Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[justusranvier]

remember what's driving these Silicon Valley ppl.

You keep finding the exact areas where I am most concerned.

I've talked to people who from the Silicon Valley startup scene who've related their stories about the ties between the angel investors who funded their ventures and the CIA, including being subjected to a "aptitude evaluation" which was basically an IQ + (lack of) empathy test.

Remember this article? https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

If you're betting on Silicon Valley to fight the Fed what you're betting on is the defection of crucial sections of the military-industrial complex of a magnitude equivalent to the dissolution of the USSR.

Personally, I do think a USSR-style breakup of the USA is in the cards, but I'm not at all sure about the timing.

Also, in the Soviet case their equivalent of the MIC were the holdouts who were the last to accept that the system could not continue and held a coup to attempt to keep it limping along.

[jmw74]

did you listen to the above audio?  it doesn't necessarily have to make money for the OEM.  they stand to profit from other ways.

So I listened to most of it. I don't really care whether OEM's profit or how, I want to know why regular people would have any interest in this at all.

He's changing the original plan as stated on their website. Their website says in big bold words:

"We've developed a chip for embedded bitcoin mining."

But this guy is talking about distributed apps - eg turing complete computation. Those are two different and mutually exclusive things. So I don't know who's correct here.

Let's say the audio guy is correct and they're embedding distributed app computation into all your devices. The guy says "oh you'll get *slightly* higher priority for stuff because your device spent energy on someone else's computation". This still makes no sense. If I want the 1 cent of electricity I burned to get me slightly higher chance of getting a parking space, why can't I just spend money directly?

He still doesn't address why it's beneficial for devices to sell their computing power, breaking even or at a loss, vs just using money that the device's owner earned, for example, from their job.

[cypherdoc]

did you listen to the above audio?  it doesn't necessarily have to make money for the OEM.  they stand to profit from other ways.

So I listened to most of it. I don't really care whether OEM's profit or how, I want to know why regular people would have any interest in this at all.

He's changing the original plan as stated on their website. Their website says in big bold words:

"We've developed a chip for embedded bitcoin mining."

But this guy is talking about distributed apps - eg turing complete computation. Those are two different and mutually exclusive things. So I don't know who's correct here.

Let's say the audio guy is correct and they're embedding distributed app computation into all your devices. The guy says "oh you'll get *slightly* higher priority for stuff because your device spent energy on someone else's computation". This still makes no sense. If I want the 1 cent of electricity I burned to get me slightly higher chance of getting a parking space, why can't I just spend money directly?

He still doesn't address why it's beneficial for devices to sell their computing power, breaking even or at a loss, vs just using money that the device's owner earned, for example, from their job.

in the audio they explain that they want to automate those tx's as opposed to having humans make them.  from what i could glean, an app would allow you to preset your preferences to allow, for instance, an Amazon drone to fly over your garage as opposed to your kids sandbox.  the drone center would have this info in their controlling servers which could then pre-compute a flight path over your house.  or the other example they gave was 2 Google driverless cars arriving at an open parking spot at the same time requiring an immediate decision/negotiation to take place determining which car gets the space.  the audio emphasized the "immediacy" of a decision making process enabled by essentially a bidding process somewhere out on some ethereal exchange which would determine who gets what first. humans arguing in a public garage won't cut it.  in order for these types of decision making tx's to take place, "cycles" (or Satoshi's i guess) need to be on the phone ready to be utilized.  the only way to ensure that these are in place ready to go is to have the phone itself mine them continuosly.  if you depend on someone to get a paycheck, go out onto an exchange to buy Satoshi's, pay the exchange fee, and then send them to their phone to enable this whole process, it will never happen.

[tvbcof]

...
Personally, I do think a USSR-style breakup of the USA is in the cards, but I'm not at all sure about the timing.
...

I'm going with Rumsfeld, Cheney, et-al from their PNAC document on this one.  That is, the most likely end-game is a one-world government.  In that case I would expect the management strategies promulgated by the leadership to be in many ways almost indistinguishable from those employed by the Soviets and other totalitarian regimes, and I would hold near zero hope for anything resembling 'democracy' (though it may well be called that.)  The methods of control used would include austerity, surveillance, anonymous informants, etc.  Basically any structure which keeps individuals separate and suspicious of one another.

