You know, it's hilarious to read speculation threads from, say, a year or so ago.

Just saying.

I'm guessing it's someone hoping for a huge freak spike.

Repeat after me: Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Could you have mined more than you could have bought, that is, around 500 BTC?

To be fair the author notes Bitcoin is different in that it isn't controlled by the government or the private sector.

Where did this idea of Mega taking BTC come from anyway? I see a lot of talk about the idea with nothing tangible to back the idea at all. The amount of speculation over the subject just shows what an echo cahmber this forum is, IMO.

Currently that's about 60,000 BTC to go to13 in one go. Serious money. We've seen huge dumps to be sure, but you have to consider the USD price too, don't you? How many dumps over 500,000 dollars worth have there been? I must admit, I don't remember.

By "reading" do you mean imagining? Read the article. Krugman is specifically arguing that the IT revolution is only starting.

Calling is easy. It's getting it right that's hard... What's your track record?

Too easy, don't you think?

Go read that SA thread where they engage in a circle-jerk over how badly Bitcoin sucks. See the groupthink. Then consider that's what this forum looks like to them. See what pisses you off most about what the SA folks say and do, and make sure you don't do it yourself, because that's all just primate dominance dynamics, nothing to do with actually furthering any cause beside self-aggrandization.

That was amazing. It was like the writer was using a language they don't know very well, only the language in question is basic cognition. Maybe the product of some type of psychotropic drug.

I adde my 2 cents, replying to a request for a "source saying Bitcoin is a currency by an unbiased organization with reconized authority"

So much energy goes into explaining mining to people who should be told why they would want to use Bitcoin in the first place. It's like you explained a city to someone who's never seen one, and mainly concentrated on telling them how the plumbing works and how much money plumbers make.

I'd argue there's a bias towards equating "morality" with "good". I, too, can't see any way to have morality without a supreme authority. This doesn't mean there's no right and wrong, the responsibility for deciding what is what is simply left to the individual.

It'd be tempting if I had a time machine. As I don't, I might as well flip a coin.

Lately I've had this feeling, not particularly well articulated yet, that a part of the problem with the way we think of economies is that we measure their growth and decline in currency. It's a feedback loop, isn't it?

GDP is measured in currency, but the value of that currency is dependent on the GDP of the states issuing said currency. From what I can gather, the "proper" thing to do is to take GDP growth and substract the inflation rate from that to arrive at a realistic figure... but what happens when the inflation rate radically changes? What if the inflation rate isn't properly reported?

I'm too much of an economics noob to ask more insightful questions about this, but it bothers me. Hopefully someone here can catch on to what I'm circling around?

edit: From what I can gather, it seems economic policy, in an idealized form, is a balancing act between keeping inflation to a "sustainable" level while achieving GDP growth of a couple of percent a year, but where did the idea that a few percent a year is a sustainable rate of growth come from? If you discard the idea that significant yearly growth is sustainable, doesn't a deflationary currency become preferrable?

Interesting, but no mention of Bitcoin in the article.

Not wanting to be the first to try it out is part of why I don't see myself selling any time soon... I figure I wait until I can either just buy something significant directly in BTC or until the profits are sufficient to justify hiring a lawyer to deal with it. Probably the former.

edit: and I should note, I'd guess a lot of big early adopters are thinking along the same lines. Although Sirius apparently bought an apartment. Maybe he'd have something interesting to say on the subject.

That's good, I guess. Any idea how that works, more specifically? If you spent X USD over a year, at varying prices, and sold a portion of what you've bought, what will your buy-in price be counted as?

How many people have records of how much BTC they bought and when? What documentation will the IRS accept?