I don't get it.
I mean: if I'm in debt to you, unless this debt was explicetely measured in dollars, it doesn't make sense that you are forced to accept dollars to repay the debt.
Say I owe you a chocolate cake. I don't have a chocolate cake to give you right now, but I have 2 dollars. So I give you the two dollars and tell you:
<< Sorry dude I don't have any chocolate cake to give you back, but I have those two dollars and according to Federal law you must accept them to clear my debt. So take them and go away please. >>
Sounds silly to me.
Of course if the debt was expressed in dollars, then the problem doesn't exist, but then saying that the dollar is "legal tender" is a bit of a tautology, isn't it?
You would go to court, and the court would determine fair market value for the chocolate cake, expressed in US dollars, and rule that you owed that. |
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Hang on, I think I finally understand.
Saying that dollar is "legal tender" basically means that law can enforce debts only if they are expressed in dollars.
Is that it?
The dollar is also either the de facto or de jure unit for settling debts expressed in things other than dollars. For example, if I go to the Art Institute of Chigago and accidentally damage the painting American Gothic, a court will no doubt rule that I owe the Institue a great amount of US dollars. The court obviously can't rule that I must repay them with another original American Gothic painting, since there aren't any others. So some law establishes US dollars as the standard unit of payment for these such debts. I'm not sure if it's the same law as legal tender laws. |
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Two words: Online poker.
This was enormous in the US until the Feds stopped people from being able to collect their winnings through credit cards.
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'Early adopters having an advantage over later adopters' is not a sufficient characteristic to classify something as a Ponzi scheme.
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Bid/ask ratio is not a reliable figure for two reasons:
1) Dark pools
2) Bids and asks that are far from the current trading price would not really affect trading. There are currently well over $10,000 worth of asks above BTC 1.05 . If I wanted to, I could put in a ton of bids or asks at prices nobody is ever going to trade at, but I seriously doubt these are going to affect near-future prices.
I think if you wanted to predict future prices you'd have to look at the number of bids and asks within, say, 5% of the last traded price. That number, as are all numbers when predicting the future, is entirely subjective.
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See what you fail to realize is that in a free market you are not powerless, you are the most powerful players! You see you also have the right to freedom and a right to your private property meaning you can take your private property anywhere the hell you want! And if you don't like how Mt.Gox is running his business you can take your fees that you would otherwise pay him to someone else.
There are other options, as well. Users can complain about his practices. Users can convince others that his practices aren't good. Freedom of speech and all. |
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I'm not stuck I just feel that the current price of BTCs does not validate the gained value of advantages through it's use for most new to this economy.
What I don't get is why the exchange rate of BTC would have any affect at all on the adoption and growth of bitcoins. They could be worth $0.10, $1, $10 or $1000 and I don't think it would make a difference. But, I can see argument that exchange rate volatility is a hinderance to adoption and use. If the price moves in large swings over short periods of time, people will be less confident in holding and using bitcoins in commerce. And that is why we need lots of active BTC traders...people willing to buy as the price falls and unload as it rises in an effort to profit from the volatility (reducing volatility in the process). The exchange rate should have no effect on peoples' willingness to adopt Bitcoin. Extreme volatility in exchange rate, however, may have a negative effect. |
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Because I've heard this many times but there's simply one thing that doesn't stick: if that was the true reason for the invasion, why didn't Saddam ever cited it in his own defense?
You know, I've thought of that too. But then, western media are hardly unbiased and I wonder if Saddam had ever said such a thing, would it ever have reached front page of the WSJ? I think not. It would've been buried and confined to extremist newsletters & websites and laughed at by the mainstream media. It would have gotten on Al Jazeera. |
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_schemeA Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors, not from any actual profit earned by the organization, but from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors. http://www.sec.gov/answers/ponzi.htmA Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that involves the payment of purported returns to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors. Bitcoin does not pay returns, therefore, it cannot be a Ponzi scheme. The value of Bitcoin may increase and it may later drop in value. Under this scenario, it can be rightly described as a bubble that popped, but it is not a Ponzi scheme.
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I propose that a particular day each year is established in which currently existing Bitcoin community and enthusiasts collectively promote bitcoin throughout various locations (maybe both online and offline) and help to spread awareness through such efforts. Any ideas for a particular date that seems worthy to establish for such efforts?
April 20th Let's not pick Hitler's birthday. |
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A People's Court episode indicated that a seller who couldn't prove shipping, through something like registered mail, received a judgement against him. If you don't want to pay the extra registered mail fees, you have to agree not to sue me in court.
As Bitcoins are not legally recognized, I highly doubt anyone is going to sue anyone in court to recover Bitcoins. |
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I have a feeling that the change of ownership of Mt. Gox might have caused this slight dip in the prices.
I think X cause Y change in bitcoin price. Yeah I hate it when today's "news" outlets release articles about various prices rising or falling and then they pin on something banal like I don't know unrests in Libya being responsible for rising price of silver...  It's always just supply vs demand with a tiny bit of the speculative element. While CNBC sometimes has what I consider to be silly reasons for why the market moved today, news can and does move markets. |
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Off peak hours are when free/low fee tx will get in.
No-transaction-fee transactions will only get processed when a miner who accepts NTF transactions finds a block. I suspect that all miners will mine 24/7, so I don't think NTF transactions are any more likely to be processed in the middle of the night than they are during peak business hours. (Plus 'off peak hours' may not mean anything as I suspect Bitcoin will be used all over the world.) |
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I have a feeling that the change of ownership of Mt. Gox might have caused this slight dip in the prices.
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What do you want to major in?
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Ask Zimbabwean people if there are happy with huge numbers on their bills.
Their problem is that the number of zeroes keeps increasing, not that there are many to begin with. And there's surely a happy medium between having $100,000,000,000,000 notes, and dealing with units of .00000001 |
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The Japanese ¥en currently trades at $0.012190 to the dollar and people still use ¥ quite a bit.
In fact, when the ¥en was trading at 130 to the dollar in the good ol' days, it was 1¥ = $0.007692 (traders would just drop the first two zeros and trade it as 7692/7694).
That's the opposite situation. People have to deal in tens or hundreds of thousands of yen, not figures like .00006831 Not true. It's only the opposite situation if looking at it from the ¥en-to-Dollar perspective. When you look at it from Dollar-to-¥en (or future BTC-to-Dollar) perspective, then one Dollar would equal .0070 BTC in future. Exchange rates are always different sides of the same 'coin'. Just inverted. I don't think the awkwardness of the exchange rate to the USD is an issue. The issue is the awkwardness of prices people will be using when buying and selling goods and services. |
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The Japanese ¥en currently trades at $0.012190 to the dollar and people still use ¥ quite a bit.
In fact, when the ¥en was trading at 130 to the dollar in the good ol' days, it was 1¥ = $0.007692 (traders would just drop the first two zeros and trade it as 7692/7694).
That's the opposite situation. People have to deal in tens or hundreds of thousands of yen, not figures like .00006831 I suspect one of the reasons it's easier to deal with really large numbers than really small numbers is that we use commas (or periods for you Europeans) to make it easier to visually recognize the units. $1,800,000 is easier to read than .0000018 edit: To further illustrate, it's far easier to tell the difference between $1,800,000 and $18,000,000 than it is to tell the difference between .0000018 and .000018 |
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The deflationary model (well, not deflationary, just very slowly inflationary) will encourage individuals to use it. It will not encourage institutions to choose it, but institutions may have to end up using it if enough individuals do.
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Did anyone claim that Mt. Gox did not have the right to have dark pools, or that he could be forced to stop having dark pools?  |
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