My life is a horrible inefficient mess because I'm not spending that two seconds curing cancer?
Maybe you'd rather spend that 2 seconds playing computer games or walking in a park or playing with your dog or anything else that you would rather be doing. Frankly I can think of thousands of things to do that would be much more productive and fulfilling and useful than fussing over what to wear. It doesn't have to be be saving the world to be a better use of time.
At the core, that's fashion. A way to express who do you want to be, and projecting an image that conveys something you want to say about yourself.
Fashion to me is basically putting on a costume. Even if you purposefully put little effort into fashion you still are putting on a costume and it does say something about who you are and what you care about. Whether you dress in a suit or jean/tshirt or wedding gown, you are playing a role like an actor on stage. My choice to wear jeans today doesn't tell much about who I am but it does say something - and that is ok. And if someone judges me too harshly regarding my choice of dress, that tells me something about them AND it might be a signal that I need to re-evaluate the "role" I've chosen to play that day. We need to interact with the world and once our clothing has served its protective purpose everything else is costuming. It's possible to spend too much or too little time fussing about it but most people manage to strike some sort of vaguely reasonable balance.
Quite often they tend not to consider that introverts don't, and instead find the constant novelty draining.
Novelty isn't inherently draining to an introvert - social interaction is. I'm an introvert myself, albeit not severely so and I am quite energized by novelty. I just don't much care what other find novel. Engineering and science research fascinate me whereas fashion and reality tv could not be more boring. Both have novelty as a component but the difference is one is internally directed and the other is externally directed.
I don't think I'd trust someone who needed a nutritionist to eat healthily. It suggests incompetence, ignorance, and a lack of personal will.
Or it speaks of honesty, humility and lack of time or energy. If you are someone who is genuinely busy and has the financial resources to outsource decision making on routine meals, why wouldn't you? Basically you are trading money for time. Sure, you could take the time to research nutrition and cooking and handle it yourself just like you can mow your own lawn. But if you get no joy from the task and have the ability to hire others to do it for you you would be a fool not to.
Don't mistake lack of interest with lack of aptitude. Speaking for myself, I actually like to cook (occasionally), am pretty good at it and have a pretty good working knowledge of nutrition but I'd hire a personal chef/nutritionist in a heartbeat to take care of that for me most days. I genuinely would rather spend my effort elsewhere. There is nothing preventing me from cooking food whenever I want to but much of the time I just am not all that interested 90% of the time. It's really easy to make bad choices like going to McDonalds because it is quick and easy and requires little thought. You are basically already outsourcing it to McDonald's "nutritionists" if you do that. Why not hire someone who can do it better if you have the means?
Put real, rideable bikes back in big box stores and you'll see a resurgence in bicycle commters... in about 15 years.
No you won't. The laws, culture and infrastructure were built to support cars. Most adults in the US regard biking as a casual recreation activity, not as transportation. It has nothing to do with the type of bikes found at your local mega-mart.
I even like to bike but I live 20 miles from work and am not about to get up 90+ minutes earlier (while it is still dark out btw) ride that distance, get all sweaty and smelly and gross for the whole working day, ride back home at the end of the day to finally take a shower. Furthermore I live in a location where bike commuting would be absolutely miserable (and dangerous) for 5 months out of the year thanks to cold temperatures and snow.
The highway code explicitly says it's OK to ride bicycles two-abreast.
That actually varies by locality here in the US. Some places it is fine, others it is prohibited. Usually there is a requirement to not unduly interfere with the flow of traffic. Check your local laws to be sure.
In countries where cycling is common (Denmark, the Netherlands, Japan) people regard riding a bicycle as common as taking a walk. Would you walk as much if you had to wear a helmet?
Cycling is not popular in those countries because of helmets or because of the lack of them. Those countries have a culture and an infrastructure supportive of bicycling. The US does not in most places. The US has a culture built around the automobile and bicycles are not regarded as transportation by most adults. I don't have to wear a helmet to ride my bike where I live but the lack of that requirement has had precisely zero impact on the popularity of cycling around me.
