As soon as you puritans manage to get talk of drugs banned here and and on the wiki, there will be another forum and another wiki. Make no mistake, when newcomers search for bitcoin, it will quickly become clear to them that they can use it to buy and sell drugs.

Ha, ha.  Well they should with all the free material available there. 

How could there be "too few" speculators?

I have a Mises account.  I'll take a look and might make some contributions.  I'm really frustrated with the Mises crowd for not bothering to correctly apply their own damn theories about money correctly to bitcoins.

If I get too pissed off I'll just tell them to eat some fucking carrots. 

Bitcoin is not about democracy.  You are probably in the wrong forum.  Bitcoin is about having total control over your money.

In the case of a bank run, bank executives should be held personally liable for funds owed to account holders who are unable to receive them. This debt should be non-dischargable in any bankruptcy.

You need to understand that there is no difference between a speculator and an entrepreneur.  Both are attempting to predict future market preferences by risking their own capital.  Also, your dream of stable prices are unobtainable without heavy market intervention (and, even then, one could only achieve stable prices in the short term).  Stable prices not only require a stable currency but also stagnant demand and stagnant supply.  Consumer preferences change dynamically as does supply.  Intervening to stabilize prices with money supply manipulations and/or price controls only serves to distort prices away from reflecting true supply / demand dynamics and will cause even more instability in the long term.

Yes, at least as difficult as electronic money...

Imagine a small town with 10,000 people.  This town lives more or less apart from the rest of the word.

They have their own language, their own culture, and their own currency.  It's a fiat currency, and it's purely electronic.  People use it because to them it is just more convenient than using gold or silver.  Their currency is totally decentralised, anonymous and it is called bitcoin.

Now, some terrible natural disaster occurs:  an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, whatever.

Those ten thousand people have to leave their town and travel around the world to find a place to live.

They are dispatched in several countries where they learn the language and culture.   But everywhere they go, they find that people use a currency that they consider inferior.  Those currencies are controled by a bureaucratic elite, and there is no way to have financial privacy using these currencies.

So our small town people keep in touch between one another, and they keep exchanging the local currency against their bitcoins.   Basically they never store any significative amount of the local currency, as they know it would be ripped by inflation.  Instead, they only store their bitcoins.

When they need to buy something, they just sell some of their bitcoins to one of the small town people who has local currencies to get rid of.  And then they can proceed to the paiement in order to buy stuffs.


You get my point, right?

Now, how many people are there on this forum already?

So If i was pure evil and I decide to ruin the market by selling all my BTC for 13 cents each,
which satisfies all the bids on MT gox, I could generally ruin the whole market right?


or If I had 500k usd in my bank account and decide to buy up every coin on mt gox I could greatly change the price of the btc.


dosent that mean that mtgox is insanely unstable?

How many people do you know who trade Forex? That takes much more wherewithal that figuring out how to use Coinpal and a Bitcoin client. The point being, it need not cater to everyman in order to have significant economic impact. But all this will come in time, it is still a fledgling project compared with something like a Forex or a PayPal...

Regardless if some people out there are willing to send cash in an envelope or give someone a copy of their ATM card, I don't think most of the general public will.

I think this is the biggest problem, in order for BTC to really succeed, it has to get in the hands of as many people as possible, and the current options are not good enough.

Since the hurdle of transferring large amounts of cash is really difficult, it would probably be better to work on really small amounts.

Here is an idea on that... suppose

1. the 0.01 minimum transfer limit built into the current BTC clients was eliminated, and was pushed back to the ultimate limit of 0.000001. I know you can technically do this, but the current clients don't let this happen.
2. a service was setup where people could mine for bitcoin with a more predictable, constant flow rate, so they'd get 0.000001 bitcoins per minute or something, which would be siphoned off by the main server.

If online games started using very small amounts of bitcoin as currency, you now have an easy way to trade it. That'll never happen as long as sub-penny amounts can't be traded.

I mean there is, what a $6 million float out there? Hardly a world currency. If BTC wants to be one of the big currencies, it should to start acting like one, and treat 0.000001 bitcoins not as a meaningless small value, but a tangible one. It's like if a country that was aiming for the started up with a brand new fiat currency where the smallest value is $1,000,000 bills.

