Completely backwards, coins depends on block-chain, you confuse 'for-profit-prof-of-work-mining' with the block-chain.

The OP's bafflement is like an Painter wondering why a Bank would want to have Paper when they aren't drawing pictures on it.  Banks want verified transactions that 3rd party or man-in-the-middle can't spoof, they do not want is to create their own money, and do NOT want to 'mine' aka expend expend ludicrous computer resources to verify transactions, which is great because public private key Cryptography lets you do that.

No one should have expected anything else.

The design of Bitcoin (deflationary, finite eternal supply cap) has within it a political ideology (Libertarianism at least as that term is used in the US), and the creator, earliest adopters and most vocal enthusiasts for it have always been incredibly vocal about this ideology and literally offer Bitcoin as a kind of sacrament to that ideology.

It is also undeniable that Bitcoin community is rotten to the core, full of scammers, parasites, get-rich-quick types, ponzi runners and pyramid schemers, this is the communities opinion of itself.  The old saying is true the fish rots from the head down, and the head of Bitcoin is Libertarian ideology, a fundamentally immoral and rotten ideology.

Bitcoin is simply a way to get the currently widely dispersed Libertarians to interact with each other, the result is not unlike what would result from air-dropping Libertarians onto an uninhabited island, the result is literally a dystopia on par with classics such as Animal Farm and Brave New World, only the physical separation provided by the internet and the fact all these people are still embedded in normal society keeps them from literally ended up in Lord of the Flies cannibalism.

Nothing else was ever possible, the community is not some random agglomeration of people who were bad by random chance.  Any institution attracts the kind of people it deserves, people who embody the institutions values.  To think otherwise is like claiming Mother Teresa had equal probability of becoming a Nun or a Nazi prison guard.

Newly minted coins are all that's needed to crash the market.  The BTC community needs to CONTINUALLY spend more then a million dollars a DAY to support the current price, they can not simple HODL the price up because thouse miners need to have their costs covered.

igorr is just reiterating the model I developed almost a year ago, that revolutions in mining tech cause temporary hyper profitability in mining and huge hype based speculative bubbles in which miners hoard their coins rather then sell them.  Eventually miners become unprofitable and must sell daily coin production to meet their electricity costs and the market grinds down until the daily production can be fully absorbed by the BTC loyalists.

More like 1% is being bid up by the small-fry, the amount of coin on exchanges has been measured in days or weeks worth of mining for some time now.  The market-cap numbers are meaningless in such a shallow market, people would be wiser to watch the USD depth on all exchanges and divided that by all outstanding coin to get a reasonable valuation.

The analogy I like to make is that the 'block-chain-protocol' was like inventing the postal-service at the turn of the 18th century.  It was a massive improvement over everyone hiring a courier to deliver things.  As a technology it is a great.

But the 'Currency regime of BitCoin' that is built on top of all that tech was like inventing the first chain-letter-pyramid, you know the 'send me a dollar and send 5 copies of this letter too your friends' kind of stuff.  The postal system makes chain-letters possible but chain-letters are a terrible waste of that platform.

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly:
 “I seek BitCoin! I seek BitCoin!”

BTW TC, someone over at Freicoin is also looking to do a universal income experiment also, again as a voluntary layer onto of the coin, you may wish to contact him.

http://freicoin.freeforums.org/application-to-make-an-freicoin-basic-income-experiment-t701.html

This is largely the motivation behind Freicoin which implements 'Demurrage' the technical term for the decline TCraver described, reducing interest rates to zero is the primary goal and reduced hoarding is a means to that end.  I don't believe loaning normal 'hard' money even for productive investments in adequate because interest rates act as a floor for what IS a profitable investment.  Demurrage is designed to cancel the liquidity value of money and it is this liquidity value with gives rise to interest.

I also like the idea of universal ownership of dividend paying stock as a means of universal income and suggested something similar in another thread.

Back on topic

Yes proudhon was right, all other bears are false-prophets!

