One fact about religion is that people who believe in a god are gullible. They would make good scam victims.  Good scam victims indeed. It's called donating to a church. |
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I found out the other day that a credit card can actually have a positive balance if you pay more than what is owed on the card. I wasn't able to find out more about this strange fact on Google, and I had some questions about it.
What does the bank do with the funds that make up the positive balance? They don't pay you interest on the positive balance. Do they loan those funds out?
If you don't go below your positive balance, does this still help your credit score?
Weird... so it's like, a prepaid debit card without fees?  Seems like it, but apparently not all banks allow you to overpay. However, I think you can still get a positive balance via refunds (e.g. you buy stuff with your credit card, pay it off at the end of the month but then return merchandise and get a refund). |
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I found out the other day that a credit card can actually have a positive balance if you pay more than what is owed on the card. I wasn't able to find out more about this strange fact on Google, and I had some questions about it.
What does the bank do with the funds that make up the positive balance? They don't pay you interest on the positive balance. Do they loan those funds out?
If you don't go below your positive balance, does this still help your credit score?
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Is there really regulations about the number of toilets a place must have? I said I'm not preparing foods, only prepackaged.
You are asking for 10s of thousands of dollars worth of loans and you are asking this question now? I'm shocked that there are people in this thread entertaining this by giving you information and advice.  Oh wait, I forgot, in the beginning of the thread you clearly stated that the strategy is to figure out everyone on the fly. My bad. Carry on then. Get the money now and figure out those pesky details like toilets later. |
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There are a lot of flaws with bitcoins, and it pioneered cryptocurrency. But do we still dial up to BBSes today? Use gopher? No, it has being replaced by the world wide web. Bitcoins will be replaced, don't put your life savings in.
Bitcoin is not just software. Bitcoin happens to be a protocol, and as it becomes more popular and entrenched as the de facto cryptocurrency, it will be near impossible to replace it with a new cryptocurrency. It's called the network effect. If people can't be bothered to try a different social network than Facebook, they sure as heck are not going to be bothered to switch to a new cryptocurrency (and certainly not on a whim). |
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This was a great interview. James Turk reveals the solution to his own 'stumbling block' with Bitcoin when he says that money is a 'tool of the mind to communicate value'. Bitcoin is such a tool and it is backed by its superiority over other inferior currencies and payment methods. Ultimately, the demand for Bitcoin will be derived from all the things you can do with it that you can not do with other currencies, or things that you can not do as well with other currencies.
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You are thinking about furniture when you haven't even secured a location or have a floor plan? Yikes!  To be honest, I wouldn't want him to secure the location until it's been inspected out the wazoo, he's absolutely sure that he can use it for his intended purpose, and he has firm quotes on exactly how much it will cost to built out to the standard required by various regulations which will affect his business. He definitely needs the plans, though, as well as detailed information on the specific requirements for toilets, food preparation areas, ventilation, fire exits, licensed capacity, noise control, etc. +1 I know nothing about running a small business, but common sense tells me that selecting furniture would come after all of the above. Probably long after. |
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Adding beach theme to hookah bar. Will setup subs to make rumbling wave sounds. Wall will be the ocean.
How much work have you done on properly researching your start-up costs this week? I don't time myself. I'm getting furniture done now. You are thinking about furniture when you haven't even secured a location or have a floor plan? Yikes! |
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Bitcoin Project's Major September Announcement Will Be Delayed Past September http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=689Who wants to bet that this major announcement will be delayed? We are already well into September with no new details on the announcement. |
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Was 0.7 the announcement? I can't find anything "major" about it. Am I missing something or is the announcement still pending?
Still pending. Stay tuned. |
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Change the protocol, call it whatever you want. Bottom line is the government would be taking a big risk by trying a 51% attack. They would bring a massive amount of free press to Bitcoin, and ultimately fail to stop it. It would destroy Bitcoin. It would, however, be a huge boost to alternate crypto-currencies that don't use computing power to solve the double spend problem. Sounds neat. How do they operate then? Some kind of random number-based thing or something? Proof of Stake is one proposal for that. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_Stake |
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Change the protocol, call it whatever you want. Bottom line is the government would be taking a big risk by trying a 51% attack. They would bring a massive amount of free press to Bitcoin, and ultimately fail to stop it. It would destroy Bitcoin. It would, however, be a huge boost to alternate crypto-currencies that don't use computing power to solve the double spend problem. Bitcoin Plus |
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A first world government could launch a 51% attack on Bitcoin, but it would be quite pointless. The blockchain would just be reset back to before the attack happened and a patched client that rendered the 51% attack useless would be released.
