No one needed to audit the code to learn this, it has been very well known since day 1. It isn't anything like a chargeback though, since an arbitrary spender can't just make the decision to reverse one of their transactions on a whim.
Well, in a way what you say is true. And yet nobody important from the bitcoin community was willing to sign their name under the sacramental formula: I certify under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct. Executed on ...
In fact at least Gavin Andresen closed his company instead of facing an audit. Simultaneusly, I have to commend him for not accepting patches that change or completely remove the chain reorganization functionality. There's lots of patched and otherwise badly designed code floating around that makes the assumption about nonexistence of chargebacks. This is going to be an interesting subject for litigation: 1) on one hand the chargebacks "should never happen", 2) on the other hand this is the major feature of the protocol as described in the whitepaper. There will be interesting legal debate wheter removing the chargeback functionality was: (a) negligent accounting, (b) fraudulent accounting, (c) conspiracy to commit accounting fraud, (d) something else. Interesting times ahead. You should really stop saying "chargeback". It isn't even slightly similar to what actually exists in the bitcoin system. |
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Gold is the opposite of volatile. Countries have stopped using gold because they can't just dilute everyone's gold holdings by printing more gold whenever they want.
That's so obviously wrong it's ridiculous, and only shows how much you need to bend reality to make it fit with your world view. Are you saying that they actually can print more gold? |
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Gold has been around for thousands of years, and a lot of the reason why countries stopped using it as a currency was that it was too volatile.  Gold is the opposite of volatile. Countries have stopped using gold because they can't just dilute everyone's gold holdings by printing more gold whenever they want. |
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What's up with those squiggly traces, ngzhang? Never seen that before
Usually, those are used to equalize the lengths of lines used for high speed busses. Unequal lengths = unequal delays. Unequal delays =  |
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I've been getting bogus idle miner notifications this morning. Looks like the box that sends them is having a 9 hour disagreement with the database servers about the time (or time zone).
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The government needs easy credit, which means that it needs banks, which means that it can't mess with something so fundamental to the modern banking system.
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Why don't they expand the money supply by paying for stuff instead of using this shitty credit scheme? They could fund a significant portion of the budget this way. In the US M2 is at like $ 10 trillion and last time I checked it was expanding by almost 10% a year. This would mean a trillion in revenue, enough to completely slash the individual income tax. I'm sure some less bloated governments would be able to completely fund themselves like that without necessarily causing hyperinflation.
Am I missing something here?
Think of it as a back room deal for the benefit of both bankers and politicians. Bankers like having the currency creation system under their control, and politicians like that it gives them an unlimited checkbook. Fractional reserve and deficit spending are like two unstoppable forces of nature. Bankers will always find ways to loan out more than they have, and politicians will always find ways to spend more than they have. The Federal Reserve system is a way to combine the two, neutralizing all opposition to both. |
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In addition to the above: some potential players actually audited the source code for the Satoshi bitcoin client and know that it contains the code to reverse transactions (chain reorganization) and change transaction timestamps in direct violation of the GAAP (or their equivalent throughout the civilized world).
And yet the bitcoin promoters continue to advertise that there's no chargebacks in bitcoin.
Can you point me at this thread? No one needed to audit the code to learn this, it has been very well known since day 1. It isn't anything like a chargeback though, since an arbitrary spender can't just make the decision to reverse one of their transactions on a whim. |
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About $5,000/oz gold...
There was an interview on King World News a while back, with one of the regulars. I don't remember which one, maybe Jim Sinclair. His idea was that the market was pushing towards a de facto gold standard, of sorts.
If you look at various central banks around the world, you can come up with a reasonable level of gold to hold to back a currency. Around 20% seems pretty reasonable, and is within the ranges that other central banks use. So, if you consider the dollars in the world, and U.S. gold holdings (Fort Knox, etc), and you want that gold to be worth around 20% of the dollars outstanding, gold would need to be around $5,000 per ounce.
Whoever it was, they explained it a lot better than this. I'll see if I can dig it up.
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Hop on IRC. #mtgox channel on the freenode servers.
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Give slashdot some credit. The first post was:
Qualifying Krugman as a "prominent Keynesian economist" is like calling Stephen Hawking a "prominent Einsteinian physicist". I call shenanigans.
