Only problem here is that at least so far as Bitcoin is concerned, a Bitcoin is NOT a store of the energy it took to produce it. Oops. It's like expending effort to play a video game... all you are doing is adding to the entropy of the universe, that doesn't mean that your effort is worth anything down the line to other people.
Try it and see how far you get. It isn't the same thing at all. Stocks have an intrinsic value in the underlying company's economic output, revenue, growth, and profit margins. If a stock is fairly valued and some idiot wants to waste a few million dollars trying to push it down, all that person is doing is giving real investors an opportunity to buy the stock at a discount.
Bitcoin has nothing at all backing it. If someone wants to push the price down the action is merely subject to trader's whims, which means that the price can settle anywhere. There is no 'cheap' for a Bitcoin.
Are you joking? Is that supposed to be a joke? You think that explosive growth in commerce using a 'currency' which can't be expanded to fit that growth leads to stability?
Your comment regarding the USD indicates just how ignorant you are about what a currency is supposed to accomplish. If I sell something and get paid in dollars then I can be fairly well assured that as a store of value, those dollars will be quite stable for the few months they remain dollars, before they get invested (or spent) somewhere else. That's the purpose of a currency.
Currencies are not supposed to be used to store value in the long-term, let alone for 100 years. Why should you be rewarded for letting your cash rot verses someone else who invests it or cycles it back into the economy instead?
Now lets see how Bitcoin stacks up. A virtual commodity that isn't a currency, highly unstable with no stabilizing factors, can't be used to store wealth for even a few seconds without potentially losing its value. Deflationary and thus subject to hording and the fate of all other private currencies in history (that is, complete failure).
Did I miss anything? Oh yah, the EUR/USD exchange rate... only problem there is that the US has not seen any significant inflation, meaning that goods and services cost about the same so why should I care what the exchange rate is? I'm not taking any vacations anytime soon. Besides, the ECB is printing almost as much as we are, they are simply disguising the printing as 'loans' which nobody actually believes will ever get paid back. Europe's economy is in a huge mess because of their attempt to hold the value of the Euro constant.
How is something like Bitcoin supposed to react to a major recession or depression? You do realize that the dollar's peg to gold lengthened the great depression, don't you? It wasn't a good thing, and neither is Bitcoin with its built-in deflation.
For currencies, the most important event right now is what the Japanese are doing. They are basically forcing a very fast devaluation of their currency to boost commerce and clean up their massive debt. Japanese with their money under a pillow or sitting in a bank account are getting screwed. Even there, a Japanese citizen could be invested in Japan's stock market to essentially become immune to the devaluation, if he or she desired.
Which leads to another point regarding currencies and governments fleecing their own citizens: There are plenty of ways to protect yourself from currency devaluation already. Bitcoin is *NOT* one of them.
The BTC market is so shallow that even small sales can drop the conversion price significantly. While watching the realtime last night I saw numerous single-transaction sales of less than 10BTC drop the conversion price by over 2%. In one transaction.
I saw all sorts of manipulation. It's totally obvious to anyone who actually has any real experience working markets. I saw bid probing (a HFT algorithm), bid-ask range clearing (to create areas of weakness that can cause step functions later on). Cycling to squeeze money out of unsuspecting investors (where BTC is sold almost at the market, forcing prices down, and then re-purchased using limit orders on the way back up). Front-running due to mtgox allowing too fine a fraction in bids and asks. Out of order transactions that were clearly delayed, sometimes off by several dollars verses where the market actually was.
All clearly computer driven or caused. And trivially accomplished, I might add, because there isn't even a fleeting intrinsic value to a bitcoin that makes any one conversion price more or less appropriate than any other. It can swing wildly in any direction for any reason.
And then I saw what were obviously ordinary investors doing tiny little transactions that looked like market orders, getting taken to the cleaners over and over again by the speculators.
Do people actually believe that their BTCs are worth what they pay for them? Honestly, how can anyone think this is viable? Tons of real money is clearly being squeezed out of the system, leaving less and less for the investors left behind... and people don't seem to understand just how fragile the conversion value they see quoted on their screen is.
I see absolutely nothing stabilizing Bitcoin. There are no stabilizing factors at all. Zero. Not the mining (the rate of BTC generation is just too small and is too disconnected from supply-demand), nothing to stop massive deflation were it to be adopted (which is extremely destabilizing to any economy), nothing to stop inflation brought about by value crashes (Fiat currencies at least have the fact that you have to pay taxes, meaning that ultimately you have to convert proceeds from your goods into the Fiat currency in order to pay those taxes). Nothing to control the velocity of money in the Bitcoin universe. Retail transactions are not stabilizing because there is no mandate to require BTC use. Bitcoin is worthless as a store of value.
Basically, Bitcoin is an out of control freight train doomed to massive instability until it eventually gets shut down or goes out of favor. It is a virtual commodity. It is NOT a currency or anything even remotely resembling a currency.
Interesting paper, but there won't be much visibility for the BTC held in Mtgox or other exchanges. Presumably they are not creating a new entry for each trade but instead just holding the bitcoins on the Mtgox servers. Only deposits or Withdrawals will record a new entry. I'm guessing here, someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Since the manipulation can just use the balance of BTC in the account, it would not be readily evident from the chains. That is, the number of BTC remains constant, but the manipulation drains dollars from the exchange. It is the dollars which are withdrawn, not the BTC.
From the looks of the volume it looks like a manipulative sale only requires 20K BTC or so. Maybe 35K BTC to the bottom after that, then tons of horizontal volume which gave the original seller plenty of time to buy it back at a lower price. So, $4.5M or so in sales, cause panic, then spend $3M buying it back for a profit of $1.5M or so, just off the cuff of my sleeve.
Also looking at the real time it only seems to take ~25-50 BTC (barely $8400) to seriously move the USD price. e.g. $172->$168 w/a 50 BTC sale, which amounts to a 2.3% move in BTC's value in a SINGLE transaction. That is extremely unstable and should scare anyone.
For that matter, there is no guarantee that BTC balances are being backed by actual BTC (though presumably people have enough trust in Mtgox and other exchanges that it isn't a big issue).
I shouldn't have to point out the obvious here, it will clearly fall on deaf ears considering the vast amounts of stupidity revealing themselves in postings on this topic. But hell, if it brings just one person to their senses I'll count it job well done.
