More likely we'll see a consolidation in energy companies with M&A activity to absorb any defaults. The big players will use this advantageously. Energy is too large of a cost input on other industrial production to be a downside default catalyst from price depression, even though there are a lot of bonds floating, there is also a lot of money floating. |
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Also with each effort, new efficiencies are found. Many of the Saudi fields are <$5 so it can go a lot lower if economies slow.
Another unintended consequence is that the falling energy prices may slow (and mask) some inflationary effects allowing this to creep up on the wizards behind the curtains of the Central Banks.
Five dollars - not any more - they need money to spread around. 20 K princes with families, every public service free, and no taxes. It has become a welfare state. They need cash flow. They can get the oil out of the existing sites pretty cheaply, but there is no reason not to sell all they can with the new supplies available from technical advances. They can be profitable when others can't. You are right that they have lots of expenses though, lots of subsidies. So they will pump away. Here is some other details on some of the no-longer-profitable US sites (some well over US$130): http://www.bloomberg.com/infographics/2014-11-19/shale-profits-at-risk.html Lowest cost of production is in Saudi Arabia due to it being so close to the surface. The operating cost (stripping out capital expenditure) of extracting a barrel in Saudi Arabia has been estimated to be around $1-$2, and the total cost (including capital expenditure) $4-$6 a barrel. Even with such low costs, for the oil Saudi Arabia exports to the USA, the USA makes more on taxes levied on US citizens from that oil than Saudi Arabia makes in selling it to the USA. |
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Also with each effort, new efficiencies are found. Many of the Saudi fields are <$5 so it can go a lot lower if economies slow.
Another unintended consequence is that the falling energy prices may slow (and mask) some inflationary effects allowing this to creep up on the wizards behind the curtains of the Central Banks.
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Too much investment in surveying, platform and drilling, due to forced low interest rates. It takes 20 years after investment till the product reaches the consumer.
Shale oil probably needs 130 USD to be profitable. Low interest and easy money has led to overinvestments. Those state capitalists and crony capitalists move slowly, so it will go on for some time.
Most is profitable quite a bit lower than that.  Market forces matter too, not just theories about politics. |
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I have heard the argument put forth by Funtotry before. This was supposed to be one reason why Bitcoin was safe as compared to Liberty Dollars. An earlier FBI press release says this
Following an eight-day trial and less than two hours of deliberation, von NotHaus, the founder and monetary architect of a currency known as the Liberty Dollar, was found guilty by a jury in Statesville, North Carolina, of making coins resembling and similar to United States coins; of issuing, passing, selling, and possessing Liberty Dollar coins; of issuing and passing Liberty Dollar coins intended for use as current money
Von NotHaus designed the Liberty Dollar currency in 1998 and the Liberty coins were marked with the dollar sign ($); the words dollar, USA, Liberty, Trust in God (instead of In God We Trust); and other features associated with legitimate U.S. coinage. http://www.fbi.gov/charlotte/press-releases/2011/defendant-convicted-of-minting-his-own-currencyThis is one reason why (Hopefully) the Government's treatment of Bitcoin should be different. Nobody is going to confuse bitcoins/satoshis with dollars/cents. If the question was over the monopoly of Congress over money, I am sure the government would have taken some action against cryptocurrencies in general. We wouldn't have the IRS clarifying bitcoin's tax status and the feds auctioning bitcoins ever so often. Nobody confused Liberty Dollars with US Dollars either. The "$" never appeared on any US dollar prior to its use by the Liberty Dollar (However it WAS used on Mexican Peso). The FBI press release is pure BS. These were not the arguments used in deciding the case, nor were they the reasons for the judges decision. There were no victims of this "fraud" of minting a competing currency. The government does not have a constitutional monopoly on money creation, cases like this are an attempt to fabricate it where it doesn't exist in the law. |
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On Counterparty...
I like it, but also recognize that it brings SOME of the problems that side chains bring. One of these is the increased regulatory attack profile. The more things Bitcoin does, the more government agencies start to think "oh, we are the authority on everything to do with that".
The introduction of securities, distributed organizations, distributed exchanges, and all of the wonders of the Bitcoin 2.0 suite of things brings in new armies of regulators that will work to enforce rules on anyone who lives in or has assets in their jurisdictions.
It also used a sort of SVP one directional diminishing peg with the Proof of Burn initial distribution. This was the most ethical distribution method of any of the 2.0 efforts of the time. Earliest "burners" were rewarded slightly more than later burners, and there was an end block after which burned BTC would yield no XCP.
