And if climate change is true, and Greece becomes much hotter, what do you think happens to the agricultural base of Greece? Again, economic crisis is the near term problem. If people in Greece can't grow enough food for their populations due to the heat, the increases in viable farmlands in Siberia and Canada's Northern Territories would more than compensate, but if the Greeks can't afford to trade internationally, they starve.
A valid point,but most of our agricultural products get traded to other EU countries,and for instance we end up buying olive oil from other countries anyway. That is of course the way the market works.But you'd be hard-pressed to find someone that actually buys olive oil from the store,and not from some "family member" in the village. So if we end up being unable to trade food,we will turn to our "families" to get some of the food they have stored away. And maybe get to teach a 75 year old woman how to use bitcoins in the process. My point was, that if the climate change crazies are right about their worst case predictions, then Greece will have a much hotter & dryer climate, and thus the ag base will not be able to grow as much, limiting the local population in a future with limited international trade. Your local connections are great, but it's actually impossible for all Greeks to be able to find local food sources in an economic crisis. |
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Vastly more people would die from starvation in a massive economic breakdown in Greece than will die as a direct result of climate change in the worst case. Even if tides rise a full 11 meters like the most extreme estimates claim, that will still take 100+ years to happen. This kind of thing has been happening to Venice for hundreds of years. No one is going to drown because they can't manage to escape the rising tides.
Honestly, kids. Try and keep the global threats in perspective.
ummm... no. it's the heat, in greece. not the ocean-level rise. look into it. And if climate change is true, and Greece becomes much hotter, what do you think happens to the agricultural base of Greece? Again, economic crisis is the near term problem. If people in Greece can't grow enough food for their populations due to the heat, the increases in viable farmlands in Siberia and Canada's Northern Territories would more than compensate, but if the Greeks can't afford to trade internationally, they starve. |
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it is only recently that it was hard to match inflation in a bank account, and the reason for that has more to do with the unique failures of central banks over the last few years than the generalised problems that people here want to assign to all central banks everywhere, throughout time.
Well, that's just it. The recent failures of central banking over the last few years were not only not unique, they were entirely predictable from the moment the central banks shed the discipline of the gold standard and thus gained the power to inflate. That is what happens to all fiat currencies. It always has. Just because we are finally starting to see the fatal imbalances in the system accumulate to a visible level, doesn't mean that those imbalances were not there from the start. They were, and I believe that you are smart enough to understand that. The cognative dissonance that you are experiencing within this forum is not a unique affliction. Most people very much desire to believe that the society that they live within is a predominately honest one, and that the image that it presents to us is not fraudulent. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but what you have been told since you were a child, what your parents believed, and what you believe about the best intentions of those who command these vast monetary systems is a lie. |
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Difficulty is a made up metric to help humans understand the system better. It is literally the number of times more difficult that the present target is to achieve than the minimum difficulty of 1, which is (and always has been) defined as the maximum target that the client was hardcoded to permit. That maximum target is (roughly) 32 leading zeros in a 256 bit hash. With each extra leading zero (target cuts in half, it's binary) the difficulty literally doubles; so as the target approaches zero, the difficulty metric would approach infinity. The difficulty, however, is not actually used by the bitcoin system at all, the target is. And since the target is a bounded 256 bit number, the system has no trouble storing the integer.
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First, let's look at "who benefits and who suffers." In a centralized, inflationary monetary system, this is pretty clear. The primary beneficiary is the one who gets to create more money (or I suppose more accurately, those immediately able to use the new money in exchange for goods and services at full value. This could be the central bank itself. This could be the entities bailed out via newly minted cash.)
just as an example, bailouts of banks are an extremely recent phenomenon and have little to do with historical inflation. i've never criticised anyone who opposed bailing out the banks. i simply insist that people who criticise the very existence of central banks at least try to learn, in detail, how newly created funds enter the monetary system. almost nobody here seems to manifest that understanding, but that doesn't stop them from criticising the system they don't understand. That's quite an assumption to make about your detractors. I consider it more likely that you don't understand a system that you advocate. You might know bitcoin inside and out, but you still don't understand that which you speak. |
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That's extraordinarily disingenuous of you. The expectation of the day was CERTAINLY NOT that the dollars they were accepting in 1913 would be lose more than 90% of their value in less than 90 years.
