[Announce] Project Quixote - BitShares, BitNames and 'BitMessage'

[td services]

Another way of putting this, is that when the dollar is your unit-of-account, you don't say your dollars are worth less when gold goes up in price.

I say exactly this - they indeed are worth less when the price of gold goes up, soon to be worthless. The dollar is worth 1/70 of what it was in 1933, and 1/40th of what it was worth in 1970.

Increased productivity has lessened the loss in dollar purchasing power in some areas like food, and even increased it in electronics, but overall it has been an exponentially increasing decline in value.

[AnonyMint]

1. The wealthy transact a much lower percentage of their wealth than the lower class, yet they own 90% of the wealth. If BitShares is truly to become a means for decentralized stock markets as you envision with BitAssets, then you have just invented the most regressive tax ever known to mankind. Way, way, way above the Laffer limit, thus guaranteed economic implosion if BitShares became the dominant money and capital stock.

It is comments like this that show you have no value for capital accumulation and believe only the 'workers' deserve the profits of a business.   This is the heart and soul of marxism.   Throwing in terms like "Regressive" tax is also a political opinion based upon an idea of fairness where someone other than the owners of capital deserve the profits.

I am the one embellishing capital creation (necessary for accumulation) and you can't see how you want to destroy it.

The fact is you can't tax over the Laffer limit long-term without imploding the economy. It is an established fact, whether you like it or not.

You are conflating buzzwords without deep understanding.

The difference between wealthy creating a diversity of businesses, and a monopoly in the money business handed to them by you seems to have escaped you. You keep missing the point about fitness. It is flying right over your head.

The Sum(Parts) != Whole. An economy is composed of many local issues that have to solved with many diverse actors. If you provide a means for people to get wealthy by doing JUST ONE THING, you destroy what makes an economy exist.

Now if you can't wrap your mind around this, I am not going to explain it again. Just go on in your myopic understanding.

Apparently the current 'owners' of the network are not entitled to the profits of the network.

You don't seem to differentiate between someone who funded you to create the network and someone who just comes along later and does JUST ONE THING with 90% of the capital of the world. Your concept of ownership is fundamentally flawed because you don't understand the economy-of-(diversity of)fitness.

You haven't even read my links. So I am going to stop now my effort since you are not trying to comprehend.

Now clearly I do not have enough capital to buy the CPU power and the risk of being centralized could destroy my business, so I offer to pay people in company stock to mine for me.  In exchange they get some dividends from the company in return for their mining effort.

The dividend part isn't required to make your statement still valid.  

The fact that you introduced yourself as a min-archist shows you have contradictions in your thinking because you support some exceptions to the non-agression principle.

Non-aggression sounds to me like tree hugging and other such nonsense, but I think it is irrelevant to our discussion.

[Luckybit]

Legal issues will always be a problem when we live under a corrupt system.  We could follow the law and it could be changed or reinterpreted.   The truth is we live in a lawless society where no one knows or can even agree on what the law is, it is selectively enforced, and entirely detached from morality.   This makes the 'law' irrelevant if someone in power considers you a threat. 

The only defense against corrupt enforcement of the law is publicity and providing a good to society that is so in demand that the government is unable to outlaw it. 

The true purpose of our company is as a free market solution to fighting the most common crimes in our society:  identity theft and fraud in the financial industry.  You cannot overcome government by 'fighting the government' because they can always claim the 'moral high ground' of fighting crime and 'protecting people' from 'money laundering' and ponzie schemes.     Well, we are claiming that high-ground first.   If they want to fight us, they are going to have to claim that our efforts to fight identity theft and financial fraud are a bad thing.  That grandma doesn't deserve a safe ROI on her savings, and that people should not have free and easy to use secure communication software. 

So our goal is to provide people the services they expect from their government, but do it without shoving a gun in their face.   So people expect the government to regulate the financial markets to prevent fraud and abuse.  To insure deposits at banks.  To provide counterfeit resistant identities.  To provide postal service.   We will provide those same services and do a better job in an entirely transparent manner.

If governments want to claim the high ground, they will have to start actually doing the job they sell themselves as doing because they will look very foolish attacking us we will achieve what they have failed to do... regulate financial markets and secure identities.     Besides, wall street will be able to make a killing with this system so they will probably not push for it to be outlawed entirely nor for us to be put in jail. 

