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If you think there's a market for this service start a competing exchange that performs a preliminary audit prior to listing as well as enforcing requirements for transparency and good accounting practices. Charge more for your service in order to cover the cost of the audits. If people value the additional scrutiny then they'll be willing to pay for it.
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I call 'em like I see 'em. That's my job. But accepting even the tiniest denomination of coins for doing so would undermine my credibility as a journalist.
So I'm going to try to return the bitcoins I received to the senders, and any coins I can't return I will donate to charity.
And no, I'm not going to say which charity. I prefer to give anonymously. See, Chuck Schumer? There are perfectly legitimate reasons to want to "disguise" the source of a payment. I don't understand how this article does anything to increase credibility his credibility. If there are people doubting his journalistic integrity based on such a small sum in tips, wouldn't those people also wonder if the unspecified charity was another address in his wallet? |
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Instead, the "private store of value" premium in Bitcoin is (and will continue to be) the driving force behind its price. Bitcoin is your digital gold and personal offshore bank, at no cost to you, and without leaving your house. That's Bitcoin's killer app: mathematically guaranteed financial security and privacy. The only problem is that a "store of value" doesn't exist. It's a convienient model that works only under certain conditions. The economy is the production and subsequent consumption of products and services. When people talk about "storing value" unless they are stockpiling canned food what they mean is storing a claim on future production. Obviously the claim is only worth something if the future production actually happens AND the producer chooses to honor the claim. Commerce is the economy. Under favorable circumstances we can build higher-level abstractions on top of that commerce like "saving" deferred consumption, but those abstractions are only valid under the right economic conditions. |
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But what you don't get is that inflation does not necessarily equal Keynes, just like deflation does not necessarily equal Austrian. And the god awful majority of you didn't know your ass from Austrian economics until you heard of bitcoin.
What you don't get (or are deliberately ignoring) is that people don't want their savings to devalue over time. You are loudly arguing that Bitcoin needs to be "fixed" to stop offering people what they want because people shouldn't want it. A lot of vested interests are doing very well right now because everybody else has limited choices with regards to storing deferred consumption so I'm not surprised to see people desperately trying to hamper the idea that alternatives are possible from spreading. |
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Do you think that the current price of gold is related to its use as a facilitator of trade, or to its use as a means of preserving - or even increasing - value in an uncertain future? I think it's far more accurate to treat gold like a luxury good than a currency. |
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I think it's time for this:  |
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The number of people using bitcoin to actually buy things (legal things) is still quite small, but we sign up new businesses every day so the numbers are growing. Do you think that legal trade will overtake Silk Road relatively quickly, or is it going to be a while? Alsao, early investors in bitcoin will experience the "wealth effect" as their value grows. So, people will be more likely to spend their bitcoins after they have held them awhile. I don't see that as being realistic. Based on the known volume of bitcoin commerce I think the exchange rate is too high, possibly by an order of magnitude. Signing up new merchants and convincing more people to use bitcoin for purchases could lower the exchange rate due to increased velocity before it increases it. Another big speculative bubble like last year wouldn't keep prices high for very long, especially if early adopters started spending their coins, so any wealth effect would be short-lived. |
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While I can't falut your analysis, I think that you are overlooking something very important. All things equal, and increas in velocity implies a decreasing time preference, meaning people in general are more inclined to spend now than wait for a better deal. Right now, the time preference is very high in bitcoin, as many of us have been sitting one some considerable funds for moneths to years. While this is bound to lower as the economy grows, the increases in velocity would tend to cancel out the price increases that a growing economy would otherwise imply. And this leads to my final point; for all practical purposes the velocity of US $ is limited to the rate at which the middle class worker is paid for his labors. SInce the average worker is paid weekly, this effect slows down $ velocity overall and drives consumers towards credit to improve the interval; but even credit can't cycle as fast as Bitcoin is capable of, since bitcoins can be respent roughly every hour. So, theoriecally, a bitcoin can be priced an order of magnatude lower than $ (with an equvialnt monetary base, which we don't have) and move the same value in the same time frame due to the very real possibilty that employers could pay employees for work on a daily, or even hourly basis, using funds spent at POS the very same day.
I agree that Bitcoin is technologically possible of sustaining a higher monetary velocity than current currencies but I'm not sure that it would actually increase. Governments do a lot to cause people to spend money faster than they would choose otherwise via tax codes that give people an artificial incentive to put their savings in the stock market, inflation reducing the value of savings, easy credit that gives consumers the illusion of increased purchasing power, policies that reduce the incentive for personal savings (old age pensions), etc. The inability to do all these things with Bitcoin would tend to reduce velocity to a more natural level. Which effect will predominate? We won't know until it happens. One thing is certain, however: a higher bitcoin velocity would indicate health in the BTC economy as a whole but would have a disappointing effect on exchange rate for the speculators. |
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For example, an (arguable) estimation of US total economic production is it's GDP of ~14T if I'm not mistaken. That's much more that the entire USD money supply. Granted, you must better define "money supply" as many things may be used as money... but if you take for example the M2 aggregation for USD, that's around ~10 bi according to wikipedia. More than 1000 times lower than the GDP...
