Slashdot Mirror
Krugman On Bitcoin and the Gold Standard
twoallbeefpatties writes "Prominent Keynesian economist Paul Krugman has left a note on his blog at NYTimes about his view of Bitcoin, discussing its similarity to the gold standard and suggesting a drop in 'real gross Bitcoin product' as its users hoard the currency rather than spend it."
I thought meteorites brought most of the Bitcoins to Earth.
Bull. Shit. 24 6990s = about 8.5kW, you're not pulling that through that wimpy plug.
This oughtta be good for at least 50 Libertarian ragers ragging on Keynesian economics, and 100 or so knock-on posts of rebuttald and counter-rebuttals. Throw in another 50 "bitcoin slashvertisement" complaints and carefully crafted trolls. You've got yourself 200 posts or so, not including this one, and some nice pageviews. Keep the ad revs rollin' in.
You are making bitcoin into something important and noteworthy and it is not.
No wonder taco left.
Have you actually made any money yet? When I looked into it I wasn't too thrilled at how easy it was for people to scam you out of bitcoins by contesting Paypal payments etc
which is totally what she said
First of all, taking electricity from the hallway is obviously theft.
But more importantly you are trolling because each 6990 consumes at least 300 watts during mining, which means you need 7.2kw for your whole setup. This far exceeds what a single outlet can provide.
In the one-in-a-billion chance that 20 years from now the entire world's economy is being transacted in bitcoins, you'll be a multibillionaire.
If you think the odds of Bitcoin taking over the world (or even replacing PayPal for ecommerce) are one-in-a-million, owning one whole bitcoin is a lottery with a 1000:1 payoff. If you think it's a one-in-a-billion event, it's a coin flip. If you think it's a one-in-a-trillion event, buy a Big Mac instead.
That doesn't look like a standard 115AC outlet. Maybe it's 220 or European? I'm surprised that his landlord hasn't said anything about it.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Qualifying Krugman as a "prominent Keynesian economist" is like calling Stephen Hawking a "prominent Einsteinian physicist". I call shenanigans.
That's why you don't sell uncounterfeitable, undisputable, unrevocable, instantly transferrable Bitcoins for Paypal payments, which can be disputed, paid with stolen credit cards, accounts frozen, etc. Don't blame Bitcoin for PayPal suckage.
Why would Paypal be involved in anything he's doing?
Looks like a CEE 7/5 or 7/4 -> 240V/16A ... less than half of what his claimed setup would require.
Not only that, but now you have 7.2kw of heat that may need to be pumped out. Running an AC compressor isn't cheap either.
Life is not for the lazy.
By "discussing its similarity to the gold standard" the summary means "he points out one way Bitcoin is flawed." Specifically, that people hoard it instead of spending it (creating an unstable monetary system). Fewer transactions actually means less value, since the whole point of a monetary system that lacks intrinsic value (gold at least had that) is that it gets spent. Since the amount of Bitcoins is limited, and as time goes on the early adopters get "richer" (since less is being mined), they have an incentive not to spend. But the system will only succeed if they do spend and create a thriving system.
This is a massive gaping flaw in Bitcoin that I haven't seen pointed out yet. It means that Bitcoin will nearly always be a deflationary system. It also requires people to keep investing computing time, while their return on investment only gets less and less over time, and early adopters have no reason to spend, creating fewer transactions to be verified. And this can't be fixed: the limit to the number of Bitcoins is builtin to the system and cannot be changed.
So to everyone going "not another Bitcoin story!": read it. It actually points out a way that Bitcoin is (possibly) flawed (unlike so many of the stories on /.) And from a real economist, too.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Getting paid for being actively harmful (using electricity) is precisely why Bitcoin will never amount to anything.
Ah, so you're a thieve too.
I wouldn't take it off, I would call the cops and the landlord.
Yes, I guess someone with your talents would be perfectly suited for the financing world.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
So at the beginning of the article he says, "In effect, Bitcoin has created its own private gold standard world, in which the money supply is fixed rather than subject to increase via the printing press."
Which is seriously wrong. The money supply is nowhere near fixed. How can his opinion on this be valid when he doesn't have an understanding of what he's criticizing in the first place?
Why do people care about what Krugman has to say? This is the guy who believes that destruction of wealth is the necessary stimulus that USA needs and that it would be great to have destruction even if by wars or natural disasters?
He believes there is a real difference in economics between 'micro' and 'macro', which is same nonsense as when the same differences are applied to evolution, so if you ask him - would he like his own house to be destroyed by a tsunami/tornado/flood, I am sure he'd answer - no. It's not good when done to a particular person. Only entire nations need to suffer altogether in wars and alien invasions.
This is guy is a Keynesian charlattan, he has nothing to do with economics, but his type of 'economics' is pervasive, because the politicians love these guys. The politicians invite these sort of 'economists' to be in the white house to help with policy, and this is the kind of help you get, while the universities then decide to have only these kinds of 'economists' propagate this nonsense further, so you end up with only Keynesian ideology in higher education. Thus all the underlying problems in the economy - because politicians use this charlatanism to give excuse for their only real agenda - stealing your money.
OK, from TFA:
What we want from a monetary system isn't to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that's not at all what is happening in Bitcoin.
- that's the problem. The entire fiscal policy of USA destroys the value of savings by inflation and this is what destroys the economy.
Bear in mind that dollar prices have been relatively stable over the past few years â" yes, some deflation in 2008-2009,
- RELATIVE TO WHAT, YOU DUMBO? Relative to other flawed currencies? :) Well, not to Swiss Franc. Not to Canadian dollar. Not to NZ dollar. Not to Australian Dollar.
Besides, 2008-2009 is a TERRIBLE time to compare, as too many people completely misunderstood what was happening in the real economy and plunged head first into the dollars, which was the absolute wrong thing to do (and it is wrong thing to do now too, but now people understand it. Look at kitco.com) Too many people actually think that Keynesian charlatanism is economics, so they fall in this trap of following completely wrong ideas.
Anyway, yes, it's deflation of assets in real terms, so in terms of gold/silver assets are falling in price. It's cheapest gasoline ever today - under 10cents for a gallon, but those are silver cents.
But the inflation is in dollars, which is why real money is going up.
then some inflation as commodity prices rebounded, but overall consumer prices are only slightly higher than they were three years ago. What that means is that if you measure prices in Bitcoins, they have plunged; the Bitcoin economy has in effect experienced massive deflation.