For some stupid reason people who call themselves "austrian economists" are still given credibility despite their continued track record of failure, so in this case the distinction is prudent. Heh. Track record of failure. If you want a real track record of failure, consider that all evidence in favor of Keynesianism is in the form of "well, sure, this was a fucking disaster, but think how much worse it would have been if we hadn't stepped in". You wouldn't trust a doctor that killed each and every patient he ever treated just because he claims that they would have turned into bloodthirsty zombies if he hadn't helped. |
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I watch the super long 40 year dow/gold chart, and I occasionally look at Jesse's 2 year weekly close charts, but most of the time I'm looking at 2 day charts for gold and silver on nwtmint.com, just because I like the layout.
This is probably my own personal bias talking, but the impression I have from watching the short term charts for a long time is that for the last few years, they have been drifting up more than they have been drifting down, but the sudden movements have been in the other direction, with more sudden decreases than sudden increases. Again, this is just the impression I have from memory, it isn't backed by any real data.
If that is really what is happening, the narrative I invent is that there is broad interest from common folks in holding metals, while the big institutional players are trying to push prices down by using their resources to create large movements to spook weaker players.
This story is pretty much what you hear if you spend a lot of time reading what gold bugs have to say about things, which makes me cautious. But it still does sorta look like it, so maybe they aren't entirely crazy.
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The only way to do naked shorts in bitcoin is if some exchange is willing to go fractional reserve. This would be considered fraud, and would probably be prosecutable.
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It is just that. It would be the most restrictive license yet used for anything required. If this was brought in, anyone distributing binaries will also have to make available the source code to the Qt that they used for example or not bundle it. Wxwidgets made sure those conditions did not apply to derived works distributed in binary form. The creators of Qt got dragged a bit towards it even being as unrestricted as the LGPL in the beginning. I had noticed that the licenses picked so far are all much less restrictive and had thought that was a deliberate choice to keep the software free to more uses without the burdens of the GPL I can't imagine a better way to keep the software freer than with the likes of the GPL, but I suppose that's beyond the point. If copyleft should work its way into the main branch, as it might with the inclusion of Qt, folks who don't like it can just work with their own non-copyleft branch. Actually I can't imaging someone wants a closed source bitcoin client - the only advantage of not using GPL. As a side effect of using GPL all bitcoin forks would stay open source too, which is not necessary with MIT/BSD. Looking at Linux, GPL did not prevent it from being used commercially, in contrast, it enabled it reaching from smartphones to supercomputers. GPL software is never open source. It is always free, which is the whole point of the license. |
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The following summary was written by the Congressional Research Service, a well-respected nonpartisan arm of the Library of Congress. 3/15/2011--Introduced.
Free Competition in Currency Act of 2011 - Repeals the federal law establishing U.S. coins, currency, and reserve notes as legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues. Prohibits any tax on any coin, medal, token, or gold, silver, platinum, palladium, or rhodium bullion issued by a state, the United States, a foreign government, or any other person. Prohibits states from assessing any tax or fee on any currency or other monetary instrument that is used in interstate or foreign commerce and that has legal tender status under the Constitution. Repeals provisions of the federal criminal code relating to uttering coins of gold, silver, or other metal for use as current money and making or possessing likenesses of such coins. Abates any current prosecution under such provisions and nullifies any previous convictions. How should the first sentence be interpreted: "Repeals the federal law establishing U.S. coins, currency, and reserve notes as legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues." That dollars are not longer legal tender, that they are no longer the ONLY legal tender, or what is meant here? Also what about "Repeals provisions of the federal criminal code relating to uttering coins of gold, ..."? American's can't currently talk about gold coins? Do these 'repeals' only mean that this bill overrides previous bills? With the federal laws repealed, or with a court willing to read the clear language of Article I, section 10 of the Constitution, no currency would have any special legal status. This would be the prompt demise of Federal Reserve Notes, because those are only used because federal law says that people must accept them for repayment of debts. Basically a dollar was once a silver coin of a given weight. Eventually, we had silver certificates that were redeemable for silver coins. Fractional reserve isn't exactly a new invention, so people wouldn't always accept these paper dollars. So, they added a legal tender law. Before the tender laws, if you borrowed silver dollars, your creditor could make you repay with silver dollars, and a court would enforce a judgment against you if you didn't pay in kind. After the law, the courts recognized the paper dollars as extinguishing any debt, no matter what the note said. So, your creditor no longer had the option of suing you to force repayment in metal. That law is pretty much the key to inflation. Paper money can be debased without limit, because it looked just as worthless before as it does after. Metal debasement is a bit harder to do, because people can easily spot differences in metal coins of different compositions. Not that it stopped the Romans from reducing the silver in their coins from nearly 100% down to homeopathic levels. Wikipedia has a decent article on Legal Tender. The section on United States gives a very abridged history of how it played out here. If you want a complete history of these games, you'll have to dig up a copy of Pieces of Eight by Edwin Vieira. Oh, and uttering is related to forgery. |
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And because of that, there has been an incentive to hoard the virtual currency rather than spending it. The actual value of transactions in Bitcoins has fallen rather than rising. In effect, real gross Bitcoin product has fallen sharply.
