My American friends, this video on the fed is awsome.
even though you can't redeem fed notes for gold and silver coin you can redeem them for united states notes which are reedeemable in gold and silver coin
United States Notes were never redeemable in gold or silver coin. Gold and silver certificates were redeemable but the government canceled redemptions on the former after 1933 and the latter stopped after 1964. |
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It's a scary thought that it could be manipulated easily enough if you want to throw 5+ million at it.
Keep in mind though that the cost it would take to ruin Bitcoin is proportional to the size of the Bitcoin economy. Nobody in the federal government cares enough about the Bitcoin economy right now to do anything about it. They might care if it were a hundred times as large, but in that case, it would cost them a hundred times more to disrupt it. |
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Sell goods and services!  The bitcoin economy can't exists without people peddling their goods and services for bitcoin! This is the best thing you can do to help. Sell your old stuff on Biddingpond or the bitcoin-otc IRC channel. |
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If this happened,
A) everyone holding Bitcoins would see a tremendous profit, and
B) we would all probably just start over from scratch with another blockchain for "Bitcoin 2." Which would probably take off much faster now that everyone has seen the US Government has ridiculously overpaid for Bitcoin 1.
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Any financial system can be damaged by someone willing to destroy a massive amount of their own wealth. But self-interest usually discourages people from doing so.
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The encryption of one's private keys is entirely different from the hashing algorithm used in generating blocks.
SHA-256 hashing, ECDSA encryption.
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How do you define professional vs amateur in regards to bitcoin mining at this point and in the future? You could explain it in rigs or hash per second or eficiency or acountability or whatever works for you
People who are mining for profit. Doesn't everybody, big or small, mine with the hope that they will profit? |
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Nothing has intrinsic value except for perhaps basic necessities like food and shelter. These things do not act well as forms of money because the former rots and the latter is immobile and indivisible.
That's a narrow definition of intrinsic value. That there are so many different methods of determining 'intrinsic value' is a testament to the entire concept being subjective. |
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The thing I'm most worried about is that people will start mining just because they think they're helping the network, and this unprofitable mining will push more efficient and competent miners out of the market.
Could you explain this a bit further? I don't see how raising the difficulty is anything but a good thing. Also if people mining on their CPUs don't have a real chance of mining a coin, then I don't see how they will be any real negative influence on miners. It's not low-scale miners' responsibility to make things easier for the high-scale miners. |
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The original article talks about the dollar being backed by force (specifically since people are coerced into paying obligations to the US government using dollars.)
If bitcoins are in use for a while and legal contract are written requiring the paying of obligations in bitcoin then bitcoins will have a little bit of the same kind of backing as the dollar. Someone could be coerced (by the courts) into seeking out bitcoins to pay off obligations. In that sense bitcoins will have intrinsic "value".
We could grow into this kind of world because bitcoin has advantages paper dollars don't. Contracts may start to be written denominated in bitcoin.
The problem with bitcoin is that it is not legal tender. If a country recognize it as legal tender, than bitcoin would indeed...have "backing". Of course, it's a bad kind of backing. I agree it's not legal tender, but bitcoin civil agreements can still be written and enforced by courts (such as wage agreements denominated in bitcoin). If this becomes common who cares if the US government insists on dollars. The US government voided all contracts that were payable in gold from 1933 until many decades later (the 80s maybe? I can't remember). They could potentially do the same with Bitcoin as soon as its market had any significance. |
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Nothing has intrinsic value except for perhaps basic necessities like food and shelter. These things do not act well as forms of money because the former rots and the latter is immobile and indivisible.
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I'm a little confused - for one set of data and one method of hashing, isn't there only one possible hash? What does it mean then to try to find a hash below a certain value? From what I understand about hashes, either it is or it isn't below that value, and no amount of retrying can change that.
Yes. Only one possible hash. In fact very probably a useless hash because it is larger than the target difficulty. That's why the block has a random number that you can change. It's called the nonce. If a hash fails to be below the difficulty threshold, you increment the nonce and try again. You get a different hash and a new shot at having the hash below the difficulty. You'll probably fail again and have to increment the nonce again. Guess what. You're mining! After billions of tries you run across a nonce that makes the block hash to a value less than the difficulty and you've made yourself 50 bitcoins. Ahh, I understand now. so it calculates hash(lastblock+random_num) and checks to see if it is less than the difficulty. If it's above, it changes the random number and tries again. Does it increment the nonce by 1 each time, or does it pick a completely random nonce each time? |
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I'm a little confused - for one set of data and one method of hashing, isn't there only one possible hash? What does it mean then to try to find a hash below a certain value? From what I understand about hashes, either it is or it isn't below that value, and no amount of retrying can change that.
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The House of Saud permits people to live on their land with certain agreed-upon restrictions, one of which is that they can't have property. Is this agreement not something a person should be allowed to set up on their property in a libertarian society?
That's a big land claim. I can't imagine homesteading that much properties. So a libertarian/ancap society can have limits on how much property a person can possess? |
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As a thought experiment, what would you guys say to the following assertion:
"Saudi Arabia is a perfect anarcho-capitalist (or libertarian) society. It just so happens that all the land is owned by one family, who are justly free to make their own rules for people they choose to allow on their property."
It isn't much of libertarian society if the family denies citizens the right to property. The House of Saud permits people to live on their land with certain agreed-upon restrictions, one of which is that they can't have property. Is this agreement not something a person should be allowed to set up on their property in a libertarian society? |
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Where do the bitcoins exchanges get there bitcoins from?
People who have bitcoins sell them to the exchange for dollars. Where did those people get their bitcoins? These people either sold goods or services for Bitcoins (a large percentage) or generated them themselves (a small percentage) |
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As a thought experiment, what would you guys say to the following assertion:
"Saudi Arabia is a perfect anarcho-capitalist (or libertarian) society. It just so happens that all the land is owned by one family, who are justly free to make their own rules for people they choose to allow on their property."
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1. Buy Bitcoins 2. Submit Article to Slashdot 3. Sell Bitcoins 4.  ? 5. Profit! |
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Thats not what I mean...
What I'm saying is what teathers my bitcoins to me?
My ip? thats no good its dynamic... my pc? thats no good what if it crashes....
Can i get an account to link it?
The blockchain, freely available to anyone on the network, is analogous to a publicly-accessible bank vault. Bitcoins are stored in safety deposit boxes. Your wallet.dat file on your computer holds your keys to your box with your coins in it. |
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The solution to 'sticky wages' is to educate people that the value of their wages is going up or staying flat, even if the number on their check goes down. I don't think this would be as hard as people think, especially if there were reliable statistics available on the price deflation rate.
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