- GOOD. Good for those who hold Bitcoins. Bad for those who hold dollars.
And because of that, there has been an incentive to hoard the virtual currency rather than spending it. The actual value of transactions in Bitcoins has fallen rather than rising. In effect, real gross Bitcoin product has fallen sharply.
- This Keynesian wants you to be poor, do you understand that?
He wants you to pay 3.50USD for your gas, and BTW, he doesn't think it's high enough. They have a target to make it much higher. But he doesn't want you to pay 10 cents for that gallon.
So to the extent that the experiment tells us anything about monetary regimes, it reinforces the case against anything like a new gold standard â" because it shows just how vulnerable such a standard would
You can't handle the truth.
While bitcoin is quite interesting from a cryptography point of view, it totally fails to address human nature.
In particular, GREED.
2 years ago it was trivially easy to mine 100s of bitcoins. Hell, you could by 1000 for less than a happy meal. Now people sit on those coins, hoping that bitcoin will become a mainstream currency, in which case the value of a bitcoin would need to rise by many orders of magnitudes. If it reached a capitalization compareable to the USD, that bigmac would become equivalent of $25M.
And there are people around with a much much larger fraction of possible bitcoins than there were ever for any real currency. And the deflationary nature of it will mean that the value of those horders (and thus their economical power) WILL have to grow in case of a success of bitcoin.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
how easy it was for people to scam you out of bitcoins by contesting Paypal payments
1. Scammer buys bitcoins on ebay.
2. Seller sends the bitcoins
3. Scammer pretends he never received them, and reports this as a fraudulent transaction to Paypal
4. Paypal asks the seller for evidence that he has sent the goods (i.e. a tracking number)
5. Sellers explains what bitcoins is, digital revolution, bring back the gold standard, Ron Paul 2012 et cetera
6. Instead of a tracking number, Paypal gets a bunch gibberish, so it rules in the scammer's favor
7. Rinse and repeat
This applies to pretty much all virtual goods on eBay, so it's not really a bitcoin problem as much as it is a Paypal problem.
This whole digression is moot in the end because there are dozens of bitcoin exchanges out there now, so there's no need to rely on Paypal. Admittedly it was a problem in the early days before exchanges were established, so that's no longer the case.
. I don't have electricity costs as I take it from the hallway
There ain't no free lunch. Either you're still paying for that electricity indirectly, or someone else is bearing that cost. If the latter - which seems to be more likely - then it's about as moral as tapping that electricity and reselling it directly, then pocketing the profit.
Just because something is provided to you "for free" (really, at the expense of your community) doesn't mean that you should feel free to abuse it for your own sake.
With that kind of power, I do wonder if bitcoin mining is the most profitable application for it.
http://www.aaronrogier.net
You'd think the retard selling the bitcoins would just use a block explorer to point to the number of the block containing the transaction and show that as proof that the coins were sent and credited to the buyer's address instead of going through all that bullshit you listed in step 5.
If PayPal wants some kind of "tracking number" for the bitcoins, the block number containing the to/from addresses is as good as you're gonna get.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Trust me (and I know this sounds funny coming from an AC), this particular story is totally worth reading at -1 moderation, because that's where the best comments will be.
However, they try to do so with a bit more subtlety than Adams' imagined Golgafrinchan macroeconomists.
And immensely more subtlety than our friend the OP, whom is utterly delusional. Encouraging currency hoarding rates roughly up there with Caucescu's "export everything" policy as the silliest economic policy idea of all time.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
is the digital implementation of the 1800 con with the same name.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yep, he should be growing weed.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Paul Krugman?
Is this the same guy that said we should fake an alien invasion in order to fix the US Economy?
Is this the same guy that in 2002 that the federal government should create a housing bubble in order to recover from the dot com bubble?
If any one still thinks this guy isn't a lunatic, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.
History also shows that Keynesian policies can fail to address an economic crisis. This led some Keynesian advocates to rethink things, including the often ignored "future" costs and unintended consequences of "today's" Keynesian stimulus, and develop the approach of Monetarism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetarism
Is Keynesian theory wrong, not quite, just incomplete. Not a universal solution. Its like physicists moving from Newton to Einstein. Its not that Newton was "wrong", he just had an incomplete understanding and methods that were often useful but universally applicable.
The fact is "blockexplorer", "block chain", "bitcoin address" are complete gibberish to Paypal (more accurately the minimal wage drone in India working for Paypal). They are trained to either take a USPS, Fedex, or UPS tracking number and verify whether that shipment matches the buyer's and seller's address. That's all they know how to do. No matter how much you explain bitcoins to them they will not understand.
At the current difficulty (you know what that means if you mine bitcoins) and the current rates of kW-hours in the US, it would take about $0.35 of electricity to generate $0.02 of bitcoins. The cost of power if the main cost of generating. There has been a steady decline in the exchange rate of bitcoins in the past month and at the same time a steady decline in the difficulty. These two are supposed to be inversely proportional. The only conclusion I reached was that the proportion of bitcoins generated with stolen cycles or stolen power is rising. Not coincidentally, there was recently a report of increasing use of botnets for bitcoin generation (that would be the increased number of stolen cycles). Apparently, people with access to electricity paid through commons are contributing to the generation of bitcoins from stolen electricity.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Qualifying Krugman as a "prominent Keynesian economist" is like calling Stephen Hawking a "prominent Einsteinian physicist".
I call shenanigans.
That analogy would make sense only if the theories of John Maynard Keynes were as universally accepted as those of Einstein. Economics never has been and probably never will be as testable a science (if it's a science at all) as physics.
Actually Keynesian theory would be more akin to Newton's. Sometimes useful, but it can fail under some circumstances. As Newton's followers went on to refine things with Einstein's theories, some of Keynes' followers went on to refine things and came up with Monetarism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetarism
Bitcoin is the equivalent of a nations currency that has been printed by individuals by permission.
This fact alone is its undoing.
Your GPU's do not constitute value. Nobody will accept the fact that you are a bitcoin millionaire simply because you let a few unused computers run for a few months.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Krugman strikes me as a man with two personalities.
There's "Dr." Krugman, the man that won awards for his work showing the importance of free trade. And then there's "Mr." Krugman, who is a democratic party partisan and has, over time, put forth views that are near opposite of Dr. on his NY Times column and blog.
Sadly, in this column on gold and bitcoin, it is Mr. Krugman doing the talking. Dr, please come back, those of us that like reason and try to think outside of the current gangland Blood/Crip political spectrum miss you, and we're tired of Mr's claptrap.
