Better not to, fragmentation is really bad for starting open source projects...
It's not that he ought not, it's just that it won't really work. If we had to depend on everyone not doing something, we'd be screwed. Bitcoin has a good chance because the right incentives exist to get everyone to work together. |
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Read books, not websites.
Seriously? Like the information in "books" is any more "real" than "websites" </rant> +1 google "economics in one lesson" and begin reading in seconds. The whole thing is out there in multiple places. It's much more economical than waiting for the book to arrive. |
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What if somebody wants to start a new currency based on bitcoins with some changes in mechanism (for exaqmle suggested here or any other), or even without any changes but for special purpose or within a special society? Bitcoin is open source, so I don't see any technical problems with that. Also, we would have a speculation market between two bitcoin currencies, which could be a way of earning bitcoins for newbies. So, what do you think of the idea? It's totally possible technically. You might think about why test network coins have such an unfavorable exchange rate with bitcoin though. It always makes sense to join the strongest and most widely accepted chain unless there is some major improvement in the new one. This is good though because focusing all generation on one chain maximizes the difficulty of a takeover. |
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Apolitical, not big on ideology, more of a practical, "whatever works" type of person.
But I probably pass the duck test for a centre-left-libertarian.
I believe that a functioning society needs a balance of collectivism/cooperation/solidarity and selfishness/competition/individualism. However, I believe that collectivism can and should be strictly voluntary.
I'm too cynical to believe that true anarchy is sustainable. Humans are a very hierarchial species by nature, and some thug will always dominate unfortunately; that thug may as well be democratic government (the least of all evils). That government should be as small and as accountable as possible. Utilitarian, "harm-reduction" based government interference should be minimised; if it can be justified at all it must be based on reason and empirical evidence.
Government, as everyone uses the word, always means force. Using force to solve problems is never rational. The correct balance between collectivism and individualism cannot be known be anyone let alone forced on people. Anarchism just means letting this balance emerge naturally. If the government evaporates, most of my life with still be collective. I will still share everything with my family and work their needs into all of my decisions. I call myself an anarcho-capitalist because I think this will be the large scale structure of a free world. But nearly all of my personal interactions will have nothing to do with acquiring capital. |
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My statement was based on the number of people who regularly complain that it's not quick and easy to get funds into MtGox. (Note that I said "I think", not "I guarantee".)
It's my own experience too. If I could get PayPal funds into MtGox "instantly", I would buy bitcoins there.
There is a lot of demand for MtGox USD or LR in this community, and trade for PayPal. This is does not help getting more funds to Mt. Gox, because the funds are already there. It would help if Mt. Gox had more funding options. E.g. Liqpay, which is preferred by some. There are other ways to trade Bitcoins. Why don't people use Bitcoin Market or #bitcoin-otc if they want to pay with other currencies? If the price difference is high, then use it! Get LR the slow way, buy coins at Mt. Gox and sell them for PayPal. The way to "use' this opportunity would be to get money onto MtGox to buy and sell on BCM. People are suggesting that getting money onto MtGox is the hard part. On a related note. I'd like to buy some MtGox for PP if anyone is interested. |
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One reason price might follow difficulty is that mining should not be too profitable (because nothing should be too profitable, the world doesn't leave free money lying around). Therefore the price of Bitcoins can't rise too much above the cost of mining (counting equipment depreciation among the costs of course). The cost of mining is proportional to the difficulty (approximately). Therefore we might expect to see price proportional to difficulty.
We do see a nearly proportional relationship in the 1st graph, but that data set was incomplete. I'd like to see that last graph redone with a linear difficulty scale so we could see how the proportionality holds up with more data.
Exactly right about no free money lying around. But that doesn't mean one follows the other, only that they will maintain a close relationship. |
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I think that it's too vague an idea to judge the risks. Details are neccessary. Perhaps you could develop it into a system that adjusts for risks to the lender, but I don't think anyone else is going to help unless you can prove the validity of your idea yourself.
oh fully, initially im willing to accept all the risk myself, and only do this with people i trust as an experiment. I'll report my findings here. just wanted to announce my thoughts If other people start valuing the points without looking at details then people will just run up transactions and payments back and forth for getting points. Because of this I don't think anyone will put much stock in the points, but only in actual reports from actual people they know. the details are, i made a risk and they didn't screw me. thats valid in *any* trust system Ah, I imagined you were suggesting a generalization where anyone would be able to award points. My mistake. I always thought the credit system in the US was weird. People are encouraged to borrow even when they don't need to if they are young in order to prove they can pay back. It should be the opposite. "This guy is 27 and never needed to borrow any money! Wow, he must really have his shit together!" But no. |
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I'm sure that I don't really need to remind the members of this thread, but to anyone who doesn't already know...
Corrolation is not causation.
In all likelyhood, both these variables are responding to the same unknown. That unknown is likely the number of people who are interested in bitcoins at any particular point alont the timeframe noted. But that is just an educated guess, since there is no really proxy for the number of users in the network.
Yeah, it does feel to me like price drives difficulty. But I think "demand" drives both really. |
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Localism is just another type of bigotry. Trade with whomever can do the most with the least and we'll all be wealthy. This will often be people near you because of lower transportation costs and in the past because of the cost of knowledge, but that is dropping to zero.
