Surrealism occurs pretty much throughout video gaming.
In a typical JRPG, your party merges into one person, wanders around the map as that single person, then when attached, splits out into a party again, whereupon they take it in turns to trade blows with enemies.
In LA Noire, you drive through the streets of LA like an absolute maniac (at least, if you play the way I do) leaving a trail of destruction, then calmly stroll out of your car and conduct a sober murder investigation.
Sorry. It's not going to be popular with the Slashdot crowd, but dumping it onto a cloud storage service seems to make the most sense.
I keep seeing ads for a service that gives you 2TB backups for £5/mo. For that you get full redundancy, and let them worry about replacing broken hardware etc. Cheaper than buying the hardware yourself, over the first year, and bound to get cheaper.
If you're genuinely worried about your cloud provider having a catastrophe of some kind that their own fault-tolerance approach doesn't cover, then dupe your archive across two cloud storage suppliers.
Centuries ago, the Royal family signed over vast swathes of land to the British government in return for a perpetual stipend, which is dwarfed by the price of the land in question. They also bring in a crap-tonne of tourists. They generate a definite, sizeable net profit for the country.
Of course the other red-tops have done it. The Daily Mail has been noticeably reluctant to comment on the subject, for example.
Already today, the Sunday Times and the Sun are being implicated in illegally investigating Gordon Brown's affairs (including his child's medical records).
They might cause confusion, but you wouldn't be able to spend them interchangeably, because the BitCoin network simply wouldn't acknowledge the non-Bitcoin wallets. You can create a new currency called "ByteCoin". You can't consider ByteCoins to be counterfeit BitCoins, analogous to making coins that look like Yen.
I suppose the closest analogy might be that Canadian Dollars have the same name as US Dollars.
Indeed there *is* a parallel Bitcoin network called TestNet, which is used for testing. Its coins are considered worthless, I guess simply by common consent (I don't know whether there are other precautions taken to make TestNet coins worthless).
How can bitcoins be valued in $ if they're not tied to $? If you mined 500 bitcoins and they could buy a laptop now, but then they kept "going north" (relative to what?), would the vendor really sell you the same laptop for 400 bitcoins next month?
Try substituting British Pound or Euro or Yen for Bitcoin. If you had £400 and it could by a laptop now, but the pound gained value relative to the dollar, then yes, the (American) vendor would really sell you the same laptop for £350 next month. Anyone who buys stuff internationally experiences this.
If I had £1M stolen from me in some comical manner, it might get reported in US newspapers as "A British man lost £1M ($1.6M) in a comical manner" -- next month it might be a different dollar value.
Similarly, how can gasoline, or corn, or any commodity be valued in $ if it's not tied to $? It's valued according to what people are prepared to pay for it.
What if the demand for bitcoins as a "great deflational currency" leads to the creation of bitcoin clone currencies that are practically identical but have their own pool to create more coins in circulation?
... then there will be another currency, with its own market value. It won't be easily confused with Bitcoin, any more than a Dollar is easily confused with a Yen.
The two currencies' values will each be dictated by how people perceive and use them.
I think that might be a feature -- to some people -- rather than a bug. The libertarians and crypto-anarchists wanted a currency that wasn't controlled by a government. As such, would they really want the law-enforcement arm of that government to step in and investigate theft of that currency?
It's endlessly fascinating to me, I have to admit. The minute the law regards bitcoins as having value, is the moment they expect people to pay tax on bitcoin income. Presumably that tax will be payable in national currency...
But if you sell your Bitcoin to a nerd for real money, and then spend that real money, you've bridged the gap between the "real world" and wherever it is that Bitcoin has value. Tada!
It's expected that the market value of Bitcoins will settle at just above the cost of mining, if you mine very efficiently.
Which if bitcoin is successful can only happen with massive deflation, because if the whole economy runs on bitcoins and there are 20 million in total, the value of each has to be huge.
No - primarily because the cost of mining increases exponentially by design.
But also because the bitcoin economy doesn't necessarily need to grow to $20 million, if it's used mainly for "in flight" transactions.
