My mom cursed me out for saying this, but my opinion is capitalism sucks a big one. Nah, you're wrong on that score. Your mistake is to think that what you're seeing in the US is capitalism / a free market. It's not. You're seeing crony capitalism, ie: business allied with lawmakers for their own advantage. And yeah, it sucks, but don't blame capitalism, if anything blame government collusion with business. If you removed government there could be no cronyism, thus it's government, not capitalism, at fault here. I don't think socialism is the way to go, but maybe it is best in a world where we are all lazy asses who like robots to do things for us. Any such prosperity will be produced by a free market, not socialism. |
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Wow, I am getting more and more interested in KncMiner. They seem to be saying and doing all the right things.
If they can delivery on their claims in September, and do a decent job of keeping up with demand, they will be the new gold standard in Bitcoin mining hardware.
In their defence, they at the open day, actually said, "they intend to set the gold standard...", with respect to Bitcoin hardware, fed up seeing a lack of professionalism this far. So let's see... They want to be in this for the long haul and this means behaving in the best interest for Bitcoin and those that support and use it. Do you remember they mentioned somewhere producing a ~$20k device in the terahertz range as a gen-2 product? Part of their "in it for the long term / repeat customer" strategy? I'd love to make enough from these early devices to invest in a $20k device ^_^ They have alluded to a larger mining device in future, yes. What hashrate? No one knows. Marcus has much scope to play and revise future chips once they know what they have. There is a poll on their homepage currently, if you want a larger device, go vote! Oh I did, sadly seems the majority want a smaller option. Only 19% voted, like me, for the larger device. |
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They also remove the reference to water cooling from the spec details. Last time i've checked, last week, it was still there
They've abandoned water-cooling, since datacenters asked them not to create devices with water, they don't want the liability, and they expect many people will host these in DC's, including them themselves with their Stockholm pickup. |
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In keeping with KnC's pattern of carefully choosing their binding terms, I wouldn't be surprised if the feedback they got from their chip manufacturer was even better than this 15% pump and they're continuing to temper expectations. If I were a betting man, I'd say the final hashing speed of Jupiter will be >400. I would expect them to report the lowest expected range, sure. That's the only way to result in zero disappointed customers. Either you get exactly what they promised or you're lucky enough to have some above-average yield chips in which case you might get as much as 10-20% more than 400. Smart if that's what they're doing. |
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Wow, I am getting more and more interested in KncMiner. They seem to be saying and doing all the right things.
If they can delivery on their claims in September, and do a decent job of keeping up with demand, they will be the new gold standard in Bitcoin mining hardware.
In their defence, they at the open day, actually said, "they intend to set the gold standard...", with respect to Bitcoin hardware, fed up seeing a lack of professionalism this far. So let's see... They want to be in this for the long haul and this means behaving in the best interest for Bitcoin and those that support and use it. Do you remember they mentioned somewhere producing a ~$20k device in the terahertz range as a gen-2 product? Part of their "in it for the long term / repeat customer" strategy? I'd love to make enough from these early devices to invest in a $20k device ^_^ |
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Maybe they will even end up with two new products once they see the actual chips: one-chip Saturns and two-chip Jupiters, made from chips that had very low bad-engine rates!   (Total wild optimism speculation that of course just to stir the pot, but think about it, just how many bad engines per chip are they allowing for?) On the other hand maybe the die is so massively huge that the number of bad engines per die will tend to average out to much the same for the majority of the dies... -MarkM- They're probably figuring the likely engine failure rate / yield into their 400gh/s rate. Thus, if the design has better yields than expected, they can up the figure--likely what they're already done. Might mean instead of expecting a 30% engine failure rate they now expect 15% failure rate. |
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Solar offers more power than we can use. We can even move to harvesting solar in space for literally the foreseeable future. It will begin to be used when it's cost-effective against other forms of electricity. Which won't likely be very long now. We already have perfect solar antennas that pickup solar energy like an antenna rather than like photosynthesis, and can thereby capture a large percent of the energy efficiently, like 99.5%. What we lack are transistors that can switch fast enough to turn light's AC current into DC current. So, by roundabout method, the microchip industry will ultimately solve our power problems  Long term, fusion may pan out also. But I think solar will bridge the gap. Solar may offer some energy but takes up a lot of surface we aren't necessarily willing to give. I think we have plenty of space on the ocean's surface, we're not even using it. And power system requires that in each moment power generation equals consumption. Yes, a problem, but a solvable one. Therefore, energy market values coal and nuclear, whose generation can be foretold a year in advance easily, unlike solar, for which even a day is a long time to forecast. The problem would be perhaps solved if techology would be found to store energy efficiently and cheaply. That technology isn't there.
