I agree that increasing services used in BTC is the only real way to stabilize the currency.  I rant about this occasionally, and we're trying to quantify where the real floor (and thus stability) is.

The list you want is over here.

Inflation isn't theft if your coins aren't devalued.  If new coins are mined but the exchange rate remains stable, the total economy just gets bigger and you don't lose anything.



Exchb was great while it lasted.  CampBX looks like it might be a winner too.  I doubt you're going to have established companies jumping in at this stage, but we've had two US-based startups with real people behind them who seem to be taking it seriously.

d) No one knows that I'm the manipulator, but this is what I've had planned from the beginning.

e) Even now there are tons of people who still want to buy in at just the right time and get rich, because it's inevitable that Bitcoin is going to be huge in the long run, right?  They're diminishing in numbers, but with the falling price it takes ever fewer of them to hold each new level.

I agree with your conclusion: the only way to grow Pf is to grow the economy.  I'm personally not interested in growing Pf, but I do want to see the economy grow.  I would rather this happen with inflation: grow the market cap / total value store with an increasing number of coins and keep the Pf stable, but that's really a topic for altcoins.

Yes, the B and D terms in my original formula are a little fuzzy, since they incorporate several different elements in a nontransparent way.  It makes it easier to initially understand at the expense of being messy when you want to apply it in detail.  I think breaking them out is worthwhile.

Where does S belong, in D or A*B?  Which way is right?  Well, what are savings?  An attempt to store value?  A casual investment in the future?  Avoidance of friction?  I don't have a simple answer to that.

In the current market I don't think anyone has savings that last more than a week.  I think people who hold their coins longer than that pretty universally consider them an investment. Thus, I rolled S into A*B - the coins are still in circulation and intended to be spent on goods even if those goods are not yet selected.  At present, that's just taking a slightly broader picture of required value store.  In the future, I think you're right to roll it into D.  In practical terms, it works either way: in A*B it slightly stabilizes Pf; in D it tracks the market quicker.

I'm not sure why you put a + between the S and I.  Here are the two ways I'd write it:

Pf = V * T / (A - S - I - L)
Pf = V * T / (A - (S + I + L) )

A bit more background for those who didn't read the original thread:
Much more detail on how this model works: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=42514.msg579137#msg579137
Explanations for my guesses for the variables: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=42514.msg579196#msg579196

Yes, that's the total number of relaying nodes on the network.  99% of those are the Satoshi client / wallet.

I don't want an award for good character.  This isn't about me.  I want people to get the help they need in an easy and fair manner.



I don't blame myself for the ones I can't help, but they still don't deserve to die or be left in the cold at the whim of my good or bad fortune.



Of course! I'm not saying there shouldn't be consequences for people's actions.  What I advocate is that no matter how badly someone screws up, the bare necessities - food, shelter, health care, education - are not in jeopardy.  Let them lose everything else and restart from dirt-poor again.  They want life to stop sucking?  They work their way out of it.  But leave them in a position where they don't have to literally fear for life and limb while they do it.

People work better and make smarter long-term decisions when they're motivated by desire rather than fear.



Actually, I have not watched the Frontline documentary.  I'm one of those "Don't own a TV" freaks.  That's how I have time to spend on these forums!  

They can tax me.  I'm not a fan of big government, but I'm much more opposed to being forced to pay big corporations.  I would have paid this money to insurance companies anyway, and they'd take 30% for themselves...  Cut them out and the same amount of money that I'm already paying will go farther.

As it is, hospitals are cutting more and more corners and are still constantly on the verge of bankruptcy.  It's mostly due to the large number of uninsured patients that are constantly defaulting.  They would much rather set their rates lower and actually get paid instead of playing roulette with each new patient that walks in.

I know this because I've talked in person to a perhaps a dozen doctors and other workers about it - My GP, ER surgeons, nurses, billing clerks, a cardiologist, psych ward shrinks... Most strongly support a switch to a single-payer system; a few are more ambivalent but think it couldn't be worse than what we have now.


Thanks for saying so.    I hope you don't mind my mostly focusing on the parts where we disagree.



The churches were asked.  They chipped in, but it won't cover it.  Who should, then?  The hospital?  That's who it's going to fall to by default.

I'd rather not have these screwups in the first place.  Do you agree that everyone should be covered some way or another?  By making it universal, we will never have to say "Well, you should have had insurance!  You screwed up!"


How would you fix this problem?


Same here.  I carry catastrophic-only coverage and just pay all my own routine bills in cash.  Sadly, they don't take coins yet.  