So can we please stop calling neo-Marxists "Keynesian?" Keynes' theory predicted that expansion could be accomplished by government disposing of excess collections through spending. He never proposed or advocated deficit spending as a way to expand economy. Even Keynesian economics predicts that long-term deficit spending would cause a contraction.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Let me recast Paul Krugman argument by using this 1930’s example:
The Monetary Supply is fixed
BitCoin: By design – 21 million is the max.
1930: Currency is tied to gold, and no major gold strikes in the 1920s
The demand for money increases.
BitCoin: More people get interested
1930: The economy grows in 1920s high productivity, population growth, move away from agrarian society, etc.
Supply and Demand
If the supply is fixed and the demand increases, the value of money goes up.
Krugman point – If people perceive that money is going to be more valuable tomorrow then today – why would they spend it either on investments (think the practical kind – plant & equipment - not stocks) or consumption? One can make a good risk free investment by hoarding the currency. Which pulls more money out of the economy, which leads to a downward spiral.
BitCoin is only going to work as a currency if people transact with it – which they are not.
My Point – Deflation. Yeah, I know that in theory people should be o.k. with inflation – but their not. There is something hardware in our reptilian brains. Give a worker a 10% raise when inflation is 10% and they can work things out – and they are happy. Give a worker a 5% cut with 10% deflation and they can’t work things out. Nor can Harvard MBA students. There is something about seeing the number of dollars shrink – even if there value is increasing – which throws people. And – also – not many banks offer negative interest rates on loans.
According to this profitability calculator with the current difficulty and market value, miners are now making a negative profit.
So ship the buyer an empty box, and use that tracking number.
While voltage may change the wiring still has a similar max wattage handling.
Any mainstream economists will point out similar flaws with bit coin.
The supply of Bitcoins can't keep up with the demand which leads to deflation and hoarding, which will stagnant the economic activity. Countries used to have similar problems when they were on the gold standard, which is why all modern economies have a fiat money system.
But if you are really think the modern banking system is a scam, gold is a much better investment. Gold has thousands of years of tradition behind it and there will always be people who value it so the prices will be relatively more stable.
A hilarious comment from the source shows how pathetic your trolling attempt is:
Not to mention that the door hinges on the side away from the plug, so you have to unplug the door to open it.
Krugman should recognize GDP for what it is, a convenient and available metric, but not an end goal.
It is common to fixate on measures that are available, in particular in economics. But satisfaction and value are subjective and cannot be measured. Many things that are improvements in standards of living actually decrease GDP (leisure and social activities for example).
Also, the fixation on GDP leads Krugman to despise hoarding, when it is clear that hoarding produces value for the hoarder (and produces value for the spender too, as the circulating dollars now have greater purchasing power).
Or ship a bitcoin wallet on a thumb drive?
If he were in the US, the DEA would have kicked in his door after a week.
I agree, though, that he would make an excellent hedge fund manager; greedy, solipsistic and anti-social. Here's an idea: get together with your pals and sell derivatives based on your awesome income stream. You can lie about it -- nobody cares. You can bribe Moody's to give your crap AAA ratings. Then buy default insurance on your own crap. When your neighbors, landlord or the law pull the plug, collect!
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
I don't quite understand why saving is considered so evil in the United States. I guess it explains why the country is getting sucked into a debt vortex.
How about we meet in the middle and develop a monetary system that features stable prices? Ooops, the Federal Reserve is supposed to do that as part of it's "dual mandate" yet fails miserably.
The question is, do we need to do *anything* to "get us out of a recession" - Here's the last big example where we did absolutely nothing on a governmental level to "stimulate" in any way, shape or form (only measures passed were tarriffs response to european tarriff, which of course exacerbated the situation)
Ever hear of the depression of 1920? No? Thats because it was over very fast and followed by a period of sharp growth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depression_of_1920%E2%80%9321
The problem with Krugman's argument is that he is taking the price increase in bitcoins due to massive speculation and applying it to a case of deflation that occurs when there is a decrease in the ratio of gold to goods in an economy. They are two separate things and no conclusions can be drawn from one and applied to the other, especially if you are not going to discuss the elasticity between present and future consumption. The problem with the Keynesian critiques of deflationary currencies is that they look for the most extreme cases of deflation and assume that all deflation will set off a deflationary spiral.
The argument that Krugman is making is that because people hoard money when deflation is 50% or more then its obvious they will completely hoard all their money when its 2%-3%. Its not a fair comparison at all and assumes an unreasonably high rate of intertemporal consumption elasticity. To believe this would mean that people are not willing to pay the 2% opportunity cost of consuming in the present which is almost identical to saying that people will not substitute future consumption for present consumption they face an opportunity cost of 2% or more, ie they would not take out a loan if the interest they are paying is 2% or more. Obviously no one is going to use a credit card that charges 50% but I am pretty sure that a 2% charge on present consumption is not going to stop a lot of people from thinking twice about consuming in the present.
What Krugman is really critiquing is that a deflationary currency is going to prevent people from being incentivized to drastically reduce their savings rate. As we can see in this quote: "What we want from a monetary system isn’t to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich."
We dont want hoarders (aka savers) from making risk free profits? Why not? When people pull their money out of the economy it doesnt prevent others from making transactions as long as the currency is divisible, which is completely effortless with bitcoin and only faces a modest cost under the gold standard. Luckily for us these evil hoarders will eventually dis-hoard their money in retirement and provide an even flow of savings and consumption over their lifetime. What Krugman wants is for our current generation to get the benefits of past savings while at the same time preventing future generations from having the same priviledge that we do. It works for a while and has been in operation for the past 20 years but we are quickly coming to a period in time when there will be no more dis-hoarding of savings and no hoarding to divert into present consumption. The shell game that Krugman constantly promotes on his blog is quickly coming to an end and we are soon going to have to figure out how to run an economy through a deflationary recession without recourse to inflation or borrowing.
In addition it has been shown empirically that times of mild deflation have not been the catastrophe that Krugman claims they would be. See: Milton Friedman's Monetary History of the United States.
so the only way to make bank is to not pay for power?
I once bought an item on eBay and the buyer sent me the wrong product. The listing clearly said it was for an audio CD and I got a key chain instead. When I filed a dispute with PayPal, they didn't do anything because there was a tracking number.
So yeah, sending an empty box just for the tracking number will probably get the disputes closed (fraudulent or not).