This is his main point, I think. And I can't exactly disagree, mostly because I have no idea what the real gross Bitcoin product is. Which makes me wonder where he got the numbers. Either way, regardless of his conclusion, he understands the key issue. I hope we are paying attention. I would like for the bitcoin community to grow over the next year, or two, or five, so that the next time he takes a look, he'll correctly come to the other conclusion. |
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conspiracy theory: if Ben has told all banks that there will be no more QE (he's actually told all of us but most here refuse to believe it) and that they want to kill gold to save the USD and the world financial system what asset would you rotate into if you knew these facts beforehand? USD's of course. as i said in my OP, i bet the banks were heavily into GLD, gold futures and CHF to create the parabola and suck everyone else in before selling it off. look at the volume spikes in each of these on the selloff days. much larger than on the days the price went up esp. the last 2 wks. this is called a divergence and is a warning sign somethings up.
bubble theory: forget the conspiracy theories, gold went into a parabola at the end of an 11 yr bull cycle and most investors concluded that their proceeds from selling off the CHF on the SNB anncmnt wouldn't go into a bubble but instead into the world's reserve currency, the USD, which currently is very UNDERvalued. not to mention the huge short interest in the USD. this really is the basis of most of my moves regarding selling off my bullion and putting on shorts. i refuse to buy parabolas. all the fundamentals stack up for a reversal of all markets as well. markets love volatility. you just need to make sure you get into position before everyone else.
This. Ben's job is to keep the game going until the next thing can take over. If that means gold must go down, then gold will go down. At least to the extent that they can do it. Some day, the game will be over. That day is almost certainly not today, and it is probably not tomorrow. Betting against the government and the Federal Reserve is usually not wise. The question is how much push do they have left? The gold charts certainly look parabolic right now. See here. But... Sideways, then up. Sideways, then up steeper. Sideways, then up even steeper yet. I'm no good at technical analysis, so I'd be very cautious about taking a large position on either side, at least in the short run. In the long run though, I'm pretty sure gold isn't at a top yet. For those that haven't read the whole thread, I use the Dow Jones / gold ratio for my long term view, and not the gold / dollar ratio. |
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Fact: Overpopulation is a serious risk to all life on earth (because humans, like other animals, are mostly egoistical) and foor + water = more humans
The HUMANE thing to do for the future is reducing population, not increasing it.
But of course, that leads to inhumane things on the short term.
So, to do good you need to do some evil.
And now you have to form an opinion about what you consider good or evil.
Fact: Humans produce more food and water than they consume. |
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Is someone's tradebot having a meltdown?
Why do these bots trade back and forth at basically so near each other the trade fees cancel out any possible profit? Because the feeling of powerlessness is much more palatable if you assume (invent) a powerful agent. I don't get it? Is Mt. Gox doing this to make investors feel powerless? No, you are doing it to yourself so that you don't feel so powerless. You are staring at the static of a dead TV channel (if you are old enough to remember those) and seeing the devil. |
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Is someone's tradebot having a meltdown?
Why do these bots trade back and forth at basically so near each other the trade fees cancel out any possible profit? Because the feeling of powerlessness is much more palatable if you assume (invent) a powerful agent. |
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