One of the real challenges I see is getting people to trade on any US exchange. It isn't happening much now. For an exchange to flourish, they are going to need to give major incentives, imo. Most bitcoiners do not trust the US government, for good reason. I will cheer lead any US exchange that can grab big volume. I just think its going to be a challenge. Unfortunately I think you are correct. I'm not going anywhere near a US exchange until I can be sure that it is impenetrable to the NSA-IRS-FBI panopticon dragnet surveillance vampire squid ... and any business that values it's privacy should practice the same. Trust is easy to expend but difficult to win back and in financial matters of confidence, trust is crucial (unless you can replace with crypto  ). |
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Possibly for routing around surveillance of data lines using the wiretapping and eavesdropping legal protections for voice lines?
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bitcoin thermodynamics  |
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Kind of two-faced to come out in support now after ruining the livelihood of some previous intrepid entrepreneurs who they had accepted business from and then pulled the rug oot from under.
I'd stay away from them until they demonstrate less craven tendencies and schizophrenic about turns.
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...
Look at what happened with online poker a decade ago. Government got involved, seized bank accounts, forbid banks from doing business with online gambling sites, etc etc.
They didn't have to go after individuals to cripple something, they go after the big institutions.
So for bitcoin, if they want individuals to comply with laws, they could set up an agency where you have to register your bitcoin addresses with (and possibly give them access to freeze/seize your funds if they deem necessary). If you don't have a valid registration with that agency, banks will not allow you to do any transactions related to bitcoin (eg, wire transfer to an exchange). The government would use the banking system to enforce their laws.
That would probably make both governments and banks both unpopular and unsuccessful. Big institutions are a no-no in the bitcoin sphere. Something a lot of people doesn't seem to get. The US Govt and the US banking system is incredibly unpopular. Look at the crappy congress approval ratings, and how many people are angry about what wall street and the big banks did. But they're very successful. The US Govt is still in power, and the US Banking system still has control over the economy. Big institutions are already in the bitcoin sphere. What do you call CEX.io who has 1/4 of the network hash power? What do you call bitstamp and the other big exchanges that handle the bulk of trading volume? They have huge influence over the bitcoin economy. If black/red-listing (aka, tainting) can be arranged in a way which is even a little bit credible, I believe that it would open the door for such registration. This because large institutions (Google/Facebook, Overstock/TigerDirect, etc) can be forced to honor it and it will rapidly create fungibility problems for everybody. And also, of course, that forced registration would in and of itself change the nature of Bitcoin beyond recognition.
That's not what I was getting at though. Forcing people to register/provide access to their wallets to a govt agency makes it possible for the govt to seize your coins. You make it sound like USA has a Police State problem. |
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Bitcoin is probably not meant to be used by the innumerate.
These days if you can count makes you one of the "elite".
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Well 'libertarianism' is anger from the political far right and because USA doesn't allow far left (McCarthy etc), 'libertarians' get to talk all underdoggy mavericky ghost in the system conspiracy evil globalists are onto us deconstructive style all the time, but in truth the only difference between a conservative and a 'libertarian' is that when the former fucks you in the ass he quotes god, the latter just admits it's because he has more money. Parody, laughter or irony isn't going to go in strong with a brand of Wittgenstein-wannabes who think they've rediscovered the meaning of the word ''freedom''. Word on the street is their favorite stand up comedian is Drew Carey, Benny Hill a close second!
dickhead |
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With exponential growth already on the charts I'm not going to fight the trend.
I meant. Is there a technical reason? Why do you do Technical Analysis w log vs linear? He just said .. representing logarithmic growth on linear chart is nonsensical. 0.1 does not register on chart that has a scale to 1000. |
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I don't have any financial relationship or otherwise with SatoshiLabs, other than the pre-order I made, which is now delivered. It's just a project I think is important.
Thanks. I agree TREZOR, and other user-friendly hardware wallets, are for me the most pressing bottleneck for bitcoin adoption. Good work all around guys! |
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Most of the printed money is ending up in the hands of fewer and fewer people, thus the massive and growing wealth inequality.
A few rich people can't create hyperinflation because they are a tiny percentage of the population and have only a limited net demand for real goods where hyperinflation would be measured (how many steaks can they eat?)
