Thank you!  It's nice to see someone who understands how hard it is to come up with something original, only to have critics try to tear it down.

Oh, that.  Not a troll forum, just a small general discussion board.  No one takes it too seriously,  hence the tongue in cheek banners.

That site has nothing to do with#TweetForumTweets, however.  Please try to stay on topic and avoid the unnecessary personal attacks.

It's not a forum, it's a Twitter feed.  No trolling, just tweets of TweetForum threads.

Anyone interested in TweetForum should check out #TweetForumTweets, coming soon!

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=29470.0

As many of you know, Twitter is a popular new web 2.0 interface that allows people to read and post web 2.0 content from a variety of mobile devices, including phones and computers. 

"Twitter allows users the ability to update their profile by using their mobile phone either by text messaging or by apps released for certain smartphones / tablets.[46]

In a 2009 Time essay, technology author Steven Johnson described the basic mechanics of Twitter as "remarkably simple:"[47]

    As a social network, Twitter revolves around the principle of followers. When you choose to follow another Twitter user, that user's tweets appear in reverse chronological order on your main Twitter page. If you follow 20 people, you'll see a mix of tweets scrolling down the page: breakfast-cereal updates, interesting new links, music recommendations, even musings on the future of education."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

I have an idea for a twitter feed to create a web 2.0 style interface to one of Bitcoins' hottest new forums, TweetForum.com.  The idea would be to automatically take topics from there and convert them to 140 character messages or "tweets" and automatically send them to followers of the feed.  Every once in a while, we would also "tweet" a Bitcoin payment address for people who like our feed to give us donations to pay for expenses. 

I'm looking for developers to write the software to automatically take the forum topics and convert them into "tweets".  Payment will be in the form of shares of any Bitcoin donations we receive from our followers.

I think this could be a large untapped market, potentially.  I asked about buying a gas mask at Home Depot and all they had were flimsy respirators for painting and stuff, which would obviously melt as soon as lava hit them.  And nothing at all in the way of lava-proof suits.

I did buy a big piece of rebar, though, which I hit people with who come into my yard.  So I don't need a baton or anything like that.

Thanks!  Maybe I'll go order a pizza and pay for it with a small business.  Small businesses are money after all.

I love when I go out to eat and pay the bill with a small piece of real estate, maybe tip an extra square foot section of a flag lot in Modesto if the service was good.  Or that time I went to the movies and paid the ticket guy with a couple of MUNI bonds.  Yes, it's all money.  Everything is money.  Dogs, pogo sticks, that full feeling after you eat a whole pie:  money.

And the fact that Utah has a goldbug-pandering state legislature doesn't change anything.  States have no rights to issue currency.  The bill simply said the state would recognize federally-issued gold and silver coins as legal tender.  Whoop-dee-fucking-do.  Walk into any store in Utah and try to pay for something with that Genuine Buffalo Head Gold Coin you bought from the late night TV infomercial.  Let us know how that works out for you.

I heard he doesn't want candy to be money either!  Why does he hate candy?  What's his angle???

So....what's wrong with saying gold isn't money?  Gold isn't money.  People don't exchange it for goods and services, people buy it (with actual money) and hold onto it.  Just like other assets, e.g. silver, oil, buildings, paintings, etc.

I know goldbugs love bashing the Fed, but this is just silly.

LOL, you want me to somehow prove to you that the USD is not going to crash?  Want me to prove that an asteroid won't hit Earth next Tuesday while I'm at it?

The burden of proof rests with those making outrageous claims, not with those who are skeptical.

I see far more people calling everyone who doesn't agree 100% with either their politics or their rose-colored view of Bitcoin trolls than actual trolling.  And even for actual trolling, if people responded with intelligent, logical arguments instead of kooky crazy-talk, it would be a very effective way to persuade casual lurkers than trying to ban all comments that aren't reflexive agreement with the majority view.

Greed is coloring many Bitcoin supporter's perceptions.  They think "wow, if Bitcoin went up to $200 next week, I'd make a ton of money!  So that's obviously a good thing!"  They're forgetting that Bitcoin was originally intended to be a currency, not a get-rich-quick scheme. 