If I'm late to the bitcoin biz, I'm not going to try to buy my way in with dollars. Instead, I'm going to continue to do my transactions in dollars. I suspect lots of other people will think the exact same way.
I don't think anyone -- even most Bitcoin proponents -- would object to that line of thinking.
Where it becomes interesting is when properties of the electronic dollar make your transaction problematic.
These could be the situations where you might choose to use cash (e.g. for anonymity), except cash has its own problems -- you can't transfer cash electronically, for example.
These could be situations where you might choose to use Paypal (e.g. for sending money abroad), except Paypal has its own problems -- their fees.
I'm sure Bitcoin has its own problems too, but for some transactions, it's probably worth considering.
I haven't dabbled myself yet. It seems like the easy way, for a purchase where the seller accepts Bitcoin, and sending them "real" currency would be problematic, would be to buy some bitcoins, then immediately spend them. Or, as a seller, accept them then immediately exchange them,
As one gets more confident in it, one might choose to keep a float of maybe $100 worth of Bitcoin, just as I leave money in my Paypal account.
Nobody in their right mind would keep their life savings in Bitcoin. That's not what it's for.
I'm willing to admit that the Market Economics 101 was pretty useful (almost everything I know about economics comes from Economics For Dummies, which borrowed from the library some time ago).
However, using "speculators" in the informal way -- people buying "stuff" in the expectation that its value will increase whereupon they sell it -- I'd like to believe that not everyone willing to buy Bitcoins in exchange for real money come under that classification.
My sense is that there's a non-negligible number of people who have bought bitcoins because they find them useful.
As an easy, documented example, those Silk Road customers, who bought Bitcoins because they perceived them as the key to a safe way to buy drugs. They're not speculating in the sense that I would understand it. They're just finding Bitcoins useful -- as are the dealers!
Other possibilities -- people who want to do international money transfers without paying bank transaction fees or Paypal fees... I don't know how these compare with the losses you make converting Bitcoin back to real money -- but in principle it's a realistic scenario.
Libertarians and anarchists with ideological objections to government backed currencies... Transactions people would prefer not to appear on their bank statements...
Enough of this involves illegal activities that it should raise eyebrows, but there are legal scenarios where Bitcoin might seem useful too.
Real money backed by a government doesn't behave this way because it has intrinsic worth in that the government guarantees you can pay your taxes with it.
Not disagreeing with you, but it's interesting to note that the government only has authority because a critical mass of people choose to recognise it. If everyone simultaneously decided not to recognise their government, and not to pay tax, that particular property of the US$ would wither away.
Likewise, if enough people continue to ascribe value to bitcoins, then it will continue to be useful. If enough people decide they're worthless, then they're worthless.
Slashdot Mirror
Surrealism occurs pretty much throughout video gaming.
In a typical JRPG, your party merges into one person, wanders around the map as that single person, then when attached, splits out into a party again, whereupon they take it in turns to trade blows with enemies.
In LA Noire, you drive through the streets of LA like an absolute maniac (at least, if you play the way I do) leaving a trail of destruction, then calmly stroll out of your car and conduct a sober murder investigation.
In Portal 2, a robot tells you you're fat.
heed
Like any other proxy, no doubt it will heed the cache-control HTTP headers.
I didn't want to single out a provider; the answer was meant to be more general.
But since you ask: http://www.livedrive.com/ -- I have not tried them; this is not a recommendation.
Actually it appears the £5/mo backup service has no storage limit. The 2TB applies to their more dynamic (and expensive) "Briefcase" service.
Sorry. It's not going to be popular with the Slashdot crowd, but dumping it onto a cloud storage service seems to make the most sense.
I keep seeing ads for a service that gives you 2TB backups for £5/mo. For that you get full redundancy, and let them worry about replacing broken hardware etc. Cheaper than buying the hardware yourself, over the first year, and bound to get cheaper.
