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With Euro Zone Problems, Bitcoin Experiencing Boost In Legitimacy
derekmead writes "Despite being used for drugs and beef jerky, Bitcoin is finding legitimate purposes. Bitcoin's decentralized convenience means international efficiency, in areas where local restrictions on money transfers to foreign companies make legal businesses cumbersome. 'I've been able to have cash in my bank account in a matter of hours using Bitcoin, rather than three days with traditional banking,' one British businessman in China told Reuters. In embattled Europe, Bitcoin offers some a viable alternative against central banks, said a Greek owner of an island bar and restaurant who accepts payment in Bitcoin. 'I don't put money in the banks. I trust the euro as a note, but I don't trust banks. I don't want them making money out of my earnings.' Indeed, Europe's financial woes are caused an unprecedented surge of interest in the alternative currency, as the continent loses economic credibility with each new bailout, according to a report by the Financial Post."
"Despite being used for drugs and beef jerky, Bitcoin is finding legitimate purposes"
Is buying beef jerky NOT a legitimate purpose?
Or is "beef jerky" here a euphemism... and if so, dare I ask what for? ("prostitution" would be the obvious companion to drugs, and I'm familiar with a handful of "beef" related euphemisms, but jerky? Hookers with hard, dry vulvas that will abrade the skin off your dick?)
Not necessarily true. Banks are only insured so much against failure. Including, for example, if they hold massive amounts of loans to construction companies and construction workers in spain and will not be able to collect those loans.
Thus far the Eurozone has, through various mechanisms, organized bailouts of banks to prevent them from collapsing and to prevent bank runs. However, there is not actual insurance system keeping the banks afloat. There's just the implicit expectation that eurozone governments will cough up the cash to keep all their banks from collapsing and taking the rest of the economy with them.
Ah, the weekly obligatory Bitcoin article. I expect that another Raspberry Pi article should follow shortly.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Oh for god's sake....
This is also one of the main flaws in bitcoin. There are a set amount, therefore there must be deflation if it ever takes off. Deflation encourages hoarding because money is likely worth more tomorrow than today. Hoarding encourages further deflation, and we go round.
A small inflationary pressure encourages use, rather than hoarding, of money, and helps grow economic activity. Furthermore, having a central control on currency allows the adjustment of the amount of money to ensure there is enough of it to keep the economy rolling.
A bitcoin-based county-sized economy would be as much a failure as the old gold-based ones were. You, as a hoarder, may feel that inflation is theft. I, as a realist, see moderate inflation as essential.
Now the problem with barter is inefficiency, that you can't really pay me in chickens for software with effective granularity. So we really need a unit of exchange that can be broken down into small parts that are easily tradable. Say rice. Well the problem with rice if you have a bumper crop you have massive inflation in rice, and anyone who can grow rice will grow rice rather than something actually useful, since they think they're printing money. If crops fail there's not enough rice to supply both food and currency needs and everyone goes broke. So then we try gold. Gold has it's perks. It can be broken down a lot, it doesn't degrade, it has only limited commercial value which derives mostly from it's being money at all (jewelry). But then there's a constant tick of inflation in gold assuming production can keep up with inflation, and since china, south africa and australia produce a crap load of gold (and especially the latter two who out produce the US), you can end up with one country controlling the value of gold in the US or China or wherever, offering to supply gold cheap, or flooding the market with gold, preventing the US from buying goods abroad or the reverse, making things prohibitively expensive. Oh and since they have gold, they can pay for an army to defend themselves.
Since rice, and gold don't work. lets come up with a new system. The Bimetal, erm.. bigood system, which uses both as a currency, but their individual problems remain. So now lets add into the mix iron, silver, nickel, oil and a few other things, a giant aggregate basket of things to barter with. So to buy a video game from me you need to give me 1 chicken, 25g of silver, 10g of iron, and 250ml of oil. Or just one half of a barrel of oil, but since a barrel of oil is 158 litres, trying to carry around 79 litres of oil is kind of a pain, I'd rather the chicken and the metal, a barbecued chicken sounds good right now. .
So now we've done this for a while, and you get sick of carrying around a large jar of oil, and having to have armed guards for your 2 bricks of gold in your basement, and the equipment needed to shave off slices for payments for valuable things. We agree that we're going to just write down these transactions. But since I don't trust you, because you're a raving fucking loon, and you don't trust me, because I'm an asshole who makes software we need a 3rd party to do it. You and I agree that Okian Warrior is a sufficiently neutral party that any exchanges we make we'll file with him on paper, and it's up to him to decide how much value things have. We start by having everything considered as 'equivalent to gold' but since everything in our wagons full of things used as money fluctuates relative to gold and frankly, we don't want to think about this shit anymore, we have actual work to do, we leave it up to him. He decides that the best way to do this is to only have official notes that he issued and tracked, of course this takes time for him, so he takes a cut. But then, we don't have to pay for armed guards for our gold, so we're net ahead. In the course of this little experience I've had kids, and they're in the software business, and you've had kids and they're in the gold/rice/oil/iron business. And Okian now has to make sure they can get enough of his notes to account for the fact that they have increased the production of software and other goods. More people = more production. So he starts making more notes. The problem with this plan is that he's not really sure how productive my kid is. Lines of code is a terrible metric. So he decides it's better to err on the side of caution, and create a little bit more money than we need, rather than to little. Because if he creates too little you and I can't fulfill our contracts, and never will, but if he creates just a little bit too much we can still fulfill our contracts and we've only lost out a little bit. We still don't need to lug around jars of oil and bricks of gold, or have personal guards for our gold, and we just pay a lit
next week RaspberryP cluster used to farm Bitcoins
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
next week RaspberryP cluster used to farm Bitcoins
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
A beowulf cluster being held by Natalie Portman covered in grits.