It takes chutzpah.
The Fed says that the Gold standard doesn't work because it can be ended by the politicians at the behest of the Fed.
They can be expected to try to use the same reasoning with bitcoin... but only if they first make it the bitcoin standard? Somehow I think that simply asking for it all by force of law probably won't work again the same way Roosevelt took the gold.
Yeah, you picked on that shit too? Amazing. ZH recently had an interesting article on Warren Buffet's father's support for the gold standard. It's worth a read. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-08-14/70-years-later-warren-buffetts-dad-proved-right-about-everythingWhat I find interesting is all of the reasons he uses to support gold can just as easily be applied to bitcoin today. From this view bitcoin simply becomes a better implementation of the gold standard, largely because it is less manipulable. Some extracts from the article and Buffet's letter: Unlike his son who has lauded the Federal Reserve and in particular its former chairman Ben Bernanke, along with others who intervened during and after the financial crisis of 2008, Howard Buffett was an outspoken proponent of laissez-faire economics and sound money. In a 1948 article he wrote: Is there a connection between Human Freedom and A Gold Redeemable Money? At first glance it would seem that money belongs to the world of economics and human freedom to the political sphere.
But when you recall that one of the first moves by Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler was to outlaw individual ownership of gold, you begin to sense that there may be some connection between money, redeemable in gold, and the rare prize known as human liberty.
Also, when you find that Lenin declared and demonstrated that a sure way to overturn the existing social order and bring about communism was by printing press paper money, then again you are impressed with the possibility of a relationship between a gold-backed money and human freedom…
The subject of a Hitler or a Stalin is a serf by the mere fact that his money can be called in and depreciated at the whim of his rulers…
Under such conditions [of depreciating currency] the individual citizen is deprived of freedom of movement. He is prevented from laying away purchasing power for the future. He becomes dependent upon the goodwill of the politicians for his daily bread. Unless he lives on land that will sustain him, freedom for him does not exist…
Buffett argues that the lack of a gold standard meant that Congress was unrestrained in spending money to cater to various interest groups, stating “With no bad immediate consequence it becomes expedient to accede to a spending demand. The Treasury is seemingly inexhaustible. Besides the unorganized taxpayers back home may not notice this particular expenditure — and so it goes.” Further: Far away from Congress is the real forgotten man, the taxpayer who foots the bill. He is in a different spot from the tax-eater or the business that makes millions from spending schemes. He cannot afford to spend his time trying to oppose Federal expenditures. He has to earn his own living and carry the burden of taxes as well.
But for most beneficiaries a Federal paycheck soon becomes vital in his life. He usually will spend his full energies if necessary to hang onto this income.
The taxpayer is completely outmatched in such an unequal contest. Always heretofore he possessed an equalizer. If government finances weren’t run according to his idea of soundness he had an individual right to protect himself by obtaining gold.
With a restoration of the gold standard, Congress would have to again resist handouts. That would work this way. If Congress seemed receptive to reckless spending schemes, depositors’ demands over the country for gold would soon become serious. That alarm in turn would quickly be reflected in the halls of Congress. The legislators would learn from the banks back home and from the Treasury officials that confidence in the Treasury was endangered.
Congress would be forced to confront spending demands with firmness. The gold standard acted as a silent watchdog to prevent unlimited public spending.
Buffett ends his column with this warning:
Because of our economic strength the paper money disease here may take many years to run its course.
But we can be approaching the critical stage. When that day arrives, our political rulers will probably find that foreign war and ruthless regimentation is the cunning alternative to domestic strife. That was the way out for the paper-money economy of Hitler and others. In these remarks I have only touched the high points of this problem. I hope that I have given you enough information to challenge you to make a serious study of it.
I warn you that politicians of both parties will oppose the restoration of gold, although they may outwardly seemingly favor it. Also those elements here and abroad who are getting rich from the continued American inflation will oppose a return to sound money. You must be prepared to meet their opposition intelligently and vigorously. They have had 15 years of unbroken victory.
