It really isn't going to surprise that this technology destabilizes civil society more than it promotes it.
If a significant portion of the country's population is earning BTC and spending BTC, the government will be forced to abandon existing (progressive) taxation (because nobody is earning any money) and switch to... to what? Taxing everyone equally, in BTC? The poor won't be able to pay; the rich will not notice. What is the solution?
Enforcement of reporting of BTC assets is theoretically possible, but not likely. One can have wallets anywhere outside of the country, or inside, but connect through a VPN. There is no realiable way to prove what you have in BTC. Without ability to tax people the government will fall - and it will be most obvious to people as public services die down, and your medical insurance, and your protection from aggressive neighbors...
But what if all citizens of the country suddenly become honest? That's from the category "... and then a miracle happens." People will simply declare some petty income, while their real earnings may never even be physically within the country. If BTC is widely adopted, all governments will have to either make some draconian laws about what you can and cannot do on the Internet, or they die. What, in your opinion, will they pick?:-)
And most people find gold beautiful, whereas it takes a peculiar mind to appreciate prime numbers...
A piece of gold is yours. If you have it, others do not have it. You can make it into a ring and wear on your hand. You can exchange that ring for something else because that's the only way for another person to get it - and then you don't own it anymore.
A prime number cannot be yours alone, as it is infinitely copyable. I do not need to even talk to you if I want to appreciate a prime number that you happen to have. I can get my own, the same or different (there is no way to know.) You cannot sell me your number even if I find it beautiful (which I do not.)
What is common for BTC and gold is that they are primarily money - tokens that are made for convenience of trading that are universally accepted as such. Gold is also useful in jewelry and in dental crowns; paper bills can be used to burn in your stove; sea shells can be milled into a fertilizer for your garden; shark teeth can be used to make a primitive knife or a club.
The fact that BTC is utterly useless as a good is not really a big deal. Paper money is not very valuable, really, outside of it being money. IMO, BTC is mired in a sea of other problems, starting with early adopter's advantage, then with secrecy of its creation and administration, then with builtin deflation, then with BTC being used as an object of speculation, then with BTC network wanting money for payments, then with mining being impossible for common folks, then with the network being ill-suited for modern business transactions, and so on. These are far more serious issues, and they *will* bring BTC down. It may remain an obscure cryptocurrency for a few enthusiasts, but there is no good reason why it should be adopted by the rest of humanity.
You think BTC will protect you from the crash of USD? Did gold protect you in 1933? Imagine that the USD crashed, and bread is sold for $1M per loaf. How will you be able to sell your 1 BTC for USD one billion? It would be illegal to do inside the country, and it would be impossible to do outside (due to lack of USD, which is likely to be dropped on the floor and Amero printed within the USA.) And how will you, pray tell, import that $1B even if an exchange in Japan has it for you? Through a tunnel under the MX border? It would be foolish to think that the government will not make sure that you do just what they want you to do.
Whether it trades at $600 or $1200 today, a pair of trading partners in different countries can save a fucking fortune (in bank fees, not taxes) by buying BTC, denominating the trade in BTC, and converting back to the local currency.
According to Mt. Gox fee schedule, each conversion will cost you 0.60% (under 100 BTC.) Then two conversions (say, USD to BTC to USD) will cost you 1.20%. A wire transfer through a US bank costs $40 (a fixed fee) and you can transfer as much as you need. Let's say 1 BTC = USD 1000, and you want to send 100 BTC. Then the bank fees will be 40/100000 = 0.04%. The Bitcoin method is 30 times as expensive!
If you transfer less money, at some point BTC method and the bank method will be equally expensive. (Obviously, 40/x = 1.2%, and then x=40/0.012 = USD 3333.) Below that sum you will be better off using BTC; above that you will want to use your bank.
This is either uninformed, or - more likely - FUD. In any case it is entirely false.
This is something you have to debate at bitcointalk.org, per the link that I provided, directly with people who made those statements. I only read them.
But my personal experience is not favorable. I obtained some time ago a fraction of a BTC for playing with the software. I cannot transfer it anywhere because the sum is too small, and if I pay the transfer fee it will amount to the entire sum that I want to transfer (so nothing will arrive at the destination.) This is not a usable feature of money. This is more typical for an investment instrument.
To compare, regular cash has no payment fees, can be paid in the minimum denomination, and the payment is instant. I do not need to wait 30 minutes to an hour for my c/c payment to go through. I understand that BTC is operating on a different principle; but it does not make that principle more convenient than centralized banking and centralized payment processors. As a customer, I do not want to care for millions of nodes that must see my transaction. As a customer, I want the full attention of the payment system. Additionally, I do not want to share the details of my payment with the entire world.
The fact that they never did makes them at least as trustworthy as any democratically elected government
Unfortunately, people, companies, and governments change over time. You cannot trust any of them, long term. Even if you are looking at a very short term, you still can be screwed. A person may lose all his money overnight and become unable to pay you; a company may bet on a wrong horse, and one fine morning a competitor releases a product that turns the company into a history record. A government can be elected and turn on a dime.
What you need to look for is braking forces. What stops a man from declaring a bankruptcy? Very little; he only loses his pride and some of his credit rating. What stops a company from stopping outgoing payments? The company may be seriously damaged, or destroyed - but the owners will be just fine. What stops the government from devaluing the currency? The inevitable prospect of massive riots, loss of control, and ultimately of defenestration of the minister of finances. The latter is a serious counterbalance to frivolous ideas of playing with nation's money. But a BTC exchange risks nothing - a new one can be put up in a day, by the same people.