The Side Chain technologies provide much of the same, but also allow for "unburning" the burned BTC, but the Bitcoin protocol doesn't support this currently.
Personally my position on SC is pretty nuanced, I'd rather see the experimental changes done on another block chain rather than Bitcoin. The economic issues are complicated, and some of the risks are insidious (they build over time). For those, we won't know that we hit a tipping point until afterwards, and I don't see an impending crisis of need for Side Chains manifesting. We already have Counterparty, and its implementation of turing completeness. We have some parts of our test bed already, but there are others we don't have.
The benefits of SC are tremendous. They also pale in comparison to the Bitcoin endgame and provide a distraction from the steady march towards that. I like the innovation, I would like to see it on the Bitcoin block chain... eventually.
For now, I'd rather see it as a Dogecoin side chain implementation, or Litecoin side chain implementation or Monero side chain implementation. I would like to see how the economics play out, or at least have some faster chain running into the problems that Bitcoin may have with it AHEAD of when it would happen with Bitcoin (each of those examples have faster block times, and faster emission schedules).
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Yea I always wonder what is the point to bitcoin difficulty. Surely its not a self assembled mountain ready for the fresh ascent of miners every day in order to claim a prize. It must make the protocol more secure right, some kind of offshoot benefit would be good to hear. Not just we needed to stop it being easy to solve. I mean if it werent for high diff we could process transactions in 1 minute or less instead maybe though I realise this makes cohesion of the chain harder
AFAIK difficulty is essential to regulate the emission schedule of newly minted coins. This is precisely true. (with some liberty taken on the definition of minted) |
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I personally don't put much emphasis on the distinction between use of force by the feds vs. use of force by the states or local governments. It seems to me either we are free or we are not. The manner by which we are not free (feds vs. local authority) is not very critical.
It is a pretty important distinction. You might consider rethinking your approach. Government is a social cost, anything that needs governing costs therefore... Start with the maxim: "That governs best which governs least" I'm not saying it's ultimately not a distinction worth making, I'm just saying that when your freedom is being infringed, it matters less who is doing it than the fact that it is happening. I guess I'm taking issue with the reasoning that because a local government is restricting my freedom, I should be more OK with it than if it was the federal government. That doesn't make a great deal of sense to me. I accept the idea that states should be allowed to set their own laws. That doesn't make states restricting my freedom more palatable. Under the maxim you quoted, every regulation would make the government less good, so it would stand to reason that the best governments allow the most freedom through the least number of regulations. So when a regulation is passed about who you can give sandwiches to, it stands to reason that it's a pretty unnecessary restriction of freedom. (At least judged solely by this maxim. I would tend to agree, just for different reasons.) This is good, you made it a good part of the way. My statement was not enough to take it further so here's a sign post for the next step: Which is the better governance, is there a difference, and why? 1) The father that requires his child to be home by midnight on weekends. 2) A similar city curfew. 3) A national curfew. 4) A global curfew. All laws must require enforcement in order to be law. Enforceability is primarily a matter of geography, and of what authority holds the uncontested right of force within that geography.
So please consider whether the calculus of "# of regulations" is therefore an insufficient gauge for measuring government freedom restrictions, and consider also the number of square meters/kilometers those regulations cover in their scope.The only reason I remarked on the number of regulations was because you brought it up. I was, in effect, using your own example without subscribing to the belief myself. It's a snappy maxim, for sure, but number of regulations is somewhat immaterial to me. Rather, the quality of the regulations is my concern. More freedom and fewer regulations can be correlated, but are not necessarily the same. (As a rather silly example, a law that it is illegal to kill someone with a firearm and a separate law that is illegal to kill someone with a vehicle does not make us less free. While it would be easier to have one law that simply makes killing illegal, having a higher number of regulations that effect the same result would not make us less free, which is why the quality of the regulations matter more than the quantity. I'm concerned with laws that limit freedom.) As for the examples of curfews, I don't consider familial restrictions by a parent-child relationship a valid analogy, and I view all three curfews imposed by the different levels of government as invalid and unnecessary. The base issue with curfews is the same as with any other issue: does freedom of association give you the right to use force to curtail the freedom of other people? My answer to that is no; that your inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property justly derived remain inalienable by all others. Inalienability doesn't end at majority vote. That's what makes it inalienable. Maybe it was a simple misunderstanding. I saw # of regulations as your addition not mine. "That government is best which governs least" is from Henry David Thoreau. It advocates for the smallest government practical. It doesn't really equate to the quantity of regulations. It is also scope. Small government. A "least" government can be considered as most local to the issue governed. The absolute most direct would be self government. Whether your view of a curfew being valid or necessary, is somewhat less material than whether it is enforced (or even enforceable). Whether a right is inalienable has a lot to do with what is doing the alienation. We likely agree on general principles anyhow. |
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Perhaps but also in the larger trend collapsing faith in the paper markets. It is not the perceived value of the metal that is dropping but the perceived value of the paper contract. The fact that the backwardation exists is a sign that the holders of the metal don't trust the integrity of the futures.
