Done!

I want BTC on my CD account
Userid: Player_630

Thanks!

I'm not going to use this site for any reason, as it doesn't sound trustworthy, but may I assume that your username and your hostility toward a service operating out of Baku are not totally unrelated?

Here's my suggestion as an economist: a topic that has not been explored at all is how different user groups, real or potential, will handle the trade-off between volatility and transaction costs, and how the degree of development of insurance/derivatives markets will come into play in determining the terms of this trade-off. You could run a few nice simulations and see how it plays out.

For the sake of clarity let me give you an example.

The problem with remittances now lies mostly in transaction costs; according to recent World Bank data, fees charged by traditional players such as money transfers stand at an average of 8-10% depending on the area. Now, assuming there was some user-friendly application allowing low-income immigrants to send money to their home countries, and if this application only allowed bitcoin transfers without providing a conversion into fiat for the receiver, they would have to choose between this known fee and the unknown capital gain/loss incurred on account of price fluctuations in bitcoin. If, on the other hand, the application already included the conversion into fiat at known rates (if I understand correctly, that's how Kipochi is supposed to work), that would partly reduce the benefits of bitcoin, as extra fees would probably have to be paid to use the service. There's a whole continuum of possibilities here, and only some of them have been explored. It would be really interesting to see some numbers on how diffferent hedging/insurance architectures (financial derivatives? p2p insurance?) could impact on the choice to use bitcoin versus traditional systems, never forgetting that so far there is no user-friendly app at all for this market, and profit opportunities might motivate a few developers to delve into it.

I'm singling out this specific group of potential users to make an additional point. I suppose that the very same volatility would affect such users in a very different way compared to how, say, it affects high-income investors, and in turn the latter behave differently from merchants that choose to accept bitcoin as payment for their goods. The optimal market for risk-mitigating financial services in the bitcoin ecosystem might look very fragmented, on account of heterogeneous user groups, or maybe there are one-size-fits-all solutions. I wouldn't know as I never studied this topic in any detail. Maybe your thesis could help shed light on this?

This topic is just what I needed.

I'm a computational economist currently writing a paper on how certain innovations, including blockchain-based contracts (of which Bitcoin is an example, but not the only possible one), may impact the way we think about economics. The paper is far from finished, but so far I am under the impression that two very different worldviews are coming together in a way that has few precedents.

Vitalik Buterin's concept of DACs incorprorates, albeit implicitly, the neoclassical idea of homo economicus. There could be no DACs without the idea of optimizing, utility-seeking agents who solve maximization problems. Here I am purposedly mentioning "utility" as opposed to "profit", as DACs might have social/charitable goals etc; what counts here is not the greed motive per se, but rather the underlying idea that economic behavior can be modeled in a highly deterministic fashion once goals are known.

Looking at the way economic literature evolved in the past, say, 20 years, this is an interesting step... backwards. Please note that there is no element of good/bad judgment here. I'm just saying that the behavioral economics revolution championed by Nobel prize Daniel Kahneman, and the increasing relevance of psychology/neurosciences in the explanation of economic choices, point to phenomena such as bounded rationality, preference inconsistency etc. that suggest deterministic modeling has little chance of working in any real-life context. That's not because factors other than money are at play, that would just lead to a need for more variables in the models. That's because some of these factors are very hard to represent mathematically, either because our knowledge of the human brain is still insufficient, or because their nature is intrinsically stochastic.

Of course with DACs one is not trying to create a laboratory version of existing markets/firms so as to forecast their behavior; the firms and markets themselves are what's being created, in an experiment of artificial economy that will be welcomed by those who embraced methods such as agent-based modeling as an operational tool as opposed to an instrument exclusively dedicated to representing reality. DACs may be, in other words, an implementation of what the world would look like if traditional economic modeling was methodologically correct.

I'm saying that this brings two very different approaches together because the use of artificial intelligence in economics (decision theory/microeconomics, not algorithmic trading!), mostly machine learning at first and then anything to do with emerging complexity, was going in lockstep with brain/mind sciences as a way to bypass the limitations of closed-form mathematical representations of utility-maximizing rational agents. Now, on the other hand, artificial intelligence might be one of the constituent parts in the creation of a world that is populated by such agents.

