Fiat allows bigger and more expensive wars than what?
Than no fiat How do you figure? The amount of resources needed to fight a war is the same, no matter what currency you're using. A country using fiat will just spend more of their currency on the war, but they have more to begin with because they're presumably printing a lot of it. Agreed that most politicians probably don't just try to start war : politicians do things that lead to wars and are manipulated by people that want war, it is very obvious in the Ukraine situation
That's very true, especially the part about politicians being manipulated by other people that want war. |
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It depends on are you talking long run or short term, freshly out of college, freshly out of high school?
I would say this:
A person who goes to work for 4 years after high school and gets experience
Versus
A person who goes to College and pays for it and then gets a job:
A person who is working not only will have a lot more money, but they will probably be earning more than the college person at that time.
I would say 5-10 years down the road....the college student will start making more money....and after 15-20 years...the college kid will have more money than the high school grad...
What jobs are you thinking of? When looking at median annual earnings, the high school grad will not catch up to the college grad, even after 4 years. This is from an article earlier this year: "Among millennials ages 25 to 32, median annual earnings for full-time working college-degree holders are $17,500 greater than for those with high school diplomas only." If you only have a high school diploma, your salary is not going to increase by $17.5k in 4 years unless you're really really lucky. http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/02/11/study-income-gap-between-young-college-and-high-school-grads-widensEdit: This is for the US, of course. It may be different in other countries. |
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Unfunded liability such as social security and pension are not counted toward the National debt figure.
The money need to be printed in the coming years will be staggering as baby boomer starting to retire.
Actually, the money spent by the Fed on assets was essentially "printed" though technically "created" by Bernanke pressing a button. This is why so many people thought there would be a lot of inflation right now in the USA. However, the velocity of money dropped and so inflation has yet to show up. This has enabled left of center economists like Paul Krugman to claim that more of the same is needed to create full employment. This still does not account for the unfunded liabilities. Our country needs serious entitlement reforms in order for us to be able to continue paying our bills. I'm sorry to jump all over this, but the words "entitlement reforms" make me mad. First, I very much dislike how people use "reform" to try to make screwing over people's lives (seriously in some cases) sound like an improvement. And second, "entitlement" is a poor way of describing things like Social Security and Medicare because of all the connotations the word has. I think they are better described as paid-for benefits. You pay into the system to earn a benefit in the future. That said, I don't fault you personally for using those terms as, unfortunately, they've caught on. You do not pay into any system. Social security is setup so that the taxes you pay today pay for today's beneficiaries of the entitlement. You do not have any kind of "social security account" that increases in value as you pay more in taxes, although this would be a much better system then what we have today. When social security was first implemented, the average person would live to be around the age that they would be able to retire with "standard" benefits (not early retirement, not full retirement) so they would receive benefits for a very short amount of time, however today, people will most often live for decades after they can receive even full retirement benefits. As a result people are able to draw much more benefits then what they "put into" (aka paid taxes for) the system. This is obviously not sustainable. Yes, you pay into the Social Security system: you pay X today so that (hopefully) you will get Y tomorrow. I said nothing about having a Social Security account. There is (or at least used to be) a trust fund that held all the saved money from the system. I believe, however, that it's been mostly drained due to improper management of the system. Social Security is intentionally designed to be a pyramid scheme. If all the numbers were actuarially adjusted to properly balance the inputs and outputs, it would work well. But with longer life spans and an aging population, benefits have effectively become too generous. But that still doesn't mean that the benefits each person has earned to date should be diminished. You pay in "x" over your career in taxes, however under today's system you will end up receiving more then "x" in benefits over your retirement even after accounting for inflation and interest. In other words you end up taking more then you pay in taxes over your retirement. This is obviously not sustainable and changes need to be made. I would hope that if you pay in X over your career that you'd get more than X+inflation out (interest might be pushing it). Otherwise there's little point. But as long as the numbers are calculated correctly, that doesn't *have* to be a problem. The population *should* be growing such that there will always be more workers paying in than those receiving benefits. But with people having fewer kids now, that really messes things up. Like I said, it's supposed to be a pyramid system. And it works fine as long as the base is much wider than the top. |