Being able to buy/sell futures of commodities such as oil ties the bit coin to the real world in a way we haven't seen before.
No one who is hedging in those commodities for real is going to have anything to do with bitcoins. So the only people who are going to do anything combining futures contracts and bitcoins are speculators - and stupid speculators at that. It's super difficult to make money speculating on futures contracts even without adding in all the exchange rate and other risk associated with bitcoin.
it makes holding bitcoins a much more sensible, or at least much less financially treacherous prospect.
No it doesn't. Introducing derivatives contracts for speculation ADDS risk to the equation. There is no causal relationship between the value of any commodity traded as a futures contract and the value of bitcoins with relationship to other currencies. The only thing bitcoins add to the equation is additional exchange rate risk.
A potential user of bitcoins may be put off by the volatile nature of the value of the bitcoin itself, but if he can pin it down to the value of oil or gold by trading those futures, it makes holding bitcoins a much more sensible, or at least much less financially treacherous prospect.
So your idea is to (somehow) reduce your exposure to the volatility of bitcoins exchange rates by buying a differently volatile commodity which bears no relationship to the value of bitcoins whatsoever? Why not just avoid the bitcoins altogether and buy the futures contract directly using dollars? It would cost less and have no exchange rate risk.
I could then, with my 100 bitcoins, buy gold futures. Even if the value of a bitcoin plummetted meanwhile, I'd be making all that money back as the price of gold (expressed in bitcoins) skyrocke
Gold and bitcoins bear no causal relationship regarding their value. Gold can just as easily go down while bitcoins are going down. Gold is of dubious value as a hedge against fluctuations in the value of bitcoins.
I'd be essentially immune to the fickle price of a bitcoin and merely invested in gold. I could further stabilise my finances by SELLING gold futures in USD. If I did this right away, for a small cost, I would essentially have pegged the value of my bitcoins at 1 per every 10 USD.
If you are going to peg to the dollar, why not just own dollars? You have just taken a lot of risk and spent a bunch of money on a hedging strategy that you could replicate without spending anything and just holding on to your dollars.
Find me a service that delivers money into my account in less than 30 minutes, without fees, from Japan to France or Australia to France. I am more than interested.
Without fees or without cost? HUGE difference. Bitcoin might be without fees but it carries significant costs in terms of time and more importantly risk. You have to set up and administer the account which is an additional account beyond your regular bank account. You have to take the risk of putting your money into an illiquid currency and then have exchange rate risk when you try to exchange it for regular currency like dollars. I'm pretty sure you aren't even close to accounting for the actual expected cost of the transaction. I haven't even gotten into counterparty risk, market risk, and the rest. Sure it will often work out fine - but if you are actually accounting for the risk you are taking and time you are spending, the cost is no where near zero even if the fees are.
I still offer a 5% discount for bitcoin users, but until now, no clients have been interested.
Why? That's financially stupid unless your transaction fees are greater than 5% which is a pretty easy hurdle to beat. Furthermore bitcoin introduces a whole mess of additional risks that need to be paid for and that I'm pretty sure you haven't adequately considered. Clients aren't interested because it is actually rather expensive in terms of time and financial risk to use bitcoin.
However I do not despair as I am getting clients from all around the world and a lot complain about the difficulty to make international payement.
Making payments internationally is absurdly easy. It's not free but it isn't hard at all. If someone complains these days that it is difficult to send money internationally they are either stupid or unbelievably lazy. In a previous life I owned an auction company and we sold things worldwide. Transmitting payment was never even remotely difficult.
Dollars are also not generated by doing useful work. They are generated by a printing press, which is not doing anything inherently useful. I don't really see why rewarding early adopters is a bad thing.
Dollars are created by the Federal Reserve loaning money to banks. Those loans are then turned into additional loans which are used to buy things that do useful work. Governments don't actually fire up a printing press to "print money" and haven't for a very long time.
Sometimes, you just have to trust that things will work out well and take a chance because if nobody does, nothing will happen.
