Ponzi schemes are fun, providing nobody is lying to you about what it is.
It's not worse than lottery or gambling, anyway.
Try explaining that to the general public. |
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Why? Let the free market handle it. If it's not popular it'll die out...  Why? Because newcomers might get the wrong idea about Bitcoin. Is it really worth the damage it does to our image? This is something I think we need to give more consideration to. So many of Bitcoin's users seem to be individualists and on the political fringe - the sorts of people who say "I don't care what anybody thinks of me" - and while that's often a great attitude to take, there are times and places where it's not beneficial. That sort of attitude could hurt the spread, and therefore the value, of the currency in which so many of us have invested. I'd defend the ponzi schemes in the context that most of us here are like-minded and can easily take it as a joke. But in order for Bitcoin to move forward, we might need to start looking a little less "fringey" in order to get normal people on board... the sorts of people who might not find ponzi schemes so funny. +1 Well said! |
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So basically, casascius's point is that a small minority of future potential bitcoin population has grabbed significant share of total bitcoin wealth and this is portrayed as bitcoins disadvantage and unfairness.
Proposed solution is to somehow change rules of the game now so that "jonny's come late" get bigger piece of the pie without taking much risks.
What disregarded is amount of risk early adopters took allocating significant part of their resources, be it time or money, to a high risk venture while protecting initially vulnerable bitcoin network.
Now it is proposed to change the rules of the game to redistribute wealth away from early adopters to jonny come laters or else jonny come laters will revolt and start their own currency.
Right, this is perfectly understandable, it sounds like you feel we deserve to be enriched at others' expense because of all the risk we took. (Which was what, exactly, by the way?) Bernanke probably feels the same way... After all, printing money is tiring and risky and at the end of the day, he and all his buddies deserve to be compensated for that lavishly the fruits of others' labor. Were the late immigrants to America unnerved by the fact that they would be increasing the value of the US dollar? And that they had no US dollars to begin with? |
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it's highly volatile and easily manipulated because of that ratio.
it's not easily manipulated because of that ratio, it's easily manipulated because of the small economy-size of just around 5million USD, every "one guy" with a couple of million USD to spend can manipulate the market. to distribute the coins in some different way wouldn't change anything. I agree, and take it one step further: the market can be manipulated with far fewer amounts than $millions! With $6000 in BTC, I can make this 5 million USD economy into a 3 million USD economy. Doesn't something seem wrong with that? You sure couldn't do it for very long. |
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I like keychain too, but what about chainkey? Isn't that exactly what it is? A block chain key?
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I get that the chance is very, very, very small. But unless there is no chance at all there is still a chance. All I am saying is that there should be a check to make sure that a new address does not exist already.
The chance is probably way less than the chance that a bank's computers and all of their backups will get destroyed and there will be no way of recovering bank deposits. Has that prevented people from using banks?No, because whatever I deposit into my bank is backed up by at least $100k by the Canadian Deposit Insurance Corporation. |
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Why? Let the free market handle it. If it's not popular it'll die out... Why? Because newcomers might get the wrong idea about Bitcoin. Is it really worth the damage it does to our image? |
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The only reason why ponzi schemes are banned is because central banks would like their own ponzi scheme (fiat currency) to be the only [ponzi] game in town. I do not see why bitcoin community should be concerned about this at all. That is preposterous. Name one thing about fiat currency that is even close to a ponzi/pyramid scheme. Are you speaking facts here or are you just angry towards the central banks? I for one believe we should try to create somewhat of a legal/up-and-up business presence here on the main forum. And ponzi schemes are bad for business. I'm not saying we should ban all talk of ponzi schemes. I suggest that we ban the promotion/solicitation of ponzi/pyramid schemes. The thousands of new guests coming to this forum might get the wrong idea by reading all of the references to "sign up to my ponzi scheme today!". |
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USD, CAD, AUD, BTCD? Why can't we just use the dollar symbol? That is probably the most internationally recognized symbol in the entire world when it comes to "money".
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Do you support the banning of all "ponzi scheme" related promotions on this forum?
Why or why not?
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Unless the thing I'm missing is cooling. I haven't tried to build a 4 GPU system before. Is it going to be impossible to cool a 4x 5870 system that's running 24/7?
You would have to use flexible PCIe-extenders to connect four GPUs because if you plug them all directly into MB, they'll block ait intakes of each other. And you can't plug them all directly because standart ATX system would accept only 7 cards (and each 5870 takes double space). Can you recommend a case that would work with 4 5870's? You're probably going to have to modify almost any case slightly to fit 4 cards into it. |
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Soooo... try to take down the banks? That most all of the superpower world governments just recently bailed out and now have a stake in?
Good luck with that!
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My thoughts exactly, xc. The OP on HN got the idea of bitcoin wrong. It is first and foremost a "store of value", not a currency. Nothing backs gold, and nobody says boo. Here's what I posted there:
This obsession with 'backing' demonstrates a gross failure to understand the subjective theory of value.
What backs gold??? Nothing other than the subjective valuations of individuals. The same is true of fiat currencies, except here individual subjective valuations concern matters such as 'not getting arrested' or 'not getting shot.'