The rest of the printed money is ending up in a continuous string of housing, stock and bond asset bubbles ... or soaked up by banking losses from previous burst asset bubbles.
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Nice to see it in the flesh and thanks for the review Mike.
Just to tick all the boxes here, can you confirm that you have no other vested interests in TREZOR (shares in company, consultant agreements, endorsement incentives etc) that might bias your review? (Excepting of course being enthusiastic about the tech. generally.)
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Feels like Italy could be next in a matter of months (I'm italian, saying this listening to how some news about fiscal compact were presented)
Do you have any good links or sources to read about this? I'm amazed they have been able to paper over their massive structural problems as long as they have. That whole thing with Monte dei Paschi di Siena and ECB head Mario Draghi stinks to all hell. |
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On the Origins of MoneyMany kinds of wealth transfers -- one-way and mutual, voluntary and coerced -- face transaction costs. In voluntary trades both parties gain; a truly free gift is usually an act of kin altruism. These transactions create value for one or both parties as much as the physical act of making something. First key insight into why bitcoin will have value purely as transacting medium. To be useful as a general-purpose store of wealth and means of wealth transfer, a collectible had to be embedded in at least one institution with a closed-loop cycle, so that the cost of discovering and/or manufacturing the object was amortized over multiple transactions. Furthermore, a collectible was not just any kind of beautiful decorative object. It had to have certain functional properties, such as the security of being wearable on the person, compactness for hiding or burial, and unforgeable costliness. That costliness must have been verifiable by the recipient of the transfer -- using many of the same skills that collectors use to appraise collectibles today. Second key insight into why a verifiable proof of work will give rise to store of value.
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Tom O’Donnell’s children’s novel, “Space Rocks!” is out now. I suspect that explains the New Yorker in brief, it is written for the benefit of the childlike? |
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Yup. The IRS ruling merely crystallises in many foggy minds what many of us have known all along. Unfortunately, a lot of VC's and USA based money seems to have already been thrown at making a Bitcoin branch that looks and feels like something the US authoritarian regulators might like ... and ended up with Pay-Pal2.0 ... oops. They need to raise their sights and take a look at the real high ground before they waste any more of their powder on those stinking trenches filled with the unfortunate US patriots. Bitcoin technology is better suited to settlement/clearing and medium/long term International irreversible, censorship-resistant exchange of value. However, it does also pave the way for crypto-financial layers to be built on top that can deal with jurisdictional risk and instantaneous payments and etc, on a case by case basis. |
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this is really crazy to see how good of an investment bitcoin would have been for the early adopters. like wow thousand % returns and stuff Smiley very good to see Depending of course on the final adoption numbers it could be that we are still in early adopter, early majority stage of network growth, e.g. 2 or 3 more orders of magnitude growth left. Those people messing around with bitcoin when it was worth cents or a dollar weren't early adopters but akin to the founding members of a start-up, garage-dwelling innovators, experimenters tinkering where absolutely nothing was certain or even clear what it was they were messing with. Some of this fog is clearing but nothing is yet certain, the risks to failure however decrease with every increase in usage (and thus price) somewhat paradoxically. |
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At worst, it hinders bitcoin as a transactional currency for law abiding USA citizens. Subset use case for a subset of users. For the $8 trillion gold market, $17 trillion offshore assets market and International transfers ... bitcoin users not affected. Ironically, most of the very people clamouring the loudest for regulation are going to get everything they ask for and deserve, an arcane unworkable system for daily payments governed by ill-informed bureaucrats producing reams of bureaucratese for no good reason but to make everybody feel safe, warm and fuzzy. Well done, you just reinvented bitcoin in Pay-Pal's image and blew god knows how much venture capital creating a dead fork of an open source project the rest of the world is going to ignore. |
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The doc/build-unix.md instructions say: To Build
---------------------
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
yet the supplied tarball for linux ( https://bitcoin.org/bin/0.9.0/bitcoin-0.9.0-linux.tar.gz)has no autogen.sh script supplied in src. Is it expected to generate that script locally (which would be unorthodox)? But if so it should say so in the documentation. |
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