Since you're such an expert on these things perhaps you can explain why prices would fall in a Bitcoin economy and whether this would more closely resemble the prosperity situation or the depression situation? While you're at it, can you explain the mechanism that makes falling prices good in some situations and bad in other situations?

There is a type of person who desperately wants a path to easy wealth. This person doesn't want to start a business, invent something, or develop a marketable skill - they just want to "invest" in the right thing and have it explode in value so they can cash out. The kind of person I'm talking about is so desperate they have no problem suspending disbelief if somebody comes by telling them what they want to hear regardless of how warning signs are apparent.

Many of these kinds of people are attracted to alternative currencies and precious metals, and wherever they go they attract scammers like chum attracts sharks.

"I'm so sick of evidence constantly contradicting my beliefs. Can't you people stop replying on empericism and just believe me in spite of all proof to the contrary?"

Deflation is terrible - that's why the computer (and consumer industry in general) is doing so badly compared to the rest of the economy because of the enormous deflation in electronics.

Nobody buys anything because there will always be something better in six months and it's impossible for any company in the sector to make a profit.

Deflation is a nightmare. Consumers and produders alike are much better served by constant price inflation. The healthcare and higher education industries understand this which is why people are so much more satisfied with the products of those industries than they are with electronics.

My decision to buy or not buy more copies of Bitcoin Magazine will depend only on how much I like #2 and #3 when they finally arrive.

In the original bet thread Matthew offered up his own reputation as collateral.


His reputation is his own to enhance or squander, so if he decides to cheapen it I'm going to honor his choice.

You are an metaphor hero.

When people who aren't deliberately trolling describe volentarism as being violent it's typically because they recognize the inherent brutality of modern society but have to project it onto "anarchy" for psychological reasons.

What we have now is lawlessness and the rule of organized crime. The violence that people fear so much when you talk about a stateless society is the violence they live in fear of every day but can't/won't acknowledge.

Yet nobody will answer his very simple question. The only responses have been evasions, smokescreens, and personal attacks.

I don't live very far from McKinney so it would be very easy for me to drive over there and investigate some of the addresses that have been floating around, but since I never put any money into his scheme I don't really have any reason to.

I don't think Bitcoin needs a slogan any more than a technology like SATA needs a slogan.

If a company needs to promote Bitcoin to get customers instead of promoting what they can do which their non Bitcoin-using competators can't that actually doesn't reflect well on the premise that Bitcoin is a disruptive technology which enables new business opportunities.

The majority of people don't care about the underlying technology as an end to itself - they care about what the technology can do for them. So a payment processor should advertise that it offers risk-free, instant payments from customers located anywhere in the world because that's what people who are selling things online care about. A gambling site can advertise based on its payout ratios, provable fairness, and the ability for people anywhere in the world to participate regardless of exclusionary rules set up by local cartels, because that's what gamblers care about.

Bitcoin itself hardly needs to be mentioned at all.

They can't - their actuarial projections required 7% annual returns forever in order to fund the promised benefits. Now to make up for the losses they have to go chasing returns even higher than 7%. It will never work but they and a lot of other public sector pensions are going to keep playing the game until they blow up.

I never claimed they were competent, just that they were reacting to political pressure.

CALPERS is still bankrupt but by getting the primary dealers to prop up the stock market with money borrowed from the Fed the current crop of politicians got at least one extra election cycle before the cash flow dries up.

They did. The housing bubble was the mechanism for the 2000 crash and the various programs which have brought the stock market back up since the 2009 low were how they did it this time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/opinion/dubya-s-double-dip.html

The stock market is being propped up with printed money to save the public sector pension funds primarily and the 401k accounts of the baby boomers secondarily. It's all about political pull and buying votes.

Who do I talk to about never receiving issues 2 and 3 that I bought in June?

Since the fraud drives the up price there would be less of it in a free market because there would be no laws forcing people to buy. Mandatory insurance laws effectively subsidize the fraud.

The biggest concern I have with using a brain wallet is chance of forgetting the passphrase.

In order to get high entropy you needs a unique phrase that does not appear anywhere in media, literature or popular culture. How easy is that to remember for long periods of time, especially if you don't compromise security by writing it down? Surely no one would use a brain wallet for addresses which they frequently withdraw from, so how would one remember a random set of words accurately across a period of years?