Sorry, I'm telling everyone: Just like anything, never pay list price.  Almost all providers will give you the same discount as the insurance companies (about half off for routine things).  You just have to ask nicely.  Some will discount farther if you're paying cash, and they'll still love you as a customer because they hate dealing with insurance companies.  This even works for ER trips that you can't negotiate up-front: they would much rather get paid a fair rate (usually less than a quarter of what you get billed) with no hassles than to have you default.


Bankers have been rigging the system since long before Fannie and Freddie.

Don't get me wrong - I strongly support the individual mandate given the assumption that we need to channel all the funds through insurance companies.  But I think that system of collecting money from employeers, individuals, and generating refundable tax credits is convoluted and inefficient.  I think we'd be better off taking all the money that's spent purchasing insurance and using it to fund a single-payer system.

I think that looking to mining to determine the price to be backwards logic: price drives hashrate, not the other way around.

I consider the fundamental price floor to be driven by the needs of commerce, and right now it's very low - cents, not dollars.  I've blabbered on about this recently, so let me recycle some of it here:


Much more detail on how this model works: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=42514.msg579137#msg579137
Explanations for my guesses for the variables: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=42514.msg579196#msg579196

Only until Despair.  Then we're going to board the place up.

Here's an example: https://blockexplorer.com/tx/e9db67d0018769521d6773345180731dab1f1c4905e4f5bd9cb5a91a3da87202

That's just someone with 4050 BTC who sent 153.5 BTC to someone and got 3896.5 BTC of change back.  These are frequently pools paying out from their fairly large central wallets, but it could be anyone with 4kBTC who wanted to pay someone 150BTC.

I know, but I think that scam-avoidance and volatility are hurting us more than the bait-factor is helping.  Perhaps we never would have gotten here without it, but now how do we get past here with it?

...  and thus the cycle begins again.  This is exactly why I don't like the deflationary model.

One was disowned by his family when he came out of the closet.  Neighbors?  They don't care about some guy they've never met renting a room in an apartment in the city where he recently came to take a job.  Friends?  Well, I stepped in, but I was the only one.

Another was dropped by his quite Christian family who felt that his mental health problems were a personal failing and so he didn't deserve their help.

Another one is an orphan, no family to fall back on at all.

So yeah, I took up the slack, and it worked out for them.  But what if I wasn't here, or what happens during the lean years when I can't afford to keep a spare room open for charity?  Sometimes the support network is there to take care of people, but sometimes, through no fault of their own, it just isn't.  This is too important to leave to a game of chance where some people just get screwed because no one wants to help.


I think you missed mine: While I'm doing this, everyone has treated me like I'm an absolute freak for wanting to help people.  It was really crystallized for me when I was talking to someone's mother to help cover the $15k of costs we were looking at.  She couldn't afford to help - fair enough - but could not understand why someone who was "just a friend" would even be trying.  That blew my mind.  (And in that case we ended up unable to do anything for him...  It was tragic.  )

It is completely inconceivable to most people in the United States - not all, but most - to help each other when they're down on their luck.  The persistent attitude is "Well, they must have screwed up to get there.  It's their own fault!"  I am fighting that cultural flaw, but until it's fixed, we need some systematic way to deal with this.


Of course not.  These things have to be carefully designed or they go wrong.  Obamacare is a mess - all the worst of big government bureaucracy, insurance companies, hospital billing practices, useless oversight, and so on all rolled into one big steaming log.  It's another screwup like Fannie and Freddie, just a thin veil of a worthwhile program in front of something designed to funnel a bunch of money for some particular group (insurance companies in this case, who're going to be raking in the dough from the absurdity of mandatory insurance.  What possible economic sense can that kind of market distortion make?  Cut out the middleman who has a vested interest in taking a percentage of ever increasing costs, and just pay the damn bills).

But that doesn't mean it's impossible for the government to do it right.  Every other first world nation manages a national health care program.  Why can't we?


I'm absolutely in favor of this - basically any program that can be pushed to a more local level will do better there.  When I say we should have the government involved, I don't mean the feds.  The more competing systems we can have, the better.  Health care has some ugly jurisdictional issues that make it hard to do locally, but it's not impossible.  Regardless, I completely support the principle.


The libertarians called on the churches to help out.  The churches failed to deliver.  His mother ended up with the bill.  Either she paid for his screwup, or she defaulted and the hospital eats the cost.  Either way, how is that right?


They can't deny emergency care, but there's no mandate to provide preventative care.  People get a minor infection that could be treated with a simple round of antibiotics, but it goes untreated until the infection goes systemic and they have to put them up in the ICU for $5,000.  Of course most of the time people are defaulting on hospital bills, so they jack up his (and everyone's) bill to $30,000.  They default, the hospital writes off the losses, we all end up paying for some of it, and the occasional guy who had some money but no insurance gets stuck with a $30,000 bill for some random 1-day ER visit.

