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Not a big fan of steam per se but it's not bad for picking up budget games and some of the sales are pretty awesome. Plus when my old (199x) half-life disk wouldn't install under Windows 7, I put the CD key in Steam and it installed right off and gave me a bunch of others in the series for free as well.
It's a dream compared to that Windows live crap that installs as well. That never remembers my account details so it's password resets etc.
I don't see Steam going console as all of the console makers are too up their own rear ends with walled gardens, DRM and total nazi-like control of their systems. Unless Steam plans to build their own console. But unless you can plug a keyboard and mouse into it, I'm not interested (and wouldn't be even then).
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I guess the only counter argument is that a $ today is worth more than a $ in the future (the first thing they teach you in economics schools). In other words if I want to start a project today and I can either a) borrow the money or b) save for 1 year ... if I choose a) and assuming the project's return rate is greater than whatever interest I need to pay on the loan, I will be better off by starting the project today and not delaying for one year.
However, not everything goes well with all the projects and growing with credit borrowed from future savings doesn't always end well (aka look around in Europe, U.S., etc.). Or like Adrian put it:
Yes. Borrowing exposes you to quite a lot of risk. Unfortunately, those making the decisions typically a)Have an ego the size of the titanic and don't believe that anything could possibly go wrong and b)are somewhat shielded from the outcome of bad outcomes of their decisions. |
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Looks like BTC is on its way up today...
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Doesn't work with the pool I'm using  I may write something anyway. I'm thinking it could be something that would also recognise when game binaries were running and cut the mining and cut it back on when done. |
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rix: Didn't find it there and psy: Thanks. That's a little backwards to be honest but it is what it is. It's the only way that works apparently. Rix's solution has only to do with email subscriptions. I think we must be versions behind because another forum I use which is similar treats it as subscriptions and you can subscribe and unsubscribe anytime. |
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rix: Didn't find it there and psy: Thanks. That's a little backwards to be honest but it is what it is. |
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Could we at least get an unsubscribe button. I'm no longer interested in the "I'm a newbie, get me out of here" thread.
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Erm... you shouldn't snip everything if you make such accusations. And I always thought even mentally ill people can be right about things, so that statement doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. In a way I think that everyone who doesn't completely resign for rational reasons, has to be kinda insane, but I guess that doesn't really count, because that brings everyone here on the same level.  If I missed something, please show me! Also I am curious on what you consider to be my position and what I reveal. Dude, that was back in September. That's like the 19th century in internet time. |
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BTC wins  That's what I'm banking on. |
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I am aware that the lender will spend some money back into the economy which might end up in the borrower's bank account as profit. Assuming 20 mil BTC is the total amount of BTC in existence, in your example, the lender will have to buy 10 mil BTC worth of good and services from that country so that in the end, the lender gets 30 mil BTCs as 20 mil in coins + 10 mil in the form of good and services. Right?
Well, I'm not sure that is the perception that many people have when making a loan. If you give a loan for $1000 with 10% interest, you expect to get $1100 after a (long) period of time, not to get $1000 + a $100 voucher worth of goods and services. I'm not saying that we shouldn't go back to the "voucher" system when money are backed by good and services, maybe that would be one of the fixes ...
The real issue arises when the money loaned is magiced out of nowhere. If I have $100, loan you that, get $110 back, that's one thing. If I don't have $100 but magic it from nowhere, lend it to you, get $110 back, I have obtained $10 for nothing. That is what the government/federal reserve is up to at the moment and it's a problem. |
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Angela Merkel.
Any relation?  |
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I think that's what I'll go ahead and do Adam as I've said, not interested in ripping people off what I'll do is probably keep it at 0.5 BTC and see what happens, if people seem happy with that then I don't think I'll change it, pretty much the equivalent of the price I was planning in the normal currencies anyway according to Mtgox Now I've got that absolute headache out of the way I just need to focus on drawing my manga and trying to figure out all the Opencart options without throwing my computer out the window, I couldn't figure out the PhP thing for bitpay so I'll have to use the simpler option instead. Just to say, there's always the "pay what you think it's worth" option. Especially if you're going to put it out for free on bittorrent anyway (Hmm, did I misunderstand that?) |
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Bitcoin helped to take me from minarchist to market-anarchist. I was infected by the community and exposed to the likes of Stefan Molyneux, who really made the case for no-state.
Can you expand on why? Minarchist sounds like a very reasonable position and I wonder what benefits full blown anarchism would have over a minimal state. Stefan Molyneux recently made the argument in an interview (with VisionVictory, I think, search youtube), that a small state always has the tendency to grow so we would always end up with big government once again. I'm not sure a state can be kept small. Quite possibly true. And it seems that possibly a democracy can grow even more than other forms of government. Western governments are way out-of-control now and are orders of magnitude larger than they were under monarchs (England's monarchy doesn't really count). |
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"Minarchy" still creates two classes of citizens: ordinary people like me and you, and "special" individuals who get powers that ordinary people don't have. In today's society they are the police, the judges, the politicians, and other bureaucrats. The only different is where the line is drawn in terms of defining the size of government.
