There's new video showing what appears to be a tear gas canister hitting him in the head, so maybe he was "shot" after all - they do fire those things from grenade launchers right?

According to the article, he wasn't shot, he was hit in the head with a blunt instrument. He's still in critical condition though and if he dies... Well I'd rather be shot to death than clubbed to death...

My favorite bit of the article was this:


Which of course immediately follows this:


The video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OZLyUK0t0vQ

That... That appears to be an Oakland PD officer in full riot gear chucking a flashbang into a crowd... Do they seriously think they can say "we don't use flashbangs" in response to video of an officer chucking one? That's like me saying "I'm on a diet" while my mouth is still full of donuts...

Apparently I'm a Japanese rap group now...


Interestingly enough, #4 is my WoW character, which used to be my GitHub avatar, so clicking it now takes you to my current avatar:

Well, yes and no...

The coca leaf is listed on Schedule I of the 1961 Single Convention together with cocaine and heroin.
Outside of South America, most countries' laws make no distinction between the coca leaf and any other substance containing cocaine, so the possession of coca leaf (except for de-cocainized leaf) is prohibited.
In the United States, a Stepan Company plant in Maywood, New Jersey has the only license to legally import coca leaf. The company manufactures pure cocaine for medical use and also produces a cocaine-free extract of the coca leaf, which is used as a flavoring ingredient in Coca-Cola. According to the Bolivian press,[citation needed] Coca-Cola legally imported 204 tons of coca leaf in 1996.

Commercially available sources of coca leaves like this one all obtain decocanized leaves. These leaves have none of the active ingredients which make coca a stimulant and cannot be processed into cocaine.

Note that local law enforcement might not be up to speed with all of the above and you're as likely to end up in cuffs over decocanized coca leaves as for medical marijuana (or even smoking tobacco from a hookah in some parts of the country).

And speak of the devil... I say we should hit it when it goes public and a few hours later... It does  
http://economics.stackexchange.com/ is now in public beta folks!

Oh, and feel free to upvote all my questions and answers! GO FORTH MY SOCK PUPPET ARMY!!!

Actually, no, I'm a mod on the Bitcoin SE so that might look bad..... Do bring some intellectual discussion to these boards though. They're in sore need of differing opinions, especially where those opinions are more (formally) educated than mine.

That's what I kept doing too. I wasn't even sure until they mentioned NFC by name that they *weren't* talking about Bitcoin.

It can be used by mobile phones... Its "shares" are at a nice low price and some economists at least expect a rebound... It stands to revolutionize payment and do away with your credit card(s)... When are they actually going to say the word "Bitcoin" already! Ohhh they're talking about NFC... Damn.

Don't forget that if you're mining indoors outside of winter that you're also paying to cool the home. By my math, whatever electricity is consumed by my rigs I pay about 40% of that over again to remove the GPU heat from my apartment (0.41W of cooling for every 1W of mining). My rigs, combined, eat up about 2,100 W so I'm using about 861 additional W to cool them, for a total of 2,961 W. If your estimates are correct (we'll split the difference and say 28.5% is "free") then about 600 of my original 2100 W is now "free" plus the 861 W that I'm saving in air conditioning costs. Thus my new "wasted" power consumption (power spent only mining bitcoins and not performing any other useful task, like heating a house) is 1,500 W, or about 50% of my original energy usage.

So there's an economics StackExchange site currently in private beta and I must say it's absolutely overwhelmed by Keynesians. Even daring to mention Austrian concepts leads to lovely chats like this one:

http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/1610/discussion-between-david-perry-and-chad

Now I'm not economist enough to argue every point a (possibly?) professional economist wants to bring up, but I am a big believer in the Austrian ideals and I know there are folks here who can argue all those points. For now all I have to offer is a chat room for debate, but once econ.SE goes into public beta, I think we should all head over and make sure that the Austrian viewpoint doesn't get absolutely trampled. I'd like econ.SE to represent a fair multi-sided debate between the varying schools, unfortunately that's not currently the case.