It is all a public relations game.   

I agree with your philosophy on this.

[AnonyMint]

Another way of putting this, is that when the dollar is your unit-of-account, you don't say your dollars are worth less when gold goes up in price.

I say exactly this - they indeed are worth less when the price of gold goes up, soon to be worthless. The dollar is worth 1/70 of what it was in 1933, and 1/40th of what it was worth in 1970.

Increased productivity has lessened the loss in dollar purchasing power in some areas like food, and even increased it in electronics, but overall it has been an exponentially increasing decline in value.

I am sorry to inform you that you speak complete nonsense. If you held gold you would be a pauper compared to holding the DJIA:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/18/money-had-never-been-tangible-period-if-you-do-not-understand-what-money-is-you-will-lose-your-shirt-more/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/22/no-single-investment-will-ever-be-perpetual-it-all-changes/

[AnonyMint]

Do you all even know that Martin Armstrong was managing $3 Trillion (the most ever) and that is why the bankers locked him maximum security prison for 7 years without a trial on a bogus contempt charge, because his computer was helping capital outsmart the bankers. Luckily he had too many well connected friends, so they had to back down, after they almost succeeded to kill him in prison.

You had better listen, he has never been wrong.

[AnonyMint]

I hope this is my last.

Imagine how ludicrous if everyone holding dollar bills got paid a transaction fee from everyone who spent dollar bills.

It doesn't make any sense to tax money itself. Even our government is not that stupid.

[td services]

Another way of putting this, is that when the dollar is your unit-of-account, you don't say your dollars are worth less when gold goes up in price.

I say exactly this - they indeed are worth less when the price of gold goes up, soon to be worthless. The dollar is worth 1/70 of what it was in 1933, and 1/40th of what it was worth in 1970.

Increased productivity has lessened the loss in dollar purchasing power in some areas like food, and even increased it in electronics, but overall it has been an exponentially increasing decline in value.

I am sorry to inform you that you speak complete nonsense. If you held gold you would be a pauper compared to holding the DJIA:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/18/money-had-never-been-tangible-period-if-you-do-not-understand-what-money-is-you-will-lose-your-shirt-more/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/22/no-single-investment-will-ever-be-perpetual-it-all-changes/

From Armstrong, http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/18/money-had-never-been-tangible-period-if-you-do-not-understand-what-money-is-you-will-lose-your-shirt-more/

While you have waited for this TANGIBLE rectification, in 1980 gold was $875 and the Dow was 1,000. The Dow rallied to almost 16,000 and gold could not exceed $2,000. It would seem to a reasonable person that 33 years is a long time to keep saying you will be right while refraining from investing. If you bought Detroit bonds in 1930 because “government debt” was safe compared to the risky stock market, when they suspended all payments, yes they eventually made good in current dollars only in 1963. If you were 60, that was 33 years to waiting and you still lost due to inflation.

This presents a very false impression since he only picks a limited time span to make his assertion when the Dow was bubbling up. He should track the Dow to gold ratio over the total time the dollar, DJIA, and gold have been around. http://www.macrotrends.net/1378/dow-to-gold-ratio-100-year-historical-chart shows this info.

I agree that it would be much better to invest in income producing and appreciating assets, but the current climate makes that far too risky, for reasons that Armstrong makes very clear. Also, the only types of securities I would invest in, bearer shares and gold bearer bonds, are not currently available. I do not trust any asset where some one else can come along and say I don't own it any more. Hence my interest in Bitshares and other systems which eliminate the need for accounts.

[Luckybit]

Do you all even know that Martin Armstrong was managing $3 Trillion (the most ever) and that is why the bankers locked him maximum security prison for 7 years without a trial on a bogus contempt charge, because his computer was helping capital outsmart the bankers. Luckily he had too many well connected friends, so they had to back down, after they almost succeeded to kill him in prison.

You had better listen, he has never been wrong.

He has never been wrong? No one on this earth has "never been wrong"

He may be right or may not be, but the best way to find out is to put his ideas to the test and compete against other ideas. The best ideas will win and evolve.

