Then don't sell them if you believe they are undervalued.
If lots of people think like that it means that a large amount of bitcoins that people really want to sell is piling up. When you give up waiting the price will crash. Price will collapse and 0 - 2016 blocks later so will difficulty. Unless BTC is deposed from some other inherent flaw in the long run this will only make mining more attractive to those of us who think BTC has a future in its own right. More likely the efficient will crowd out the inefficient as gigahash miners become tera and peta hash miners. Yes, because there's no limit to how much electricity a residence can use.  Seriously, though, there's a limit to how much a residence can draw from the power company. Transformers in your neighborhood can only handle so much, etc. Remember, electric company engineers assume a transformer will be for 20 RESIDENCES, not businesses or industry. Then there's the whole "use more than 90 KWh a day and we can bust your door down, and fine you $2,000 EVEN IF WE FIND NO POT". I realize profit is profit, but nevertheless it's a BIG STEP to go out and rent office space for an operation. Even if it were profitable to do so, only 1 out of 100 people (if that) would actually do it. Not everyone is willing to take this to the Nth degree. That's what I meant, not everyone is willing to take it to the Nth degree but some folks are. They will be the ones building ASICs, installing solar, living next to the plant or whatever they find economical. They will be fewer than the current crowd but operate most of the capacity. |
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LOL at your pic, I assume you do not support the idea that Anarchy is order.
Very little, except that it would make for some form of transaction roll-back for bitcoin built into it. Also if such an idea were implemented with a block chain approach we might as well all hash the same thing.
It might also embed some additional uses into bitcoin that currently rely on external implementations.
Distributed exchanges would be one step closer to bitcoin itself, removing some of the weaknesses of centralized exchanges.
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According to those graphs it looks like difficulty is now slightly above mining interest. If there are no more price spikes I suspect the next difficulty might be less than 10%(  ) when the next adjustment comes around. |
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The laws of quantum mechanics provide a complete probabilistic account of the motion of particles regardless of whether or not free will exists. Physicist Steven Hawking supports this idea in his book, The Grand Design. He says that humans are therefore complicated biological machines. Hawking adds that although our behavior is impossible to predict perfectly in practice, "free will is just an illusion."
I don't care what Hawking BELIEVES, just what he scientifically discovers. Do we live in a deterministic and causal world or not? We don't know because of Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Yes we have a complete probabilistic account of the motion of particles regardless of whether or not free will exists, that's the whole point: what we have is a probabilistic approach to reality; we don't know the inner works of particles, we just know probability. So still we don't know if our world is deterministic and causal and therefore we don't know whether fate or free will (under the actual definition) exists. Read the Black Swan yet? Great book (has nothing to do with the movie) Some things are simply beyond our understanding and the things we will never understand infinitely outnumber all the things we will ever know squared. We don't even know what we might or might not be able to understand. |
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Don't underestimate the "common" people. Early adopters of new internet technologies are not always who we think they are. see: http://www.economist.com/node/9249302?story_id=9249302It is migrants, rather than geeks, who have emerged as the “most aggressive” adopters of new communications tools
Migrants were doing videoconferencing 5 years before everyone else. Migrants will also be the first large group to adopt bitcoin IMO, not because they find it sexy but out of necessity. Insightful |
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Hi gents,
Sorry if this has been posted here before but I just had to get it out of my head. Moderators please move if this is the wrong board.
I've been thinking about a contract/payment enforcement mechanism that uses the block chain and independent arbitrators to ensure that parties are paid and happy with their transactions.
Basically it boils down to:
Party A sells good or service to B for some price. Party A and B decide beforehand on an arbitrator C, who they both must approve to settle the dispute if either one is unhappy with the transaction. When B pays A he does so using a special transaction that contains the details of the transaction along with the appointed arbitrator C and perhaps an arbitration fee (freewill equal amount from both A and B) that will be paid out if the transaction needs arbitration and some smaller fee if it does not. The bitcoins are transferred to a special account that only C can control if A and/or B are unhappy and then only to have the funds transferred to either A or B in some distribution.
Upon conclusion of the transaction both A and B generate another "transaction" saying whether they were happy or not with the previous one. If both were happy then the funds clear to A and C gets the lesser of the two arbitration fees. If B is unhappy and A has no objections then the value of the original transaction is sent back to B and C gets the arbitration fee.
