Silver is useful enough that it could command huge valuations if a severe supply issue pops up.  I would not rule out a return to the magical 7:1.  But I am certainly not counting on it by any stretch no matter what.

The fact that a good bit of the Ag supply comes as a byproduct mining more industrial and less valuable resources, a supply issue is even more possible.


Could.  I'm not ruling it out.  OTOH, a revaluation could be something which is forced upon everyone no matter what their political bent or current power base.

---

On a different topic, thank you to the poster who called attention to the transmutation possibility.  Although I try to keep some vague tabs on such things, I cannot say that I had been aware of this line of research.  As much as I wanted to find it obviously 100% scammy when I explored a bit last night, I could not bring myself to that mindset.  But the hour was late.

If transmutation of W --> Au is the best hope for Bitcoin then it does not exactly increase my hope for the solution.  It does, however, add another reason to have at least a tiny BTC position.

The 'simple' reason is that our regulators and government officials who have anything to do with nuclear power are owned lock, stock, and barrel by the nuclear industry.


I'll agree.  There are plenty of people in that category.

But there are a fair number of people who understand the issues well and are genuinely alarmed and keenly aware of the dangers that we face as long as we are playing around with these early generation nuclear facilities.  I am confident to say that Gundersen personifies this category.


I've overstated the probable impacts on the residents of Tokyo, and partially for effect which is not normally my style.  At the end of the day, though, nobody is really sure exactly what the 'fallout' of a full-on pyrophoric fire in several of the spent fuel pools would be.  It is now revealed that the Japanese were considering evacuating Tokyo if Daichi-I were abandoned to burn itself out and Diani went up.  Considering the lack of appropriate action on the part of the Japanese government after the #3 explosion, and to this day, that is saying something.

One thing that most people don't really consider is that nuclear weapons need to be small enough to be transported on rockets or airplanes.  Nuclear plants having no such limitations tend to have vastly more nuclear material.  It has never been considered as a practical possiblity that they could release their inventory and I have significant concern that this underestimation could be one of the greatest engineering failures in human history.  That concern is probably already sinking in as a reality in Japan.  If we don't act appropriately and it happens to one of our Mark-I reactor facilities we will at least know first hand the danger of allowing our government to become so corrupted by corporate influence though I expect that that will be a small consolation.

I had to balance trust in an exchange against the cost and convenience when I 'went in.'  In this case, I did my best to ascertain whether the business (Tradehill) was trustworthy, and even then I did my buying in batches (which meant I paid more for wire transfers) and took my BTC home ASAP as I purchased them.  This meant that I had some uncomfortable periods of time waiting for a buying opportunity and some tough decisions about when to send in wires since there was an indeterminate delay between sending the wires and being able to use the money.

Bitcoinica has something like $9.00 worth of combine value which used to be mine and which I probably won't even bother to try to re-obtain.  This relatively low number is, in part, because I am not simply trolling but do indeed believe what I say here and practice what I preach to the largest extent practical.  I also earnestly believe that the more people who share this philosophy, or at least consider it a bit before making financial decisions, the fewer the number of people who will be needlessly abused in the mishaps which lay before us.  A never-ending stream of past events lead me to believe that there will be many.

Bitcoin is somewhat unique in that it offers a realistic potential for very little counter-party risk.  This is one of the reasons it appeals to me so much, and I do try to make the most of it.

Here are a few of my favorite words of wisdom quasi-related to the subject:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCNGaafnAGk

Full body scanners are popping up like mushrooms in the US, and manual cavity checks are now available to any degenerate law enforcement officer who get's his jollies out of such things.  I'd try to avoid a path which takes you through the US, but I don't expect you would require much convincing of that.  I'd be shocked if such policies were far behind in the vassal state of Canada (and I am aware that you guys are a commonwealth of the British Crown...in theory that is.)

I might suggest that a (well) encrypted wallet.dat floating around in the ether of cyberspace is an alternative, or supplement, to a USB stick, and might have it's advantages in a worst-case scenario.

General Comment: BTC FTW (vs. last.)