OTEC or ocean-current generation could perhaps supplement for night-time, as well as the further development of supercapacitors or molten-salt power storage. It's not insurmountable. For that matter, one solution is to build caissons on the ocean floor and use power during the day to pump water out and air in to these giant caissons. When you later need that power back out, you start letting water in which pumps air out at very high pressure, driving a generator. Voila, constant power as needed. |
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In a voluntary exchange--a capitalist exchange--I look out for my own interests, and the other party looks out for theirs. There is no conflict of interest, and if a deal completes it is because both participants feel they will be better off after the deal is done than before, or else the deal does not take place. Thus every transaction in a capitalist system results in more and more benefit to society in general.
I don't see how a voluntary exchange implies that there is no conflict of interest. If the other party withholds information that would make you change your mind about the deal than that is pretty much direct conflict of interest. Bring in a third party that both of the first two parties agree to use, to make sure there are no conflicts of interest such as these, and have both of the first two pay the third one. Everybody wins. An agent can maybe represent one person's interests legitimately without conflict, but surely not two people, for if their interests diverge he will have to choose one of them. This is why we don't allow one lawyer to represent both sides of a court case and the like. |
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In a voluntary exchange--a capitalist exchange--I look out for my own interests, and the other party looks out for theirs. There is no conflict of interest, and if a deal completes it is because both participants feel they will be better off after the deal is done than before, or else the deal does not take place. Thus every transaction in a capitalist system results in more and more benefit to society in general.
I don't see how a voluntary exchange implies that there is no conflict of interest. If the other party withholds information that would make you change your mind about the deal than that is pretty much direct conflict of interest. That's fraud, and both rare and punished. It's not a market action, it's a criminal action. |
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Very nice and accurate description of each circumstance. So, do you agree with the Zeitgeist Movement that a resource based economy can work?
Yes. But only if the centrally controlling computer is able to know what everyone thinks and wants, know all the resources that exist, can track every single resource through its entire production method, is able to motivate inventors and doers with more stuff, if that's what they want, without upsetting the neighbors who are getting less stuff, and is able to make everyone happy and like itself. Personally, I can't make everyone like me. Maybe it's possible if I abduct people and drug them, and then make sure they all take drugs from then on to stay complacent and ignorant? Have you seen Equilibrium before? No, there is no such thing where humans are concerned. Your population would need to cooperate completely and that wouldn't happen. Civilizations failure, regardless of the system in place, is always the human element. Capitalism only works to an extent because it is basically founded in greed which everyone can support. It's not founded on greed, it's founded on self-interest. There's a difference. In a voluntary exchange--a capitalist exchange--I look out for my own interests, and the other party looks out for theirs. There is no conflict of interest, and if a deal completes it is because both participants feel they will be better off after the deal is done than before, or else the deal does not take place. Thus every transaction in a capitalist system results in more and more benefit to society in general. The socialist systems fell victim to greed quickly. Correct, the socialist system fell victim to greed because there was a conflict of interest. Bureaucrats were given power over huge swaths of humanity and asked to make self-less decisions for them. They instead made self-serving decisions that either incidentally helped those people, helped them to a lesser extent than those people would've chosen for themselves, or actively went against the interest of those other people. That is, the bureaucrats acted in self-interested fashion, just as in capitalism, but because they could benefit at the expense of others, they more or less did so depending on individual character and chance of facing consequences. Thus the capitalist system is far superior for it removes the ability for a transaction to take place if one party isn't benefiting, whereas the socialist system could force those kinds of transactions to take place regardless of it not being in people's interests. Peter Joseph is a typical dreamer that thought of a good idea on paper but then humans become involved and it gets screwed all up. The idea of no private property alone will keep it from ever seeing any real success. The "scientific method" of allocating resources would work until the first person decided to game the system and you know that would happen almost immediately.