they could have simply asked their grandparents, as a similar phenomenon described the previous ninety years. inflation in the united states is generally recognised to have been greater from 1913 to 1999, but not by as much as the often-disputed '90%' figure would have you believe. (probably it was about twice as great in the 20th century as the 19th century, though i'm saying that offhand without looking at the best data.) You're saying this without access to any factual data. It's simply not true. The US Dollar prior to 1913 did have it's ups and downs, but the general trend over the prior century was deflationary, if only very mildly. It would be tricky to have an inflating currency that wasn't just on a bi-metal standard, the currency was actually the metal. Try and imagine the world before 1913, for the most part paper money didn't really exist. All those old Westerns showing thieves robbing banks and getting away with paper money were wrong. A dollar was (and legally still is, look it up) a defined weight in gold, while coins were made of the silver itself. Paper money was rare. |
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Vastly more people would die from starvation in a massive economic breakdown in Greece than will die as a direct result of climate change in the worst case. Even if tides rise a full 11 meters like the most extreme estimates claim, that will still take 100+ years to happen. This kind of thing has been happening to Venice for hundreds of years. No one is going to drown because they can't manage to escape the rising tides.
Honestly, kids. Try and keep the global threats in perspective.
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So who here thinks that BitCoin is going to 'die' just because some people out there want it to? How about torrent file sharing? How about .onion? How about drugs? How about murder? How about the US dollar?
How about gCoin or iCoin. Game over bits. With Chuck Schumer calling bitcoin "money laundering", I wouldn't bet for it. All google needs to do is hook a currency into it's payment system or apple into itunes. Good luck with that. |
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how come in politics people can wear a bow tie or whatever like that one weird senator from illinois or other things like in politics u can wear a mr peanut monocle for real and people have to not laugh cuz yer like a real guy in politics...
the more retarded u the more they have pretend yer a real person... but if yer just a regular person u cant get anywhere in politics cuz u got no 'zazz'
I have a headache. |
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Study stock splits. I'm really surprised that the community has such little background in equities, revaluation of currency or commodity. There should have been an economist at the core of this development team. BTC is already trying to pull a quantitative easing 1. But you have no board, theoretical basis or a bernank to oversee the operation. so goes anarcho capitalism.  There should be an incremental splitting, first .000, then .0000, then .0000 up to some static limit, say .000000. If there is no absolute limit the BTC will go Zimbabwe and be defunct. The splits should be well notified in advance, say 2-3 months notice, then on a certain day at a certain time all BTC go to .000. Then in the next X time frame they go to .0000 using the same process. so forth and so on. What are you talking about? No one is expanding anything. Simply moving the decimal. The current 1 Bitcoin will still be 1 Bitcoin and there won't be any more of them created by moving the decimal. Have you ever sliced up a pie? Did you end up with more pie after cutting it? No. But what he is saying is that 21 million total bitcoin is not large enough. We need to periodically adjust the amount higher. Not by issuing new bitcoins but by simply splitting the current supply and adjusting the bitcoin block generation reward. Right now I think an ideal split would be 1 for 20. Basically for every bitcoin or partial bitcoin you have it is multiplied by 20. So if you had 1 bitcoin it would go to 20. If you mined a block then the reward would be 1000 btc, not 50 and the total supply would eventually go to 420 million. The biggest problem is the external problems that can arise. Its easy to make the adjustments in the code but you would have to stop trading and tell everyone about the adjustment. Otherwise idiots are going to be still buying/selling btc at 20$/each even though they would be worth around 1$/each after the split. <sigh> |
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On #1 I don´t see the separation you make between bitcoin and its underlying infrastructure, because I think that all were designed as independents parts of a whole "product" since the beginning.
I'm not making a seperation. I consider them parts of a whole system. That was my point. |
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There doesn't need to be a loophole around #1, because Bitcoin does have a use value. That use value is derived from the software that forms the client as well as the network. Software represents organized work toward a goal, namely to create a logic machine that performs a desired function. In the case of Bitcoin, that function is to transfer value (not wealth, which is different) over vast distances at unmatched speed and for a very low cost. The kicker for bitcoin (the currency itself) is that bitcoins are required for this function, for no existing form of currency can cooperate with the Bitcoin client to this end. Adding confusion is the fact that, due to the nature of a decentralized currency, there can be no form of backing or peg. So the relative value of bitcoins verses existing currencies must float. Thus the chicken and egg problem then becomes, how does one get an initial relative value for bitcoins? It happens to be that said initial value was established when an early adopter, wishing to advance the currency, chose to offer some of his vast holdings in return for a pizza. He offered 10K BTC, and someone else decided that it was worth that to him. All of point #2 flows from this singular event, but the use value that those two traders saw in bitcoin wasn't in the pizza, but in the functions that the currency and the client together could perform. I.E. to move value across limitless distance. It is this function that no other prior currency on Earth, fiat or otherwise, could perform in an economicly competitive manner.
