I don't think you understand what "fiat" means.  And the dollar today is no less convertible to gold than it was in 1970.  Just who does it, and at what rate, is different.

If you buy a share of Apple stock from the market, do you think that Apple now has more capital to work with?  Because I think it important that you understand that it doesn't.  It is certainly true that an Apple gained capital, and you gained a share, and the indirect linkage between those events is crucial for the system, but you did not invest in Apple.  In the same way, when China buys US Treasuries from the market, and I think we've established that they barely do this these days anyway, they aren't loaning anyone anything.  They are purchasing an income stream created when someone else (the primary dealer banks) made the loan.  But even that is wrong, because the Treasury created the loan to itself and then sold the income stream off as a bond.

You have a perversely money-centric view of things.  If you think of government spending in terms of wealth (goods and services), rather than money, it may snap into place for you.

P.S.  The concept of "real unprinted dollars" leaves me speechless.

Virtually nothing in your post is correct.

The dollar has been fiat paper since long before 1971.  What happened in 1971 was a "solution" to Triffin's Dilemma.

China's dollar holdings are off by a couple orders of magnitude from being able to "buy all of it in cash".

The military is not particularly financed by Chinese loans.  In fact, China doesn't make any loans as such.  What really happens is that dollars flood into China in trade for manufactured goods, and the Chinese central bank has to do something with them.  In the past, they've used them to buy US Treasuries, which are essentially dollars in different packaging.  Though the end result is similar, buying debt instruments on the market isn't what most people have in mind when they think of someone "making a loan".

At any rate, Chinese holdings are pretty much flat, and have been for a while now.  This reflects an appetite for risk on the part of the Chinese central bank more than anything else.  During times of crisis, global demand for safety rises, and treasuries do quite well, because as bad as it is in the US, it tends to be far worse elsewhere.

Banks do produce much of value.  It is just hard to see that right now because their productive work is swamped by gambling and manipulation schemes.  Your gripe should really be with the governments that have turned them into instruments of the state, and that shelter them from losses.  It is hard to imagine an industry that wouldn't be similarly corrupt if raised in a similar environment.  If your industry was given a stack of signed blank checks and told to do whatever they like so long as they don't cross a few arbitrary regulatory lines, how long do you think virtue would last?

Oh, you are one of those.  Apparently I was wrong when I thought you misspoke.

I'm with you about 80%, but it seems daft to me that you insist that the borrower be 100% responsible for their own bad judgment, but the lender can toss cash at any warm body that is willing to sign the note.  The borrower's default is evidence that the lender wasn't sufficiently diligent, and should share, to some degree, in the losses.  Modern bankruptcy laws implicitly or explicitly accept this joint responsibility.

At any rate, this is a degenerate circumstance.  Commerce is rarely zero-sum.

From reading this thread, I can only conclude that no one here is older than about 30 years old.  20 years ago, the Japanese were buying up all sorts of iconic American properties^*.  Oh, and in the 70s and 80s, it was the Arabs "on the corner buying everything in sight"^**.

At any rate, no nation that borrows in its own currency (such as the USA) ever needs to have a formal default.  The reason is that we can (and do) use the informal default of inflation.

Also nice to see the insane "money is debt and you can't pay it off" crew making a good showing in this thread.

* 1992.  Fiction, but it shows the mood.
** Happy Birthday from 1982

He misspoke.  Under virtually no circumstances will the lender profit while the borrower loses.  Typically, the failed borrower will ask a court for bankruptcy protection, and the courts will attempt to divide the losses between them the best it can.


On the other hand, he only misspoke in one sentence at the end.  The mistake is blatantly obvious because it reverses the entire meaning of the whole rest of the post.  What's your excuse for ignoring the rest of the post so that you could highlight the one line that agreed with your initial misconception?  Smells a bit trollish from here.

Real money?  What the hell is that?

Why do so many people believe this?

There are risks inherent in transactions, for all parties.  Why do so many people insist that it is wrong to use third parties to manage those risks?