But, unless you are willing to surrender your children and your country to galloping inflation, war and slavery, then this cause demands your support. For if human liberty is to survive in America, we must win the battle to restore honest money.
There is no more important challenge facing us than this issue — the restoration of your freedom to secure gold in exchange for the fruits of your labors.
In the end those who argued against FDR and Wilson will be proven right. My fear is no one alive will notice or care. Bitcoin is our escape from this. |
|
|
|
You're probably right this time, but I want to make sure this possibility is on everyone's radar because the odds of it happening go up every day.
That the Federal Reserve Bank of NY stole 300+ tons of gold from Germany is not an imaginary conspiracy theory.
They promised to hold those bars. Not an equivalent value - the specific serial numbered one which Germany originally deposited.
When keeping that promise became inconvenient they defaulted.
This is the MO of Wall Street, and they will not change their ways when they get involved with Bitcoin.
What I expect to happen is that Bitlicenses are going to eventually force all Bitcoin startups to get acquired by banks, because Bitlicenses are impossible to comply with and banks are immune from their provisions. One day after Coinbase has been bought out, their users are going to log in and have to check a box indicating they've read the new Terms of Service. Buried deeply in the legalese where nobody will actually read it will be the provision that says they "might" rehypothecate your deposits.
tl;dr: Hold your own coins and don't store them with third parties, because if you don't you'll eventually discover you don't actually own any.
The advantage for bitcoin is it is less manipulable than gold has proved to be. Throughout history just about every single major power started with some form of gold as a base currency, but then resorted to debasing the gold content in coins more and more until the populace finally would not accept the devalued coins anymore. This has proven even easier in the modern era where the banks/government do not even have to issue falsified coins with less and less gold content, and instead have been able to completely sever gold content from currency in people's minds. But with bitcoin it will always be easy for people paying attention to take physical possession of their own coins in their own wallets. The only way to stop this is to make it illegal entirely, which exposes the scam. This is why I am betting on bitcoin more than gold this time around. |
|
|
|
|
Glad to see the focus on designing the lowest power chips, in the long run these are the only ASICs that will succeed. That said the J/GH/s ratio is only one part of what is required. The other significant factor is finding locations in low electricity cost regions.
For example if you have a chip twice as efficient but located in a region with electricity costs three times higher than lower cost regions, you are still at a disadvantage. Take California, we pay $.35/KW in the upper tier while other states to our north pay around $.07/KW, which is more than a 4x difference. Germany and the EU also have high electricity costs.
So assuming you build these, where are you sourcing your datacenter locations? Finding low cost electricity is just as important as chip design, but there are a limited number of fixed options to find the best spots globally.
|
|
|
|
This is absolutely correct. Bitcoin is not a currency, instead Bitcoin is a form of money. They are different. |
|
|
|
They are already fully-compliant with the legislation, which hasn't even been passed into law yet.