Fine, you go ahead and take a chance with your money. If it works out well for you maybe the rest of us will consider it. Maybe you'll even find some great opportunities. Or maybe you'll be eaten by proverbial sharks. I'm quite comfortable not using bitcoin and see lots of risk to it with little potential upside. Always possible I could be wrong - but I doubt it.
BitCoins doesn't solve all the problems of money, but it does solve a fair number of them.
Bitcoin doesn't even solve the problems it was created to solve. It carries enormous risks, not the least of which is huge exchange rate risk. It's not a particularly effective medium of exchange (complicated, requires a computer, thinly traded, not accepted anywhere) nor is it a particularly good store of value.
Logic and reason would seem to indicate that this is a better way to do currency.
Do you seriously think that Bitcoin is trying anything that has never been tried before? Limiting the amount of currency available by tying it to some arbitrary limiting function? Tried that with the gold standard - didn't work very well.
Can one of the economists explain why it won't work?
While I'm not an economist, I am a certified accountant. I see numerous problems with bitcoin.
First, governments are an integral part of EVERY economy and usually account for a substantial portion of GDP (20-50% is pretty common). We can fairly argue about how much of a role governments should play but the fact is that they do play a substantial role even in the most restricted forms. I cannot conceive of a circumstance whereby a government would abdicate its ability to control and influence monetary policy. Even if they were willing to do it however, it would remain a bad idea because...
Second, there is no escape hatch. The biggest flaw in the gold standard was that it was difficult to impossible to depreciate currencies if a country were to run chronic deficits. The Euro is experiencing this problem right now in Greece - exchange rates are effectively fixed within the Euro zone and there are limited ways for Greece to devalue its currency - basically the only option is austerity measures. (The US doesn't experience this because labor and capital mobility is easier within a political union) Bitcoin would share the same fatal flaw as the gold standard. In certain inevitable circumstances it would be extremely difficult to influence the money supply in helpful ways. Effectively bitcoin would severely limit options in the event of a fiscal crisis by replicating the single worst feature of the gold standard.
Third, I find it deeply unlikely that most people will ever trust bitcoin and trust is fundamental to any currency. People (sort of) get that the dollar can be created by the Fed and taxed by the government and used pretty much anywhere. It's complicated but fundamentally run by people. People feel they can wrap their head around that even if they get some of the details wrong. Asking them to trust the bitcoin creation and storage process which uses untested (for this purpose) and highly technical cryptography that sounds scary and incomprehensible to most people is going to be asking a lot. I cannot imagine successfully explaining how bitcoin works or why she should use it to my grandmother. Furthermore, bitcoin presently is apparently being used by most accounts primarily to launder money and facility transactions of dubious legality. If you want to be able to trust a currency, having the perception (right or wrong) of potential criminals as counterparties isn't a good start.
Fourth, exchange rate risk. Given that it isn't going to be supported by a government, bitcoin is almost certainly going to remain a niche currency. This means that it probably is going to remain thinly traded and subject to wild fluctuations in exchange rates. Inflation/deflation will be severe problems. You can facilitate transactions in bitcoin but eventually you will have to turn those bitcoins into dollars or euros or some kind of good. Without the support of governments it will be virtually impossible to achieve the kind of scale needed to provide enough liquidity to mitigate the exchange rate risks. As such it will effectively be more expensive to exchange goods in bitcoin once you fully account for the risks
In general, as stocks decline, gold goes up as people shift money from one market to another. So if you buy both, when one goes down, the other will go up faster, helping limit losses.
Gold and real estate may tend to have a negative correlation with stock prices but there is little actual relationship between the two assets in most cases. Gold can just as easily go up at the same time as stock prices go up and that often happens. Our current financial crises was caused by real estate dropping in value (for complicated reasons) and taking other assets (including stocks) along for the ride. A futures contract creates a perfect hedge for a defined amount of the underlying commodity. A perfect hedge is not always possible so sometimes we use proxy commodities (oil for gasoline for instance) but "hedging" stocks with gold or real estate is merely diversification with negatively correlated assets. Might work but it is a rather poor hedge if that is the actual goal.
All currencies are ethereal, the difference is belief that it has value.