[domob]

bytemaster, as stated already I'm very interested in your ideas about BitAssets.  (In fact, I even commented in your initial threads some months ago if you remember.)  However, while I see and understand the basic claims you make about why BitUSD will track the USD value, I'm still very sceptical about it.  You know, in comparison to BitAssets, Bitcoin itself is almost trivial - so I'm really not sure whether there are some problems in the design I (and everyone) missed.  (I'm aware of your "design by bounty for pointing out problems" efforts, but this can't ever rule out that there's not still some problem not discovered yet.)

As a mathematician, I have to admit that I find your whitepaper interesting to read but not really 'exact' in the way I would want it in order to accept that BitUSD will really track USD.  (Also the Bitcoin whitepaper is not really as I expect a mathematical paper, but that doesn't matter because the ideas there are so clear and easy to grasp that the description is enough.  I also think it is a good idea to have a non-mathematical whitepaper, but it would be great to have more details in addition.)  Have you ever tried to precisely state your assumptions on the market for USD, BitShares, BitUSD and such (I mean mathematical definitions, not like your "axioms" in the whitepaper), and then to prove (mathematically) that given your assumptions the best (according to game theory) move of a rational participant is always such that it leads the price of BitUSD towards that of USD?  That BitUSD = USD (or something like that) is the Nash equilibrium?  Something similar?

Of course such a proof would still not ensure that, if BitAssets are deployed, not someone found a way to manipulate and trick the market because people are behaving irrationally, but it would at least give me much more confidence that it really works out.  If you have not yet tried to do that, would you be interested that I try?  (Although I can't promise how much time I have for this.)

[AnonyMint]

would you be interested that I try?  (Although I can't promise how much time I have for this.)

I am very interested to see that genre of analysis. I am also considering to implement BitAssets in my coin, yet improve on any mistakes bytemaster makes.

I hope such analysis considers my point about asymmetric motivations (probabilities) between the short and the long, due to asymmetric probability of expiration of investment position and secular price trend of the designated asset given the positions can be held for longer periods of time.

He has never been wrong? No one on this earth has "never been wrong"

I went back and looked at his amazingly accurate predictions since the 1970s which were published in the likes of Barron's. He hit every major turn, e.g. the Japanese bubble and crash 1990. The USA flash crash 1987 and all the events since, including 9/11 way before it happened. He was predicting 10 years in advance nearly to the day the events that actually transpired.

He has said the only way the DJIA will not have a phase transition before 2015.75 is if we get a significant enough war to stop the sovereign debt collapse from proceeding which would delay it by 8.6 years (1000 x Pi days) to 2025 (but he doesn't view this as very likely).

Agreed he is not correct about every small turn in the economy. No one can be. It is randomized by the entropy of the universe. However, the longer the period of the periodic wave (e.g. 8.6 years x Pi = 26 years x Pi = 78 years x Pi = 224 years), the more accurate he is. Which makes sense if you understand Fourier analysis.

I know it sounds crazy that someone could predict the future. As a math and scientific method driven skeptic, I didn't want to believe it. Then I realized the universe actually derives from the frequency domain and spacetime is just an illusion (perception) of our senses:

http://unheresy.com/The%20Universe.html#Entropic_derivation (my blog)

Armstrong has said he never made assumptions. Everything was found via the scientific method, even when it disagreed with his personal opinion, e.g. he started as a market maker in gold and loves gold:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/24/gold-5000-why/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/23/gold-the-coming-slingshot-move/

This presents a very false impression since he only picks a limited time span to make his assertion when the Dow was bubbling up. He should track the Dow to gold ratio over the total time the dollar, DJIA, and gold have been around. http://www.macrotrends.net/1378/dow-to-gold-ratio-100-year-historical-chart shows this info.

Compare the average time the ratio is rising to that of falling, and you can clearly see that on a time-weighted basis (given our time-preference opportunity cost in life), it is better to invest in the DJIA.

So yeah, if you are wise you trade into gold for 17 - 21 year bull market every 30 - 50 years. But if sat in gold always, you would be a pauper (you have to invest to keep up with those who are productive and this is precisely my point to bytemaster about the value of savings).

Facts is facts.  

I agree that it would be much better to invest in income producing and appreciating assets, but the current climate makes that far too risky, for reasons that Armstrong makes very clear. Also, the only types of securities I would invest in, bearer shares and gold bearer bonds, are not currently available.