Sorry about the negativity.. I think it's a really good idea and there is a lot of value to it. I'm thinking about investing in it, which is why I voiced these concerns. But, I'd like to see some adequate defense against hostile action, and there doesn't seem to be any, right now.

Can someone tell me how BTC is going to the moon when it is still relatively difficult to acquire in the first place? I imagine there are a lot of people who think Bitcoin is really cool but don't get involved much past playing around with the small amount of BTC from the Bitcoin Faucet. Given the difficulty of acquiring BTC, I think the fact that BTC made it to almost $2 is amazing in the first place.

Actually I agree the guy looked very likeable.

When writing "get him" I was interested to find out who he is, now knowing that you know him, even better: Now we may be able to explain a bit better what the benefits of bitcoins are.

This guy sounds like he got his money in and now wants to try and pump up the price. No way anyone with big money will touch this anytime soon, it's too thinly traded.

It would be funny to find out who the guy is. It should be put "wanted" somehwere..
If he is in the US, maybe PLATO can get to him on his road trip and convert him to bitcoins (selling for a few carrots as Plato needs food)

I think the disagreement boils down to what different people find would be a fair split of the money.

I don't think there is much disagreement that if you had a good reason to spite the other guy, spending some small amount of money to pay back would be warranted.  tomcollins admitted as much in his reply to the (admittedly extreme!) question of vetoing the guy who killed his family.

So the real question is: should you have any reason to spite the other guy?  Which comes down to: is he being an asshole by asking for 99.998% of the money, or is it fair for him to do so just because he "can"?

There is a mindset --let's call it carebear; just a label, no ridicule intended-- that expects humans to display some sensitivity towards each other's utilities.  We are social animals endowed with empathy.  Morals are almost innate, common sense rules of thumb that make life better for everyone.  Equality is seen as a sane default, even in non egalitarian cultures.  An inequality must be warranted: someone worked harder, was smarter, or got luckier.

For a carebear, the fair split in the Ultimatum Game is an equal one (althought others may be pragmatically accepted), and the Splitter is being a jerk for trying to abuse his position.  He's failing the basic rule of "do as you'd like to be done to you".  Being put in the position to accept $10 is doubly indignating.  Not only is he trying to get almost all of the money, but he's relying on you being nice about it (the utility of the $10 themselves barely registers, in this context).

There is a mindset --let's call it cutthroat-- by which, at least when money is involved, humans are expected to behave as selfish aggressive maximizers in a game with only the most basic ground rules: basically, respect for physical integrity and property (some would argue that real cutthroats won't respect anything that can't be defended, but again, it's just a label, take it as defined here).  For the cutthroat, morals are there mostly to avoid physical violence, and behaving morally consists of refraining from theft and aggression.  Behaviors that a carebear would consider "abusive" and "exploitive" are not immoral unless mediated by violence or threat thereof.

For a --um-- throatcutter, the Splitter is just being logical so it's wrong to spite him in first place.  The destructive spiteful reaction thus seems doubly irrational.

Of course I'm simplifying a bit.  Barring that, any big objections so far?

I am not a software engineer, so I don't know exactly all this would be put together, but I have been musing about how a Bitcoin-like system could solve the problems of electronic voting including verification and non-reproducibility.

One way I could see it happening is to have a client for voting on and browsing ballots, and a client for issuing ballots and maintaining the block chain. A ballot issuer would have to register voters through an independent verification process, and would issue a certain number of votes (coins) to each registered voter for the ballot. In the case of public election ballot each voter could be issued a single vote, in the case of a shareholder ballot a number of votes could be issued according to the registered number of voting shares. In the case of caucusing votes could be transferred to a caucus.

Each ballot would have a unique hash for every possible combination of selections on the ballot, so the ballot browser would count up the number of votes spent on each outcome and reconcile the votes on each selection for the ballot. Once a vote is 'spent' it is destroyed. All ballots and their associated votes would be preserved in the block chain in perpetuity...

Problem???