In terms of timing, the PNAC folks main thesis was that we have about another 100 years where a multi-polar world is practical and the U.S. may as well sit on the top of the stack during this time.  That strikes me as an adequate estimate.

I personally don't see why we cannot do something like 1) make use of our resources and infrastructure to have a decent life for our citizens, 2) rely on our nuclear capability and MAD for defense, 3) and treat other nations with dignity and respect but mainly butt out of their business and let them deal with their own problems without our 'help'.  This seems to be something of a 'third way' between what the Left and Right sees as the way forward.  Frustrating.

Going back to Bitcoin, this is one of the top reasons I am interested in it.  A viable currency solution which anyone can use and which is robust enough to withstand attack could be a very useful tool for those who wish to resist where whoever takes power wishes to herd us.  I'm drifting back to my position of giving up on Bitcoin except as a template for crypto-currencies to figure out what NOT to do.  We've still not managed to 'mainstream' it yet so all hope is not lost, though, as I see it.

[justusranvier]

I'm going with Rumsfeld, Cheney, et-al from their PNAC document on this one.  That is, the most likely end-game is a one-world government.  In that case I would expect the management strategies promulgated by the leadership to be in many ways almost indistinguishable from those employed by the Soviets and other totalitarian regimes, and I would hold near zero hope for anything resembling 'democracy' (though it may well be called that.)  The methods of control used would include austerity, surveillance, anonymous informants, etc.  Basically any structure which keeps individuals separate and suspicious of one another.

Of course they're going to try, but they can't pull it off.

They're a generation too late.

[Fabrizio89]

Dollar will weaken as rates won't increase as per FOMC announcement yesterday. Might be a good point for commodities and hopefully Bitcoin.

[smooth]

He's changing the original plan as stated on their website. Their website says in big bold words:

"We've developed a chip for embedded bitcoin mining."

But this guy is talking about distributed apps - eg turing complete computation. Those are two different and mutually exclusive things. So I don't know who's correct here.

My read on it was that the guy on the call, if he works for them at all, is more on the IoT side of their business and not directly involved with the mining (portion of the) chip.

[Erdogan]

The loss leading principle is known and works, for phones that could be as simple as a subsidized phone and paying more for minutes. Or the opposite, paying extra for the phone and free calls for two years (loss trailer...). Both are well known marketing strategies. The mining thing - why bother?

In addition to the public being the victims of scamming in case of the hidden mining, the planned victims could also be future investors. This is also not a very new thing, as we all know.

[jmw74]

did you listen to the above audio?  it doesn't necessarily have to make money for the OEM.  they stand to profit from other ways.

So I listened to most of it. I don't really care whether OEM's profit or how, I want to know why regular people would have any interest in this at all.

He's changing the original plan as stated on their website. Their website says in big bold words:

"We've developed a chip for embedded bitcoin mining."

But this guy is talking about distributed apps - eg turing complete computation. Those are two different and mutually exclusive things. So I don't know who's correct here.

Let's say the audio guy is correct and they're embedding distributed app computation into all your devices. The guy says "oh you'll get *slightly* higher priority for stuff because your device spent energy on someone else's computation". This still makes no sense. If I want the 1 cent of electricity I burned to get me slightly higher chance of getting a parking space, why can't I just spend money directly?

