myrkul, it's not worth the time and frustration to argue with a statist. It's no different than arguing religion. It's their own faith, and they would be lost without their savior (the state).
You're probably right, but it's just not in my constitution to give up without a fight, so I'm going to take at least a few token swings. I just gave you two areas, he propose to get rid of income tax and capital gains tax. He propose all prison be privatized.
Let's see, some other positions he has:
* ban student loans (he think student loans increase tuition)
* no tariffs (great news China!!!)
* he also supports legalizing the illegals (though he does redeem himself by also supporting green card for advanced degrees)
* open borders to Mexicans (this is just .... insane)
* 23% sales tax (this would be so much in favor of the rich, or does he think the rich buy 1000 beds or 1000 toilets so they could pay a fair share in tax?)
Open borders and no tariffs would greatly improve our economy by increasing international trade. Removing income tax and capital gains tax likewise would improve the economy by not punishing earning and saving. Student loans do indeed increase tuition, much the same way widespread medical insurance increases medical costs. I'm not well versed on his position on that, but I feel private loans would be acceptable, but government loans and grants would not. As for the sales tax not being "fair," how is 23% of all purchases, across the board, to everyone, not fair? Should the rich pay larger percentages in taxes, just because they have more money? They'd already be paying more in raw numbers. A poor person buying a pack of ramen would pay $1.23, while a rich person buying a tin of caviar would pay $123.00 That's $23.00 in tax instead of $0.23. Seems plenty "fair" to me. I, of course, am not in favor of any taxes, but if there must be tax, you can't get more fair than a sales tax. I'd like some clarification on one point, though... How, exactly is opening the borders "just... insane"? Sorry but if you are seriously thinking that "open borders" is not insane, you are seriously out of touch with reality. There's basically billions of people in the world that would kill to be living in America, once you open your borders, these people will rush in, now instead of tens of millions of unskilled illegals, you'll have hundreds of millions, or even billions. That's a quick path to disaster-ville. With a 23% sales tax, the rich are not really paying the same percentage. Because not all rich person spends a lot, many of them don't. For example Warren Buffet, his life style is very modest. He would be basically paying a 0.1% tax rate on his income, he simply does not spend that much money to buy things. Plus even if the rich person do spend a lot, like I said he still only buys 1 bed to sleep on, unless his bed is 1000 times more expensive than the average joe's, he's not paying his fair share. If I was Warren Buffet, I'd quickly run out of things to buy to achieve even a 5% tax rate, because even a rich person simply does not need 1000 beds or 1000 toilets. Agreed that open borders is insane. I believe it is an eventual inevitability that the world will no longer have countries, but it is something that must be "eased" into. If you let a bunch of 3rd-world people into America all at the same time, it would very quickly turn it into a close-to-3rd-world country. No one wants that. Also agree on the sales tax. Because the poor population is forced to spend a higher percentage of their income in order to survive, whereas the rich can save, the poor would pay a higher effective tax rate than the rich. That said, deductions are ridiculous all across the board. No one should be able to deduct anything. Everyone should pay the same income tax %, regardless of how much they make and how many children they have. And no one should receive tax credits or welfare of any kind. That's what families and charities are for. JMO. On the other points: - Student loans do increase tuition by artificially increasing demand. Banning them would certainly reduce tuition rates as attendance falls. Whether that is good or bad is debatable. - No tariffs WOULD be good for the economy, at the expense of some lost jobs where other countries can produce items more efficiently than the US. Whether that is good or bad for the people overall is debatable. Fewer people with jobs, but goods are cheaper, so fewer people need jobs? - Legalizing aliens is just stupid. Yes, let's reward people who break the law - that'll solve our border problems real quick! - Privatized prisons would be interesting... certainly, they could do it more efficiently than the government if nothing else! Of course, in my opinion, prisoners don't deserve anything more than a 5x5 cell with a drain in the middle and a bowl of mush twice a day. My prison would be incredibly cheap to operate. It's probably a good thing I don't operate one, because it just rubs me the wrong way when prisoners have big screen TV's and Playstation 3's and good hot meals to eat, when many people who actually work for a living can't claim the same. |
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I've kind of been out of the loop on mobile chips lately, but have been looking at buying a new laptop... are the "APU's" the chips that contain both a process and a GPU? And they are good? I'm looking in the $600 or less range, but can only find integrated graphics on the Intel side with those, and decent dedicated GPUs on the AMD side. So I like the looks of the AMD offerings on paper, but I am just concerned about the CPUs themselves - power usage, actual processing power compared to the i3/i5's, etc. And what's the difference between A6/A8/A10?
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I'd sure love to see this happen...
