You don't need banks to borrow money. Just search "auction bond" in the marketplace forum.
Banks aren't required to borrow with current money systems and they won't be required in a Bitcoin-dominated world. But they will exist because they will be useful for people who want to lend money at interest without having to be directly involved with: a)deciding who is worthy of a loan b)collecting on bad loans A lot of people would rather pay someone else to handle these aspects of loan-making. And the banks perform that job for a fee. |
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First, Bitcoin eliminates the need for banks to provide safekeeping of money or to act as a transaction clearinghouse, but it doesn't eliminate the need for loans. So banks will become less important but not completely irrelevant.
Second, when people switch out of unnecessary jobs, they are hopefully finding more useful jobs, which is in general a good thing for all of society.
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I motion that the Chinese Students subforum be archived.
AFAIK the project is done, and that subforum rarely sees any activity.
Seconded. |
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The last posting from your IP was less than 0 seconds ago. Please try again later. Happens to me, too. <insert funny joke about forum software being able to see the future> |
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I'm really surprised nobody has started a dedicated site for poker-site money to BTC conversion. That seems to me that it would be the Bitcoin killer app.
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I don't think it really fits into his realm of political analysis and comedy. How does bitcoin relate to US politics? It doesn't... yet  Perhaps at a later date, but not now imho. we should be donating Bitcoin to those political campaigns we support, instead of USD. no politics here: it's a simple thought which will result in more wide-spread use of Bitcoin, and may help with the inevitable legal issues in the future. just send 10 BTC to whoever you want to support. trust me - there's nobody more likely than a political campaign to figure out how to use Bitcoin. and nobody more likely to see the advantages of Bitcoin as a tool to finance election efforts. those politicians... they like their money. Political campaigns are under such close observation by the IRS that I can't imagine any mainstream campaign that would accept Bitcoins. Too many unanswered questions that could lead to campaign-finance controversy. For starters, you can't make anonymous donations to campaigns, you can't accept donations from foreign nationals, and you have to be sure nobody goes over the donation limits. Accepting Bitcoin makes it very difficult for a campaign to ensure it is following any of these three laws. |
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Could also be BTC held on behalf of others.
MtGox / MyBitcoin / etc
I think this is very likely. |
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Sure, but if 6 million BTC's or 21 million BTC's are to lent out where are the new BTC's going to come from to pay for the interest. Gold became unsutable for modern finance because of this scarsity, so fiat currency was created. how can an economy grow?
You do not need to have an inflationary currency to have interest-paying loans. This is not the reason gold stopped being the basis of currency. I hear this objection every once in a while, but it doesn't make sense. Let's imagine an island with three people in it, Aaron, Bob, and Charlie, and only 10 credits of money, which will never increase. Aaron lends Bob 5 credits at 5% interest. Bob buys a widget from Charlie. Bob now owes Aaron 5.25 credits. Where does this come from? Bob exchanges his services for it, from either Aaron or Charlie. Perhaps Bob has a job working in Charlie's widget store where he earns the 5.25 credits to repay his loan. Or perhaps he mows Aaron's lawn in exchange for the 5.25 credits he must repay. Or perhaps he sells some of his old DVDs to get the 5.25 credits. The fact that Bob borrowed 5 credits and must repay 5.25 credits does not in any way require that the money supply on the island grow to more than its set 10 credits. Let me get this straight, Aaron has all the credits, he lends Bob and Charlie 5 credits each at 5% interest each. Bob and charlie use the money to have fun and buy stuff from each other but they eventually have to pay these 10 credits back to Aaron, plus interest. Where is .5 of a credit going to come from? Even if all money in existence was loaned from one person to another at interest, (which is an extreme example, but let's play along) this still wouldn't be a problem. The borrower can perform work for the person he borrowed from in exchange for the owed amount. Or sell him something worth the owed amount. Some people are under the impression that there must be enough dollars/Bitcoins in circulation to match the value of all goods and services in existence in the entire economy. This is not so. |
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You don't need to worry. 2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshis is incredibly optimistic. If one Satoshi (smallest Bitcoin unit) ever becomes worth more than one US cent, the Bitcoin economy will have become roughly 2.3 times larger than the entire economy of the United States.
Currently M2 of the US Dollar (all the cash printed plus dollars in savings, checking, money market, and CDs less than $100k) is roughly $9 trillion = 900 trillion cents
2.1 quadrillion Satoshis / 900 trillion cents = 2.33 Satoshis per cent.
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Sure, but if 6 million BTC's or 21 million BTC's are to lent out where are the new BTC's going to come from to pay for the interest. Gold became unsutable for modern finance because of this scarsity, so fiat currency was created. how can an economy grow?