Don't confuse regulation with legislation. They are only different in HOW the come into being. They are identical in what they are and the force behind them. It does not matter if it is a regulation or legislative law, if you do not follow either men with guns come and take your possessions, take your children and throw you in jail. |
|
|
|
It doesn't look like it to me, the market is now locked into a new long term downtrend ... by fair means or foul the banksters want cheap coinz ... and people seem to be willing to sell them ever lower. It appears to me to be some kind of algorithm that is designed to walk the market steadily lower, after each dump, new blocking sell walls spring up of a consistent size and interval above market to cap any bounce back rallies developing. Bitcoin needs a new Silk Road. As long as price discovery takes place on the exchanges, instead of via supply and demand for commerce, the banksters can play their tricks very easily. The only killer app for Bitcoin is to enable commerce that would otherwise impossible, and that means the black market. Note that the black market doesn't imply violent or destructive - it can be as ordinary and benign as operating a lemonade stand without a permit from the city, or participating in a ride sharing service without a taxi license. Bitcoin needs to give people access to things they can't have without it. A safe and pleasant drug buying experience was a great start, but it's time to think bigger now. Adoption is proceeding fine IMHO, the number of new services combined with steady/accelerating merchant adoption shows the future direction. 2013 was a crazy speculative year. The price ran up 10,000% from $10 to $1,000 in around 12 months, yet adoption (although growing exponentially) definitely did not grow 10,000% in the same time period. This is why 2013 was a speculative bubble. That does not mean such speculation was wrong, but it was driven by expectation for future adoption that has not yet been realized. 2014 is a pause and catch up year (and maybe 2015 and 2016 too). Adoption is growing which continues to increase the "floor" price, however the price is still ahead of adoption. Going forward we are starting to see merchants offer BTC discounts (because it saves them money), this will grow adoption. It seems some parts of the porn industry are waking up to BTC as a way to bypass 40% fees and chargebacks, this will grow adoption. We will have OpenBazaar coming up as a global ebay, this will grow adoption. We will have all these VCs services start to come online, this will grow adoption. We can list dozens of other areas, these all will grow adoption. The end result will be a higher BTC price, but don't be surprised if adoption takes a while to catch-up to the 2013 10,000% run in the price and/or for the price to stall for some time. |
|
|
|
Ease up. 27 pages so far today and the day is only half done.
I scrolled through all those pages checking posters's names, to see if one of the three or four people worth reading had contributed.
Nothing but the usual cataract of logorrhea and cutesy images.
Personally I am only here for the cutesy images at this point, and even those are few these days |
|
|
|
if you sold and rebought youd have even more of your precious bitcoins?
Yeah, that's what I did > $1000. Everyone was "Buy buy!" so I was "Sell sell!" A lot of other people did the exact same thing when bitcoin first past $30 in 2013 and shot up to $60. Many never got back in and btc got away from them. The fact is no one knows what the short term will do, but if adoption continues in the long term we know it will keep going up. |
|
|
|
Worse than Bitcoin losing its value will be we see the fallling guy being 20x more active if we really break the 550's almost half month after he predicted a 550 crash in 24 hours
better start selling now  cry won't help I'm already full fiat. But I believe we won't stay at below 550 for much time, if we indeed break that level i saw these crashs months ago, i told you the price is going nowhere but down, the next target will be $4xx, believe or not it will be there bitcoin could test $30 (call it total market crash or final capitulation, it would be a 95% drop) within 3 months from now and i suggest you do not buy at all unless you do day trades Isn't bitcoin up around 500% in just the past 12 months? I wouldn't exactly call that crashing. |
|
|
|
Tell me why exactly investors will rush to buy in to an under performing asset just because it's packaged into an ETF? Everyone and their hairdresser is now aware of bitcoin... if they had wanted to invest in it, they would have invested in it. Clearly, the last 9 months are telling us something: they're not.
Some investors cannot invest in Bitcoin because of regulatory concerns. The EFT enables huge amounts of money to be invested with no friction Also: some investors won't invest in Bitcoin because their financial advisors don't recommend it, and their financial advisors don't recommend it because they can't get a commission out of selling it. In my experience "financial advisers" at the retail or lower private wealth management levels have exactly zero useful advise to share, and simply parrot the exact same useless advise you can pick up in your average issue of Forbes or Money Magazine. (i.e. always use index funds, use stock/bond ratios based on age, etc) The real investors (VCs, PE funds, etc.) are starting to move more and more into bitcoin. These are the people to watch. Just look at the silk road coins, 100% picked up by the same VC to bootstrap a new service. Investment by these investors is accelerating, and there are deep pockets there. |
|
|
|
|
I've had zero problems with coinbase. You use them to buy coins and then transfer to your own wallet. Easy.
|
|
|
|
when gold was at it's peak as a world reserve currency, it free floated btwn individual actors/players on the global scene. it wasn't housed in CB warehouses. there was some centralization in gold warehouses/exchanges back then but it could be freely redeemed to cross international borders so as to bring a country's balance of payments/and interest rates into line.