First, nobody is forcing anyone to hold their savings in US Dollars. You can hold your savings in whatever form you want, it's called a BROKERAGE ACCOUNT. Buy a commodity-tracking ETF if you desire, and keep just enough dollars around to service your monthly needs. The dollar, after all, is very definitely stable in the short-term. One month isn't going to destroy its value. Realize, though, the price of everything in real terms fluctuates. Someone who bought gold at $1900 is sitting on a 15% loss of value in dollar terms right now, for example. Real commodities generally maintain their value over long periods of time. Are you worried about buy/sell fees? If you are, then you don't have enough savings to even be AFFECTED by inflation in the first place.
Second, Bitcoin isn't a currency. It's a commodity with a limited supply. Not only is it a commodity with a limited supply but it is a VIRTUAL commodity with a fixed supply. It isn't even real. It's not something you can touch. It doesn't even behave like a currency fod gods sakes! It may not be possible to counterfeit, but that doesn't stop anyone from creating their own virtual commodities and competing. In fact, there are MANY virtual currencies already in existance, primarily used in games, which are already far more stable than bitcoin.
Third, Bitcoin's 'value' is fleeting. It's like tulip-mania but worse. It's worse because the market is so shallow it is trivial (and obviously trivial) to manipulate. Heavy manipulation by people selling high slowly, causing a panic, and then buying low. Rinse and repeat.
I'm guessing that a large percentage of the exchange volume is from rinse and repeaters and very little is actual investment purchases or sales. It creates the illusion of decent volume when, in fact, there actually isn't any. Each time it cycles the manipulators are removing more real money from the system, leaving everyone else holding the bag.
Think about what this means, folks. It isn't rocket science. Whatever cash was injected into the system by real investors is being leeched away by the manipulators. There is LESS real original cash remaining, yet all the remaining real investors believe that a Bitcoin is worth at least as much as they originally paid for it, because they see that magic exchange value in $USD 'Oh look, 1BTC is worth $166 BTC!'. What these investors do not understand is that they cannot ALL get that price if they were to sell. They can't get it even if they all paid that price going in because the manipulators have already squeezed out a considerable amount of cash from the system.
The very definition of a Ponzi scheme. This will only end in tears.
On those Android phones which have user SD card slots, I wouldn't mind allowing the phone to page memory to the card at all if it saves on bandwidth. For internal flash... definitely not.
I already cycle about a gigabyte a day through my 16G microSD card just from DogCatcher. Another few hundred megabytes wouldn't make a dent and those cards are pretty cheap anyway.
However, allowing paging on any machine can lead to big trouble in the form of thrashing. It probably isn't reasonable to implement that sort of feature as a default on a consumer phone.
At least in the case of browsers the default memory limits can clearly be increased.
EYE-FI SD cards are cool, but storage capacities trail what you can get with a straight storage card. So for example you can get a 16G EYE-FI card, but a SanDisk Extreme SDXC card comes in capacities up to 128G.
EYE-FI has other problems, including fairly slow WIFI transfer speeds. WIFI tends to drop out unless you are transferring to a storage device on your belt, and a 4G hotspot setup doesn't work very well when you are taking RAWs. I would not rate EYE-FI as a professional-level product, frankly.
Sometimes quality and dependability trump convenience. My preference is to stick to normal storage cards and not have to worry about some WIFI snafu messing up my ability to take pictures. EYE-FI has its benefits, but it also has a lot of moving parts (software-wise).
Not unexpected, but its kinda hard to take candid photos from a hijacked camera when the lens cap is on. And those WIFI systems are not generally left on anyhow.
I don't understand why they used a 1Dx though, which would require an external WIFI adapter to even have a WIFI capability. I would be more interested in penetration testing something like the Canon 6D which has the WIFI built-in. I fully expect there to be holes, Canon's WIFI software has always been quite primitive and even the new stuff is still quite primitive.
But if we make enough noise and Canon will fix it in a software update.
Currently I only use the 6D's built-in WIFI to be able to review pictures in-camera from an android tablet... quite a useful feature. I'm not particularly worried about hijacking there since the Camera's WIFI transmitter has rather limited range. And most of the time the WIFI is turned off anyway since it eats the battery otherwise.
I do sometimes delete photos in-camera, usually three or four out of every 100 or so I take, but generally I recommend (and also for myself) NOT to delete photos in-camera because it's easy to miss things you might want to keep when you try to review pictures on such a small display.
But I've never had an issue with any of my Canon's corrupting the SD card.
Not exactly, Khashishi. Money is created multiple ways:
(1) The outstanding federal debt is created money. This created money is injected into society through federal spending (for example, through social security payments which do NOT impose a debt on the people receiving it).
(2) The interest the federal government pays on that debt is also created money, and also does not impose a debt on the people receiving it.
(3) Debt isn't always paid back. People, companies, even whole countries default on their debt all the time. That debt is wiped out, basically... for all intents and purposes the money is destroyed.
Most people make the basic mistake of assuming that the Federal Debt is, well, Debt. It actually isn't. It is created money. Interest on the federal debt can be paid simply by creating more debt. This 'federal debt' is a VERY different sort of debt then the debt held by a person, or corporation, or a country which does not have control over the currency the debt is denominated in (read: Euroland and most developing economies, except China).
Of course, when taken to extremes this will be extremely destabilizing because it will result in hyper-inflation (Argentina anyone?). However, it is a perfectly valid mechanism to use to control the money supply for a fiat currency. You add to the supply by creating Federal debt (deficit spending), and you remove from the supply through taxes (taxes in excess of spending).
People don't trust the government to operate their currency this way, I get that. But using any sort of limited commodity as a replacement simply won't work. Without any way to balance the currency against the size of the economy, you will get inflation or deflation depending on where the economy is going.
The problem is that any sort of economic hardship, such as a modest recession, can create a deflationary spiral due to such a currency. Because the currency is deflating and is worth more and more as time passes, it becomes worth more to horde it than to invest it. People begin to horde it 'as an investment'.
How many times have we heard that phrase on this board from people playing with bitcoins?
