For those people the sky has already fell. The only ones talking about the sky falling are likely the ones that have no investment in Bitcoin, nor interest in it succeeding.

Rarity, for being a Londoner, you sure do care a lot about dead 9/11 Americans and America's wars... Why is that?

Fight the hoarders? Is the money I worked hard to earn, which I then put into the bitcoin economy in order to boost is value and get some bitcoin to hoard, not worth anything? Sure, I may not be working directly for bitcoin, but it's not as if I just pulled my hoarded bitcoin, or the money used to buy it with, right out of my ass.

And yet, despite the continuing wars, Bitcoin still continued to go up in value over the last two years (don't know how they are related, just trying to steer towards the OP)

Um, actually, when it came out that the CIA was cherry-picking evidence and sometimes outright lying, turns out not so much...

Same way Bank of America managemet got rich after BoA stock went from $54 to 3$ (WORSE drop than Bitcoin)

Hey, if Bank of America can go from $54 to $3 and still not be done, why can't Bitcoin?

Sorry if this is too long to read. I wanted to explain as much as I could instead of just "you're wrong"


I'm one of those with $75,000+ of debt. Student loans are owned by the banks and the government, but in turn, through stocks and bonds, are owned by the people. Amnesty for all student loans will result in a lot of 99% losing their retirement funds, and the government going into much further budget deficit. (Also, don't forget, the banks have paid back most of the bailout money.) This situation is closer to that of Italy, where the debt is actually owned by all of us, as opposed to Greece, where the debt is owed to outsiders. Forgiving loans could also set up a precedent where no bank or organization will ever risk giving out a student loan again out of fear of losing their entire investment.



All for keeping tabs on banks to make sure they don't foreclose illegally (aka literally steal someone's property they have no right to). As for stopping all foreclosures, until the banks clear the bad assets off their books, this recession will continue. (and, again, they paid back most of the bailout money). Best course of action is to have them keep foreclosing (LEGALLY) as fast as possible until all this is cleared out. Like it or not, economies still heavily rely on the banking/finance system, and the sooner we clean that up, the sooner we can get our economy growing again. Also, coming from countries where it's normal to see whole families living in the same house/apartment, and where it's normal to move out, into an apartment, only once you are married (countries being entire ex-soviet block and much of Europe), I have no sympathy for the people being foreclosed on. Move back in with your family until you can truly afford a house without relying on someone else's financial trickery. The whole "american dream/owning your own house" propaganda and subsidies have actually been rather disastrous for the US economy for the last century.



I'm all for social safety nets, but how much longer should we keep paying for unemployment, and with who's money? Don't forget, those big banks are owned by the same people who have been saving for retirement, and making the banks pay is almost like asking for people who have pensions and 401k's to pay. Forcing Wall Street to pay will only hurt those older people's destroyed 401k's further. If the problem is unemployment, then focus on fixing the problem instead of patching the symptom. Unemployment is high because the amount of unskilled labor is high, and number of unskilled jobs available is low. On the other hand, demand for skilled labor is very high, but the number of skilled employees is always low. In today's economy, just like during the Great Depression, it's really hard to find good help. Unemployment rate for college educated people is in the 4% to 5%, the way it's always been. So either make our unskilled labor more competitive with the rest of the world by lowering minimum wage, or use the money going for unemployment to make specialized job training mandatory and increase our pool of skilled people.



Ugh, horrible idea! Considering A LOT of securities have returns of only 1% to 3%, having to pay sales tax both ways will instantly cut 2% off of all gains. You are also, again, forgetting that bankers aren't the only ones doing the trading. Everyone who owns pensions or 401Ks will be hit by this 2%. Like minimum wage, this tax will make certain types of investments (jobs) not possible (profitable), such as more secure and stable treasuries, bonds, or certain Large Cap stock investments. As a result, everyone will end up having to invest in much more risky securities in an attempt to stay above the 2%, resulting in much more risk in the economy overall.


Few problems here: First, the government works way too slow, so by the time they finish bickering and increase/decrease the money supply, it will likely be too late to help. Second, why is it the government's job to determine who can lend money and to whom? And finally, I'm all for putting upper limits on interest rates to limit predatory lending, but actually determining interest rates, or setting them at 0%, is a bad idea. Interest on a loan is very literally a price for taking on risk. Not all risks are the same, and thus some risks cost more than others. The #1, main, and biggest, reason we had the market crash in '08 is because the price for the risk was set way below the actual cost of the risk. Very short version: thanks to credit default swaps, high risk activity (subprime mortgages) that cost a lot in risk, were sold as zero risk. Once the cost of the risk surfaced, no one had the money to pay for that risk, since everyone assumed it was zero. (don't want to get into technical details, but can if you ask). The government giving out 0% loans is essentially throwing away free money, too, in a sense that they will get back WAY less than what they give out, even if all the loans are eventually paid back.


