The debt is an illusion, there is no debt when central bank can print money at will: All the debt is owed to banks, but banks don't really need the repayment, when they need money, they just print as they see fit

However, banks will never do a debt forgiven, so you have higher and higher national debt, this is to make sure people trust the value of fiat currency. You can imagine, if all the debt can be forgiven (as they should), then people will all take unlimited loans and spend, no one is going to work, immediately create hyperinflation and destroy the value of fiat currency. Debt is the driven power for the society

Extremely useful heater (after down clock and apply quiet fans), it runs 24/7 so you don't need extremely large power consumption to heat a house, and the electricity cost is compensated by the mined coins

http://astronomynow.com/2015/07/17/diminishing-solar-activity-may-bring-new-ice-age-by-2030/

Bitcoin miners will save humans from new ice age

I heard that bitstamp has claimed to be running on bitcoin XT, the biggest dangerous right now

Actually 1%, e.g. 6 seconds delay in 600 seconds block interval is extremely low, in practice all the direct measurement value is much higher than this, see the paper below

https://scalingbitcoin.org/papers/feemarket.pdf
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Table 2.  Estimates for the Block Solution Propagation Impedance and the Associated Minimum Fee Density

Estimate name                Propagation impedance(sec/MB)  Method                         Year   Ref.    Min. fee density (μɃ/kB)

Decker and Wattenhofer   80                                            Direct measurement       2013  10      3,333
Tradeblock                      17.1                                          Direct measurement       2015  18      713
This study                       7.6                                           Theoretically formula       2015  19      318
Relay network                 2.0                                           Taken as T5 time to 99%  2015  20     83
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I would take the conservative approach of 60 seconds delay, about 10% of the block interval, which means current fee is not optimal from miners point of view. Obviously miners are still mainly incentivized by the block reward, so they would sacrifice some of the fee income to maintain the health of the network. But those miners on slower network (for example chinese pools) might start to generate empty blocks to improve their propagation speed: If a large mining pool are mining 10 blocks per day, losing 1 block of that income is a huge loss

IMO, the block orphan rate affects the mining income of bitcoins, has no direct relation to bitcoin's price

If one bitcoin is worth 1 million dollars, and miners still get 1% orphan rate by including 2000 transactions (e.g. lose 0.25 BTC), so they would still charge 0.25 BTC for 2000 transactions, 0.000125 btc per transaction, but then each transaction will cost $125, anything below that will not be included by the miners, since they get more than that by not including such a transaction

In that case, if the network speed do not increase by 3-5 magnitudes, then transaction on the blockchain will become so expensive that small casual spending would only use off-chain-zero-fee services. Hopefully by the time bitcoin reach 1 million dollars, the block reward has dropped to single digits, and hardware and network would reach that level of capacity

The offchain solution is the only way to compete with traditional payment capacity. As I'm familiar with, in some countries like China Sweden etc..., mobile payment and third party payment solutions do not charge any fee at all, and the payment is done instantly, so bitcoin blockchain has no way to catch up with those solutions, only centralized offchain solution can compete

But the bitcoin's main advantage is its limited supply and censorship resistant, not the payment function

Obviously he don't know what money is 

In a discussion about transaction fee, I just sorted out these facts:

A smart mining pool will calculate the block orphan risk when including transactions (more transactions will raise the orphan rate due to longer broadcasting time)

For example, if a full 1MB block containing 2000 transactions will broadcast slower than an empty block, thus raise the block orphan rate by 1%, then the pool will lose 1% of the block reward, which is 0.25 BTC, divided by 2000 transactions, you get 0.000125 btc per transaction, that's the recommended fee right now

For 2MB blocks, the broadcasting time of such a large block might affect the orphan rate more significantly, say raise the block orphan rate to 4%, and then you can include 4000 transactions in each block. As a result, although each block can hold double amount of transactions, a full block will cost 4x more for miners, so the fee for each transaction would double at 2 MB full block

Currently, due to the block reward, you can not enforce a higher fee for miners, since the miners on today's fast network have very low orphan rate if they include all the 2000 transactions, thus any fee above 0.0001 is good enough for them to happily include it

