"Your pseudonym isn't evidence that you're actually a woman, and it's silly to treat it as such."
And your pseudonym is no evidence that you're not a coward, and it's silly to pretend as much.
Repeat: what's your point? Granted, my name does not "prove" anything, but I didn't claim it did. Still, do you have any evidence to the contrary? If not, your argument is pointless.
On the other hand, I would say that repeatedly posting under "Anonymous Coward" is prima facie evidence of real cowardice.
For chrissakes, will somebody just fork Java and have done with this persistent Oracle nonsense?
I mean, sure, it's good Oracle is doing this. They're just way late, as usual.
Why doesn't somebody just fork it (from back when it was easily forkable), then re-implement the security fixes?
Granted, it would take a lot of work to do that NOW, but if somebody had done it way back when it should have been done, it would have been lots easier.
I firmly believe that an active open source community would be a much better caretaker of Java. Oracle has proven again and again that it doesn't care much about people who actually use Java.
"But the backing of the currency, and the specific percentage of reserves a bank must maintain, those are independent controls."
You're just demonstrating that you don't understand what I wrote. I'm not saying that's your fault. Maybe I didn't explain it well. But for some reason what I'm trying to tell you isn't getting across.
Under the gold standard, the total number of dollars in circulation was relatively fixed. The government couldn't simply "print" money, nor the Fed create it willy-nilly when they want. It wasn't legal.
"A big chunk of the money that banks loan or invest today--the money supply in concept, if not historical definition--comes from the float on various kinds of insurance."
That may be 100% true. But it has almost nothing to do with what I was talking about. I repeat: under the gold standard, the amount of money "in circulation" hardly changed at all. BY LAW. The Fed couldn't affect it much, the government couldn't affect it much. That's WHY they got rid of it. They wanted to print more money.
It did not work the same as it does today AT ALL. Not even close.
"I don't understand what your point is. But just in case, a floating fiat currency can be used to effectively combat deflation, which is significantly more damaging than inflation."
It seemed to me that this point was pretty clear. It was about rate of change, not about deflation.
Relatively speaking, gold tends to change in value (not dollars) slower than fiat dollars change in value. That was one of the main reasons to have a gold standard in the first place: to tie dollars to something that only changed slowly in value.
But when the dollar is not tied to gold, then gold can fluctuate in dollars quite rapidly, as we have seen just recently.
Also, "deflation is damaging" is a mantra of discredited Keynesian and government economics. Lots of deflation throughout the economy can be damaging, certainly, but a relatively modest rate here and there doesn't hurt anybody except those whose livelihoods have become tied to constant inflation, like Government and Wall Street. Not to mention the Fed and fractional-reserve banking. But neither the Fed or fractional-reserve banking are strictly necessary either. We did just fine without the former and the latter is not even theoretically necessary, even to Keynesians. (But they do like it.)
As that chart I linked to way up above shows, history proves that inflation is not necessary to a healthy economy. Dollar-equivalent value stayed pretty constant for close to 200 years prior to the Fed, while (not shown by the chart but true nevertheless) during that same period individual commodities experienced a trend of fairly consistent but mild deflation.
If you want to scroll way back up this thread and find the link, take a look at that chart and see for yourself where in the chart the economy was obviously healthier.
"There is another algorithm which is independent of the workunit frequency that determines how many bitcoins are earned with each work unit."
Ahem... That's what I wrote. I fail to see where your misunderstanding is.
"You used the word "difficulty" here, which in the context of Bitcoins is the hash difficulty. That is indeed based upon work unit frequency. If a bunch of work units are created in a short period of time (you devote a billion processors to generate a couple dozen work units in an hour or so), the difficulty factor will increase substantially and in a very short period of time."
Ah... well, there it is. Mostly, but not entirely, a matter of terminology. Here's the upshot: we are both wrong, to approximately the same extent.
My earlier source said that the frequency limit was to prevent disruption from DDOS attacks and the like. (Which it might do to some very small extent, but as I found out later that was not the sole purpose and almost certainly not the primary purpose for that design.)