There is also a question of competence. Bankers generally get good financial education, and get trained at their job, so that they are not as likely to sign up for an obvious fraud. (That still happens, banks are first in every bubble.) However how competent are BTC exchange operators? Where do they store the money until the transaction clears? How secure is that deposit? Is it sufficiently insured? Is the whole exchange backed up, and geographically distributed, to ensure nonstop operation, or at least atomic transactions? There are many questions, and BTC exchanges are known to manipulate availability of exchanging BTC into cash as it suits the current moment.
You have to trust some exchange. Otherwise where are you going to get your BTC, and how are you going to spend it? Mining today is not for common people. On the spending side, there are a few businesses that take BTC - but they rarely sell what you need (usually it's services that cost very little to provide, like hosting.)
Trusting the exchange means that you need to send your country's currency to a faraway country. The exchange there operates without any oversight, and it is only due to goodness of their heart that they send some BTC into your wallet. The same happens in the opposite direction: you send them your BTC, and in return, at some later time (soon or not so soon) they will send you the national currency - that you may have to explain to your country's tax authorities.
The exchanges are not immune from more common financial difficulties - here is one story as an example. Exchanges are not insured, and they can crash and burn at any time. Sending money to them always carries a high risk of never seeing the money again. This is far less of a concern with a bank, where you have a contract and where your money's path is traceable.
Note that both conversions (to and from BTC) cost you money; and the BTC transfers themselves also cost money. BTC was always claiming that fees are optional and symbolic, but none of that appears to be true today, as mining turned into a for-profit business with hefty investments and running expenses. In the end, the service (BTC or bank) will cost you something because the work has to be done, somewhere and by someone, and the BTC not a network of close friends anymore. People are in it for money, and guess whose pockets that money is supposed to come from?
I can see it finding a niche as a payment service for those distrustful of conventional finance. That's quite a lot of people right now.
I understand that there are people (not too many, but some) that do not trust US banks, or Federal Reserve, or the US Government. However what in the world would make them trust Mt. Gox instead?
That is very true. A wise speculator can make money on any asset, as long as the asset's price is moving. It was tulip bulbs, and it was shares, and it was metals, and it was houses... and now it is just long numbers.
It's just important to note that being money and being an object of speculation are two goals that are diametrically opposite. So far BTC is an excellent object of speculation - and the better it becomes at that, the less attractive it becomes as money. The BTC picked the speculation route, and as result it is now a bubble. "Buy now, the prices are guaranteed to grow into millions per coin, the prococol is designed for that!"
The idea behind it was that humans are bad at remembering very specific facts but are very good at remembering stories - narratives
As long as you don't require accuracy of facts that build up that story. In this proof the storytellers are very much unsure what happened, and to who.
It may be that an attacker, with the story researched and printed, will pass this authentication easier than the legitimate user who made no such preparations.
How can you know that the "investigation" they do into your facebook profile is actually on the right person?
Does that matter to HR? They have no engineering deadlines to meet, and no products to deliver to the customer. In a large company (where HR is most likely to be a significant group) HR would be well insulated from financial results of the business. Nobody is going to double-check resumes that they threw away.
he can probably transfer the money to separate exchanges and no one is the wiser that $BIG_CORP just sent him $100K.
The USD works much better: the $bigCorp simply gives him a briefcase that is full of cash. Here is an example. The advantage is that the cash is untraceable. Say, the politician got 100 BTC. How can he exchange them to USD without going through regular banks? I guess he could go to Japan and bring cash from there... which he can't do without declaring the money. A briefcase fixes this problem easily. A $bigCorp can always obtain cash within the country, and the transfer is not recorded on the Internet.
Now for a fact that hasn't been widely reported. Mr. Razgui was also transporting new, green reeds [artsjournal.com] for making flutes along with his finished flutes. There are not allowed into the country without a permit, and *should* have been destroyed.
They should have been quarantined, and the traveler should have been asked what to do - to destroy, to keep until he returns, to fumigate, or whatever else. Only destruction is a free option. But how can one destroy things that one does not own? What kind of loss can that cause? What if those reeds were containing a cure from $deadly_disease, and the scientist who collected them simply did not know of the rules? What if that scientist risked his life to get them, and got malaria, and was delivered to the USA barely alive, being unable to fill customs forms? All kinds of scenarios are possible; and what had, in fact, happened is one of those "not very welcome" scenarios, where valuable items were destroyed by JBTs simply because the customs officers had neither the duty to care, nor the desire to help a fellow human.
Those are good points... but they are relevant only to a tiny majority of the population. I, personally, don't need any of those advantages. I will even gladly pay for a wire transfer, getting in return the guarantee that the money undisputably ends up where it should.
Which proves, again, that BTC is an excellent currency for very, very few people. Sure, they can print and play with their own money, just as children play with toys, but none of that is of interest to a common man who has job to do and bills to pay and family to feed.
One should not underappreciate the work that bank does for you. It's not complex once you have it all set up; and your own BTC client is easy to use too, on your home desktop PC, once you have it configured and it is synchronized to the blockchain. But how many people on this planet can install a BTC client (correctly)? People are not interested in doing IT research and troubleshooting whenever they need to buy a newspaper. At this point BTC is so complicated that it is available only to geeks. A common man cannot accept anything that is more complex than a piece of paper (cash) or a piece of metal (coin) or a piece of plastic (card.)
And, as events in Cyprus so demonstrated, not have to worry about my account being suddenly frozen because some supernational institution is pondering whether it'll confiscate it for reasons that have nothing to do with me.
