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1422
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Other / Politics & Society / Re: Anyone following the ebola outbreak?
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on: September 20, 2014, 07:47:45 PM
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I guess the phrase "desperate times call for desperate measures" could not apply more here in this situation. I do think that these people are likely taking bigger risks in trying to rid themselves of the virus then they should be taking. I am not a doctor but I would think that if the person whose blood they purchased had a different strand of eboli then the person who receives the blood could potentially have either two strands of the virus in their blood stream or potentially have one, even stronger strand of the virus With an already severely compromised immune system, and the huge variation of blood borne diseases, there is nothing much helpful from doing this in this way. The existence of any antibodies in the bought blood are not going to be helpful in the creation of the infected person's own antibodies. It is more sympathetic magic than anything curative. As a vaccine, that is a different matter, but you are giving yourself a disease (or several) that is likely just much better avoided. |
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1423
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.
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on: September 20, 2014, 06:34:49 PM
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Economists pretty much all work for government, or want to. Some are at Universities on government grants or state univeristies. Its rare to find one that is not corrupted by statist interests, always hopeful though. |
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1424
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Other / Politics & Society / Re: Anyone following the ebola outbreak?
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on: September 19, 2014, 01:22:28 PM
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Human blood is one of the most toxic things there is to humans. Ebola is more toxic. This is sheer desperation, and deeply tragic. Actually this method has been used throughout the ages with some success on diseases like smallpox. People would take blood or scabs (Cowpox also widely used) from an infected person and rub it into a scratch on the arm of a healthy person in hopes for a milder version of the disease. India was know for doing this ages ago. The word Variolation is the term used to describe the method I believe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VariolationVariolation or Inoculation was the method first used to immunize an individual against smallpox (Variola) with material taken from a patient or a recently variolated individual in the hope that a mild but protective infection would result. The procedure was most commonly carried out by inserting/rubbing powdered smallpox scabs or fluid from pustules into superficial scratches made in the skin. The patient would develop pustules identical to those caused by naturally occurring smallpox, usually producing a less severe disease than naturally-acquired smallpox. Eventually, after about two to four weeks, these symptoms would subside, indicating successful recovery and immunity. The method was first used in China and the Middle East before it was introduced into England and North America in the 1720s in the face of some opposition. The method is no longer used today. It was replaced by smallpox vaccine, a safer alternative. This in turn paved the way for the development of the many vaccines now available. It is sheer desperation. Or were you thinking that they are not desperate? Do you intend to rub ebola blood on a scratch? Would you advise that others do so? http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-29256443Guinea health team killed Not just desperate, also some are violently angry. Imagine people come from far away to tell you what to do, and presumably have some authority over whether you live or die and how you spend your remaining days, some attention to how this is received is sensible. |
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1425
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Gold, Bitcoin, money.
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on: September 19, 2014, 11:08:58 AM
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Before the agricultural revolution, it took humanity about one million years on average to develop enough infrastructure/capability to support an additional one million humans living at subsistence levels. After the agricultural revolution, that changed to talking only a few hundred years. Now, after the industrial revolution, that takes 90 minutes on average.
Think about that. Humanity and civilization are changing faster than they ever have before, by many orders of magnitude, and the digitization and electronic interconnectedness of the world is only accelerating that pace.
I think you mean ~90 hours per million? (75 million per year)No, it's minutes. Just double checked:  Note that it's not talking about straight population growth, but about the level of economic activity/wealth created per unit time that can theoretically support a given amount of population growth. This is from Bostrom's new "Superintelligence" book: http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199678111It looks to reference some research? (that little superscript 1 at the end). It would be nice to know where Nick Bostrom gets these numbers. |
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1426
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Alternate cryptocurrencies / Speculation (Altcoins) / Re: [XMR] Monero Speculation
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on: September 18, 2014, 08:16:38 PM
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Tell me one billionaire who owns bitcoin - for them it is too volatile. If you are a billionaire and want a money, you cannot take anything so unstable that you are unable to predict the price tomorrow.
Richard Branson. There are others but you wanted one. How many bitcoins the billionaires own on average? Which part of their entire wealth is in bitcoin? My friend, I am happy with the knowledge that we are unlikely to learn the answer to those questions. This is one of the merits of Bitcoin, right? If you look at the Forbes billionaire list, there are a lot of billionaires NOT on that list because they have older money. There are some though who have famously supported it. If you took some time, you could probably spot a few more. Considering that the entire value of all bitcoin is less than $6 Billion USD, there are quite possibly folks on this list that have more bitcoin than they do, but I imagine they have a fair bit more than most folks reading this. Your point is well taken, that billionaires tend to own companies, and countries, more than currencies. They are wealthy because they own the productive output of other people. |
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1427
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Alternate cryptocurrencies / Speculation (Altcoins) / Re: [XMR] Monero Speculation
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on: September 18, 2014, 08:03:40 PM
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Tell me one billionaire who owns bitcoin - for them it is too volatile. If you are a billionaire and want a money, you cannot take anything so unstable that you are unable to predict the price tomorrow.