So I was wrong about that. However, I was right in a way too. Perhaps "difficulty" was not the best word, but it does become "harder" in a very real sense to mine Bitcoins over time, because fewer can be mined per 10-minute time period. Yes, it is a frequency limit, but yes, that limit also DECREASES WITH TOTAL TIME, not just frequency. So it is genuinely "harder" in the sense that fewer can be mined in a given period, so any given individual will be less likely to successfully mine a Bitcoin during that period. So not "difficulty" in the sense of computing time, strictly speaking. But "difficulty" in the sense that your statistical chances of being successful in any one period goes down. It will take more time, on average, to mine a Bitcoin, but not computing time, per se. That was where I went astray. To quote Wikipedia [emphasis added]:
"The number of newly created bitcoins per period depends on how long the network has been running. Currently, 25 new bitcoins are generated with every 10-minute block. This will be halved to 12.5 BTC during the year 2017 and halved continuously every 4 years after until a hard limit of 21 million bitcoins is reached during the year 2140."
So I was correct in the sense that the rate of Bitcoin mining does go down with time not just, as you assert, with frequency. Lower rate = "difficulty" in the sense that on average it will take any given Bitcoin miner longer to mine a Bitcoin.
"Perhaps you could hack the hashing algorithm through a really devoted mathematical attack.... Since you are all hung up on that difficulty word, there is one possible attack that could function as a real denial of service attack:"
You are getting way off base here about "attacking" and "hacking" the algorithm, since I did not mention anything even remotely like that at all. And you are also off base with that opinion about DDOS, because it's just wrong. Anybody on the Internet can be DDOSed, and it has absolutely nothing directly to do with Bitcoin. But it sure as hell would bring any Bitcoin mining operation to its knees, for the period of the attack.
If you knew someone was mining Bitcoins, you sure as hell could DDOS them, without doing anything at all that had to do with the Bitcoin algorithm itself. Either you grossly misunderstood me, or (I think more likely), you are suffering from "security blindness": so caught up in the security of the algorithm that you don't see the obvious vulnerabilities that lie all around but outside of it.
This would all be true ONLY if the copyright trolls could not name hundreds to thousands of Does in a single lawsuit.
Granted, judges have become increasingly wary of this tactic. Nevertheless, they never should have allowed the joining of the suits anyway. There really isn't any legal basis for it. There is one half-assed theory they have pushed for justification, but that's all it is: half-assed.
But I really have seen it lots of times: football player, or rich kid, or whatever, has women swooning all over him so he can act like an asshole and often get away with it. Both parties are at fault. Him for acting that way, her for putting up with it. What is this, the 50s?
"All those guys who you think are assholes for not treating a girl the way you would? They're treating a girl like the girl is an EQUAL, not some sort of rare, fragile flower that will die the instant you disagree with it."
I do agree with the rare flower bit. But no. While some people do confuse the doormat thing, I don't thing GP did.
Most of those guys you think treat girls like assholes, are assholes. You can blame the girl for falling for that crap.
"If you're suggesting there's no escape from the friend zone, there is. The secret is cold-turkey no-contact for a while (I haven't dialed in the exact timespan, but I've confirmed 1 year separation can do it), and improving your life in some way during that time (status based like better job, higher income, new car, but anything with growth helps like learning a new language, travelling, volunteering)."
Dude, if she's dating you because you're making more money, or because you've changed in other "keeping up with the Joneses" ways, you're doing it wrong.
"Reliability is easy at very small scale - just run a single server with some OS that doesn't need regular reboots. But the cost per user is remarkably high, in comparison."
That may be true but it has nothing to do with my point. My point was: until the reliability is up to what I consider to be a reasonable level (and I consider reasonable to be the same as the services that I currently use), then I'm not putting my important business "in the cloud".
It may be that kind of reliability in "the cloud" is prohibitively expensive or difficult right now. I don't care. Unreliable is unreliable.
"Yes of course it's true. Even if your currency is physical gold coins, there are still going to be checking accounts (though maybe we wouldn't need those for bitcoins), there are still going to be savings accounts and CDs, there are still going to be mortgages, there are still going to be insurance policies, and the money supply will still be many times the amount represented by physical currency. It just doesn't matter (in terms of money supply) how you limit or back or base the physical currency."
You have completely missed the point. Which is that with a hard standard (like gold) you can't make the money supply independent of the currency.
For example: banks were required to maintain a 40% gold reserve in relation to their deposits. (Still "fractional reserve", but far, far less than say, 2008).
With a hard standard, there are just so many dollars that can be in circulation. Period. You can bend the rules a bit (fractional reserve, etc.) but if you try to break them you're SOL.
That's WHY the gold standard was dumped in the first place. The government wanted to circulate more money, but it didn't have the gold to do it.