If A and B are unhappy and a dispute arises they can both contact C who can assess the situation and effects a transaction in either B or A's favour or some split of the monies between them. In this case the system generates a transaction or two from C that looks like a payment from the special account to A or B (or both in some distribution). Now C gets the full arbitration fee.
These types of transactions should be able to be contained in the same block chain if I understand the process correctly. This also allows some measure of voluntary reversibility of bitcoin transactions that someone could submit to if they choose. Other transaction would continue as normal.
A, B and C could remain completely anonymous if they chose existing only as accounts, perhaps with conflict ratings attached to them. Contact information could be included in the original contract transaction. Perhaps also an expiry date could be set on the contract transaction that if resolution is not found within a certain period then the funds are split in some fashion among A and B, with C waiving their fee.
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I voted before  Vote early vote often citizen. |
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Then don't sell them if you believe they are undervalued.
If lots of people think like that it means that a large amount of bitcoins that people really want to sell is piling up. When you give up waiting the price will crash. Indeed. Bitcoin's value requires a constant infusion of new market participants. If people become disillusioned with mining and bitcoin fails to find a real use, the hoarders waiting for a better price will be waiting for Godot. If enough people come to the conclusion that 'this is as good as it gets' in regards to BTC's price, it's a downward spiral from there. Sellers attract more sellers as BTCs are dumped onto fewer and fewer buyers. Speculators may cherish this buying opportunity but there comes a time when even the strongest believer in a commodity must wonder if they're going to be stuck holding the bag. Price will collapse and 0 - 2016 blocks later so will difficulty. Unless BTC is deposed from some other inherent flaw in the long run this will only make mining more attractive to those of us who think BTC has a future in its own right. More likely the efficient will crowd out the inefficient as gigahash miners become tera and peta hash miners. |
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Progress occurs in spite of the monetary system, not because of it. Trade secrets, patents, copyright and a corrupt legislative and legal system work to inhibit the free flow of ideas, cooperation and faster progress. We are stuck with medieval institutions and methodologies that have been around for centuries despite our enormous advancements in productivity and capability. Servicing the profit motive is no way to make things better for people. If we each understood that the individual does better when all of society does better, then personal profit would not be rewarded as much as it is now.
Economic data over the last 300 years disagrees with you. We have had incredible growth in options, daily income, caloric intake, you name it. Individuals might do better when they take society into consideration but society definitely does better if it allows individual freedom. I am also against the current forms of intellectual property and I agree 100% that the current legal framework does little but protect established interests. Pricing is however not part of the problem but part of the solution. If you do not allow both freedom and sound money then resources will be miss-allocated in most shocking ways. There is no free will. Your actions, thoughts and ideas are limited to the experiences and environment you have developed in. You will continue your actions until you experience the consequences of them. That is why our main focus as an movement is making people aware that there are alternatives and that we can choose a better way of life. Our model has nothing in common with historical failed experiments in social control.
I know you believe this but again, my question is the same. Will you force me or anyone else or approve of force against someone so that they co-operate with the plan if a version of the Venus project ever takes off or will all work be 100% voluntary? |
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Now, if only we can trigger this...
**** you. I doubt what I would make off of bitcoin would be enough to support all the people I care about who would suddenly be thrown in the poor house. It's not so easy to enjoy your wealth when everyone else is suffering. Sure, I told them about bitcoin, but I can't really blame them for being risk adverse during such uncertain times. I understand your concern. What I have concluded though is that the biggest beneficiaries outside of the Arab world will be the American public. America has one of the healthiest and wealthiest of all economies but it is being strangled by the actions of the federal government. Most of that debt they talk about is owed to American citizens (50% or so at my last count) and that is only the official debt, if you add Social Security and the medical programs the total debt is something like 95% to the American public. They are funding themselves and the programs off of other Americans and to some extent funding it by devaluing the overseas dollars. Once this ends the US will have far more internal resources available than it currently has and will be able to rid itself of several hurtful monopolies. Most notably the money monopoly enforced by the fed. The federal government is not the people of America, it's well being is not necessarily yours. If you can rid yourselves peacefully and orderly of the sections of your government that have been usurped for special interests and oligarchies you should be fine. Another thing to keep in mind is that it has already happened. Like a driver speeding to the edge of a cliff there was a line on the road where if he applied the breaks he would have been fine, that line has been crossed long ago. There were in fact several such lines. The first was the bankruptcy of Social Security and the medical programs. That happened quite some time ago, maybe even 30 years. Then there was the collapse of the dollar. That probably happened 10 years ago. Even if you get someone like Ron Paul, who in my opinion is the only man who even understands the problem, the entire monetary system will need to be overhauled. Ron Paul proposes lifting the restrictions on alternative forms of currency to let free market money emerge. Something like bitcoin would be ideal for this. After the crash, if America does not turn its military might in on its own citizens, I think there will be a very strong recovery. The other alternative, and this is the really terrifying bit, is that America is choked more and more over the next decade and supranational organizations (like the IMF through SDRs) prolong a collapse by shifting the costs to the rest of the world. This would keep the federal government in power for much longer and be much worse for the US and the world. |
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Such use would have been developed over time with tradition being the enforcement mechanism. Any sufficiently advanced society is held together by tradition, the propagation of the dominant culture. Once again, its value is based on opinion, as opposed to the obvious value of necessary resources, animals, food and manufacturing material. Certainly its value as a currency is obvious, but beyond that it would be subject to all the forces that affect currency. Group A might have a different opinion about the worth of gold since they live in an area with far more of it than group B. The enforcement mechanism in this case is force of violence if the groups do not come to an agreement.
