How long did it take you to become a Bitcoin true believer after heard about it?

Quote from: stompix on November 25, 2013, 12:02:06 PM

1 year and still counting

Roughly 3+ years for me and still counting also, meaning I am not convinced of its great future.

However, I must admit that my reason for dismissing it in 2010 was that it was not backed by anything tangible, which I now think is a silly objection. I didn't get the value of the decentralization until I took a long study of it earlier this year, although it is clear I was aware of the "distributed" benefit as early as 2012. I will try to go find my earliest writings on Bitcoin. I am curious.

Edit: I found some of my prior writings. Here is one from summer 2011, where I had moved on from criticizing Bitcoin for not having tangible value and rather on the Tragedy of the Commons that money is:

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Tangentially, I also think that knowledge will soon become fungible money (and I don't mean anything like BitCoin, of which I am highly critical), in the form of compositional programming modules, which will change the open source model from esr's gift to an exchange economy. Remember from esr's recent blog, my comment was that software engineering is unique in that it is used by all the others, and it is never static, and thus is a reasonable proxy for (fundamental of) broad based knowledge. I suggest a broader theory, that the industrial age is dying, which is why we see the potential for billions unemployed. But the software age is coming up fast to the rescue. Open source is a key step, but I don't think the gift economy contains enough relative market value information to scale it to billions of jobs.

Here are some from late 2012 in comments on ZeroHedge.

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Note I am not criticizing the secure, anonymous, distributed trading capability of BitCoin. That could be reused in a knowledge trading system, where the supply of knowledge is allowed to increase by the market. In theory such a system (possibly coming soon) could destroy or attenuate the incidence of money, socialism, and governments. If ubiquitous, those vested interests (in money, e.g. central banks, governments, socialized welfare recipients, savers, passive investors, speculators, etc) might resort to 666 physical tagging in order to regain the ability (top-down control) to tax, redistribute, and destroy knowledge production (as they do now).

P.S. For those that like spooky correlations, a 666 system trends to knowledge becomes static (since any rise in knowledge becomes a threat to such a system), and thus axiomatically humans are effectively lobotomized (which is consistent with being harvested for their blood and flesh only since their brain wouldn't matter). Note that 666 is roughly the wavelength of blood red. So there is a potential solution to the biblical puzzle of the "number of a man". It is his blood. Think of the "Ministry of Plenty" which allocates rationing and starvation in the book 1984:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Background

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you don't save wealth in bitcoins, you save your wealth in real assets
The problem with bitcoin is the same problem as with gold (money is always socialism):

That is the supply can not grow as fast as people want to expand production, thus its value will increase just by idly holding it (for as long as the real interest rates are negative on any competing fiat). Thus people will hoard it (if there is ever any serious mass movement into it), thus destroying its viability for commerce (Dark Ages is an example).

The fundamental problem is that money can not represent a store of knowledge, and all value (and increase in production) created comes from knowledge. Read my article above if you want to understand deeply.

Money can't exist without credit (read the link above about the problem with gold), thus there can not exist a utopic advantage to any form of money that will avoid socialism

Money in every form is failure (socialism, suboptimal knowledge production) and thus not competitive (not even for the passive "investor" over the long-run).

Read my other comment linked below to understand that only knowledge (not money) is unlimited (fiat is limited, as debt is limited due to misallocating away from knowledge production, and hard money is limited in supply causing hoarding due to increasing "value" rewarding being idle from knowledge production and because the marginal utility of saving money is not infinite, because again debt and interest rates are not...an circular illusion that society has rightfully destroyed throughout recorded history in boom and bust oscillations between the two manifestations of the same problem)

Evidence all the commentators here who expend their energy trying to maintain the value of their idle savings, instead of producing productive knowledge outside the scope of maintaining idle savings (that dog chases his tail forever into the poverty abyss... it is no different than the supranational passive capitalists who spend all their energy trying to sustain or increase their idle savings rather than producing knowledge).

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Trade knowledge instead of money. See my other comment for more reasons not to use money.

The supply of knowledge is not limited, unlike all forms of hard money which means they retard knowledge production because they reward idleness and limited supply must eventually be subverted by the fractional reserve demand created by inexorable demand for debt from the low knowledge producers. Because fiat money retards knowledge production by misallocating capital to the low knowledge producers. I explained this in more detail at the link above and the sub-link to my thesis paper (draft).

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You can start by noting that most everything you have today (including the internet and computer you using, and including the food, antibiotics, etc) all came from knowledge production. Manual labor and hard resources without knowledge would give you the quality of life that existed before the stone age and the discovery of fire. Then after noting that, then observe that if knowledge were static, then we can already produce all that we need with robotics, so we could just eliminate the humans and churn out zillions of material goods which no one would be able to pay for with money (because no one would earn an income). And then you could proceed to note that since knowledge is the only thing of value being added in the economy, then ... you can follow the rest of the conclusions in my thesis...