"The algorithm for increasing (or decreasing.... it does happen) difficulty is based upon the frequency of work units being process, where processing more work units in a given period of time will send the difficulty factor up. "
Haha. No it's not. It's based on the total number of bitcoins mined.
What you're referring to are the built-in protections against malicious attacks, which are not the same thing AT ALL.
True, only so many bitcoins can be mined at once, but that's not part of its valuation system. That's just to prevent things like DDOS. The "eventually" I was referring to was the limits on the difficulty, not the simultaneous amount, of Bitcoin mining.
"I love these statements. Are these "happen to know" sources you can quote?"
No, because I am not going to give out hints about where I live.
And get off this "Fox News" shit. I don't watch Fox News. By the way, not that it matters to me much, but you might want to know: a recent Pew study (about as reliable source as you can get) which was mentioned here on/. said MSNBC news was far worse than Fox for giving opinion as opposed to real news. And CNN wasn't a whole lot better. (Though CNN was better than Fox, and both were far better than MSNBC.)
So if you really wanted to insult somebody, you should accuse them of watching MSNBC, not Fox news.
"Being at a prestigious medical university hospital close to the boarder in the US"
Ah... I see. So you claim your "anecdotes" are somehow (without any evidence) "better" than mine. Hahahahahaha.
I admit that I did not offer any evidence, and I'm not going to, because I have no desire for people to know where I live. But your argument is the funniest thing I've seen in at least a few days.
"f by "reliable" you mean "no failures for any users anywhere" then sure. If your service has 300 million users, you're going to have downtime for some of them more frequently than if you have 300 users."
No. By "reliable" I mean "not being down in any given year, for any length of time, for any significant percentage of your user base".
And EVERY major cloud service so far has failed that standard. Every one that I know of: Microsoft Azure, iCloud (which is based on Azure), AWS, Google Apps, Gmail... the list goes on.
Haha. That says exactly what I wrote: it prohibits private possession of gold money, and gold certificates. (In case you didn't know, bullion was used as money. High-value money, but money nevertheless. Bullion is processed bars, not the same as bulk, raw gold.) The WHOLE POINT of his action was to prevent people from trading in gold as money.
But gold itself, in jewelry and collectors' items, was NOT prohibited to own. I did not at any time say people could own any gold for any reason. It was gold coin, ingots (bullion) and other forms of gold money, other than collector's items, that was confiscated. (Please don't argue with me that it wasn't confiscation; it sure as hell was. People were compensated, but the gold was still confiscated. Payment for it doesn't change that.)
"Not really. Yes by canceling the agreement Nixon ensured that the dollars that were loaned to the US would be paid back with ones worth less but those obligations were denominated in US dollars, not gold so we didn't default."
Hahaha! That's the kind of distorted logic that I expect from Government economists.
Listen up: dollars were worth a certain amount of GOLD according to the Bretton Woods system. And most signatory countries still used gold as the standard against which dollars were measured.
When Nixon removed Bretton Woods, he also devalued the dollar against gold. So as far as EVERYBODY ELSE was concerned, that dollar was worth A LOT less than before, so yes we sure as hell did rip them off.
From OUR standpoint, we didn't default, because we still paid in dollars. But that's laughable self-deception. Because the true VALUE of a thing is what it can be traded for, and almost instantly the dollar had lost a shitload of VALUE to everybody else.
If I signed a contract with you, saying you would pay me in certificates that were valued in new Ferraris, then later, without my consent, you changed your mind and tried to pay me in certificates valued in the same number of Volkswagens instead, you would be ripping me off. Even though you paid me with the same number of certificates. From my point of view (and for that matter, any rational point of view), you'd be defaulting on your obligation.
This ain't exactly rocket science. You can argue semantics all you want, but the objective reality is that the U.S. defaulted on debt.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah. It's the old Sun fork. I didn't know it was still around.
I would argue that though it may be "widely" used, it is nowhere near as wide as it should be.
"Your pseudonym isn't evidence that you're actually a woman, and it's silly to treat it as such."
And your pseudonym is no evidence that you're not a coward, and it's silly to pretend as much.
Repeat: what's your point? Granted, my name does not "prove" anything, but I didn't claim it did. Still, do you have any evidence to the contrary? If not, your argument is pointless.
On the other hand, I would say that repeatedly posting under "Anonymous Coward" is prima facie evidence of real cowardice.
"You mean your anonymous pseudonym? For all we know, you could be a man posing as a woman on the internet."
