I dont get it. His mother spent USD(!) in such a complicated way for her son to aquire bitcoins? Why didnt he just go buy some on cavirtex.com himself?
In the beginning, the mother in Iran has USD, the student in a far away land has no money. A couple hours later, the mother does not have the cash, but the student has USD which he can now use to buy his food and pay rent. Bitcoins were just a part of the conduit bringing the money from the parent to the student, but can you think of another way to get money transfered so quickly? |
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If you promise not to tell anybody (lol, derp) the first confirmed transaction of paying cash in Tehran and receiving Bitcoins across the world worked out pretty good. A student last night on my campus called his mother in Iran to go to a local currency exchange and give the guy behind the counter USD and emailed instructions how to load an unnamed foreign bitcoin exchange (instructions provided by me, translated by the student). Currency guy in Tehran phoned his hawala network partner, as apparently they all have foreign partners, in that bitcoin exchange's country who bought the coins on their behalf and withdrew them directly to the student's wallet address in Canada (for a really awesome rate too, damn these shady currency hustlers are even savvy in the virtual money world)
Said student then turned around and sold them for cash in hand to a guy on campus using localbitcoin in just 1hr after his family paid in Tehran, which is a pretty awesome fast transfer from a country with zero money transmitting abilities and for a hawala guy who had no idea what bitcoin was but managed to fund and buy the coins anyways, and withdraw them to the correct wallet address. Word spread and now every Iranian student on campus is getting their family to go to this one store to get coins, and a girl told me the store maxed out the 24hr exchange limit before lunch just dealing with the few student's family members on my campus. There's serious potential in Iran. Now the student here has money for rent instead of wondering where the hell he was going to sleep in a month since our country cut off incoming transfers even from family members.
Awesome demonstration of the power of bitcoins. |
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This is why I trained my daughters to keep shooting until the threat stops moving.
Hollywood teaches people that one bullet kills bad guys. That is a dangerous belief.
I think it depends on the caliber, I would think something like a .308 rifle will pretty much 1 shot 1 kill, or at least disable the guy with one shot. Though any hand gun caliber would definite not do it. It depends on if it hits and where it hits. Even a .308 will not kill you if it just grazes or hits your hand or something. |
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Shoot, I was just going to list a bunch of stuff there this weekend. I guess I will wait until the situation stabilizes.
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He thinks that the second string from the top is a B string. It depends on how you look at it. I guess the b string is second from the ground, so you could say it is second from the bottom. But when I am holding a guitar and looking down at the strings, the b string seems to be second from the top (since the view is inverted). Also, the b string is the second highest sound; it makes sense to refer to the highest note as the top string, that way the top always refers to the same string no matter which way you point the guitar. |
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Actually, over 40% of that debt is owed to American citizens and corporations (no, they are not the same). Love my T-Bills
You do know it's a negative equity investment, right? This means the return interest rate is lower than the rate of inflation, so it is worth less at the end than at the beginning, right? Why would anybody buy such a thing? |
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To bad they cant download the software easily.
What stops them from downloading just like anybody else? |
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Nothing to do with bitcoin.
Yeah it has nothing to do with bitcoin since http://bitcoin.org/ is hosted on github pages, and the source code is hosted there. Sarcasm doesn't show well over typed mesages (I think that was sarcastic? Otherwise your sentence just doesn't make any sense) |
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I have OSX 10.5, why is it no longer supported? I have run into a few programs that are no longer supported on my "older" OSX, it is just a few years old. This is very frustrating, I suppose it is time to upgrade my computer anyway. Why not just update your OS instead of the whole computer? The newer OSX operating systems apparently will not run on my computer? Oh gawd... Gotta love Apple lol Right? Apparently backwards compatibility is not very important to them. I have been thinking my next computer should be a linux box of some sort. For those people who are running linux: do you ever run into this sort of problem, where the hardware you have is unable to run updates to the operating system? Do you ever run into updates to programs that will no longer work on your system? |
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...gays and women? It is amazing to me that the country can be $16,000,000,000,000 in debt, and the big stories of the year are Chick-fil-a and Planned Parenthood. "Pay no attention to the impending doom, watch these dancing monkeys!" That equates to about 50,000 usd per person in the US. |
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I have OSX 10.5, why is it no longer supported? I have run into a few programs that are no longer supported on my "older" OSX, it is just a few years old. This is very frustrating, I suppose it is time to upgrade my computer anyway. Why not just update your OS instead of the whole computer? The newer OSX operating systems apparently will not run on my computer? |
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Is this guy for serious? Whoever deposited money in this guy's "bank" (it's probably just used to pay back credit card loans of 'Dank') is out of their minds. I wonder how many days until Dank's "Bank" will close down.
I don't have any credit cards. Right, that is what Dank Bank is for, giving money so you can make purchases. Huh?
Nonsense.
A ponzi cannot run if it doesn't grow at a certain pace.