However, if block is larger and the transactions processing speed (CPU/network) is limited, miners can not include as many as possible transactions without added orphan cost, then I guess the fee will rise when blocks grow beyond certain size, regardless of the block size limit

Only a speed increase in CPU/network infrastructure would lower these cost, and we know that the improvement in those area (especially the fiber network infrastructure) are not that easy to upgrade

This is actually a very large and forward-looking topic, tied to the discussion of block size limit

It is forward-looking because currently majority of the miner's income is coming from block reward(25 btc per block), the fee income is neglectable

So you can observe that some chinese mining pools would mine empty blocks to just harvest the block reward and quickly broadcast that empty block to the network (their network speed is slow, if they broadcast a full 1MB block, the chance that block being orphaned will be larger, thus incur a loss for the pool)

Basically, a smart pool will calculate the block orphan risk when including transactions (more transactions will raise the orphan rate due to longer broadcasting time), so today's recommended fee is based on the result of such calculation, not arbitrarily decided

For example, if a full 1MB block containing 2000 transactions will broadcast slower than an empty block, thus raise the block orphan rate by 1%, then the pool will lose 1% of the block reward, which is 0.25 BTC, divided by 2000 transactions, you get 0.000125 btc per transaction, that's the recommended fee right now

For 2MB blocks, the broadcasting time of such a large block might affect the orphan rate more significantly, say raise the block orphan rate to 4%, and now you can include 4000 transactions in each block. As a result, although each block have double amount of transactions, but a full block will cost 4x more for miners, so the fee for each transaction would double

So increase the block size might bring a higher fee, if the network is not fast enough to broadcast a 2MB block worldwide in 10 minutes



And then you have another scenario of fixed block size at 1MB forever. In this case, the transaction capacity is always 2000 transactions per block, people will compete for these limited spaces, and also combine their small transactions into large ones to save the fee. Just like Fedwire system only processes 4 transactions per second, if bitcoin become a system like that, then it will only process large transactions valued more than 1 million dollars, and users would not mind paying thousands of dollars in fee (0.x%)

There is a question: Should miners incentive be raised above block reward long before the block reward drop to zero(even at 4th or 5th halving), or after that?

Currently, due to the block reward, you can not enforce a higher fee for miners, since the miners on today's fast network have very low orphan rate if they include all the 2000 transactions, thus any fee above 0.0001 is good enough for them to happily include it

However, if block is larger and the network speed is limited, miners can not include as many as possible transactions without added orphan cost, then I guess the fee will rise when blocks grow beyond certain size

Another use case on coindesk discussion:

"Nahh, my son's a gamer, he buys his bitcoin, then uses it to buy a steam card online using a VPN that looks like he is in russia (the games are cheaper if you buy them in russia)...sounds weird, but due to geo-locking and the inability to figure out the actual geographic location of the bitcoin, the transaction is far cheaper then doing it any other way in Australia - with credit cards they know where you live lol and ream you because you are Australian...thus I understand what the gamer's are doing here: it is a good use of bitcoin to avoid geo-locking."

I guess in future, goods/services priced in bitcoin will always be much cheaper than price in fiat money, since all the merchants know that their bitcoin income will appreciate over time, makes them some extra profit, even the sale income is lower than fiat. And they can have international sale too

I think web based, centralized wallet service will have a large market share at the beginning, when people are all used to centralized banking services around the world today. Suppose that some large banks provide wallet service, there will be many people switch to that service quickly

Do not understand what OP want to say, mass adoption is obviously happening if you consider the price was basically in a down trend during last 2 years

And money is a one-size-fits-all thing, just like USD is suitable for any kind of transaction, so does bitcoin

If bitstamp indeed goes for BIP 101, then I will immediately withdraw all the money I have there

The previous stress test showed that even under a load of 100% full block for several days, most of the transactions are still not affected, this shows that the block size being full is not a dangerous thing, since humans are all adaptive, they will reschedule their transaction when banks are closed

The most important is to lay out a more reasonable scaling framework for the years to come