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dice game should be working here at spartangame.com also SPN is trading on https://cryptex.biz/market/71...and I have been looking at our upcoming projects. One item of importance is the PoS. Looking at the broad scope of the project, if I add PoS then at the current time, mobile apps are out under a PoS system. That will greatly diminish my plans for social integration. I am not a huge fan of having multiple wallets on some server somewhere trusting someone else to keep my coins safe as I spread spartancoin or any coin around the world. I like the idea of having a local wallet I control. and I am sure many of you do as well. I would like some community input as this is a community coin not my coin. I have a path I want to take with the coin personally but everyone needs to be on board and support the path. I am still going to reduce the coin amount in half, and will integrate digishield to replace KGW. I do not have the resources at my disposal to create a mobile working wallet for a PoS so, holding off on PoS in favor of keeping a major tool in project is the best approach. PoS can always come at a later time and work nicely. It is not a make or break piece to the puzzle. Thanks for the update. While I will confess a little disappointment at not getting PoS right now, that's just a personal preference. Your reasoning makes a lot of sense, and your plan sounds like it will be much better for the future of SPN. Do what you can to get SPN rolling. That should lead to having more resources later. |
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The financial crisis took out a few players (banks / investment banks) in the credit market. The absence of these financial intermediaries would have resulted in lower credit being available to main street. Rates would also have risen, with banks not willing to take on additional risk. QE was supposed to ensure that this did not happen, by making ample liquidity available in the system.
So, in the worst case, QE just didn't work out since there was not much demand for credit from the "main street", but it didn't make it worse either, right? It hasn't made it worse, but its efficacy was low. QE and low interest rates postponed the crisis but it is going to be worse and will probably end up in hyper inflation and wars I really don't see QE and wars being linked, especially since most of the modernized world has engaged in some kind of QE (neither wars fought with military or economic/trade wars). Also the fact that banks are keeping the majority of the money they get from QE as excess reserves at the federal reserve is preventing inflation from getting out of hand. Fiat allows bigger and more expensive wars; QE and low interest rates is a way not to be honest about the situation and to hide the problems for a while; when the problems will come back and be bigger, the politicians will not accept it and say they were wrong. QE+low interest rates manipulate the markets heavily which can come back in the form of frustration, protests or wars. In the US the politicians tend to regulate for the big banks and the big corporations such as the military industry; wars are good for the former so wars are made. Politicians are often sociopaths who want to control everyone so they are likely to start wars when their fallacious economic actions are unsucessful Fiat allows bigger and more expensive wars than what? I agree that poor economic policies can lead to wars, and that QE and low interest rates, when taken to excess, as it seems they have been, are poor economic policies. But I don't think that politicians (at least most of them) just try to start wars like that. When a country's economy collapses, that generally leads to a lot of unrest as the vast majority of people really get screwed (see Greece). Some politicians may try to deflect that angry sentiment to their neighboring countries, which could lead to wars. But I don't think that (most) politicians sit around trying to figure out how they can start wars. |
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People that go to college are in average brighter, harder working, more ambitious and for more affluante families and they are meant to make more money (as a group) than people that don't go to college If you factor in the cost of going to college will you really make more money because of the diploma you will get? Support : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbUFBk3477o (few minutes video debating the subject) Going a college is a reference, but i does not means you cna do everything. Being a good human speaks more in real life. One of the most important academic lessons I learned in college was figuring out how to figure out how to do things. College didn't teach me how to do everything, but it taught me how to go about learning how to do something I don't already know how to do. That lesson is priceless. But you could have learned it in high school, at home and it is not worth tens of thousands per year; even if you didn't pay tens of thousands per year it costed tens of thousands per year No, I couldn't have learned that in high school. High school is too low level--they're mostly concerned with teaching particular facts and concepts. The atmosphere is too constrained by particular curricula. You have to be given time and space to learn to think independently and figure out how to solve the problems you run into along the way. |
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Bitcoin's concept of anonymity is a hot target for the greedy. Its structure helps criminals do their criminal acts. They can easily participate on illegal transactions without being traced (or a high possibility of not being traced) by the authority. Decentralization also helps them in accomplishing some serious thefts and laundering because nobody has the power to freeze their money unless they're traced by the government. This is just one of the many things why merchants all over the world doesn't accept the idea of using bitcoin into their business. It seems to risky for them to touch knowing that there are many possibilities that they can be victimized by theft and frauds.