Anyway, my point is, money supply != economic production. You can't compare "black market production" with bitcoin's monetary base of 21M and reach any meaningful number. One could produce an approximation by making some assumptions about velocity. The simplest assumption is that velocity is roughly equal in the underground and official economies. Here's an example using order-of-magnitude estimation to expand on my previous comment. The size of the US economy and the underground economy are the same at 10^13 each. There are 10^12 USD in circulation but will only be 10^7 BTC in circulation. Assuming similar monetary velocity a BTC economy the size of the entire underground (or US) economy would create an exchange rate of 10^7 ($100,000/1BTC). How does this compare to current conditions? First we need to estimate the size of the current Bitcoin economy. If Silk Road is moving $2000000 per month that puts the size at >10^7 so for calculation purposes let's call it 10^8. This would imply an exchange rate of $1 USD/BTC, except only about 1/3 of the bitcoins are mined yet. This isn't quite enough to justify the current price of 10^1 USD/BTC, but it's relatively close. Apparently velocity in the bitcoin economy now is lower than the general economy but velocity should increase as the total amount of bitcoin commerce increases, so this estimation method should get more accurate over time. Based on that I expect to see $100/BTC when Bitcoin "GDP" reaches $10 billion equivalent per year and $1000/BTC at $100 billion equivalent per year. |
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Bitcoin has no mechanism to implement demising returns on saving.
Every economy has that:
Gold: Physical wear, increased storage space higher cost of guarding.
Fiat money: Inflation
Barter economy: Depreciation of goods
IOU trust network alas ripple: Increased counterparty risk.
With bitcoin the fundamentally best strategy to reach highest economical authority is to never spend them ever, which is obviously not feasible.
I don't speak out against the fixed supply, but it needs some mechanism to encourage spending for luxury like demurrage for example.
A concrete scenario for many bitcoiners is to save them for cases where they are either overvalued (from their personal perspective) or to save them as an insurance against economic turmoil while at the same time doing nothing to prevent that scenario from occurring.
The main reason I am opposed here is the self interest of bitcoin hoarders to justify their own behavior and keep up the public perception of bitcoin.
Somehow I doubt that's your actual motive. People are attracted to bitcoin precisely because it has no mechanism to implement demising returns on saving. I suspect you're more interesting preventing the spread of the idea that it's possible to have a currency which is not intentionally devalued because of how popular this idea is one people hear about it. Bob forbid that people could store their deferred consumption themselves instead of losing large parts of it to rent-seeking assholes. |
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- All the problems with other techniques generally have to do with the ubiquity of using those communication channels for stuff. There's already subsystems of code and drivers for auto-operating on signals over ethernet, USB, IR, bluetooth. This is not true for audio -- I plug in a mic, worst case a program on that computer records it, but it's not executing any code with that as input. I mean, it's an analog signal, how could it? (unless it was specifically designed to know what it was looking for, like Armory will have when I'm done)
That sounds suspiciously like, "what could possibly go wrong?" |
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U.S. dollars must be accepted for all debts, public and private.
Not where I live... Unfortunately what matters, if you're trying to use the legal system to recover your money, is the rules of that system where he lives, not where you live. Even if you could get a ruling in your favor where you live how would you get it enforced? |
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It would be nice if bitcoind could use PAM for password checking, at least on systems where PAM exists.
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Criterion number one would have to be my personal opinion that World of Warcraft is an addictive scourge on society. I know someone who stuck his "box set" in the trash. When asked why not try to resell it on Ebay, he said would never want to inflict so much pain on anyone, not even his enemies, and would rather just throw it away. Iran getting banned from the Blizzard servers is a blessing in disguise, kind of like a boatload of heroin and dirty AIDS-riddled needles "unfortunately" sinking to the bottom of the ocean and failing to reach its destination.
So, why should I help Blizzard in making more money? There's a difference between your personal opinion and morality. "Murder is immoral" does not mean, "I don't want to murder" but instead means, " nobody should murder (and those that try can be stopped)". Saying that it would be immoral to help people Iran use WoW implies more than just that you don't want to do it, but that you feel justified in stopping people from doing it. |
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So what? A blanket statement of fact isn't automatically a moral thing to pursue.
Since you decided to break out the "m" word, can you explain by what criteria it would be immoral? |
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For example, an (arguable) estimation of US total economic production is it's GDP of ~14T if I'm not mistaken. That's much more that the entire USD money supply. Granted, you must better define "money supply" as many things may be used as money... but if you take for example the M2 aggregation for USD, that's around ~10 bi according to wikipedia. More than 1000 times lower than the GDP...
Anyway, my point is, money supply != economic production. You can't compare "black market production" with bitcoin's monetary base of 21M and reach any meaningful number. One could produce an approximation by making some assumptions about velocity. The simplest assumption is that velocity is roughly equal in the underground and official economies. |
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I've removed the content for discussion. However,I don't think it's a good idea to impose self censorship on yourself when you have the freedom to say the truth. It's even worse than the case where one is forcefully silent by an external force.
I noticed that you use the word "protect" many a time, which practically means don't say any thing the Chinese Gov. doesn't like. It's pitiful that netizen can't post freely on Chinese forum. But even to do so when you are free of that restriction and continue to keep silent is the worst decision ever. You are not believing that one hand has four fingers and five fingers simultaneously right?
There are other technologies that can be used for people to speak without self-censorship without fear of retaliation, like Freenet. |
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So we live in a world where we have monopolies maintained by violence (governements), where freedom erodes every passing month with every new laws pooped by the power the be. But we can't have a free market (which by definition means that everyone is free and entitled to the same rights) because it will leads to less freedom and monopolies?
I'm trying to follow the anti-capitalist propag reasonning here.
The relevant question is not "will it lead to more or less freedom?", but ""freedom for whom?" A free market will lead to less freedom for the rent-seekers to exploit everybody else. |
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OMG the oppressed Iranians don't have access to Digital Speedball (aka: world of scumcraft), and its psychopathic makers will have slightly less cash to pay their in-house team of psychologists working to make it ever more addictive. How will the Iranians cope without this drug?! Quick! We must use Bitcoin to free the Iranians from their WoW shortage!  Any instance where some people are being prevented from using their money how they wish is a use case for Bitcoin. |
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