Of course it can. You just do like Dank does and pay out of pocket (i.e. parents) for the interest. I invest deposits to make a profit. If Dank Bank was a ponzi and I was lying about it, it would fail due to bad karma, but it's still here, over three months since fruition. Since when is three months a long time? You have not even been doing this a year. Also, you could say it has not failed, but it sure has not been very successful either. |
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What I would like to see happen: income tax should be flattened, exemptions and credits eliminated so there is a single tax rate for all income. At the same time, the spending should be drastically cut: Close oversea military bases, increase minimum social security receiving age, sell off national parks (preferably to states to make state parks or to non-profits who will care for them), raise the interest rate on student loans, give all federal employees a 10% paycut, and whatever else can be cut. After the tax revenue rises above the spending, the surplus can be used to pay down the debt, eliminating that huge chunk of the budget that goes to debt servicing. After the debt is eliminated, taxes should be lowered (still keeping it as a flat income tax so everybody benefits from the lowering) and governemnt services can be expanded.
Why would you cut taxes for the rich (or punish horribly the middle class) while you are trying to balance the budget. The only balanced budget in recent memory came from a 39% tax rate for the upper bracket. It is simple, we have done it before, it WORKS. Combine the additional revenue with modest across the board cuts including defense and you can get a balanced budget. Leave student loans as they are, as the rate is ALREADY ABOVE PRIME. Education is a cost for a functioning society and pays dividends later. Changes need to be made to how colleges operate and to the very high costs but that is a separate issue. I think you misunderstood what I was saying about taxes. My suggestion includes raising the taxes on the wealthy (by removing all the exemptions). I am not suggesting any taxes get cut, until after the budget is balanced and the debt is payed down. Student loans are already above prime, because they are high risk, and they would be higher if not subsidized. Think about it, we are giving money to people on the hope that they will be able to earn money later. This is very different from most loans, which are given to people who demonstrate they are able to pay on those loans now. |
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Fuck you. We're already paying 6% variable and the only likely direction is already up. Your talking about a group of people for which 50% can't find employment that actually uses the skills they were promised were valuable. Older people are working longer because of the tough economic times and so fresh graduates can't find jobs. How much more burden do you expect us to bear? Our "elders" have already given us a pile of steaming shit for a country when they were handed a land of opportunity. We won't take much more abuse before you start seeing violence. I personally am more anti-violence than almost anyone my age I know, but I can't control my peers.
whoa buddy, agree with you on the generational warfare, agree that times are tough, where exactly do you propose the money comes from? I'm okay with the other suggestions made by bitcoinbear. In fact, I'm all for reform of the student loan industry. But raising interest rates on one of the groups that is struggling the hardest is outrageous. Yes, we absolutely need to put restrictions on who can take out student loans (GPA requirements, minimum # of hours, no alcohol related offenses, etc). I hate all forms of government guaranteed loans, but you can't fuck over those of us who have worked hard to better ourselves so we can provide useful labor. I am in grad school now, and my education is paid for by my GTA position, but I have about $20k debt still to be paid down from undergraduate. I graduated early with a 3.4 GPA from a great engineering school. I have made every payment on time or early and I have even made several extra payments on my loans. How am I rewarded? By paying more interest than someone who takes a mortgage out on their home. By suggestions that I should be paying more. By suggestions that my friends, who are still smart but not quite as talented as me, who are struggling to pay the bills each month because they can't get a job outside of retail of food, pay more. Whoa buddy yourself. That shit pisses my off. The point is that everybody will have to give a little for this to work. If everybody says "Ok, the list is good except for the one point that effects me", then everything will get taken off the list and nothing will get done. Once we pay down the debt we can go back to subsidizing student loans (although perhaps not quite so much, we don't want to get back into debt as a country). If you cannot afford to pay back the student loans after you get out of college, perhaps you should reconsider taking them in the first place. (and by "you" I am not talking to you specifically, but the general you of all the people considering taking out student loans.) Many people take out student loans and then study subjects that will not help them pay back those loans. I even saw an article that says a "computer science" degree is basically worthless, companies are more interested in actual experience than a piece of paper. |
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The long-term vision is to store the backing Bitcoins in a voting pool on the blockchain (rather than directly with an issuer) in order to protect the users from being ripped off by the issuer. Voting pools aren't coded yet though, so for now, you would have to trust a Bitcoin issuer, the same as a gold issuer or any other kind of issuer.
Payees would have to then bail their BTC-units back off the OT server (and back onto the blockchain), through their BTC issuer. (And eventually, through a multisig-based voting pool on the blockchain, which would act as the "issuer.")
