The facts here are quite simple:
1. Historic fact
2. Current level of development in science and technology

Anything apart from this is conjecture since nobody can predict the future, of course. The "Luddite fallacy" argument is that we have encountered similar situations in the past and we've already documented the way society can move past them. Given the current state of events, we can already envision some of the solutions that will be used to go over the next step as well. The counter to that was that even though it worked in the past it will not work in the future any more, because a less labor intensive economy could not absorb the lost jobs. The idea that all labor intensive or not jobs that could ever exist have already been discovered and there is no way for some completely novel ones to appear in the future (despite evidence to the contrary in our historical data) is nothing but an argument from incredulity:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity

Again, anything can happen in the future, we're all interpreting existing facts to come up with possible scenarios, some might pan out while others won't. However the argument that whatever problems we are facing will be solved by surrender to world-wide communism is anything but an earthquake of logic.


But then you have all these armies of robots making tons of products with utmost efficiency. Prices would in such a case drop to levels where a small amount of money might well be enough for a simple existence.


Fully agreed on the above. I actually believe crypto-currency will not be enough to reach all the goals stated above, we will need other changes in society regarding education, politics and values. It's a great step and a way to influence things in that direction, but not the solution in itself.


Communism -- some say around 100 million, others go much higher to 150 million:
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4230/so_how_many_did_communism_kill
http://www.scottmanning.com/content/communist-body-count/

Great Depression in the US -- between 7.5 million and 10 million:
http://www.cherada.com/articulos/10-million-americans-disappeared-during-the-great-depression-time

European Colonialism -- difficult to find estimates; 10 million in Congo, a couple million elsewhere in Africa:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa

Slavery in the US --  huge variance in numbers, from 6 to 60 million:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#Human_toll

Can you see that even considering the lowest estimation on one side and the highest on the other you're still short about 18 million? That's the population of a medium-sized country...

However this should not in any way be construed as an attempt to downplay the seriousness of those events -- they are all, together with the wars that killed hundreds of millions more, a horrific tragedy and a wound in our collective consciousness. All I want to point out is that communism managed to outdo them all.


That is an interesting link, thanks for sharing. I would note however that one of the points made in the article is that "freemium" apps which are free to download but offer in-app purchases are actually on the rise; a glance in the "top grossing" category in any app-store will reveal the same -- the most income is produced by otherwise "free" apps. It also talks about new advertising avenues -- via word-of-mouth, reviews and social media -- becoming more important. I would say that is the market adjusting and diversifying -- remember that it is still a very young market with a lot of potential for growth, and this will mean a large amount of volatility. Also, "less than $1250 per app per day" does not sound too shaby for a small developer; it might not entice a million-dollar 100 person development team, but for a single developer that's gold!

I'm sorry but if you don't see there is no logical connection between those (horrible indeed) events and the economic concept of free markets, then we have nothing further to discuss on the subject. Tragically, even adding those numbers you'd run short of reaching communism's death toll -- yes it was that bad.


Oh, that is all quite possible unfortunately; but wait a second, the current loss of jobs is not a direct cause of automation. Sure, that plays a part but it's a small one in a very complex mechanism. Most problems stem from the very bad and irrational measures taken by governments -- ironically, mostly in the socialist direction: more welfare, more taxes, more regulation. If anything is going to kill the economy and cause civil war that would be taking this to its extreme conclusion into full-on communism. "Universal income" will just create universal misery for everyone while a centrally planned economy is such a hilariously bad idea that it's not even worth considering.

No, the solution here is to go in the opposite direction since this one is clearly not working: less regulation, reduced taxation (especially towards the working class who are being taxed more than the ruling elite nowadays), fewer welfare programs, less debt; teaching people how to be responsible adults and take care of themselves once again instead of running to the "nanny" every time they have a problem. That will bring us prosperity again -- but not without pain and suffering first, I grant you that; we are too deep down the rabbit hole to get out unscathed. The deeper we go however the worse will be the end result.


You haven't countered that argument with anything but a lack of imagination. Just because you can't imagine the ways the jobs will change to evolve and adapt to a changing society does not mean it won't happen.