See the Cross of Gold speech by William Jennings Bryan. Deflationary currencies facilitate concentration of wealth in fewer pockets.
Six days out of seven, I agree with the vengency and ridicule of /. commentary on bitcoin. But I find that most of the ridicule is automatic, and automatic criticism of gold is better than knee-jerk opine of bitcoin. Knowing how gold mining works (14/15 USA Superfund sites), I know how randomly awful digging into rain-forested-mines can be. If this "derivative" of bitcoin, pinned to other currencies, weens humans off the tit of OK Tedi Mining, it's a derivative which at least beats the Digger. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ok_Tedi_environmental_disaster
Gently reply
Hopefully your neighbors will report you to your landlord so he can stop your unauthorized use of electricity you're not paying for.
Then your neighbors aren't just being "jerks" for unplugging your rig. They're seeing you abusing the system and putting a stop to it. They need to start taking more permanent steps.
Krugman once again demonstrates the Keynesian confusion about the role of savings in the economy. A miser is a good neighbor: instead of consuming all that he could consume in exchange for his production, he holds onto his money, thus making everyone else's money buy more in the market. The profligate spender who consumes all he earns, and the borrows more and consumes all of that (like the federal government) is the one to despise.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Inflationary currencies guarantee concentration of wealth in the pockets of the Bankers. Seehttp://mises.org/resources/614/Mystery-of-Banking-The Deflation like you're talking about only occurs after the inevitable monetary contraction which follows cascading debt defaults.
While voltage may change the wiring still has a similar max wattage handling.
The wiring, outlets, and circuit has maximum current rating, not wattage. The higher the voltage you put through the wires, the more wattage they can handle because you get more power with the same amount of current.
But even if it's 240V at 7.2kW, that's still 30A which I highly doubt a hallway circuit would be rated for.
Wiring to connect silicon wafers to the chip leads, radiation shielding on spacecraft, super thin metal foil, gold plating on cards/pins, super low resistance wire.
There are mature bitcoin exchanges like Mt Gox where other users can't scam you.
A hilarious comment from the source shows how pathetic your trolling attempt is:
I wouldn't call it pathetic. Yes he was trolling, but I still found his comments funny.
this is a good read:
The End of Dollar Hegemony
excerpt:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_wire_gauge
The thing TANSTAAFL ignores is that things get cheaper thanks to productivity increases made possible by technology, like computing power. Why shouldn't we reach the limit of free? In fact you can get food for free from food banks or with food stamps. As for energy, dark energy (73% of the universe!) is being produced and current models of physics can't explain where it comes from...
William Jennings Bryan is a perfect example of most "populists". He advocated an approach to government that involved people like him making decisions for people like you and me (rather than leaving us with the freedom to make the decisions that we wanted to make).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
This works and is how the US got out of the great depression with help from the New Deal and WW2.
It also helped to have a huge industrial base that wasn't being bombed to bits - jobs for everyone (in the military and in industry) and a lot of customers.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
Sorry but in this case the link is immediate. You just don't recognize it. And the results are certainly not trivial. The result of money printing since 2008, even without it being in circulation, is that we avoided the rational outcome of a couple of big banks going under due to their risky mortgage lending, the dimwits who invested in flipping houses on margin and buying houses they couldn't afford having to lose said houses, the price of housing falling, and everyone else's standard of living rising as a result. What we got instead was everyone else's standard of living falling as savers are forced to bail out bankrupt banks and dimwit house-flippers.
Money sitting in a bank's vault directly determines the amount of real assets in the real world that that bank is able to control. This entire "money printing doesn't affect anything if it sits in banks" talking-point is a total bullshit lie.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
People have wanted gold for thousands of years and that is not likely to change.. A lot of the intrinsic value of gold is a means to store wealth. There are problems with this, but there are problems with any way of storing wealth.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
Regardless of whether we may reach the economy of abundance through technological progress eventually (which I think we will), TANSTAAFL is the reality today, and what GP is doing amounts to abusing (=stealing) a common resource for his own private gains.
It's a pyramid scheme - do you really think the participents that want the advantage of early adoption in the pyramid really care about the morality of theft?
The model is artificial inflation of value of a virtual ponzi and the hope that later marks will swap real goods of dramaticly greater value for the virutal ponzis, giving those involved early in the scam an advantage when they buy out of a scheme that is nothing but a drain on resources and currency.
It's got cool geeky elements to catch the interest of the marks but the technology is really just window dressing on an age old scam. Bitcoin is a really cool concept but becomes just another form of pointless low grade evil once it gets implemented in reality.
Nope, not quite right (except the part about higher voltages needing less thick wires.). How thick a wire must be to handle a given load depends mainly on amperage. Since this is a heat dissipation issue, where you put the wire also matters: in a wall means less heat dissipation than outdoor use which means a thicker gauge. Voltage means nothing. The only thing that voltage matters for is insulation. The higher the voltage, the better able electricity is at jumping gaps in the circuit, and so you need thicker insulation to prevent this. To give you an example, in my brother's car, one of his amplifiers uses 6AWG wiring, and runs at 60A at 12V. An overhead transmission line that uses 6AWG aluminum wire will typically carry 69kV with a maximum capacity of something like 300A. The reason it can use higher amps is because of the cooling effect of having the wire exposed to air and not near anything, and that we have increased safety tolerances for wires in areas where humans are likely to be present (buildings, cars, etc.). The insulation difference is massive. The car wiring's insulation is like 1mm plastic, whereas the transmission line uses literally meters of air between the wires and ceramic insulating suspenders that are several feet tall.
To give another example, let's take house wiring. If I have a 20A 120V circuit, I'll need to use 12AWG wire. If I have a 20A 208V circuit, I'll need to use 12AWG wire. If I have a 20A 240V circuit, again, I'll need to use 12AWG. Now you might be tempted to say, "But, there are three wire in the 208V and 240V circuits." But then I'll remind you that all the electricity, no matter the configuration*, flows back through the neutral.
* Yes, I know that's simplistic and 3-phase is even weirder and 208V is the potential between the hots and we don't touch the neutral with 208V, but it doesn't really affect my point, so fuck it.
RL chicks have intriguing potential as a porn substitute, much like how sleep has intriguing potential as a caffeine substitute.
Your idea of "economics" has no relevance to what happens in actual economies.
