Yeah, a good iPhone app would bring down the barrier to entry a bit, I imagine.

You might want to keep those tattoos somewhere only you would get to see them.

I'd be too paranoid to do that. I'd have to become a never-nude if I ever did. Those tattoos would never see the light of day.

Universities and biotech startups, I imagine. Not sure. I'd have to do some research to find out. The same people using the Amazon GPU cloud and Sabalcore's clusters, essentially. There are businesses out there already doing this, so it seems there's a market for it. But like I said, all the clusters-for-rent I've come across so far consist mostly of crappy NVIDIA-based boxes. Our network contains nodes of a much higher quality.

Protein folding, prime number finding, DNA analysis, data mining. Lots of research applications, from what I understand. Anything involving lots of parallelizable computation would stand to benefit, really.

The question of where bitcoins get their value has been chewing at the back of my brain for a while now. Yes, I know speculation and dollars invested gives it value, as do the goods you can buy with them. However, as long as dollars remain a more convenient alternative, I think the general public will be slow to adopt bitcoins. This low adoption rate will likely keep the value of the bitcoin down.

If we can find a "killer app" for bitcoins, a commodity that can only be bought through bitcoins, then we will have effectively ensured demand for bitcoins will remain at least as high as demand for that commodity. I hear the US uses oil for this purpose, though I haven't researched that claim at all. This commodity would, of course, have to be unique to our own "nation;" that is, our bitcoin community.

The collective computing power of our network is phenomenal. There are a massive number of GPUs and GPU clusters grinding away to create new bitcoins every day. But what if it were more profitable to pool together our resources and rent them in exchange for bitcoins? We would be selling bitcoins to people only to have them give those coins back to us later, and at potentially a higher price than we might have earned by mining those bitcoins. After all, we are more efficient than any of the commercial clustering services out there and our margins could potentially be high. How many of you have tried looking for a clustering service only to find they were all priced too high to be profitable for you?

And, of course, if mining ends up being more profitable because of bitcoin deflation as a result, it would be a small matter to devote more of our nodes to mining again until the situation reverses again. At the very least it would establish a way for us to earn some good money with our mining boxes once all the bitcoins have been mined.

As a network we are faster, more efficient, and much more powerful than any other clustering service I've come across. Computing power is a commodity and we have a ton.

What do you all think? Am I on to anything?

Haha. Well said. Of course, these are the same people who say the Hunt brothers were the sole reason the price of silver rose back in the 70s.

That is an excellent selling point for the bitcoin system. Maybe it ought to be better publicized?

Looks awesome. Unfortunately I can't bring up the settings, nor can I run the screensaver. When I try to run it from the display settings dialog, it does nothing. When I try to run it directly, by double clicking on it in the system32 directory, I get this error:
"The procedure entry point cuMemAlloc_v2 could not be located in the dynamic link library nvcuda.dll"

I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit with an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS video card.

Any idea as to what's going on?

Thanks.

Swarmonomics

Swarmonomic Industries/Ventures

The Nimblest Monolith



I'll try to come up with more later. :-)

You can buy bitcoins with inherited money though. So in a sense, yes, anyone who has bought bitcoins with inherited money has inherited bitcoins, albeit indirectly.

Wait, so what about this?
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Units

According to that page, 0.00000001 bitcoin is a bitcoin-bong...

Actually, I think once the bitcoin gets that strong, we'll start seeing people listing prices in terms of micro-bitcoins or something to that effect.  When everything was super cheap (by face value, anyway) here in the States, back during the Great Depression, a lot of shops began listing prices in terms of cents if they were cheaper than a dollar.

True. However, regardless of how hard these questions are to answer, a person can still have trouble understanding another. To such a person, the one speaking would make little or no sense, regardless of whether they have a valid point or not.


Well yes. I didn't mean that people are necessarily poor because they choose to be. I meant that one can choose to be poor. It's an option.

That... really doesn't sound right. I don't think you can say that 0.01 bitcoin is one bitcoin. Because to say 0.01 bitcoin is one bitcoin is the same as saying that 0.01 bitcoin is 1 bitcoin. That doesn't hold, logically.

0.01 != 1

Any time I see the number 0.01, I don't think "one." I think "zero point zero one," or "one hundredth."

Just to back me up, here's a quote from the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin) on bitcoins:


A Google search also shows that most people agree with the terminology. It's 21 million, not 21 quadrillion.

Wow, this discussion's gotten rather heated!


But if he doesn't want an actual house, if he only wants a month's stay, then what? You're going to end up having a landlord/renter situation no matter what, unless Bob gives away his basement. Whether he gives it away or not, it's Bob's choice and I cannot assign morality to his decision to rent unless I know more facts about the situation. Is Bob putting himself and his possessions in peril by housing Adam? Then I couldn't blame him for charging a fee. If he suffers damage and Adam flees without helping repair the damage, then at least Bob has his fee. But will Adam die for want of shelter, and has Adam come to a want of shelter through no fault of his own, and will housing Adam do no harm to Bob? Then I would say it would be right for Bob to offer his basement on more lenient terms, perhaps for free. It would be wrong of Bob to leave Adam to die.