this is what all the goldbugs want you to believe. it was the paper market that allowed the elevation to today's values in the first place. it's over. Could you please elaborate a bit on that? Paper = more supply, how more supply can make prices higher? leverage Makes sense. It can also be leveraged down too though... |
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How is this a fail? David Andolfatto is pointing out that bitcoin miners serve a more socially-useful purpose than gold miners: bitcoin miners process transactions and secure the ledger (in addition to finding new bitcoins), while gold miners just find new gold. In other words, the resources spent mining bitcoin are a necessary evil while the resources spent mining gold aren't (because we don't need gold miners to find new gold in order for the "gold ledger" to remain secure and for gold to be useful as a medium of exchange). Gold mining is necessary as well. Without an ongoing completive effort at mining, there is no way to know that gold is really as scarce as we think it is. That's an interesting perspective, Smooth. With commodity money like gold, resources are consumed mining for more of it; indeed, it is the production that results from these efforts that signals the scarcity of the commodity to the market. Bitcoin is fundamentally different because its supply is defined a priori at the protocol level; no resources need to be consumed to verify scarcity. I think I twisted the argument Andolfatto was making, and sort of made it wrong in the process. But it is still true, at least when viewed through a certain lens, that gold mining is more wasteful than bitcoin mining. Consider the discussion earlier in this thread about extracting gold from the oceans. If a breakthrough were to occur that enabled low-cost recovery of a portion of the millions of tons of dissolved gold, it would significantly depress gold's market price and distort the memory function of the "gold ledger" (the % of the total gold supply held by each individual would be distorted by this event). It would also result in a huge amount of resources being directed at extracting gold from the ocean. From the perspective of the economy as a whole, these resources would be wasted (it would have been better for the economy in aggregate had the ocean contained no additional gold). In fact, the waste would be amplified due to the economic distortions caused by the subsequent (and unexpected) inflation. But from the perspective of the individual sea-gold miner, it is in his best interest to consume resources to extract the gold...and so resources will be consumed nonetheless. Gold is a "barbarous relic" partly because of this misalignment of incentives regarding gold mining and the unpredictability of new supply. With a system like bitcoin, the incentives of the miners are more strongly aligned with the incentives of the economic majority. If a miner tries to produce more bitcoins than permitted, his blocks are simply ignored by the network. TL/DR: A monetary system based on bitcoin would be more efficient than one based on gold. Though the result you predict seems likely...Not all would agree. The presumption that ~21M will be reached always seems a bit odd. This may not ever occur, 2140 is a long way off. The notion that they already exist, is a false one. They do not exist until they are awarded from the coinbase transaction in the block reward. Until then they are at best theoretical. So consider whether a monetary system based on gold could exist without more gold mining, and whether it could with bitcoin. |
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Architecture votes from the House of New Liberty:
Casino 2
Brewery 1
Auditorium 1
Theatre 1
Congratulations to the architects for these excellent works, each would be a great tribute to CK.
Unfortunately you can only vote for 3 of them, for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place. Apologies, I have too many votes for my own good. then lets do this? Casino 2 Brewery 2 Auditorium 1 Or since it is after the 8pm GMT... I'm amenable to however you like to interpret the " hanging chads" |
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https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=24792I think this may go deeper than anyone could imagine. I know it appears he is still around using alt accounts but resent research has indicated the posts being made look computer generated from a database of Phinnaeus Gage's previous post from here and other internet sources. The alt account post seem real, but here's how it works to trick us: "Suppose that I'm locked in a room and ... that I know no Chinese, either written or spoken". And that i have a set of rules in English that "enable me to correlate one set of formal symbols with another set of formal symbols", that is, the Chinese characters. These rules allow me to respond, in written Chinese, to questions, also written in Chinese, in such a way that the posers of the questions – who do understand Chinese – are convinced that I can actually understand the Chinese conversation too, even though I cannot. Now that's out of the way, where could he have disappeared to, or who could have abducted him? NSA? AMT? BFL? Aliens? Satoshi?...We need to find out what really happened on that day to everyone's favorite legendary Member. No FUD please, this is a serious situation. You could drive to Illinois and say hi. IIRC, he posted an image of his driver license. At any rate, he's just gone a little bonkers...my guess is that he will be back to normal in a year or so. The posting of the Drivers license could have been done by the third party thats running the AI program that's posting as Gleb Gamow....notice PG is not physically in the picture holding a current dated newspaper with a shoe on his head. PG after all knows the rules of the " Bitcointalk Identity Photo Protocol"...... but it looks like the perpetrators did not.... Ah yes, the BIP... |
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Architecture votes from the House of New Liberty:
Casino 2
Brewery 1
Auditorium 1
Theatre 1
Congratulations to the architects for these excellent works, each would be a great tribute to CK.