But really, insisting on only dividing labor with people who happen to be near you is very wasteful.
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Don't question the antitrust authorities: Offer your price too low, you're doing predatory pricing. Offer your price too high, you're gouging your customers. Offer your price the same, you're colluding. You're evil, and should be eliminated.
Nice summary. The best thing I've ever heard in support of "price gouging" was Mike Munger on Econ Talk. I'll try to find a direct link and put it here. The main example he uses is selling ice in North Carolina immediately after a hurricane. http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/01/munger_on_price_1.htmlRuss Roberts has lots of great interviews. I especially enjoy the ones with Munger and Don Boudreaux. |
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I think that it's too vague an idea to judge the risks. Details are neccessary. Perhaps you could develop it into a system that adjusts for risks to the lender, but I don't think anyone else is going to help unless you can prove the validity of your idea yourself.
oh fully, initially im willing to accept all the risk myself, and only do this with people i trust as an experiment. I'll report my findings here. just wanted to announce my thoughts If other people start valuing the points without looking at details then people will just run up transactions and payments back and forth for getting points. Because of this I don't think anyone will put much stock in the points, but only in actual reports from actual people they know. |
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105,000 is gives an extra month or so and it is exactly half of 210,000.
On net I don't think this is important enough to change. I think we lose a lot of credibility if we change the generation agreement. Even though the total is not changed it sets a precedent and could lead to things like speeding up the whole process, etc..
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@davidonpda, I ran it previously but stopped since no one was using it and the client got outdated. I restarted it with puddinpop's recent version yesterday when I posted the IP address. The number of clients, as bober182 noted, has ranged from 2 to 10.
What's needed is a larger number of people to contribute (and hopefully someone with a GPU) so that the lesser powered CPU clients can start getting some benefit from being involved.
I'm not sure if that will happen though as the GPU clients are probably more likely to want to keep mining for themselves.
Even GPU generators are beginning to be exposed to some high variance and that will only grow. |
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This is a pretty fundamental change, but I don't see any downside. I'd be interested to hear why Satoshi chose such a lumpy function.
It seems to me that all marginally profitable generation will turn off at the drop to 25 and some will come back after the first difficulty drop.
It's complicated though. I'd guess the price will rise well before the drop since everyone knows it's coming and this might actually cause a ramp up in generation before the end resulting in an even bigger drop after 25 arrives.
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16 year old here. I introduced the concept to many friends and a whole class. No dice.
Interesting. Do they have objections, or just a lack of interest? |
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We should finds way to introduce teenagers to bitcoin and the concept of earning bitcoins.
We knows that there are lot of unemployed teenagers who would like some extra cash.
Any ideas?
I thought of this the other day. Maybe high school cryptography or programming classes could be contacted or something. Kind of a "Look at this real world application of cryptography, oh by the way you might have noticed your national currency is going to collapse but this is secure" sort of thing. Where do smart teens hang out on the web? |
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Looking at today's transactions on Mt Gox shows 17,159 BTC traded over 22 trades at the same time. That's about $5K USD ... presumably in a single transaction. The spread between the lowest and highest paid is 2.5% though most of the trade executed at the upper end, $0.2890. http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.htmlIs there anything that this transaction tells us? I was wondering how much a buy of this size would affect the price. This one transaction represents 0.3% of all bitcoin in existence today. This one transaction was over half of all today's volume. Does this say that today there is a fairly efficient market? You can fairly easily compute how much a large purchase or dump will move the market by reading the order book and doing a little math. There was even a site that had a calculator like this, but it is down now. A big order done slowly might get a better price if new offers come in, but you can roughly tell. But yeah, the market is much deeper and tighter than it used to be. $5k USD would have completely blown out all the bids or asks just 2 months ago iirc. |
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That ignores the fact that I can walk away from my debts via bankruptcy.
As the credit card (and other general) debts increase the governments of the world make it harder and harder to file bankruptcy. Also, (I may be wrong) I heard that you can only file bankruptcy in the USA once. If you file bankruptcy where I live you become a 'financial leper'. No bank will loan you money for 7 years. It's fairly complicated here (US), but I know you can do it like every 7 or 10 years for sure. I honestly don't get why they call it bankruptcy though. If you don't have money you don't need (and can't afford) to file bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is for people with money or assets who want to protect them from creditors, not for people who are broke. It should be called the "cancel your promises like we always do" deal or something. |
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I'm a bit more then just a socialist and I know bitcoin is a step towards getting away from government/corporation authority and control. After that it will help move into a classless society and possibly money will be abolished altogether.
This confuses me. Do you not consider bitcoin money? What classes do you see now that could be gone in the future? |
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This reminds me of a sneakernet that was intentionally set up in Africa to allow residents of small towns to send & receive email, as well as request entire websites for educational research. Once the website was captured and shipped to the distant school, a modified squid would keep a copy of that website on cache indefinately.
It would be great if a durable flashdrive could be made into the form factor of a mailable postcard, but then how would you know who to mail it to next, and how could you encourage the current user to send it to the next guy in the chain rather that keep it for himself?
Doesn't get the next one until the first one is sent and received? |
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