This represents a complete and closed world view that cannot be argued with.
It is unfounded enough to dismiss out of hand.
I could say the same thing about your worldview. Are you unwilling to continue the discussion because you realize you are standing on a house of cards, or is it simply because it is your own mind that is closed and is unwilling to learn, which is why you simply dismiss ideas that you do not understand? |
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Printing money "transfers" nothing!
This is an untrue statement. Money spent into existence alters the price structure into something different than what it would be if that money had not been created. The people whom receive the new money first benefit the most, as they can still take advantage of lower prices in the market. By the time the money filters through the economy and raises the general level of prices due to more money chasing the same amount of goods, the non-recipients of this new money are left with less purchasing power than before. This is always true, unless the following conditions hold: * Everyone's cash balances and debts are simultaneously and synchronously increased by exactly the same proportion. * The newly created money is never spent and never entered into circulation. I noticed you only responded to the first half of my post and completely ignored this, Red. |
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"But in general, deflation steals from the cash poor and gives to the cash rich.
Inflation steals from the cash rich and gives to the cash poor.
That is why deflation causes uprisings but inflation causes malaise."
This is an invalid argument if applied to price inflation/deflation. Those phenomena are caused by supply and demand and have nothing to do with theft or fraud, unless you are implying that it is somehow theft if I buy 1000 shares of Apple and the price goes up as a result.
This of course was a metaphor, but if you are having trouble getting it, how about an example. It was an invalid metaphor. Suppose on average it take 100 BTC a year for a person to buy all the necessities of life for a year. Food, rent, minimal stuff.
Now we have two people doing the same job, one rich in cash, say because he happened to discover bitcoin four years before the other guy. The second person just discovered bitcoin today. So they start in the same job at the same wage (100 BTC) with the same needs (100 BTC). However, 4 years ago the rich guy traded a stack of old porn for 1000 BTC and then hoarded them. Say it was worth $5 at the time.
Now say it is a really good year for bitcoin adoption. The "demand" for bitcoins doubles and the prices of necessities falls by half. Now let's say salaries fall to match. Now both guys make 50 BTC and spend 50 BTC. So who cares?
Well the rich guy went from having a 10 year reserve of BTC to having a 20 year reserve of BTC. The other still has no reserve.
The rich guy did no more work than the poor guy. AND!!! This is the important part!!! His hoard of 1000 BTC added no more value to the overall economy than the poor guys 0 BTC hoard. In productivity value, all hoards are equal.
The so-called "rich guy" traded in his present consumption for future consumption by saving his bitcoins instead of spending them right away. He made a calculation that future Bitcoin use would be higher. He had to trade something to get those Bitcoins in the first place; this is not "doing nothing"! There is no reason that he remains the "rich guy"; Bitcoins could very well fade away and be replaced by something else, in which case your rich guy winds up flat out broke. He did in fact add to the economy: By hoarding Bitcoins, he is signalling that he believes Bitcoins to be more valuable in the future. He also takes on very real risk by doing so. If you believe he is wrong, you can short Bitcoins by borrowing them and then return them when their value has dropped. Without these early adopters, there is no way that Bitcoin could ever get off the ground. I would say that they are performing an extremely valuable service by driving adoption of the currency. They are also taking on significant risk by doing so, as they could easily end up with worthless Bitcoins. Are you saying that people should take on risk without getting anything in return? Hence the over all transfer of wealth to the rich. You might not consider it "stealing" however certainly both people and their stashes benefited the economy equally, one got disproportunate reward.
This is no more a transfer of wealth than it is a transfer of wealth that a lot of people at Apple are probably very wealthy now due to stock options, the same as people at Google. Demand for their stocks increased, thus rewarding the guys who got in earlier. This is not a transfer of wealth because it is entirely voluntary; it is "risk & reward". People deserve to be compensated for risk, and their compensation is entirely through the voluntary actions of others. There is no coercion here. There was always the risk that Google/Apple would fail and those stock options would be worthless, as with countless other companies whose names you don't even know about because they did fail. If you think about it, this is how Feudal systems work. However the important commodity is land rather than BTC.
Feudal systems were built upon slavery and the idea that some classes of people were better than others. |
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OlliPro's latest build is still faster, but this one comes close. 4700khash vs 5000khash
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Sweet, over 5000 khash/sec with the latest release! I believe that's a little more than double over the stock build.
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Printing money does squat. The US is printing money at a huge rate at the moment and prices are still deflating. Or I could be lying and the government could be burning money at a huge clip. You can't know and you don't have to care.