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I just figure SOMEONE out there will say, "hey, instead of dropping this BTC on a round of satoshi dice, why not give it to this guy?"
We've all been scammed too many times to say something like that. Go ask a friend for the money. Or family. Surely there's someone in your life who knows and trusts you who can give you the money. |
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- One post
- A fairly solid plan, but refuses to share what said plan is
- Can't come up with $17
Hmmmm...
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I imagine BitPay would be a better fit. Yeah, you're probably right. Both of them, really...! |
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Regarding dropping your computer in the toilet.... do you have a netbook or something? I'm going to take a wild guess and say the average "full size" laptop isn't going to fit in the toilet seat hole. And if you're taking a full rig into the bathroom with you, and have it precariously balanced above the toilet, in all likelihood, it would break the toilet apart whilist falling upon it, negating the effects that the almost-drowning would have caused. Or, perhaps we are discussing semantics, and you refer to your smartphone as your computer. In which case, do you know the dangers?
As a wise man once said...
When you store bitcoins on your phone, and your phone is lost, you get irritable.
When you get irritable, your work suffers.
When your work suffers, the wrong man is convicted.
When the wrong mad is convicted, he has time to think.
When he has time to think, he thinks about you, a lot.
And when he thinks about you a lot, your house explodes.
Don’t have your house explode. Get rid of bitcoins on your phone. And store them in a paper wallet.
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Also keep in mind that Bitcoin is meant to be more than just a way for people to make money "mining". It's meant to be a currency in which people transact. Many people here have never touched mining, and have no interest in it. They are here because they see the value in a currency that acts like digital cash.
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Breaking a contract may not be a crime, but you can still certainly be sued for it. No you cannot. All contracts have to made in the legal tender of the land to be recognised by the court of the land. If you cannot pay your taxes in it, it's not legal tender. No, all contracts can be made right in the legal tender of the law though. If I stole 10 Bitcoins from you, you could sue me for $120. |
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Geistgold is interesting... but a factor of 15 times slower than QUICKCOIN!™ I am still curious what happens if blocks are generated every second. That said, it does sound similar in goals to what I am proposing. So, the question is, why does no one use it? And more importantly, who came up with that horrible name? It reminds me of a yeast infection every time I read it.
@ercolinux, I understand that 1 second is slower than network latency/propogation, but why would that really be a problem? Sure, blocks would be orphaned a lot, and forks would dead-end even after several blocks fairly often, but I don't see either of those as a show-stopper.
@markm - I don't know anything about liquidcoin, and, while it sounds like an interesting experiment as well, I likely do not have the hashpower available to push it to its limit. Thus, I cannot experiment with such an alt in the way you describe.
You seem to have misunderstood my intent. This is a call for an experiment - nothing more, nothing less. It would only be a few lines of code changed from the Bitcoin-QT client to actually see this happen. I would do it myself if it wasn't for the difficulty in compiling Bitcoin for Windows (and I'm not much of a linux user either).
No one uses geistgeld because it is a resource hog and the blocks are too fast. Why do another experiment? There have been 2, geistgeld and liquidcoin, and both are unusable for the main reason of the exact property you are trying to add. Heck, litecoin is having problems due to its block propogation speed. I know how you coin will turn out (unusable) because i've tried it and it doesn't work. What are you going to do differently to fix the problem? Nothing, you're going to make it even worse. Good luck with that. Ok, I can agree with you on that. |
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Hacking is a crime.
Breaking a contract for non-legal tender is not.
Breaking a contract may not be a crime, but you can still certainly be sued for it. |
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Why would splits need to be dealt with? If two chains are competing with each other, and each has dozens of blocks, and one is finally rejected by all the miners, then.... so what? Why is that a problem?
Possibly relating to gmaxwells comment but your coin would quickly look like an irreconcilable tree of data with probably hundreds of branches that sprout new splits as often or more often than shorter branches are pruned. It would also be likely the most energy/resource inefficient coin system out there since your miners would spend a majority of their time mining on yet to be orphaned chains... but if you have a method to converge the branches instead of pruning them then a majority of those issues go away.... oh and 2.5 gb of data for a chain that essentially did nothing for a year? Seems kind of high to me or you don't intend it to get any use at all and this is just garage talk... in which case, have at it sounds like a great idea! I am still unconvinced that lots of splits are a bad thing. The only thing that would be "seen" is the longest chain. That's all that matters. Splits can be thrown away as soon as they are detected. I agree that it would be somewhat inefficient compared to existing solutions, but don't believe that is a deal-breaker. It would be the price to pay for as-quick-as-possible confirmation of payments. 2.5GB of space is nothing these days. It would take 1,200 years to fill up a 3 TB HDD at that rate, and storage is only going to continue getting larger, while that 2.5GB/year minimum requirement would stay the same. |
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There's no legal precedent for stealing Bitcoins = theft, but I am certain any court of law would rule it theft if it came up in a lawsuit. They have obvious value, and people can own them.
