Do listen to both kinds of music; country and western

(You seeming to appreciate amusing lines from good movies.)

Real Estate?  I diversified into that last year when I thought the prices had gotten close to fair even though I suspected some more downdrafts.  It's already given my a 5% on my principle return via rental...and I only got it rented in Sept (though to be fair I've not factored in taxes and insurance so It's probably closer to 3%.)   But I got an office to use as well which I needed.

OTOH, if I'd not been busy with that, I probably would have been pursuing Bitcoin in the Feb/March timeframe and who knows where I'd be sitting now.  I bet I would have sat out the peak of the bubble like an idiot though.

Are you sure that was not me you are thinking of here?  I did 'freely admit cherry-picking' in my reports once, but had to be somewhat misleading just to annoy someone.  As I had explained earlier and as apparently the other person had not stumbled upon, the yearly marker is not exactly an arbitrary selection.  Nor is SB's start of this thread.  (Nor would be the point when you did your 'Gold: I smell a trap' post.)   

This is not to say that I didn't strongly suspect that the year marker would make BTC look like shit.  I did of course.  What I don't know is for how long and also if/when it will make Au look like (slightly more palatable) shit as well.

You could get out in front of things and make 6-mo reports.  And with some legitimacy under the argument that everyone should be thinking about BTC as a short-ish term play (if that's the way you feel about it anyway.)

That may be a fairly strong positive to some while at the same time a significant negative to others.  This is a hypothesis which seems to me to explain the somewhat amusing failures between different individuals to conceptualize one another's views on possible future trajectories of Bitcoin and beyond that, crypto-accounting solutions generally.

General Comment: USDX: now @ 82.90.  Had trended down to sub-82.5, but shot up recently.

Another Score:  6/05/12
          year ago    now       delta mult
BTC     17.50        5.43      + 0.31
Gold    1545         1617      + 1.05

--------------------------
ref (for future updates):
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#czsg2011-06-01zeg2011-06-03ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv  (change date)
http://www.kitco.com/charts/livegold.html  (hist cgi at bottom)
mult=now/year_ago

day           ya-btc  btc  mult    ya-Au  Au    mult
2012-06-05 17.50  5.43  0.31   1545  1617  1.05
2012-06-01  8.80  5.25  0.60    1542  1614  1.05
2012-05-25  7.30  5.15  0.71    1528  1574  1.03
2012-05-24  7.10  5.14  0.72    1514  1558  1.03
2012-05-23  7.10  5.13  0.72    1515  1562  1.03
2012-05-22  6.30  5.09  0.81    1512  1560  1.03
2012-05-21  5.90  5.10  0.86    1514  1590  1.05
2012-05-18  7.50  5.12  0.68    1497  1592  1.06    
2012-05-17  7.80  5.09  0.65    1480  1574  1.06            
2012-05-16  7.40  5.09  0.69    1495  1533  1.03
2012-05-15  6.80  5.03  0.74    1492  1545  1.04
2012-05-14  8.50  5.00  0.59    1495  1555  1.04
2012-05-12  5.40  4.95  0.92    1505  1580  1.05
2012-05-11  5.00  4.95  0.99    1505  1580  1.05
2012-05-10  3.82  4.90  1.28    1510  1593  1.05
2012-05-09  3.75  5.03  1.34    1510  1590  1.05
2012-05-08  3.64  5.03  1.38    1497  1605  1.07

I wonder it Keyar would accept a kickback.  Of course it would be unethical to simply take the play himself.

It looked to me like in order to play the arbitrage game, one would need to trust a lot of money to a lot of exchanges, and also to have a lot of money in various pipe-lines (where everyone takes their cut.)  So I decided against it back in the Tradehill days and have lost what little interest I had in the times since.

I hold that we humans are a lot more similar to bacteria than we are different.  Once we run low on energy we'll start to die off.  When we do see an economic boom it will likely follow a significant population reducing incident.  We saw a similar scenario following the black plague for instance.  Growth happens as we fill up to the carrying capacity of the environment, and it looks to me like we are getting close.  Even if not, a glance at the exponential nature of various curves indicates that it won't be terribly long when measured in time anyway.

That's pretty straightforward.  Give them more BTC than they could earn mining Bitcoin.  As the reward drops it will only become that much easier.

I'm betting you are right on this one.

It is refreshing to see your post replete (relatively speaking) with some markers which could be used to gauge the hypothetical projection.

Lamentable I vote high risk, but it is tempered with a few qualifiers.  I think that BTC retains the ability to produce an extremely high monetary reward (not to mention political and others.)  Tempering that, however, is a belief that one will have to be knowledgeable, agile, and fairly lucky to boot in order to make the most of the various fruit which it could bear.

Unfortunately there is a possibility that that ability will end up being one of the more valuable tools to have in one's toolbox

Some countries throw inconvenient limits right out the window when the chips are down.

Agree.  I have sort of the same mindset about it that Dr. Strangelove asserted those who were about to enter the mineshafts would feel.

I also think that these combine with REAL p2p crypto-accounting methods and possibly in combination with some of the mesh networks thoughts could emerge as a real revolution for humanity.  It's a promise worth working towards IMHO.