Richard Branson. There are others but you wanted one. Michael Dell. OK Couldn't resist adding him, just because he is a good bit richer, and later to the bitcoin owners club who have had their companies start accepting the stuff. |
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1430
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.
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on: September 18, 2014, 06:54:03 AM
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i'd bet just about every serious gold investor has become sick hearing about Bitcoin.
I'm not. There's no reason not to own both if you dislike / don't have faith in the current financial system. As a gold investor it would be silly to disregard bitcoin. As a investor in bitcoin the same could be said. Once the petro-dollar system comes un-done a tsunami of value is going to shift..somewhere. The value of bitcoin is not so contingent on the failure of anything else. It is just better money. |
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1431
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Economy / Economics / Re: The Export-Import Bank
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on: September 18, 2014, 06:51:13 AM
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The reason the government is involved in the export-import bank is because other countries could economically attack the US if they were to engage in a trade war. If a country (say China) were to get it's companies to order a lot of American products with no intention of paying for them nor taking delivery of them then the US government can use it's political influence to get this to stop and reverse this policy of China (in this scenario). The private sector would not be able to exert this influence.
The ex-im bank is in no way required for political action regarding this concern. If the ex-im bank is going to take a loss because a country is cancelling orders from US companies in mass, then the US government would likely contact the country via diplomatic channels to try to get these order cancellations to stop. I'm baffled as to why you think the government needs the ex-im bank for an excuse to do this. If this is the reason we need it, it is the flimsiest justification for it yet. Creating a intermediary bureaucracy so that it can lose money in order to give a reason for foreign policy action? Even the more obvious justification is better, as a means to extract donations from corporations to political campaigns, and a way to channel the extracted wealth of citizens to advance those interests. At least there is some perverse logic to that. |
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1432
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Alternate cryptocurrencies / Altcoin Discussion / Re: BCX thinks he could attack Monero (ROFL), major wannabe
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on: September 17, 2014, 11:50:22 PM
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Is it possible to provide some proof of the exploit without giving away the details on how to achieve it or how to fix it?
Are you offering to compensate for such efforts? Doing this is high value labor and expense. BCX has many demands on time. Keep in mind that this is described as a CN vulnerability. And so it affects all the CN variants. BCX provided enough description that others can also find it. We should expect this to happen. BCX has honor and also well earned pride which was exploited by the moneroman88 trolling to provoke the use of the exploit through persistent goading and insults. Some others piled on because they saw it happening. BCX has been clear enough. To ask for more it would have to be worthy of BCX's efforts, not just in compensation but in a positive outcome for the broader goals. And so, this little experiment in increased monetary privacy continues. Its only about a US$6 million market cap in the coin so far. These are early, but contentious, days. |
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1433
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Alternate cryptocurrencies / Altcoin Discussion / Re: BCX thinks he could attack Monero (ROFL), major wannabe
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on: September 17, 2014, 01:13:49 PM
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How the hell did this empty thread by BitcoinEXpress (of all people lol) get so much attention. BitcoinEXpress just deliver or shut the hell up.
This thread is not by BitcoinEXpress ... I meant discussion obviously. The size of this thread is one indication of how many people take this seriously. r u sayin BCX claims r not serious? i wouldnt be sure of that- history shown otherwise evry time ~CfA~ Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Why would he make this thread otherwise? There's no money to be made making this thread. He's bluffing and I'm calling all day long and twice on Sunday. BCX found flaws in CN previously, and described them. The Monero dev team have also found a LOT of CN flaws, and are still working on these. There is no shortage of things for them to do. BCX likely may well be able to craft an exploit based on these flaws, whether this 'takes it down' or not would greatly depend on the response and the nature of the attack. There are option contracts available, put and call, so there is "money to be made". It is plainly clear by now to everyone reading this thread that the OP's intentions (and the fake aminorex account among others) are to do harm to Monero by creating emotions in others more competent. Maybe this will succeed, maybe it will not. The folks 'believing' the OP are riding along and in on the game. Move along, nothing to see here. The ushers will clean any spilled popcorn. |
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1434
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Economy / Economics / Re: The Export-Import Bank
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on: September 17, 2014, 06:02:52 AM
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The reason the government is involved in the export-import bank is because other countries could economically attack the US if they were to engage in a trade war. If a country (say China) were to get it's companies to order a lot of American products with no intention of paying for them nor taking delivery of them then the US government can use it's political influence to get this to stop and reverse this policy of China (in this scenario). The private sector would not be able to exert this influence.