That Made me laugh out loud.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The initial bit-coin spike was mostly an artifact of it's promise for anonymous transactions. Anonymity caused sites like the silkroad to appear, as the value of anonymous transactions began to become apparent, the demand for bitcoins began to rise rapidly enough that speculators decided to get involved. Tack on a few mainstream news articles and the lack of other resource based options at a time when most of the worlds economies are printing money to pay off debts, and people who wouldn't otherwise be as speculative become so.
Despite the conclusions one might draw from Krugman's article, the number of Bitcoins is actually designed to inflate relative to the output of society (based on the relative amount of available processing power) unlike traditional resource backed currencies. Thus, the current boom and horde should not be attributed to a failure of the Bitcoin currency, but instead a failure of confidence in the fiat model. For instance, imagine you are an Argentinean during their finical collapse. Now imagine there being a small and limited amount of stable US dollars available to convert your hyper-inflating Argentinian currency into. One can reasonably assume we would see exactly the same effect with dollars as we do in bit-coins if more dollars are not created out of thin air.
Realistically, current monetary policy has us print more dollars as demand increases in order to stabilize prices. This works until the stressed market stabilizes again and people let go of their dollar holdings to go back to their native currency thereby creating inflation. All said, it's probably the lesser of two evils, which is why I would argue that another bitcoin like currency could be the appropriate way to buffer the demand. Yet it seems that the current instance of bitcoin hyper-valuation is likely only a blip and will continue for a short period of time relative to the current world economic decline. Further, there are already signs that the speculation and volatility is beginning to end: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg180zvztgSzm1g10zm2g25
In summary, the point I'm trying to make here is 2 fold. First, if we all had access to a stable currency (like bitcoin), there would not be any incentive to horde bit-coins. Second, if the appropriate response to overwhelming demand for a currency is to make more of it, then there is actually a way to create more bitcoin like currency. Yet since more currency isn't actually necessarily as no one currently trades exclusively in bitcoin, and because the rest of the world is working with a fiat system, the hyper-valuation of the currency is to be expected, but cannot be pointed to as a failing of the bitcoin system.
(Also, it's interesting to not that most sites that take bicoin haven't been chaining their prices to match the hyper inflation, which is why I refuse to use the term deflation in terms of the bit coin market.)
-JHF
I've checked with Wikipedia too, he's born in NY and nationality is listed as United States. Why are you saying he's Keynesian? Did you confuse it with Obama's biography?
Democracy is for the people; you only vote once per season and we'll do the rest of the work for you don't have to.
If you treat the wire as a resistor, yes, a certain "wattage" applies, per unit length (since if the wire runs twice as far, it has twice as much space to dump heat into the wall). But the voltage across it has nothing (well, little) to do with the nameplate voltage, and if you look at the linear variation of resistance with length, and a W/m rating, it reduces to a fixed current for a given wire gauge.
The wires are in series, so they see the same current as the load; they are (ordinarily) a small fraction of the load, so they see small voltages.
e.g. in a 240V system:
*Hot
wire 1V
Load 238V
wire 1V
*Neutral
At the same current (= half the power, total) in a 120V system, it would be:
*Hot
wire 1V
Load 118V
wire 1V
*Neutral
Same gauge of wire, same current = same heat dissipation. Of course, this means you typically see smaller wires and lower current limits in a 240V system, since a given appliance needs half the current, and you can then afford 4x the resistance for the same heating.
Of course, if the wires are long enough, the voltage drop becomes significant, and either the system draws less current (e.g. an incandescent bulb), or more current (e.g. a motor driving a load with constant power) -- in either case, heating in the wires remains acceptable iff the current remains below the appropriate rating.
No, that's the only supply-side cause of deflation. There is also deflation caused by growth concomitant with a steady money supply (or a money supply growing slower than economic activity).
In addition, there is deflation caused by a reduction in circulating money supply (decreased money velocity) caused by hoarding. This particular form of deflation is dangerous, because hoarding results in greater deflation, resulting in even more hoarding... you get the picture. A deflationary spiral that ends up contracting the economy.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Anyone wanting to save themselves some trouble when evaluating the Austrian School of Economics should research its epistemology (I wish I had, before wasting hundreds of hours reading that tripe). Its founders categorically discount empirical data in favour or arguments made from first principles. They're basically philosophers, which is fine, but highly suspect in the world of science, as Aristotle showed when he wrote about physics. Despite being a genius, he assumed that heavier weights would fall faster. He never bothered to verify his assertion. His argument was logically sound, but his assumptions were flawed (in this case, that mass is proportional to acceleration -- they're inversely proportional -- F=ma -- Thanks, Newton!).
The Austrians state that economic activity is too complex to be empirically studied. They prefer to choose axioms that sound reasonable, and derive predictions from them. It's like doing math without bothering to go to the lab.
I'll never understand how they get so much play on /., given the science/tech orientation of the site, but then again pure science articles have been neglected more than usual over the past 8 years or so.
Shame, really.
Please remind me again; what is the value of a Bitcoin?
I know people are willing to pay real money for it, but what value does it actually represent?
The CPU mining; does it generate something of value?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
If it's for all people to use, you can't complain if somebody unplugs your cable to use it for their own appliances.
Usually these buildings have rules regarding the use of shared resources; most likely being allowed to keep it plugged in all the time to power stuff inside your house isn't one of them.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
In Paul "Fake Alien Invasion Would End Economic Slump" Krugman's Keynesian world the fact that the technology sector is hyper deflationary (prices for the same thing falls constantly) should make it a tremendous drain on our economy, nobody would ever buy a computer because a better one is going to come out later for less money. You can't watch cat videos by staring at dollar bills. Because value and utility isn't considered, only how well the hedges are doing we get things like cash for clunkers. Here's a plan, let's borrow money from the Chinese to pay people for their old computers if they buy a new one, then we will destroy the old computers. Dell and by extension America wins. Right?
Many of you compared BitCoins to national currencies, but they are not. This is quite an important factor: at the moment people can afford to "stash" bitcoins because there's no real need to spend them: we still rely on national currencies for buying most of what we need.
However, the fact that it's getting more and more difficult to mine them also means that the 21M limit is getting closer. Once reached, the impossibility to mine new bitcoins will inevitable affect their value and I'm quite confident that bitcoin trades will rapidly increase, as that will be the main way to "earn" bitcoins (vs exchanging them for other currencies).
Honestly I think that having an exchange market has been a bad idea, as well as making bitcoins to last forever. If they'd been granted a maximum lifetime, people would have been forced to trade them as quickly as possible. What happened instead is that many guys mined bitcoins just to have a try, and will never use their stash, so those bitcoins are lost forever.