The economic calculation problem proves such socialist schemes impossible, pipe-dreams, and forever unworkable. |
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My loyal USA customers: If you've been satisfied with my service thus far and want it to continue, I encourage you to contact ASICMiner and provide them with honest feedback about my business practices so they can make an informed decision regarding a re-seller partnership. It would take you 60 seconds to do just one of the following: - PM friedcat - tell him how your experience with me has been and your honest opinion about me becoming an exclusive US re-seller
- Email ASICMiner (asicminer.usb AT gmail.com) and tell them how your experience with me has been and your honest opinion about me becoming an exclusive US re-seller
Please see my OP ... TL:DR - I would love to continue serving you all, but only as an exclusive US re-seller with standard privileges and protections. So you want a territorial monopoly on ASICMiner goods, and AM wants the money you'll offer them for it. What do we get out of that exactly, except higher prices overall |
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We will also be able to significantly reverse environmental degradation (including, as a minor aside, powering bitcoin on equipment that is no longer coal-fired).
We've had the technology to do this for forty years. It's just not being developed, and it won't in the current geopolitical environment. It's wishful thinking to believe that wind, water and solar are ever going to be able to run our modern industrial economies. Nuclear power is simply required if we really desire to move away from using coal. Solar offers more power than we can use. We can even move to harvesting solar in space for literally the foreseeable future. It will begin to be used when it's cost-effective against other forms of electricity. Which won't likely be very long now. We already have perfect solar antennas that pickup solar energy like an antenna rather than like photosynthesis, and can thereby capture a large percent of the energy efficiently, like 99.5%. What we lack are transistors that can switch fast enough to turn light's AC current into DC current. So, by roundabout method, the microchip industry will ultimately solve our power problems Long term, fusion may pan out also. But I think solar will bridge the gap. |
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. The austrian anarchocapitalists believe, that we will produce even more without the state. That's the greatest economic joke I ever heard.
I don't know where you got this idea, but that's not true. I know of no argument to imply that a free market would produce more than the current market. The fact that a free market wouldn't have taxation means it's virtually guaranteed that it would produce more than the current managed market. Because there'd be a lot more wealth available for investment. Governments cannot invest, despite their ridiculous attempts to do so, because it costs them nothing for those investments to fail and the incentive structure makes them far more wasteful than an investing private individual. It might, or it might not; depending on the desires and needs of the people. The difference would be that productivity would not be siphoned off by an ever more needy state, and those who are dependent upon the state would have to learn how to produce something of value as well.