That's completely true for any asset - currency or otherwise. However there are proven mechanics regarding how to administer a currency such that it is actually useful to a society. While confidence in the value of a currency is a necessary condition it is not a sufficient one. Bitcoin is terribly flawed in a variety of ways that go well beyond whether people actually believe it has value - which they largely do not.
Pro-tip for life, instead of just saying someone is wrong, tell them why you think they are wrong, and maybe even how you think they can fix it.
Since you asked so nicely.... Bitcoin is a stupid thing to use because it introduces a lot of unnecessary risk and there is a very strong chance that it is either a pyramid scheme or an outright scam. Bitcoin is thinly traded, difficult to exchange, accepted almost nowhere and fluctuates wildly in value. It is used primarily for illegal activities including purchasing of controlled substances and money laundering. It has a dubious and complicated method of currency creation which is fairly incomprehensible to anyone who isn't a crypto-geek. It replicates most of the problems of a gold standard based economy plus rampant inflation/deflation cycles and extremely poor liquidity. Bitcoin is a pet project conceived and executed by a few geeks who think they know more about economics than they actually do. I have difficulty conceiving of a more perfect vehicle for losing a lot of money than bitcoin.
How to fix it? Stop using bitcoin and stop wasting everyone's time with pointless articles about it on slashdot.
Buying gold futures, by contrast, does not have any use, except to then sell those futures, hopefully at a profit.
You mean except for the actual purpose of a gold future which is to take delivery of a defined amount of gold at a specified price on a specified date?
Methinks you are confusing speculation on a financial instrument with the actual purpose of the instrument. The purpose of a gold future contract is to lock in a price on a delivery of a defined amount gold. The primary purpose of futures contracts is to hedge against future price fluctuations in commodities like gold or corn or frozen concentrated orange juice. [/movie reference] If you are a farmer and you are growing corn, you are carrying a lot of risk if you wait until the end of the growing season. Not only do you not know how much corn you'll have but you don't know what the price will be. So you sell a contract to deliver X bushels of corn on Y date for Z price. Your price is locked in and if there is a drought you can simply sell the contract on the futures market instead of delivering the corn.
Anyone who buys a futures contract using bitcoin is an idiot or a scam artist. No one who is actually hedging risk is going to use bitcoin to do it so all that is left is speculators. Speculating in futures contracts is highly risky even without adding an additional level of exchange rate risk in using bitcoins. Furthermore, I'm rather doubtful that if you purchased a futures contract through this "market" that you could actually take delivery of the products that underlie the contract.
I have no idea why there is this obsession with bitcoin by a few people here on slashdot. Bitcoin is an incredibly stupid idea used mostly by people doing illegal things. Anyone who uses bitcoin either has no concept of exchange rate risk or is doing something illegal that carries an even higher risk like jail time. At best bitcoin is an ill-conceived and fatally flawed virtual currency. At worst it is a pyramid scheme and/or a money laundering scheme. Either way it is something to stay away from.
The Bible says in the New Testament in 1 Corinthians 15 that the church's judgment is to be enforced only within the church.
The bible means whatever people want it to mean. I'm pretty sure I can find some verse in the bible to directly contradict the one you cite. Christians have never been particularly bashful about trying to force the church's judgement upon others. Evangelizing (sometimes at the point of a sword) is a huge part of the history of christianity. This is simply one more instance.
It'd cost me $2100 to replace every bulb in my home (not including the 8 flood lamps).
Bull**** it would cost that much.
CFLs can be had for under $5. So you are saying you have 420 light bulbs in your house? A house that you claim costs $90/month to heat even in summer? Even if we go with LED lights which can be had for under $25 you are saying you have 84 lights in the house. If you are going to make stuff up, at least do it in a way where we can't do the math.
Some people prefer incandescent bulbs, do you want to take away their freedom to choose?
People like all sorts of things that are a bad for them. I don't really give a crap if people prefer incandescent bulbs. I do think they are an inefficient relic that people need to stop buying. To do this the alternatives are either make it illegal or provide incentives to make a better choice. I'd prefer they just be taxed heavily but that's politically impossible. A ban isn't an ideal solution but it does have the desired effect. If you have a better solution that is politically possible I'm all ears however.