This is also a valid concern, but it flies above the heads of most people today. It is awfully difficult to become immune to a massive financial crash. There is no silver bullet. BTC may be one of many possibilities; a far better option would be simply to keep foreign currency that is expected to be more stable; or metals; or goods. It's risky to bet on BTC because it is a very fair weather currency, as of now. It depends on reliable power and Internet, but most importantly it depends on buyers and sellers. You cannot eat fiat money, which BTC is. You always have to exchange it for goods that you need. This means that your reserve currency should be very liquid. BTC is not liquid at all - I cannot go to the corner store and exchange 1 mBTC for a can of Coca-Cola. The largest exchange is in Japan. You can be a millionaire in virtual cash, but still you may be unable to pay your rent.
But if you find a place to exchange BTC for something else, what will the exchange rate be? Note that BTC is not backed by any contracts, loans, futures, etc. - its value is 100% speculative. If Bill sells his 1M BTC to Joe for $1B, that's the price of BTC today. Joe can even do better - he can sell the same 1M BTC back to Bill for the same $1B (so no real USD is required!) - imagine what that will do to the puny BTC market. All this means that when you are in need of selling your BTC, the price, being a lightweight, will become very uninteresting for the seller. This problem is not unique to BTC; however larger, established currencies are better protected from such manipulation. Still, I wouldn't recommend to buy gold as your TEOTWAWKI money. Lead will be far more valuable, followed by brass.
Given the choice between cypherpunks and central bankers - well, we gave the central bankers a chance and look what they've done. I'll take the loons who are always going on about freedom and privacy over the Jamie Diamonds any day.
Nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is - a real person, or an alias of a person, or a large group. It would be very reckless to give "them" keys to the kingdom without checking.
Besides, central bankers are not that personally rich. The list of richest people on the planet is regularly published, but on top of it are people like Bill Gates and Arab sheiks - not the bankers. Central banks are usually owned by the state. The share of BTC that is owned by early adopters (or founders?) is considerable; and it was mined nearly for free. Those guys are smart and all, sure, but I don't think they deserve even 1% of the planet's wealth for their little project. IMO, nobody deserves such extraordinary payment for inventing a new way to exchange goods.
As it always happens, the only sure winners from a gold rush are sellers of shovels. In this case, plenty of money was made by ASIC miner manufacturers, and by utilities. Everyone else has to fight for survival.
Is it really a failure of one currency if it only fills in a niche?
BTC does not fill any niche. What is it that BTC allows me to do that I cannot do through the bank, using any currency of my choice?
On the other hand, the bank offers me features that BTC does not have. I do not need to worry about the mechanics of inter-bank transfer. I do not need to carry a computer and a BTC wallet with me; a simple number on a plastic card will do. If I lose that number, I am insured against the loss. If a merchant lies to me I can have the payment reversed. If I use the card I get some money back (as opposed to paying for BTC transactions.) There is no reason at all to own BTC - not even a weak one. There is absolutely no upside.
But what about TEOTWAWKI, you say? Well, the USD and many other paper currencies will likely crash. Or not. But BTC will certainly be of no use because BTC requires Internet, stable power, miners - all those are attributes of a wealthy, stable and safe society. So after TEOTWAWKI you can't use BTC either.
I think bitcoin works pretty well overall and fills in a real gap between cash and traditional bank mediated transactions.
It needs to become less speculative and more stable to be a true alternative.
It cannot become more stable. The supplies of BTC are limited by design. As BTC is used more and more in the world trade, each BTC keeps increasing in price. This is on top of the built-in deflation in a market of fixed size. This is why it cannot be used as money. Nobody wants to part with something that becomes more expensive as you hold it. There is an awful amount of USD in circulation, and only 21 million BTC. If you replace all USD with BTC, each BTC would cost a million dollars, and you'd run out of divisibility of BTC, and the "small" payment fee would be unaffordable. Also, BTW, early adopters would own half of he planet's wealth.
If somebody doesn't like you because you're doing something that isn't actually wrong, that's *THEIR* problem, not yours, and although they might try to make it yours
People are quick to jump to conclusions. It will be, actually, my fault if I am careless with images that they see. Humans are not computers; humans gladly operate on fuzzy data, and they substitute missing information with their own understanding - which may be right or wrong. A neighbor can remain your friend, but you also have to work toward that. You help him, he helps you. Limiting access to information that can hurt him is a good deed. It is customary to put warnings like NSFW or "graphic photo" before the link. As one classic book says, "in much wisdom there is much grief, and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain." We do not give an illustrated catalog of BDSM techniques to children. It will not occur to you to send a video of an Islamic beheading to a random friend. All that is information - and it can hurt.
they might try to make it yours if they decide to get physical with you over it
Going physical is not even necessary. I'd be unhappy if my neighbor starts silently hating me. Good luck talking him out of that. He won't listen to me, and the law does not help. If Shakespeare to be believed, people died from true information that was simply misunderstood. Too much knowledge is a pain indeed. I, personally, do not want to know more than necessary about others.
Razgui says he had made all of the instruments using hard-to-find reeds.
How does one compensate for a dozen of instruments that were hand-made by the player from rare materials? You can't go to the nearest store and rebuy the lost instruments. How long will it even take to make them again? Can the player even do it?
Worse still, will the Customs destroy a Stradivari violin just because old Antonio neglected to attach a US-approved sticker that lists all used woods and where they were finished?
The point I was trying to make is that my wife wouldn't worry
That is highly uncommon. You are lucky. Few families can claim that. In fact, I personally know exactly 0 families with such trust.
