even more rare is another aspect of Jorge’s intellect. Jorge is able, better than anyone I have ever known, to put clean mathematical structure on an amorphous set of vague ideas and produce elegant and informative mathematical abstractions that allow insightful formal reasoning on a problem. I cannot count the number of times that I walked away from a technical conversation with Jorge thinking that now, finally, I understand the essence of the problem we’ve been discussing. Jorge likes both his ideas and his programs (and yes, not to forget, his LATEX macros) to be clean, well organized, and surgically appropriate to the task at hand. In this respect, and in balance overall, I think Jorge was more of a teacher to me rather than the other way around. I want to close by mentioning another characteristic of Jorge, his remarkable diversity and versatility, as demonstrated over a long and distinguished scientific career. Jorge’s curiosity is not limited to any one special topic. Besides computer graphics and computational geometry, he has made many other contributions to interval arithmetic, splines, image search, the reconstruction or archaeological artifacts, elasticity, and even the Voynich manuscript analysis. So happy birthday, Jorge, and my best wishes for many more productive years to come. Even after all these years, I still miss having you around – and in that vein let me publically remind you that you promised to come spend a sabbatical at Stanford " are you tenured prof? It seems bating Bitcoin followers and folding notes and playing with balls seem ... a little..... well.... pointless. Like I said.. moments ago.. it seems to me you could put yourself to much greater use... to humanity as a whole ... by maybe fixing problems that you see rather than wasting time here... unless you simply enojoy wasting time nowadays... or feel that you are not able. Anyways... as you were |
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And hey man, i think you have two eyes and some read skills to check the address of your car dealer is the correct, don't you? Don't you trust yourself?
Check it against what? You get a copy of the sales contract with the address and the QR-code before you transfer the coins.
... a contract which you downloaded from what seemed to be their website? That is how I always buy a car... I download a contract from the internet... and wait for the car to come through the modem/G4 connection always worked so far.... and car garages have always just sent me the car without ever setting eyes on me... simples ps Jorge... if you were not actually trolling... you might put you brains to some use! find solutions... come on you are actually a computer scientist no? instead you seem to actually enjoy repeating the same old shit over and over again... far from tire from it. |
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Obvious troll is becoming obvious.
It is a student question automaton. The purpose is, by means of automation, to support the students in their quest to understand bitcoin, and a test to make sure they can answer all expression of doubt with adequate clarity. As new and ever greater waves of students enter with the passing of time, the learning starts on the base level, with the same problems. The automaton saves time that otherwise would have to be expended from the hodlers. Of course, should a student go astray, the real teacher's are only a click away, scanning the messages boards while simultaniously staring at bitcoinwisdom. The propositions the students have to adequately refute, are presented in a round robin manner. Note that there are some inconsistencies, and there is some truthiness to some of them. This is just to sharpen the brain of the students. Here is the list (reading it before exams constitutes fraud): It's a ponzi. It's a pyramid. There is no intrinsic value. There is intrinsic value. Transactions are expensive. It's unsecure It's not needed. Price will go to 10 Killed by governments You need a big company Governments work as specified. You are not supposed to be free. They can be produced infinitely using alternative chains It's not anonymous Used for drugs Its too volatile It is not a unit of account Nobody can understand bitcoin There should be a bitcoin central bank There should be a different coin in each country When you trade using bitcoin, you have to convert currency trice ISIS use them gold is the only money Nobody can afford a bitcoin Mining monopoly will kill it Mining is too expensive There is no backing There is no redemption You can not eat bitcoin The world is unfair Rich people should never be allowed to decide where the factory should be located. Girls use bitcoin Bitcoin can run on solar power An asteroide will hit the earth. I should not go to bed now and "truthiness" brilliant word. (if you watch this show....... and I hope that you do) |
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Bulls waking up?  That bull looks odd.... stripey n stuff |
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My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.
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