The ex-im bank is in no way required for political action regarding this concern. |
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1435
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Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [ANN][XCP] Counterparty - Pioneering Peer-to-Peer Finance - Official Thread
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on: September 17, 2014, 05:55:59 AM
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Why is there a need for faster transactions? Block chain size and security should outweigh speed in my opinion. XCP has an advantage being built on Bitcoin.
I don't know of any existing market in the history of the modern world where the average "tick time" is some random duration of approximately 10 minutes, or occasionally very much longer. It has yet to be seen whether a functioning live market can develop under these conditions. I'm all for Counterparty and decentralized markets in general, and agree with the current chain size and security advantages, but have my doubts about this. I've also been playing with VIA/XCH for this reason, but it also suffers from this same speed issue, only to a lesser degree. Much business is done "Net 30" Modern banking takes days to months. 10ish minutes is not so cumbersome as the alternatives. |
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1436
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.
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on: September 17, 2014, 02:26:40 AM
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You don't even need a derivative market (although that is another way to leverage the nothing at stake problem). You have some coins in block x, you sell the coins, you now have nothing however you can re-org the chain back from block x. Why? Although you have nothing "now" in the past back at block x you did have something. You are attacking with the "memory" or history of coins.
First you must secure $50 bln. (as in $50 000 000 000) funding to buy enough stake. Then you can try. apparently it only costs 200BTC, or approx $100,000, to buy 45M NXT. not quite the same maths. That's a month's rent in NYC: http://observer.com/2014/07/5-nyc-apartments-that-rent-for-more-than-100000-a-month/ |
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1437
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.
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on: September 17, 2014, 02:12:33 AM
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I personally think bitshares x has a better product than nxt with a truly decentralized AND collateralized market. I believe this achievement is being overlooked because this is the first time in human history that any asset on earth can be traded with actual collateral backing up the trade (btsx) and enforced automatically by an algorithm instead of people. This is NOT an IOU for an asset, which has been the only option in markets until now. Also, the DPOS model will be great if it stands the test of time because of the 10s confirmation times.
Bitcoin and nxt have both been tested with bailouts/qe/inflation with Mt gox and bter repectively and both have passed the test. The question remains; is work truly required to give a money it's value? This is more of a socionomic question and a bit harder to predict but I don't think so. I believe we will see 3 to 5 dominant chains emerge with Bitcoin being the primary POW, or digital gold. Other chains will provide other uses but their associated currencies will act as money in many cases. The alternative is for Bitcoin to survive as the sole form of money with open transactions, side chains, or some type of m of n oracle system to provide collateralized markets with Bitcoin being collateral.
Is not the alternative (bolded) more likely? Is this a true statement?: The features of any appcoin can be emulated by a m-of-n oracles system that uses tokens pegged to bitcoin as fuel. If that is true, I don't see why, should some useful "app" actually emerge, that the equivalent systems that use bitcoin wouldn't outcompete the appcoins that use proprietary tokens. Which, like Cypher said, suggests that the value of these proprietary tokens should trend to zero. The appcoins appear to be further along in development. As a test on the btsx platform, I successfully sold 124 btsx for $5(bitusd) on Sept 11 and then sold that $5 for 134 btsx on sept 15, keeping in line with overall market prices. This was all done completely in a decentralized system with btsx as the underlying collateral and enforced automatically by a smart contract, keeping the entire trade in a trustless, yet collateralized environment. Once I can do this with bitcoin I will definitely take notice. Perhaps I already can and just don't know about it? Gold (bitgld) can also be traded. Obviously this is in the early stages (alpha) of development and this design has never been tried before so plenty can go wrong. The client is also buggy at this version. I am all for a working solution and if devs can make this happen with bitcoin then that would be great. I own both. The appcoins are further along because that's their angle--that's the value proposition they use to monetize their proprietary tokens. What I'm arguing is that if any of these apps prove useful, then if it is possible to create the same app but using bitcoin as fuel, then someone will create that app, and it will tend to outcompete the proprietary token. The example you gave about the decentralized BITUSD assets is interesting and a potentially useful product. But I don't see what's special about BitShares other than it was the first to do this. This functionality could be built on top of bitcoin (no protocol changes), and, by learning from the BitShares experience, probably executed better. I don't think the bitcoin core devs should do anything in the way of "more features." Bitcoin is just better money. Any truly useful apps can be implemented on top using oracles, sidechains or open transactions like you said. I see this as a vastly more robust solution than some hodgepodge cryptocurrency with a feature set that changes from week to week. Well I for one am tired of hearing that x can be built on top of bitcoin using y, z etc etc etc yet constantly seeing nothing delivered. Counterparty was built on top and that is a pretty horrible experience. Open Transactions has been talked about as the answer for years yet still nothing working there either. And sidechains? That is so far from ever getting off the ground that it shouldn't even be mentioned. The reason I got interested in Nxt was because it has a lot of features already implemented and working now! By the time these other things come out it'll already be on to the next thing! Bitcoin doesn't want these things to be added on to it, it is allergic to change. Which is ok, because it does it's job as a layer 1 currency well and that's how it should be. Weird, I see Counterparty & OT as more tried, tested and proven than NXT, and they seem to do plenty. Very fit for purpose. What are these NXT features already implemented that you haven't found elsewhere? |
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1438
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Alternate cryptocurrencies / Speculation (Altcoins) / Re: [XMR] Monero Speculation
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on: September 16, 2014, 02:09:54 PM
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People, Joe and Jill Public, don't want cryptonote. They might go for another alt, but it will be easy to use and they will want to be able to track their money and to prove it to the authorities.