He still doesn't address why it's beneficial for devices to sell their computing power, breaking even or at a loss, vs just using money that the device's owner earned, for example, from their job.

in the audio they explain that they want to automate those tx's as opposed to having humans make them.  from what i could glean, an app would allow you to preset your preferences to allow, for instance, an Amazon drone to fly over your garage as opposed to your kids sandbox.  the drone center would have this info in their controlling servers which could then pre-compute a flight path over your house.  or the other example they gave was 2 Google driverless cars arriving at an open parking spot at the same time requiring an immediate decision/negotiation to take place determining which car gets the space.  the audio emphasized the "immediacy" of a decision making process enabled by essentially a bidding process somewhere out on some ethereal exchange which would determine who gets what first. humans arguing in a public garage won't cut it.  in order for these types of decision making tx's to take place, "cycles" (or Satoshi's i guess) need to be on the phone ready to be utilized.  the only way to ensure that these are in place ready to go is to have the phone itself mine them continuosly.  if you depend on someone to get a paycheck, go out onto an exchange to buy Satoshi's, pay the exchange fee, and then send them to their phone to enable this whole process, it will never happen.

Yeah, I get all that.

First of all, the use cases are nonsensical, are these the best they can think of?

It presumes a world where there is demand to make digital payments of very tiny amounts that don't exist today, but no demand to make payment of larger everyday amounts. That seems highly unlikely.

The car example doesn't even require money at all. It depends on the cars cooperating anyway - a non-cooperating car can always refuse to yield. So they might as well play a digital form of rock-paper-scissors. No mining or special hardware required.

In general, a device does not need money to communicate or "make decisions".  They already do that today.

The real driverless car use case is the car paying automatically for a paid parking spot. There's no way mining would yield enough for that. The real solution here is payment channels - between your main wallet and your devices, and devices amongst themselves.

There is no special hardware required. This is a world where people are going to have to have digital cash anyway.

[sickpig]

https://twitter.com/jgarzik/status/601447310535458816

[smooth]

In addition to the public being the victims of scamming in case of the hidden mining, the planned victims could also be future investors. This is also not a very new thing, as we all know.

It's not scamming or "hidden" mining, necessarily. In their white paper-isn thing they describe it as financing the phone via power bills. Let's assume people are actually told the power bill will be higher. Maybe that is seen as a way to offer financing in markets that don't really have the infrastructure for traditional credit, or where the handset maker doesn't want to (or can't for whatever reason) get in bed with the carriers. Instead of needing to collect payments or get a subsidy from the carrier, the phone itself makes the payments via mining. Even if the mining is somewhat unprofitable, as a credit-substitute there might be value there.

[Erdogan]

In addition to the public being the victims of scamming in case of the hidden mining, the planned victims could also be future investors. This is also not a very new thing, as we all know.

It's not scamming or "hidden" mining, necessarily. In their white paper-isn thing they describe it as financing the phone via power bills. Let's assume people are actually told the power bill will be higher. Maybe that is seen as a way to offer financing in markets that don't really have the infrastructure for traditional credit, or where the handset maker doesn't want to (or can't for whatever reason) get in bed with the carriers. Instead of needing to collect payments or get a subsidy from the carrier, the phone itself makes the payments via mining. Even if the mining is somewhat unprofitable, as a credit-substitute there might be value there.

Rather stretched idea, but ok it is possible that they think along those lines. I see other, simpler, cheaper  and more direct ways to have the phone cost on the electric bill, but maybe that is only me.

[smooth]

In addition to the public being the victims of scamming in case of the hidden mining, the planned victims could also be future investors. This is also not a very new thing, as we all know.

It's not scamming or "hidden" mining, necessarily. In their white paper-isn thing they describe it as financing the phone via power bills. Let's assume people are actually told the power bill will be higher. Maybe that is seen as a way to offer financing in markets that don't really have the infrastructure for traditional credit, or where the handset maker doesn't want to (or can't for whatever reason) get in bed with the carriers. Instead of needing to collect payments or get a subsidy from the carrier, the phone itself makes the payments via mining. Even if the mining is somewhat unprofitable, as a credit-substitute there might be value there.

Rather stretched idea, but ok it is possible that they think along those lines.

Well they said exactly that. Go look in their paper.

I see other, simpler, cheaper and more direct ways to have the phone cost on the electric bill, but maybe that is only me.

Really how?

[cypherdoc]

did you listen to the above audio?  it doesn't necessarily have to make money for the OEM.  they stand to profit from other ways.

So I listened to most of it. I don't really care whether OEM's profit or how, I want to know why regular people would have any interest in this at all.