"Entitling" the doctors to get paid means we can deal with this with for a $70 doctor visit plus $30 of antibiotics.


Indeed, how could it not?  Given such, how can you not see that this was intentionally, maliciously a creation of rent-seeking bankers?


Absolutely.  I wasn't trying to single out the irresponsible buyers.  The whole system is a self-perpetuating mess designed to keep raising prices to extract ever more money into the hands of bankers, realtors, and all the others you mentioned, while people own ever diminishing percentages of their homes...  The buyers are just useful idiots.  I still don't feel sorry for the idiots. 

I agree it's not completely dead.  That was said in context of another thread, and it was a bit of an oversimplification and exaggeration.

Most likely it will always be at least marginally profitable for you if you carefully plan your rigs for efficiency and you have inexpensive power, but the days where anyone could just pick up a couple Radeons and start shaking out coins worth well above their costs are over.  You can't do it on residential power in Hawaii or California no matter what hardware you have!

I do!  A couple weeks ago I commented that I had invested all my BTC into USD, and I've been earning a 1500% ROR ever since! 

But that's not really true.  It's hard to pin a specific value (Not price!  I mean value: how much it's actually worth when I buy goods) on a unit of currency, but BTC has lost 90% in 4 months, while USD hasn't lost more than 10% value even by pessimistic metrics.

No, they do not.  A lot of people fall on hard times and nobody helps.

I do my part.  I've taken people into my home until they could get back on their feet.  I've paid hospital bills.  I've bought the medicine to save someone's life.  But it's not the norm, and so much so that when helping people I frequently get asked, "Why are you doing this?  What's your angle?"  There's no scam, I'm just doing what's right, and people cannot believe that's the case because they've never seen it happen before.

People should be entitled to a minimum safety net.  Food.  Shelter.  Health care.  Education.  From there, go earn the rest of what you want.  Having those things as a given makes people more productive because they'll start ventures that they could not risk if they were afraid to quit their job and lose their insurance, or be afraid that they'll starve to death if their business fails.


Apparently those people are enormous hypocrites.  Last I heard they'd only covered about 10% of the bill.


This is not a "left" problem.  This is a "corrupt politician" problem, and they're available across the spectrum and from all parties.

I'm not saying that to defend the left.  I consider myself neither leftist nor a Democrat.  I own too many guns for that.    And I have a load of other issues with the Democrats, but I'd rather not divert there.  In many issues I swing libertarian, but I don't take that label either; they foam at the mouth when I talk about social safety nets.  The fact is I have complex views that defy all the common labels.  Anyway, my point is that I'm pretty neutral, and not just knee-jerk defending one side.


This isn't leftists/liberals/socialists.  This is immoral bankers who bought corrupt politicians (across the whole spectrum) and created a system where they could make money by creating piles of terrible loans, skimming off some fees, and dumping them before they ended up with any responsibility.

This was never about helping people get housing.  That's the cover story, but it was always about making bankers rich.


I ask no such thing.  They fucked up too and bear the moral responsibility for taking on debt they couldn't possibly pay.  I don't feel sorry for them.  They were being irresponsible too, so fuck 'em.  I still think they're entitled to have some kind of cheap roof over their head, but they deserve to lose their house and go spend some time in the projects until they can get their act together and start paying for something better.

I agree, but it should be about choosing to move value, not having it moved because the market shifted around me in ways I didn't expect.

Unfortunately for a few overly-optimistic fools, it DID eat up their life savings, and they went into debt buying even more coins.

Like you say, that money wasn't destroyed, it just went to someone else... But I object to shoveling money from one person to another just because one bought in early and won the gamble against the guy who bought in late, when no one involved did anything to create or destroy any real value.  Exploiting people's gullibility is not a moral act.

Why do you need more connections to mine?  If you're mining with a pool you just need one RPC connection from your miner to the pool.

If you're solo mining 8 connections in your client is plenty.  The network propagates transactions very quickly.

+1, it's a lot like a low value stock.

I compare it more to the pink sheets (penny stocks, which I also consider to be pyramids).  The behavior is similar:  with a tiny market cap, just a few guys pumping it (on forums, "BUY XXX" spams, giddy youtube videos, or whatever) can start a bubble, the new guys will take over excitedly promoting it, and it'll self-sustain long enough for the first ones in to cash out.

But those only get one shot, then they're dead.  Bitcoin may have a future.  If it can create some real value by growing a real economy, it may get somewhere.  Don't listen to the excited speculative investors who're telling you this will happen... They're speculating.  Pay attention to signs of real commerce - that's the only thing that will drive growth in the long run.