How's that for an incentive to spend the coins: Everyone has to pay me taxes (or else goes to jail) and I only accept bitcoins.
And I know where you live and where your kids go to school...
Gold has internal value because it encompasses the incredibly large amounts of energy ancient exploding supernova stars spent creating it. Without expending similarly huge amounts of energy, gold cannot be created (i.e. reciting alchemical matras does not work) and that gives safety to investment gold owners. Nor can you create gold or platinum out of tin air via confidence scam or faking SSL certs.
In contrast, Bitcoin is essentially an alchemical mantra: people make their computers recite variable strings over and over billions of times and manipulate them according to complex methodology, hoping gold will come out of it in the end. One would hope people have gotten smarter than that in the 400 years that lapsed since Emperor Rudolf wasted his life on alchemical ventures in his Prague castle.
Futhermore, if you trust your wealth on an algorythm that can be written on the back of a napkin, rather than a star 1000x more energetic than our Sun, then you are plain stupid and deserve to be laughed at when NSA nixes the algorythm and discarded useless bitcoins are collected by brooms on the streets. Even paper money has more value, because those are backed by a massive entity, e.g. countires have government, military, police, industry, agriculture. It is not something that can fall in a day, while algorythms are mobile (as in women).
Been to Walmart lately? Everything except tech is going up. The government is suppressing the official inflation figures with a lot of smoke and mirrors but for an ordinary person wages are pretty flat and the price of everything is going up.
You're labeled a troll, who knows if fairly or unfairly, but for you and for others who come across this I would just like to mention that the subjective perception of inflation is still subject of research.
At least one group of economists (sorry, I don't have the link handy) is trying to address exactly what you're saying. The disconnect between official CPIs and what people perceive exists in many countries, at the same time as independent economists confirm official CPI computations, so to believe in government conspiracies everywhere is at least a bit crazy.
So they tried to figure out why individual perception is different. The summary of their result was something like: CPIs are computed to represent people's spending in an objective way, but in people's perceptions, some classes of goods have a much higher impact on how they feel about the price level. Since inflation is never equal across the board (there are always some classes of goods whose price increase is higher, and others whose price increase is significantly lower than average), the individual perception can become distorted depending on which classes of goods have particularly strong price increases.
Well how many recessions have been caused from over extension of debt? Sounds like your theory is missing some sample data.
The sample data strongly suggests that it is in fact government surpluses that cause depressions. I quote from here:
Since 1776 there have been exactly seven periods of substantial budget surpluses and significant reduction of the debt. From 1817 to 1821 the national debt fell by 29 percent; from 1823 to 1836 it was eliminated (Jackson’s efforts); from 1852 to 1857 it fell by 59 percent, from 1867 to 1873 by 27 percent, from 1880 to 1893 by more than 50 percent, and from 1920 to 1930 by about a third. Of course, the last time we ran a budget surplus was during the Clinton years. (...)
3. The United States has also experienced six periods of depression. The depressions began in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, and 1929. (Do you see any pattern? Take a look at the dates listed above.) With the exception of the Clinton surpluses, every significant reduction of the outstanding debt has been followed by a depression, and every depression has been preceded by significant debt reduction. (...)
Obviously, correlation does not imply causation, but if data as strong and suggestive as this doesn't at least make you stop and think and reexamine the conventional wisdom of the austerity fanatics, then you aren't being rational or reasonable, you're simply being a religious zealot.
People should not be free to hoard the money they earn!
People should be told what to do with their money, because they are not prepared to spend it, only government(and Krugman) can.
Next time you want to hold your money, think twice, Krugman is looking and could denounce you to the authorities for not being a good citizen.
Now, stop reading slashdot and continue working, or our leaders wont love you.
"The over extension of debt can be corrected by devaluing the the currency."
Yay! World War 3 Here we come!
Think about what you are saying.
Deleted
Krugman is a mad man, he said that faking an alien invasion would revive the economy, as we would produce a massive amount of weapons to protect ourselves against the invasion.
Booms and crashes are caused by credit expansion and contraction. Not the underlying money.
Deleted
Thats why you transfer the bitcoins not to the buyers address but to a new created own address.
Save the wallet file of that one on a floppy disk and mail that with UPS.
That way you can hope the floppy gets lost ;D or destroyed and you still have a copy of the sent wallet file.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
> The essence of intrinsic value is that you can estimate it in a vacuum for a specific asset, without any information on how the market is pricing other assets
and
> Only assets that are expected to generate cash flows can have intrinsic values.
from Aswath Damodaran who, literally, wrote the book on valuation.
Therefore, neither gold nor oil have an intrinsic value because a specific quantity of either does not generate a cash flow. An asset that can be used as capital (in production) would have an intrinsic value.
http://www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/faculty-research/UAT_025578
Its main advantage was obviously to traffic illegal goods (Silkroad). The other advantages are only theoretical in nature and so entangled in bias that it's best stepping away and getting back to looking at the main advantage. As far as that goes, volume of available product has not appreciably increased since the introduction earlier this year.
The only really interesting comments are at -1 Troll as they normally are on such stories.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
A government can't print more of it.
Mansa Musa, an African ruler, went to Mecca on the Hajj with a huge caravan carrying tons of gold. He spent so much during his visit to Cairo and other cities on the way that it depressed the value of gold and caused massive inflation. Realizing this, he borrowed a bunch of gold to drive the value back up. But the market didn't stabilize for years.
I'd rather have more stupid Apple stories than one more article about fucking bitcoins.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Keynesians are not "real economists".
The CPU mining; does it generate something of value?
No and that is the really peculiar part of it. People are using real resources (computers and electricity) and paying for that with real money to produce a digital puff of smoke called a bitcoin, in which they then place more trust than the money issued by the government they elected themselves.
Bitcoin isn't even close to the gold standard. Just because a person has wasted real, physical resources in a convoluted proces to produce a string of ones and zeros, doesn't mean that string carries value (above the fairytale belief that it actually does). When a virtual currency is backed by gold, there is actual, physical gold in a repository to imbue the virtual representation of it with real value. Handing over that virtual representation can get you the physical gold. Even if you don't value gold for its own properties, at least it has industrial applications that are valuable.
Bitcoin on the other hand is backed by unnecessary environmental pollution, which you can't even physically claim by handing over that bitcoin. Not that I think people are waiting to physically get their waste CO2 handed back to them for their folly.
