The hilarious part is that you'll find that what I'm saying is very unpopular in the US.  But I guess, haters gotta hate...  I'm pretty sure I know how history will understand this era when personal jealousy is no longer an issue.


You are going to have to explain this part to me, I can make no sense of it.  In particular:

What non-depreciating assets?
Who are they being provided to?
If dollars are so bad, why exactly are they gathering more of them instead of getting rid of them?
Again, what was being provided?  By who?  And to whom?
How has the US been feeding off of whatever you are talking about?
Do you mean exploit in the good sense, or the bad sense?

There is an RPC call that can do it, and I'm pretty sure the GUI has a button for it.

This is incredibly common.  It doesn't mean anything bad.  All states require that a corporation list an agent with a physical address in the same state that is capable of accepting legal process.  Because of this, all states have companies and/or people that act as registered agents for various fees.  States with favorable corporate laws (Nevada, Delaware, North Dakota, etc) have tons of these agents.

Apparently it is a huge secret, because at least once a month I hear someone just learning about it and talking like they think it is evidence of something sinister.

If you are using plastic, you can stop automatic overdraft rapes.  When the law changed a few years ago, all of my credit card companies were hysterically begging me to opt in to overcharge protection so that they could charge me $35+ if I ever went over limit.  I declined them all, and now if a charge would ever accidentally take me over my limit, it is merely declined, for free.  It's happened a few times when I wasn't paying attention.  I just put away the card that pays 2% cash back and have them redo the charge on the card that I rarely use because it only pays back 1%.

Ha!  I love hearing his speeches.  He talks so slow that I can almost keep up despite knowing virtually no french.

He was mostly right, too.  There really was no way that the USA could both provide dollars in the quantity the world needed and redeem them for gold.  There simply isn't enough gold to go around.  That is the di part of Triffin's Dilemma.  And the resolution of that problem led us directly into the bizarre situation we are in now.

When Nixon closed the gold window, that rest of the world had the chance to get off this crazy ride.  For the most part, they chose to stay.  And they continue to stay because staying is better than leaving.  Creating a better system is a long, difficult road, paved with mistakes and uncertainty.

I think it would be absolutely awesome if bitcoin could step up as the global reserve currency.  It would fit the bill perfectly, even better than gold.

There is no such thing as a trade deficit, not really.  In the long run, there is always balance.  As the dollars flowed out, our capital, our saved production, our means of future production, flowed out with them.  We didn't rebuild Europe and Asia after the war with tricky accounting, we poured out our sweat and blood, because no one else would.

In a hundred years, or two hundred, future historians will note the last several decades as the era when the United States impoverished itself to catapult the rest of the world into the modern age.


I see this one a lot.  Sadly, it is really silly.  The unit of account for oil sales is meaningless.  In what way do you imagine that it helps the banks?  Do you think that oil purchasers are able to buy dollars through FOREX when they want to buy oil, but oil producers are unable to sell them when they want to buy something else?

Build it by hand.  Your example should be pretty easy to do.

The code gets a bit murky if you aren't up on your C++ skills (like me), but start around line 261 of rpcrawtransaction.cpp and follow the calls if you want to see where the original script comes from.

Except that being the world's reserve currency isn't a gift, it is a burden.  A huge fucking burden.  The price that the USA has paid over the last 40 or 50 years to support, build and rebuild the world is mind boggling.

Painfully obvious inflation mostly, obscured slightly by bogus statistics.  The usual.  Remember that the debt in question is denominated in a currency that we can print at will (and have!).  The repayment amount isn't a fixed value, but a fixed quantity.

Who would buy or hold a debt like that?  Turns out that everyone does, because the alternatives are mostly worse.  That may change in the next 20 years, maybe it will even be Bitcoin that brings the system down.  But those are both long shots.

No, I promise you that the ounce of silver in my wallet stamped "One Dollar" by the U.S. Mint is not in any way, shape or form a debt instrument.  It is really a dollar.

You are being pedantic about dollars.  In everyday usage, the word "dollar" is very well understood, whether it be a silver eagle, a paper FRN, an entry in your bank's computer, or a treasury bond/bill/note.  For what it's worth, I totally agree that most dollars are not really dollars.  That doesn't change anything.

I would be amazed if the dollar doesn't still exist in 20 years.  As fucked up as our financial and economic systems are, it turns out that pretty much the whole rest of the world is even more fucked up.  China thinks so too.  They keep buying our debt because it is the best place to park their export earnings.  If they didn't think so, they would FOREX their USD away as they came in.

There are no bitcoins either.  What's your point?

And for the record, there are dollars.  I've got one in my wallet that was minted in 2010.

What the hell else are they going to do with their dollars?

Deadline?  What did I miss?

I would be pretty surprised if China wasn't still buying US debt in 2032.  What the hell else are they going to do with their dollars?

http://matejdanter.com/2010/12/elliptic-curve-php-oop-dsa-and-diffie-hellman/

Library download link at the bottom.  You need to add a generator for secp256k1.

Meh.  Bitcoin was designed to gradually stop inflating.  As a result, it attracts the interest of people that don't like inflation, people that don't like seeing their savings erode over time.

I personally don't believe any sort of economist much more than I believe witch doctors. * At least Austrians tend to promote smaller government.

* Except Steve Keen, to some extent.  He does some really good work of the "trying to understand what is happening" variety, which I sadly see as very lacking among economists in general.

Heh.  Maybe we can get the devs to make the client pop up a dialog box with this quote the first time it starts.

Sorry dude, this is a hotbed of rabid anti-Keynesians.  We get it that you prefer that your money inflate, we simply disagree, and we have our reasons.  You have a high bar to pass if you want to convince us, and reductio ad absurdum isn't going to be enough.

Flip it around.  The dollar is inflationary.  Every time you sell something, you could have gotten more dollars by waiting until tomorrow.

Trade.