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The only way I see such a high speed chain really working is if it had a better way of dealing with chain splits, perhaps a new way in which to identify a malicious split whereby in all other cases the splits are all accepted as good once they converge (note: likely needing a chain convergence algorithm instead of just dropping shorter chain splits). Additionally, blockchain bloat would have to be far superior, perhaps going to the often proposed ledger system instead of the current bitcoin standard.
Edit: minimum speed should account for reasonable network latency as well, not just a blanket 1s ... perhaps some sort of algo could be used to adjust this dynamically such that the targeted chain speed over the next X blocks is the average latency between miners in the previous X blocks + 1s
Why would splits need to be dealt with? If two chains are competing with each other, and each has dozens of blocks, and one is finally rejected by all the miners, then.... so what? Why is that a problem? I am unconvinced that 1 second blocks would cause too much bloat in the blockchain. The smallest a Bitcoin block can be (i.e. empty) is 80 bytes. 80 bytes/second for one year = 2.5GB. It's really not an insurmountable problem. Ok, so I don't have anything created or compiled or made, but I think it would be extremely interesting to see how a bitcoin-clone with blocks confirming every second would actually work. Sure, confirmations would get reversed all the time, then rebuilt, then reversed again, but eventually, a transaction would make its way into a generally accepted longest chain.
Depends on how you define "eventually". If there exists a partitioning of miners such that the mean time between blocks is less than the communications and block processing latency for a block to propagate completely is less than the mean time between blocks then the bitcoin algorithm will take infinite time to converge in the average case. In Bitcoin at current transaction levels we now see propagation times at several minutes sometimes. High orphan rates and lots or reorganizations also slow down convergence, so in practice you probably need to have a block time considerably greater than the latency bound or bad things start happening. But hey, if you plan on reporting the many coin-generic bugs I'm sure you'll find then it's all good, and might be a fun exercise even if it's doomed to fail. Have fun! Can you explain your scenario in more detail? Why would latency cause the chains to never converge (on average)? |
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Anyone here actually tried this? Seems like it would be nothing to sell 20 bitcoins on ebay for $20 and then buy 33btc back.
...until the user files a Paypal dispute, and you lose because you're selling Bitcoins. I'm not sure that I would count on physically shipping something along with the Bitcoins either - if the customer claims a misrepresentation of the item for sale, Paypal could still very well side with them. |
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I wouldn't be surprised if there are very few FPGA orders after August, and they are scaling down production of them to match the remaining demand.
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That's the other part that confuses me... I can see someone being able to attach a name/address to a bitcoin address if they had access to the wire transfer data, but how would a random person on the internet be able to make that connection?
I was just going by the following: We will probably never support firstbits addresses, think about it for a minute, by inputting someone's address I can instantly find out whether this person transacted with Instawire, what this person's IBAN and name are. Probably not the best idea when firstbits are often part of forum signatures.
I understood this to mean "If anyone inputs any bitcoin address into our system, they will be able to see the person's name and IBAN, so it's a good thing we don't allow firstbits, because some people's firstbits are available to the public and bitcoin addresses are not, and people might start seeing other people's personal information if we allow people to input firstbits". Yeah erm... that would be bad. |
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Roman - any update on the potential investors/payback of the lost BTC?
I somewhat expected to start seeing my "held" BTC balance tick downwards ever so slightly as transaction fees are being collected, but it hasn't happened. Maybe it's a manual process now, but Roman should automate it. Continuous, incremental progress toward getting everyone paid back, even if it will take years, would be a welcome sight. Agreed, though I was also hoping he would find an investor to cover the losses.  |
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My take on it was that people would more easily use firstbits familiar to them, possibly ones that had been previous posted on the internet. It's a bit of a heavy-handed approach, but I can't deny that users are generally stupid, and protecting them from themselves is sometimes appropriate.
Not using firstbits is already a good idea (since firstbits offer no protection against typos and practically guarantee that any mistake means you'll pay the wrong person). But the revelation that one can see someone's identity and personal banking details by providing nothing more than a Bitcoin address and that this is by design, if true, would indicate... well... I'll leave it up to others to draw their own conclusion as to what that means. That's the other part that confuses me... I can see someone being able to attach a name/address to a bitcoin address if they had access to the wire transfer data, but how would a random person on the internet be able to make that connection? |
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