While this is a fair point, it has zero relation to the OP proposal.

I used to get topup codes for Virgin mobile prepaid cell service for a 6% discount using bitcoins over credit, but Virgin sold out the US brand to Sprint and that changed.  So I can't really offer you a current example, but it sounds to me that there is a profit opprotunity there.  Become the online shoe salesman that accepts bitcoin.

Really?  This is your argument?  That the satoshi is too large of a unit to use in daily transactions for 7 billion people?  Roughly 30K people use bitcoins sometimes, and less than 100 use them daily and exclusively.  Do you really think that bitcoins will ever be the exclusive, or even primary, unit of exchange for all the people on this planet?  I doubt it.  Yes, there can be unit divisions less than a satoshi.  So what?  How many decades before we need to even name that unit?

Satoshi had a point.  He hasn't been here for some time, and his comments were relevent to the state of Bitcoin at that time.  The main client was still, itself, very rough.  Very much still beta.  IT's also a monolithic implimentation.  Which is fine for early work.

We are beyond early work.  I have long complained that the main bitcoin client didn't have simple unix like tools.  Libbitcoin seems to intend to be that set of unix tools.  I want to be able to pipe a transaction to a file, move it with a usb sneakernet, and pipe it to the bitcoin network on another machine.  I want a client that can do this for me, automaticly.  I want a client that I can create the keypairs on one machine, and manage the funds on a headless server half way around the world, without either of those machines even knowing the IP address of the other.  I want an online wallet service client that can logic bomb my funds onto the bitcoin network if tripwire is activated.  If the tools exist to perform each of the simple operations that the bitcoin client performs; then clients that can do a great many things can be developed to suit small group needs.

Sounds good.  What's stopping you now?

This is provablely false.  Most units of measurement are, in fact, arbitrarily chosen standards of agreement.  Currencies are, truthfully, a unit of measurement; but only of value.  Value is, itself, highly subjective.  No currency has a constant value relative to anything other than itself, and often not even to itself over time.  Yes, Bitcoin is both a currency and a commodity, in many respects; it's also a service, and that service also contributes value to the users.

Bullshit.  These sex workers aren't undocumented.  They file returns, they just lie about how much they really make.  Waitresses do it, restaurant owners do it; just about any cash dominated business does it to some degree.  That's a rational (although arguablely immoral, and certainly illegal) response to the tax policies of the US.  Tax avoidance and tax evasion are two terms that describe exactly the same activity, where one is considered criminal and the other is not.  Cash transactions have the same annoying feature, so vilified by government agencies, that Bitcoin has; in the sense that a cash transaction, between two parties that don't have a reason to involve the government, doesn't leave a paper trail.  For all intents and purposes, if there is no paper trail, then no taxable event ever occurred.  So what good does drawing in the "undocumented" workers do?  Only the stupid & largely unsuccessful are going to trade their anonimity for a $200 per month health care subsidy anyway.  I've known a few 'undocumetned' workers in my time, and in my experience these people aren't going to be signing up for this kind of thing anyway.   It wouldn't work for them, since most of them have regular jobs anyway.  What they do is, the jump the border fence and spend a few days with a 'documented' relative.  they gather up his personal information, including his tax id number, and 'become' him in another area of town, or even in another state.  These duplicates never file for taxes, and never get any benefits; but the original guy with the tax id is working 6000 hours per year, working four different jobs, claiming 6 kids, and probably getting back more in his tax returns than he actually (personally) paid into it.  The only guy that could file for a subisty is the one guy with the tax id number, and he makes too much money to bother.

Although I'll agree that Peter doesn't understand Bitcoin, I'll also say that he doesn't really need to understand bitcoin to make a reasonable assessment of speculation risk.  In this clip, he remains skeptical of bitcoins, and thinks that they have many halmarks of a bubble.  That's quite true from a traditional investment perspective.  Perhaps traditional investment perspectives don't apply (yet) to Bitcoin.  Who am I to disagree?  Anyone rational will go through all these same stages of distrust, although many of us proceeded much faster through the darkness than Peter has been.  I, for one, had real trouble believing that it was anything more than a scam in the early days; I just couldn't shake that idea that it could work.  And so I kept coming back and re-reading the white paper until it all 'clicked'.  I can now honestly claim that I understand how bitcoin functions, on a low/process level as well as a macro-economic level, better than 95%+ of the membership of this forum.  One day it will 'click' for Peter as well, along with the rest of humanity.  The vast majority of people will not know, nor need to know, how Bitcoin actually does what it claims to do; eventually they will just trust that it does it, in the same way that the public generally 'trusts' that the central banks know what they are doing and have much to lose by screwing it up.  (This is the real source of the "faith and credit" of the average Joe, the belief that the rich guys running the game have more to lose than Joe does if things go sideways; bitcoin will not alter the root source of the public trust either, most will simply start to trust bitcoin because they can see more and more big players who have much to lose puting their faith into it)

In short, Peter's distrust is rational at his own stage; and therefore warning callers (asking for his opinion) against bitcoin investing is also rational.

You do realize that the only reason that they have such low 'taxable' reported incomes is because they don't tell the truth about all the cash profit, right?  Do you really think that full-time professional sex workers in California only make $25K per year?  Seriously, would you do that kind of work for that?  If they don't make four times that much, they couldn't afford to live in California.  They only qualify for medicaid because the government buys their BS.

They aren't going to have their tax returns "fully vetted". Ever.  If you have a job that removes your income tax from your wages before you get it, then you're subsidizing their (high risk) lifestyles.