The amount of hording that occurs is totally out of the control of ANYONE (short of taking away the commodity, which governments HAVE DONE in the past, e.g. with gold). Hording begets more hording, creating a deflationary spiral where the currency's value in real goods increase until it can no longer be used as a currency. Then it becomes worthless. Not just a bubble and then a crash, but a bubble that bursts and leaves nothing but wasteland behind. This sort of cycle destroys nations.
If you understand this then you perhaps understand a little of what Bernanke is so afraid of. He's taking the pain he knows money creation can result in over the potential for a nation-destroying catastrophe. But if you don't like that... if you don't like what the Fed is doing, then you are barking up the wrong tree, because the Fed's money creation is NOTHING compared the the money creation being done through our trillion-dollar-a-year deficit spending. Blame congress, not the Fed.
The increasing value of the work product stored in a deflationary currency is precisely the problem. It's a problem because people then simply accumulate it and neither invest OR spend it. It does not generate any new economic activity.
Investing or spending your money, on the otherhand, is supportive of the economy. Spending increases economic activity and Investing enables it.
So a currency which is either stable or somewhat inflationary is better for the economic health of the nation than a currency which is deflationary. Basing an economy on a highly deflationary currency essentially results in stagnation.
Another way to think about it is to take the deflationary currency case to the extreme. If the currency's value seriously increases on an ongoing basis, you basically earn enough from just holding it to support your standard of living. That is, even though you don't get a dividend or interest, your cost of living in terms of the currency continues to go down and keeps pace with your dwindling cash pile. But this means that *nobody* would have to work, which is clearly not possible since obviously someone has to be a worker for the society to function. It is not a stable solution.
The result is that the deflationary currency puts the society in crisis. The people who remain who are still working stop accepting the currency (because nobody is willing to give them enough of it to live off of... otherwise it wouldn't be highly deflationary!). The deflationary currency suddenly turns on its head and becomes nearly worthless. The society (or at least the currency system) then proceeds to collapse.
Quite excellent testing by xtremesystems. I'm not doing anything nearly so formal, but my numbers for the two brands I use (Intel and Crucial) are roughly on track with their results. And it does give me more confidence in those two brands.
I have an OCZ as well which still works, but after all the negative issues came up I pulled it out of production boxes. And I only have one... never bought another one, every time I researched them out they just weren't up to snuff.
It should also be noted that SSD firmware continues to undergo radical change, so for leading vendors such as Intel and Crucial who seem to be more on top of the firmware running on the more generic chipsets underneath, we should expect further stabilization verses older products. I'm frankly a bit surprised that my old 40G Intel SSD hasn't hit one of its known firmware issues yet, but my environment is backed up by a UPS so it might simply be bullet dodging.
(OCZ, on the otherhand, seems to put out new firmware with inadequate testing, their newer products are not any more reliable than their older products).
So far I see a lot of complaints from people who don't appear to even know how to run SMART tools to get write cycle and wear statistics from their SSDs... you know, so real actual numbers can be posted.
So far none of my SSDs have failed, and I have almost 20 installed in various places. The one with the most wear is one of the first SSDs I purchased, an Intel 40G device:
da0: Fixed Direct Access SCSI-4 device da0: Serial Number CVGB951600AC040GGN da0: supports TRIM
Power on hours - 19127 Power cycle count - 48 Unsafe shutdown count - 32 Host writes x 32MiB - 375697 Workld media wear - 5120 Available reserved - 99/99/10 Media wearout - 91%
Basically 12TB worth of writes on this 40G drive over the last 2.18 years. No failures. Media wearout indicator 99 -> 91. Estimated durability based on the wear indicator is around 132TB. Roughly comes to ~3300 cycles/cell. This vintage of SSD uses MLC flash whos cells are roughly spec'd at ~10000 cycles.
While firmware issues are well documented for various SSD vendors over the last few years, and cell erase cycle life has gone down as the chips have gotten more dense, I would still expect the vast majority of failures to be due to wear-out.
Lots of things can cause premature wear-out but probably the most common would be using the SSD for something really stupid, like to host a database doing a lot of random writes or with a high frequency of fsync()s, using the SSD for swap on a system which is paging heavily 24x7, using the SSD for WWW log files on a busy web server, formatting an unaligned filesystem on the SSD or a filesystem which uses too-small a block size, and any number of other things.
The only adjustment I would make is that as the Intel 40G continues running, the wear I'm getting on it is pointing closer to ~130TB of durability and not 400TB (400TB is the theoretical max at 10,000 cycles/cell). Still reasonable. Generally speaking, that's the older 34nm technology. The newer 24nm technology will get fewer cycles but devices tend to have more storage so, as I say in the manual, you could expect similar total wear out of a newer 120GB 310 series SSD whos flash cells have 1/3 the cycle life.
If they introduced an ipad with twice the ram and an iOS update with a more multi-tasking-friendly UI I would be impressed. If Apple added an external storage slot, I would be tempted. But bumping up the internal flash from 64G to 128G and charging $1000 for it? Sorry, in this heavily networked world that's almost completely worthless.
After some thought I decided to sign the White House petition. Honestly, I don't expect a whole lot of actual justice from our system, though I won't go as far as to call it corrupt beyond redemption. But insofar as we the people have a voice, perhaps some small measure of justice can be squeezed out of this particular case. "Justice" clearly wasn't high up on their list of reasons for pursuing the case. The prosecutors involved and their teams deserve jail time themselves for their vindictive, intentional destruction of someone's life.
Wow, so much misinformation across the board. Both the ARM based Razr M and the Intel based Razr I have excellent battery life. They are both excellent phones. I have the M myself, but comparing against friends with the I... No real difference.
And everything to do with the fact that error paths are rarely actually TESTED by the programmer, so if the program is complex enough the likelihood that an error condition will be handled properly rapidly drops to near zero.
The problem is thus really that of not being able to easily test that the error paths actually do the right thing.
I can definitely see why Intel might want to migrate to directly soldered cpus on lower-end machines. As more stuff gets integrated onto the cpu chip we wind up with more and more pins which now must exactly match the mobo connector and other hardware. A socketed chip in this situation is actually less flexible.