So you could pay dividends using shares of the company (since any asset can be used to pay dividends)? Interesting. Could you go into more detail about what this multi-sig based voting pool is? |
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get out your chemistry books.  I am currently working on a synthesis using C 12H 19N and C 9H 13N as starting materials. (Those are 2,6-diisopropylaniline and 2,4,6-trimethylaniline, probably not quite what your name is referencing  ) I might in the near future use C 10H 15N (2,6-diethylaniline) for the same synthesis to make an intermediately bulky product. |
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there is nothing, NOTHING! that will create "enough" revenue
not defense cuts, not social security, certainly not the more politically palatable pittances bandied about by one candidate or another
it is all smoke and mirrors now, until the wheels come off in earnest
That's ludicrous. While it is most likely that the problems will not be remedied, it certainly is possible with persistent focus and time to get out of the debt problem we have. Canada went from ~64% GDP public debt in 1997 to ~28% public debt in 2008. I don't think we WILL course correct, but its definitely possible. While the debt servicing is still lower than the tax revenue there is still a posibility of reducing the debt by cutting spending. Once the debt payments rise higher than the tax revenue the only way to eliminate the debt would be to raise taxes or print more money. To anybody who is familiar with math, it should be obvious that we only have a short time to fix things (balance the budget, pay down debt, etc.) before the situation gets completely out of control. What I would like to see happen: income tax should be flattened, exemptions and credits eliminated so there is a single tax rate for all income. At the same time, the spending should be drastically cut: Close oversea military bases, increase minimum social security receiving age, sell off national parks (preferably to states to make state parks or to non-profits who will care for them), raise the interest rate on student loans, give all federal employees a 10% paycut, and whatever else can be cut. After the tax revenue rises above the spending, the surplus can be used to pay down the debt, eliminating that huge chunk of the budget that goes to debt servicing. After the debt is eliminated, taxes should be lowered (still keeping it as a flat income tax so everybody benefits from the lowering) and governemnt services can be expanded. |
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- Privatized prisons would be interesting... certainly, they could do it more efficiently than the government if nothing else! Of course, in my opinion, prisoners don't deserve anything more than a 5x5 cell with a drain in the middle and a bowl of mush twice a day. My prison would be incredibly cheap to operate. It's probably a good thing I don't operate one, because it just rubs me the wrong way when prisoners have big screen TV's and Playstation 3's and good hot meals to eat, when many people who actually work for a living can't claim the same.
Many prisons in the United States are already privatized. This creates a issue because it is in the corporation operating the prison's best interest to keep their cots full since they get paid per head. To that end they lobby for laws that supply more heads for them to charge the customer (the government) for. For example: http://colorlines.com/archives/2010/10/arizonas_draconian_and_constitutionally_suspect.htmlSure, they might be able to house the same number of prisoners for less money, but if they are using their profits to "reinvest" by turning more people into criminals, than that is a problem. In the end, it costs the taxpayer and the economy more because we've moved yet another productive member of society into a position of dependence on the government. The fact (yes, this is a fact) that the "land of the free" has the highest per capita incarceration rate of any country in the world disgusts me. For more information see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rateI propose we eliminate federal prisons altogether. Keeping people locked up in cages is just a waste of resources. Instead, we should use alternate forms of punishment. Fines, wage garnishments, etc. For henious crimes, just use a quick capital punishment and get it over with. |
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There are several issues that makes Obama a deal breaker for me, not that I really like Romney, but right now, Romney looks a million times better than Obama:
* Obama supports legalizing tens of millions of illegals, Romney is against
What Obama says and what he does do not always intersect. Obama has overseen the largest number of deportations of any presidency. Yet he makes token movements toward allowing undocumented immigrants who have been here since they were children to remain. I support feedom of movement, I would like to see the borders opened much more than they are now, and practical policies and procudures put into place for people to immigrate legally. You don't see US states putting up border patrolls and inspection points, this freedom of movement has been a great boon to the US. Why would we not see similar benefits from having national borders unrestricted? |
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The problem I forsee, and it is one shared by bitcoins, is that the distributed hash table just keeps on growing, like the blockchain. The more popular the system becomes, the faster the database grows, and the more memory needed to save it. Is there a way to keep all the necessary data without the ever-growing pile of everybody's data?
To be clear: Open-Transactions does not need to store any historical data, other than the last signed receipt. Most transaction systems break down without their historical data, which is necessary for them to prove the current state of the system. But Open-Transactions is able to prove your balance, as well as which instruments are still valid, and which transactions have closed, without storing the entire history, but instead by merely storing the last signed receipt.Therefore when OT places receipts in a DHT (which it doesn't do yet) it will only be for a temporary period of time, in order to facilitate receipt exchange, and to give auditors access to the receipts. It will not be because of some need to keep them around as "necessary data" and it will not result in some "ever-growing pile." I hope that clears it up. Yeah, that clears up alot, and makes it sound much more workable than having a never-ending pile of receipts. I gues what I am envisioning would be a front-end client for Open Transactions, which associates a bitcoin address with the shares, allowing the issuer to for example, send dividends or coupon payments to share holders. |
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