It is a factor in the economy, but it's ridiculous to deal with it by printing money.

Les virements bancaires mettent de un à trois jours ouvrés pour aboutir.    Et aujourd'hui, on est samedi.

Thanks so much for pointing this out.  I really wish socialist-minded people could understand that:  ownership is not a static process, it's dynamic.  If you give something to someone, he might very well not know what to do with it and then he will sell it to someone else.  In the end, stuff end up belonging to people who are the most willing to own them:  those who are willing to pay, notably.  This is true for resources and means of production.   Giving them to people on an equal basis would only lead to a unstable economic situation which would rapidly end up back to the current situation again, at the cost of having confiscated stuff initially just to eventually fail to change anything.

Merci pour ce rappel.

D'ailleurs du temps de l'étalon-or, d'autres métaux étaient utilisés pour les transactions qui ne pouvaient pas raisonnablement se faire en or.    Argent et cuivre essentiellement.   Un point intéressant aussi est que ces monnaies secondaires émergaient souvent du fait d'initiatives privées, pour répondre à la demande en signes monétaires que l'état ne parvenait pas à satisfaire.

Une conférence intéressante de Georges Selgin sur le sujet:

The Private Supply of Money | George A. Selgin

To be fair, there is a logic behind this.  I guess, in some perverted way, you can indeed solve any problem by printing money.

Let's say you want to find the Higgs Boson  (random example).  How could it be possible that you can do such an extraordinary accomplishment by just printing money?

Well, it's easy.  First, you need brain power.  And this, you have.  Thousands of people all around the word are smart enough to imagine a way to detect a Higgs Boson.  The problem is that it's difficult for them to convince other people (workers, engineers,...) to build a machine capable of doing that.

The solution:  just print the money and give it to the smart people.  They will give it to workers in order to convince them to build the machine.  The workers don't know that this money has been freshly printed.  Or they don't care, as long as they can give it to someone who will not care either.   At the end, people accept to work for a money that has been devaluated, and I'm not sure they always realize that.  Basically, the whole thing is either a fraud if you disagree with it, or an illusion if you think it's just the magic of monetary policies.

To me, it's a fraud, nothing else than money counterfeiting.   It should be a crime, even when the FED does it, and even if it's smart, good intended people who benefit from it.

It's indeed a legend that during any speculative bubble, whenever the peak was close, we were hearing stories about some people having sold all their belongings and borrow tons of money to buy the speculation asset.   And indeed it was often interpreted as a sign that the crash was close.

One difference is that I'm not sure all these stories happened in the internet age.  We live in a sea of information and the story of the OP pops up very easily.  We would never have heard of him so fast, had we used only telephone and physical mail to communicate.

Now, does this thread nevertheless mean we are near a major correction back to 20$, 10$ or even less?    I don't know.   You tell me.

Of course.  And obviously the solution to solve this is to print money.       Paper is magic.

I'm naive enough to think it's possible to be interested in monetary alternatives, and then end up on the bitcoin Wikipedia article,  which is not supposed to promote bitcoin, just to inform about its existence make information about it available.

That's how I got to know about it anyway.

Also, I totally understand this guy and I think he proves a point I had tried to make several times.

Basically he says that he had began suspecting bitcoin to be a Ponzi scheme whenever he started to receive tons of emails and other messages inviting him to learn about bitcoin and buy some.  I totally understand how it may have looked to him:  precisely like members of a pyramidal scheme trying their best to recruit new suckers.

So I'll say it again:   please stop bitcoin proselytism.

One can make a Ponzi scheme out of anything.  You basically just have to try very hard to have as many people as possible buy it at a higher price than the one you paid.  Don't do that with bitcoin.   Let people who need it or want to use it chose to do so by themselves.

Never seen this exactly like this.  Quite an interesting point of view.  Thanks.

Before I knew about bitcoin, I was a gold bug.  And I can assure you that on the forums where I was hanging out, there were quite a few people that indeed were trolling this idea that gold is a ponzi scheme.  I'm not exagerating in any way whatsoever.  I'd give you links but these forums were not in english.

On the other hand, I think the Ponzi scheme accusation is a fair one, and that's why I think we really should stop promoting bitcoin as we too often do.  It's really too easy to interpret such noise as a way to bring new incomers in order to raise the price.

I think for instance of the way some of us keep harassing Wikimedia to accept bitcoins, or Rick Valvinge's recent article making a prediction for a price at about on hundred thousand dollars or something.   This inevitably attracts skepticism and make the thing look like a scam.  Stop it, please.

Just let people get to know about bitcoin by natural ways (the wikipedia page exists, after all), make their mind about it and use it as a medium of exchange whenever they need it.   We have perfectly natural, commercial and not speculative use cases for bitcoin:  gambling, Silk road, money transfer, IT services, donations and so on.   There is no need to blow whistles and ring bells everywhere to attract the random internet user.

I've watched the video and what really pissed me off was the claim that six millions bitcoins were mined before the whole thing went public.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but Satoshi published his idea, with the source code about one month after he mined the first block, didn't he?  It's not his fault or any other's fault if very little people paid attention at this time.

Don't bother posting more indeed, what you wrote is a nice summary and it should be good enough.

First time I read this, and yet I'm sure we've all thought of it at least once.

Ok mais qu'est-ce qu'un "wallet" exactement?   Dans le wikipedia anglais il est écrit:

« A wallet, or billfold, is a small, flat case that is used to carry personal items such as cash, credit cards, identification documents (driver's license, identification card, club card, etc.), photographs, business cards and other paper or laminated cards. Wallets are generally made of leather or fabrics, and they are usually pocket-sized and foldable. »

Clairement un wallet c'est pas juste quelque chose conçu pour contenir des sous.  Ca peut contenir n'importe quel document qui a une forme "plate", d'où la traduction française de portefeuille, mais en faite porte-document serait presque aussi valable.

L'aspect "feuille" c'est à dire "plat" de ce qui est contenu n'est pas très pertinent comme anologie pour les documents numériques.  Par contre, le concept de clef, lui, existe aussi bien dans le physique que dans le numérique.  D'où ma préférence pour le mot porte-clef.

First, bitcoin exchange markets are not all bitcoin activity.  It's only one part of it.

Second, you already provided your answer:  anyone can set up an exchange.  It's true that having a prominent exchange has some advantages in terms of liquidity and efficiency.   But it's up to you to come up with a solution to this if you think it's a problem.  Also, consider using bitcoin-otc or Ripple then.   They are the only decentralized exchanges that I know of.

Je ne suis pas sûr de l'avoir déjà fait donc dans le doute je reposte cette idée.

Je voudrais plaider pour l'utilisation du mot "porte-clef" au lieu de "porte-monnaie" ou "portefeuille" pour désigner le fichier "wallet.dat".

C'est plus éloigné de la traduction littérale mais je trouve que ça évoque bien mieux ce dont il s'agit.


Je sais aussi que ça relève du détail, mais bon, je tique à chaque fois que je lis "portemonnaie" ou "portefeuille".

I can't help thinking this guy may have been hanging around here, possibly reading a post where I made a similar analogy

I don't get your reasoning.       How exactly do you think this siphoning happens and why do you think nationalizing resources would change anything to it?