And for all WE know, you're actually a coward.
So what's your point?
"Neither do you, little miss bitcoin."
And this added something to the conversation?
If you have a specific rebuttal to make about what I wrote, then make it. This kind of remark is nothing but a waste of everyone's time.
For chrissakes, will somebody just fork Java and have done with this persistent Oracle nonsense?
I mean, sure, it's good Oracle is doing this. They're just way late, as usual.
Why doesn't somebody just fork it (from back when it was easily forkable), then re-implement the security fixes?
Granted, it would take a lot of work to do that NOW, but if somebody had done it way back when it should have been done, it would have been lots easier.
I firmly believe that an active open source community would be a much better caretaker of Java. Oracle has proven again and again that it doesn't care much about people who actually use Java.
Read my name again.
"But the backing of the currency, and the specific percentage of reserves a bank must maintain, those are independent controls."
You're just demonstrating that you don't understand what I wrote. I'm not saying that's your fault. Maybe I didn't explain it well. But for some reason what I'm trying to tell you isn't getting across.
Under the gold standard, the total number of dollars in circulation was relatively fixed. The government couldn't simply "print" money, nor the Fed create it willy-nilly when they want. It wasn't legal.
"A big chunk of the money that banks loan or invest today--the money supply in concept, if not historical definition--comes from the float on various kinds of insurance."
That may be 100% true. But it has almost nothing to do with what I was talking about. I repeat: under the gold standard, the amount of money "in circulation" hardly changed at all. BY LAW. The Fed couldn't affect it much, the government couldn't affect it much. That's WHY they got rid of it. They wanted to print more money.
It did not work the same as it does today AT ALL. Not even close.
"I don't understand what your point is. But just in case, a floating fiat currency can be used to effectively combat deflation, which is significantly more damaging than inflation."
It seemed to me that this point was pretty clear. It was about rate of change, not about deflation.
Relatively speaking, gold tends to change in value (not dollars) slower than fiat dollars change in value. That was one of the main reasons to have a gold standard in the first place: to tie dollars to something that only changed slowly in value.
But when the dollar is not tied to gold, then gold can fluctuate in dollars quite rapidly, as we have seen just recently.
Also, "deflation is damaging" is a mantra of discredited Keynesian and government economics. Lots of deflation throughout the economy can be damaging, certainly, but a relatively modest rate here and there doesn't hurt anybody except those whose livelihoods have become tied to constant inflation, like Government and Wall Street. Not to mention the Fed and fractional-reserve banking. But neither the Fed or fractional-reserve banking are strictly necessary either. We did just fine without the former and the latter is not even theoretically necessary, even to Keynesians. (But they do like it.)
As that chart I linked to way up above shows, history proves that inflation is not necessary to a healthy economy. Dollar-equivalent value stayed pretty constant for close to 200 years prior to the Fed, while (not shown by the chart but true nevertheless) during that same period individual commodities experienced a trend of fairly consistent but mild deflation.
If you want to scroll way back up this thread and find the link, take a look at that chart and see for yourself where in the chart the economy was obviously healthier.
"There is another algorithm which is independent of the workunit frequency that determines how many bitcoins are earned with each work unit."
Ahem... That's what I wrote. I fail to see where your misunderstanding is.
"You used the word "difficulty" here, which in the context of Bitcoins is the hash difficulty. That is indeed based upon work unit frequency. If a bunch of work units are created in a short period of time (you devote a billion processors to generate a couple dozen work units in an hour or so), the difficulty factor will increase substantially and in a very short period of time."
Ah... well, there it is. Mostly, but not entirely, a matter of terminology. Here's the upshot: we are both wrong, to approximately the same extent.
My earlier source said that the frequency limit was to prevent disruption from DDOS attacks and the like. (Which it might do to some very small extent, but as I found out later that was not the sole purpose and almost certainly not the primary purpose for that design.)
So I was wrong about that. However, I was right in a way too. Perhaps "difficulty" was not the best word, but it does become "harder" in a very real sense to mine Bitcoins over time, because fewer can be mined per 10-minute time period. Yes, it is a frequency limit, but yes, that limit also DECREASES WITH TOTAL TIME, not just frequency. So it is genuinely "harder" in the sense that fewer can be mined in a given period, so any given individual will be less likely to successfully mine a Bitcoin during that period. So not "difficulty" in the sense of computing time, strictly speaking. But "difficulty" in the sense that your statistical chances of being successful in any one period goes down. It will take more time, on average, to mine a Bitcoin, but not computing time, per se. That was where I went astray. To quote Wikipedia [emphasis added]:
"The number of newly created bitcoins per period depends on how long the network has been running. Currently, 25 new bitcoins are generated with every 10-minute block. This will be halved to 12.5 BTC during the year 2017 and halved continuously every 4 years after until a hard limit of 21 million bitcoins is reached during the year 2140."