The money supply is actually decreasing, in spite of fed actions. The next step will probably be to directly buy treasuries to spur on inflation. Printing money "transfers" nothing!
This is an untrue statement. Money spent into existence alters the price structure into something different than what it would be if that money had not been created. The people whom receive the new money first benefit the most, as they can still take advantage of lower prices in the market. By the time the money filters through the economy and raises the general level of prices due to more money chasing the same amount of goods, the non-recipients of this new money are left with less purchasing power than before. This is always true, unless the following conditions hold: * Everyone's cash balances and debts are simultaneously and synchronously increased by exactly the same proportion. * The newly created money is never spent and never entered into circulation. |
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"But in general, deflation steals from the cash poor and gives to the cash rich.
Inflation steals from the cash rich and gives to the cash poor.
That is why deflation causes uprisings but inflation causes malaise."
This is an invalid argument if applied to price inflation/deflation. Those phenomena are caused by supply and demand and have nothing to do with theft or fraud, unless you are implying that it is somehow theft if I buy 1000 shares of Apple and the price goes up as a result.
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No way. I'm still in business. I have large quantities available and will forever. Just PM or post here to strike a deal.
Ok, I updated the first post. |
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No way. I'm still in business. I have large quantities available and will forever. Just PM or post here to strike a deal.
I really wanted to get rid of my party poker chips, but it turns out I need to send them a government ID to be able to activate gift cards and player transfers. Blech!  |
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The poker chip coin store is closed. Sorry guys!
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I'm glad that there's guys like Red out there keeping a sharp eye out on things! This thread also makes me appreciative of open source software, since there's so many smart and interested people on this forums that can validate the software and place an additional degree of trust in it. Not sure that Bitcoin could be too successful if it was closed source!
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OK, now for some absolutely incredible performance. Credit to tcatm for the caching part of the SHA context - this offers absolutely brilliant performance. Additionally, the Intel compiler really comes into its own here as its parallelisation abilities give a massive performance boost over Visual Studio. Performance: 4700khash/s on 4 cores, I think that speaks for itself. I've included both the VS and Intel build, but there's really no comparison, the Intel build craps all over VS. Grab SHA state caching Bitcoin hereWow, this is the biggest jump I've ever seen. Nearly a 250% increase in speed from the stock version, amazing. Now let's see how stable it is  Windows 7 64-bit
AMD Phenom II X4 810 2.61Ghz
2000 khash/sec
CPU temperature stabilises at 61C
MB temperature at 40C
I noticed something funny: After running for a long while, the khash/sec went down to 1750-1800. Is this normal? I see the same thing happening on my laptop where it went down to 275 after staying at 300 - 310 for a while.
Bitcoin 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit AMD Phenom II X4 810 2.61Ghz 2450 khash/sec So, somewhat faster than in Windows 7. However, ubuntu lags a lot more than Windows does when Bitcoin is going fullbore. Windows 7 64-bit AMD Phenom II X4 810 2.61Ghz I get 4200 - 4400 khash/sec using the SHA state cashing build above (Intel build). Using the VS build I still get 3100 khash/sec. |
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OK, now for some absolutely incredible performance. Credit to tcatm for the caching part of the SHA context - this offers absolutely brilliant performance. Additionally, the Intel compiler really comes into its own here as its parallelisation abilities give a massive performance boost over Visual Studio. Performance: 4700khash/s on 4 cores, I think that speaks for itself. I've included both the VS and Intel build, but there's really no comparison, the Intel build craps all over VS. Grab SHA state caching Bitcoin hereWow, this is the biggest jump I've ever seen. Nearly a 250% increase in speed from the stock version, amazing. Now let's see how stable it is This one blows the other one out of the water, even on my AMD. |
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When's the next one? Definitely looks interesting!
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I have no problems with Bitcoin's economic model (remember: money is not like other commodities) nor the decreasing rate of minting, but it would have been cool if done in less of a 'lottery' fashion and distributed equally among the users. It would be great if my laptop could generate even 0.1 BTC a day, for example.