You don't need to forget a past mistake to move beyond it... in fact, forgetting mistakes only encourages their repetition.
When you regret a mistake you do not simply remember it as a special case; you form and remember a generic rule. For example, if you got nearly killed on a bike one night it'd be nearly pointless to memorize that specific occasion. It will not reoccur. Instead you tell yourself: do not ride a black bike at night in all black clothes. This is what is memorized.
On top of that, if you remember your mistake it's one thing. If other people remember your mistake it's another. Not everyone is kind; plenty of people will find it funny to recall, years after the fact, how you got nearly killed that night.
If outside circumstances have made it much more difficult because, say, they are being judged for getting drunk at the company christmas party, acting up, and getting fired, reducing the chances of finding new work anytime soon, that's unfortunate, but it's dick-all nothing compared to the shit that people without access to things like facebook have to deal with. In the time that I've typed this, alone, at least a dozen people have died from starvation
You are introducing unrelated events - unless you can show how one's drinking at a party causes hunger in Zair.
But yes, someone drinking at a Christmas party can be denied employment. Wrongly denied, by the way, because he drank a soft drink; but the photo from GG did not come with a handy chemical analysis of the content. Do you want to be wrongly judged by strangers, without a chance for appeal?
You accuse me of living in fear, and yet it seems to be you who does.... fear of what your neighbor might think of you when they see you doing something they don't agree with.
That is true, but it's true because the neighbor (or the boss, or the HR person, etc.) does have certain power over me. I find it unwise to give them reasons to act against me, even if they are incorrectly reading the evidence. This is not the court of law, and if your neighbor sees you on someone's GG with *his* wife he may not think first that you were talking about the Bible. You'd get beaten up. You physically cannot be safe and secure in a society unless you make sure that not only you behave according to the norms of that society, but ALSO that you appear to behave according those norms. For that reason I do not fear my neighbor, but I am trying to ensure that the neighbor has no reason to become my enemy. Yes, it is possible to resolve the enmity were it to occur; but it's easier to prevent it.
Also, your last paragraph...dude, that is too much fantasy to process. A guy filming me with glass in a "less common viewpoint"? Should I be seeing guys appearing from under my crotch now?
Even that happens. I can offer you a personal anecdote. A bunch of girls, in dresses, were sitting on these benches at a school gym, across from us. It took only a moment of distracted attention to transform the "100% best" view into something else. That was quickly signaled across the gym, of course:-) Nobody was wearing GG, obviously, so this is just a verbal story, attached to no one in particular, and entirely harmless. But if GG were to be involved, those images could be quite unwanted. What, in your opinion, would be the chance that all boys who filmed the event would be wise enough to immediately delete the recording? Note: that age is the prime audience for GG.
I can't take your post seriously if the first thing you say about the device is "camera that streams data to the mothership". Get real now.
This is the intent of GG. What is the objection? Battery, storage and bandwidth limitations are mere technicalities that can be solved over time. For example, there is no limit on storage in the cell phone itself - you can get multi-GB SD cards right now. Battery demands are small if the camera is only streaming over BT to the phone. The phone then can upload the video as time and battery and bandwidth allow. Google does not necessarily want your records right away. An hour, or a day later is also OK. It's even possible to come home and upload all those recordings via tether to your PC, over USB or Wi-Fi. As you can see, those solutions exist even right now if you look for them.
And you didn't even challenge my point of the device needing some form of visible activation. If I see some guy touching buttons on his glass or saying "ok glass, record" then I'll have reasons to suspect.
I did not challenge that point because it is trivially defeated. The GG can be activated by a myriad of methods - by a timer, by an app on a cell phone, by a remote phone call, by head movement, by detection of something, by a different keyword, and, finally - in advance. You cannot have "obvious activation" as the only firewall that protects your privacy. Not unless that activation is absolutely, positively, impossible in any other way. Today's GG does not guarantee that - it's all software. Also, the current rev of GG does not even have a recording LED. It only highlights the screen... which means nothing, as there are many reasons to see the screen without recording.
Also, your last paragraph...dude, that is too much fantasy to process.
I simply cannot imagine anyone who looks their best 100% of the time. This is achievable only at fashion shows, where trained models have no other duties but to carefully walk back and forth for 60 seconds. Besides, the very definition of "best" depends on the audience.
What difference should the imperfection of human memory make? People not remembering that Joe did X does not mean that Joe never did X in reality.
I thought it's obvious. It does not matter if Joe did X in reality. All that matters for Joe's social life is what others think of Joe. The only exception is serious crimes. It is essential to forget because this allows people to begin each day anew, hoping to learn from mistakes of the past days, and expecting that eventually mistakes of those past days will be forgotten. No adult wants to be judged for something stupid that he did 40 years ago. A searchable, immortal computer will be incapable of forgetting.
If I were married, why would the fact that another girl who, as you put it, doesn't mind my company, be of any concern whatsoever to my wife?
Only your wife can answer that question. And she will, mark my words:-)
If I am doing something that I don't want others to know about, and I'm not saying that there aren't such things in my life, I do them in private.
It's really nice that some people have private parks, private landmarks, private beaches, private movie theaters, and many more such private things. Poor peons, however, have to share those facilities. There are about two things they can do in private - to study the Bible or to have sex. That'd be a rather abrupt transition from meeting someone in the street and saying "Hello."
Slashdot Mirror
It really isn't going to surprise that this technology destabilizes civil society more than it promotes it.