Hmm, that's funny, I would argue we see the exact opposite happening -- a true democratization of creativity. While before the advent of the Internet writers could starve until they got a book published and painters had to die before their paintings would sell, these days almost anyone can become a "star". People make money with Youtube videos about the silliest of topics; e-books on Amazon that aren't even edited properly; musicians go on iTunes and ten-year-olds publish game apps for mobile devices. If anything, we're seeing fewer millionaire "rockstars" but instead regular people making smaller amounts of money individually, yet in much greater numbers. They have smaller but more loyal audiences, they cover niche markets with targeted products and they constantly invent new forms of expression. The biggest threat to creativity (and making money out of it) is not automation -- instead we find, yet again, statist power coming down with restrictions and regulations, this time in the form of IP law and its many ugly heads.

This is actually a very good point, and one could argue that we're already seeing this in our current society -- many people hardly use their brains and live in a purely vegetative state. However, the question then becomes -- will these apathetic humans be content with their lives or not? Because if they are content with some soap operas and porn and the occasional B-movie then they won't have reasons to riot and kill. However if somehow they become discontent and desire more from life, will they choose to better themselves or to "take" it from the ones they perceive as having more? I guess this mostly depends on the political environment at that time; as so many other times in history, if enough propaganda is leveraged the masses (especially the otherwise apathetic ones) can be warped into a frenzy of destruction. We can't predict if and when this would happen, only try to prevent it when we see the signs -- and the best weapon is education (not the public-school type unfortunately, but the Internet can play a huge role here).


Yes, agreed that people will need something to do. But what about virtual realities in this case? We already have tens of millions of people playing games like WoW, and if anyone has ever tried such a game you can tell it's mostly a simulacrum of work with a little fun in between. Grind, grind, grind, sell & buy, grind, do a raid. Rinse and repeat the next day I think more advanced versions of this will undoubtedly appear in the next few years and they would be a great avenue for people with otherwise no occupation to expend their mental energy.


Sorry, but that's wrong on so many levels... First of all, the Great Depression was caused by a complex combination of events which had a global impact, affecting countries with various types of economies. The pain and suffering was compounded by ecological and political crisis, and many historians argue that some of the statist measures being enforced (such as restricting international trade to "protect" the local markets) actually worked against recovery, deepening the economic meltdown. In any case, even taking all that into consideration, the amount of people directly affected by communism is an order of magnitude higher, you just can not compare one with the other.

As for the victims of WW2 -- the aggressors were all statist regimes (fascism being a close relative of communism), the most you can blame the "free-market" states like Britain or the US is that they tried to keep out of it as much as possible (which turned out to be a bad idea in the end).


As cool as Baxter is, and as useful as it can potentially become, it still can not do all the things you describe. It is only able to learn and repeat simple tasks. Knowing a thing or two about robotics, even that is an amazing achievement -- but way short of the robots you describe that will completely replace humans. For one, it is completely unable to move around by itself -- and that's not an easy problem to solve. Will it evolve? Certainly! Will we reach a point when it can do all those things? Probably. But that time has not yet come, which is also evidenced by the fact that factories around the world are not yet buying them in the millions. Do not underestimate the difficulty of getting there; when that happens, we can have this discussion again.


Now that I will not deny -- the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of very few individuals has become clearly disproportionate (some wealth inequality is normal and to be expected; the amount we have at the moment however is not). But is that a failure of the market or the result of statist laws and regulations and the expansion of government power? The evidence points quite clearly to the later in my opinion. Also, please remember that while power concentration may happen in a free market, it is a guarantee when you talk about a communist state. There you don't even have the choice -- the elite has the power "by law" and that's it, end of story.


I'd say there will be just enough of these jobs to provide a level of subsistence to a good portion of the population. Keep in mind that there will be jobs created in such an economy which we can't even imagine right now.


This is certainly true for simple, repetitive tasks -- humans are terrible at those while robots will excel. But when talking about the more complex, creative jobs that you envision will be taken as well? Not clear, not clear at all. A robot that will have a "hard AI" level (required to perform the most advanced human jobs) might very well suffer from mood swings, compulsive behaviors and the need to "take a break" from time to time just like humans. I have a feeling we'll be surprised how close to us these truly intelligent machines will turn out to be.