Nonsense. if that was the case they would not accept dollars. Dollars fund wars. Bitcoins do not fund wars. War is in general a criminal act, few if any wars are in self defense, most wars are theft by a larger country against a smaller one because they can get away it. but not because it if theft by a country it stops being theft, it may not be theft under the law because that same country that doing the theft is the one writing the law, but if we were to hear from the smaller country the one that is on the losing end they would say it is theft. That is why in the world an international court with power it is highly needed, not a symbolical one with absolutely no power. Going back to Bitcoin, Bitcoin is much more transparent than the dollar, the rules are precise and well known by everyone, there is even a public ledger which is the blockchain, on the other hand the Dollars operates in a very closed way with no transparency. So if you are a crook your currency of choice should be the dollar, plus in comparison to Bitcoin they are easy to counterfeit. I agree that wars suck, and dollars do fund wars. But how do you know that bitcoin doesn't fund wars, or that it won't in the future? How do you know that people on the other side of the world aren't funding some of the wars going on in the Middle East and Ukraine? Not to mention the potential use for funding terrorist activities... |
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People don't remember MTGox? Yes, that exchange in which people lost a lot of money  Even if you don't have a mtgox type situation, have your coins stored on an exchange opens you up to a lot of risks. One main risk is that your account at the exchange gets hacked and your coins withdraw from your account. You would have little to no way of proving your account got hacked and would have no way of recovering the money. It would be very helpful to have something like FDIC or SIPC backing for exchange accounts so you could be assured that (under most normal circumstances) you won't lose your money if your account is hacked. Of course that would require additional regulation and expense, but that's the trade-off. |
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At a restaurant you trade money against a good meal. Wealth just got created.
You valued your money less than the meal, and the cook valued the meal less than the money. The sum of the difference of valuation is wealth.
Not all trade is equal. Most of the time there is a power relationship where the strong exploits the weak. An example is sweatshops. People who need jobs are willing to allow themselves to be exploited because they need money. This was common in 19th/ early 20th century before existence of labor unions Labor unions were necessary a long time ago but are useless today, as they are only good for enriching themselves and the politicians they support. There are enough employment laws today that will protect workers from these kinds of abuses. Additionally workers are educated enough to be able to stand up to these kinds of abuses. The pendulum swings back and forth. Corporations were too greedy and tried to exploit people. Labor unions were formed to combat that, and it worked pretty well. But then the labor unions got greedy and tried to take too much from the corporations. Labor unions have been disappearing, and corporations are getting greedy again. Education has little to do with it. You can't stand up to corporations when you have no better options. For example, look at how corporations have slashed benefits over the last couple decades. You can't stand up to a corporation and demand a pension when no other corporations are offering them. And just look at how companies treat their employees now--they're just expendable labor. There's no loyalty anymore. |
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If Internet has shut down, the whole world will affect not only bitcoin. So I think living without the Internet nowadays is impossible to happened.
