Most of this pertains to unregulated free markets which is only tangentially related to capitalism.

Surely someone has written an e-bay GPU finder script by now?

Hmm, It's becoming kind of obvious that Bitcoin needs an investment banker.  This seems like a good opportunity.

It would make more sense to invest in producing some type of product that you can sell for Bitcoins.

You can invert that graph to get the price curve of any new technology:

Technology Trigger == Same
Peak of Inflated Expectations == Hobbyist Usage
Trough of Disillusionment == Early Adoption
Slope of Enlightenment == General Acceptance
Plateau of Productivity == Mass-Production and Commoditization

This discussion is now about how to "fix" Bitcoin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKRDvSZ-igA

Reality does have hidden costs.  Proper application of economics only restrains us from that which is fruitless.

RBE holds collectivism as a fundamental tenet.  Collectivism creates risk.  Risk is an unaccounted-for negative externality, just like pollution.  There is no free lunch.  You can't beat the second law of thermodynamics.  Though there is room for improvement, no amount of cooperation can create an economy unconstrained by resource limitations.


Yes.  The "fullest potential" for a human mating pair, given current technology, is at least a dozen offspring and several hundred acres of resource consumption.  This is not sustainable.  Encouraging this is cultural suicide.  It is much better to encourage sustainable growth of living standards through resource conservation and technological advancement.  And the best way to do that is through individual property ownership.

Come on, really?  It's like you aren't even trying.  I can think of about a dozen ways off the top of my head:  warfare, stem cells, insurance, pollution, GMO foods, von Neumann machines, etc..  Internet surfing (and Bitcoin mining) kills people via pollution from coal and nuclear electric plants.  That's an obvious one.

Regardless, the RBE argument seems to be something along the lines of "the free market is killing people by using corn to make ethanol instead of giving it away as food."  Basically, any time or resources that you spend doing anything other than working to support some idiot who spawned more kids than he can feed, is equivalent to killing people.  The RBE solution is apparently to end the selfish destructiveness of the profit motive through techno-utopian-psycho-babble.


You see, this is how I know the RBE philosophy is complete bunk.  For my part, I am selfish and competitive not due to indoctrination (because I was indoctrinated in quite a bit of crypto-communist "sharing" crap starting at a young age) but due to the fact that I have spent the majority of my life surrounded by morons who have absolutely no clue how anything works and engage in magical thinking as a substitute for logic and reason.  Capitalism just sort of naturally emerges as the obvious solution to the problem of self-replicating mouth-breathing retards who destroy everything they come in contact with.  So, ironically, you can say that RBE is part of the reason that people are competitive and dominant -- because placing any significant amount of resources in the control of people who say things like "What we are talking about is the abundance of access to all of life's necessities" is just such a horrifying alternative.

I usually have more computer junk laying around than I could possibly want.  But here are some ideas that might resonate with the BTC audience:

Graphics cards that are good for mining (high performance / watt)
Open source compatible hardware
Arduinos
Water cooling stuff
Rackmount stuff

The United States thinks it is monetarily sovereign because 1) it would like to be and 2) it would be broke otherwise.  And the way it has rationalized this is by effectively nationalizing private banks (the Federal Reserve), loaning themselves unlimited funds from the nationalized banks (quantitative easing) and then claiming the power to arbitrarily re-distribute wealth (ie your house) for the benefit of the private banks (Kelo v. New London).  To cover this all up, they forced the banks to accept insignificantly tiny loans (that they didn't want) and pay them back immediately, and then had the corporate-owned media run stories about how the US is the one bailing out the banks instead of the other way around.  It's all ridiculous.

Let's just put it this way.  Gold is valued as capital.  Not just as money.  Not just as jewelry.  Whether it is being used or not is irrelevant to its value.

Any good or service that must be priced at or near the Planck limit is by definition too cheap to meter.

I've been thinking Coke syrup would be a good item for someone to sell.

2010 is to 2400 as 1340 is to 1600

(except that's not really true because the extra 800 points is now based on the ability to write an essay about Jersey Shore)

Fantastic idea.  You should print up some physical Bitcoins and exchange them.


A deli is a perfect business to pitch Bitcoin to.  That's a great idea.

I literally mean that gold is capital.  It is a means of production.  It is also money but that's not what I said.

Gold is capital.

The value of Bitcoins is determined by how successfully those who own them use them to create capital.

If people hoard them, the value will go down.  If people just buy junk with them, the value will go down.

"We aren't running out of resources we're just finding substitutes for the resources we're running out of."

"Now watch as I pretend that oil at $150/bbl is as economically beneficial as oil at $2/bbl."

Someone should put this guy's theories to the test and lock him in a cell with nothing but 10 gallons of water and a party sub.  As his food sources are depleted, their value will rise and I'm sure that before he starves he'll discover new sources of nourishment* he didn't know existed before and he'll be better off than ever.

*eat shit dude

This is actually pretty smart.  The Republicans did a good job of selling their base on the idea that Obama 100% ruined the economy before he even took office, even though it was obviously mostly Bush.  There will probably be a certain percentage of liberals who can be easily convinced that the Tea Party is ruining the economy with fiscal responsibility.