That is one of the fascinating things about free will trades. Neither party would engage in it if they thought they would be worse off. Hence the only logical conclusion is that both parties are better off after these exchanges. In our example war would not be a necessary outcome, since if the price was not acceptable to the one party they would simply not engage in it. Prices are the result of perceptions and those perceptions guide people to decide what projects to tackle, what work to accept or reject and what products to buy. It indicates roughly to them what effort they are supposed to expend to get what they want. Since they can only get what they want by giving others what they want, this is how society is built economically and progresses. It is what drives innovation and is responsible for all the computer based technological advancement in the past 40 years. Speeds double every year due to profit seeking, not academic science. Engineers and scientists are hired to solve the problem of increasing computer capacities and apply their skill set to that problem. This in turn leads them to discover that which would have laid undiscovered had it not been for an economic price motivation. So both economic prosperity and science are furthered. To cut out one is to cut out both, progress will completely stop. There are no rights. My reaction to your perceived wasteful behavior depends entirely on my previous experiences in the environment that sustained me. If I have had a limited education and lacked the skills or abilities necessary to engage you with different and possibly better ideas about resource management, then I might use force as my only option. If you lack the education or critical thinking skills to understand that my ideas are better, or have an aberrant value set that doesn't allow you to understand the consequences, and I am unwilling or unable to use force to alter your behavior, then we both suffer for your wasteful actions, assuming that they do in fact lead to negative outcomes. I know that is not a simple answer, but it is necessary to point out the inadequacy of your question.
Here is what it boils down to. If you perceive my actions as wasteful and I refuse to act differently out of my own free will, you must either suffer the collapse of your model or resort to central planning to get me to act differently. If I do not submit to the central plan, then again you must either suffer the collapse of your model (since people are acting "wastefully" and not co-operating) or you must somehow force me to do it. Historically this is what has happened to communist countries, if the absence of free will action, and being unwilling to suffer the collapse of their model, communist governments have resorted to forcing their populous as gunpoint to execute the central plan. Once this forcing mechanism is in place things deteriorate rapidly as people are no longer able to make their own subjective decisions about what is good for them and are told to continually submit to some "authority" on the matter. |
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There is an upside to the hoarding though. I hoard because I believe there will be a market for BTC in the future and that the USD (or in my case ZAR) price will also be much higher than it is today. Without a market the exchange rate will be very little. However just acting as a means to transport money across jurisdictions BTC's current exchange rate it nowhere near where it is now.
Remember hoarding drives up the price either through bidding it by market action or through not bidding it down when you sell it into the market. This makes it more attractive to a larger group of people. Lets face it that $16.60 for a BTC is what got a lot people interested. The higher that number goes the more interested people will be. At present there is only about $110 million worth of BTC, that is not nearly enough to get someone like Amazon on board. Given if Amazon got on board the price would definitely adjust upwards to allow them to participate.
During hyperinflation something interesting happens. Sound currency is first hoarded, this sometimes takes years. Then once a sufficient quantity of the sound currency is in private hands, then the unsound currency is replaced in day to day trade. A similar thing might happen with bitcoin, once enough of it at a high enough price is in the hands of enough people, trade will take off rapidly and naturally.
Taken from an investor's perspective, you will only want to go through the bother of building a BTC business if you are sure you can make more money than a normal business. Else why bother? If the answer is; because BTC has some inherent philosophical value and deserves an economy, then it is too soon to do so.
