I would much rather see hoarders prosper than the bankers and politicians and those that are well-connected. People who are actually productive and making positive contributions to society (as determined by a free market) are the ones that should be rewarded with prosperity, not the scammers.
Bankers and politicians will profit with any form of money -- that's their reason for being. The new moneyed elite will be just like the old moneyed elite, only without the need to keep cycling their money through the economy. It should be obvious that those driven by the love of money will be the ones who eventually wind up with the most of it. There are plenty of financial instruments that can be created to exploit any situation. Shorting, for instance, allows one to profit from failing companies. Greedy and corrupt people are greedy and corrupt, not stupid and unimaginative. At least they won't be able to profit by creating bitcoins on a whim, to bail themselves out, fund their deficits, or to "stimulate the recovery". Stealing people's purchasing power by devaluing their money is off the table with bitcoin. I think enough people understand that a bitcoin derivative is not a bitcoin. Peer-to-peer decentralized exchanges will be needed to prevent market manipulation. We should be seeing those within the next couple of years. |
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As i have mentioned earlier, money itself doesn't change the amount of goods in the world. By changing from one money to another, the world doesn't suddenly become wealthier or poorer as a whole. So, to answer your question, as you & other money hoarders become richer, the rest of the people become poorer, and that's who gets hurt. The poor people, the have-nots, the ones who always get hurt.
I would much rather see hoarders prosper than the bankers and politicians and those that are well-connected. People who are actually productive and making positive contributions to society (as determined by a free market) are the ones that should be rewarded with prosperity, not the scammers. |
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That's not lending, that's theves vs usurers. And let's remember that, as we speak, bitcoin is technically an inflationary currency. The number of coins is increasing by the number of coins mined. And yet its value is going up -- Magik!
I agree that bitcoin is an inflationary currency, because, like you, I define inflation as an expansion of the money supply. However, a lot of folks around here think of inflation as an increase in prices. It's that the inflation is controlled and predictable that makes it attractive to those of us that prefer to live below our means for the time being and do most of our spending later. What about 0% interest? That doesn't sound like usury to me. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=288543.0 |
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You'll never see 30-year mortgages denominated in honest money. You'll just rent and save for a few years and buy a house outright.
You'll never see *any* loans denominated in "honest money." Why lend if you could simply hold & get rich, amirite? You'll see some short term loans denominated in honest money, but not a lot. I'm sure you've seen the Lending section of the forum where this sometimes occurs. |
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Prices most certainly can continue dropping forever with a fixed money supply. Technological advancements always cause prices to drop if those values (prices) are measured with honest money.
It'll be quite a thing to adapt to, having to be more productive each year in order just to maintain a steady mortgage payment. But I still hope to see it during my lifetime. You'll never see 30-year mortgages denominated in honest money. You'll just rent and save for a few years and buy a house outright. |
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The goal of stable money and low taxes will lend to prosperity for all, this deflationary period is not going to last forever.
This double-digit a week deflation won't last forever, but I'm not convinced that moderate sustained deflation can't, on average, last forever. Prices most certainly can continue dropping forever with a fixed money supply. Technological advancements always cause prices to drop if those values (prices) are measured with honest money. |
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Simply holding printing a piece of paper should not enrich you. That is fucked. You didnt do a thing. You didnt innovate you didnt improve you didnt do shit, but sit on your ass and you think you should be rewarded for that?
Look at the way bitcoin fiat is working. Hold Print more paper and be enriched! More people want to use save, but bankers keep creating more of the "currency" and the value changes drops, so for doing nothing you the bankers get more purchasing power or if, leaving less for the people that want to use save the "currency" you, but lose purchasing power. That is not moral.
FTFY. |
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Yeah, a lot of inputs from addresses with a lot of random BTC amounts in them. I wouldn't be surprised to find out they're stolen coins. Well, some of the input addresses have a balance of 0 BTC, but not all of them, so maybe not. |
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Yeah, a lot of inputs from addresses with a lot of random BTC amounts in them. I wouldn't be surprised to find out they're stolen coins. |
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Bitcoin: store of value.  Yes store of value and medium of exchange just like a baseball card. Except more durable, more fungible, more divisible, more easily transportable, harder to counterfeit... Stop calling it currency  ? Because if you can realize that bitcoin is not currency because it is not a UNIT then you can realize that the US dollar is not currency because it is not a UNIT. That is what Ron Paul is really asking Ben when he asks can you define a dollar for me. He is really asking what is the UNIT called a dollar equal to? Okay Einstein, why don't you enlighten us and give us an example of something that is a currency? bytes, kilowatts, the dollar in 1970,oil, metals they can all be currency. Because they all can be mediums of exchange, stores of value, and a UNIT of account. Bytes and kilowatts aren't scarce. The dollar in 1970 was just a piece of paper that was supposedly backed by gold. Of course Nixon let the world know in 1971 that the backing of paper with gold can be undone with the simple stroke of a pen. Oil is a consumable commodity. Precious metals are the only form of sound money the world has had before Bitcoin, but now the bankers have scammed the people into using their paper and managed to hoard most of the gold for themselves. That rules out everything on your list. Please try again. |
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Bitcoin: store of value. Yes store of value and medium of exchange just like a baseball card. Except more durable, more fungible, more divisible, more easily transportable, harder to counterfeit... Stop calling it currency ? Because if you can realize that bitcoin is not currency because it is not a UNIT then you can realize that the US dollar is not currency because it is not a UNIT. That is what Ron Paul is really asking Ben when he asks can you define a dollar for me. He is really asking what is the UNIT called a dollar equal too? Okay Einstein, why don't you enlighten us and give us an example of something that is a currency? |
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Main one is I think, sooner or later, I don't know how, BTC will be stopped. No way Visa, Mastercard, Banks become useless.
