Fractional reserve issued currency is inflation by any reasonable definition of the word and is where nearly all inflation in todays fiat currencies comes from.
That's not quite accurate. What causes the inflation in our world today are central banks, when they inflate the monetary base. Fractional reserves are direct responsible for inflation only when the compulsory decreases. When it increases, it causes deflation. In a period where the compulsory is fixed, fractional reserves are nothing but a constant multiplier applied to any change the central bank promotes. If the central bank doesn't inflate nor deflate, a constant-compulsory fractional reserve system won't inflate nor deflate either. You see what I mean? Fractional reserve banking doesn't increase base money, only credit money. We've been living in a bubble, protected from fractional banks collapsing by the FDIC and FED printing. In our world credit money is as good as base money because base money will be debased if credit money is ever worth a penny less. In free banking world there may be lots of new credit money, but that credit money will be a truly different thing than actual money. We just live in bizzaro world where the gov/banks make base money and they make credit money so they can keep them equal in value. But it's not natural for a promise to pay a dollar to be worth exactly a dollar when it's publicly known that the dollars aren't there. |
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I signed up... but there only seems to be 3 players online?
Sunday afternoon is pokerstars.com's busiest day....?
That, and the two players I saw playing were almost definitely bots. They were folding and betting hands within fractions of a second.
If you come in during a hand it catches you up at lightning speed. You probably saw that. If the speed persisted they were just really fast players. |
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No way. There is a lot more world than the US. You think people in Canada, Denmark and Indonesia who thought they missed the bitcoin boat won't jump at the chance to get them at half price? I'm in the US and I'm a buyer on that day if I can get them at 50% of the day before.
Even if everyone in the US obeyed and stopped using bitcoins there is no way price goes to 1%.
That's a rather naive assumption. If half of the world demanding bitcoin is the US, the economy is going to drop by half. A bit more. Not only do you have the lack of demand from buyers in the US, it would decrease the usefulness of the currency by some factor as well. It might be said that each new user increases the value of Bitcoin by greater than 1/n up to a certain point. This is true. |
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Since you're here, want to tell us the full story?
I'll just point out that Beacon has said nothing so far that isn't publicly available info. Clearly not. But maybe he will. |
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Bitcoins were also worth a lot less in Feb when knightmb did the deal. I hope everything works out for everyone.
That's not the impression I get. I think this deal just happened. |
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Good news for me anyway  , they sold me the project for $5k to recover some of their cost. I now technically own the wallet files and other software I was working on with them at the time. For legal reasons I can't blurt out who the investors were or the banks, companies, etc. they were representing basically (unless I won't to land in court forever), but I think I made a wise investment. It's still going to take a while to get my wife on board as she still doesn't understand the whole BTC concept, but everyone here knows and I know what it means. She was really skeptical about my purchase this week. I'll probably take some of the backup advise here too, why have a few backup copies when you can have many on different media types spread around everywhere (all encrypted of course this time). Thanks for the advise everyone! Michael Brown (knightmb), you have not told the full story here, and this is not the first time you have screwed an employer. If you do not do the right thing now, this will come back to haunt you. You are also in over your head. Has it occurred to you that you owe $850,000 of federal income tax on this "deal"? Fortunately for you, we do not have state tax in Tennessee, but you will still owe business taxes, and you haven't even applied for the right licenses. You have one chance to do the right thing here. You know what it is. Since you're here, want to tell us the full story? |
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Americans who anticipated their bitcoins becoming worse than useless would be willing to sell them at any price. I wouldn't be surprised to see a 99% decrease in value within an hour of the announcement, if it came as a complete surprise.
No way. There is a lot more world than the US. You think people in Canada, Denmark and Indonesia who thought they missed the bitcoin boat won't jump at the chance to get them at half price? I'm in the US and I'm a buyer on that day if I can get them at 50% of the day before. Even if everyone in the US obeyed and stopped using bitcoins there is no way price goes to 1%. |
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This is amazing. It's probably best your wife doesn't get it or she might insist on getting some of those paper dollars.
I can't believe you didn't even give them their 12k back! Maybe you can't offer too much without making them suspicious? How did you ever talk these people into putting up money for something they had no interest in?
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the question is, why would a hoarder get 'scared'? at this point the hoarders are mostly people who mined EARLY -- ie: their investment isn't substantial in most cases.
I wouldn't say 'scared' is the right word - but what the poster you quoted meant was that there's ~3000 BTC worth of BIDs on MtGox at the moment, after which the price of a single bitcoin is... well, zero, unless someone makes more BIDs. MtGox doesn't display bids more than ~33% from the last trade. Bids go all the way down. There is also the possibility of large hidden orders. And there are the other markets (small) and individuals (unknown, but large imo) |
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Total guess, and not even really what I think would happen. But lets say US gov squeezes out 50% of US users. Not only is this going to be <10% of worldwide users, but panic selling will we gladly embraced by the unaffected users and the drop will not be so substantial.