Should be a tax. Encourage people to make the right choices, but don't screw people who have special circumstances or are willing to compensate society for the cost of their preference.
Should be but won't be. Republicans break out in hives if you try to raise taxes even for a good reason. Economically it makes sense but politically it is impossible.
No. People continue to buy wasteful incandescent bulbs. They consume too much energy, emit too much heat, and take up landfill space since they have to be replaced all the time. They are cheap to produce so people buy them even though in the long run they cost more. We regulate lots of things because people have proven they are unwilling or unable to act in their own or collective self interest. This is a perfect example. It's example like people not choosing fuel efficient cars. I would be fine with a tax on incandescent bulbs (if it was high enough) instead of a ban but since too many people in the US break out in hives at the hint of being taxed the only alternative left is to essentially ban them.
This is not a problem that needs to be solved by expensive regulation and legislation.
Apparently it is since people continue to use bulbs that are unnecessarily wasteful despite there being viable alternatives. However much this regulation might have cost (not much I think), the energy savings will easily recoup the cost in the long run.
Always great to see Slashdot accepting article intros with obvious bias built in! Drop the political stuff, PLEASE?
I'd rather look forward than back - I want electric vehicles to improve to beat gasoline ones; not handicap gasoline ones so EVs win despite their disability.
Don't get me wrong, I'd prefer the same thing. However we know how to raise the price of gas. Dropping the cost of EV powertrains is a lot less certain and more unpredictable. It's unclear how much or how fast the technology will advance though I'm fairly confident that a significant rise in the cost of gasoline would likely be followed by a lot of research and a subsequent drop in the cost of EVs.
I don't pretend to know exactly where the tipping point is. Might be 10 minutes or even less but I suspect 15-20 would be acceptable to enough people to get people to look more closely at the advantages of electric power. What I am certain of is that it does NOT have to be just as fast as a gasoline fill up - it just has to be close enough. Most disruptive technologies are inferior in some ways early on but have other advantages that make them worth it.
With all the extra waiting you now have to have larger stations, which will have problems for cities, or you make it so that parking lots provide fueling which has other problems.
That's actually a potential opportunity. Gas stations typically don't make much money on gasoline. They actually make money on groceries or repairs or some other part of the business. If people can be induced to hang around longer there is more opportunity to sell them things.
I'd be more than happy with a low cost electric vehicle with a range of around 50-100 miles as long as it's clearly priced and marketed as a supplementary vehicle (ie you'd be expected to buy one in addition to a regular car)
Really? You'd buy a $10,000+ extra vehicle to save money on gas? You can buy an awful lot of gas for the cost of a second vehicle. I like electric vehicles too but I can't even begin to pretend that they make any kind of economic sense, even as a second vehicle.
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My life is a horrible inefficient mess because I'm not spending that two seconds curing cancer?
Maybe you'd rather spend that 2 seconds playing computer games or walking in a park or playing with your dog or anything else that you would rather be doing. Frankly I can think of thousands of things to do that would be much more productive and fulfilling and useful than fussing over what to wear. It doesn't have to be be saving the world to be a better use of time.
At the core, that's fashion. A way to express who do you want to be, and projecting an image that conveys something you want to say about yourself.
Fashion to me is basically putting on a costume. Even if you purposefully put little effort into fashion you still are putting on a costume and it does say something about who you are and what you care about. Whether you dress in a suit or jean/tshirt or wedding gown, you are playing a role like an actor on stage. My choice to wear jeans today doesn't tell much about who I am but it does say something - and that is ok. And if someone judges me too harshly regarding my choice of dress, that tells me something about them AND it might be a signal that I need to re-evaluate the "role" I've chosen to play that day. We need to interact with the world and once our clothing has served its protective purpose everything else is costuming. It's possible to spend too much or too little time fussing about it but most people manage to strike some sort of vaguely reasonable balance.
Quite often they tend not to consider that introverts don't, and instead find the constant novelty draining.