That is ENTIRELY untrue. Places where "free trade" is allowed to enter, such as Mexico, China and India, have seen very rapid wage growths. Note that we first outsourced to Mexico, but that got too expensive so we went to China and India. At this point that is also getting much too expensive, and next places will likely be south Asia and parts of Africa. Ask those three countries mentioned if they are better off now than they were 30 years ago. Free trade exports money to other countries and teaches people more specialized skills. Once those people learn those skills, they can, and do, demand higher wages. That's the reason outsourcing to India and China is getting more expensive: companies are finding shortages of cheap employees, whereas before they has lines of thousands at the gates. So, contrary to popular belief, Free Trade is not a "Race to the Bottom," but rather the propagation and teaching of skills around the globe, and a race of those at the bottom up to the top. People hate it because lower skilled workers here have to compete with desperate lower skilled workers in other countries, and for now the "bottom" is so low that it's bringing the rest of us down. But, personally, I would rather get brought down at the expense of bringing the other people's lives up (by giving them jobs and skills), then use protectionist policies to keep us up, and leave the rest of the world's poor living in cardboard boxes and doing things like working quarries by hand, working in horrid sweatshops for only local customers, or resorting to prostitution and crime.
Also, tarrifs actually don't stop free trade. They just make the stuff we buy more expensive. They are an indirect tax on us consumers, not a tax on importers.



No arguments here... although we already do "sell" military bases on foreign soil. A lot of countries (Germany, Japan, etc) actually pay for us to keep our military there. That way they can do their stuff without having to worry about keeping up a standing army. So, empire and useless wars suck, but our military isn't all just a waste of taxpayer money, and is one of our biggest income-producing exports.

Um, I'm one of those, and I'm finding a lot of issues in your claims   For instance, with the moores law claim, if the best hardware won't be able to pay for itself, won't production just scale back down to the level where it can, followed by difficulty adjustments to bring it back to break even levels?

Them? Accept me?! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Um, how so?



What about addresses owned by people in other countries? Would all of their addresses have to be whitelisted? And if not, what would prevent someone from receiving illegitimate money, sending it to an account overseas, and then having that money sent back to their own whitelisted address? (i.e. money laundering) You can't blame someone who doesn't even belong to our legal system for not keeping track of "legal" vs "illegal" money, can you?

Meh, SomethingAwful goons are pretty well known for harassing people. That's what they do. For most of them that's the only way they're able to get aroused and masturbate before crying themselves to sleep, and if they don't harass anyone, they just end up staying up all night saying crazy shit.

As for trying to help him, if men in general don't take advice from their wives who try to change them, why in the f#^& would they listen to some guy on a forum? Most of the time, only way for someone to change is to make enough mistakes on their own to realize they're doing something wrong, and change themselves. You're really wasting your time otherwise (no matter how much you want to feel good about being right and helping someone)

I see a Lincoln Navigator (5,626) and a Hyundai Veracruz (6,836) on that list...

I wouldn't know. (Did you mean $1.25mil worth?). I hope they liquidated it over time.

I understood one thing it may be needed for when back in June I saw someone use it to send $10.5mil worth overseas, with money fully transfering within 30 minutes, and paid only about $15 to do it.

If we sit on our coins doing nothing, they aren't worth anything. If we use them and spend them, they will keep getting distributed through the rest of society. OP's claims could have also been applied to Google stock (or any stock, really), yet people still buy. Those same people can be just as ignorant about bitcoin as they have been about stocks.
Besides, considering the concentration of USD, I'd think people would be used to bitcoin.

They smell like dust and slightly singed electronics. Plus are not traceable to exchanges.

At this point I am debating on whether to keep spending $50/month on electricity, or just buy $50 worth of BTC a month. If I mine, at current prices I will only get $43 worth of BTC for that $50 worth of power, but I never sell my mined BTC, paying for power out-of-pocket, and I do get the benefit of freshly minted coins and good feeling of supporting the network.

That's where networking effects come in, and what the community needs to build. Even people who hate facebook and twitter eventually join just because their friends are on there. If bitcoin starts being accepted everywhere, even SomethingAwfull goons will have no choice but to embrace it.

The rule is that mining cost will likely equal bitcoin price, efficient or not. So even if there were just a dozen trusted peers doing the mining very efficiently, they would likely spend as many resources as possible on mining as fast as possible, until the cost of their efficient mining matched the value of the bitcoin or transaction fees they produced.