This. What central banks and governments did was they made it illegal and/or difficult to use gold in transactions directly (for example FDR's 1933 exec order and ban on private possession on gold). They then backed paper money with gold since people then saw gold as money. Then after generations people no longer saw the underlying asset (gold) as money and instead just saw the currency, it's probably the biggest switcheroo in the modern era. The advantage for bitcoin is it is both 1) every easy to use directly and 2) impossible to ban. This should hopefully prevent CBs from doing the same thing. It is also why it is so important to get more adoption and transactions by merchants to encourage direct peer-to-peer usage of bitcoin as money. Otherwise if CBs end up storing all of them on behalf of people and issuing paper, bitcoin will go the same way as gold already did. |
|
|
|
Agreed...I don't like when libertarians are so radical that it turns off the majority of people (myself included). It's like Scalia's opinions on the SCOTUS, fine he has a viewpoint but be realistic and reasonable.
So he should be more like Sotomayor? Who's opinions are often not even remotely based on law and precedent, but only on what she thinks should be right and makes up justifications from the air. |
|
|
|
|
2013 matches 2011
2014 looking to match 2012
2015 is undecided.
|
|
|
|
As this is open source, any kill switch would be publicly visible. It's not there. Now then, within a closed source implementation, such as any proprietary "coin" invented by J.P. Morgan for example, a kill switch could easily be hidden.
I said "by design", not "by code". That might sound like a splitting hairs, but its actually really a very different thing. The bitcoin "design" is quite simple and straightforward, it is highly doubtful a purposeful flaw exists that remains unknown. That's not to say that the design may not ultimately fail, for example mining incentives could evolve in a manner that damages bitcoin, but an intentional kill switch is just plain unlikely. |
|
|
|
If it drops to $0.5 I will scrape together every bit of $ I have through selling stuff and borrowing and will be able to buy *thousands* of Bitcoins easily! That would actually be pretty cool, since I missed out on early adopter prices. I think that many other people like me could do so too, so probably it wouldn't go that low. Every geek could afford to buy significant amounts of bitcoins then. Love this, $4 BTC considered as missing out on the early adopter phases and $0.50 BTC as the go all in price. Just remember, we have several more magnitudes of order to go in adoption. In 2020 $500 BTC will be considered unfair early adopter prices. |
|
|
|
what i failed to do is distinguish btwn pre 2008 and post 2008. knowledge is gained thru experience; lots of honest traders and in fact the entire world, were flabbergasted by the extent of the moral hazard inflicted on our money supply to bail out the criminals in 2008. there's no way that could've been predicted, let alone know that it would work.
Libor effects everything; it is the cost of money. mind you, it wasn't the only thing being manipulated. but it was one of the key metrics whose manipulation prevented a total meltdown of the banks. a great example of the direct fleecing was the interest rate hedges sold to municipalities pre 2008. several of them went bankrupt as interest rates have continued to go down instead of up as they were advised to bet by their Wall St advisors. many had to cough up billions to cover interest rate swap losses. they are still trying to recover.