This is wrong. A 'Bitcoin' that follows something besides the majority of the hashing power is not Bitcoin. Change the protocol, call it whatever you want. Bottom line is the government would be taking a big risk by trying a 51% attack. They would bring a massive amount of free press to Bitcoin, and ultimately fail to stop it. |
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Bump, my % offer changed and still buying debt.
Pirate? Pirate? Is that you? |
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By the way, there is one kind of inflation that is harmless according austrian theory that could eliminate all price deflation. That would be a completely even distribution of the newly created money. We could let the money supply double at the end of every year, as long as the newly created money is distributed proportionally according to how much money you currently have (the value of each bitcoin adress is simply doubled). All this would cause is that prices would instantly double as well (and lending contracts would start compensate for this). No one would lose or gain any purchasing power.
In fact, someone could even create an inflationary bitcoin client without even forking the block chain. Just change the unit of representation in the UI at the end of each year, without changing the underlying code. So at the 1 of January every year, everyone's balance doubles. Thinking about it, this would actually be a really good idea to shut the inflationists up. Just give them their inflation client, where they can pick their own rate of inflation.
That is the same as moving the decimal place. That does absolutely nothing except for perhaps arcane psychological effects. Exactly. So why do people still believe that absolute prices are so important? If bitcoin grows to the rate where price decreases is predictable we could easily counter this by agreeing on a rate of inflation in the UI (moving the decimal). But as you notice, this is completely meaningless. Only relative prices matter. And that is why our current monetary inflation is bad. Newly created money is spent into the economy and changes some prices before others. In our current monetary system it changes interest rates first, and then house prices and other assets you can easily borrow against etc. It is this disruption that comes from an uneven change in prices that is bad and causes misallocation of resources. Evenly distributed inflation does nothing. That is true, to some extent the Bitcoin protocol punishes savers because it allows for inflation. If I save my BTC, I have to suffer from the inflation that is caused by the miners' block rewards. Others who spend Bitcoin a lot benefit more because they don't have to pay transaction fees, or the fees are lower due to the block reward subsidy. However, these effects are relatively negligible compared to other currencies. Also, this problem pales in comparison to the irregularities caused by Bitcoin's lack of liquidity and volatility. |
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But every business investment is a risk. No business investment can be truly guaranteed - only treasury bonds hold that status, and who knows how much longer that will be.
Bitcoins in the pocket, however, are risk free, as long as you can keep them safe.
My point is, there WILL BE less investment whenever purchasing power is increasing, however you look at it. Even when looking at higher-yield investments, the potential earnings of those investments would have to be discounted by 3% (or whatever the deflationary rate is), then reevaluated vs the potential risk. An investment with a potential to default of 50%, but potential earnings of 53% might be a good investment in inflationary USD, but a bad investment in deflationary BTC. As the deflationary rate increases, the number of potentially good investments decreases, and the number of investments made decreases as a result.
It depends on what you call an 'investment'. In a deflationary economy with a fixed money supply, you are making an investment even if you are just saving your coins. Why? Because you are just investing in the general economy! Whatever you produced to earn the coins is out there creating more gains in the economy and you earn interest on that. So by saving you are just saying you want to make the average return. Many people might go for the average return, but many would want more than that, so they would invest in individual companies. |
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You are ignoring all the work that man did to acquire those coins. You're looking only at a slice of time and saying he is being a bad economic participant. Plug time into the equation, and you discover the benefit he created happened in the past, and that must be factored into your equation of whether he is "useless". His holding of 100,000 BTC represents the amount of production he provided to the world in the days prior. You should thank him, not scorn him.
And indeed, if he starts spending it, it will drive up prices, making goods more scarce and more difficult (costly) for others to acquire.
So in fact, rather than being "useless to the economy," the thrifty, productive saver will go to his grave having produced more for humanity than he consumed, and he should be respected for that. Many people could learn a lesson from his life.