Yes, but you will need a good video card (preferably with an AMD chipset) -- the software if called "vanitygen":
https://github.com/samr7/vanitygen

More details here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25804.0

Please note that a 6-character address could potentially take a very long time to "generate", up to weeks depending on what hardware you have available.

First of all, thanks to the OP for starting this discussion, I have to say it's quite engaging; just read through the whole 20 pages, and the arguments on both sides provide some good food for thought.

It's obvious that people are separated on politics and personal value lines, although it's a bit disconcerting to see so many in support of what boils down to essentially communist solutions. After all the pain and suffering caused in the past 100 years by this brilliant on the outside/rotten in its core philosophy one would have hoped to see less enthusiasm for repeating the mistakes of the past...
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4230/so_how_many_did_communism_kill

Anyway, something that I haven't seen challenged too much so far is the assumption that the people who lose their jobs to automation will only have two choices: starve or be on (various forms of) welfare. I think this is a false dichotomy, but to explain why we may need to take a step back and look at the overall picture that is being considered here.

We are assuming a society many years into the future, where all the menial jobs can be done cheaper and more efficient by automation (I'll call them "robots" for simplicity but of course this may imply computers/machines/etc.). There is a secondary aspect of even complex jobs being taken over by robots (doctors, lawyers and programmers) but that is a non-issue in the discussion, simply because of the very small number (relative to the population) of people engaged in these jobs. If somehow all the doctors will be replaced tomorrow by Watson, they can always fall back to flipping burgers at McD; they won't be happy, but they won't riot either. The problem appears when there are no jobs to fall back on, no McD, no agriculture, no wiping the floors, nothing; that's when you have huge numbers of people with no marketable skills and no possibility for employment, and that can indeed lead to social unrest.

But let us pause for a moment and look at this world that we're imagining -- it can not have just manifested out of nothing, it must have reached that stage through change and adaptation, in other words through evolution. Just like humans did not suddenly appear from amoebas, robots will not suddenly appear one day and instantly "fire" all burger flippers and factory workers. It takes time and a lot of changes to get from the world as it is today to the world we're talking about here. Robots will be extremely expensive at first, cumbersome and limited; for a while a simple reduction in benefits or salaries will be enough to keep humans profitable, even while robots already exist.
http://www.dailytech.com/Foxconn+Runs+into+Trouble+Deploying+Robot+Replacements+for+Human+Workers/article29390.htm

Eventually, a company will appear that employed a 100% robotic workforce, and managed to make products cheaper and of better quality than their competitors. Even at that point, it would still be years before the large existing corporations would adapt their entire production to the new paradigm -- they always suffer from a lot of inertia and risk-aversion, so the improvements offered by the robots will need to be really worth it to the bottom line in order for them to engage in such a move. A robot will not only have to be cheaper than a human, it will have to be significantly cheaper and more efficient.

So what happens when we reach the point of all jobs being automated? Well, for one thing the robots themselves will be very cheap at this point, flexible, resilient and ubiquitous. They would have to be, it's what needs to happen with any technology before it takes over businesses on a global scale. It's what happened to mobile phones (once the price of a small car), computers and networks. Even in the poorest places on Earth, one can get a simple mobile phone and a netbook for next to nothing -- they may not have running water or enough food, but mobile phones are literally everywhere, including remote areas in Africa and Asia. Robots will also have to get there at the time of them "taking over".

But wait -- this means that even those poor, dis-enfranchised people will be able to afford robots for themselves! Remember they have to be significantly cheaper than the humans they replace, yet more efficient. Sure, not the latest model but a refurbished 10-year old one; not a complex life-companion but a much simpler one, still capable of doing a lot of menial work (that's what they've been created for, right?). They will be able to build them from parts, get obsolete models for free at corporate hand-overs, there will a "one robot per family" charity sending them all over the place... Basically even poor households will have access to their own obedient servants, ready to work 24x7 to provide for the family: they can build houses, grow crops, tend to farm animals, dig irrigation canals, fall trees, drive vehicles, care for the young ones and so on and on. A small village may be able to even get a team of 10-20 robots to work for them and build large projects. Again, this will not happen over night -- first one guy will be fired from the factory and buy a robot with his severance pay; then others around might notice the benefits and borrow the robot from time to time for their own jobs; then the second person does the same and so on and so on, by the time everyone lost their jobs robots will already be present in their community.