He's changing the original plan as stated on their website. Their website says in big bold words:

"We've developed a chip for embedded bitcoin mining."

But this guy is talking about distributed apps - eg turing complete computation. Those are two different and mutually exclusive things. So I don't know who's correct here.

Let's say the audio guy is correct and they're embedding distributed app computation into all your devices. The guy says "oh you'll get *slightly* higher priority for stuff because your device spent energy on someone else's computation". This still makes no sense. If I want the 1 cent of electricity I burned to get me slightly higher chance of getting a parking space, why can't I just spend money directly?

He still doesn't address why it's beneficial for devices to sell their computing power, breaking even or at a loss, vs just using money that the device's owner earned, for example, from their job.

in the audio they explain that they want to automate those tx's as opposed to having humans make them.  from what i could glean, an app would allow you to preset your preferences to allow, for instance, an Amazon drone to fly over your garage as opposed to your kids sandbox.  the drone center would have this info in their controlling servers which could then pre-compute a flight path over your house.  or the other example they gave was 2 Google driverless cars arriving at an open parking spot at the same time requiring an immediate decision/negotiation to take place determining which car gets the space.  the audio emphasized the "immediacy" of a decision making process enabled by essentially a bidding process somewhere out on some ethereal exchange which would determine who gets what first. humans arguing in a public garage won't cut it.  in order for these types of decision making tx's to take place, "cycles" (or Satoshi's i guess) need to be on the phone ready to be utilized.  the only way to ensure that these are in place ready to go is to have the phone itself mine them continuosly.  if you depend on someone to get a paycheck, go out onto an exchange to buy Satoshi's, pay the exchange fee, and then send them to their phone to enable this whole process, it will never happen.

Yeah, I get all that.

First of all, the use cases are nonsensical, are these the best they can think of?

It presumes a world where there is demand to make digital payments of very tiny amounts that don't exist today, but no demand to make payment of larger everyday amounts. That seems highly unlikely.

not exactly.  they will provide a hardware wallet as well for larger storage amts for larger tx's.

The car example doesn't even require money at all. It depends on the cars cooperating anyway - a non-cooperating car can always refuse to yield. So they might as well play a digital form of rock-paper-scissors. No mining or special hardware required.

In general, a device does not need money to communicate or "make decisions".  They already do that today.

i agree that the above examples are kinda far out there.  activities we can only imagine.  but they are building off of Mike Hearn's original driverless car visions.  not that that is a measuring stick or anything but just shows ppl have been thinking about how to do this for quite a while now. 

The real driverless car use case is the car paying automatically for a paid parking spot. There's no way mining would yield enough for that. The real solution here is payment channels - between your main wallet and your devices, and devices amongst themselves.

There is no special hardware required. This is a world where people are going to have to have digital cash anyway.

i agree completely altho we shouldn't discount micropayments completely.  esp for developing nations. 

as for mining, they do have the stated objective of trying to drive more decentralization of mining.  if that requires subsidies or riding on the coat tails of other use cases for these devices, so be it.  i think it's a worthy goal.

[cypherdoc]

totally expected up day to test the underbelly of what has now become resistance.  you have to be worried that it didn't get back over the top today.  in fact, this sets up tomorrow as a big "watch out" day:

[Pruden]

totally expected up day to test the underbelly of what has now become resistance.  you have to be worried that it didn't get back over the top today.  in fact, this sets up tomorrow as a big "watch out" day:

Would you care to specify the last 5 occurrences of this non-confirmation? This way we could compare current market breadth (which is quite strong now) and a couple other indicators with the others. I can tell the last one, in 2012, was present almost the whole year and was followed by 2013 being the best year for stocks in quite a while.

[Erdogan]

In addition to the public being the victims of scamming in case of the hidden mining, the planned victims could also be future investors. This is also not a very new thing, as we all know.