So I was correct in the sense that the rate of Bitcoin mining does go down with time not just, as you assert, with frequency. Lower rate = "difficulty" in the sense that on average it will take any given Bitcoin miner longer to mine a Bitcoin.
"Perhaps you could hack the hashing algorithm through a really devoted mathematical attack. ... Since you are all hung up on that difficulty word, there is one possible attack that could function as a real denial of service attack:"
You are getting way off base here about "attacking" and "hacking" the algorithm, since I did not mention anything even remotely like that at all. And you are also off base with that opinion about DDOS, because it's just wrong. Anybody on the Internet can be DDOSed, and it has absolutely nothing directly to do with Bitcoin. But it sure as hell would bring any Bitcoin mining operation to its knees, for the period of the attack.
If you knew someone was mining Bitcoins, you sure as hell could DDOS them, without doing anything at all that had to do with the Bitcoin algorithm itself. Either you grossly misunderstood me, or (I think more likely), you are suffering from "security blindness": so caught up in the security of the algorithm that you don't see the obvious vulnerabilities that lie all around but outside of it.
"It's not by mistake, it's by necessity."
This would all be true ONLY if the copyright trolls could not name hundreds to thousands of Does in a single lawsuit.
Granted, judges have become increasingly wary of this tactic. Nevertheless, they never should have allowed the joining of the suits anyway. There really isn't any legal basis for it. There is one half-assed theory they have pushed for justification, but that's all it is: half-assed.
Smellovision is over 50 years old, and people almost universally hated it.
s/thing/think
But I really have seen it lots of times: football player, or rich kid, or whatever, has women swooning all over him so he can act like an asshole and often get away with it. Both parties are at fault. Him for acting that way, her for putting up with it. What is this, the 50s?
"All those guys who you think are assholes for not treating a girl the way you would? They're treating a girl like the girl is an EQUAL, not some sort of rare, fragile flower that will die the instant you disagree with it."
I do agree with the rare flower bit. But no. While some people do confuse the doormat thing, I don't thing GP did.
Most of those guys you think treat girls like assholes, are assholes. You can blame the girl for falling for that crap.
"If you're suggesting there's no escape from the friend zone, there is. The secret is cold-turkey no-contact for a while (I haven't dialed in the exact timespan, but I've confirmed 1 year separation can do it), and improving your life in some way during that time (status based like better job, higher income, new car, but anything with growth helps like learning a new language, travelling, volunteering)."
Dude, if she's dating you because you're making more money, or because you've changed in other "keeping up with the Joneses" ways, you're doing it wrong.
Welcome to the wonderful world of bad marriages.
I have no doubt of it.
"Viewership numbers of Fox News vs. those of MSNBC? False equivalence much?"
Non-sequitur much?
Nothing I stated about either of them has anything even remotely related to readership level. Not one iota.
"Also, your "I know a lot of..." still isn't data."
No shit, Sherlock. I wrote as much myself.
"Put up real numbers or STFU."
How about just FU.
"As a Canadian, I can already tell where you liveâ"in the prairies, across the border from Alberta or possibly Saskatchewan."
That's not an unreasonable guess.
"Reliability is easy at very small scale - just run a single server with some OS that doesn't need regular reboots. But the cost per user is remarkably high, in comparison."
That may be true but it has nothing to do with my point. My point was: until the reliability is up to what I consider to be a reasonable level (and I consider reasonable to be the same as the services that I currently use), then I'm not putting my important business "in the cloud".
It may be that kind of reliability in "the cloud" is prohibitively expensive or difficult right now. I don't care. Unreliable is unreliable.
"Yes of course it's true. Even if your currency is physical gold coins, there are still going to be checking accounts (though maybe we wouldn't need those for bitcoins), there are still going to be savings accounts and CDs, there are still going to be mortgages, there are still going to be insurance policies, and the money supply will still be many times the amount represented by physical currency. It just doesn't matter (in terms of money supply) how you limit or back or base the physical currency."
You have completely missed the point. Which is that with a hard standard (like gold) you can't make the money supply independent of the currency.