But I don't see how this crimps the enthusiast in any way. It's hard to imagine Intel doing this on higher-end Xeon cpus and it should be noted that anyone needing a serious PC these days would likely want to go with a low-cost Xeon anyway. Think about it. Any serious workstation these days is going to have at least 8G of ram and probably 16G. There's virtually no point using non-ECC memory on a 16G rig, not if you want stability, and doubly so if the machine isn't being turned off at night (since low-power / sleep modes work pretty well and newer rams with slow refresh rates can operate in such modes without losing their minds). Cost and margins are less of an issue so Intel doesn't have to continually increase the number of pins in order to integrate more mobo features and connectors on-chip.
My expectation would be that Intel would extend the lower-end of their Xeon line to replace the higher-end of the consumer line, and then go with higher density SOC consumer chips which wind up being soldered into the mobo for the lower-end consumer lines. I think the market place would accept that virtually without protest.
Consider where lower-end boxes are going: System on a Chip is clearly going to be the future. We already have it to some degree with both the memory controller and the graphics driver on-chip. The mobo socket is actually becoming a big expense relative to the other parts on the cpu... probably second only to the cpu itself.
I dare say we might start to see consumer PC's with soldered-in dram soon too. Third biggest expense on a SOC system is going to be dram sockets.
The real issue here is whether ARM can lock up the market before Intel's offerings become highly competitive. The answer to that is clearly NO, they can't. Intel wants to compete in the mobile SOC market and they clearly have enough of a technology edge with their Fabs to jam their foot in the door before ARM can lock it. Intel doesn't need to blow away ARM here, they only need to make sufficient progress on power consumption to put themselves on near-equal ground. They've already shown that progress. ARM has no Fab... they can build as many designs as they want but they have to team up e.g. such as their announced team-up with TSMC to compete with Intel on the Fab technology.
TSMC is trying to make a huge leap to 14nm, skipping several process sizes in-between and using a new transistor tech. It's a huge gamble on their part. I have grave, grave, GRAVE doubts that TSMC can deliver a power-efficient and cost-efficient 14nm process anytime soon. Intel, on the other hand, already has working silicon one step higher than 14nm and is already producing chips in bulk using processes that essentially still work at 14nm. Plus Intel has a completely spare Fab to do the transition on (Intel has three Fabs and their entire current production can run on just two of them). Plus Intel has the ability to migrate ALL their production to the new process whereas TSMC has to deal with hundreds of customers who are working across three+ generations.
At the same time, it is also quite clear to me that ARM will have a tough time competing against Intel in the PC and server space, where performance under load matters more. Performance at idle is something that Intel can fix (and has been fixing) on its consumer and server chipsets for the last few years... ARM has no 'in' there. So ARM is left with the much tougher job of boosting performance (a problem Intel has already largely solved). ARM has no leverage whatsoever at full cpu load. In addition, ARM is really unlikely to be able to compete against Intel for SMP loads. The best ARM will be able to do for their initial high-end supposedly competitive 64-bit offerings is virtually guaranteed to have inferior cache coherency characteristics across multi-core and will certainly not have any chance at being more power efficient. As you move into the higher end performance is determined more by transistor count... bigger caches, bigger TLBs, bigger branch prediction tables, better read-ahead, more write buffering, and so forth. This is very new territory for ARM.
Intel doesn't have to beat ARM in order to insert itself into the mobile space. ARM, on the otherhand, has to seriously beat Intel in order to insert ITSELF into the desktop and server markets.
The assumption that one is sucking down more power with more cores is not correct. The point is to suck down less power. Using simplified cores allows larger chip processes to be used (no need to shrink things down to 20nm), and you run them at a far lower frequency, resulting in far less leakage (in two dimensions). Having many independent cores also allows the chip to run at a far lower frequency and to actually shut the power off on a core-by-core basis based on load. Not just stop the clocks... actually kill the power in the core's circuitry. It's actually an easier solution than trying to implement low-power modes or frequency shifting for unloaded subsystems. If the frequency can be brought down enough on a large-feature chip one doesn't even need to shut the power off, leakage will be low enough that one can simply gate the clock and achieve almost the same efficiency.
The power/performance tradeoff is definitely a win when you move to more, slower cores. That's been shown over and over again over the past decade with the opteron/xeon wars. The only potential lose occurs when you reduce the size of the on-chip caches since smaller caches will result in more power consumption accessing the dynamic ram. So tuning on-chip caches becomes very important. But that's about the only issue.
Not only possible but very easy to do, except for the issue that nobody writes complex programs in assembly any more, and very few programmers are used to working in a high level language where the basic unit of data is 8 or 16 bits wide. So the hardware is fairly easy to construct, but getting sufficiently advanced software running on top of it is not.
In anycase, all current many-core implementations offer a significant reduction in complexity. There is nothing inherently difficult about having a less complex 32 or 64 bit cpu... no real need to go revert all the way back to 8 or 16 bits. 80% (or more) of the real-estate on current generation cpus exists simply to enhance performance. If performance isn't needed... that is, if performance can be fanned-out across many cpu cores instead of concentrated in one, then it's easy.
Get rid of the branch prediction, reduce the size of the L1 cache, remove the L2 and L3 caches, revert certain direct instruction implementations back to microcode, reduce the number of execution units, simplify cache coherency semantics, simplify the floating point unit, reduce the size of the TLB and simplify the MMU... that saves a lot of real-estate. Performance will be 1/4 what it was, but it could still be a win if it means you can put 10x more cores in the same die area.
Of course, there's the other niggling little problem in that SMP / multi-threaded programming is still barely in its infancy. Most applications these days still assume one core and are only able to spool off batch tasks to other cores. Games are probably the most advanced users of multi-core technologies, with video and photo processing coming in second. But not much else.
Cell phones at least have dedicated processes that can make use of this sort of technology. You have your cellular voice subsystem, cellular data, wifi, UI, basic I/O pipeline, application space. None of these require a lot of cpu individually so the cell phone / mobile model fits the concept very well.
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Only problem here is that at least so far as Bitcoin is concerned, a Bitcoin is NOT a store of the energy it took to produce it. Oops. It's like expending effort to play a video game... all you are doing is adding to the entropy of the universe, that doesn't mean that your effort is worth anything down the line to other people.
-Matt
Try it and see how far you get. It isn't the same thing at all. Stocks have an intrinsic value in the underlying company's economic output, revenue, growth, and profit margins. If a stock is fairly valued and some idiot wants to waste a few million dollars trying to push it down, all that person is doing is giving real investors an opportunity to buy the stock at a discount.