I got an email from Motley Fool this morning that had a link to a video/slideshow which ended up being about NFC and phone-based payments, but for the first several minutes of the video I found myself saying "this *has* to be about bitcoin" - "it's the future of payments" "its price has pulled back significantly making for an excellent buying opportunity" "a technology so disruptive that it actually destroys its competition simply by virtue of superiority" and so on. Perhaps this is the tech that needs to go mainstream before the world is ready to start paying with non-credit-card currencies?

In any case, I thought it was an interesting video that this crowd might appreciate, even though after several minutes it turned out not to be Bitcoin.

Alpaca != Llama

Wasn't suggesting tulip bulbs were ever conceived of as a currency, but it is easy to argue that in its present state Bitcoin operates more like a commodity, which tulip bulbs certainly are/were.

I agree with all of your bullet points and yes, some of us do bother to think about these things 

According to http://bitcoinstats.org/count.html there are about 270,000 Bitcoin clients scattered about the web. Now granted that's not unique users, but even if we assume two clients per user that's 135,000 users - a scant .002% or so of the world's population or about .04% of the U.S. population - that might seem like a big number and I'd love to see any project I work on get that kind of adoption, but realistically we are a very small group. Part of what secures the value of, say, the U.S. dollar against massive volatility is that some 307 million people are participating in *that* project and they all agree over a short-term at least what a dollar is worth. In order for the dollar's value to make a significant move, a huge number of people must gain or lose faith in it: 5% of the U.S. Dollar's market is 15.35 million people, 5% of our market is 6,750. Inciting panic in or otherwise manipulating several thousand people is significantly easier than tens of millions.

We need adoption to create stability and we need the stability to drive adoption. The trick is to promote our way to the "tipping point" at which volatility is acceptable enough that further adoption drives itself. Unfortunately I have no idea how to reach such a point. It's vital that we figure this out at some point, so I for one am holding out hope that folks with a stronger economics or marketing background than myself will come up with something.

The above is a page from a 1637 Dutch tulip bulb catalog. The tulip pictured is known as "the Viceroy" and sold for between 3000 and 4200 florins, about ten times the annual wage of a skilled craftsman. By May of 1637 the bubble had popped and "the Viceroy" was worth, well, about what you'd expect a tulip bulb to be worth (read: significanly less than the entire annual wage of a skilled craftsman).

Read the phrase "I can't pay ten peoples' annual wages with one tulip bulb any more, and that's a problem!" - did you get through it with a straight face? Do you see the problem in your argument?

Yes, volatility is a bad thing for a currency seeking widespread adoption. Bubbles are worse. Better to have the volatility of the bubble collapsing than for it to continue growing until it destroyed a lot of lives and economies with the pop.

Hi folks, long time no see.

I asked this question on the StackExchange site about pool hopping and statistical profit increases. Meni Rosenfeld came up with some really solid math, but it seems to be indicating (based on my personal experience) that we're operating rather inefficiently... Anyone have the math to say why? I've puzzled over it for a while now and I can't seem to come up with anything, but it's been a loooooong time since my last statistical math class (high school perhaps?) so I'm fairly lost.

This is the traditional shape of a bubble. Exponential climb to peak -> correction, which dips below market value -> return to fair market value. As it turns out, homeostasis is a useful concept outside of biology class too

And some of you need to get a grip on history...

Between 1634 and 1638, there was a massive bubble in tulip prices. The bubble popped, the market corrected and the tulip industry hasn't crashed & burned. You can still buy tulips bulbs today for a reasonable price.

Between 1719 and 1720, shares of the French Mississippi Company (a company which mostly played games buying government debt) experienced a massive bubble, which popped, the market corrected and FMC couldn't ride out the correction and so they failed. They went defunct in November of 1720.