Yes, it's possible if some authority decide to shut down Internet but hope this will never happen. There was an editorial in the WSJ today that highlighted the thread of a nuke being detonated over North America. It said that the EMP would do serious damage to the entire country. I would argue that this would be the only real way to shut down the internet and/or "ban" bitcoin. No one's intentionally going to shut down the internet. Someone/something might try to destroy the power grid (e.g., a solar flare), which would result in no more internet, but then we'd have even bigger issues. Bitcoin, on the other hand, can simply be banned with a law. That wouldn't completely drive it out of existence, of course, but it would be worth very little compared to what it's worth today. |
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I'm not very familiar with the effects and aims of QEs, but if I'm not mistaken, one target of the "money printing" campaign was to liquidate toxic assets (read write off). If these funds made their way into the economy that would simply increase inflation rates (now we are heading well into exogenous vs endogenous money debate).
The financial crisis took out a few players (banks / investment banks) in the credit market. The absence of these financial intermediaries would have resulted in lower credit being available to main street. Rates would also have risen, with banks not willing to take on additional risk. QE was supposed to ensure that this did not happen, by making ample liquidity available in the system. So, in the worst case, QE just didn't work out since there was not much demand for credit from the "main street", but it didn't make it worse either, right? QE and 0% interest rate are propping up the market but they just postponed a much needed recession to eliminate bad debt, bad players and bad practices How could zero interest rates be propping up the market if no one is/was willing to take loans? Is this what is called a "liquidity trap"? No matter what the interest rate is, there's always someone who wants a loan. So it's a question of how much demand there is for loans at the current rate. And of course demand falls off as rates increase. So there may not be a huge demand at 0%, but it would be worse if interest rates were higher. Less demand for loans/credit translates to less economic growth (which could include economic contraction). So 0% rates have kept credit flowing, which is propping up the market. You are correct to say that overall demand for loans is generally guided by interest rates, however demand for loans by credit worthy borrowers is guided by many more factors, such as economic growth and the regulatory environment, both of which have been horrible over the past several years. If president Obama's economic policies had been pro growth then even without QE demand for loans by credit worthy borrowers would be much higher. I agree that Obama has been a bad president in many respects, and I wouldn't say he's helped the economy much, either. But what kind of pro-growth policies could he have implemented? He could have spent more of the stimulus money on things that would have directly contributed to the economy, like infrastructure improvements/repairs. But what else could he have done? |
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Not trying to encourage anyone to invest, but at these $500 prices, I wish I had more to throw in.
There has been a lot of volume in the last couple days. I'm hoping we just saw capitulation around 500, and that we've just started a new upswing. After we couldn't get up to 700, we really needed some kind of market reset to get things going again. Hopefully this was it. |
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out of the world, i want to travel in space, meeting something unique, discover new planet, life ecc...would be fabulous
If only space travel were as cool as Star Trek. Without a faster-than-light drive of some sort (or one that at least gets close to the speed of light, as I believe that, according to our current understanding of physics, it would take an infinite amount of energy to make matter actually reach the speed of light), it would take many years just to visit neighboring stars. |
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There is no hope left people. Sell your LTC ASAP
There's always hope. But someone big needs to champion the LTC cause. Otherwise, you may be right. |
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People that go to college are in average brighter, harder working, more ambitious and for more affluante families and they are meant to make more money (as a group) than people that don't go to college If you factor in the cost of going to college will you really make more money because of the diploma you will get? Support : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbUFBk3477o (few minutes video debating the subject) Going a college is a reference, but i does not means you cna do everything. Being a good human speaks more in real life. One of the most important academic lessons I learned in college was figuring out how to figure out how to do things. College didn't teach me how to do everything, but it taught me how to go about learning how to do something I don't already know how to do. That lesson is priceless. |
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Unfunded liability such as social security and pension are not counted toward the National debt figure.
The money need to be printed in the coming years will be staggering as baby boomer starting to retire.