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That is a huge miscarriage of justice to say the least. I wish him well.
Bitcoin kind of solves that issue by being p2p and decentralized. There are no entities to target.
Rather, it puts a target on every one of us. I think the issue was more that he was creating something that people could potentially think are "real" dollars that were issued by the US government. No. It is weird how people try to justify such things based on assumptions that the authorities couldn't make mistakes and wrongly convict the innocent in order to enrich themselves, their departments, and advance their careers. What you are suggesting would in fact be the opposite of what it was that the accused did. If you ever read anything of what he wrote, or saw any of the market facing materials, or heard anything he ever said about Liberty Dollars this would convince you of that fact that he could barely utter a sentence without describing how they were different from anything produced by the US Government. Any slightest confusion on that matter would be likely to be met with a stream of excited derision for how much better and different they were from anything produced by the US Government, possibly intermixed with some colorful profanity for making such a mistake. There were exactly zero people that confused them and suffered from that problem. THERE WERE NO VICTIMS of these "crimes". The allegation was that they were too much like US quarters and US dimes. If you accepted one of these by mistaking it for a US coin, you would be enriched, not defrauded, by having accepted fine silver rather than the base metals issued by the US Government. Never before in the history of legal proceedings has anyone been accused of COUNTERFEITING MONEY WITH SOMETHING MORE VALUABLE THAN THE "REAL" MONEY. This is a kangaroo court type ruling worthy of Jonathan Swift style satire. Entirely insane. Justice is dead. This is purely the US Government seeking the seizure of assets, using a made up crime by blending multiple laws and artistically rearranging the parts of several bits of law into a new melange, to create a crime where none existed. Then after seizing the assets, saddling the defendant with inadequate legal counsel who bungled the case so horribly that the prosecution won what should have been an impossible case for them. To amplify this point, there are in fact folks that produce replicas of US CURRENCY in silver and gold. http://www.greatamericancoincompany.com/c54/999-Pure-Silver-Replicas-c29.htmlThere is nothing illegal about doing this. These are far closer to the coins produced by the US Government than anything produced by Bernard von NotHaus. |
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You never know when you will get caught out by a new innovation. There is a minuscule amount of gold in each gallon of sea water. However there must be hundreds of tons of gold in an ocean.
More like millions of tons! sourceCombine with wave power energy generators... http://www.pelamiswave.com/You can mine gold from the water that flows through the area, and if the gold concentration falls you can use the electricity to mine bitcoin and the water for cooling. So who's in? |
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Gold will be here in another 1000 years will bitcoin be here then?
Will you? |
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This is the Chief Economist of Citibank panicking that their huge naked short position on paper gold could be a mistake. He just sold any credibility that he had with this. He says: Gold has no intrinsic value (like bitcoin), and that the Swiss Central Bank should instead buy derivatives and ETFs... He is a tool, and anyone that follows his advice is a fool. I do see a reason to buy the ETFs and derivatives though, when Citi and the rest have to unwind their positions, being leveraged on the right side of that trade will be worth a lot, but since you and I don't know when that is going to happen, why buy the paper with its time-costs? Stick to bitcoin, and the PM phys. Hodl a balanced portfolio of those and then when BTC surges, you can re-balance a little, if you like. |
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^This thread is started to harm Monero.
Nah, Monero is not harm-able by this thread. The code is increasingly solid, the technology is best of breed, now enters the web-wallet... Its just beginning really. This thread is just a bunch of bloviation and hubris with occasional sprinkles of insight. It has no power to hurt or help Monero. |
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That is a huge miscarriage of justice to say the least. I wish him well.
Bitcoin kind of solves that issue by being p2p and decentralized. There are no entities to target.
Rather, it puts a target on every one of us. There are bitcoin users outside of the US, where Fed cant do anything and I think, that is the majority. Yes, law is fortunately still constrained by political geography. |
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