If you're genuinely worried about your cloud provider having a catastrophe of some kind that their own fault-tolerance approach doesn't cover, then dupe your archive across two cloud storage suppliers.
Centuries ago, the Royal family signed over vast swathes of land to the British government in return for a perpetual stipend, which is dwarfed by the price of the land in question. They also bring in a crap-tonne of tourists. They generate a definite, sizeable net profit for the country.
Crown land dealt with here - http://republic.org.uk/What%20we%20want/In%20depth/Royal%20property/index.php
Tourism: refuted here - http://republic.org.uk/What%20we%20want/In%20depth/Tourism/index.php
Value for money: refuted here - http://republic.org.uk/What%20we%20want/In%20depth/Royal%20finances/index.php
There are *children* who pay attention to what the *Queen* has to say?
How depressing.
*Man* you read and analysed those 44 pages of maths quickly.
Of course the other red-tops have done it. The Daily Mail has been noticeably reluctant to comment on the subject, for example.
Already today, the Sunday Times and the Sun are being implicated in illegally investigating Gordon Brown's affairs (including his child's medical records).
I'm a fan of open source, but there's nothing about closed source that precludes components from communicating with open protocols.
I'm not knocking the ability to extract your data from the service -- it's all good.
But open up the inter-service protocols, so that competitors can slot into the infrastructure, and then I'd be impressed.
i.e. I'd like to be able to choose Flickr over Picasa, while continuing to use Circles and Buzz, without losing a sense of integration.
They might cause confusion, but you wouldn't be able to spend them interchangeably, because the BitCoin network simply wouldn't acknowledge the non-Bitcoin wallets. You can create a new currency called "ByteCoin". You can't consider ByteCoins to be counterfeit BitCoins, analogous to making coins that look like Yen.
I suppose the closest analogy might be that Canadian Dollars have the same name as US Dollars.
Indeed there *is* a parallel Bitcoin network called TestNet, which is used for testing. Its coins are considered worthless, I guess simply by common consent (I don't know whether there are other precautions taken to make TestNet coins worthless).
Can you "secretly" mine for Bitcoins?
Surely every mined bitcoin has to appear on the network.
I suppose you could obfuscate it by spreading your mined coins across many wallets.
Now you need to give the editors some credit here. If they were financially invested in pumping Bitcoins up, this article certainly would not help.
*Obviously* the editors are now short-selling Bitcoins. Do keep up!
How can bitcoins be valued in $ if they're not tied to $? If you mined 500 bitcoins and they could buy a laptop now, but then they kept "going north" (relative to what?), would the vendor really sell you the same laptop for 400 bitcoins next month?
Try substituting British Pound or Euro or Yen for Bitcoin. If you had £400 and it could by a laptop now, but the pound gained value relative to the dollar, then yes, the (American) vendor would really sell you the same laptop for £350 next month. Anyone who buys stuff internationally experiences this.
If I had £1M stolen from me in some comical manner, it might get reported in US newspapers as "A British man lost £1M ($1.6M) in a comical manner" -- next month it might be a different dollar value.
Similarly, how can gasoline, or corn, or any commodity be valued in $ if it's not tied to $? It's valued according to what people are prepared to pay for it.
What if the demand for bitcoins as a "great deflational currency" leads to the creation of bitcoin clone currencies that are practically identical but have their own pool to create more coins in circulation?
... then there will be another currency, with its own market value. It won't be easily confused with Bitcoin, any more than a Dollar is easily confused with a Yen.
The two currencies' values will each be dictated by how people perceive and use them.
I think that might be a feature -- to some people -- rather than a bug. The libertarians and crypto-anarchists wanted a currency that wasn't controlled by a government. As such, would they really want the law-enforcement arm of that government to step in and investigate theft of that currency?
It's endlessly fascinating to me, I have to admit. The minute the law regards bitcoins as having value, is the moment they expect people to pay tax on bitcoin income. Presumably that tax will be payable in national currency...
But if you sell your Bitcoin to a nerd for real money, and then spend that real money, you've bridged the gap between the "real world" and wherever it is that Bitcoin has value. Tada!
