Depending on the nature of the apocalypse, gold may be readily available.
Which would also mean that the gold will buy less bullets, just like I said before. |
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I have no idea why you want to claim that theft of bitcoins isn't theft, but I suggest you put your hypothesis to the test if you're so sure of yourself.
He doesn't have to put it to the test. Hundreds of other people have done that for him. There have been hundreds, if not thousands of Bitcoin thefts over the years, amounting to millions of dollars worth of coins. Prosecutions - 0. Criminal charges brought - 0. Arrests - 0. I'd say the hypothesis was pretty well tested. Number of tests of hypothesis: 0 You can hardly call that well-tested. |
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Ron Paul advocated legalizing hard drugs in order to reduce crime. Whoops. There goes silk road. So THAT'S why he didn't get nominated. Plus, the US government has been and is implicated in drug smuggling [1].
i heard there's soon going to be a highway from mexico straight to canada :O The I-5? I think it is already there. |
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Gold's value is pretty much stable. Everyone knows how much it's worth, and a Krugerrand is going to buy the same number of bullets today as it is after the apocalypse.  That is not exactly true. When the apocalypse hits, the supply of bullets will go down and the demand will go up, so your gold will buy less bullets. |
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The part you didn't bold is where I feel bitcoin falls in the Texas statute. "Intangible personal property" means a claim, interest (other than an interest in tangible property), right, or other thing that has value but cannot be seen, felt, weighed, measured, or otherwise perceived by the senses, although its existence may be evidenced by a document. The part you bolded was just a bunch of examples the TX legislature gave. It isn't meant to be an exclusive list. It's a complete list of examples and none come close to bitcoin. Maybe we can try Florida? (14) “Intangible property” includes, by way of illustration and not limitation: (a) Moneys, checks, drafts, deposits, interest, dividends, and income. (b) Credit balances, customer overpayments, security deposits and other instruments as defined by chapter 679, refunds, unpaid wages, unused airline tickets, and unidentified remittances. (c) Stocks, and other intangible ownership interests in business associations. (d) Moneys deposited to redeem stocks, bonds, bearer bonds, original issue discount bonds, coupons, and other securities, or to make distributions. (e) Amounts due and payable under the terms of insurance policies. (f) Amounts distributable from a trust or custodial fund established under a plan to provide any health, welfare, pension, vacation, severance, retirement, death, stock purchase, profit sharing, employee savings, supplemental unemployment insurance, or similar benefit. Still nothing that comes close to bitcoin. Your problem is you don't seem to understand that your wallet.dat is not 'filled' with bitcoins. It's just a big long number... it's the same as someone stealing your password. Even you should be able to see that charging someone with stealing a password is absurd. It's the actions you take with the stolen password that matter. So you can't STEAL bitcoins. You can only gain unauthorized access to the network and execute actions and that's covered under standard computer law. The real legal question is it's easy to see how someone can gain unauthorized access to a big monolithic server with a password but it would be interesting to see how the law comes down on unauthorized access to a p2p network with a private crypto key.... That's where the real legal loophole might be. I would say that Bitcoins fall in the category of "Money". |
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Over time bitcoins will be lost, and by lost I mean forever. Inevitably wallets will be corrupted or deleted and can't be recovered. Inevitably someone with bitcoins will die and their heirs will not know how to recover them, if they know of the coins at all. In theory this loss could add up significantly over a long period of time. With the total number of bitcoins capped what are the implications?
Forever is a very long time. As the number of "lost coins" goes up, the chances of people opening a new address and finding a pleasant suprise within also goes up. As the number of bitcoins drops, the value of each bitcoin goes up, so people hold less and less bitcoins in a single place, and so each time bitcoins are lost the number of bitcoins goes down. In addition, as the value of bitcoins goes up, and as knowledge and protocols increase, people will lose less and less of their bitcoins (They are more careful with what they have, since it is worth more, and better layers of protection are invented and used to prevent total loss of bitcoins.) Based on unscientific polls of users of this forum, most bitcoiners are in the 20-35 year old range, these young people do not think about death and wills and providing a means for people to access their bitcoins if they die. However, as the bitcoiner population ages, they will (on average) think more about these things and many will put into place some mechanism for the coins to be passed to their survivors. Just consider the math behind what you are suggesting. Let's say we have 100 units of currency, and we loose 1% of the outstanding amount every year. After 100 years we will still have 36.6 units of currency. So all the prices will only be about 1/3 as high, and we have had 100 years to be accustumed to the change in price. |
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Say I am computer-unsavvy, or I tend to loose my computer, or it gets stolen a lot. Whatever the factors, I decide the risk of me holding my own bitcoins and losing them is higher than the risk of you defaulting. If this is true, then it does make sense to lend you the bitcoins at a negative interest rate.
