And besides, I don't think any reputable sorcerer would give that up for Bitcoin.

Truly painful.


I'd be a lot happier with sigs in general if they couldn't be formatted, aside from links.

Most people are too ignorant of economics to make an informed decision, and the tiny percentage which are given the power to make a difference know not to bite the hand that feeds.  The best option is to let people figure out on their own whether they prefer an inflationary or deflationary currency, and to allow both to thrive in a market; there's no reason to force everyone to stick to one currency, controlled by government; of course it can never be deflationary, that would take all the power away from government.  It's not that most people don't want a deflationary currency, it's that they're not even aware of the possibility that an alternative exists; you cannot be aware of the box you're in if you've never been outside.  The idea of one currency that everyone must follow or civilization will collapse is entirely based on propaganda, and it's getting tiring.

It doesn't matter whether fiat can be inflationary or deflationary; what matters is the reason why I can't decide which currency my peers and I prefer, and why government needs to issue a currency to begin with; we've already seen a plethora of examples of private currencies being successful, and as with anything which threatens the powers that be, they're always shut down.

"Yes, but only a tad!"

This thread changed your life; without it, you wouldn't be here saying it didn't.

This is the essence of the world at the moment; most people living in the world today are used to their money being worth less over time, and used to spending what they have now instead of later, and used to being in debt because of it.  It'll take time before most people see the world differently, but I think it'll happen the more Bitcoin gains traction.

If they can take a bite out of it, more power to them; at that point, it's hard as stone.

Whaaaat?

No.  Impossible; there's legislation against that.  What?  Whaaaat?

Are you saying the law isn't working?  Impossible!

No!  Nooooo!!!

Obviously the graphic is conservative, and therefore lying.  Red herring.  Strawman.  Explained by these charts: didn't see them?  That's because I don't need charts.  Look at the monkey:



He's probably endangered, thanks to guns.  Global warming.

Checkmate; liberals win again

I would argue that children belong to themselves, and are guided by their parents; I don't find it moral to own a person, not by family or government.


No.  Not this.  There is no good reason to force a person into a bad school (and I say bad in every case simply by following what happens in a coercive monopoly; unless we're going to argue that the drop in quality and rise in price of a service is a good thing.)  Children can absolutely be social with or without homeschooling; this assumes the stereotype that homeschooled children are sheltered and always socially awkward, which is entirely false.  It assumes the child lives in a vacuum and without public schooling, they would never have friends or learn to cooperate in society (but judging by the fact that most criminals of today went to public schools for most of their early lives, we can at least see that public schools do not actually help someone meld into society, if not worse.)

How anyone can argue that shoving a person into a giant box for 8 hours a day, five days a week, over the course of 13-14 years is the best and most preferable way to educate the masses (which, as we can see from simple observation, has completely and utterly failed many nations), with the threat that if the person does not cooperate, their guardians will be fined or lose their "right" to raise their children (which was never a right to begin with if it can be taken by a higher power at discretion), often without even the basic choice as to where that child will attend school but the prescribed school they must go to, and completely without the choice as to whether they will even fund the school they may or may not want, is completely beyond me.  Why is it my neighbor's choice how I raise my children?  Does nobody find that creepy?  This will continue to be the norm the longer we believe children are not human beings, and that we, the individuals, do not have the required sensibility, responsibility, or maturity to make an informed decision for those children, which is justly ironic, as one who does not have at least those three things cannot properly care for children in the first place.

Isn't government wonderful?

Right; people think, "Well, if I have two options, Stalin or Hitler, I'd better go with the lesser of two evils."

In my humble opinion, no one's better than Obama, which is why I voted for no one. 

Related to the thread: my money's on these two happenings not being related to each other.

1. You use it as money.
2. You can speculate on Bitcoin to make money, or hold it and allow it to appreciate on its own.
3. Earlier this year, Bitcoin was roughly $10; if by often you mean, how often daily, usually it's stable daily.  Monthly, not so much, but after it dipped to 60 and came back to 100, it has been steadily rising.  See the various BTC charts to see this illustrated.
4. The official value is whatever value you assign to your Bitcoin, and however much someone might trade you for it.  If someone wants to pay you $1000 for your one Bitcoin, and you accept that, then that's the official value.  The markets only show what people are generally buying and selling at, which can go up and down; there's a whole study of this known as economics.
5. You're basically gambling, so nobody can say how much you'll earn vs. how much you'll lose through speculation.
6. How good are you at gambling?