And what if they can't stop Bitcoin? Ideas are bulletproof. Another reason is I have no confidence in exchangers, so can't trade easy.
Use escrow and you don't have to trade them--you could just hoard some, if not all, of them. |
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Does anyone know how the "Mining Difficulty" setting works in the Dashboard section of their Mining Pool website? I'm guessing this allows me to decide how many BTC to reinvest based on the network's difficulty level?
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It appears that they have managed to make this a lot more complicated than it was when I originally purchased contracts back in May. I registered a BTC address for payouts to be sent to when I purchased the contracts and the last payout was received on October 2nd. Now I'm supposed to create an account at a new website they've created and set a payout threshold? Do we no longer have the option of receiving a regularly scheduled payout every one or two weeks?
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Altcoins as a commodity may not be a very good idea. Like the Gold Standards of yore, the more valuable an item becomes, the more likely people will desire to hoard the item rather than spend it.
This is essentially why governments went off the precious metal standards. What costs 2 BTC now will cost 1 BTC tomorrow and so on because no one will be willing to spend such a valuable item.
Would this "perfect altcoin" be competing with other currencies in the free market or would bankers and politicians dictate that everyone in their jurisdiction use it? In a free society, where people are free to transact and save in whatever currency they choose, those who prefer to live below their means would just be buying bitcoins with the excess income they receive in this "perfect altcoin". |
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I see your point, but what advantage is there in backing a currency with a measurable unit? In the case of gold, if you back a currency with it then you are now creating an additional use for gold and artificially increasing its worth. This is true for any precious metal. In the USA close to 50% of all silver purchased per year is in the form of coins, now anything that uses silver(Such as electronics) suffers in cost because the demand is higher. Furthermore, as you pointed out even gold suffers from value change due to perception.
You have highlighted an underlying problem with Bitcoin and currencies in general though. It is difficult to price something in Bitcoin because the value changes so rapidly. To me this means that you cannot effectively price goods/services using currency units. I've thought about having a separate unit for measuring value that can be used as a mechanism for pricing, and the only thing that changes is the ratio between this hypothetical value unit and a currency. Even if Bitcoins value stabilizes, we will hopefully move towards competing currencies and this means we need a standard pricing mechanism as an intermediary. I doubt I will have all the answers for this problem though, but I expect something similar will be required eventually.
Hopefully, Bitcoin will become that standard pricing mechanism. Instead of pricing bitcoins in dollars, we'll be pricing dollars and all of the other fiat and crypto currencies in bitcoins. The value of a bitcoin, when measured with dollars, isn't going to stabilize because the dollar will not stop losing value until it no longer exists and has the same value as the other fiat currencies that have failed throughout history. |
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They're required to dispose of seized assets in some way.
The federal government could dispose of the bitcoins by selling them to the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is certainly in cahoots with the federal government, but technically isn't part of the federal government. |
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The Federal Reserve will probably be the first ones in line to snatch these up with a big batch of freshly printed dollars.
Provided they really manged to get their greedy fingers on them, i think thats something the foundation should get involved with, because it would be catastrophic to have the feds holding and dropping such a large amount on the market. Afterall its just freshly printed bucks, so they dont really care. I don't think the Fed would dump them on the market. They would hoard them like they supposedly do with gold in order to remain somewhat solvent when the dollar inevitably collapses. This seizure could potentially allow them to obtain BTC without causing a large sudden disruption in the exchange rate that would occur if they purchased BTC in the open market. |
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Not saying it will happen but because of that the DOJ will wait for a conviction before doing anything with the seized assets.
Proceeds go to the treasury so it isn't like the FBI gets to keep the funds.
They don't need a conviction, which in a criminal case needs to be beyond a reasonable doubt. They could lose the criminal case and still win the civil forfeiture case, which is a separate legal action and they only need to win by a preponderance of the evidence in that action. interesting, did not realize that. so how would they auction these? just put up the entire lot of 177,000 btc or 250k, whatever it is? The Federal Reserve will probably be the first ones in line to snatch these up with a big batch of freshly printed dollars. |
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