Why would you want to hoard it? you ask.
Why would you want to hoard stocks and shares?
Historically, the value of Bitcoins has climbed. If it was "worth" $500K today, it might be worth $600K in a couple of years' time.
The right time to sell, and whether it's a bubble waiting to burst -- these are classic questions investors have to face.
Bitcoin is used by drug addicts and drug dealers to buy narcotics.
So are dollars.
Now, you could have slipped in the word "exclusively", and you'd have had a point, but a point that was factually incorrect.
You could have slipped in the word "primarily", and you'd have had an uncorroborated claim to back up.
Even if it *is* primarily used for criminal purposes, Bitcoin is *fascinating*, and geeky. So it belongs here.
It's expected that the market value of Bitcoins will settle at just above the cost of mining, if you mine very efficiently.
Which if bitcoin is successful can only happen with massive deflation, because if the whole economy runs on bitcoins and there are 20 million in total, the value of each has to be huge.
No - primarily because the cost of mining increases exponentially by design.
But also because the bitcoin economy doesn't necessarily need to grow to $20 million, if it's used mainly for "in flight" transactions.
If I'm late to the bitcoin biz, I'm not going to try to buy my way in with dollars. Instead, I'm going to continue to do my transactions in dollars. I suspect lots of other people will think the exact same way.
I don't think anyone -- even most Bitcoin proponents -- would object to that line of thinking.
Where it becomes interesting is when properties of the electronic dollar make your transaction problematic.
These could be the situations where you might choose to use cash (e.g. for anonymity), except cash has its own problems -- you can't transfer cash electronically, for example.
These could be situations where you might choose to use Paypal (e.g. for sending money abroad), except Paypal has its own problems -- their fees.
I'm sure Bitcoin has its own problems too, but for some transactions, it's probably worth considering.
I haven't dabbled myself yet. It seems like the easy way, for a purchase where the seller accepts Bitcoin, and sending them "real" currency would be problematic, would be to buy some bitcoins, then immediately spend them. Or, as a seller, accept them then immediately exchange them,
As one gets more confident in it, one might choose to keep a float of maybe $100 worth of Bitcoin, just as I leave money in my Paypal account.
Nobody in their right mind would keep their life savings in Bitcoin. That's not what it's for.
I'm willing to admit that the Market Economics 101 was pretty useful (almost everything I know about economics comes from Economics For Dummies, which borrowed from the library some time ago).
However, using "speculators" in the informal way -- people buying "stuff" in the expectation that its value will increase whereupon they sell it -- I'd like to believe that not everyone willing to buy Bitcoins in exchange for real money come under that classification.
My sense is that there's a non-negligible number of people who have bought bitcoins because they find them useful.
As an easy, documented example, those Silk Road customers, who bought Bitcoins because they perceived them as the key to a safe way to buy drugs. They're not speculating in the sense that I would understand it. They're just finding Bitcoins useful -- as are the dealers!
Other possibilities -- people who want to do international money transfers without paying bank transaction fees or Paypal fees... I don't know how these compare with the losses you make converting Bitcoin back to real money -- but in principle it's a realistic scenario.
Libertarians and anarchists with ideological objections to government backed currencies... Transactions people would prefer not to appear on their bank statements...
Enough of this involves illegal activities that it should raise eyebrows, but there are legal scenarios where Bitcoin might seem useful too.
So gold more than doubled in value, relative to the CSI, between 1986 and 1980, during which time the dollar was unlinked from gold.
I don't know what that tells us, but it's interesting.
Real money backed by a government doesn't behave this way because it has intrinsic worth in that the government guarantees you can pay your taxes with it.
Not disagreeing with you, but it's interesting to note that the government only has authority because a critical mass of people choose to recognise it. If everyone simultaneously decided not to recognise their government, and not to pay tax, that particular property of the US$ would wither away.
Likewise, if enough people continue to ascribe value to bitcoins, then it will continue to be useful. If enough people decide they're worthless, then they're worthless.