That being said, I do not think it will ever come to this. My prediction is that the value of bitcoins will never rise strongly and consistently enough to justify a negative interest rate.
If you are wanting someone else to hold your money, you are not lending but storing or depositing. If, in such a circumstance, you would expect to be able to get back your bitcoins at no notice, interest would not be an issue but there would likely be some kind of fee you would have to pay for the service. In truth, I can't see anyone ever lending at a negative interest rate. Regardless of the mathematics of the thing, you typically lend to get back more of what you're lending. Since the mathematics kinda-sorta make sense, it seems likely we are missing a piece of the puzzle. What is the difference between giving somebody a loan or giving somebody a deposit? It is just a matter of semantics based on who is the larger party. Not all deposits are available on demand, such as CDs. You lend to get more back than you would by just holding. Again, if just holding something is risky, the expected value might be lower than the expected value of a no-risk investment. The problem is, I do not think the risk of default will ever drop below the risk of lost coins. There are just no deposit takers who are trustworthy enough to be no-risk. |
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Why can't you have a negative interest rate? It might not make sense with bitcoin, but consider gold: I have 100 g of gold, but I want to keep it safe, so I give it to the bank, and pay an account fee of 1 g of gold. Paying a storage fee for a physical commodity isn't quite the same as lending at a negative nominal interest rate. If bitcoins were gaining in purchasing power at a steady 5% per year would you lend some of yours out at a nominal rate of -1%? In purchasing power terms you'd still come out ahead by 4%, but why would you accept the risk of default to end up with less bitcoins than you would have if you had just held on to them and never risked them at all? Say I am computer-unsavvy, or I tend to loose my computer, or it gets stolen a lot. Whatever the factors, I decide the risk of me holding my own bitcoins and losing them is higher than the risk of you defaulting. If this is true, then it does make sense to lend you the bitcoins at a negative interest rate. That being said, I do not think it will ever come to this. My prediction is that the value of bitcoins will never rise strongly and consistently enough to justify a negative interest rate. |
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Yes, I briefly mentioned that in a previous post; interest can be seen as a measure of investment risk and a measure of protection from inflation. In the current system it's usually both because there is no 0% interest rate for risk-free assets. Care to comment on how interest should be regarded when dealing with a deflationary currency/environment? For example there can't be such thing as negative interest for risk free assets ... Why can't you have a negative interest rate? It might not make sense with bitcoin, but consider gold: I have 100 g of gold, but I want to keep it safe, so I give it to the bank, and pay an account fee of 1 g of gold. That would essentially be a negative interest rate. Actually, come to think of it, you could say that using a webwallet which you pay a bit of extra per transaction for the security of knowing your bitcoins are safe and availible wherever you are, that would be a negative interest rate as well. The negative interest rate is possible because you are paying to have a risk-free investment. |
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To the bank the order does not matter, as long as the reserve is in place before the regulators take a look at their balance sheet.
I would say that it matters a whole lot. If you think that your deposit is enabling loans, and that banks can't make loans without them, you'll never understand how the system really works. It may not matter from the bank's point of view which comes first, the loan or the deposit, but it does matter for the money supply. If the banks can make loans before they take deposits, then they are able to create money out of nothing, whereas if they must wait for a deposit first then there must be at least a little bit of something behind the moenetary creation. Let's take the example of two banks, bank A and bank B. Bank A makes a loan to Bob, with no reserve, of 100$. Bob transfers that $100 to bank B. At the end of the day, bank A needs to raise their reserve, so they ask for a loan from bank B. Bank B has $100 on deposit, so they loan $50 to bank A, now both bank A and B have a 50% reserve, and the regulators are happy. Do I have that right? |
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To answer your question, laws limit the amount of deposited money that a bank can loan. The limit depend on the quality and size of the deposits. It is called the "reserve requirement" and it is set by the Fed in the U.S.
Fractional reserve banking (FRB) works whether or not the currency is backed by anything. In a nutshell, it works like this: I deposit $100 cash in a bank. The bank loans $90 of that to someone else. I believe that I have $100 in the bank, and someone else has $90. The perceived amount of money is now $190, although the actual amount is still $100. That's how FRB works. There is no reason why bitcoin can't have fractional reserve banking.
You have it backwards. Or rather the banks do it backwards. What really happens is that the bank makes a $100 loan first, and then seeks $10 in reserves. To the bank the order does not matter, as long as the reserve is in place before the regulators take a look at their balance sheet. |
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Always thought bitgold would have been better. "Coin" suggests "currency", but then again "gold" suggests "physical".