Another thing to consider is that once there is a booming internal economy the entrance and exit aren't so important.
Compared to the US poker shutdown it would be like if there was no way to deposit or withdraw poker money, but we could still play, buy things with it, and transfer to friends and clients. It would suck, but it wouldn't kill it it would just make it a little less convenient.
And since it makes it less convenient to get back to dollars some people would just keep coins and find coin merchants instead of converting and using a dollar merchant they used to like. Say I have my revenue 50% in coins and dollar conversions get banned. Now instead of converting all the time since it is hard I do all my grocery shopping I can from bitmunchies and use a newegg proxy for all my electronics etc etc. Of course there will just be tons of merchants by this time so it won't be that hard. If 100% of my income was coins I'd establish a relationship and maybe pay a premium to get money out for rent and parking tickets. That or move to a free(r) country :-)
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How the hell does Alipay make money?
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Alipay, PayPal, etc are just services that merchants pay for. They can be built on top of any currency. The problem is that all good currencies get crushed by tyrannical governments (Liberty dollar, e-gold). Now we have one that can't (hopefully). You can build something like Alipay on top of bitcoin if you want (mybitcoin, clearcoin).
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No-one said they were illegal ... although I think you've just taken the opportunity to put up a scaremongering headline in the main discussion for noobs to run smack slam into with their first bitcoin encouter ... fail.
Yeah, if this wasn't your intention you can change the headline. I don't know exactly what you're suggesting people do though. No one can make anything legal, they can only stop hurting people for doing things. And no one is hurting anyone yet, so they can't really stop. |
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I wrote an experimental one for college but I could never get anyone to comment on it. If anyone is interested in it, let me know. It's written in Java.
I don't know the first thing about Java, sorry. I use a special program that will convert bitcoin transactions into discussions about anarchy vs. statism.
I think I'm using a similar one, but it turns everything into discussions about anarchy vs. statism. So you guys embedded your wallets into the bitcoin forum itself huh? That's pretty clever. Doing it right now. Pretty amazing that we can hide wallets in discussions about hiding wallets in discussions about hiding wallets in discussions, eh? My method is heavy on recursion btw. |
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Come on. They aren't even hassling us yet and you're ready to start begging them to stop?
Even from a good slave perspective it makes no sense. Everything is legal that is not prohibited, even officially we don't live in a permission-to-live society.
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I used to make a little money doing this. I was taking PP risk though, I think that's why I was able to find small amounts frequently. I remember waiting up until bitcoin market would open to make sure I didn't get sniped, lol. All to make like 20BTC. Well, I guess that's worth something now, but it wasn't much then.
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My job is about letting people exchange bitcoins, what else can I say?  Yeah, but you just bought and let it sit there When do we get MtGox 2.0? I have seen new features added such as Dwolla and API related stuff. Also I can imagine just the growth and dealing with the DDOS attacks has kept Tux busy. I would like to see more shopping cart interfaces to mtgox, though that does not necessarily fall into mtgox's responsibility to implement them. I has half serious half sarcastic. I know he's been busy and is adding important things. I just want it to be faster, prettier and cleaner working. |
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I didn't realize this had a name.
I think Bitcoin is part of the solution. Not as you described, but in a thousand indirect ways. The most direct I can think of is bloggers and such stepping forward on hard issues and seeing huge waves of support come rolling in. I'm throwing a few cents to math/science/tech stuff that takes coins, but people who share my fringe views get a lot more. It's nice to think that libertarian blogs and podcasts are going to have a lot better marketing budgets in the near future.
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i'm willing to bet that it was a life or death decision for Madhatter. the way the price was escalating at such a parabolic ramp, i'm sure investors were logically locking prices left and right making a killing off of Madhatter. what is a fixed rate quote anyway? its effectively a SHORT against btc. after all, he's in it to make money; he was willing to fix a price thinking he could buy it cheaper later after the fix (this is the short part) and make money doing so. the parabolic ramp isn't good for everybody; it kills short sellers.
So he went short and lost money, that means he pays now. A price drop isn't good for everyone either, people who are long get killed. |
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i'm sure he wasn't hedged in any way. how could u be?
You hedge your own position by buying the coins when you guarantee the price. that takes tremendous discipline. theres a natural tendency to try and wait for the price to come back under the price u just guaranteed. its easy for a bull mkt to run away from you. The price could just as well go up over the price you guaranteed which means you are ate a loss. There is no such thing as a natural tendency to gamble with other peoples money. i hope ur kidding. what do banksters do everyday? gamble with OPM thru fractional reserve lending to infinity. Just because .001% of people do a certain thing because they have a promise from other thieves to move losses elsewhere doesn't mean there is a natural tendency to do it. |
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