There is no gain in life without risk. You may or may not be making an accurate assessment that the risk outweighs the rewards. Personally I am throwing $5 - $10K into LEAPS. I can afford to lose that in return for the 30-50% probability of $100K  - $1 million return.

Hiding in a cave waiting for the end of the world that takes a lifetime to come is not wise. It is all about assessing relative risk and opportunity cost.

I do not trust any asset where some one else can come along and say I don't own it any more. Hence my interest in Bitshares and other systems which eliminate the need for accounts.

I too wish for that!

But don't ever expect an investment that is without risk. That would be a travesty of optimization, thus can't exist.

In the moment, I still have to deal with what is in reality, not what I wish.

[bytemaster]

bytemaster, as stated already I'm very interested in your ideas about BitAssets.  (In fact, I even commented in your initial threads some months ago if you remember.)  However, while I see and understand the basic claims you make about why BitUSD will track the USD value, I'm still very sceptical about it.  You know, in comparison to BitAssets, Bitcoin itself is almost trivial - so I'm really not sure whether there are some problems in the design I (and everyone) missed.  (I'm aware of your "design by bounty for pointing out problems" efforts, but this can't ever rule out that there's not still some problem not discovered yet.)

As a mathematician, I have to admit that I find your whitepaper interesting to read but not really 'exact' in the way I would want it in order to accept that BitUSD will really track USD.  (Also the Bitcoin whitepaper is not really as I expect a mathematical paper, but that doesn't matter because the ideas there are so clear and easy to grasp that the description is enough.  I also think it is a good idea to have a non-mathematical whitepaper, but it would be great to have more details in addition.)  Have you ever tried to precisely state your assumptions on the market for USD, BitShares, BitUSD and such (I mean mathematical definitions, not like your "axioms" in the whitepaper), and then to prove (mathematically) that given your assumptions the best (according to game theory) move of a rational participant is always such that it leads the price of BitUSD towards that of USD?  That BitUSD = USD (or something like that) is the Nash equilibrium?  Something similar?

Of course such a proof would still not ensure that, if BitAssets are deployed, not someone found a way to manipulate and trick the market because people are behaving irrationally, but it would at least give me much more confidence that it really works out.  If you have not yet tried to do that, would you be interested that I try?  (Although I can't promise how much time I have for this.)

I certainly welcome any and all attempts to prove by game theory that the price will behave as I expect.  I will gladly help define my basic assumptions and work through this formally.    One technique I find very powerful to solve problems is to assume a solution exists that I have not found yet.   So assume there exists a solution then try to find it.

The next step toward this discovery process involves ruling out solutions that are a waste of time for some fundamental reason.   This is where my economic axioms (not the ones in the white paper) come to play.   I impose the following limits on the solution space:

1) You cannot perform mathematical operations on prices except comparison.  Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division are not valid operations on prices.
2) A price represents a single exchange ratio, a single data point.  Its meaning is limited to the two people involved in the exchange and cannot speak for the global value.  It cannot be aggregated, averaged, or used for anything other than curiosity.
3) As a result of a market exchange, value may neither be created nor destroyed, only reallocated.
4) No one should get something for nothing or nothing for something.
5) There is no 'unit' of value.
6) BitShares have a non-0 value.
7) the only valid price is between the highest bid and lowest ask because this means the whole market agrees, not just one person.
If there is an opportunity to profit, someone will find it.
9) All trades must be voluntary, ie: the two sides of the trade must agree.
      * note * margin calls the 'bank' has authority to sell the collateral but not force someone to buy it.

Given those rules I then went with basic game theory between the long and short positions as well as the individual vs the consensus.

I would love to see what you can come up with, and if you can express any other assumptions I must make.

I am an INTJ so the challenge for me is moving from intuition to explanation.  If you can help define things in formal concrete terms that would be great.    We are also working on an informal white paper that is easier to read than the current one.   Having a more formal explanation than the current one would be nice too.  Charles would be happy.

[td services]

I've been reading the Armstrong site, quite interested. Has he published and open sourced his math analysis and algorithms for peer review? My current favorites are Nassim Taleb, Benoit Mandelbrot, and Edgar Peters.