If a significant portion of the country's population is earning BTC and spending BTC, the government will be forced to abandon existing (progressive) taxation (because nobody is earning any money) and switch to ... to what? Taxing everyone equally, in BTC? The poor won't be able to pay; the rich will not notice. What is the solution?
Enforcement of reporting of BTC assets is theoretically possible, but not likely. One can have wallets anywhere outside of the country, or inside, but connect through a VPN. There is no realiable way to prove what you have in BTC. Without ability to tax people the government will fall - and it will be most obvious to people as public services die down, and your medical insurance, and your protection from aggressive neighbors...
But what if all citizens of the country suddenly become honest? That's from the category "... and then a miracle happens." People will simply declare some petty income, while their real earnings may never even be physically within the country. If BTC is widely adopted, all governments will have to either make some draconian laws about what you can and cannot do on the Internet, or they die. What, in your opinion, will they pick? :-)
And most people find gold beautiful, whereas it takes a peculiar mind to appreciate prime numbers...
A piece of gold is yours. If you have it, others do not have it. You can make it into a ring and wear on your hand. You can exchange that ring for something else because that's the only way for another person to get it - and then you don't own it anymore.
A prime number cannot be yours alone, as it is infinitely copyable. I do not need to even talk to you if I want to appreciate a prime number that you happen to have. I can get my own, the same or different (there is no way to know.) You cannot sell me your number even if I find it beautiful (which I do not.)
What is common for BTC and gold is that they are primarily money - tokens that are made for convenience of trading that are universally accepted as such. Gold is also useful in jewelry and in dental crowns; paper bills can be used to burn in your stove; sea shells can be milled into a fertilizer for your garden; shark teeth can be used to make a primitive knife or a club.
The fact that BTC is utterly useless as a good is not really a big deal. Paper money is not very valuable, really, outside of it being money. IMO, BTC is mired in a sea of other problems, starting with early adopter's advantage, then with secrecy of its creation and administration, then with builtin deflation, then with BTC being used as an object of speculation, then with BTC network wanting money for payments, then with mining being impossible for common folks, then with the network being ill-suited for modern business transactions, and so on. These are far more serious issues, and they *will* bring BTC down. It may remain an obscure cryptocurrency for a few enthusiasts, but there is no good reason why it should be adopted by the rest of humanity.
You think BTC will protect you from the crash of USD? Did gold protect you in 1933? Imagine that the USD crashed, and bread is sold for $1M per loaf. How will you be able to sell your 1 BTC for USD one billion? It would be illegal to do inside the country, and it would be impossible to do outside (due to lack of USD, which is likely to be dropped on the floor and Amero printed within the USA.) And how will you, pray tell, import that $1B even if an exchange in Japan has it for you? Through a tunnel under the MX border? It would be foolish to think that the government will not make sure that you do just what they want you to do.
Whether it trades at $600 or $1200 today, a pair of trading partners in different countries can save a fucking fortune (in bank fees, not taxes) by buying BTC, denominating the trade in BTC, and converting back to the local currency.
According to Mt. Gox fee schedule, each conversion will cost you 0.60% (under 100 BTC.) Then two conversions (say, USD to BTC to USD) will cost you 1.20%. A wire transfer through a US bank costs $40 (a fixed fee) and you can transfer as much as you need. Let's say 1 BTC = USD 1000, and you want to send 100 BTC. Then the bank fees will be 40/100000 = 0.04%. The Bitcoin method is 30 times as expensive!
If you transfer less money, at some point BTC method and the bank method will be equally expensive. (Obviously, 40/x = 1.2%, and then x=40/0.012 = USD 3333.) Below that sum you will be better off using BTC; above that you will want to use your bank.
This is either uninformed, or - more likely - FUD. In any case it is entirely false.
This is something you have to debate at bitcointalk.org, per the link that I provided, directly with people who made those statements. I only read them.
But my personal experience is not favorable. I obtained some time ago a fraction of a BTC for playing with the software. I cannot transfer it anywhere because the sum is too small, and if I pay the transfer fee it will amount to the entire sum that I want to transfer (so nothing will arrive at the destination.) This is not a usable feature of money. This is more typical for an investment instrument.
To compare, regular cash has no payment fees, can be paid in the minimum denomination, and the payment is instant. I do not need to wait 30 minutes to an hour for my c/c payment to go through. I understand that BTC is operating on a different principle; but it does not make that principle more convenient than centralized banking and centralized payment processors. As a customer, I do not want to care for millions of nodes that must see my transaction. As a customer, I want the full attention of the payment system. Additionally, I do not want to share the details of my payment with the entire world.
The fact that they never did makes them at least as trustworthy as any democratically elected government
Unfortunately, people, companies, and governments change over time. You cannot trust any of them, long term. Even if you are looking at a very short term, you still can be screwed. A person may lose all his money overnight and become unable to pay you; a company may bet on a wrong horse, and one fine morning a competitor releases a product that turns the company into a history record. A government can be elected and turn on a dime.
What you need to look for is braking forces. What stops a man from declaring a bankruptcy? Very little; he only loses his pride and some of his credit rating. What stops a company from stopping outgoing payments? The company may be seriously damaged, or destroyed - but the owners will be just fine. What stops the government from devaluing the currency? The inevitable prospect of massive riots, loss of control, and ultimately of defenestration of the minister of finances. The latter is a serious counterbalance to frivolous ideas of playing with nation's money. But a BTC exchange risks nothing - a new one can be put up in a day, by the same people.