Bitcoin has nothing at all backing it. If someone wants to push the price down the action is merely subject to trader's whims, which means that the price can settle anywhere. There is no 'cheap' for a Bitcoin.
-Matt
Are you joking? Is that supposed to be a joke? You think that explosive growth in commerce using a 'currency' which can't be expanded to fit that growth leads to stability?
Your comment regarding the USD indicates just how ignorant you are about what a currency is supposed to accomplish. If I sell something and get paid in dollars then I can be fairly well assured that as a store of value, those dollars will be quite stable for the few months they remain dollars, before they get invested (or spent) somewhere else. That's the purpose of a currency.
Currencies are not supposed to be used to store value in the long-term, let alone for 100 years. Why should you be rewarded for letting your cash rot verses someone else who invests it or cycles it back into the economy instead?
Now lets see how Bitcoin stacks up. A virtual commodity that isn't a currency, highly unstable with no stabilizing factors, can't be used to store wealth for even a few seconds without potentially losing its value. Deflationary and thus subject to hording and the fate of all other private currencies in history (that is, complete failure).
Did I miss anything? Oh yah, the EUR/USD exchange rate... only problem there is that the US has not seen any significant inflation, meaning that goods and services cost about the same so why should I care what the exchange rate is? I'm not taking any vacations anytime soon. Besides, the ECB is printing almost as much as we are, they are simply disguising the printing as 'loans' which nobody actually believes will ever get paid back. Europe's economy is in a huge mess because of their attempt to hold the value of the Euro constant.
How is something like Bitcoin supposed to react to a major recession or depression? You do realize that the dollar's peg to gold lengthened the great depression, don't you? It wasn't a good thing, and neither is Bitcoin with its built-in deflation.
For currencies, the most important event right now is what the Japanese are doing. They are basically forcing a very fast devaluation of their currency to boost commerce and clean up their massive debt. Japanese with their money under a pillow or sitting in a bank account are getting screwed. Even there, a Japanese citizen could be invested in Japan's stock market to essentially become immune to the devaluation, if he or she desired.
Which leads to another point regarding currencies and governments fleecing their own citizens: There are plenty of ways to protect yourself from currency devaluation already. Bitcoin is *NOT* one of them.
-Matt
The BTC market is so shallow that even small sales can drop the conversion price significantly. While watching the realtime last night I saw numerous single-transaction sales of less than 10BTC drop the conversion price by over 2%. In one transaction.
I saw all sorts of manipulation. It's totally obvious to anyone who actually has any real experience working markets. I saw bid probing (a HFT algorithm), bid-ask range clearing (to create areas of weakness that can cause step functions later on). Cycling to squeeze money out of unsuspecting investors (where BTC is sold almost at the market, forcing prices down, and then re-purchased using limit orders on the way back up). Front-running due to mtgox allowing too fine a fraction in bids and asks. Out of order transactions that were clearly delayed, sometimes off by several dollars verses where the market actually was.
All clearly computer driven or caused. And trivially accomplished, I might add, because there isn't even a fleeting intrinsic value to a bitcoin that makes any one conversion price more or less appropriate than any other. It can swing wildly in any direction for any reason.
And then I saw what were obviously ordinary investors doing tiny little transactions that looked like market orders, getting taken to the cleaners over and over again by the speculators.
Do people actually believe that their BTCs are worth what they pay for them? Honestly, how can anyone think this is viable? Tons of real money is clearly being squeezed out of the system, leaving less and less for the investors left behind... and people don't seem to understand just how fragile the conversion value they see quoted on their screen is.
I see absolutely nothing stabilizing Bitcoin. There are no stabilizing factors at all. Zero. Not the mining (the rate of BTC generation is just too small and is too disconnected from supply-demand), nothing to stop massive deflation were it to be adopted (which is extremely destabilizing to any economy), nothing to stop inflation brought about by value crashes (Fiat currencies at least have the fact that you have to pay taxes, meaning that ultimately you have to convert proceeds from your goods into the Fiat currency in order to pay those taxes). Nothing to control the velocity of money in the Bitcoin universe. Retail transactions are not stabilizing because there is no mandate to require BTC use. Bitcoin is worthless as a store of value.
Basically, Bitcoin is an out of control freight train doomed to massive instability until it eventually gets shut down or goes out of favor. It is a virtual commodity. It is NOT a currency or anything even remotely resembling a currency.
-Matt
Kinda hard when the conversion price of bitcoin can changes by 2% in less than a second. Let alone all the transaction costs. Good luck with that.
-Matt
Interesting paper, but there won't be much visibility for the BTC held in Mtgox or other exchanges. Presumably they are not creating a new entry for each trade but instead just holding the bitcoins on the Mtgox servers. Only deposits or Withdrawals will record a new entry. I'm guessing here, someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Since the manipulation can just use the balance of BTC in the account, it would not be readily evident from the chains. That is, the number of BTC remains constant, but the manipulation drains dollars from the exchange. It is the dollars which are withdrawn, not the BTC.
From the looks of the volume it looks like a manipulative sale only requires 20K BTC or so. Maybe 35K BTC to the bottom after that, then tons of horizontal volume which gave the original seller plenty of time to buy it back at a lower price. So, $4.5M or so in sales, cause panic, then spend $3M buying it back for a profit of $1.5M or so, just off the cuff of my sleeve.
Also looking at the real time it only seems to take ~25-50 BTC (barely $8400) to seriously move the USD price. e.g. $172->$168 w/a 50 BTC sale, which amounts to a 2.3% move in BTC's value in a SINGLE transaction. That is extremely unstable and should scare anyone.
For that matter, there is no guarantee that BTC balances are being backed by actual BTC (though presumably people have enough trust in Mtgox and other exchanges that it isn't a big issue).
-Matt
I shouldn't have to point out the obvious here, it will clearly fall on deaf ears considering the vast amounts of stupidity revealing themselves in postings on this topic. But hell, if it brings just one person to their senses I'll count it job well done.