Any system that gives power to a subset of the population will eventually fall prey to corruption.
This is true. So to minimize the system minimizes the potential damage caused by that corruption. It's important to realize that there will be no perfect system. This is the mistake the statists make. Things will be perfect with just-a-little-bit more government. They accuse libertarian and like-minded people of being Utopianists but that is far from the truth, we merely want to move towards "as good as possible", not "perfect". |
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Long-term stable coin is possible only if it's not dependant on profit-oriented people.
But what the hell you are talking about here? Value each person can withdraw from the system must be very close or equal to value that same person put into system, at all times. Why ever put value in the system at all then? Exactly. The whole success of currency is that it's a representation of value. The labor theory of value just doesn't work. The point of mining isn't to put the value of the labor into the coin. |
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All those things are what we try to simulate.
Maybe the word "simulation" might make the concept more understandable to you than the word "game".
You kind of sound a bit like a Private who refuses to take part in "field exercise" / "field training" on the grounds that there is no point "playing wargames".
Real world forces actually do "play games" as much as they can afford to, so that they can know whether their tools, equipment and people are ready for "the real thing".
Millions of dollars have already been lost due to people insisting on "going live" before their systems and people have been proven in "simulation".
It is not easy to get lots of people to spend hours and hours each doing testing; making a "game" out of it lets them at least get some kind of satisfaction/reward out of it.
-MarkM-
The issue I see with this is how the rate of generation of the currency would be controlled. With Bitcoin it's in the protocol. How would you prevent gaming the system or the game's owner from generating large amounts of currency whenever they wanted in your scenario? |
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I assume it's affirmative action. It's basically a euphemism for reverse discrimination.
M
Ah, that makes sense. I'm no fan of Affirmative Action but it's really a sideshow to the main issues, sad to say and only one of those "wedge topics" to make people think there's any real difference between the two. |
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Maybe you'll eventually convince yourself.
I do not need to convince myself because it's a fact Romney and Obama are provably different on the issues I care about. For example, as governor of MA, Romney signed an executive order to ban AA in MA. Obama never did anything like that, Obama on several occasions publicly said he support AA policies, including siding with the university on the current ongoing supreme court case. How much different, do you need to get? and these are just on issues I care about, I'm sure they are completely different on many other issues as well. So I tell you again, to say they are the same, is completely misleading and untrue. What is AA? I tried three different searches and turned up nothing. |
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After 21 mil BTCs are mined even loans are not the answer because there is no money created to cover the interest.
I'm just curious, why exactly do you think loans can ever only be made if interest can be charged? Do you not think loans could have a different kind of a price? I'm not sure why you have to magic up money to pay the interest either. Could there be no interest charging loans in a gold-only economy? |
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The trick is to eliminate the possibility of runs.
That would be an undesirable 'trick' indeed. The free market requires failures to actually fail in order to progress. That is part of why we are stuck in an economic rut these days, because TPTB are making mistakes similar to 1933 when they should be doing the things their predicessors did int 1920. I disagree (With the first statement, not the second). A lot of the problem is the fiction that the bank can lend out your money and yet still have it available. Simply making it clear that your money is either here or there but not both would effectively put an end to runs.
When you put your money in an interest paying account, it is agreed that it is not in the hands of the bank and it may take you time to have access to it. The fiction that you still have it needs to stop. If you want the bank to hold your funds, they would be required to actually have them on hand and provide them to you immediately on request (they would also likely charge you for the service).
On-demand accounts are, for all practial purposes, entirely useless within the Bitcoin economy. That's one of the functions that your bitcoin client provides for you at the cost of processor time. No bank could compete with that, nor can any payment settlement system (think Western Union or SWIFT) compete with the Bitcoin network's cost effectiveness and speed in this catagory, either. The only function that a traditional bank could offer the Bitcoin economy would be interest bearing accounts in return for investment lending. Mostly. I suspect I could come up with a couple of scenarios where it would be advantageous for others to be holding my money but I agree that such a system would be largely superfluous for most of the population in a bitcoin economy.
The greatest impediment to widespread Bitcoin adoption is the idea that credit cards are faster. They are not, and any online vendor would be able to tell you it can take up to 40 days for such transfer to "settle". Bitcoin transfers are usually settled within an hour. Transfers among users of the same online wallet, so long as both users were trading using their online wallet account to trade, occur as fast as Paypal and for the same reasons.
Agree. I think hardware wallets may have a big future in the Bitcoin world. |
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