There is also a question of competence. Bankers generally get good financial education, and get trained at their job, so that they are not as likely to sign up for an obvious fraud. (That still happens, banks are first in every bubble.) However how competent are BTC exchange operators? Where do they store the money until the transaction clears? How secure is that deposit? Is it sufficiently insured? Is the whole exchange backed up, and geographically distributed, to ensure nonstop operation, or at least atomic transactions? There are many questions, and BTC exchanges are known to manipulate availability of exchanging BTC into cash as it suits the current moment.
You have to trust some exchange. Otherwise where are you going to get your BTC, and how are you going to spend it? Mining today is not for common people. On the spending side, there are a few businesses that take BTC - but they rarely sell what you need (usually it's services that cost very little to provide, like hosting.)
Trusting the exchange means that you need to send your country's currency to a faraway country. The exchange there operates without any oversight, and it is only due to goodness of their heart that they send some BTC into your wallet. The same happens in the opposite direction: you send them your BTC, and in return, at some later time (soon or not so soon) they will send you the national currency - that you may have to explain to your country's tax authorities.
The exchanges are not immune from more common financial difficulties - here is one story as an example. Exchanges are not insured, and they can crash and burn at any time. Sending money to them always carries a high risk of never seeing the money again. This is far less of a concern with a bank, where you have a contract and where your money's path is traceable.
Note that both conversions (to and from BTC) cost you money; and the BTC transfers themselves also cost money. BTC was always claiming that fees are optional and symbolic, but none of that appears to be true today, as mining turned into a for-profit business with hefty investments and running expenses. In the end, the service (BTC or bank) will cost you something because the work has to be done, somewhere and by someone, and the BTC not a network of close friends anymore. People are in it for money, and guess whose pockets that money is supposed to come from?
I can see it finding a niche as a payment service for those distrustful of conventional finance. That's quite a lot of people right now.
I understand that there are people (not too many, but some) that do not trust US banks, or Federal Reserve, or the US Government. However what in the world would make them trust Mt. Gox instead?
That is very true. A wise speculator can make money on any asset, as long as the asset's price is moving. It was tulip bulbs, and it was shares, and it was metals, and it was houses... and now it is just long numbers.
It's just important to note that being money and being an object of speculation are two goals that are diametrically opposite. So far BTC is an excellent object of speculation - and the better it becomes at that, the less attractive it becomes as money. The BTC picked the speculation route, and as result it is now a bubble. "Buy now, the prices are guaranteed to grow into millions per coin, the prococol is designed for that!"
The idea behind it was that humans are bad at remembering very specific facts but are very good at remembering stories - narratives
As long as you don't require accuracy of facts that build up that story. In this proof the storytellers are very much unsure what happened, and to who.
It may be that an attacker, with the story researched and printed, will pass this authentication easier than the legitimate user who made no such preparations.
How can you know that the "investigation" they do into your facebook profile is actually on the right person?
Does that matter to HR? They have no engineering deadlines to meet, and no products to deliver to the customer. In a large company (where HR is most likely to be a significant group) HR would be well insulated from financial results of the business. Nobody is going to double-check resumes that they threw away.
If the USA is attacked, do you expect Taiwan to declare war on the attacker, or to send troops? If not, Taiwan is not an ally, but a protectorate.
John Cornyn who [...] voted in favor of notifying parents of minors who get out-of-state abortions
Aren't parents of minors somehow responsible for said minors? If they are, they should know what's happening.
he can probably transfer the money to separate exchanges and no one is the wiser that $BIG_CORP just sent him $100K.
The USD works much better: the $bigCorp simply gives him a briefcase that is full of cash. Here is an example. The advantage is that the cash is untraceable. Say, the politician got 100 BTC. How can he exchange them to USD without going through regular banks? I guess he could go to Japan and bring cash from there... which he can't do without declaring the money. A briefcase fixes this problem easily. A $bigCorp can always obtain cash within the country, and the transfer is not recorded on the Internet.
Now for a fact that hasn't been widely reported. Mr. Razgui was also transporting new, green reeds [artsjournal.com] for making flutes along with his finished flutes. There are not allowed into the country without a permit, and *should* have been destroyed.
They should have been quarantined, and the traveler should have been asked what to do - to destroy, to keep until he returns, to fumigate, or whatever else. Only destruction is a free option. But how can one destroy things that one does not own? What kind of loss can that cause? What if those reeds were containing a cure from $deadly_disease, and the scientist who collected them simply did not know of the rules? What if that scientist risked his life to get them, and got malaria, and was delivered to the USA barely alive, being unable to fill customs forms? All kinds of scenarios are possible; and what had, in fact, happened is one of those "not very welcome" scenarios, where valuable items were destroyed by JBTs simply because the customs officers had neither the duty to care, nor the desire to help a fellow human.
Those are good points... but they are relevant only to a tiny majority of the population. I, personally, don't need any of those advantages. I will even gladly pay for a wire transfer, getting in return the guarantee that the money undisputably ends up where it should.
Which proves, again, that BTC is an excellent currency for very, very few people. Sure, they can print and play with their own money, just as children play with toys, but none of that is of interest to a common man who has job to do and bills to pay and family to feed.
One should not underappreciate the work that bank does for you. It's not complex once you have it all set up; and your own BTC client is easy to use too, on your home desktop PC, once you have it configured and it is synchronized to the blockchain. But how many people on this planet can install a BTC client (correctly)? People are not interested in doing IT research and troubleshooting whenever they need to buy a newspaper. At this point BTC is so complicated that it is available only to geeks. A common man cannot accept anything that is more complex than a piece of paper (cash) or a piece of metal (coin) or a piece of plastic (card.)