P.S. the title could have been "Demise of Money, Rise of Knowledge".

P.S.S. Beside underestimating how much you depend on knowledge production to survive (and thus underestimate why you will be poor if idle yourself on money and savings), you also highly underestimated how inefficient it is to try to be self-sufficient and disconnect from nature's inexorable trend of maximum division-of-labor (more accurately division-of-knowledge) and maximum economies-of-scale.

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You built the strawman of the bad effects of fiat money, then concluded that the effects of hard money are somehow different (even superior) without thinking it through and substantiating it. This is the myopia I am trying to correct.

I did not say hard money is worse. I said (if on a global basis, and not a localized gold standard receiving influx of gold) it will lead right back to fiat money again (see "Storing Idle Savings" section my paper), because people will demand usury and you can never stop that. And hard money can not be sustainably loaned because its supply is limited and usury grows at an unlimited compound rate. Thus fractional reserves come naturally (even illegally as they did by the private banks in 1800s), because of the law of supply and demand (if people demand it, supply will come). Read this:

Also hard money rewards people who sit on money instead of produce knowledge (as many of you do now, exspending muchtime thinking about your stacks of gold and silver). Note I have stacks (of unspecified quantity) too but I stopped thinking about them, because the measily annual increase in value of 21% (before taxes! what if they raise them to 100% as FDR effectively did? And block money laundering into a new digital fiat), can't come close to what I can generate in returns with my mind creating new software.

Hard money is not a solution to anything long-term. It allows the passive capitalists to enslave the world, then the masses try to fight back by borrowing more, and the cycle repeats over and over.

The only solution is individual knowledge production. It is up to you, if you want to end up with nothing or not. At the End Game, all the gold "investors" are destroyed any way. It must be that way. Do you really think nature is going to reward you for stacking money?

There is no system that will protect you. Nature wants you to be constantly producing knowledge in order to survive. Nature does not want to get you a comfy soft bed. Nature wants to keep the threats dynamic, so that you don't become complacent. Read the Parable of the Talents in the bible (even if you are an atheist, there is some economic wisdom).

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Let me explain it to you in different way. When gold skyrockets in value, it means the debt system collapses, which means the value of what the passive capitalists owns has imploded. They end up owning all the failure. By buying gold, you will own a large share of what is left, but what is left is failure. You end up with all this overcapacity in everything, even factories.

This enables interest rates to go sky high again, because real capital is scarce, as everything has imploded.

This is the 666 or slavery directed system because it seeks increasing failure as long as control is maintained (see the Ministry of Plenty in 1984), that oscillates between fiat and hard money.

Fortunately it doesn't own knowledge producers, and thus the progress of technology continues more or less orthogonally (although the capital adoption it is not linear, e.g. China is subsidizing -800% profit margin losses in order to slow down the onslaught of automation and robotics that will come after China collapses).

So by holding gold you end up owning a larger share of failure. Of course, politics of the majority will never let you be a slave owner, unless you want to kiss up the king slave owners. So it doesn't work out the freedom-directed way you are expecting it will for you. Technology will probably bail you out, assuming you don't go live in a bunker and shut yourself off from it.

Freedom comes from knowledge production only, not from money.

The supranational passive capitalists (a.k.a. the banksters, elite, TPTB, Bilderbergs, etc) are enslaved by their passive capital. They could not for a moment have the freedom to walk away from the grind of managing slavery. Try being a manager at a fast-food restaurant or labor intensive business and you will quickly see how slavery is mutual. They are slaves to you and you are slaves to them, because they must each grab slices of your time to get approvals for each thing that they are not free to decide themselves (e.g. overriding a duplicate order at the cash register, etc).

Co-dependencing is a jail because it can consume all your time and you don't get to do any thing productive with your mind! If your dependents are doing low-knowledge things, then you end up doing so too, in order to manage them.

Lets take Bill Gates as an example (or even Steve Jobs). Although Gates was reputed to be a good coder, my understanding of Gates and Job's igsignificant role were to be micro-managers of process in their key technology (and for Jobs also marketing) departments, i.e. the Cathedral model. This is why they never got around to understanding (or at least not fully adopting in Jobs' case) the benefits of a chaotic Bazaar model.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

Thus these guys built magnificient cathedrals, based on maintaining a firm top-down control on process. They were enslaved to it. When they left their companies, the cathedrals began to decay. These cathedrals has less value when left alone to run on autonomously. Have you not heard of the tirades and personal lashings dished out to employees by these two mega-managers?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1384932/Behind-screens-look-Apple-shows-Steve-Jobs-corporate-dictator-accepts-excuses-failure.html

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385078,00.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Management_stylehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Management_style

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-435346.html

It doesn't mean these men were not smart, rather that they applied their intellect to building co-dependent cathedrals, which bogged them down. The Bazaar model is in its infancy, and we are only just starting to see the early effects of it, e.g. the internet and Android (Linux) are generated from the bazaar model predominantly.