My guess is that, at some point in time, all those geeks will realize they wasted numerous hours and real money costing resources to produce exactly nothing and that it ultimately was only their own misguided belief that gave it a shine of value.
The only ones laughing are those who produced a lot of bitcoin when they were easy to create. For some inexplicable reason these digital puffs of smoke can now be traded for real money.
How do you print money? Get gullible saps believing that your magic beans are worth real world money.
# touch universe # chmod +rwx universe #
So people are actually giving you cash money for your bitcoins? I highly doubt that, as anyone with real cash money actually sees no value in bitcoins. Bitcoin fans have such sorry lives that they put personal value on making their CPUs and GPUs do stuff and accumulate points. Nerds love to accumulate points (see the slashdot karma system), because they lack anything truly fulfilling in their lives.
Bitcoin is just point accumulation for geeks/nerds. No different than the slashdot karma system, RPGs, folding at home scores, etc. When you have nothing fulfilling in your life, you accumulate points to define yourself. Fucking sad.
The most interesting comments are at -1 Troll on this story, like on any story that deals with economics and politics.
Erm...
People are using real resources (computers and electricity) and paying for that with real money to produce a digital puff of smoke called a bitcoin,
I also use real resources (computers, electricity, and time) and I both pay for and am paid for these things with real money, in order to produce a digital puff of smoke called software.
in which they then place more trust than the money issued by the government they elected themselves.
This may be your most relevant argument, if you actually fleshed it out. But the rest of it...
Bitcoin isn't even close to the gold standard.
It's actually very close to the gold standard. People use real resources and real money to dig up a metal whose only real use is that it's kind of shiny, so people place value on it...
When a virtual currency is backed by gold, there is actual, physical gold in a repository to imbue the virtual representation of it with real value.
Only as much value as the actual gold contains. So let's see...
Even if you don't value gold for its own properties, at least it has industrial applications that are valuable.
Oh, bullshit. How much would it actually be worth if we only valued it for its industrial applications? By that logic, silicon should be our currency.
For that matter, what's the industrial application of any "real money", like the dollar? Unless people value it for its intrinsic properties, or for what it will buy, it's not like you're going to take those bills and build something out of them. Not that it would really matter, since more dollars these days are digital anyway than physical.
Bitcoin on the other hand is backed by unnecessary environmental pollution,
Which is again pretty much like the gold standard. I can't imagine that if we started distributing the gold in Fort Knox to industry, that we would actually need any mining for the next few decades, if not centuries.
For that matter, we need to be switching to alternative energy anyway. Electricity is possible to generate cleanly. Gold isn't.
My guess is that, at some point in time, all those geeks will realize they wasted numerous hours and real money costing resources to produce exactly nothing and that it ultimately was only their own misguided belief that gave it a shine of value.
And you could say the same thing about any other currency, except that we have collectively decided that these other currencies have value, but Bitcoin doesn't.
Most of your argument amounts to an argument against characteristics Bitcoin has in common with other currencies, and particularly with the gold standard. I'm not saying you're wrong, and it's true that Bitcoin will have no value if no one values it -- which is much more likely to happen to Bitcoin than to other forms of currency -- but to say that it isn't even close to the gold standard, and then enumerate a list of complaints about it that apply as easily to gold, makes no sense.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
So people are actually giving you cash money for your bitcoins?
No, I never bought in to it. I should have though, when it was still easy to grab these intrinsically worthless pieces.
To see that there are people working their ass off to exchange acceptable money for digital nothingness, just look here:
https://mtgox.com/trade/buy
You can actually plonk down real money to get these silly signed computer files.
# touch universe # chmod +rwx universe #
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Err, you don't touch the neutral with 240Volt (this is assuming US wiring) either. 120V, 240V, and 3-Phase 208V systems have 1, 2, or 3 hot wires. All of the hot's have a 120VAC potential relative to neutral/ground. For a 240V setup, it's two hots that are 180 degrees out of phase with each other. 208 volts is 3 hots which are 120 degrees out of phase. If you build a 240 volt device that uses two 20 amps at 120V circuits and sends back through neutral, the neutral will carry between 0 and 20 amps depending on how balanced your load is between the two phases, which is why you need a neutral that is sized to carry the same maximum load as the hots.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
So basically, the only way you're "making money" off this thing is that you're stealing electricity? Yeah, that sounds like a great plan.
So are you sharing your profits with them? I mean, they are helping to pay for your endeavors.
It's actually very close to the gold standard.
No, it's not. Under the Gold Standard, I could take my currency and trade it in for an equivalent amount of gold. What can I trade a set of Bitcoins for?
Oh, bullshit. How much would it actually be worth if we only valued it for its industrial applications?
Nowhere near what it's worth now. Which makes the whole "Gold is better than US Dollars" thing kinda silly. In the collapse of civilization, US Dollars might be worthless, but odds are your gold will be too. You can eat it, you can't make weapons out of it. What can you do with gold? Make jewelry? Yeah, there's not gonna be a big market for that.
For that matter, what's the industrial application of any "real money", like the dollar?
Facilitating trade.
You're right! I totally should be given the "freedom" to be fired because of the color of my skin, because of my religion, or because of my sexual orientation!
Yes, you should. It is called freedom of association.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
No, I shouldn't. That is not "freedom of association". It's discrimination, pure and simple. And it's disgusting.
Tell me, why should your "freedom of association" be able to trump my requirement that I be able to work? Or buy food?
Ironically, I knew that and meant to put that in my asterisk as well, but submitted too quickly.
Plenty of hoarders will attempt to buy them, thereby creating demand for them. There will always be some people who want to hoard bitcoins and not generate the bitcoins personally. They will want to buy them at market prices. This constant demand will ensure transactions keep occuring. Look at any bitcoin exchange and you'll see that there is no shortage of transactions and the "hoarding" isn't bringing bitcoin transactions to a standstill by any means. My advice is put in a few hundred dollars on bitcoins.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Funny I was growing indoors for more then a decade (until market forces made it not worth my while, CA though).
Now it's just four in the backyard.
He should/is scam whatever welfare is available. Bitcoin/pot income would be hard to track, so he can suck on the government tit until it goes dry. I assume he already is. Very typical for parasites to work under the table.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The remaining crude is heavier, in deeper places. Needs more energy to extract, and refine, and its market price is lower than the lighter ones. One of the last places with good amounts of light crude oil is... Libya.