[AnonyMint]

I've been reading the Armstrong site, quite interested. Has he published and open sourced his math analysis and algorithms for peer review?

As far as I know, no. He open sources the overview description now on his blog as a "public service". He apparently considers the $100 million investment proprietary. For example, he claims to have spent $10 million constructing an accurate price history of silver during the Roman empire. He had researchers compiling from libraries, news archives, ancient artifacts archives, etc.. The database is what he claims is so valuable.

My current favorites are Nassim Taleb, Benoit Mandelbrot, and Edgar Peters.

Taleb replied (1 sentence) in private email in the affirmative on the following I wrote:

http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Knowledge_Anneals

[charleshoskinson]

Having a more formal explanation than the current one would be nice too.  Charles would be happy.

Never ask a mathematician for a formal explanation. David Hilbert tried to do that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_program

It ended up creating the foundations of computer science. You're welcome btw.

[AnonyMint]

I am an INTJ

Yeah I see that (The Scientist), including the J for Judgment. I am ENTP (The Visionary), very much including the E for Extrovert and the P for Perception. I back it up with strong T for Thinking so I don't get my facts wrong, and N for Intuition so I derive from big picture (over the trees) instead of mired in the forest. I also have a significant F component, i.e. sometimes I subsume the T to employ F where it aids my big picture perception (this is my brain jumping to a pseudo-randomized distant location in the solution space incorporating more potentially randomized fitness data/entropy).

The downsides of my personality type are too many ideas and too many crap ideas that have to shifted through to get to the profound ones.

[AnonyMint]

Having a more formal explanation than the current one would be nice too.  Charles would be happy.

Never ask a mathematician for a formal explanation. David Hilbert tried to do that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_program

It ended up creating the foundations of computer science. You're welcome btw.

Causes me to think of the nature of the proof of the Four Color Theorem.

[AnonyMint]

1) You cannot perform mathematical operations on prices except comparison.  Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division are not valid operations on prices.
2) A price represents a single exchange ratio, a single data point.  Its meaning is limited to the two people involved in the exchange and cannot speak for the global value.  It cannot be aggregated, averaged, or used for anything other than curiosity.
3) As a result of a market exchange, value may neither be created nor destroyed, only reallocated.
4) No one should get something for nothing or nothing for something.
5) There is no 'unit' of value.
6) BitShares have a non-0 value.
7) the only valid price is between the highest bid and lowest ask because this means the whole market agrees, not just one person.
If there is an opportunity to profit, someone will find it.
9) All trades must be voluntary, ie: the two sides of the trade must agree.
      * note * margin calls the 'bank' has authority to sell the collateral but not force someone to buy it.

Although they exhibit highly insightful and intelligent thought (e.g. #1  seems like I may have thought of long ago but didn't carry around in my mind as being significant, so it took me by suprise now), I am skeptical of most of these. I sense (the F and P and not T and J in ENFP/ENTP which I am) the same methodology of logic that applied in our debate about economics. My hypothesis is it seems you may desire to view systems as orthogonal rules, without considering how the system anneals (optimizes). I hypothesize the possibility that your assumptions are not mathematically independent. (no proof, I could be wrong)

I see no mention of the marginal price, which is a key concept in economics 101.

I see no mention of asymmetric time and risk preference and the effect on the strategy for profit.

Nothing in life is ever 100% voluntary. We all have finite degrees-of-freedom. (Here is your J poking you in the eye again with that non-aggressive delusion, which is not rational)

There is a unit of value, that is what money is. Money is what the majority decide is fungible. Everything else is measured relative to the unit-of-account, because it is what is most liquid. This is not an absolute, e.g. exporters and importers must hedge FX.

[domob]

1) You cannot perform mathematical operations on prices except comparison.  Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division are not valid operations on prices.
2) A price represents a single exchange ratio, a single data point.  Its meaning is limited to the two people involved in the exchange and cannot speak for the global value.  It cannot be aggregated, averaged, or used for anything other than curiosity.
3) As a result of a market exchange, value may neither be created nor destroyed, only reallocated.
4) No one should get something for nothing or nothing for something.
5) There is no 'unit' of value.
6) BitShares have a non-0 value.
7) the only valid price is between the highest bid and lowest ask because this means the whole market agrees, not just one person.
If there is an opportunity to profit, someone will find it.
9) All trades must be voluntary, ie: the two sides of the trade must agree.
      * note * margin calls the 'bank' has authority to sell the collateral but not force someone to buy it.