Hello, It is not necessary justifying Bitcoins value looking at its underlaying infrastructure´s value. No matter the costs of the infrastructure if nobody uses bitcoins, because in that case the infrastructure is worthless unless you use it for something different (web servers or whatever...). Bitcoins are currency, and they were invented specifically for that, and they are valuable becuase they render monetary utility. Once a good renders utility, it is valuable, no matter wich kind of utility. Also, I think there is no such a "chicken and egg" problem. The value of currency or money is discovered by the market, just as it is discovered for any other good. It happens whenever something new is invented or discovered. Did you actually read my post? Or did you just read part of it and assume you understood it? |
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Therefore, while it is absolutely necessary that a money originate as a commodity with direct uses, it is not absolutely necessary that the direct uses continue after the money has been established.
Here is a paraphrased summary of the excerpts above: point #1) It is absolutely necessary that a money originate as a commodity with direct uses. point #2) If an established money were to stop being used as a commodity, it would not necessarily lose its character as a money. I believe point #1 is a big obstacle to bitcoins because I don't see any direct commodity uses for bitcoins, and I don't consider the many monetary and exchange properties of bitcoins to be direct commodity uses. This is why I like thinking of ways to back bitcoins with something that has a direct use as a commodity. Point #2 seems to leave open the possibility of something like bitcoins getting around point #1, establishing itself as money, and then maintaining its character as money with no need to ever have a use as a commodity. However, I believe the underlying commodity use of a money is an essential ingredient that interacts with its monetary and exchange properties to make it more desirable to use it as a money than as a commodity. There doesn't need to be a loophole around #1, because Bitcoin does have a use value. That use value is derived from the software that forms the client as well as the network. Software represents organized work toward a goal, namely to create a logic machine that performs a desired function. In the case of Bitcoin, that function is to transfer value (not wealth, which is different) over vast distances at unmatched speed and for a very low cost. The kicker for bitcoin (the currency itself) is that bitcoins are required for this function, for no existing form of currency can cooperate with the Bitcoin client to this end. Adding confusion is the fact that, due to the nature of a decentralized currency, there can be no form of backing or peg. So the relative value of bitcoins verses existing currencies must float. Thus the chicken and egg problem then becomes, how does one get an initial relative value for bitcoins? It happens to be that said initial value was established when an early adopter, wishing to advance the currency, chose to offer some of his vast holdings in return for a pizza. He offered 10K BTC, and someone else decided that it was worth that to him. All of point #2 flows from this singular event, but the use value that those two traders saw in bitcoin wasn't in the pizza, but in the functions that the currency and the client together could perform. I.E. to move value across limitless distance. It is this function that no other prior currency on Earth, fiat or otherwise, could perform in an economicly competitive manner. |
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State owned enterprise working under the principles of capitalism
This is a logical impossibility. |
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Even if there were a secure summation available on the server, this doesn't tell you if the server itself has already be compromised and whoever inserted a malicious client didn't just do the same for the summation and alter the timestamps. Ultimately you are going to have to trust someone. It's because of this very issue that older Bitcoin clients persist upon the network.
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You need guns, lots of guns.
Those we have. |
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So the price of bitcoins is going down?
If it were only that simple. The relationship between Bitcoin and any particular fiat currency, reflected as they are in their relative prices, are complex enough taken alone. But they really can't be taken alone, as each is affected somewhat by the influences of the other currencies and the relative influences of their respective economies. |
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They are local to Japan. Why would they have to be concerned about when you are awake?
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Although this true enough taken alone, it's not relevent to the argument because I have already shown that it's possible, by presenting an existing solution. Are you twelve?
It's not a solution if it doesn't apply to everyone affected by the problem. Nothing in life is absolute. You are tweleve, aren't you? |
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