I expect Bitcoin to do to currency what Bittorrent did to old media, what websites did to the newspaper industry, what VoIP did to landline phones and what email did to the postal service.

Was he then laughed off the stage?

My favorite part is the bit about the Federal Reserve employees taking the bitcoins you sent them back to their lab to try to print more of them.

Why is that a problem?

If the entire population of a country decides that an invasion isn't worth resisting, that's their choice and it should be respected. Why should they be forced to fund defense if they don't actually want it?

I don't know what that means. What's he actually going to do with his bitcoins?

Deflation is associated with depression because depressions always happen after an bubble created by the mass emission of unbacked credit, with all the resource misallocation this entails.

When all the bad debt eventually defaults the result is deflation while the effective monetary supply shrinks.

Blaming deflation for the pain experienced during depressions is a case of blaiming the symptom - it's like blaming the fact that you stopped drinking for causing your hangover instead of blaming the excessive drinking. There's nothing wrong with the natural deflation caused by increasing productivity in an economy with a fixed currency supply. The problem is speculative bubbles caused by excessive credit.

Bitcoin companies that are large enough to end up in the crosshairs of regulators need to comply with all the rules which make Bitcoin necessary in the first place or else risk being shut down.

It's a temporary problem that will go away when most people get their bitcoins via trade instead of buying them on an exchange and spend them instead of selling them for other currencies.

Nobody remembers what capital formation means any more - they are so accustomed to central planning via credit allocation that the idea that business expansion can be funded by allowing producers to retain their profits is completely alien to most economists.

Drought isn't helping anything, although you're right that the government intervention such as mandated corn ethenol production makes it worse.

She was correct in her choice of methodology, that ethics should be derived from logically consistent principles, but her derivation contained errors. Fortunately other people have improved on her work.

If you don't like Bitcoin's inflation algorithm you can always start using one of the other cryptocurrencies which have different policies.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=211410



It's understandable why the teachers are so desperate to keep their jobs and benefits. They will literally die without hundreds of dollars of pills every month to keep their self-induced diabetes at bay.

They have absolutely no skills that any employer would pay for, and even if they could get a job flipping burgers they'd never be able to afford their meds.

Public sector unions are going to devour everything in their path like a plague of locusts.

New suggestion: Leave everything the way it is except change the domain name to "bitcoindrama.org"

Rand did a lot of good work, but her ethical system runs afoul of David Hume's is-ought dichotomy. The "nature of man" can be used to derive description of how men do behave; it can not derive how men should behave.

There exists no abstract, collective "mankind" that can be used to derive principles either, as in saying, "that which is good for mankind is good for individuals". Only individuals exist to derive principles from so violence might be what's good for my survival, and it would be impossible in that case for Objectivism to explain why I shouldn't use violence.

I guess I should have given a more concrete example.

I'm fairly familari with Peru, having visited it extensively and I have (former) inlaws who live there. There are a lot of Peruvians who have disposable income, but no bank accounts or credit/debit cards. The country receives a substantial amount of remittances and the people there want imported goods, especially consumer electronics.

Right now few Peurvians know about Bitcoin, have any way of obtaining bitcoins, (and most importantly from your point of view) don't know about your customers and what they sell. Anything that closes the circle in a way that makes your customers obtain more sales makes your service more compelling to businesses that aren't your customers yet, not to mention the additional export opportunities that could be made available to Peruvian businesses.

I'm sure there are many other countries that could be used as an example, but that was what I meant by "selling into markets which were previously unavailable to them".

This is a duplicate thread.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=105657.0;all

That won't do much about the upcoming 1-3 years and in the long run global fertility rates are dropping and almost below the replacement level so the population problem is already being solved by the fact that when standards of living improve people choose to have less children.

I agree, but I can't do anything about it. All I can do is try to make sure I have as little reason to riot as possible when things get bad.