A while back I encountered the Talent Exchange (interest free, debt based, online currency). They have quite a large following in the city of Cape town. To the point where I've heard of people living exclusively in the Talent economy. Still that market was only about $1million worth of trades in 2009, and that after years of building it.
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If we resort to assassination markets, are we not just warring statists? Sorry, bad bit of writing there. If we resort to assassination markets, are not just warring statist? Governments and the rich already have the means to assassinate people. Assassination markets would just even the playing field. IMO. It would even the playing field. However what will emerge as victorious will just be another beast with a "might is right" approach. If we sentence people to death then there needs to be a just justice system also. Things like 6 million dead Iraqis since 1990 might constitute such a judgement on large groups of the federal government but I'm very happy that is not my job to decide. |
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I've been following this for almost 3 years now. Here's how I think it will play out;
They are saying this not because they are really considering gold or anything else, they are saying this since even they are beginning to think you cannot prop a government up with massive debt forever. They realize the dollar will begin to lose value too rapidly for their liking.
As an alternative our owner class seems to be pushing the SDR issued by the IMF. This effectively makes the IMF (one of) the most powerful institution on the planet. They may now borrow their own debt based currency to countries to bail them out. The SDR is already operational and many international business people already request quotes in SDR. Whether they think it's time is that soon I don't know but it is happening. So if the dollar were to suddenly begin to lose value (100% per year sort of losses) then the SDR can simply fill the void.
If you believe in the one world government talk then the above should scare you. Personally I believe there are people trying to accomplish this but I don't think they are all knowing and all powerful. I think their own bad economics and ethics will catch up with them. They also don't take big rapid unexpected changes into consideration. They, or the people like Fed chairman Ben Bernanke they appoint, do not understand black swans.
What I suspect will happen is that the dollar will crash in an unbelievably short period. There are several things that could trigger this but the end result is a massive sellback of externally held dollars to the Americans. There will probably be another debt panic before this can happen, IE there will be a run on treasuries or a debt collapse in the US banking system. In response the Fed will prop up the system with unheard of amounts of money and vacuum up the treasuries or prevent deflationary collapse (not the same as deflation). This might hold things for a while but once those dollars are traded there will be a roller coaster like anticipation, then acceleration, then total plummet in the value of the dollar.
They Weimar hyperinflation took 4 years to draw to a close but I suspect this time it will be much, much faster thanks to the amount of information that is available to the public through the internet. Something, gold, silver, bitcoin will be identified as a sound alternative to the dollar and news will spread like wildfire, further accelerating the demise of the dollar. Hopefully for the Americans they will all trade their dollars back to the local, state and federal government for whatever services those entities still provide at that point.
Remember inflation is the effect of issuing new currency into an economy, there is a lot you can issue before this becomes a problem, you could probably quadruple it in one year and not cause a panic. Hyperinflation is when you have a drastic loss in confidence in the future purchasing power of a currency as well as a loss of confidence in the issuer of the currency. The currency then becomes a hot potato, no one wants to hold it, the velocity picks up and prices skyrocket.
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If we resort to assassination markets, are not just warring statist?
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As I said earlier, money was emergent as was societal structures that developed enforcement mechanisms also. Barter had been dominant due to the simple and local nature of trading and it did not require a third party to enforce arbitrary values. Money can only exist when the dominant culture enforces arbitrary and opinion based values on others. But as with many emergent behaviors and technologies, they give way to newer and better ones.
Well here I disagree because two societies could trade with gold because both realised it served as a good medium of exchange. No central enforcement was necessary. Both parties were willing to accept it, both recognized it as being in their best interest. This is important since they had an independent yard stick by which they could measure the worth of their production and the production of others. With sound money you can only enrich yourself if you produce what others need and are willing to trade for. There are no "rights". You behave and act in accordance with the dominant culture and society that you have developed in. Your ability to cause positive or negative outcomes depend on what is tolerated, incentivised and punished by your environment. Your choice to be wasteful is predicated on what your environment allows for.
That is not what I asked. Do I have the right to misspend what I've produced? Or rather, do you have the right to force me to spend or produce in a fashion you deem better than my own judgement, even if you are correct? |
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When I first read the title of this post, I was like hell ya.
Then I read the contents. Sigh.
Aah violence. Is there no ill that more legislation, kidnapping and murder cannot fix? ;-) |
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