https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/tu-quoque

I can do this all night,

This is incorrect.  All value is subjective, even nominally 'intrinsic' value.  Whatever value his penis has is only for him to decide, based upon how much he values offspring (or other uses for said penis).  His offspring have zero value to me, however.

See what I did just there?  The term 'intrinsic value' gets English speaking economics professors in trouble, simply because it conveys the wrong idea.  It's not that anything can have a value that is intrinsic, but that any given item can have intrinsic characteristics that we, both individually and as a society, value.  Said another way, we value the object because of it's intrinsic characteristics, but how much we value it depends upon our subjective preferences.  Value is never an intrinsic characteristic itself.

You might be the programmer, but don't forget that when it comes to economics, you'll forever be my student.

Yes, very conveniently.  Particularly in the middle kingdom, where gambling has been officially illegal for most of it's history; but has never really even been curtailed during that entire time.  The Chinese don't really have a moral compunction with gambling, like we decendents of Christiandom often do.

NOW I'm offended.


I'm simpy amazed that this is what you took away from those same 8 pages.

Is that what you told yourself when you put me on your ignore list?

My nephew mined three blocks in a row with a laptop, but that's been a while.

Seriously, do you guys ever stop?  I've been hearing this same crap since 6 cents per bitcoin.

I suppose so.

No, there were other people around, just not many.  The genesis block was released the same day that bitcoin was offically announced on the cypherpunks list, IIRC.  There was no mining for any significant period of time before others from the cyperpunks forum downloaded and started the early client.  The evidence is in those first couple dozen block headers.  IIRC, it took about 3 days before someone other than Satoshi mined a block, but the decreasing interval between blocks makes it plain that others were already involved by that point.  There are timestamps in the headers, after all.

I'd wager that by the time we get to the 'fall' part; neither this forum nor any of the past or present posters in this thread will still be around to discuss it.

Bitcoin was not premined.  There were just not many people involved in the early mining that first year, so Satoshi's computer mined many due to a low degree of competition.  It's also evident that the minimum difficulty level was a great deal higher than what his own machine could do, since it took a while for the block interval to stablize at anything near 10 minutes.  In the beginning, blocks were hours apart.  That might be what you are mistaking as periods of stopped mining.  There were no periods of halted mining that I know of, although there was a bug that permitted a DDOS attack against the network that had to be fixed around 2010, and that DDOS delayed some blocks.  More recently, there was a bug that could have forced a blockchain split; and there might have been a halt in mining over that, I'm not sure.

If there were any critical feature that any alt-coin possessed that a majority of Bitcoin users could agree is an improvment; that feature would quickly be intergrated into Bitcoin's protocol in short order.  The fact is that we can't agree on such things, and that is why the alt-coins exist at all.

The very fact that Bitcoin is, by it's nature, completely detacted from any fiat currency is the long and short of it's inflation-hedge case.  Cans of soup are an inflation hedge.

Bitcoin's strong growth phase must eventually level off, but where that mature level actually might end up is anyone's guess.

He did make some good points, but I wonder if he thinks that anyone (himself?) actually knows what gold will be worth next year.

And he still seems completely ignorant of blockchain enforcable contracts.

In 2-3 years Chinese rice farmers will be pricing their harvest in bitcoins.

I don't have access to google translate at work.  Do you mind a summary?

While the inner workings and musing of the Chinese elite are always hidden, and their agenda strange, we do have some evidence that Bitcoin is being left alone by some implicit approval of the elites.  Namely that a couple of major Chinese websites, state operations one and all, are openly accepting bitcoins for services and products.  They even have a sound reason for doing it.  Since the Yaun isn't an international reserve currency, and they can't really snuff it out anyway, open support for Bitcoin could undermine the US dollar's hedgemony without actually breaking the currency for which they have so much invested, and perhaps give the Chinese an edge in some emerging markets for which there is evidence that bitcoins are being used as a System D (grey market) international currency.  Particularly in resource rich regions of Africa.  The Chinese elite aren't stupid, so they tend to know when something is inevitable; certainly better than most Western elected politicos. 

I know what you mean.  I dithered around with the price fluctuations, and by the time I finally bought some, the price had hit an all time high up until that point.  I couldn't believe that I had paid 6.5 cents EACH!  Of course, the price pulled back to under 6 cents almost immediately.  I had bought at the peak!  I was the fish!  It took weeks for the price to recover.  I'm sure glad I learned my lesson.  There were so many forum members predicting the Great Bitcoin Crash (tm) at that time, so I guess they had to be right!