Bitcoin is a technologic, cryptographically-rooted, informational commodity. It has unique, desirable properties inherent to its design and structure. Individuals subjectively value these properties. Their reasons and value scales differ, but the simple fact that people are already trading Bitcoins proves that it is subjectively valued.
You talk about 'confidence crises.' This is unique historically only to fiat currencies (and paper currencies built fractionally on commodities like gold). The subjective valuation of fiat currencies is derived from political considerations. As such, confidence in them is built on the ever-shifting sands of political perceptions.
When was the last confidence crisis in gold? There hasn't been one. People value gold for its physical properties defined by the laws of nature. Those properties do not change and individuals have continued to subjectively value them.
The same is true of Bitcoin. Its properties are rooted in our present understanding of cryptographic principles. As long as individuals continue to value properties such as anonymity, decentralization, finite supply, low transaction fees, ease of digital manipulation, ability to integrate smart contracts, etc... we have no reason to expect a 'confidence crisis.'
This will be true as long as the cryptographic logic buttressing the system remains sound – just like the laws of physics underlie the desired properties of gold. Breaking this cryptographic logic (akin to cheap transmutation of lead into gold) would require breakthrough advancements of our knowledge of cryptography and discoveries on hitherto unsolved mathematical problems. But even in this case, the open-source nature of Bitcoin allows it to evolve new cryptographic implementations that would avoid such problems.
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Unless facebook or google open sources the btc2 who would want to use it when you know its controlled by a corporation ?
They couldnt control it so are not likely to use it imo. They couldnt risk people buying drugs with facebook or google btc2.
Besides then it wouldnt be p2p would it ? It would be facebook credits 2.0
fail.
Probably the best answer in the entire thread. If you think about it logically... No one man could re-create what satoshi did. Not anymore. Not with 2 years of open source code being contributed to the project. If anyone had a radically new/amazing idea they would probably just implement it into bitcoin. And if any new "group" of people tried to come along and tell us bitcoin was no good anymore, we would most likely not believe them. |
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Say I send an email money transfer (these are popular in Canada) to my friend.
The bank's software that handles email money transfers forgets to remove the money from my account. But still adds it to my friends.
He is not $100 richer. And I am no poorer. Because of a software glitch.
This is entirely plausible to me.
Does it happen? How do they catch it? What can it's (presumably negative) effects be on the currency as a whole?
By the way, am I correct in presuming you meant to write "he is NOW $100 richer"? You bet they'll catch it. Remember, what are bankers, really? They're accountants. And accountants live to make sure glitches like that don't happen. In accounting, every transaction is treated as a transfer from one account to another. It's called double-entry bookkeeping: every transaction has a debit entry in one account, and a credit entry in another account. At the end of the day, add up all the debits, add up all the credits. The amounts have to be the same. Not true. Bankers lose money and make mistakes, and often don't catch them unless someone else does. My grandfather found an extra 10k in his account one day. Being an honest guy, that or being afraid of getting into trouble (I think a bit of both actually), he went over to the bank manager and reported the mysterious 10k. Their response was "Thank you so much, we were looking for that money, if you didn't come forward, i don't know if we ever would have found it". Just because they make a mistake, doesn't mean they know where to look to catch it, what if the reason that they didn't take the 100 out of your account included losing the account number associated with the transaction? Finding where it should come from is not only a needle in a haystack... bankers, being accountants, also realize that its entirely possible to spend more time trying to find where some money went, than you lost in the first place. Come to think of it, I too have noticed "mystery deposits" at my home branch here in Canada. And we're talking the 2000's here. It was a few thousand bucks. Just noticed it in my account one day, and then received a letter in the mail informing me of the error I believe. Or a phone call. Something fairly formal at least. But I still think Jim is right, in the sense that at least the bank could not simply "create" that money and add it to the "missing" account. Banks are run by people, of course they will press the wrong button occasionally. But it doesn't mean that they can just go and duplicate missing money. |
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Whoaaaaa nelly, thanks for the link. |
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So long as we don't make bitcoin.org all about buying illegal items. We'll be fine.
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Would it be valuable to have a bank that other banks wouldn't/couldn't deal with? What are you trying to accomplish?
Basically what I want is a way for people to purchase bitcoins, and "store" that value with a "bank" somewhere. I don't care if it's in tim-buck-too. And I don't care about being able to transfer money to and from other banking institutions. Online Poker Websites for example... they couldn't get jurisdiction in Las Vegas for their "Casinos"... so they went to native reserves in Canada (possibly an option for us, natives will change any of their laws in exchange for money)... and tiny islands in the middle of nowhere, and setup their "Casinos". Does anybody regularly check on their methods and processes? Probably not. Does anybody reprimand them if money is lost, stolen or misappropriated. No. They run a fairly lucrative business, and that notion alone is enough for millions of people to log on and desposit their money every week. I bet if you asked all of the pokerstars.com players "Where is pokerstars located?" they probably couldn't tell you, and they probably don't care. Thanks for all of the great discussion/insight guys. Let's keep it going. |
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I'm up to 45 today - seems to be a slight jump in my "max" of about 10 users.
How does one go about becoming a permanent seed node? I run a dedicated 100mbps and only restart my computer every few weeks. Surely I would be a great match for something like that.
Or does the bitcoin client choose them over time?
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