It's not scamming or "hidden" mining, necessarily. In their white paper-isn thing they describe it as financing the phone via power bills. Let's assume people are actually told the power bill will be higher. Maybe that is seen as a way to offer financing in markets that don't really have the infrastructure for traditional credit, or where the handset maker doesn't want to (or can't for whatever reason) get in bed with the carriers. Instead of needing to collect payments or get a subsidy from the carrier, the phone itself makes the payments via mining. Even if the mining is somewhat unprofitable, as a credit-substitute there might be value there.

Rather stretched idea, but ok it is possible that they think along those lines.

Well they said exactly that. Go look in their paper.

I see other, simpler, cheaper and more direct ways to have the phone cost on the electric bill, but maybe that is only me.

Really how?

Choose us as power supplier - get a free phone!

[smooth]

In addition to the public being the victims of scamming in case of the hidden mining, the planned victims could also be future investors. This is also not a very new thing, as we all know.

It's not scamming or "hidden" mining, necessarily. In their white paper-isn thing they describe it as financing the phone via power bills. Let's assume people are actually told the power bill will be higher. Maybe that is seen as a way to offer financing in markets that don't really have the infrastructure for traditional credit, or where the handset maker doesn't want to (or can't for whatever reason) get in bed with the carriers. Instead of needing to collect payments or get a subsidy from the carrier, the phone itself makes the payments via mining. Even if the mining is somewhat unprofitable, as a credit-substitute there might be value there.

Rather stretched idea, but ok it is possible that they think along those lines.

Well they said exactly that. Go look in their paper.

I see other, simpler, cheaper and more direct ways to have the phone cost on the electric bill, but maybe that is only me.

Really how?

Choose us as power supplier - get a free phone!

Putting aside the question of monopoly power markets or other regulated markets that don't allow such promotions, or where the power supplier is bureaucratic and would take years to even negotiate such a deal, what would be the incentive of the power company to even do that?

I think you're reaching a bit to conclude the loss leader mining is obviously impractical.

Also, it isn't limited to phones. In their write up they mentioned internet-connected devices. That could include devices that don't normally include a paid service at all, for example dropcams, media players, wireless routers, WiFi-only tablets, really almost anything. The loss leader model where you pay back the up front cost with integrated mining still (possibly) makes sense.

[Biodom]

remember what's driving these Silicon Valley ppl.

You keep finding the exact areas where I am most concerned.

I've talked to people who from the Silicon Valley startup scene who've related their stories about the ties between the angel investors who funded their ventures and the CIA, including being subjected to a "aptitude evaluation" which was basically an IQ + (lack of) empathy test.

Remember this article? https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

If you're betting on Silicon Valley to fight the Fed what you're betting on is the defection of crucial sections of the military-industrial complex of a magnitude equivalent to the dissolution of the USSR.

Personally, I do think a USSR-style breakup of the USA is in the cards, but I'm not at all sure about the timing.

Also, in the Soviet case their equivalent of the MIC were the holdouts who were the last to accept that the system could not continue and held a coup to attempt to keep it limping along.

USSR had very little in common with USA. US is very integrated, USSR was a quilt of very different cultures, especially on the periphery (-stans, etc.)
I don't think that what you suggest will happen in the foreseeable future.

[tvbcof]

I'm going with Rumsfeld, Cheney, et-al from their PNAC document on this one.  That is, the most likely end-game is a one-world government.  In that case I would expect the management strategies promulgated by the leadership to be in many ways almost indistinguishable from those employed by the Soviets and other totalitarian regimes, and I would hold near zero hope for anything resembling 'democracy' (though it may well be called that.)  The methods of control used would include austerity, surveillance, anonymous informants, etc.  Basically any structure which keeps individuals separate and suspicious of one another.

Of course they're going to try, but they can't pull it off.

They're a generation too late.

I think you have that almost exactly backward.  There is a strong push toward indoctrinating U.S. public school kids from an early age to being conducive to 'global citizenship' as one example of the necessary requirements.  Efforts in this direction have been going on since I was a kid in the 1970's but in fits and starts, and things like genuine individuality, healthy skepticism, and some degree of self sufficiency were still at least tolerated.  When the generation who are now in grade school matures, look out.