First, nobody is forcing anyone to hold their savings in US Dollars. You can hold your savings in whatever form you want, it's called a BROKERAGE ACCOUNT. Buy a commodity-tracking ETF if you desire, and keep just enough dollars around to service your monthly needs. The dollar, after all, is very definitely stable in the short-term. One month isn't going to destroy its value. Realize, though, the price of everything in real terms fluctuates. Someone who bought gold at $1900 is sitting on a 15% loss of value in dollar terms right now, for example. Real commodities generally maintain their value over long periods of time. Are you worried about buy/sell fees? If you are, then you don't have enough savings to even be AFFECTED by inflation in the first place.
Second, Bitcoin isn't a currency. It's a commodity with a limited supply. Not only is it a commodity with a limited supply but it is a VIRTUAL commodity with a fixed supply. It isn't even real. It's not something you can touch. It doesn't even behave like a currency fod gods sakes! It may not be possible to counterfeit, but that doesn't stop anyone from creating their own virtual commodities and competing. In fact, there are MANY virtual currencies already in existance, primarily used in games, which are already far more stable than bitcoin.
Third, Bitcoin's 'value' is fleeting. It's like tulip-mania but worse. It's worse because the market is so shallow it is trivial (and obviously trivial) to manipulate. Heavy manipulation by people selling high slowly, causing a panic, and then buying low. Rinse and repeat.
I'm guessing that a large percentage of the exchange volume is from rinse and repeaters and very little is actual investment purchases or sales. It creates the illusion of decent volume when, in fact, there actually isn't any. Each time it cycles the manipulators are removing more real money from the system, leaving everyone else holding the bag.
Think about what this means, folks. It isn't rocket science. Whatever cash was injected into the system by real investors is being leeched away by the manipulators. There is LESS real original cash remaining, yet all the remaining real investors believe that a Bitcoin is worth at least as much as they originally paid for it, because they see that magic exchange value in $USD 'Oh look, 1BTC is worth $166 BTC!'. What these investors do not understand is that they cannot ALL get that price if they were to sell. They can't get it even if they all paid that price going in because the manipulators have already squeezed out a considerable amount of cash from the system.
The very definition of a Ponzi scheme. This will only end in tears.
-Matt
On those Android phones which have user SD card slots, I wouldn't mind allowing the phone to page memory to the card at all if it saves on bandwidth. For internal flash... definitely not.
I already cycle about a gigabyte a day through my 16G microSD card just from DogCatcher. Another few hundred megabytes wouldn't make a dent and those cards are pretty cheap anyway.
However, allowing paging on any machine can lead to big trouble in the form of thrashing. It probably isn't reasonable to implement that sort of feature as a default on a consumer phone.
At least in the case of browsers the default memory limits can clearly be increased.
-Matt
EYE-FI SD cards are cool, but storage capacities trail what you can get with a straight storage card. So for example you can get a 16G EYE-FI card, but a SanDisk Extreme SDXC card comes in capacities up to 128G.
EYE-FI has other problems, including fairly slow WIFI transfer speeds. WIFI tends to drop out unless you are transferring to a storage device on your belt, and a 4G hotspot setup doesn't work very well when you are taking RAWs. I would not rate EYE-FI as a professional-level product, frankly.
Sometimes quality and dependability trump convenience. My preference is to stick to normal storage cards and not have to worry about some WIFI snafu messing up my ability to take pictures. EYE-FI has its benefits, but it also has a lot of moving parts (software-wise).
-Matt
Not unexpected, but its kinda hard to take candid photos from a hijacked camera when the lens cap is on. And those WIFI systems are not generally left on anyhow.
I don't understand why they used a 1Dx though, which would require an external WIFI adapter to even have a WIFI capability. I would be more interested in penetration testing something like the Canon 6D which has the WIFI built-in. I fully expect there to be holes, Canon's WIFI software has always been quite primitive and even the new stuff is still quite primitive.
But if we make enough noise and Canon will fix it in a software update.
Currently I only use the 6D's built-in WIFI to be able to review pictures in-camera from an android tablet... quite a useful feature. I'm not particularly worried about hijacking there since the Camera's WIFI transmitter has rather limited range. And most of the time the WIFI is turned off anyway since it eats the battery otherwise.
-Matt
I do sometimes delete photos in-camera, usually three or four out of every 100 or so I take, but generally I recommend (and also for myself) NOT to delete photos in-camera because it's easy to miss things you might want to keep when you try to review pictures on such a small display.
But I've never had an issue with any of my Canon's corrupting the SD card.
-Matt
Not exactly, Khashishi. Money is created multiple ways:
(1) The outstanding federal debt is created money. This created money is injected into society through federal spending (for example, through social security payments which do NOT impose a debt on the people receiving it).
(2) The interest the federal government pays on that debt is also created money, and also does not impose a debt on the people receiving it.
(3) Debt isn't always paid back. People, companies, even whole countries default on their debt all the time. That debt is wiped out, basically... for all intents and purposes the money is destroyed.
Most people make the basic mistake of assuming that the Federal Debt is, well, Debt. It actually isn't. It is created money. Interest on the federal debt can be paid simply by creating more debt. This 'federal debt' is a VERY different sort of debt then the debt held by a person, or corporation, or a country which does not have control over the currency the debt is denominated in (read: Euroland and most developing economies, except China).
Of course, when taken to extremes this will be extremely destabilizing because it will result in hyper-inflation (Argentina anyone?). However, it is a perfectly valid mechanism to use to control the money supply for a fiat currency. You add to the supply by creating Federal debt (deficit spending), and you remove from the supply through taxes (taxes in excess of spending).
People don't trust the government to operate their currency this way, I get that. But using any sort of limited commodity as a replacement simply won't work. Without any way to balance the currency against the size of the economy, you will get inflation or deflation depending on where the economy is going.
The problem is that any sort of economic hardship, such as a modest recession, can create a deflationary spiral due to such a currency. Because the currency is deflating and is worth more and more as time passes, it becomes worth more to horde it than to invest it. People begin to horde it 'as an investment'.
How many times have we heard that phrase on this board from people playing with bitcoins?
The amount of hording that occurs is totally out of the control of ANYONE (short of taking away the commodity, which governments HAVE DONE in the past, e.g. with gold). Hording begets more hording, creating a deflationary spiral where the currency's value in real goods increase until it can no longer be used as a currency. Then it becomes worthless. Not just a bubble and then a crash, but a bubble that bursts and leaves nothing but wasteland behind. This sort of cycle destroys nations.