How would such an economy look like? One first conclusion I have is that it would not look very similar to what we have right now. In the DAC world, humans are supposed to be present at the level where the carrying out of specialized tasks is required, but the rest is self-sustaining and, well, decentralized. This looks nothing like real firms in terms of decision-making processes, but the bounded rationality biases etc are going to be at work right when contracts are designed. For a different paper, I'm trying to model the differences in outcomes between traditional firms and DACs based on this.

If you found this stimulating/useful please consider a tiny donation (as in 0.001 is great already!) to 1KQNcjSTmPx5j7atMWUAk26NZm7XpfExFY, I'm setting up a bitcoin-based behavior experiment and I can't be bothered wiring money to an exchange to buy a grand total of about six dollars worth of bitcoins...

And by all means I am looking forward to exchanging ideas on this subject with anyone who would like to contribute their own point of view. IMHO DACs could be one of the next big things in economics.

I got my payment declined at SimpleVoucher, charged on my credit card, and Liqpay won't answer at all. SimpleVoucher support was really fast in answering me, but apparently LiqPay never even sent the funds. They said the payment didn't go through and they're not telling me ANYTHING about it after about five attempts to contact them. I also made a thread about this.

I suppose this might be a scam.

Last week I tried to purchase a very small amount of bitcoins via LiqPay.

They redirected me to SimpleVoucher, I paid for the voucher, I got informed that I needed to wait 3 days for security controls (this was less than 100 dollars). When I tried to redeem the voucher the following week, I got a "Payment failed" message.

I contacted SV support and they were extremely quick to answer, saying that I should contact LiqPay because the payment did not get through on their side. Unfortunately, this is not true - it was on my credit card statement alright and I did pay the amount.

I tried live support on the LiqPay site, no dice, only "Wait, please, you will be answered by operator". I emailed them, no dice either. Have I been scammed?

Thanks for any input / experience.

QE

Yeah, that one exactly. And if I try to go directly to the charts, I just get a 404.

Why do I get an ad for a German company instead of the usual homepage?

I'm sure you're (a) 10.

This from the user condemning groupthink in his signature line.

Hooray for me....

Thanks, yeah. 

Fundamental flaw of the "tits or GTFO" argument: while not a strict implication, one can safely assume that a Bitcoin user, male or female, attaches value to privacy. Posting naked pictures of oneself on the internet appears to be at odds with such an assumption.


Makes a lot of sense - to me it would sound unauthentic, but I would never imply that it must be so for everyone.

Oh, and re "no girls on the internet", I'm in my mid-thirties, so I fail to qualify as a "girl".

I am:

- a woman

- an economist

- a Bitcoin user

- a geek with a PhD

- short-haired

- into punk rock

- into existentialism

- straight

- fit

- a pessimist where it comes to communicating with other human beings on any of these matters.

 

Hahahahaha, you bring me back to when I was a student sysadmin at the dawn of the public Internet in universities... plenty of people would come to the "computer room" to chat on IRC channels consistenly named #sexsomething, a lot of fun was had scaring the living daylights out of them with random popup messages via the Novell Netware messaging system. It only lasted about 3-4 days then everyone caught on, but those were 3-4 glorious days.

Thanks! SQL is fine. I'll take it from there.

I would like to perform some standard econometric analysis of Bitcoin transactions, so as to see which external factors may contribute to increase/decrease of payment activity, market liquidity etc. The problem is that I don't know how to turn the blockchain into a database that may be used with statistical analysis softwares such as Stata, SAS etc; did anyone do this already?

Thanks
QE

Hang on. How does this work?

If I trust you for 1 trillion BTC you can send them to me even if you don't actually have them in your Ripple account? If that's the case, yes, serious bug; but how come nobody realized?

rMq1UcM8nMs7m7HFGuDdCYfWNZQVCTRb4g

Eccone una. Bologna non è proprio vicinissimo, ma si può fare. Se si organizza a Roma vengo 100%.

I'm kind of positive that this is a joke.