And, as events in Cyprus so demonstrated, not have to worry about my account being suddenly frozen because some supernational institution is pondering whether it'll confiscate it for reasons that have nothing to do with me.
This is also a valid concern, but it flies above the heads of most people today. It is awfully difficult to become immune to a massive financial crash. There is no silver bullet. BTC may be one of many possibilities; a far better option would be simply to keep foreign currency that is expected to be more stable; or metals; or goods. It's risky to bet on BTC because it is a very fair weather currency, as of now. It depends on reliable power and Internet, but most importantly it depends on buyers and sellers. You cannot eat fiat money, which BTC is. You always have to exchange it for goods that you need. This means that your reserve currency should be very liquid. BTC is not liquid at all - I cannot go to the corner store and exchange 1 mBTC for a can of Coca-Cola. The largest exchange is in Japan. You can be a millionaire in virtual cash, but still you may be unable to pay your rent.
But if you find a place to exchange BTC for something else, what will the exchange rate be? Note that BTC is not backed by any contracts, loans, futures, etc. - its value is 100% speculative. If Bill sells his 1M BTC to Joe for $1B, that's the price of BTC today. Joe can even do better - he can sell the same 1M BTC back to Bill for the same $1B (so no real USD is required!) - imagine what that will do to the puny BTC market. All this means that when you are in need of selling your BTC, the price, being a lightweight, will become very uninteresting for the seller. This problem is not unique to BTC; however larger, established currencies are better protected from such manipulation. Still, I wouldn't recommend to buy gold as your TEOTWAWKI money. Lead will be far more valuable, followed by brass.
Given the choice between cypherpunks and central bankers - well, we gave the central bankers a chance and look what they've done. I'll take the loons who are always going on about freedom and privacy over the Jamie Diamonds any day.
Nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is - a real person, or an alias of a person, or a large group. It would be very reckless to give "them" keys to the kingdom without checking.
Besides, central bankers are not that personally rich. The list of richest people on the planet is regularly published, but on top of it are people like Bill Gates and Arab sheiks - not the bankers. Central banks are usually owned by the state. The share of BTC that is owned by early adopters (or founders?) is considerable; and it was mined nearly for free. Those guys are smart and all, sure, but I don't think they deserve even 1% of the planet's wealth for their little project. IMO, nobody deserves such extraordinary payment for inventing a new way to exchange goods.
As it always happens, the only sure winners from a gold rush are sellers of shovels. In this case, plenty of money was made by ASIC miner manufacturers, and by utilities. Everyone else has to fight for survival.
Is it really a failure of one currency if it only fills in a niche?
BTC does not fill any niche. What is it that BTC allows me to do that I cannot do through the bank, using any currency of my choice?
On the other hand, the bank offers me features that BTC does not have. I do not need to worry about the mechanics of inter-bank transfer. I do not need to carry a computer and a BTC wallet with me; a simple number on a plastic card will do. If I lose that number, I am insured against the loss. If a merchant lies to me I can have the payment reversed. If I use the card I get some money back (as opposed to paying for BTC transactions.) There is no reason at all to own BTC - not even a weak one. There is absolutely no upside.
But what about TEOTWAWKI, you say? Well, the USD and many other paper currencies will likely crash. Or not. But BTC will certainly be of no use because BTC requires Internet, stable power, miners - all those are attributes of a wealthy, stable and safe society. So after TEOTWAWKI you can't use BTC either.
I think bitcoin works pretty well overall and fills in a real gap between cash and traditional bank mediated transactions.
I am not sure what gap is that.
It needs to become less speculative and more stable to be a true alternative.
It cannot become more stable. The supplies of BTC are limited by design. As BTC is used more and more in the world trade, each BTC keeps increasing in price. This is on top of the built-in deflation in a market of fixed size. This is why it cannot be used as money. Nobody wants to part with something that becomes more expensive as you hold it. There is an awful amount of USD in circulation, and only 21 million BTC. If you replace all USD with BTC, each BTC would cost a million dollars, and you'd run out of divisibility of BTC, and the "small" payment fee would be unaffordable. Also, BTW, early adopters would own half of he planet's wealth.
If somebody doesn't like you because you're doing something that isn't actually wrong, that's *THEIR* problem, not yours, and although they might try to make it yours
People are quick to jump to conclusions. It will be, actually, my fault if I am careless with images that they see. Humans are not computers; humans gladly operate on fuzzy data, and they substitute missing information with their own understanding - which may be right or wrong. A neighbor can remain your friend, but you also have to work toward that. You help him, he helps you. Limiting access to information that can hurt him is a good deed. It is customary to put warnings like NSFW or "graphic photo" before the link. As one classic book says, "in much wisdom there is much grief, and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain." We do not give an illustrated catalog of BDSM techniques to children. It will not occur to you to send a video of an Islamic beheading to a random friend. All that is information - and it can hurt.
they might try to make it yours if they decide to get physical with you over it
Going physical is not even necessary. I'd be unhappy if my neighbor starts silently hating me. Good luck talking him out of that. He won't listen to me, and the law does not help. If Shakespeare to be believed, people died from true information that was simply misunderstood. Too much knowledge is a pain indeed. I, personally, do not want to know more than necessary about others.
Razgui says he had made all of the instruments using hard-to-find reeds.
How does one compensate for a dozen of instruments that were hand-made by the player from rare materials? You can't go to the nearest store and rebuy the lost instruments. How long will it even take to make them again? Can the player even do it?
Worse still, will the Customs destroy a Stradivari violin just because old Antonio neglected to attach a US-approved sticker that lists all used woods and where they were finished?
