Free market is advocated as efficient system as resources are allocated by the 'invisible hand' of the markets. I, however find the efficiency claims quite unfounded as direct consequence of maximizing profits is phenomenon know as planned obsolescence. That is, products are made inferior than need be just to be able to resell updated version as soon as possible. Also resources are recycled only when its profitable comparing to new materials, meaning its very rarely going to happen voluntarily. These two factors make free market extremele wasteful when considering resources. My claim is that by limited central control you could have hands down more efficient outcomes than in pure laissez-faire. By effieciency I'm speaking about use of commodities of real economy. I'm not impressed by abstract numbers representing speculation.
(Oh, btw, I'm really advocate of free market provided there is sufficient regulation for enviromental matters.)
I can't wait for this whole aregument to become irrellvant once the open-source 3D printers and CRC routers mature and become commonplace...
"Son, back in the old days before a little kid like you could own a 3D printer, we were all held hostage by evil corporations that deliberately designed their products and toys to fail after a certain amount of time."
Good points. Now WTF do pages 2-5 of this thread have to do with "Free market efficiency and planned obsolescence"? |
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Their long term strategy didn't seem to account for the possibility of MS dropping support. Sounds like a lot of stories from around that time where it was so profitable to just coast on stock price increases that nobody worried too much about the longer term outlook. There probably are some parallels to namecoin in there, speculative investment is all well and good but what really matters at the end of the day is whether some user base can actually access the name service and find some content they consider worthwhile.
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If the internet was destroyed somehow, why not do local trades with actual coins of known composition instead? Trade can be as decentralized as you like.
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I'd have to look up the date, but the point is they're still valid currency (though the silver is worth more than a dollar). His mistake was making something that looked like real US currency. All he had to do was make something that looked unique and he would have been fine.
There are also current issue US bullion coins that are based on other earlier designs, not to mention all the commemorative one-offs they come out with all the time, some of which are pretty amateurish looking IMO. It really isn't a big stretch to say that some people would mix them up with gov issued currency. On top of that the "Trust in God" paraphrase is just asking for it. |
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If you're exchanging BTC for something else that exists only digitally, the incremental cost to the seller for sending one more copy of an already produced work may be almost negligible for example. If the product/service is fixed at a certain price in BTC then it may seem like a better deal when BTC prices are lower, and the seller wins because there are more sales. For the seller who has to exchange those BTC immediately to pay for costs incurred processing and shipping some tangible good, it's a different story.
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I'm still not sure how these ideological allegiances relate to a "resource based econonomy". Is the world economy today not already "resource based" in large part? How is it beneficial to give this concept such a vague name? It's hard to be against something as broad as a "resource based economy", it's basically something that goes without saying for economies everywhere to some degree.
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Namecoin is essentially filling a need that does not yet exist. The US gov't has been meddling with the internet more and more and wants to control whatever they can. But to look at it another way, the benefit of dns seizure immunity doesn't necessarily have to be a key selling point in order for there to be an appeal for namecoin domains. The internet as seen from Google becomes progressively stupider over time, overflowing with SEO fluff and populated by high schoolers testing out their arguing skills. There can be a certain appeal to a site/server being a little out of the way, even if doesn't relate to anything remotely illegal or controversial. |
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Silver is pretty hard to find but it does get back into circulation, when I search dimes I get one or two per box of $250. In the US you can do halves and nickels too but not so much in Canada where I am. Quarters seem trickier because they get noticed by more people. You never know when you might luck out and find the mother lode though. For copper pennies and (.999 Canadian) nickels some people use machines to sort. I have thought about buying one but they're fairly expensive. Coinflation.com gives metal values for US and Cdn coins based on industrial spot prices, market value may not be quite that much for various reasons but you can make some money at it. Etiquette with the banks is important too, some will cut you off if you do too much volume or bring back the coins to the same place you got them.
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I probably have a pretty vague idea of the workings of DNS resolution or browser plugins but intercepting addresses at least seems like plugin level stuff (ad blocker, net nanny style plugins) even if the next stages are not. Would it help if some intermediate server was involved, selectable by some setting in the plugin like how you might subscribe to an ad blocking list? It might not satisfy purists or those concerned about maximum anonymity, but it would let those nontechnical grampa users at least get a taste of web 1.95 as it were. Also, users who happen to desire a certain degree of 'filtering' for whatever reason could choose a server that caters to that.