The account software in XMR will do all the bookkeeping for you, just print is out for taxes. No sweat. There is very little reason not to use CryptoNote. It does exactly what you want money to do. Is "Fear of the state" supposed to be a good thing? There should not be fear with Monero. You can prove you have paid Ceasar its due. And your competitor can not see your business. |
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1439
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.
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on: September 16, 2014, 01:36:05 PM
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Pile of Shit coins can not go anywhere because you can not stop progress. Daily superior technology hits the market endlessly diluting the market. Software is cheap and easy to replace starting a new chain is no effort. It is akin to a parallel system, start again and again.
With Bitcoin progress is made too with new better miners hitting the market the technology is hardware based the chain stays the same, akin to a serial system keep building atop of the foundation.
In software we tend to 'lock in' (excellent analysis here: http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-Gadget-Manifesto/dp/0307389979) but on the other hand first mover advantage is highly overestimated too (netscape, myspace, etc). It is difficult to know the result because Bitcoin is both asset/currency/commodity/store of value etc AND software. I guess we will learn sooner or later! I agree but bitcoin software is about to hit the hardware limit regarding mining devices. Best Chips are 28nm so far and there is room for 22nm but it wont be as profitable beyond those nodes (intel just released their 14nm chips). My guess is that quantity should take on from there, tappering the network's overall power (hashrate). What will be the effect on btc price is puzzeling. More centralization in the mining. |
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1440
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Economy / Economics / Re: The Export-Import Bank
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on: September 16, 2014, 01:33:12 PM
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How is it preventing oversupply? It is just a re-seller of that supply, if it consumes nothing productively, it is just an intermediary middleman centralizing foreign counterparty risk at the expense of the national treasury? It merely adds waste to the economic system in which it operates.
The ex-im bank is able to release the supply at a slower pace then the original producer would be able to. The producer would have to pay it's employers and it's suppliers; if it's buyer is not able to pay then it would need to rush it's now unsold goods to the market in order for it to pay it's bills. Then why (over)claim that it reduces supply when you clearly state it doesn't do anything more than put it on a shelf to rot and become obsolete, just like it would on the producer's shelf, and perhaps ultimately be sold? This is not reducing supply, only productive use does that. This is not a public good, it is the opposite, a public taking. It is a politically controlled market distortion at public expense for private benefit, subject to lobbyist influence and plain corruption. Government ought not be in this business, it is wrong and a misuse of power. I was in the "What is it?" / "I don't care" camp until all these ExIm apologists came along with these mealy-mouthed justifications. The more they write, the more reprehensible it seems. Should just stop and hope that folks don't see it for what it is. The more you explain, the worse it appears. Not much patience for all this lipstick on a pig. You fail to recognize that the export-import bank takes a fee for every loan/order they guarantee payment for. They do not necessarily need to sell all of the goods they purchased because a foreign company defaulted on an order because of this. They are a way of spreading the risk of foreign companies' defaulting around the US economy. This is not a function of good government. Government interferes in what should be private business. This should be done by private insurance and be competitive. There is no state interest here other than the capitalization on political power. Get elected, and then use the power of the state to enrich those who elected you. It is simple corruption. It should be private or ended, not government subsidized. My argument is not that this should not be done. Just that it should not be done by governments, especially not the US which ought be above such nonsense. Its bad enough that the government thinks it is the insurance company for its citizens and banks and random companies that are too-big-too-fail, but throwing its weight into the international trade to pick favorites among the exporters is unnecessarily corrupt. |
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