The point I was trying to make is that my wife wouldn't worry
That is highly uncommon. You are lucky. Few families can claim that. In fact, I personally know exactly 0 families with such trust.
You don't need to forget a past mistake to move beyond it... in fact, forgetting mistakes only encourages their repetition.
When you regret a mistake you do not simply remember it as a special case; you form and remember a generic rule. For example, if you got nearly killed on a bike one night it'd be nearly pointless to memorize that specific occasion. It will not reoccur. Instead you tell yourself: do not ride a black bike at night in all black clothes. This is what is memorized.
On top of that, if you remember your mistake it's one thing. If other people remember your mistake it's another. Not everyone is kind; plenty of people will find it funny to recall, years after the fact, how you got nearly killed that night.
If outside circumstances have made it much more difficult because, say, they are being judged for getting drunk at the company christmas party, acting up, and getting fired, reducing the chances of finding new work anytime soon, that's unfortunate, but it's dick-all nothing compared to the shit that people without access to things like facebook have to deal with. In the time that I've typed this, alone, at least a dozen people have died from starvation
You are introducing unrelated events - unless you can show how one's drinking at a party causes hunger in Zair.
But yes, someone drinking at a Christmas party can be denied employment. Wrongly denied, by the way, because he drank a soft drink; but the photo from GG did not come with a handy chemical analysis of the content. Do you want to be wrongly judged by strangers, without a chance for appeal?
You accuse me of living in fear, and yet it seems to be you who does.... fear of what your neighbor might think of you when they see you doing something they don't agree with.
That is true, but it's true because the neighbor (or the boss, or the HR person, etc.) does have certain power over me. I find it unwise to give them reasons to act against me, even if they are incorrectly reading the evidence. This is not the court of law, and if your neighbor sees you on someone's GG with *his* wife he may not think first that you were talking about the Bible. You'd get beaten up. You physically cannot be safe and secure in a society unless you make sure that not only you behave according to the norms of that society, but ALSO that you appear to behave according those norms. For that reason I do not fear my neighbor, but I am trying to ensure that the neighbor has no reason to become my enemy. Yes, it is possible to resolve the enmity were it to occur; but it's easier to prevent it.
Also, your last paragraph...dude, that is too much fantasy to process. A guy filming me with glass in a "less common viewpoint"? Should I be seeing guys appearing from under my crotch now?
Even that happens. I can offer you a personal anecdote. A bunch of girls, in dresses, were sitting on these benches at a school gym, across from us. It took only a moment of distracted attention to transform the "100% best" view into something else. That was quickly signaled across the gym, of course :-) Nobody was wearing GG, obviously, so this is just a verbal story, attached to no one in particular, and entirely harmless. But if GG were to be involved, those images could be quite unwanted. What, in your opinion, would be the chance that all boys who filmed the event would be wise enough to immediately delete the recording? Note: that age is the prime audience for GG.
I can't take your post seriously if the first thing you say about the device is "camera that streams data to the mothership". Get real now.
This is the intent of GG. What is the objection? Battery, storage and bandwidth limitations are mere technicalities that can be solved over time. For example, there is no limit on storage in the cell phone itself - you can get multi-GB SD cards right now. Battery demands are small if the camera is only streaming over BT to the phone. The phone then can upload the video as time and battery and bandwidth allow. Google does not necessarily want your records right away. An hour, or a day later is also OK. It's even possible to come home and upload all those recordings via tether to your PC, over USB or Wi-Fi. As you can see, those solutions exist even right now if you look for them.
And you didn't even challenge my point of the device needing some form of visible activation. If I see some guy touching buttons on his glass or saying "ok glass, record" then I'll have reasons to suspect.
I did not challenge that point because it is trivially defeated. The GG can be activated by a myriad of methods - by a timer, by an app on a cell phone, by a remote phone call, by head movement, by detection of something, by a different keyword, and, finally - in advance. You cannot have "obvious activation" as the only firewall that protects your privacy. Not unless that activation is absolutely, positively, impossible in any other way. Today's GG does not guarantee that - it's all software. Also, the current rev of GG does not even have a recording LED. It only highlights the screen... which means nothing, as there are many reasons to see the screen without recording.
Also, your last paragraph...dude, that is too much fantasy to process.
I simply cannot imagine anyone who looks their best 100% of the time. This is achievable only at fashion shows, where trained models have no other duties but to carefully walk back and forth for 60 seconds. Besides, the very definition of "best" depends on the audience.
What difference should the imperfection of human memory make? People not remembering that Joe did X does not mean that Joe never did X in reality.
I thought it's obvious. It does not matter if Joe did X in reality. All that matters for Joe's social life is what others think of Joe. The only exception is serious crimes. It is essential to forget because this allows people to begin each day anew, hoping to learn from mistakes of the past days, and expecting that eventually mistakes of those past days will be forgotten. No adult wants to be judged for something stupid that he did 40 years ago. A searchable, immortal computer will be incapable of forgetting.
If I were married, why would the fact that another girl who, as you put it, doesn't mind my company, be of any concern whatsoever to my wife?
Only your wife can answer that question. And she will, mark my words :-)
If I am doing something that I don't want others to know about, and I'm not saying that there aren't such things in my life, I do them in private.
It's really nice that some people have private parks, private landmarks, private beaches, private movie theaters, and many more such private things. Poor peons, however, have to share those facilities. There are about two things they can do in private - to study the Bible or to have sex. That'd be a rather abrupt transition from meeting someone in the street and saying "Hello."