Another Score:  5/21/12
          year ago    now       delta mult
BTC     5.90         5.10       + 0.86
Gold    1514         1590      + 1.05

--------------------------
ref (for future updates):
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#czsg2011-05-08zeg2011-05-08ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv  (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
2012-05-21  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've long held that Bitcoinica probably didn't have much impact on Bitcoin valuations although I was somewhat skeptical of my own intuition here.  This Bitcoinica dead-time has been most interesting to me from that perspective.  I remain open to an argument that people who wish to liquidate are taking advantage of what would be an organic increase in value in the absence of Bitcoinica driven speculation are doing so...but see no obvious evidence of this.

And thanks for the chuckle several posts above, blablahblah.  Nailed it!

Bitcoinica is just doing people a favor by providing an object lesson in 'counterparty risk'.  People can (sometimes) conjure up some pixels on their monitor stating that they have NNN.NNN BTC...and they believed it.  What they actually have is a loose promise that a counterparty (Bitcoinica and it's nebulous owners) will give them up to that number of BTC or $$$ equiv if they ask for them.

It amazes me that so many people are so anti-Bitcoin in that they cannot except what it is and love it for it's unusual strengths.  A life-time of training under our current monetary solutions has had it's effect I guess.

Where?


Mr. Gundersen sounds a bit like some lady (who I've never heard of) who says wacko things, eh?  How very compelling.

I've followed Mr. Gundersen's work since days after the plants blew and have found him to be extraordinarily reliable.  Lots of the 'outrageous' things he said early on are now accepted as fact (and downplayed as much as possible when fessed up to.)

It does not sound like Jaczko is planning to have a quite retirement.  He strikes me as one of the good guys and, while severely limited by corp/gov to actually do his job, he at least tried to do the right set of things.  If he's not suicided he might have some interesting things to say in the not to distant future.


Ironically, it could.  If even a part of the remaining inventory burns and the weather conditions are not highly favorable, I suspect that even residents of Tokyo will be hairless and puking up blood.  That will be a challenge for even Libertarians to deny.  Although in decline, Japan still has a very large footprint in the global economy and if it glows to brightly for broad swaths of industry to be viable it could prove a tipping point into a variety of economic maladies (which could help prod Bitcoin onto the world stage.)

The primary precaution here seems to be mostly to hope hard enough that there won't be a problem.  Not unlike the strategy used to keep the plants operating smoothly prior to the earthquake.  Cost the Japanese a good bit of prime agricultural real-estate (among other things.)


It already is the worst nuclear disaster ever, at least in my and a lot of other people's analysis.  Except for possibly WW-II and certain plagues of remote history, it would not surprise me to see it recognized as the worst disaster ever if/when the numbers are tallied.

Ironically, the violent explosion of what was probably the #3 spent fuel pool was a genuine boon since it fragmented the fuel inventory rather than atomized it and thus the dispersal mechanism was more limited.  A fire or less prompt criticality in the remaining groups of inventory would be a pretty significant catastrophe.  I personally do not intuitively sense that it would be as devastating to the Northern hemisphere as some people are claiming.  On the other hand, a lot of the people claiming so know a hell of a lot more about it than I.


Agree.

You cannot be wrong.  'soon' is to poorly defined (and the valuation of the USD is also subject to massive upheavals.)  I can tell you that 'soon' there will be a supervolcano at yellowstone and be quite correct in that projection because relative to the age of the earth, the next eruption is just around the corner.

If you want to put a bet on gold vs. barrels of oil at a particular point in time, and further stipulate that neither item is encumbered by legal issues, feel free to pop one out.  I like that high-end barelywine.  About $30/bottle, but even just one bottle gives me a lasting headache so there is no way I'm going to put away more than one/day.

Thanks, but you've already reminded me.

My ordering:

  gold -> silver ----(xMany)---> BTC

is something I would argue in terms of safely storing wealth (high to low) and in terms of _potential_ to increase one's wealth (low to high.)

Hmmm...Silver at $160,000/oz and 'soon', eh?  Or do you mean gold at $0.28/oz?