Mint:  Your links are just for more anti-socialism political screeds similar to what your stating, no actual evidence that refutes AGW is presented.

zerk has it backwards, for most of the big run up in exchange rates the miners were holding and counting their paper-gains, when they lose profitability it will force them to START selling their newly produced coins to pay ongoing operating costs.  Coin flows into exchanges will rise not fall and exchange rates will fall not rise.  This is what happened the last time miners over-invested in the GPU era, and realized they couldn't meet ROI or even cover operating costs.

Yes it would take only about 6 days worth of BTC mining being sold to completely empty the BitStamp exchanges of USD (Gox because of lower price and higher USD would take 1 month).

People need to understand that BTC 'market-cap' of BILLIONS is an illusion created by hoarding 99% of the supply and keeping a mere ~20K (0.1% of Total) coins on exchanges to be offered in exchange for USD.  This gives us an absurdly shallow and volatile market, you hardly even need to be a 'whale' anymore to move the price.

A 'safe' valuation for a BTC is the 'total-supply' that everyone loves to talk about divided by total offered dollars, which would give us a value of around $3.50 right now if you total all the USD on all exchanges, round up to $5 even for all the Euro and Yuan markets too.  That's a valuation that people could feel confident in not losing value at due to this kind of 'bank-run'.

In response to Mint directly,

Your first link was nothing more then a Google search for 'Global warming Hoax', If you have specific sources you want me to read link them but I am not going to trawl through a goggle search doing your work for you.

You then made reference to the well know 'petition' with so many thousands of PhD's and such, I presume you are referring to the infamous 'Oregon Petition' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition a well documented piece of total Bullshit as at best something like ~100 people (signatories are nearly impossible to verify) had any expertise in Climate science, not to mention it is now decades out of date.

Lastly why you would dredge up on older Thread now is rather odd.  It is sounding to me like an attempt to imply that I am unreasonably 'challenging' you.  In that thread you clearly did make several errors that I corrected, and then when I misunderstood one of your points I admitted it forthrightly.  I see nothing their that impinges upon me as an honest debater.

I never denied falsifiability as a basis for science, I am fully in agreement with Karl Popper as blax4 describes it.  As a theory AGW clearly passes the test of falsifiability being a theory about a very real physical object with measurable physical properties, we test it ever day as we observe the warming trend and observe the Climates interaction with Carbon-Dioxide that we know is man-made.

But remember Popper when describing falsifiability makes it a condition for us to call a theory scientific, he dose not call on us to REJECT every theory that HAS been falsified.  Simply finding 1 incorrect prediction dose not cause us to throw out an entire theory as garbage and revert to a state of theoretical agnosticism.  Every theory will have it's bumps and wart and will and should be challenged with falsification attempts, if a new theory comes along which can explain the warts on the old theory it rapidly becomes the consensus.  The normal course of science is to have two theories which each fail and succeed in some major way until some new observation definitively puts one theory in the lead but the lead theory will usually still have warts.  The participial-wave problem in quantum-mechanics is a classic example, the current 'duality' is just a kind of scientific truce waiting for a better theory, so while we KNOW that particle and wave descriptions are wrong we do not throw up our hands and say we know nothing, we work with what we have.

Mint might be confusing 'experiment' with 'controlled and repeatable laboratory experiment' which is understandable, we can not do a laboratory experiment on the Earths climate as their is only one in existence and it's being used.  Climate Science is much like Astronomy in this sense, we can't put the heavens into a test tube and run repeatable experiments on it, but in both cases we can make OBSERVATIONS, and it is observation that provides falsification, laboratory experiments are just one (highly trustworthy) form of observation but inability to experiment dose not rule out a field as science.

Mint might also have meant that AGW is unfalsifiable due to his belief that their is some cabal of socialists which are preventing this falsification from being communicated to scientists or from scientists to the public.  This is richly Ironic because their is nothing LESS falsifiable then this kind of conspiratorial thinking, how could we prove that no sinister shadowy group of people are not pulling all the strings behind the scenes.  In the milder form of this argument you might say that is it just institutional dogma and inertia among climate scientists that prevents the recognition of failed predictions and the acceptance of some better theory.  This is about equivalent to what I believe is happening around the Big-Bang, the theory is held up as 'solid' when in fact is has lots of failed predictions.  But their is no remotely solid counter-theory for the BB so even I can't claim that anyone is 'wrong' to believe the BB, simply that confidence is too high and the search for and respect for alternatives is too low.