Fossil fuels are not going to run out anytime soon, they are simply getting less profitable, more expensive to get. It is one of the effects of "peaking", after more than a century of extracting the best (and even burning away perfectly good but then less valued natural gas).
Eventually the private companies will give up or reduce their size drastically and mostly State owned operations will remain. See the refining business? Of course you can't sue your country for a spill in the ocean or a national park they will drill into... Might even subcontract scapegoats to blame into oblivion for any mistakes.
Opec might even be reaching production limits, but this can never be disclosed to prevent market panic. In the meantime other powers are literally destroying Opec members one by one, only to leave the places unstable and unable to even reach previous Opec production levels.
ALSO country population and economies grow, and that needs more energy, period. China and India to name the biggest 2. Right now US & friends are having a field day bombing whomever they want, but soon enough those powers are going to act to protect their suppliers, and perhaps a bit of world balance will be restored (by way of tensions, sadly).
The US will have to learn from Europe to live with expensive energy and become more efficient, even if that means the collapse of suburbia, give up SUVs and live closer to work; not to mention relearn to produce their own stuff (including food) again.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
No, it's not. Under the Gold Standard, I could take my currency and trade it in for an equivalent amount of gold. What can I trade a set of Bitcoins for?
Missing the point. Bitcoins are the otherwise-useless item which we all agree has value. With the Gold Standard, it'd be gold. If Bitcoin were to somehow take over (which seems unlikely), you'd likely have things like paper currency which would be backed by actual bitcoins being held in reserve somewhere, assuming the bitcoins themselves can't be made convenient enough (which is likely).
You speak as though gold is incredibly more valuable than data for some reason other than that gold is actually used for trade. Then you say this:
Oh, bullshit. How much would it actually be worth if we only valued it for its industrial applications?
Nowhere near what it's worth now.
Which was my point. The actual inherent value of a currency is almost entirely based on how much it's actually being used as a medium of exchange, and not some intrinsic properties of it. Dollars, for example, are not backed by the gold standard and have almost no use other than as a medium of exchange, and are more often digital than physical anyway -- so you could at best exchange "virtual" dollars in your bank account for "real" paper dollars.
For that matter, what's the industrial application of any "real money", like the dollar?
Facilitating trade.
Oh, zing!
Except you just contradicted yourself. If "facilitating trade" counts, then the dollar would be worth exactly what it's worth now. You just admitted it wouldn't be worth nearly that much. Clearly, you weren't talking about "facilitating trade" as an application of gold.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Actually, a lot of newer residential installations in the US are using 30-amp breakers these days, although 20-amp ones are probably still more common, even in new installations. (Setups from the late twentieth century, however, often use 14-2 cable (instead of 12-2 or better) and so tend to have 15-amp breakers for everything except the dryer and range, because a heftier breaker wouldn't be a real great idea with that cabling. Heaven forfend you put a modern thousand-watt microwave oven on such a circuit, because it'll trip the breaker every time you turn around. And don't even get me started on old fusebox installations that you can find in nooks and crannies in the unfinished basements of older homes from the first half of the twentieth century, complete with pairs of non-cabled cloth-insulated wires [shudder] plastered right into the wall, without the benefit of junction boxes or conduit or even a second layer of insulation, running to ceramic standoffs, with no proper grounding anywhere...)
I have no idea what's prevalent in Europe. For all I know they could have speaker-wire-quality pre-WWI uninsulated lines running through the mortar between the foundation blocks and gnawed by dozens of generations of rats in one building and separate sixty-amp circuits run through proper conduit for each outlet in the building next door.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Actually, a lot of newer residential installations in the US are using 30-amp breakers these days, although 20-amp ones are probably still more common, even in new installations.
I'm not sure where you heard that, but the required lighting and small appliance circuits in a dwelling as detailed in the National Electrical Code section 210.52 must have overcurrent protection of either 15 or 20 amps. I believe you CAN install general-purpose circuits rated higher than that around the house, but those would be in addition to the required 15/20-amp receptacles (of which there are many: any wall space must be within 6ft of a receptacle, kitchens must have no less than two separate small-appliance circuits feeding not less than two receptacles with any countertop space more than 12-in wide having no point on the wall be further than 24-in from a receptacle, etc, etc, etc), and would require receptacles rated for whatever the circuit is rated for (in most cases). A 15-amp circuit must only have 15-amp receptacles. A 20-amp circuit can have 15- and/or 20-amp receptacles. A 30-amp circuit must have only 30-amp receptacles. Basically, if the plugs in your house don't look like this, then you don't have 30-amp circuits... and frankly why would you?
(Setups from the late twentieth century, however, often use 14-2 cable (instead of 12-2 or better) and so tend to have 15-amp breakers for everything except the dryer and range, because a heftier breaker wouldn't be a real great idea with that cabling. Heaven forfend you put a modern thousand-watt microwave oven on such a circuit, because it'll trip the breaker every time you turn around.
Most new construction still runs 15-amp lighting and small-appliance circuits... and therefore usually runs #14 because it's cheaper. And a 1000W microwave on 120V only draws 8.3A or so... if your wiring is planned out properly such that the microwave mostly has a circuit to itself, it should never trip a breaker. And as for "a heftier breaker wouldn't be a real great idea with that cabling"... there are clear requirements in the form of both text and tables that dictate how you are to plan the circuitry for a residential dwelling as well as what size wire, breakers, etc you are to use. It's very clear-cut. Either what you're installing meets code or it doesn't. If it does, you're fine. If it doesn't, you're breaking the law and risking your life and property (or that of whomever you're doing the work for). I hope you're not installing wiring in your own house using fuzzy logic like that.
And don't even get me started on old fusebox installations that you can find in nooks and crannies in the unfinished basements of older homes from the first half of the twentieth century, complete with pairs of non-cabled cloth-insulated wires [shudder] plastered right into the wall, without the benefit of junction boxes or conduit or even a second layer of insulation, running to ceramic standoffs, with no proper grounding anywhere...)
That's called knob and tube wiring. It was common until the 1930s or so and usually uses wire insulated by a cloth/rubber composite... and it was considered proper and perfectly up to code back then. No grounding anywhere because no appliances needed a ground back then (rather, the need for a ground was not recognized). Most existing K&T installations have extremely brittle insulation and nobody in their right mind should dare fuck with it or you'll end up with some extremely hazardous conditions.
(Hint: I'm an electrician.)