Actually, the money spent by the Fed on assets was essentially "printed" though technically "created" by Bernanke pressing a button. This is why so many people thought there would be a lot of inflation right now in the USA. However, the velocity of money dropped and so inflation has yet to show up. This has enabled left of center economists like Paul Krugman to claim that more of the same is needed to create full employment. This still does not account for the unfunded liabilities. Our country needs serious entitlement reforms in order for us to be able to continue paying our bills. I'm sorry to jump all over this, but the words "entitlement reforms" make me mad. First, I very much dislike how people use "reform" to try to make screwing over people's lives (seriously in some cases) sound like an improvement. And second, "entitlement" is a poor way of describing things like Social Security and Medicare because of all the connotations the word has. I think they are better described as paid-for benefits. You pay into the system to earn a benefit in the future. That said, I don't fault you personally for using those terms as, unfortunately, they've caught on. You do not pay into any system. Social security is setup so that the taxes you pay today pay for today's beneficiaries of the entitlement. You do not have any kind of "social security account" that increases in value as you pay more in taxes, although this would be a much better system then what we have today. When social security was first implemented, the average person would live to be around the age that they would be able to retire with "standard" benefits (not early retirement, not full retirement) so they would receive benefits for a very short amount of time, however today, people will most often live for decades after they can receive even full retirement benefits. As a result people are able to draw much more benefits then what they "put into" (aka paid taxes for) the system. This is obviously not sustainable. Yes, you pay into the Social Security system: you pay X today so that (hopefully) you will get Y tomorrow. I said nothing about having a Social Security account. There is (or at least used to be) a trust fund that held all the saved money from the system. I believe, however, that it's been mostly drained due to improper management of the system. Social Security is intentionally designed to be a pyramid scheme. If all the numbers were actuarially adjusted to properly balance the inputs and outputs, it would work well. But with longer life spans and an aging population, benefits have effectively become too generous. But that still doesn't mean that the benefits each person has earned to date should be diminished. |
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Buying 1 bitcoin should be considered insurance rather than investment. Same with gold.
It is a way to insure against total economic collapse.
This isn't necessarily true. Bitcoin is certainly being adopted by more and more people and businesses, but it's really hard to predict what would happen in a total economic collapse. Bitcoin isn't widespread enough yet to survive on its own. You can't go to any local grocery store and buy bread with it. If a major economic collapse happened, it's possible that many people may sell their BTC so they can buy necessities with their local fiat. |
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I'm not very familiar with the effects and aims of QEs, but if I'm not mistaken, one target of the "money printing" campaign was to liquidate toxic assets (read write off). If these funds made their way into the economy that would simply increase inflation rates (now we are heading well into exogenous vs endogenous money debate).
The financial crisis took out a few players (banks / investment banks) in the credit market. The absence of these financial intermediaries would have resulted in lower credit being available to main street. Rates would also have risen, with banks not willing to take on additional risk. QE was supposed to ensure that this did not happen, by making ample liquidity available in the system. So, in the worst case, QE just didn't work out since there was not much demand for credit from the "main street", but it didn't make it worse either, right? QE and 0% interest rate are propping up the market but they just postponed a much needed recession to eliminate bad debt, bad players and bad practices How could zero interest rates be propping up the market if no one is/was willing to take loans? Is this what is called a "liquidity trap"? No matter what the interest rate is, there's always someone who wants a loan. So it's a question of how much demand there is for loans at the current rate. And of course demand falls off as rates increase. So there may not be a huge demand at 0%, but it would be worse if interest rates were higher. Less demand for loans/credit translates to less economic growth (which could include economic contraction). So 0% rates have kept credit flowing, which is propping up the market. |
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What I'd really like to know is who broke 540-550 area on Bitstamp and why. I can see why many traders and miners would sell above (afraid that it will break) or below (figuring that price will continue downward now that it's broken), but I'm having a hard time figuring out how it would be profitable for anyone (who's obviously a whale) to actually be the one to sell through that area.
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It's as simple as not everyone has faith the coin will rebound.
Really, since there are much more profitable coins to mine at current price, the only reason to mine spartan is to support the network.
No, there's another reason: speculative investment. If you think SPN will be worth more some day, then now is a good time to mine. |
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