Owning a fixed fraction of all coins -> his "reward" for the production he provided in the past will continue to grow as the economy grows. I guess here is where I differ in valuing what he did in the past. I think if he produced 10,000 pairs of shoes for those 100,000 coins, then, if he holds them for 10 years, he should only be able to buy 10,000 shoes with them. You feel that if the economy grows, then in 10 years he should be able to buy 20,000 shoes - even though he never contributed an iota to the growth over the last 10 years. He did contribute to the growth over the last 10 years though, by not pulling goods and services out of the economy. He earns a general interest rate of return. All those shoes he produced are in the economy, creating even more growth. Hence, by not spending his coins he is investing in the general economy. |
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Interesting argument, I'll have to take that into consideration. I'm no economist by any means, but it just makes sense to me that the optimal economy would be one in which the money supply does not affect the decision to spend or save (or take on debt).
But would an economy in which the money supply dynamics are fully defined and well known with perfect information for all participants affect someone's willingness to invest negatively? Wouldn't the known money supply dynamic just become the backdrop on which people still evaluate whether they can put capital and labor together to yield more than the sum of those costs? Sure, savings would grow purchasing power over time, but investing would bring in profits that also grow purchasing power over time... Doesn't this even out? It seems to me that the key is perfect money supply information. People are exceptionally conditioned to a generally inflating (at variable rates) money supply right now, so if we get brief periods of deflation (or deflation expectations), of course people hoard because they know the supply is just going to inflate again soon. But again, if the supply dynamics are perfectly well known to everyone, it should just come back to sound business decisions without any of the macro-forecasting shenanigans that pervert investment incentives. Bitcoin is the first feasible monetary system ever proposed that credibly offers perfect information to all participants. That changes (purifies) the calculus quite a bit. Let's continue with the maths then. Say I am looking at a potential investment in a company that has a 95% chance of succeeding, and if it does succeed, it'll grow my investment at an average rate of 7% per year, but if it doesn't succeed, then I lose everything. I might value that investment as a potential 2% growth on my money. Now, say that I know that prices are dropping at a rate of 3% per year (purchasing price increasing, due to deflation in the monetary supply). Why would I invest in said business with my money to make 2% per year, when I could just keep the money in my pocket and make a certain 3% per year? I can know everything about the specifics of the money supply, but that wouldn't change the fact that 3% > 2%, and thus saving instead of investing is the wiser business decision. The question I cannot answer is whether the expected 7% return would have been greater in the inflationary economy vs in the deflationary economy. If that is the case, then perhaps my argument would be nullified. HuH? A business making 2% a year is fine, because that would be 2% a year in a currency that is appreciating in value 3% a year. I invest 100 BTC and I make 2 BTC the first year. Let's say the interest doesn't compound so I make 2 BTC again the next year. That 2 BTC will be worth 3% more than the 2 BTC I made the year before. I don't see the problem. That's only true if the company itself is also growing its productivity at a rate of 3%/year. For example, assume the company sells 10,000 widgets in year 1 at 1 BTC each, thus generating 10,000 BTC in revenues, and assume my payout of that is 2 BTC. The next year, assume that the same company sells the same 10,000 widgets in year 2, but this time, because the purchasing power of BTC went up, buyers are only willing to pay 0.97 BTC per widget (i.e., 3% less than they did the year before, due to the 3% rise in purchasing power). Now, the company only generates 9,700 BTC in revenues, and my payout is reduced to 1.94 BTC. If the company sold 10,300 widgets (an increase of 3%), then they could "keep up" with the deflation and still meet the requisite 10,000 BTC in revenues. Of course, this is a very simplistic example with many factors left out, but it should give you an idea of what I mean... I see what you are saying. In reality, however, only investments that were 'guaranteed' and paid out less than 3% would go out of business. Any business that could potentially reap returns above the 3% savings rate would still get investment, even if in some years it didn't have a 3% return. The reason of course is because of lack of information. Who knows which businesses will have above average returns and which ones will have below average returns? |
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A first world government could launch a 51% attack on Bitcoin, but it would be quite pointless. The blockchain would just be reset back to before the attack happened and a patched client that rendered the 51% attack useless would be released.
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