Yes, and it's those people who will fight tooth and nail to continue the system until it crashes irrevocably, and why political change in the US prior to a major economic disaster is not likely to happen. |
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Capitalism has been the driving mechanism for human society, progress and prosperity in modern history. It is this driving engine that is now about to fail completely. Capitalism, as in free trade and voluntary interaction, is not going to fail. Much of the establishment of corporatist inefficiency will be in turmoil and the collateral damage for everyone may be severe, but eventually the natural order will recover better and stronger than before. Yes, without the state, inefficiency will be eliminated. That means, that nearly nothing will be produced, as it was the case within stateless communities in the whole history of mankind. But that wasn't Capitalism. The austrian anarchocapitalists believe, that we will produce even more without the state. That's the greatest economic joke I ever heard. You have a strange conception of the state's role in production. To be more exact, you're conflating property and rights protection (law and police) and dispute resolution (courts) with the state. But you don't need the state to provide any of those things. Law can be crowd-source or agreement based, ie: polycentric-law. No societal entity needs to have a monopoly on law production, that's just the way things have been largely until now. There's no reason for it to stay that way, and an alternative may (and probably will) be far better. Similarly, courts and police can be privately provided on the market and due to changed incentives of the market will probably be far better. Stateless communities often also had no rights protection, law, or courts. But it's possible to create not a state nor a stateless community, but rather the ideal is a self-governed community, and by that I mean one where each individual rules himself and himself alone. Not a community which uses a collective body to govern the whole--no, I mean a community where each individual has sovereign control of himself and no one else. A truly individualist society. This has never existed because we never had the ideas explicit to try it until modern time. |
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I suspect we have at least a decade before any coming crash truly hits, and possibly more like 30 years before the crisis is unavoidable entirely.
if this is true then most of the leaders of the world today couldn't give a crap... nobody will blame them ( at least not while they are still alive...) Does it look like they give a crap? Doesn't look like it to me. All politicians worry only about their term of office, so 2-6 years tops, at least here in the US. They wouldn't be piling debt on debt if they did care. |
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Who is worse? Bernanke or Greenspan?  Bernanke. I think each succeeding Fed chairman becomes more of a rube and a tool than the last one, because they look at the actions of the last chairman and see what they got away with and consider it normal, and extend the policy of the previous guy. At some point that strategy crashes spectacularly. Once the US pops I predict one of two scenarios;
1. The US crash brings the world into a global depression much like the great depression of last century, or
2. The US crashes to whcih China, Russia and OPEC switch from Petro/US to Petro/Gold. This puts US into a long term sprialling depression, Europe goes into a 3 year recession and Asia + Russia slow but hold firm.
In both scenarios, enough populance move some wealth out of their home nation through the BTC pathway which pushes BTC prices up exponentially for the next 3~5 years.
It really depends on when this happens. There's a possibility that by the time this crash comes, a few forward-looking countries may switch directly to bitcoin for settling international debts and currencies, essentially replacing the dollar in that capacity. It also seems like China may be the one to spark this off. They can crash the dollar at will, and they'd love to put the yuan in its place as a world reserve currency. But no one trusts them enough to accept the yuan as a reserve currency. China may be happy simply to black-eye the dollar and replace it with bitcoin ultimately. |
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It's really simple. Once they start QE, there is no way of stopping. As soon as they stop, a recession starts again. There is a feedback loop. It's a no brainier that they continue with QE, ramping it up compared to before.
Yes, but the problem is that the system will adjust to the existing level of QE, and when the next thing happens they'll have to pile even more than what they're doing to have an effect. QE becomes economic heroin and the Fed chairman ends up chasing the dragon every time a new problem comes along. What the neo-keynesians have never accepted is that while short term pumping may reduce unemployment, it creates economic distortions that lead to long term consequences, including bubble behavior and much greater unemployment than otherwise would've resulted. What could've been bearable as a series of waves can instead line up temporally and become am economic tsunami. |
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meet the new boss, same as old boss
Exactly. She'll undoubtedly continue the same QE policies, she's of the same mind as Bernanke. All a Fed chairman is, is an economic priest there to give scientific cover to whatever the politicians already want to do. The politicians simply enshrine on these positions of power those whom already think in line with what they want to do: inflate the money supply. Their answer to every crisis: inflate the money supply. It's beautiful how a thing works until it doesn't. The tipping point will come caused by the inflationary policy. In the long run we may all be dead, but the guy who said that is now dead and has left us with the consequences he spawned. |