"Bitgold" suggests that it is related to gold in some way, like having units backed by gold or something. This is flase and would be misleading, since the price of gold in bitcoins fluctuates just like the price of everything else. Bitcoin is a currency, and whle it shares a couple properties with gold they are not related. |
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Bitcoins could solve this problem so easily, cause I know sometimes I am just too far to put money in a meter, and with bitcoins you get an address as soon as you pull up, then you can just keep depositing into that address to keep the meter filled. I wonder if anyone has explored that?
It depends on the purpose of the meter. If the meter is there to collect money for the city, then that should work fine. If the meter is there to encourage people to move their car within a time limit, then that defeats the purpose. |
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You need to be very confident about your computer knowledge before you do all this alone by yourself
When the sum of money becomes larger than salary, it need to be managed against potential loss, people start to rely on institutional services. Even if you stashed 10000 BTC in your offline wallet, you will feel unsecure
No I would not. You WILL if one BTC exchange value is $1000, by that price, a team will brake into your house with a gun pointing to you to get that string  If they succeed, no trace to chase them, it is almost a risk free robbery. Actually this could be a problem preventing BTC from going main stream And to the computer part, either a web based online account or a managed pension fund, normal people can not go higher than this degree of complexity How will this band of robbers know who owns the bitcoins? will they just randomly pick houses, break in , and demand money? What is to stop these people from doing this now, but instead of a bitcoin password demanding cash, jewelry, everything else? I think it would be harder to guess who has bitcoins lying around on their home computer, so to me it seems safer to stash money away as bitcoins than to keep other kinds of wealth. |
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People with a desire to be knowledgeable will do better than those that don't. Those with a desire to be skilled will do better than those that don't. It has nothing to do with a formal education.
In an attempt to put this derailed thread back on track, you realize both Obama and Romney have degrees from Harvard. As did/do: John Adams John Quincy Adams Rutherford B. Hayes Theodore Roosevelt Franklin D. Roosevelt John F. Kennedy George W. Bush So, if you want to be president, your best bet is to go to Harvard? |
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So if the US economy has to print more $$$ to deal with this fiscal cliff I've been reading about in the news will the inflation of the USD cause an increase in BTC price? Or are BTCs relatively pegged to USD?
Ceteris paribus, the more USD available, the higher the BTC price. It's just a supply and demand thing. If the supply of USD rises, then their price (in bitcoins) falls. |
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If 1 bitcoin will buy 1 gram of weed (on silk road), it does not matter what the price of USD is. If they print a bunch of USD, but the supply and demand of bitcoins and weed remain steady, then 1 bitcoin will still but one gram of weed, but that bitcoin will buy more dollars than before. So the USD inflation does not have any afect on BTC, but the USD/BTC rate will go up.
Taking a different view, if the USD starts going into faster inflation, then more people will start looking for places to put their money that are not subject to the inflation, so more people will want to put their savings into bitcoins. This will raise the value of bitcoins (maybe 1 bitcoin will then buy 2 grams of weed, or 10 grams of weed).
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What I don't understand it that since it became legal, does that mean that companies cannot refuse to hire you anymore if they find out that you smoked weed?
Pot smokers aren't going to suddenly be made a protected class under civil rights and other anti-discrimination laws. But it should reduce the number of pee tests. Companies can require alcohol tests, but alcohol is legal. It is not about the legality of the substance, it is about the impairment to performing the job functions. If you come to work high impaired and put other people in danger, then you should be fired. Fixed that for you. But I 100% agree. I was speaking of pre-employment pee tests. You know, the ones where they check to see if you've smoked in the past 3 months. (They don't check for past history of alcohol use...) That is only because alcohol is harder to measure than cannabis. Where I work, we sometimes have to take a random trip to the clinic for a pee test and alcohol breathilizer. So they are measuring alcohol use. And before I started this job I took the pee test and breathed into the machine. While few people would be drunk going into a job interview, I suppose doing the test screens out the real screwballs. |
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Thus everyone could live where they would feel closer to their views. That was the idea in the US. The Federal government was to do little more than protect our rights. You could pick a state that more more closely reflected your views. That all basically ended with the civil war. You mean the Second American Revolution? The Failed revolution? |
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What I don't understand it that since it became legal, does that mean that companies cannot refuse to hire you anymore if they find out that you smoked weed?
Pot smokers aren't going to suddenly be made a protected class under civil rights and other anti-discrimination laws. But it should reduce the number of pee tests. Companies can require alcohol tests, but alcohol is legal. It is not about the legality of the substance, it is about the impairment to performing the job functions. If you come to work high and put other people in danger, then you should be fired. |
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