For example: banks were required to maintain a 40% gold reserve in relation to their deposits. (Still "fractional reserve", but far, far less than say, 2008).
With a hard standard, there are just so many dollars that can be in circulation. Period. You can bend the rules a bit (fractional reserve, etc.) but if you try to break them you're SOL.
That's WHY the gold standard was dumped in the first place. The government wanted to circulate more money, but it didn't have the gold to do it.
But imagine how much it would have changed if it had been floating like today.
Yep. Got me. I don't know how my memory changed it to "Yahoo" but there it is.
"The algorithm for increasing (or decreasing.... it does happen) difficulty is based upon the frequency of work units being process, where processing more work units in a given period of time will send the difficulty factor up. "
Haha. No it's not. It's based on the total number of bitcoins mined.
What you're referring to are the built-in protections against malicious attacks, which are not the same thing AT ALL.
True, only so many bitcoins can be mined at once, but that's not part of its valuation system. That's just to prevent things like DDOS. The "eventually" I was referring to was the limits on the difficulty, not the simultaneous amount, of Bitcoin mining.
"I love these statements. Are these "happen to know" sources you can quote?"
No, because I am not going to give out hints about where I live.
/. said MSNBC news was far worse than Fox for giving opinion as opposed to real news. And CNN wasn't a whole lot better. (Though CNN was better than Fox, and both were far better than MSNBC.)
And get off this "Fox News" shit. I don't watch Fox News. By the way, not that it matters to me much, but you might want to know: a recent Pew study (about as reliable source as you can get) which was mentioned here on
So if you really wanted to insult somebody, you should accuse them of watching MSNBC, not Fox news.
"Being at a prestigious medical university hospital close to the boarder in the US"
Ah... I see. So you claim your "anecdotes" are somehow (without any evidence) "better" than mine. Hahahahahaha.
I admit that I did not offer any evidence, and I'm not going to, because I have no desire for people to know where I live. But your argument is the funniest thing I've seen in at least a few days.
"f by "reliable" you mean "no failures for any users anywhere" then sure. If your service has 300 million users, you're going to have downtime for some of them more frequently than if you have 300 users."
No. By "reliable" I mean "not being down in any given year, for any length of time, for any significant percentage of your user base".
And EVERY major cloud service so far has failed that standard. Every one that I know of: Microsoft Azure, iCloud (which is based on Azure), AWS, Google Apps, Gmail... the list goes on.
"Don't lie. See F.D.R.'s executive order 6102. "
Haha. That says exactly what I wrote: it prohibits private possession of gold money, and gold certificates. (In case you didn't know, bullion was used as money. High-value money, but money nevertheless. Bullion is processed bars, not the same as bulk, raw gold.) The WHOLE POINT of his action was to prevent people from trading in gold as money.
But gold itself, in jewelry and collectors' items, was NOT prohibited to own. I did not at any time say people could own any gold for any reason. It was gold coin, ingots (bullion) and other forms of gold money, other than collector's items, that was confiscated. (Please don't argue with me that it wasn't confiscation; it sure as hell was. People were compensated, but the gold was still confiscated. Payment for it doesn't change that.)
"Not really. Yes by canceling the agreement Nixon ensured that the dollars that were loaned to the US would be paid back with ones worth less but those obligations were denominated in US dollars, not gold so we didn't default."
Hahaha! That's the kind of distorted logic that I expect from Government economists.
Listen up: dollars were worth a certain amount of GOLD according to the Bretton Woods system. And most signatory countries still used gold as the standard against which dollars were measured.
When Nixon removed Bretton Woods, he also devalued the dollar against gold. So as far as EVERYBODY ELSE was concerned, that dollar was worth A LOT less than before, so yes we sure as hell did rip them off.
From OUR standpoint, we didn't default, because we still paid in dollars. But that's laughable self-deception. Because the true VALUE of a thing is what it can be traded for, and almost instantly the dollar had lost a shitload of VALUE to everybody else.
If I signed a contract with you, saying you would pay me in certificates that were valued in new Ferraris, then later, without my consent, you changed your mind and tried to pay me in certificates valued in the same number of Volkswagens instead, you would be ripping me off. Even though you paid me with the same number of certificates. From my point of view (and for that matter, any rational point of view), you'd be defaulting on your obligation.
This ain't exactly rocket science. You can argue semantics all you want, but the objective reality is that the U.S. defaulted on debt.