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Guys, 99% of people don't even know what the hell a browser is either, and yet 45% of the people use Firefox or Chrome. How do you think that happened? Well that's simple, the nerds installed them on every computer they were asked to fix. Same thing could happen with a browser plugin or whatever that resolves .bit domains.
A browser plugin is not really possible as DNS is set much deeper in any operating system, and for a good reason. It's the registry in Windows, specific files under /etc in Linux and so on. If a browser would be able to change the DNS resolution process, the Internet would be a much more dangerous place. Hacks galore !!! I run a commercial e-learning site, and within a few months of operation, we already had cases of DNS hijacking of registered clients asking them to pay more money. If the browser would be allowed to be "creative" with DNS, a thousand problems can emerge. If the goal was just to have namecoin links in some standardized form (e.g. nmc://) work properly within the browser, do you really need to make low level changes just to do that? |
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Since there seem to be a fair number of 'hard money' enthusiasts interested in bitcoin, does anyone here "roll hunt" for older silver, copper or nickel coins to sell for more than the face value? It seems like there are a number of similarities to bitcoin mining, in both cases you are 'finding money', competing with others for a limited pool of winnings. And in both cases the startup costs can be very low or you can ramp things up considerably with enough capital.
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It is an open source project that has been alive for less than 8 weeks and you want what ... a fully functioning distributed DNS service with browser pugins available for download from all major repositories ...  ... reality check chaps. Why not? Nobody said it will happen tomorrow. But until/unless the dns aspect matures there is not much setting the project apart from bitcoin except as an alternate speculative token with 'potential' to become more useful. |
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Still an arbitrary 99% of people do not understand what is a domain name let alone what is the value in a "special type of domain name".
If I tried to guide my grandafther over the phone on how to access a .bit domain I'd be spending the good half of a day on the concept.
Which is why it should be as simple as explaining how to configure your browser to view flash or pdf content. Obviously there is only a reason to do so if it enables access to some content that's useful to the user. Such content could be expected to be developed more readily if it was at least easier to get to the sites. |
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If simple browser plugins existed right now that made the experience seamless, would any of that be a problem? Most people think nothing of installing an extra plugin to view previously inaccessible content (e.g. pdf, flash).
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Ultimately I guess the question is whether the project has staying power. If so then at some later time it may be handy to have lots of namecoins stashed away. Or, one or both currencies could well become completely worthless. In the long term I don't think you can really predict what the exchange rate may settle at, it's ultimately a function of popularity. If both projects stick around then eventually there will basically be the same number of coins of each, and mining costs may have almost no bearing on prices at all.
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In addition to the reasons mentioned above I think it's an extension of the Mt. Gox panic. People intending to exchange NMC for cash are at the mercy of two different exchange rates/markets, and some people will naturally panic when a 'perfect storm' turns both of those rates against them.
I'm hanging on to what I had and bought a bit more at 0.02XX. It's not like I'm working with 'money' I can't afford to lose, so why not? If it keeps slipping I won't sink any more BTC into it, but if it returns to previous levels I'll come out much better than if I hadn't bought anything on the dip.
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OK, I see how that would achieve a similar result. Either way I like the idea that nothing needs to be carried over between rounds.
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If pool hopping is leaving when the round takes a long time, what about using a decay function where your accumulated contribution on a block decays to 0 if you're away too long (measured in shares missed, not time)? Those forfeited earnings would effectively be divided among the more consistent miners to reward them for sticking it out. One advantage is that there would be no need to carry anything over between rounds.
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Thought this would be a thread on using a wider variety of metals as commodity money, no such luck.
Venus Project = Communism with a splash of Star Trek?
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Why would a government impose as legal tender a currency that it can not print and therefore can not profit from it?
There are countries that directly use USD or EUR for example as legal tender without pegging or any formal agreement with the issuing governments. They lose out on seignorage profits but they also avoid the hassle of administering a currency. |
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