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Greetings, I was very excited to learn about the Bitcoin currency several months ago, and I am very pleased to see it growing. I am part of an organization called the Zeitgeist Movement, who advocates a resource based economy. We are interested in seeing a radical redesign of society and an associated shift in values. We understand that the major cause of human suffering today is the current monetary system and the warped values and corrupt behavior inherent in its implementation. We know that we can provide food, water, shelter and a highly technological life style to every one on the planet if we chose to do so. What generally prevents us from doing so is the idea of money, which paralyzes us as a society, in terms of technological advancement, quality of education and healthcare, and a sick culture that encourages us to be competitive and cruel to our fellow human beings. Knowing and understanding the underlying mechanics of a monetary system is fundamental to not being abused by it. Currently, the vast majority of people are unaware of the destructive and unfair nature of our current fractional reserve banking system, and that makes them vulnerable to all the abuses we see today. Poverty, war, crime and hunger are the result of inequitable economic practices, and will not significantly change until we end or significantly alter our subservience to this and associated institutions. I believe Bitcoin would make for an ideal transition currency until a full RBE can be implemented. An RBE is basically the realization that there are no arbitrary restrictions on reality. Being bound to the imaginary rules of a monetary game, we limit how much we can accomplish and provide for each other. If we declared all of the earth's resources as common heritage for all the world's people, and used the methods of science to construct and provide all of life's necessities for all people, then there would be considerable reduction in hunger, crime, war and poverty, not to mention unnecessary suffering due to lack of access of medical care or inadequate educational opportunities. If people were given all that were necessary to survive, they could devote themselves to the benefit of all man kind. These would be the values of a resource based economy, not the competitive and acquisitive value based behavior we see today. I encourage you to learn more about these ideas if they interest you. I hope to support the bitcoin system as long as I am able, and I hope to see it become a dominant and thriving ecosystem in the months and years to come. Thank you for your time and attention. Foolish ideas that have failed in practice. To consume one must produce. Try to produce for everyone under collectivist ideas like this and you'll find nothing but shortages and starvation. Money is not the problem, money is only a medium of exchange, a way of suspending temporally a barter economy, allowing more complex transactions to occur. Remove money and return to barter or the like and the result will be a drastically less efficient economy, and you will no longer be able to afford everything we have now. The result will not be plenty by privation and want. After we've seen commune after commune try variations on this in the micro-scale and either completely fail or else convert to capitalism, why does anyone continue to think they can work? |
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Couple things.
First, the present system will keep going on for much longer than you think. The US dollar will be propped up worldwide because it's in everyone's interest to keep it there, since it's the reserve currency. Good for the US, bad for the world. Eventually countries holding dollars will cut their losses, let the dollar float, and the dollar will be screwed. Some speculate China is even planning to engineer this situation so as to offer the yuan as a replacement reserve currency.
But it's perhaps more likely that this would backfire and bitcoin could become the global reserve currency, since government control of currency would be what got the dollar into that position in the first place.
And you won't want to be in the US when the dollar tanks. It will be an entire generation of wealth lost or more than that. All fiat currencies eventually hyperinflate and fail and the US dollar will be no different.
However, there are always pockets that escape the turmoil of the day. I don't mean within the US, I mean places that thrive nonetheless. Like Venetia during the chaos of Constantinople being sacked; the Roman empire went down, Venetia lived on.
What we need is a new Venetia to the US's failing empire.
I suggest that the way forward, and what should give everyone optimism, is to build seasteads (/r/seasteading), free communities on the water, places where bitcoin will be a native currency and where political experimentation can flower into new desperately needed forms, forms that move beyond democracy, perhaps even abandoning it as the political crutch it was, now outdated, outmoded, discarded. The future belongs to political individualism, and abandoning democracy will mean abandoning the last element in society that clings to collectivism: politics. It will in fact mean the end of politics and the end of politicians, for political individualism constitutes a rejection of the idea that anyone should have the power to force laws on anyone else. Choose laws for yourself, each human a sovereign over their own life and own property.
That is a way forward that is truly new. And it's in such a society that people can prosper while Rome is burning.
I suspect we have at least a decade before any coming crash truly hits, and possibly more like 30 years before the crisis is unavoidable entirely.
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