If you understand this then you perhaps understand a little of what Bernanke is so afraid of. He's taking the pain he knows money creation can result in over the potential for a nation-destroying catastrophe. But if you don't like that... if you don't like what the Fed is doing, then you are barking up the wrong tree, because the Fed's money creation is NOTHING compared the the money creation being done through our trillion-dollar-a-year deficit spending. Blame congress, not the Fed.
-Matt
The increasing value of the work product stored in a deflationary currency is precisely the problem. It's a problem because people then simply accumulate it and neither invest OR spend it. It does not generate any new economic activity.
Investing or spending your money, on the otherhand, is supportive of the economy. Spending increases economic activity and Investing enables it.
So a currency which is either stable or somewhat inflationary is better for the economic health of the nation than a currency which is deflationary. Basing an economy on a highly deflationary currency essentially results in stagnation.
Another way to think about it is to take the deflationary currency case to the extreme. If the currency's value seriously increases on an ongoing basis, you basically earn enough from just holding it to support your standard of living. That is, even though you don't get a dividend or interest, your cost of living in terms of the currency continues to go down and keeps pace with your dwindling cash pile. But this means that *nobody* would have to work, which is clearly not possible since obviously someone has to be a worker for the society to function. It is not a stable solution.
The result is that the deflationary currency puts the society in crisis. The people who remain who are still working stop accepting the currency (because nobody is willing to give them enough of it to live off of... otherwise it wouldn't be highly deflationary!). The deflationary currency suddenly turns on its head and becomes nearly worthless. The society (or at least the currency system) then proceeds to collapse.
-Matt
Quite excellent testing by xtremesystems. I'm not doing anything nearly so formal, but my numbers for the two brands I use (Intel and Crucial) are roughly on track with their results. And it does give me more confidence in those two brands.
I have an OCZ as well which still works, but after all the negative issues came up I pulled it out of production boxes. And I only have one... never bought another one, every time I researched them out they just weren't up to snuff.
It should also be noted that SSD firmware continues to undergo radical change, so for leading vendors such as Intel and Crucial who seem to be more on top of the firmware running on the more generic chipsets underneath, we should expect further stabilization verses older products. I'm frankly a bit surprised that my old 40G Intel SSD hasn't hit one of its known firmware issues yet, but my environment is backed up by a UPS so it might simply be bullet dodging.
(OCZ, on the otherhand, seems to put out new firmware with inadequate testing, their newer products are not any more reliable than their older products).
-Matt
So far I see a lot of complaints from people who don't appear to even know how to run SMART tools to get write cycle and wear statistics from their SSDs... you know, so real actual numbers can be posted.
So far none of my SSDs have failed, and I have almost 20 installed in various places. The one with the most wear is one of the first SSDs I purchased, an Intel 40G device:
da0: Fixed Direct Access SCSI-4 device
da0: Serial Number CVGB951600AC040GGN
da0: supports TRIM
Power on hours - 19127
Power cycle count - 48
Unsafe shutdown count - 32
Host writes x 32MiB - 375697
Workld media wear - 5120
Available reserved - 99/99/10
Media wearout - 91%
Basically 12TB worth of writes on this 40G drive over the last 2.18 years. No failures. Media wearout indicator 99 -> 91. Estimated durability based on the wear indicator is around 132TB. Roughly comes to ~3300 cycles/cell. This vintage of SSD uses MLC flash whos cells are roughly spec'd at ~10000 cycles.
While firmware issues are well documented for various SSD vendors over the last few years, and cell erase cycle life has gone down as the chips have gotten more dense, I would still expect the vast majority of failures to be due to wear-out.
Lots of things can cause premature wear-out but probably the most common would be using the SSD for something really stupid, like to host a database doing a lot of random writes or with a high frequency of fsync()s, using the SSD for swap on a system which is paging heavily 24x7, using the SSD for WWW log files on a busy web server, formatting an unaligned filesystem on the SSD or a filesystem which uses too-small a block size, and any number of other things.
Venerable but still mostly correct:
http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=swapcache
The only adjustment I would make is that as the Intel 40G continues running, the wear I'm getting on it is pointing closer to ~130TB of durability and not 400TB (400TB is the theoretical max at 10,000 cycles/cell). Still reasonable. Generally speaking, that's the older 34nm technology. The newer 24nm technology will get fewer cycles but devices tend to have more storage so, as I say in the manual, you could expect similar total wear out of a newer 120GB 310 series SSD whos flash cells have 1/3 the cycle life.
-Matt
The Muppets do a better job than anyone here :-)
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=muppet+fox+news&oq=muppet+fox+news&gs_l=youtube.3..33i21.1646.2071.0.2120.5.5.0.0.0.0.182.454.3j1.4.0...0.0...1ac.1.AD6-ni6c5wk
-Matt
If they introduced an ipad with twice the ram and an iOS update with a more multi-tasking-friendly UI I would be impressed. If Apple added an external storage slot, I would be tempted. But bumping up the internal flash from 64G to 128G and charging $1000 for it? Sorry, in this heavily networked world that's almost completely worthless.
-Matt
After some thought I decided to sign the White House petition. Honestly, I don't expect a whole lot of actual justice from our system, though I won't go as far as to call it corrupt beyond redemption. But insofar as we the people have a voice, perhaps some small measure of justice can be squeezed out of this particular case. "Justice" clearly wasn't high up on their list of reasons for pursuing the case. The prosecutors involved and their teams deserve jail time themselves for their vindictive, intentional destruction of someone's life.
-Matt
Wow, so much misinformation across the board. Both the ARM based Razr M and the Intel based Razr I have excellent battery life. They are both excellent phones. I have the M myself, but comparing against friends with the I... No real difference.
-Matt
And everything to do with the fact that error paths are rarely actually TESTED by the programmer, so if the program is complex enough the likelihood that an error condition will be handled properly rapidly drops to near zero.
The problem is thus really that of not being able to easily test that the error paths actually do the right thing.
-Matt
I can definitely see why Intel might want to migrate to directly soldered cpus on lower-end machines. As more stuff gets integrated onto the cpu chip we wind up with more and more pins which now must exactly match the mobo connector and other hardware. A socketed chip in this situation is actually less flexible.