Novelty isn't inherently draining to an introvert - social interaction is. I'm an introvert myself, albeit not severely so and I am quite energized by novelty. I just don't much care what other find novel. Engineering and science research fascinate me whereas fashion and reality tv could not be more boring. Both have novelty as a component but the difference is one is internally directed and the other is externally directed.
I don't think I'd trust someone who needed a nutritionist to eat healthily. It suggests incompetence, ignorance, and a lack of personal will.
Or it speaks of honesty, humility and lack of time or energy. If you are someone who is genuinely busy and has the financial resources to outsource decision making on routine meals, why wouldn't you? Basically you are trading money for time. Sure, you could take the time to research nutrition and cooking and handle it yourself just like you can mow your own lawn. But if you get no joy from the task and have the ability to hire others to do it for you you would be a fool not to.
Don't mistake lack of interest with lack of aptitude. Speaking for myself, I actually like to cook (occasionally), am pretty good at it and have a pretty good working knowledge of nutrition but I'd hire a personal chef/nutritionist in a heartbeat to take care of that for me most days. I genuinely would rather spend my effort elsewhere. There is nothing preventing me from cooking food whenever I want to but much of the time I just am not all that interested 90% of the time. It's really easy to make bad choices like going to McDonalds because it is quick and easy and requires little thought. You are basically already outsourcing it to McDonald's "nutritionists" if you do that. Why not hire someone who can do it better if you have the means?
Put real, rideable bikes back in big box stores and you'll see a resurgence in bicycle commters... in about 15 years.
No you won't. The laws, culture and infrastructure were built to support cars. Most adults in the US regard biking as a casual recreation activity, not as transportation. It has nothing to do with the type of bikes found at your local mega-mart.
I even like to bike but I live 20 miles from work and am not about to get up 90+ minutes earlier (while it is still dark out btw) ride that distance, get all sweaty and smelly and gross for the whole working day, ride back home at the end of the day to finally take a shower. Furthermore I live in a location where bike commuting would be absolutely miserable (and dangerous) for 5 months out of the year thanks to cold temperatures and snow.
The highway code explicitly says it's OK to ride bicycles two-abreast.
That actually varies by locality here in the US. Some places it is fine, others it is prohibited. Usually there is a requirement to not unduly interfere with the flow of traffic. Check your local laws to be sure.
In countries where cycling is common (Denmark, the Netherlands, Japan) people regard riding a bicycle as common as taking a walk. Would you walk as much if you had to wear a helmet?
Cycling is not popular in those countries because of helmets or because of the lack of them. Those countries have a culture and an infrastructure supportive of bicycling. The US does not in most places. The US has a culture built around the automobile and bicycles are not regarded as transportation by most adults. I don't have to wear a helmet to ride my bike where I live but the lack of that requirement has had precisely zero impact on the popularity of cycling around me.
Being able to buy/sell futures of commodities such as oil ties the bit coin to the real world in a way we haven't seen before.
No one who is hedging in those commodities for real is going to have anything to do with bitcoins. So the only people who are going to do anything combining futures contracts and bitcoins are speculators - and stupid speculators at that. It's super difficult to make money speculating on futures contracts even without adding in all the exchange rate and other risk associated with bitcoin.
it makes holding bitcoins a much more sensible, or at least much less financially treacherous prospect.
No it doesn't. Introducing derivatives contracts for speculation ADDS risk to the equation. There is no causal relationship between the value of any commodity traded as a futures contract and the value of bitcoins with relationship to other currencies. The only thing bitcoins add to the equation is additional exchange rate risk.
A potential user of bitcoins may be put off by the volatile nature of the value of the bitcoin itself, but if he can pin it down to the value of oil or gold by trading those futures, it makes holding bitcoins a much more sensible, or at least much less financially treacherous prospect.
So your idea is to (somehow) reduce your exposure to the volatility of bitcoins exchange rates by buying a differently volatile commodity which bears no relationship to the value of bitcoins whatsoever? Why not just avoid the bitcoins altogether and buy the futures contract directly using dollars? It would cost less and have no exchange rate risk.