How likely would such a thing be to come into fruition?  How edible would the fruit end up being?  These are very big questions in my mind...and a large part of the reason that my nest-egg has a distinctly golden hue to it.

Sure.  But I'm happy to have you calling bullshit thoughts of mine which you find absurd, and I don't have much ability not to do likewise (personally weakness.)  I'm totally down with taking things to a less spurious level though.  I strongly feel that it is of significant value to throw a lot of hypothesis out and hash through them.  I personally should be better at walking away from loggerheads though.

If you can swear-to-god-hope-to-die-stick-a-needle-in-your-eye that none of your public statements are self-serving in that they are designed to steer the herd toward positions which are in your and your subscribers interests and at the expense of their own, I'll accept it and do my best to moderate my more thorny barbs against your newsletter operation.

Actually, it might be rather pointless.  I feel that I am probably running out of interest in at least the Bitcointalk.org aspect of things for a time.  Not sure, but I am getting that sense, and I've very close to some life changes which (hopefully) will deflect my attention to other things.

Edit: fix syntax.

The main reason seem to me to be most probably because the old cow still has some milk left in her.

Nations do seem to be positioning for their best advantage in a very different economic landscape, however, and at an ever increasing rate.  The US got serious decades ahead of most.


I happen to believe this at a fundemental level mostly because it works so well to explain a lot of otherwise mysterious things.

I believe that 'money printing' is a matter of creating debt and handing it off.  Governments can buy debt from eachother simultaneously and at will.  And governments dictate how accounting works for both themselves and the corp/gov body.  This gives them the ability to take the charade to a highly elevated level.

But it is bound to collapse at some point.  The big question in my mind is 'then what?'  I personally doubt that it would be possible to be using 'pre-collapse' instruments, so I don't hold much hope for sitting on a bunch of much more valuable USD complements of the classical theories of economics and how they explain the effects of a deflationary event.  So, saying "Gold has fallen to $400/oz" will be a laughable statement to some and a mystifying statement to others.

I could be wrong...I often am.

The only reason I credited it to Silverbox was out of fairness.  Else I'd gladly have said it myself...and, like most things I say, there would be a fair amount of truth though this can be obscured under layers of other stuff.

I think that SilverBox said it best.  Something like: 'I like you cypherdoc...I'm just not going to jump off the bridge with you.'

I'd rate Sinclair as my single most trusted source.  I feel that not only does he get a lot right and understands big picture macro factors well, but also that he is a decent person at heart.  I've been listening to him since around the time he first put up jsmineset.

I do feel that Jim has gotten some timings wrong from time to time.  I am also not terribly impressed with his $1645 or whatever it was due to the 'broken clock' principle.  But he made the call like a decade ago and it seemed absurd to almost everyone at that time.  Furthermore it's not far from where this particular correction seemed to hover in the scheme of things, but that could be mere coincidence.

It sounds like it is no bullshit that he was one of the whales in the last run-up 30 years ago, and also like he stepped off the elevator at the top.  I don't know if he was as free with info at that time.  Doubt it.  The world has changed much since then thanks to the net.  Sinclair himself probably has changed some as well.

This forum started out under bitcoin.org.  My username here actually reflects that ('TV BitCoinOrg Forum'.)  I think that it was thought that this forum was such a cesspool that it reflected poorly on the Bitcoin project by the owners of the domain.  Seemed rational to me.

Censorship of unpopular thoughts and styles seems to be rearing it's head here more and more lately which has sparked my interest in seeing what other options are kicking around.  There is some other forum where the intellectual elites gather I think, but I was to lazy to bother.  Plus, I'm sure I'd last about 5 minutes even if they did admit me to their hallowed chambers since I have difficulty minding my P's and Q's.

EDIT:  Opps...forum -ne wiki.  Sorry.  But why ask agree here?  This forum is already a blacksheep (with some justification) vis-a-vis the Bitcoin project.

It depends a bit on what role I was planning to play in an economy.

I would be (and am) quite sensitive indeed about my identity, and especially facial recognition generally.  Although I am a non-violent person, I only half-jokingly told my co-workers that one of the few things which would induce me to beat someone up would be if they pinned my name to one of the FaceBook 'who is this' queries which I had heard were floating around.  This is not to say that I would flat out not participate, but I would be naturally quite leery.

If I were in a position where I was responsible for dealing with value on behalf of a group of others, now we have a very different scenario.  Not only do I think it would be appropriate to put my face up, but various other details besides in most situations.  Part of this is simply practical...I wouldn't trust a business who's principles wish to remain anonymous unless they had a very obvious and compelling reason to do so.  Even then, it would be not so much a 'trust' thing but more of a gamble thing.

---

As an alternate way to deal with some of the issues which you seem to be thinking about...

I've always thought that there was some role for 'bonds' in securing confidence.  Maybe I keep a bond floating which covers my day-to-day transactions.  If I want to do an unusually large transaction, I might increase my bond on a temporary basis.  This would allow me complete anonymity (excepting perhaps from my bond insurer) no matter what role I played and a counter-party should not care less who I was since they have protection.