But I don't see how this crimps the enthusiast in any way. It's hard to imagine Intel doing this on higher-end Xeon cpus and it should be noted that anyone needing a serious PC these days would likely want to go with a low-cost Xeon anyway. Think about it. Any serious workstation these days is going to have at least 8G of ram and probably 16G. There's virtually no point using non-ECC memory on a 16G rig, not if you want stability, and doubly so if the machine isn't being turned off at night (since low-power / sleep modes work pretty well and newer rams with slow refresh rates can operate in such modes without losing their minds). Cost and margins are less of an issue so Intel doesn't have to continually increase the number of pins in order to integrate more mobo features and connectors on-chip.
My expectation would be that Intel would extend the lower-end of their Xeon line to replace the higher-end of the consumer line, and then go with higher density SOC consumer chips which wind up being soldered into the mobo for the lower-end consumer lines. I think the market place would accept that virtually without protest.
Consider where lower-end boxes are going: System on a Chip is clearly going to be the future. We already have it to some degree with both the memory controller and the graphics driver on-chip. The mobo socket is actually becoming a big expense relative to the other parts on the cpu... probably second only to the cpu itself.
I dare say we might start to see consumer PC's with soldered-in dram soon too. Third biggest expense on a SOC system is going to be dram sockets.
-Matt
The real issue here is whether ARM can lock up the market before Intel's offerings become highly competitive. The answer to that is clearly NO, they can't. Intel wants to compete in the mobile SOC market and they clearly have enough of a technology edge with their Fabs to jam their foot in the door before ARM can lock it. Intel doesn't need to blow away ARM here, they only need to make sufficient progress on power consumption to put themselves on near-equal ground. They've already shown that progress. ARM has no Fab... they can build as many designs as they want but they have to team up e.g. such as their announced team-up with TSMC to compete with Intel on the Fab technology.
TSMC is trying to make a huge leap to 14nm, skipping several process sizes in-between and using a new transistor tech. It's a huge gamble on their part. I have grave, grave, GRAVE doubts that TSMC can deliver a power-efficient and cost-efficient 14nm process anytime soon. Intel, on the other hand, already has working silicon one step higher than 14nm and is already producing chips in bulk using processes that essentially still work at 14nm. Plus Intel has a completely spare Fab to do the transition on (Intel has three Fabs and their entire current production can run on just two of them). Plus Intel has the ability to migrate ALL their production to the new process whereas TSMC has to deal with hundreds of customers who are working across three+ generations.
At the same time, it is also quite clear to me that ARM will have a tough time competing against Intel in the PC and server space, where performance under load matters more. Performance at idle is something that Intel can fix (and has been fixing) on its consumer and server chipsets for the last few years... ARM has no 'in' there. So ARM is left with the much tougher job of boosting performance (a problem Intel has already largely solved). ARM has no leverage whatsoever at full cpu load. In addition, ARM is really unlikely to be able to compete against Intel for SMP loads. The best ARM will be able to do for their initial high-end supposedly competitive 64-bit offerings is virtually guaranteed to have inferior cache coherency characteristics across multi-core and will certainly not have any chance at being more power efficient. As you move into the higher end performance is determined more by transistor count... bigger caches, bigger TLBs, bigger branch prediction tables, better read-ahead, more write buffering, and so forth. This is very new territory for ARM.
Intel doesn't have to beat ARM in order to insert itself into the mobile space. ARM, on the otherhand, has to seriously beat Intel in order to insert ITSELF into the desktop and server markets.
-Matt
The assumption that one is sucking down more power with more cores is not correct. The point is to suck down less power. Using simplified cores allows larger chip processes to be used (no need to shrink things down to 20nm), and you run them at a far lower frequency, resulting in far less leakage (in two dimensions). Having many independent cores also allows the chip to run at a far lower frequency and to actually shut the power off on a core-by-core basis based on load. Not just stop the clocks... actually kill the power in the core's circuitry. It's actually an easier solution than trying to implement low-power modes or frequency shifting for unloaded subsystems. If the frequency can be brought down enough on a large-feature chip one doesn't even need to shut the power off, leakage will be low enough that one can simply gate the clock and achieve almost the same efficiency.
The power/performance tradeoff is definitely a win when you move to more, slower cores. That's been shown over and over again over the past decade with the opteron/xeon wars. The only potential lose occurs when you reduce the size of the on-chip caches since smaller caches will result in more power consumption accessing the dynamic ram. So tuning on-chip caches becomes very important. But that's about the only issue.
-Matt
Not only possible but very easy to do, except for the issue that nobody writes complex programs in assembly any more, and very few programmers are used to working in a high level language where the basic unit of data is 8 or 16 bits wide. So the hardware is fairly easy to construct, but getting sufficiently advanced software running on top of it is not.
In anycase, all current many-core implementations offer a significant reduction in complexity. There is nothing inherently difficult about having a less complex 32 or 64 bit cpu... no real need to go revert all the way back to 8 or 16 bits. 80% (or more) of the real-estate on current generation cpus exists simply to enhance performance. If performance isn't needed... that is, if performance can be fanned-out across many cpu cores instead of concentrated in one, then it's easy.
Get rid of the branch prediction, reduce the size of the L1 cache, remove the L2 and L3 caches, revert certain direct instruction implementations back to microcode, reduce the number of execution units, simplify cache coherency semantics, simplify the floating point unit, reduce the size of the TLB and simplify the MMU... that saves a lot of real-estate. Performance will be 1/4 what it was, but it could still be a win if it means you can put 10x more cores in the same die area.
Of course, there's the other niggling little problem in that SMP / multi-threaded programming is still barely in its infancy. Most applications these days still assume one core and are only able to spool off batch tasks to other cores. Games are probably the most advanced users of multi-core technologies, with video and photo processing coming in second. But not much else.
Cell phones at least have dedicated processes that can make use of this sort of technology. You have your cellular voice subsystem, cellular data, wifi, UI, basic I/O pipeline, application space. None of these require a lot of cpu individually so the cell phone / mobile model fits the concept very well.
-Matt
Unfortunately B/G interferes with bluetooth, so if you have N, but also use bluetooth, you generally want to use N.
-Matt