I get it that credit card companies are reviled, and for good reasons.  But bitcoin removes the power imbalance that allows them to act in ways that earn our ire.  If they want to continue to exist, they will have to provide valuable services at reasonable costs.

The bitcoin blockchain is global and public.  Do you really think it is necessary that all transactions, no matter how trivial, must be in it?  Keep in mind that we have absolutely no clue how much it really costs to maintain the blockchain, and we won't know for many years.  I suspect that all of our estimates are very, very low, and eventually we will realize that trivial transactions are just too expensive to store publicly.

Defines the value correlation?

If you mean "define" as in sets, then you are horribly mistaken about economics.  If you mean "define" as in describe, then your question is unimportant.

Nothing has a fixed value, or even a known value.  When person A trades thing or service B for thing or service C from person D, the most we can say is that (values) B_A<=C_A and (values)C_D<=B_D.  It is likely, but not certain, that at least one of the inequalities is actually < instead of <=.

Markets exist to facilitate trades and to gather information on values.  By publishing data on bids, offers and trades, markets help people estimate how much other people value things, which helps them decide if they should buy, wait, sell or hold, and what sorts of prices are likely to be reasonable.  Money helps too, by suggesting a common scale, though many people have a hard time recognizing that the value of money varies in time and place, and individually.

In the hypothetical world of material abundance, the value of time will be set by the buyers and sellers of time, exactly the same way that time is priced today.  How could it ever be different?

server=1

Using a nonce has problems in a global system.

Ugh.

Start by parsing the block files to quickly generate your database.  Keep it current with -blocknotify.  To see unconfirmed transactions, either interface with a real node using the p2p protocol, or poll the mempool and iterate the list asking for transaction details.

Imagine a global account and balance ledger...

Now imagine the ledger changing as a batch of transactions are confirmed.  You need to ship the new ledger to thousands of nodes on the internet.  How do you do it?

Option 1 is to transfer the new ledger intact.  This can be push or pull, but it needs to flood the network.  I hope it isn't necessary to explain what's wrong with option 1.

Option 2 is to create some sort of delta or diff.  This is what we actually do.  The blockchain is just a list of diffs starting from an empty ledger and ending with the current state.

Oddly enough, I registered a domain for this service in April 2012.  I even implemented a proof of concept and hid a few timestamps in the blockchain.  Demand for the service was zero though, so I never bothered to polish it up for a public release.

There are, I should point out, a variety of ways to implement the idea.  Using blockchain.info is on the, erm, less good end of the spectrum.

If you don't feel like searching for it, I'll summarize my method:  User submits hash or file and metadata.  Metadata and hash get stuffed into a text file with info from other documents.  Hash of text file is used as a private key.  Some random transaction is spent to the corresponding address.  Proof transaction output is swept by system.  Once sweep accumulates 6 confirmations, text file is published.

(Notice the lack of external dependencies and UTXO pollution)

Well thank god!  Without the noob crew showing up, we never would have known that we were doing it wrong all these years.

We still depend on external timekeeping, but in a distributed way.

The devs aren't really trusted in the technical sense.  They simply do not have the ability to overrule your policy.

At any rate, consensus is only possible in the subset of the network that has compatible rules.  This is often a one-way street.  If you change your source so that your node rejects blocks with 0xDE in some set location, your node will not ever converge with the rest of the network.  But if your change catches on, the rest of the network can switch to your chain.  Old nodes will occasionally go off on a fork, but if most of the hashing power is on your side, they will quickly reconverge every time.

Hilarious.

The AT&T divestiture was in 1984.  Guess who was sitting in the oval office that year?  (I gave you a hint.)

Also, you may want to read up on the Glass-Steagall Act.  It was neutered by the executive branch in the 1960s, and finally repealed by Clinton.  From your recent posts, it sounds like you learned both economics and history from the same DNC fundraising pamphlet.

Just use the raw transaction API if you want fine control over fees.

For any serious use, you should be using blocknotify and walletnotify as part of an active monitoring system.

Checking balances in a cron job is fine for showing user balances, but you should not be taking any irreversible actions (shipping product, for example) based just on that information.