Thanks for reminding me how useless it is to pay attention to 'financial professionals'.

I didn't get the sense that the presenter was a particular fan of our current fiat monetary solutions or unaware of the disadvantages and limitations of them.  If anything I got the opposite sense.  But this particular presentation did not seem to have at it's focus any special advocacy role one way or another.  Seemed to me to be mostly just an intellectual exploration.

It makes some sense to me insofar as there is a social aspect here.  Startups seem to have some relatively pronounced differences in terms of work environment and in terms of the life-ways of the personnel found within them.  I'm generalizing, of course, but the tendency is certainly present in my experience.   I'm not sure about the cause/effect relationship between these to observations.  Have not contemplated it that much I guess.

The interest in 'housing IT personnel' seems to be of some hot topic these days in certain circles.

I read some article recently about how to basically keep data center personnel mostly on-site (and comfortable) in association with some of the data mining and analysis operations which are going on, but I'll be damned if I can find the article now.  This article may or may not have been one which also described methods for monitoring IT personnel behavior changes.

I've oft theorized that one of the potential weak points in sweeping up vast amounts of data is that it is as or more likely to pull in data about those at the top of the control pyramid as it is those at the bottom.  So, people who happen to be able to tap into this data and make something of it...like copies...are a very weak link.  I bet that more than a few people have awaken in a cold sweat from a bad dream about Pvt. Manning.

Actually, the reason I hold gold over fiat money or any other form of instrument with counter-party risk is very much because I trust gold more vs. that I am trying to increase my wealth.  I watched the MF-Global (and Argentina) issue with interest and am watching Greece like a hawk.  I decided to diversify into property (not farmland unfortunately) and had to address a short term (several days) cashflow issue by using gold or I would never have done it since it is expensive.  (I would have failed with Bitcoin, BTW...)

My Bitcoin is 100% speculation (minus some percentage associated with political activism.)  I consider Bitcoin to have a potential for staggering increase in value, but consider it something of a long-shot and fraught with danger and complexity even (or especially)  if it does 'go'.

I will again state a pet philosophy of mine which is that to enjoy speculative advantages of Bitcoin, one really does not need a large investment in them.  But one does need to be well secured against the twin dangers of both theft and good old fashioned loss of secret keys which means an investment in learning something about them (and possibly some more about computers depending on one's base level of knowledge.)  It might be worthwhile to put some effort into obtaining them somewhat covertly if possible.

Silver I consider somewhere between Gold and Bitcoin, but much closer to the Gold end of the spectrum.

All these are, of course, my own opinions and philosophies and I'm not qualified to give financial advise.  I get a lot out of hearing other peoples underlying thoughts on things and often they uncover ways of thinking about things that I had not considered...and occasionally they make sense to me.  I'm simply returning the favor here.

Great presentation, and one of the most compelling pro-Bitcoin presentations I've seen.

I'm sure I feel this way in part because I and the presenter seem to share a lot of philosophies on certain things.  I found plenty to disagree with in the presentation but that is almost always the case in any presentation about almost anything.

Getting money in reasonable sized quantities into Bitcoin is not terribly difficult, but if you want to try to do it with some grace and vis-a-vis timing the markets, you either have to make the money transfers in stages, or trust largish chunks of value to an exchange.

Getting money out in reasonable quantities to use for things which are not available in the Bitcoin economy (like a house or car) can prove aggravating, time consuming, and expensive.  I could see that becoming much more of an issue more easily than it becoming less of an issue.  My personal and relatively recent experience here with gold bullion was that it is not the case.


Sounds reasonable to me for someone who has the potential to absorb a fairly significant potential loss without going hungry.  Like me.

The 'barrier to entry' for confiscating physical gold is much higher than appropriating some data on some computer.  And I can donate my gold to entities who I believe are worthy if I see that coming.

I suspect that a great number of pensions have already been confiscated (and I don't buy the party line that pension fund managers are clueless boobs who didn't know what crap the MBSs were.)  The main thing left now is how to break it to the (would-be) pensioners that they are looking at some cold winters in their waning years.