But you argue that the landlord arrangement itself is exploitative. You argue about straw men and abstractions that have little to do with reality. In a certain situation, yes, Bob's charging of Adam would be exploitative. If he raised his rent simply because he knew Adam needed it badly, and especially if his hike in rent locks Adam into his impoverished state, then yes, that is certainly exploitative. It is wrong in the same way that stealing from a baby is wrong. It is the gratuitous taking of what I do not need from someone who cannot afford to lose what I am taking and who is powerless to stop me. That is exploitation.

If Adam, however, is simply a wanderer by choice and wishes to lodge in Bob's basement for a time, and if Bob chooses to charge him for that, and if Adam accepts, then I see no wrong. From a certain perspective this is akin to charging Adam for shelter without which he would die: in both cases I am putting a barrier in the way of what he wants. And I think this is what you mean by exploitation, Father McGruder: putting a barrier between a person and what they want. Perhaps you would add the qualifier "needless" to the word "barrier," but I would have to stop you there. Because who is to say that Bob's need to accumulate capital by renting out his basement is any lesser than Adam's need to accumulate experience and contacts by wandering from town to town?

Your arguments work in the clean-room of idealism, but they cannot stand when they meet reality. Yes, it would be nice if everyone worked according to their ability and received according to their need. Unfortunately we live in a world of scarcity. Once that scarcity is gone, or far enough removed so as to be unknown to anyone first-hand, then we may begin talking about the even distribution of wealth. Even now we might be at the cusp of being able to talk about the even distribution of life's necessities.

But really, I would rather human labor be removed from the equation before we start spreading the fruits of that labor. Once we automate farming and have food coming from fields where no human need ever have set foot, once by the simple motion of the sun and machinery we find food on our tables, then let the distribution be equal.


No no, he said work or die, not be employed or die. Though I guess he did imply the latter, didn't he? But really, usually there's nothing to stop a person from becoming their own employer or from banding together with other workers to make a living. Sure, it'll take a lot of work, and sure, you might have to work at something you don't really care about, but at least nobody's employing you, right?

Um... actually, poverty is a choice. And it's not the only one. We can always become our own employers. If you desire emancipation from a regular paycheck, then learn a skill people will pay you for directly, or make something you can sell. Software is the best thing to sell, since you only have to make it once and can then sell it many times. (Bill Gates was smart about that one.)

And hiring people? How's that exploitative? If you pay fair wages, or if you give what you can give at the very least, then I can't find fault. The cooperation of a group to bring in greater wealth is still cooperation, even if the leader is somewhat autocratic.

Anyway, sorry about the dissertation! I get carried away sometimes, once I start typing.

Okay, I realize I'm probably being pedantic, but you realize that 20,999,999.9~ rounded up to 21,000,000 is 21 million, not 21 quadrillion, right? 1 quadrillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000. 21 quadrillion would be 21,000,000,000,000,000. Just thought I should make that clear.


Yeah, absolutely. Keeping the bitcoins locked at a finite amount is analogous to having a gold standard. And it would ruin the whole p2p, decentralized aspect of our currency to have a central issuing authority.

Technically there will be 21 million at full implementation. Technically if the 1% lost a year rate holds, it'll be much longer than 100 years before we run out of bitcoins. Never, if we have infinite decimals at our disposal.


Not a bad idea, though it seems like a bit of a hassle, especially considering the computing power it's going to take to get to our 21 million.

True. I guess I'm just concerned about hoarding. If the people with the bitcoins are willing to spend enough to create a large middle class, then awesome. But if deflation is such that they have little incentive to spend, I can see that causing problems.

This is true. The decimal nature of bitcoins would let us do that. However (and I'm not sure if this is likely at all, but it seems a possibility) if the rate of deflation proceeds at too great a clip, couldn't that end up widening the gap between the wealthy and the poor, resulting in oligarchy? My concern is simply that we could end up creating an economy where those who are new to the bitcoin system are at a pronounced disadvantage when compared to those who are not.

At present this can be written off as a "finder's fee": we are the early adopters, the risk is ours, therefore we deserve to profit. However, if bitcoins gain global acceptance, we may have to face the fact that the "newcomers" may be drawn from among the young or freshly impoverished. Perhaps it is beyond the scope of a currency's structure to favor the upwardly mobile, but I am (presently) of the opinion that it would be beneficial to have that "upward mobility" element baked into the currency of a society.

I realize I may not have made my point very clearly, but I should be going now. I was supposed to be somewhere a little while ago and got sucked in by the discussion. I'll return, hopefully soon.

Does anyone else think this might be a real problem in the long run? To me this sounds like bitcoins will be on a long, long deflationary slide the minute we hit the 21 million mark. Bitcoins are sure to be lost; if there is no way to reclaim them, that long deflationary slide could bode ill for our fledgling coin.