I'll not go dream on a place where everyone is "peaceful" because there's no such place and never will. I don't expect everyone to be peaceful just most people. If most people aren't peaceful then we're all fucked no matter what ideology we cling to. And aren't we? By day, specially since 9/11, you see Fascism moving from the Government sphere to the mentality sphere. People is getting fascist by the day, afraid of everything and up to give away their freedom out of fear of poltergeist attacks. Ghosts implanted on the mind of people preventing them from living! We'd never been further of your dream society. That is true. Notice that googles eric schmidt is touted as the next commerce secretary? If thats not fascism i dont know what is.... Fascism is single party political control over a heavily regulated marketplace. Okay, you're right, the US is now fascist. |
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If people wouldn't be becoming more fascist, they would be rioting by now... yet they don't. Nonsense. Do libertarians riot? No, socialists do; and fascists are socialists. |
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I'll not go dream on a place where everyone is "peaceful" because there's no such place and never will. I don't expect everyone to be peaceful just most people. If most people aren't peaceful then we're all fucked no matter what ideology we cling to. And aren't we? By day, specially since 9/11, you see Fascism moving from the Government sphere to the mentality sphere. People is getting fascist by the day, afraid of everything and up to give away their freedom out of fear of poltergeist attacks. Ghosts implanted on the mind of people preventing them from living! We'd never been further of your dream society. I think that might be just your perspectives. I don't see real people becoming more fascist, just government and media. |
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I can't wait to see it either, but I've actually read the book, and I'd say that the movie is bound to be better. T the book was okay, but I though it read like a screenplay anyway.
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Installed fine, and fired up at first, but after inputting the neccessary data, I now get...
"Sorry!
The application BitCoiner (process net.lwl.bitcoiner) has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again.
(Force Close)"
It doesn't seem to matter how many times I try.
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Then why doesn't Microsoft charge $10,000 or $100,000 for their operating system? If they truly have the market cornered then they could do that and they would do that. Obviously, they don't. The fact is, if they were to start charging absorbent prices people would switch to Apple or Linux. Just because everyone likes a certain brand at a certain price doesn't mean they have a monopoly. A monopoly implies you can charge whatever you like and people will pay it. Even though Microsoft dominates the desktop market the mere threat of competition is enough to keep them in line. They want to keep their dominant position and part of doing that is not charging ridiculous prices. You really need to read more about economics since it's clear that you're just regurgitating misinformation.
You have a very narrow definition of monopoly. Microsoft is a de-facto monopoly (or natural monopoly) on the desktop. Please note that there's nothing wrong with that. If you provide a service or product that is far superior to everything else out there and everyone buys it, you have a monopoly. How do you keep such a monopoly? By charging a little less than the "pain threshold" of switching to something else. Charging what the market will bear (before customers switch) is not the hallmark of a monopoly. In a true monopoly, customers cannot switch. Once upon a time, this may have been practically true with Microsoft, but it was a temporary monopoly permitted only because of copyright laws. It's obviously no longer true regardless. |
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It is only an assumption that the "mystery miner" is a single person or group. That's is actually unlikely.
Mystery miner was single person and his wallet is tracked already. Please search #bitcoin-dev logs for "MM" or "Mistery Miner". I don't have access to IRC at work, care to share? |
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The harder the hashing is, the more difficult it becomes for an attacker to overwelm the blockchain by brute force computation. Is it correct to restate "overwhelm the blockchain" as: The harder the hashing is, the more difficult it becomes for an attacker to create tons of Bitcoins, potentially exceeding the designed creation rate which difficulty regulates by brute force computation. Actually, no. It's not possible to "counterfit" bitcoins, nor to exceed the designed creation rate. That's a little oversimplified, but in practice it's impossible Or is there something else about the blockchain which could be overwhelmed by brute force? Thanks.