Glad you pointed this out. What many seemed to miss in 2008 was the ultimate perversion was not only the moral hazard that rewarded criminals, but also the fact that those who made conservative and/or "correct" choices were in fact punished. This was the ultimate fleecing that transferred money from true market participants to politically connected large banks. Today when reading the FED's comments they seem confused at how the market ignores true economic fundamentals and instead only tracks FED policy. Yet this is exactly what the FED trained everyone to do. |
|
|
|
The ultimate advantage for bitcoin is governments can not stop convertability and it is relatively easy for individuals to hold and transact in bitcoin. Do not doubt for a moment they won't try. I can see the IRS being used to harass anybody who dares to withdraw actual bitcoins from these off chain trading platforms like Coinbase or Circle. Have you moved the coins since you withdrew them? That's a taxable event unless you can prove otherwise. Audits all around for everybody who asks for their coins. If they can make it easier to keep your coins in an off chain system that allows for fractional reserve, and harass and punish anyone who tries to leave the system, they can play all the same games as they've successfully played with gold. Accountability (via proof of liabilities and proof of bitcoin funds) is possible rather easily. No need to withdraw coins in order to force non-fratctional reserves. At least not in theory. Bingo To demonstrate your point one simply needs to ask how much of the FED's balance sheet is backed by real physical gold? i.e. How many ounces do they have vs. dollars in existence. The answer is no one really knows. The amount of physical metal has not been audited in a very long time, and even if they did that it is not clear how much of that has been lent out as collateral to primary dealers (i.e. gold no one else has claims to). In addition to that the number of dollars in existence is difficult to say because the FED and US government is required to back stop so many entities, it is not clear how much "liquidity" they would have to create "on demand", i.e. what forced future money printing has already been promised. Note: This ratio information was quite clear when the FED was first created and the country was on a gold standard. The ratio of gold-to-dollars fell and fell and fell over time, until it finally broke in the 70s and since then no one has known the ratio with any clarity. In bitcoin, all of this would be transparent and clear. In addition if a central government went too far past a 1:1 ratio, you can be sure smart people would remove as many coins as possible from the fractional off-chain system, to directly controlled on-chain coins. This would cause the ratio to become worse and worse and crash the system in a final bank run, after which the exit window closes and no one trusts that fiat anymore. Fear of such a run will force central states to remain honest. |
|
|
|
|
Even if a dump happens, how can I be a bag holder if before the dump I had X amount of bitcoins representing Y% of all coins ever possible, and after the dump I have the same X BTC amount and Y% of all coins ever possible.
The real bag holders are those holding dollars who are guaranteed to hold a smaller percentage of dollars in existence each and ever day, even if the number of dollars they hold in the bank are the same.
|
|
|
|
First time i've listened to this. Stripe is looking at the same endgame i've been advocating since the beginning. he's essentially saying that Bitcoin will act as a world reserve currency at the lower layer that can uniquely extend across borders to accomplish settlement btwn nations. the in country "gateways", as he calls them, will allow the interface btwn Bitcoin and fiat currency. customers of those gateways will continue to transact in fiat and trusted entities will arise to help guarantee customer tx's. in other words, pretty much the same system we have today except with a trustless immutable protocol layer that ties everything together, ie, a Bitcoin Standard. have a listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qZwl7mukZ8In many ways this is the same as the original gold standard. Fiat was backed by real money at a 1:1 ratio, but people transacted in paper because that was easier. The eventual problem was the government was able to break convertability. For a very long time anyone could walk into a bank with fiat and walk out with a fixed amount of gold, coupled with most people viewing gold as real money. However during a crisis government was able to stop convertability, devalue the fixed exchange rate and ban private possession of gold in one action. This ability to break convertability was the failure of the gold standard. The ultimate advantage for bitcoin is governments can not stop convertability and it is relatively easy for individuals to hold and transact in bitcoin. IMHO this is a key advantage for bitcoin over gold, bitcoin will force governments to be honest for the first time in a long time. yes, and the beauty of implementing a system like this is that it's well understood and experienced. in fact, we still have a significant % of major economic players who remember acting within the gold std system back in 1971. in addition, it should be relatively simple from a technical standpoint. it's modular, just drop in a Bitcoin Standard into it's slot in the current financial system w/o disrupting the fiat, debt, and derivative towers in place. of course, as we've already stated in the Argentina thread, the value per BTC would have to skyrocket to fill that hole. optional pegs would be M1, M2, M3 (discontinued), etc. It may be simple/easy from a technical standpoint, but since it would force real honesty in government and thus deprive government and banks of the main source of their power, such a system will be resisted and fought against in every way imaginable. The only way a bitcoin standard will happen is if the majority of people choose to walk away from fiat of their own free will and choose to adopt bitcoin and think in bitcoin. (Which is exactly why there used to be a gold standard, it wasn't because governments liked it, but because it was demanded by the people) These two opposing forces between government resistance and individual adoption is what will make this journey one of the most interesting in our lifetime, whichever way it eventually goes. |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