Ahh gotcha lol Very good writing, if not depressing and cynical

Did you write that?

But we already do govern ourselves.  To make obvious rules which are already obvious to us is a moot point; to make new rules which aren't obvious to us is in the interest of another, for if those rules were rules we agreed upon, they would already be obvious.  What we're talking about, when it comes to making rules, is curbing the actions of other people, which we already do:

An example of curbing actions
In this example, there is no rule against scamming; there is, however, still a change in action, for people who become acquainted with scammers are more likely to avoid scams.  In this case, we are not stopping scammers by telling them not to scam (ineffective, I would say, since you can't ban a scammer before he is known to be a scammer), but instead stopping scammers by educating people so the scam cannot happen to begin with.

Besides, if government wants to impose more rule upon us, making our own rules won't help; their rules would always supersede ours, they're the ones with the tanks after all.

We're comparing apples to oranges; the apple is a deflationary currency, and the orange is an inflationary currency.

Inevitably, a billion American dollars will buy a hamburger.  Inevitably, a satoshi will buy that same hamburger.  Inevitably, the two are going to cross paths along that line, where a single Bitcoin has deflated to match a thousand inflated dollars.

What's really being asked is whether Bitcoin will see continued success; now that's something I can't answer, for I cannot predict the future, but I certainly hope it does.

Yes; because there is a finite total amount of Bitcoin, the cost of each individual Bitcoin will typically rise the more people adopt the currency.  Compare this to fiat currencies, which are hypothetically infinite, so that means there's always going to be more of it; the more of a currency there is, the less each individual unit of that currency is worth (which requires you to trust your currency issuer, usually government-owned, won't do so willy nilly, but we see how well that's worked out.)  Not so with Bitcoin; because there will only be so many BTC, the more people adopt Bitcoin, the less any individual can potentially have.  Because of this, Bitcoin is eternally becoming rarer; if I owned just 1 BTC, and so did 21 million other people, that would mean that someone, somewhere, would never be able to have an entire BTC to themselves (unless he was already rich, perhaps, and could buy that BTC at a huge price, but that would mean another person wouldn't be able to own a whole BTC.)  The value of BTC will typically rise with supporters, thus making products denominated in BTC typically fall; so yes, it's inversely proportional, the higher a single unit of BTC is worth, the less an item appears to cost.  To illustrate this, consider the cost of a pizza in BTC a couple years back, and consider the cost of that same pizza in BTC today.

This does not always mean BTC will rise in price (as we can see, it has dipped several times and still hasn't hit its previous high just yet), but generally speaking, over the long term, so long as supporters increase, so will Bitcoin's value increase.  This is also the reason why it's mistakenly referred to as a ponzi scheme, but we can't call BTC a ponzi without calling the concept of money a ponzi, and I'm sure some people do...

What it boils down to is, when do America's lenders cut them off?  America doesn't have squat anymore, and they won't ever have it again until they literally collapse and start society over again.  America's entire military is borrowed from people who expect them to repay them someday, or perhaps are knowingly fueling America until they destroy themselves--anyway, America hasn't been able to afford any war for quite some time, and the more wars they get into, the more debt they accrue, the faster their demise, so of course it's in the interest of other nations to continue fueling America's war games.

So, yes, America can always 'afford' more wars, until other nations agree that it's time to pull the rug from under them, and then it's game over.  If America won't use more of its military against Syria, it's because they're saving it for bigger fish, and so Syria is just a distraction at that point.  But remember all those nuke-carrying submarines America has across the globe in unknown spots of the ocean; wonder if they'll use those in a last-ditch effort to retain control once the rug is pulled, or if that's one reason why the rug hasn't been by now.

Not as far as I know; I believe each electrum wallet requires you to know or have recorded your seed, but otherwise operates like a normal wallet.  The seed is a long string of words that can be used to recover your wallet if it's ever lost.

Chilling.