Another thought: Limiting the transaction capacity will help to reduce the amount of speculation, this is similar to Nasdaq reducing the trading frequency when there is a severe market crash. So to discourage speculation, the transaction capacity should be almost 50% full so that a sudden increase in transaction frequency can not be more than 100%

Well, I'm not living in Russia, just passed by Moscow airport a few times and did not discover a big change in price. But in Sweden where I'm living, its currency crashed 30% against USD, I can observe that many things just get cheaper, while some high end food get more expensive, like well processed sea food and luxury foods

So, I have never observed any clear relationship between the money supply and the price of food since there are so many different budget shops that you can get cheap food here. A meal in restaurant however get higher and higher price, but I guess that is due to the increase of the value of lunch that companies are allowed to deduct from income tax, it rose from 50 kr in 90s to close to 100 kr. now

These are minor issues, as long as printed money can hold its value, things can be solved easily. Average Joe are stubbornly believe in the value of fiat money, so money printing will always work, just a matter of time when the money eventually trickle down

For example, if the government borrowed trillions and hired millions of people to do almost useless job, these people will get a high salary so that they can spend on everything else, then producers of these things will find new customer and new sale, and also start to hire more and return more tax to government

The system has only one weakness: If people start to lose the confidence in fiat money, then none of the monetary policies gonna work. But it seems after several hundred years of practice, bankers are fully aware of how to make sure people do not lose confidence in fiat money (They carefully watch the inflation indicator to not trigger a panic, and by the time that inflation is high, they have already spent all their money in exchange of assets and resources)

I had a thought, there has never been a person called Satoshi Nakamoto from the beginning, it is just a name made by a group of people, and maybe some of them is already died, but just like the God in various religions are also made by a group of people, he become an immortal figure that represent the spirit of decentralization and an incorruptible monetary system

If they talk about crisis and thought it will be a crash in the price of something, that would never happen when Euro can be printed at will to support the price of anything, like what happened in US, you just need to print 5x more money to deal with a large sell-off of house

So, as long as people believe in Euro's value, there will be no crash of anything's price.

However, a crash might come from the value of Euro itself, e.g. everything's price goes up 10 times every month, but that will be triggered by a confidence collapse of Euro, which most of the european people regard as the most trustworthy currency, so it will not happen in near future. Just look at Greece, they even sacrifice freedom and take strict austerity measure to make sure they can borrow Euro, so in their eyes Euro is the king, and this king can be created at will by ECB

What might trigger the people's confidence collapse of Euro or Dollar might be a stronger competing currency like bitcoin, so I guess FED/ECB will try hard to keep bitcoin as an investment vehicle, not widely used currency, similar to what China is doing right now

The price stability of daily consumption is maintained automatically by itself, a change in money supply seldom affect it. A good example is the Ruble crash against dollar, it crashed more than 50% during 2 years, however the price domestically in Russian did not change too much. Another good example is QE, even after FED printed 5x more money, the price of daily consumption still seems stable

Even government is doing nothing, the price of daily consumption will maintain their level automatically and slowly get cheaper and cheaper due to advance in production technology, what banks do is to print more and more and added money work as a tax applied to everyone. Humans are adaptive, you tax them harder, they will work harder

Only in academic people's imagination, there is an absolute measure of money's appreciation or depreciation. In the real world, it is always something's value going up while some other thing's value going down, and there is no meaning in regulating the average price trend of those things because for each people their holdings of these things are different, and they have a conflict of interest depends on their holdings (Everyone want his holding become more valuable so that he can exchange more other things, a policy that benefiting one fraction will always hurt the people on the opposite side)

You can have a few land lords holding majority of the assets in a country wish to have their assets appreciation against cash and everything else, while a lot of poor people wish to have their savings in cash appreciation against house so that they can afford to buy a house. You can clearly see who is going to win: These land lords usually hold the highest position in this country.

"By dealing an ultimately crippling blow to the monarchy (which, even after the Restoration, no longer posed a significant challenge to enclosures) the Civil War paved the way for the eventual rise to power in the 18th century of what has been called a "committee of Landlords",[26] a prelude to the UK’s parliamentary system. " -- Enclosure - wikipedia