Speculation is fine for commodities, because it helps the market determine the price.  It's terrible for fledgling currencies.  There's a reason that new currencies have traditionally been backed by something else (gold, other established currency, etc.):  you want people comfortable that the value is based on something other than people's perceptions and you won't get screwed if you hold on to them in exchange for goods and services.  Otherwise, why would anybody use the new currency?  This problem is magnified tenfold for Bitcoin, since it's not backed by any institution and has a much higher barrier to entry for the casual user than little slips of paper with numbers and pictures of dead people on them. 

I suspect Bitcoin will provide some useful lessons for the next cryptocurrency, but that's about it.

Stop trolling, troll!!  Take your trolling trollery somewhere else!

(In addition to ranting about the government stealing their thoughts, one of the rules of being a forum crazy is that anyone who says anything you don't want to hear is automatically trolling.)

Within a few years at most, huh?  You remind me of that guy Camping, who recently predicted the end of the world.  May 21 came and went, and strangely he didn't admit that he was completely wrong.  I doubt you will either when, say twenty years from now or so, you look around and realize everything is still pretty much the same.  No big collapse, no economic apocaplyse (except that gold is back down at $800 an ounce or so, so all the goldbugs lost a ton buying high and refusing to sell), just normal growth and inflation.

Doomsday nuts always seem to forget all their confident assertions as soon as they're proven wrong.



[/quote]

The difference is that my "baseless" assertions actually match reality.  You and your "OMG the USD is dooooomed!!!" brethren are just spreading FUD based on wishful thinking and a fundamental misunderstanding of basic economics.  And probably more than a little greed, as I'm guessing many of you bought gold at absurdly high prices in anticipation of a collapse that's never coming.

Only if you insist on having a 21 million upper limit.  I contend this is a bad idea, and one of the weaknesses of the Bitcoin model.

For commodities markets, sure.  For a fledgling currency?  Not so much.  There's a reason that early on, currencies have always had to be backed by something tangible:  it allows a consistent, stable value for the currency to exist right out of the gate, so people don't have to worry that they're going to be stuck with worthless paper if they accept it for their goods and services.  It's like training wheels on a bike -- you really need extra stability at first to build confidence. 

If it helps, I meant nutter-butter in the nicest possible way. 



What other currency is the rest of the world going to switch over to?  Euros?  Yuan?  Yen?  The USD is still far and away the safest place for other nations' currency reserves. 

I agree that our national debt is getting too large and we need to reduce our deficit to avoid getting ourselves into hot water down the road, but it's hardly the impending apocalypse you're trying to portray it as.  As for your 35 year argument, you're trying to create a more uncertain image for the USD than is realistic.  It's not like there was some fundamental shift in the 70's where people were marching down to the bank to get their gold every week and suddenly couldn't because of this massive paradigm shift.  The government simply realized that keeping large reserves of gold was unnecessary -- the training wheels could be taken off and the bike would keep rolling along just fine.  Which it has, and will continue to do.  Better, in fact, because now without the training wheels you can do maneuvers you couldn't do (like avoid a full blown economic depression).

Hope you were at least able to cover your GoDaddy registration fee.

I have no problem with speculators, but they will kill / have already killed Bitcoin as a currency.  Obviously, if there's money to be made, people are going to try to make it, so the trick is to set up the system so that speculation can't make it so unstable as to be unattractive to new adopters.  I have no idea how to do this, but whoever designs the next cryptocurrency had better be thinking about it.


Oh dear, I suspect you might be one of the nutter-butters I was referring to.  Here, write this down:  The USD isn't going anywhere.  It's not 1895, you don't need to trade your greenbacks for shiny metal anymore.  Controlled inflation is a good thing, not a bad thing.

It's puzzling to me that so many people involved with a cutting-edge electronic currency project are so economically primitive.


It's completely foolish.  The actual horsepower needed to validate transactions is a tiny fraction of the horsepower currently being used to mine new blocks.  As for manipulation, the peer to peer transaction network would be far more secure if it were composed of a vast number of individuals with modest computing resources vs. a relatively small pool of dedicated mining clusters.  The choice of an exponential algorithm was arbitrary and is a huge barrier to scalability, since it requires massive hyperdeflation to scale up.  Which is a terrible expansion model for an electronic currency you expect anyone to voluntarily use.

I couldn't care less about who made how much money on Bitcoins, I'm just giving my perspective as a casual miner who is dubious of the long-term viability of this project based on the underlying mechanics and current market conditions.  It wouldn't bother me to be proven wrong.