In 1720 as the FMC was failing, the South Sea Company was created in England, similarly playing games with government debt, and actually began to intentionally inflate stock worth via a fraudulent bubble scheme - this became particularly common during the years to follow. The bubble popped, the market corrected and the investigation which followed led to the arrest of many corrupt politicians and businessmen and the seiqure of over 2 million pounds from SSC directors.

The entire U.S. stock market experienced a massive bubble between 1924 and 1929 as the massive expansion of consumer credit was used to buy stocks. The sudden increase in demand could not be sustained, however, as the demand was based on debt and when debts needed repaid, the bubble began to deflate. On Sept. 3, 1929 the Dow reached its high and on Oct. 24 (Black Thursday) the bubble popped. The market corrected (in the form of the great depression) and while a great many companies went bankrupt, many also survived much better for the trial. The economy in general recovered.

Between 1984 and 1989, Japan experienced a massive economic bubble mostly due to the combination of loose monetary policy, increase in money supply and decrease in interest rates. Massive speculation inflated the bubble to its peak in Dec. 1989 at which point the bubble popped, the market corrected and Japan experienced lower growth than any other major industrial nation for most of the 1990s. Eventually, though, they recovered and are now a major industrial nation once again.

Between 1995 and 2000, the U.S. internet sector experienced a massive bubble commonly referred to as the "dot-com bubble" fueled by massive speculation and over-confidence in the ability of internet companies to turn a profit, at its peak many companies actually had no source of income aside from venture capital and IPO profits, which is obviously unsustainable. On Mar. 10, 2000 and continued to decline until almost 2003. The market corrected, bad companies went defunct, good companies survived, and the market in general has recovered. The internet is still a powerhouse and still home to businesses of massive scale and profitability.

The take-home from this is twofold:

1. All bubbles pop. The very definition of a bubble requires "unsustainable growth" which necessitates a "market correction" often to below reasonable value for the commodity in question.
2. Some bubbles destroy their subject, others can be survived. The dividing line between those commodities that live and those that die seems to be the merits of the commodity itself. Tulip bulbs were a viable product before the bubble, so they survived to be a viable product after. FMC and SSC were both startups playing financial games with government debt, both perished when their bubbles burst. SSC and its fellow 1720s bubble companies were largely scams and so obviously died when the bubble burst. The entire U.S. and Japanese stock markets represent a massive array of companies, many of which weren't viable and many of which were - the bubble's bursting took most of the non-viable companies down with it while preserving the good (though some bad survived and some good perished, to be sure). The Internet is a tremendous force, and internet business has too many benefits to simply die in a bubble.

In all of these cases things with good fundamentals survived their bubbles while things with bad fundamentals did not. There is no question any more that Bitcoin price was subject to a speculative bubble - the question is: do you believe its fundamentals are strong enough to survive the correction we are currently in the midst of?

Different venues call for different styles of moderation. On a public forum, moderation is typically light and minimal, allowing others to voice their opinions so long as they don't degrade into flat-out name calling and scamming. This forum is such a place. If you have issues with the style of moderation on this forum, you're welcome to try the Reddit or the StackExchange on for size.

Full disclosure: I'm one of the StackExchange mods. I am also, however, a dedicated member of this forum and many other Bitcoin communities and care little for the politics of one site versus another. They each serve their purpose and each have their own moderation style and I for one have never had issues with the mods on the forums.

I don't have this info offhand but the StackExchange might be a better format for this question.

I knew it was only a matter of time until someone busted out the Spiderman references.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to the Bitcoin Stackexchange's new pro-tem moderation team!

• David Schwartz
• D.H.
• Me!!!

Look at me with that diamond by my name all official and shit. I promise to use my powers for good

In any case, by most metrics we're a thriving little community now. I encourage anyone currently looking for answers here and not finding them to give the StackExchange a shot too!

A one-week and a four-week period? Honestly the concept is sound regardless of the resolution. If we were talking about day-trading we might be looking at 10 minute and 40 minute averages, it's just about how fast/often you want to trade.