I came up with at least a partial solution to get this to work earlier, and I think it could work too, but it wouldn't be trivial to implement: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=300.msg2686#msg2686The problem right now is the network latency, and the fact that if the bitcoin block generation rate increased substantially that there would start to be some significant collisions between generated blocks and degrade the network. My suggestion here was to have multiple chains off of chains that could help improve the scalability of the network. Regardless, if the number of users significantly ramps up to be 100x or 1000x the current user base, even these "reduced difficulty" blocks would still be pretty dang difficult to generate. The one change which I prefer would be to have the rate of bitcoins being minted stay constant forever. I'd have to agree that generating more coin blocks but having those blocks worth less would be useful, and the notion of keeping the rate of increase in bitcoin blocks constant (instead of being halved every 4 years) isn't necessarily going to destroy the currency either. What is needed is predictability here instead of chaos. Considering that the once every 4 years change still has yet to happen, going to a constant increase in the coin supply over time isn't necessarily going to change at least current behavior toward the coins. It also resolves the "lost coin" issue so far as any lost coins would eventually be "recovered" so far as simply being found money through new generation and IMHO would offer some stability against deflation. I still think that the money supply itself should remain fixed and that credit markets should satisfy the demand for money; however, drawing the coin increase to a slowdown rather than a complete cutoff may be a solution for the slight monetary deflation that will occur from the lost coins. |
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I was very surprised and pleased to see an article at LewRockwell.com about bitcoins. Did anyone from here wrote it or at least knew about it? http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/luongo7.1.1.htmlAlso, I think this could count as reference for the wikipedia article. I wrote it. I hope you enjoyed it. Let's see if it results in some new interest. Ta, Nice, I finished reading it and I did enjoy reading this article. Any chance of getting it cross-posted to Mises.org or another site with less of a stigma attached to it? I've found that unfortunately, the quickest way to get labelled as a loon is to refer someone to a site like LRC. It sucks but I prefer to be able to inject ideas into people's minds without them shooting the messenger! Thanks for the feedback. As for the cross-posting, that's completely up to Lew, since he's in charge of both of them. I have no control over that. I see LRC as no more loony than the HuffPo, WND, or OpinionJournal.com All are unapologetic in their agendas and equally polarizing. I gave up years ago about worrying about being labeled anything. I'm a full-on anarchist so LRC is the appropriate site for when the spirit moves to write. LRC is the politically aggressive site, Mises.org is more of the pure intellectual one. They both have their uses. I would argue that LRC is more influential. By a long shot. I refer people to both depending on which approach will work better with that person. In the end, though, those that do not have eyes to see or ears to hear won't listen to either. I've learned that planting seeds is all you can do and you'd be amazed at how long it takes for some people to sprout. But, it happens. Ta, You can't just throw someone into an ice-cold lake. You gotta ease their minds into it. I find it's easier to get people to listen and learn when you start from a point of common reference. Agreed about planting seeds |
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Thank you. I'm glad that I'm moving to Ubuntu.
I still prefer windows 7 for many things, but I am liking Ubuntu more and more. If only some things weren't such a pain in the ass to use (Tor: Windows 7? 1 minute install. Ubuntu? WTF...) |
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""I ran bitcoin for two weeks and all I got were two roasted balls!" "
FTW
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The big problem for me is that the minting rate doesn't adjust with the size of the Bitcoin economy (ie. the swarm size). I have a feeling that if this isn't changed, the project may run out of steam.
While it may annoy old users a bit that they can't create as many coins, new users are waiting weeks to mint any coins. It is unlikely that Bitcoins will become established if new users aren't given a decent shot at their own minting (especially when the user base should be growing rapidly). Users who discovered Bitcoins early will still have amassed more coins than new entrants, even without the difficulty changing.
The software is very impressive, but the minting rules really need to be looked at again. Self minting is such a good idea for distributing new coins, but IMO it needs some basic economic theory applying to it, rather than a relatively arbitrary setting.
I have no problems with Bitcoin's economic model (remember: money is not like other commodities) nor the decreasing rate of minting, but it would have been cool if done in less of a 'lottery' fashion and distributed equally among the users. It would be great if my laptop could generate even 0.1 BTC a day, for example. |
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I was very surprised and pleased to see an article at LewRockwell.com about bitcoins. Did anyone from here wrote it or at least knew about it? http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/luongo7.1.1.htmlAlso, I think this could count as reference for the wikipedia article. I wrote it. I hope you enjoyed it. Let's see if it results in some new interest. Ta, Nice, I finished reading it and I did enjoy reading this article. Any chance of getting it cross-posted to Mises.org or another site with less of a stigma attached to it? I've found that unfortunately, the quickest way to get labelled as a loon is to refer someone to a site like LRC. It sucks but I prefer to be able to inject ideas into people's minds without them shooting the messenger! |
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