The end result of all this will be people with no jobs, yet able to survive based on the labor of their robots. In a weird way one may perhaps view this as another take on the "universal income" option above, but one that emerges from society and does not involve state intervention at any point. Actually, the only problems I see with the above scenario would come because of state intervention or human prejudice: the state may impose extremely high import taxes on the otherwise cheap robots, in order to "protect jobs" (ouch!); some "well-intentioned" politicians may be able to ban robot ownership in order to "protect the children"; or people might just hate and destroy them outright out of some irrational Luddite hatred.

Another thing to point out is that human labor will never disappear completely, even in an otherwise fully-automated society. Leaving aside the idea that programming would be done by AI (at that point we will have reached technological singularity, and nothing afterwards could possibly be predicted from our perspective), there will always be a demand for the "human touch". Even if robots would produce demonstrably better products, humans are not entirely rational creatures (thankfully) and as such they will prefer a certain sweater simply because of the "made by human" sticker. Just as we now have organic/fair-trade/hand-made products which actually are part of a growing market, we will also have "human-made" objects still being produced and valued by a significant proportion of the population. Many people will also reject robots out of hand (for whatever reason) so they will choose to employ human baby-sitters, gardeners or secretaries -- it's something that can be seen with racism and sexism in the workplace even now, there is nothing protecting robots from the same treatment.


One thing is clear and undeniable: the world will change, and quite substantially at that. There will be pain and suffering, just as there always has been since the dawn of civilization -- the solution to that however will not be found in world-wide statism, tyranny and communism. I wish we as a race will have enough reason and empathy to make the right choice here -- although, anything is possible (and on-going world events do not provide much hope, unfortunately).

Well, according to this they will have "experimental products" in the November-December time frame; honestly, December might be optimistic in this case, as we've seen time and time again (even with AM) delays happen for months at a time.

Hi, I've been trying to estimate future AM market-share based on current evolution, and I came up with some interesting numbers; I'm curious what everyone else thinks about this.

First, the assumptions:

• Difficulty is rising approx. 50% per month
• AM is working on 2nd gen chips which will be available in December
• AM 2nd gen chips will be built on 65/55nm, compared to 130nm for current gen

I. Efficiency
Generally, every die shrink allows for a roughly 40% increase in the number of transistors; coupled with a more optimized design and potential increases in clock-speed, all while keeping the same overall architecture - we're probably looking at an 80% performance increase for the same power use. Given the two steps of shrinking (from 130nm to 90nm to 65nm) we would achieve about a 3.2x increase in performance.

Existing chips perform at 332MH/s, so this hypothetical 2nd gen. design would then hash at ~1.1GH/s. With overclocking that becomes ~400MH/s, or ~1.3GH/s for the 2nd gen. chip.

That would give us the following:

• USB Erupters v2: 1.1 - 1.3 GH/s
• Small Blades v2: 17 - 20 GH/s
• Normal Blades v2: 35 - 40 GH/s

Of course, this all assumes a realistic evolution of the current AM chip design. At this very moment, significantly better designs exist on the market -- the BFL chips actually perform at a top speed of 3.75 GH/s and are also built on the 65nm process. It is possible that AM does a complete overhaul of their chip and approaches (or even exceeds) those speeds; however there is no way to predict that.

II. Difficulty
Far from being science by any definition, predicting difficulty is more like a black art. That said, it's safer to err on the side of caution here and assume a 50% monthly increase (and even that might be conservative). 4 months from now, in December, that would give us:
- Difficulty: 5x what it is now or ~190Mil.

Given I + II, the resulting price for a 2nd generation AM blade comes out between 4.5 BTC and 8 BTC - using e.g. the TGB calculator, a 40GH/s device would yield a maximum of ~4.5BTC if the difficulty keeps rising with the same rate, and even at 40% diff. rise it would not yield more than ~8BTC.

If AM can maintain a profit given the NRE and production costs for the 2nd gen. chips, they could still keep up selling them at the above prices. But what about self-mining? Given a difficulty increase of 5x and performance gains of just 3.2x, AM would need to increase their deployment area by 50-60% and replace all boards with the new chips just to keep their current share of network power; whether that will be possible or not remains to be seen.