The blockchain could be overhelmed by any attacker that can outhash the whole of the honest network, and for as long as the attacker is willing to keep it up, the attacker could (under the right conditions) rewrite the most recent block or prevent transactions from being processed. To rewrite farther back into the blockchain history requires significantly more hashing power than the whole of the honest network. To rewrite as far back as the 100 block requirement to spend 'new' coins would require orders of magnitude more power than the whole of the honest network. Which is why the system doesn't let new block rewards be spent until they are 100 blocks deep. If such an attack were to occur, the most recent blocks might get overwritten and their rewards taken by the attacker, and teh attacker would be able to retake coins that he recently owned and spent; but at least the number of people affected would be limited to very few and the rest of the network would recover without much fuss. However, anyone with that much hashing power is better off to hash honestly for the future block rewards than try to reverse recent ones to take rewards away from honest miners. And if this is ever done, the addresses of the attacker would be widely known, because the evidence would be right there in the blockchain. |
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If someone abandons their pets in your neighborhood, is that an un-accounted-for cost that you must bear?
How does that affect me? Let's say it's a thousand stray dogs. And they might bite you, or eat your cat. Negative externality? Sure. But they are just as likely to eat each other, and after I shoot the first one, the survivors are going to be very wary of me. Anyway, why would that be an issue? |
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Kinda scary to think there is a single person or group with so much power over the Bitcoin economy...
It is only an assumption that the "mystery miner" is a single person or group. That's is actually unlikely. More likely is that what we attribute to intentional action is a statistical outlier, and not any specific event. Even if it is an event, there may be a trigger causing many different users to jump in at the same time, creating the illusion of a single powerful group. Perhaps more than one person has already hacked the mining code to track the price/difficulty ratio, and only burn clock cycles if the ratio is above a certain value. I'm not a coder, but compared to the complexity of the miners themselves, hacking the client to cycle generation on and off based on a simple calculation should be trivial. I just wish whoever has done it would release their code. |
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Okay well if you want to use "rent seeking" to mean something besides seeking rent then rent requires capital and interest is not "rent seeking".
I'm using the term in the economic context, not the common usage. |
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I was under the impression that 'rent-seeking' in the pejorative essentially meant businesses using various means (usually the state) to try to subvert the market's tendency to drive profits to 0, essentially allowing them to use there market position to receive a continuous stream of profit rather than receiving profit based on innovation.
That's one way to look at it. Rent seeking is the pursuit of any market advantage via government influences. |
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Which is one reason I'm not inclined to run out to buy a new GPU. I'm not a gamer, so have little additional reason to upgrade. However, if a relatively cheap dedicated mining card is developed, I'd be all over it. |
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Seems pretty simple to me, so I'm not sure what you don't understand.
If someone abandons their pets in your neighborhood, is that an un-accounted-for cost that you must bear?
How does that affect me? |
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Yes it does. Cruel as that might be.
Good, now please answer this question. "What about stray dogs? Are those a negative externality?" I don't understand the question. |
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I can be evicted by the owner of any owned property. If you're on my property and refuse to leave after being asked, you're trespassing. You're the aggressor, not me. What if you are a child and the owner is your family? Still apply? Yes it does. Cruel as that might be. Do I smell straw burning? |
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In-person DNA testing. I wonder whether the energy costs of doing that would be more than the energy costs of mining 21 million Bitcoins.
Put ink on everyones finger. What about the cost of production of that much ink? |
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I can't corner a market through competition? Really? Tell that to Microsoft. They have what, 95% of the market?
Microsoft has 95% of the desktop market, not the software market, nor even the operating system market. Once upon a time, MS was a market maker in software, but if they were ever really a monopoly it was one founded upon copyrights, which is a government supported monopoly by definition. Microsoft is still a major player, but is no longer the only market maker. Linux is the big dog now. Everyone uses Linux, whether you know it or not. The vast majority of Internet servers, smartphones and embedded devices (such as Tivo) are Linux devices.
If we disregard all the violence caused by alcohol you mean? No, they don't generally do that. Alcohol isn't addictive the way crack-cocaine is either.
Nicotine is, however. We don't see people knocking over convience stores for a nic-fit, either. |
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You can divide labor when being self employed. You hire out services to someone else outside of your skillset.
That's just another form of employer/employee relationship. Or you form a co-op, which is just a really big form of self-employment.
And so is this. |
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If a program like this doesn't already exist then I might create one. It depends if I can even think of a way to do it that wouldn't be completely futile.
If you can think of some way that it wouldn't be futile, then Bitcoin is in trouble. |
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