Climate literature doesn't attempt to answer question A because that is the realm of expertise of Agronomists and Engineers.  The climate science can tell us things like the frequency and severity of droughts, floods and storms (all increasing).  Agronomists would translate that change into crop yield changes and Engineers could translate it into storm damage amounts, they could also tell us if their are benefits that balance these costs.

Question B is a bit ironic because 'dealing with it later' WAS the choice made in the 70's our NOW was their Future, largely they made investments in new forms of energy and made some token energy-efficiency improvements.  While more could have been done I think it is fairly obvious in hindsight that at that time carbon-free energy sources (excluding Nuclear) were simply not cheap enough to solve the problem cost-effectively, so the choice to delay direct action and instead invest in technology was correct in the past.  

The question now is, is now the time to put the tech into practice, naturally tech will get better in the future and we could delay action indefinitely if this were our only metric to judge by.  I think a credible case can now be made that acting now will ultimately be less costly, but this is certainly a weaker case then the case for APGW as a scientific conclusion.  A broad economic cost-benefit analysis is more complex then climate science, as it by nature includes all the climate science in it along with a lot of additional thinking that is economic and speculation on roll-out and replacement costs of infrastructure.  

It is perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of that wider analysis because engineers are routinely wrong by BIG amounts when estimating costs for NORMAL things like a mere road, and with rapidly advancing technology they are likely to be very wrong, and could be wrong on either the high or the low side.  We also have to consider that nearly all these engineers are working for someone who wants to sell energy, either carbon based or carbon free, and they all have financial incentives to exaggerate because no matter what happens their is going to be a LOT of money expended in the purchase of Energy in the future.  

So long as we are having an honest debate in a cost-benefit frame work rather then throwing around crank accusations of fraud, conspiracy and the like that are so obviously motivated by the clash between a global problem and an anti-authoritarian belief systems.  In the past when people with anti-authoritarian views have come to the table with solid response ideas like carbon-taxation which would allow markets maximum freedom to find a lowest cost solution these ideas have been wholeheartedly embraced by the environmentalist side of the debate so their is a history of prudence that can and should be built upon.

Mint your really sounding like a crank now, the supposed incriminating e-mail's show no such thing and it takes intentional intellectual dishonesty to perceive them that way.

Cube's argument that anthropogenic global-warming may be turning into a dogma among climate scientists has a point, and it would be unhealthy for it to be so as any dogma in science would be.  But this is not sufficient reason for a lay person to become 'undecided' as if this were a coin-flip issue, a theory becomes scientific dogma  because it has won in the scientific debate at some point in the past, a debate that was won without the benefit of being the existing dogma.  We should doubt the Dogma when it starts failing to make accurate predictions, or if the evidence that was the original deciding factor comes into doubt, but neither of these things has occurred.  

What CC references is an alternative explanation involving the Sun, the Sun has not been recently discovered and scientists rejected it as an explanation decades ago before any dogma was established and before the whole issue became so politicized.  The burden of proof is on opponents of APGW to both disprove APGW AND provide a better theory that predicts things that APGW fails to predict accurately.  But until their are serious incorrect predictions in current theory no Lay Person would be justified in having more then the barest of skepticism.

A good example of a scientific dogma that people SHOULD be in doubt of is the Big-Bang, the theory has failed numerous times to predict our next set of telescopic observations, each failure has resulted in another 'patch' addition to the theory such as inflation, dark-matter, and most recently dark-energy.  Yet the dogma is strongly enforced because of career inertia, the control of the paper-review process and even the allocation of the limited telescope observation time such that one really can't have a job as an astronomer without upholding the dogma.  But even with these failures the proper mood should be Doubt on the part of Lay Persons, not disbelief or rejection, a core set of observations DO still match the theory and no better alternative theory has been proposed.

The block-chain is like the invention of a Postal-system, the Currency is like the invention of the chain-letter.  Just because something is built on-top of an initiative, revolutionary and useful platform dose not make the secondary layer great as well.

Never

States can't pass legal tender laws and this bill dose not propose to do that.