Of course there are many unknowns that could influence the outcome for the better or worse (difficulty rising slower or faster, BTC prices increasing or decreasing, 2nd gen. chips having 10x performance, production/deployment delays etc) but overall I'd say the above analysis covers the middle ground, and if it comes to pass we'll be looking at similar profit levels in December compared to August. If anything happens and AM misses some of the targets, we could be looking at a 60% decrease in mining revenue as well as sales income.

As for impact on share prices, after a rise in the coming weeks due to increases in blade sales, they will likely level off and see a decline towards the end of the year, until production-level 2nd gen. chips start coming up en masse. What do you think?

DISCLAIMER: I currently own shares in AM as well as other mining ventures.

Uh... this is funny, in a f-ed up way -- I had pretty much the same thing happening: after getting hit with glitches left and right, finally manage to place an order, only to have it cancelled by mistake -- d'oh!... I even got three "order cancelled" emails and tried to write to support for a fix, but so far no go... I now have a positive balance with what should be enough funds; so what gives? Oh, the suspense! But it's all good, all good, it's been a fun day. Burnside, any chance for a resolution here?

There already exist companies working with chips on "better" technology at this exact moment -- Avalon (110nm) and BFL (65nm). So far they have been more an example of how not to approach this business rather than a threat. In the short term, it seems it's quite obviously a case of "size doesn't matter, but what you do with it": proper management, execution and customer service weigh a lot more towards success compared to the technology of the chips.

In the long term, there will come a point when the utter gains in efficiency of better chips will make up for the incompetence of all these competitors -- and it is quite possible that a new and so far unproven company comes up with both the tech and the execution to "take the crown"; it's happened before in very competitive fields. At that point, ASICMiner should be ready with an answer -- but rushing towards the latest and greatest in process nodes might not be that answer. Keep in mind that the more recent/small a process node is, the more difficult and expensive it becomes to work with. The tools are more expensive, the companies providing wafers are fewer, chips take longer to design and any mistakes cost more in both time and money. Personally I believe keeping at least one or two generations "behind" the latest would yield a the optimal balance of cost vs. performance and power consumption, but of course that's something for ASICMiner to evaluate themselves.

I just sold my my BFL chip-credits to CanaryInTheMine. Everything went smoothly, he finished the transactions quickly and exactly as we agreed.

All the best,
M.

Leaving aside the fact that BTCT can not be used for trading direct shares; we were talking about selling hardware and having a single, consistent place with all the information pertaining to it -- price, inventory, delivery, user guides etc.

I think it's frustrating that vaporware products have a better on-line presence (and marketing) than a company with a proven track record like AM. And if you think "well, they did great like this anyway" -- just think how better they could do with a proper website! Looking at the future, we can not rely on an incompetent competition forever...

Indeed! Setting up a website would go a long way towards legitimising AM and making it easier for customers to acquire products. Although pre-orders are a bad idea (mostly due to the bad connotation brought by other companies), selling directly from a web-store would certainly translate into more revenue. As a bonus, having a small "news" section would also help de-clutter the forum a bit...

I'm sure there are quite a number of shareholders here with the required skills to provide hosting and development time for this -- myself included. Could a member of the Board discuss this at the next meeting perhaps?

Hi, just wanted to say that I have received my dividends today as well as the satoshis confirming my number of shares. There was no official confirmation from friedcat or inau, but I guess they're quite busy at the moment, inau did announce reduced availability these days.

I would like to update my previous bid to 10 @ 1.45

10 @ 1.43

I change my previous bid to 10 @ 1.39

10 @ 1.35
(you should have my address from a previous PM, if not I can send it again)

50 @ 1.20

Ahhh, darn spammers! Making life harder for everyone :-/ But I do understand the need for such precautions like the post limit and browsing time -- having administered forums myself, trust me they come from all sides like locusts! The scary bit is that a lot of those are not even bots posting but actual people, even sometimes patient enough to go through a few "clean" posts just to fill the forum with crap the second they're free.

Oh well, a few more minutes and I'm done. It's actually refreshing to spend a little time getting to know the new members... See all around!