You do not need to have an inflationary currency to have interest-paying loans. This is not the reason gold stopped being the basis of currency. I hear this objection every once in a while, but it doesn't make sense. Let's imagine an island with three people in it, Aaron, Bob, and Charlie, and only 10 credits of money, which will never increase. Aaron lends Bob 5 credits at 5% interest. Bob buys a widget from Charlie. Bob now owes Aaron 5.25 credits. Where does this come from? Bob exchanges his services for it, from either Aaron or Charlie. Perhaps Bob has a job working in Charlie's widget store where he earns the 5.25 credits to repay his loan. Or perhaps he mows Aaron's lawn in exchange for the 5.25 credits he must repay. Or perhaps he sells some of his old DVDs to get the 5.25 credits. The fact that Bob borrowed 5 credits and must repay 5.25 credits does not in any way require that the money supply on the island grow to more than its set 10 credits. |
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Claims some guy in IRC  Indeed. This entire story is a prime example of Internet hysteria. I explicitly remember someone on either this forum or Reddit/r/bitcoin saying 'oh- wouldn't it be funny if the cops started raiding these bitcoin miners under suspicion for growing?' A day or two later this story appears, judging from some guy on IRC who got picked up by a low-level blog. From there, much like fractional-reserve banking, the story was pyramided up by more and more legitimate news sources, each one sourcing the one below it. This story was on Slashdot. All from one guy's probably-false statement on IRC. |
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Ever stopped to think what resources are consumed by 'normal' money?
I imagine that all the energy required to produce the nation's bank vaults, from mining the iron to forging the steel to shipping them to their installation at banks, is less than the energy 'wasted' on the Bitcoin network so far. Then you have no idea how much energy it takes to just refine iron. I mixed up my words. I meant to say "more" not "less." |
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Ever stopped to think what resources are consumed by 'normal' money?
I imagine that all the energy required to produce the nation's bank vaults, from mining the iron to forging the steel to shipping them to their installation at banks, is more than the energy 'wasted' on the Bitcoin network so far. edit: I originally said "less" when I meant to say "more." Whoops. |
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Here is another way to look at it: Would you to pay $10 out of your pocket to destroy $4990 of someone else's money?
If a person had offended me, yes, I would. Also note that in the scenario, the $4990 doesn't belong to the other person until the game is over with my having accepted their agreement, so the questions on the morality of destroying someone else's property are not applicable. |
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Im not sure if this is to be trusted?
I sent a few coins to the app but they were never received... (or maybe the programmer received them?)
Any other experiences?
Did you try refreshing by clicking on the "Check Balance" button? |
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I can also confirm the legitimacy and quality of Current-C's silver-selling here.
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It's possible to wish for the government to provide welfare or regulate the economy while also wishing for an honest hard money system. These goals are not incompatible or contradictory.
I don't think Bitcoin hampers a government's ability to fund itself any more than the use of cash does. Any business of significant size won't be able to get around paying all legally required taxes regardless of whether they use USD or alternative currencies. Bitcoin no more subverts the welfare state than shopping at the farmers' market.
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Assuming you pay for electricity/air conditioning and have a electricity rate of 5.5 cents per kilowatt hour, the next difficulty jump will make mining unprofitable!
when will it happen? mining will ALWAYS be profitable, in the long term. once it becomes unprofitable, people will drop out, causing the difficultly to decrease, which will make it profitable again. If this is true, then why would anyone drop out when it becomes unprofitable? And if nobody drops out when it becomes unprofitable, it won't become profitable again. My prediction is that buying and operating a dedicated Bitcoin mining rig will tend toward slightly less than break-even in the long run because of competition against: a) people who get electricity for free (college dorm dwellers, parents' basement dwellers) b) people who have high-end graphics cards for their own video game amusement, who also use them on the side for mining. These people only care about post-hardware-purchase profits, not pre-purchase profits. |
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I'm not worried about it being a Ponzi or a Pyramid scheme but...
Everyone is pontificating on the economics of it, but what is the crypto doing? The client source code is there, nice... I guess... But that is just going to tell you or me that it's a client to solve a crypto puzzle block. What is it that it's doing? We're running a distributed computing app that works on blocks of a cryptographic puzzle and we don't know what the puzzle is. What are we actually doing with our computer cycles? What is it that we're actually decrypting or encrypting?
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#What_is_mining?And, as broctice has noted, all Bitcoin source code is open source. There is no trusted server, everyone running the Bitcoin client is also a server. |
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Of course, I can exactly TODAY bye bitcoins and, EXACTLY a WEEK later, to sell.
And I will have almost 100% guarantie of profit.
BUT THIS IS THE PYRAMID GAME.
The fact that something increases in value does not make it fraudulent, and it does not make it a pyramid scheme or a Ponzi scheme. Also, you do not have 100% guarantee of profit buying this week and selling next week. |
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