If that idea offends you, to bad! It's the law of the land, after all! We can't possibly change a law once it's passed (by one vote)!  Whoever has even heard of changing an "established law"?  Next you'll be telling me that slavery was banned in every modern society on Earth!  Such nonesense!

Sorry?

There isn't even a certainty that you can always mine bitcoins with your asic.  Bitcoin is modular, and theoretically could add any other similar hashing algo to work in series with SHA256.  If this were to happen, all those ASIC wouldn't be completely useless, but would be like a V8 on a moped.  The limiting factor of mining would become the other algo in use.

At least the GPU's could still be used for games.

No matter what you come up with, it will be attacked.

I see. Then you need to wait till you can post in the alt-currencies section.

I don't understand the question.  SHA 256 is not used to create wallet files. Do you want instructions on how to set up a standard wallet client?

Oh, but it does.  You just don't see where it's going yet, apparently.  No matter; carry on and you'll get there with the rest of the short bus.

While not technically a monopoly, it's definately government led collusion by regulatory capture.  The end result remains the same, no different than the Robber Barons of the US railroad industry colluding to inflate shipping prices.  The cabal benefits so long as no players undercut the cabal, which can't really happen when government is part of the cabal.


Sure.  I need private insurance if I desire to drive on the public roads.  But driving is an earned privalige, not a right.  I have a right to life, and shouldn't have government telling me that I have to buy a particular product to continue to exercise that right to life.  The major insurance companies have long been for Obamacare as they were in favor of Hillarycare before it.  It's only the small & otherwise innovative insurance companies that were opposed.  Stop and ask yourself why this is.

http://benswann.com/mr-president-im-leaving-the-medical-field-hanging-up-the-white-coat-a-letter-to-president-obama/

This guy literally grew up in the maternatiy ward that delivered him, and he interned at that same hospital.  He just 'went Galt'.

As of this exact moment, (5pm Eastern Standard Time, Oct 23rd 2013) the value of a single bitcoin is $222.74.  Making those 10K bitcoins worth $2,227,400.  Since that order was two pizzas, each one is is now a $1,137,000 pizza.

Largest year over year asset value increase rate in the history of mankind.

Truer words have never been posted, but that is not to say that Obamacare is actually an improvement in this regard.  Ironicly, I'm personally of the opinion that, if a static baseline of public health care access is the goal, (as so stated by so many, although not in those words) then a single payer form of health care industry (a la Canada) is as good a solution to the 'problem' as a market based system would be.

The issue here is that we didn't really have a problem, at least not one that couldn't have been made worse by government aid.  The grand 'problem' was never that American's didn't have a reasonable baseline of health care, there are laws that require any public health care facility (hospital) to treat patients regardless of their capacity to pay; and if, in the future, they filed for bankruptcy, they didn't have to pay those bills, ever.  So in the US, even if you were uninsured and unemployed, you could reasonablely expect to receive the same life saving care that the rich guy who crossed the median to hit your 20 year old car with his 2014 BMW would receive, regardless of who the hospital expected to be paying the bills later on.

As of this moment, we have a health insurance reform law that, as implimented, has outlawed about eight times as many existing health insurance policies in Florida alone than the government claims has been able to sign up for subsidized insurance plans via the health care websites across the entire country in three weeks time.

"Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state. Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people – about half of its individual business in the state.  Insurer Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20 percent of its individual market customers, while Independence Blue Cross, the major insurer in Philadelphia, is dropping about 45 percent."

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2013/October/21/cancellation-notices-health-insurance.aspx

I'd almost prefer a single payer system myself, over this BS, and that is probably the point of it all.

Okay, but I can also make the argument that every American is rich by any historical or global standard.  I'm upper middle class, by American standards; but I can still afford to pay my medical costs directly.  That's what I do, too.  I do not take a dime out of my health savings account in a normal year, and have only taken $1K out of it in the entire time that I've had it.  Because I'm saving for a time when I really need it.  I have a major medical plan that is attached to the medical savings account, with an annual deductable of $6500.  I've not yet hit this mark in a year, but then I also don't pay for expensive testing that's not likely to tell me something about my condition that I can't guess.  Eventually, my condition is going to be very expensive.  That's not your problem.  It's mine. 

If you can afford your own care, shouldn't you be expected to pay for it?  Either directly or via taxation?  But if you can't afford it, who then is responsible for your bad luck?  Other taxpayers? 

Perhaps not. I'm not in a position to make this argument.  Regardless, medical patents really shouldn't exist; and then this issue wouldn't exist either.


Prohibition of lawasuits creates other perverse incentives.  We have a real world example in the case of vaccines for children.  Did you know that you can't sue the manufactuer of your child's vaccine, even if it provablely caused harm, if it's listed on any state or federal vaccine schedule?  You can, however, beg permission to sue the federal government as it has legally assumed all liability for childhood vaccines; but you have to beg such permission from a federal court, and even if you win you're taking funds from taxpayers, not the vaccine manufacter that screwed up your kid.  Artificial limitations on civil liabilites creates it's own issues, is a violation of both the non-aggression principle and 1000 years of common law, and is begging to be taken advantage of by souless corporations.


Overtesting is in the eye of the beholder.  Again, the US is the most expensive medical care industry on Earth for many reasons, but some of those are contributions to the high quality of care.  Sure, odds are good that if you get a good bump on the head, and the doctor sees no ready signs of a concussion, you'll be fine.  But what about the times those odds don't pan out?  Going with the greatest odds is cheaper overall, but if you're the guy that caught brain cancer early because the emergency room insisted on an MRI after your head injury; odds are better you would be thankful for wasteful uses of medical testing.