Canadense

canadense

Me, too!

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My own experience is with Brazil in the 1980s when we had to track the cruzeiro vs. dollar rate at least twice a day in order to seal a deal. The phenomenon of parallel and black market currencies is essentially the same across time and space. In Bazil, if you were selling a piece of technical equipment to a factory, for instance, they would always have someone on staff that could structure a barter or a black market (read free market) payment. You would need a large sports bag to carry the local currency and the banks would seal and sign the bundles of banknotes so that one didn't have to count the bills, only the bundles. With U$20 in hand you could go into a top hotel and have three waiters hovering over your table while you paid for a classy meal, with wine, and generous gratuities and leave with change.

You have to see otherwise respectable famiies watch their lifetime of savings disappearing before their eyes on a daily basis and desperate for any currency other than their own. The fact that I spoke passable Portuguese and could produce dollars gave me the breezy air of a VIP and caused me to love the county and the people deeply in the end, quite apart from the money angle.

Have no doubt that Argentina is in this state, thanks to their confiscatory socialist economics and perverse regulatory climate. Anyone who goes there with a good stock of bitcoin in hand (so to speak) would be a social success within 24 hours, but would have to be ready to learn an entire vocabulary and acquire a knowledge of free market practices. It's just too big a story to tell, if you haven't already experienced it.

The greatest frustration is that you can acquire some great stuff, say with your bitcoin, like pallets of vintage reserve wines, but you would never be able to get them home without going through the export regulatory paperwork which would seize all the profit in the deal and make it not worth doing. But there are ways... don't ask.

Bitcoins have value, but it is a USE value determined by market forces; he is correct in asserting that the value of bitcoin is NOT intrinsic since the digital substance of the blockchains has no other use than as a medium of exchange and store of value. Were bitcoin to cease being used as money it would have no INTRINSIC value outside of this function, and in this respect it differs from gold and silver which do have substantial intrinsic value.

Yes. This is the Austrian School critique of monetarism and is richly presented in the writings of Murray Rothbard. Gold and Bitcoin are the countervailing response to the money supply diddlers of the centralized confiscatory statist planners.

Is this p2p or central mediation? Just thinkin'

The five-post test is a practical implementation of the "proof-of-work" test that keeps noise levels down and strangles spam at the outset.

Hmmm. May 16 news. Anything else?

I am wondering why we would not simply print out our wallet contents on paper and look upon that as our security? Yes, we would also need encryption against hacking.

I trade on Canada's Virtex in Calgary, Alberta. Canada's AML people (FinTrac) have declared that they will not molest Bitcoin traders. I am exploring avenues for enhancd cross-border fiat trade...