I was more thinking along the lines of fixing a certain point in time and considering all possible "moves" a single participant could make in the market.  The assumptions could be something like this:

1) Bitshares have some "external" price (or marginal price if you prefer) at which everyone can buy/sell Bitshares for (real) USD.  At least for low volumes and if we for simplicity neglect the exchange spread such a price is given.  As I understand it, this is the basis on which everything is built.  (Bitshares as cryptocurrency.)

2) This price changes over time, but the future prices are unknown (a stochastic process).  Not sure yet if we have to assume something about the probabilities for going up/down or how those are perceived.  Probably the intrinsic "margin calls" put some kind of bound on the maximum steepness of the price, at least in one direction.  But I haven't yet thought about that.

3) It is known to every participant how just holding either Bitshares or BitUSD will pay out dividends over time, at least if we assume that the total amount of BitUSD does not change (because we consider short time intervals for instance).

4) There is a current market rate for Bitshares to BitUSD, similarly to 1.

5) The moves a participant can make are to buy/sell Bitshares on the market (see 1) for USD, buy/sell them for BitUSD (see 4) or create/destroy BitUSD with Bitshares collateral.  I have to admit that I have to check the current whitepaper for how/when exactly this is possible and at what rate, because this changed over time in the proposal and I didn't check the current version.

This is of course not really formalised yet - but do you think those assumptions seem reasonable?  Did I misinterpret something in the proposal or miss something?  I know this is very simplified and doesn't take a real market into account yet (because of 1 and 4), but maybe this already does for a starter.  Then the next question would be to consider the possible cases (BS/BitUSD is greater/smaller than BS/USD for instance), how the possible "moves" in 5 pay out for a single participant over a small time interval (thus how a rational participant would react) and what the influence of this move is on the rates - the question is then whether or not this always tends to equalise exchange rates, and if this can be argumented in general.

Disclaimer: As said I'm a mathematician and interested in economics, but my actual field of research is not related to economics or game theory.  I also only have some basic training in economics (you guessed it, mostly Keynesian models for macroeconomics as well as some very simplified microeconomic models).

[AnonyMint]

The value of the BitAsset will be driven by the desire for each party to maximize their return w.r.t. to their preference. Opportunity cost preference can span time, diversity, liquidity, security, anonymity, etc, etc, etc, etc.. Yes a stochastic distribution of unknowable preference strategies.

Since we can't categorize every preference scenario, my idea is to paradigm-shift to a different semantic level to remove the unknowable. I assume that if the preferences degrees-of-freedom are symmetric for both long and shorts (which in current BitAsset proposal they are not), then can assume there is no other variable to drive the valuation other than the perceived (expectation) of the value. In that case, the only expectation is the designated asset.

This is why I proposed symmetric, day trading BitAssets for tracking designated assets.

Perhaps this idea is all crap. I need to spend more time on it.

P.S. The proof of the Four Color Theorem paradigm-shifts the problem space.

P.S.S. Semantics (abstraction) are very important to me in solving problems, which is why I like Scala over low-level C++. Category theory is provably modular, ad hoc is not.

[AnonyMint]

Is this guy constantly shadowing me and reading my mind!

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/27/technology-advancement-changes-employment/ (Aug. 27)

At Princeton Economics use to have a staff of 240. Collecting data was a huge task and it was manual. Today, what use to take 30 people is down to one.

This is why unions are so destructive. They seek to keep raising the price of labor for the same job while freezing skills. That is counterproductive. They fight the natural evolutionary process that takes place because of technology.

Princeton Economics was the largest and highest paid firm ever with more than $3 trillion under contract. Why? We originally delivered our reports by telex. The cost for communications was about $250,000 annually alone during the early 1980s. Reports top the Middle East cost $50 in delivery costs alone. We opened offices around the world to reduce those costs for clients. We were the biggest client of Western Union at the time. When fax came out, those costs dropped from $50 per report to at most $5. Then email came out. Now the communication costs are nil. That is the advancement of technology and how it has changed even our business model.