I could then, with my 100 bitcoins, buy gold futures. Even if the value of a bitcoin plummetted meanwhile, I'd be making all that money back as the price of gold (expressed in bitcoins) skyrocke
Gold and bitcoins bear no causal relationship regarding their value. Gold can just as easily go down while bitcoins are going down. Gold is of dubious value as a hedge against fluctuations in the value of bitcoins.
I'd be essentially immune to the fickle price of a bitcoin and merely invested in gold. I could further stabilise my finances by SELLING gold futures in USD. If I did this right away, for a small cost, I would essentially have pegged the value of my bitcoins at 1 per every 10 USD.
If you are going to peg to the dollar, why not just own dollars? You have just taken a lot of risk and spent a bunch of money on a hedging strategy that you could replicate without spending anything and just holding on to your dollars.
Find me a service that delivers money into my account in less than 30 minutes, without fees, from Japan to France or Australia to France. I am more than interested.
Without fees or without cost? HUGE difference. Bitcoin might be without fees but it carries significant costs in terms of time and more importantly risk. You have to set up and administer the account which is an additional account beyond your regular bank account. You have to take the risk of putting your money into an illiquid currency and then have exchange rate risk when you try to exchange it for regular currency like dollars. I'm pretty sure you aren't even close to accounting for the actual expected cost of the transaction. I haven't even gotten into counterparty risk, market risk, and the rest. Sure it will often work out fine - but if you are actually accounting for the risk you are taking and time you are spending, the cost is no where near zero even if the fees are.
I still offer a 5% discount for bitcoin users, but until now, no clients have been interested.
Why? That's financially stupid unless your transaction fees are greater than 5% which is a pretty easy hurdle to beat. Furthermore bitcoin introduces a whole mess of additional risks that need to be paid for and that I'm pretty sure you haven't adequately considered. Clients aren't interested because it is actually rather expensive in terms of time and financial risk to use bitcoin.
However I do not despair as I am getting clients from all around the world and a lot complain about the difficulty to make international payement.
Making payments internationally is absurdly easy. It's not free but it isn't hard at all. If someone complains these days that it is difficult to send money internationally they are either stupid or unbelievably lazy. In a previous life I owned an auction company and we sold things worldwide. Transmitting payment was never even remotely difficult.
Dollars are also not generated by doing useful work. They are generated by a printing press, which is not doing anything inherently useful. I don't really see why rewarding early adopters is a bad thing.
Dollars are created by the Federal Reserve loaning money to banks. Those loans are then turned into additional loans which are used to buy things that do useful work. Governments don't actually fire up a printing press to "print money" and haven't for a very long time.
Sometimes, you just have to trust that things will work out well and take a chance because if nobody does, nothing will happen.
Fine, you go ahead and take a chance with your money. If it works out well for you maybe the rest of us will consider it. Maybe you'll even find some great opportunities. Or maybe you'll be eaten by proverbial sharks. I'm quite comfortable not using bitcoin and see lots of risk to it with little potential upside. Always possible I could be wrong - but I doubt it.
BitCoins doesn't solve all the problems of money, but it does solve a fair number of them.
Bitcoin doesn't even solve the problems it was created to solve. It carries enormous risks, not the least of which is huge exchange rate risk. It's not a particularly effective medium of exchange (complicated, requires a computer, thinly traded, not accepted anywhere) nor is it a particularly good store of value.
Logic and reason would seem to indicate that this is a better way to do currency.
Do you seriously think that Bitcoin is trying anything that has never been tried before? Limiting the amount of currency available by tying it to some arbitrary limiting function? Tried that with the gold standard - didn't work very well.
Can one of the economists explain why it won't work?
While I'm not an economist, I am a certified accountant. I see numerous problems with bitcoin.
First, governments are an integral part of EVERY economy and usually account for a substantial portion of GDP (20-50% is pretty common). We can fairly argue about how much of a role governments should play but the fact is that they do play a substantial role even in the most restricted forms. I cannot conceive of a circumstance whereby a government would abdicate its ability to control and influence monetary policy. Even if they were willing to do it however, it would remain a bad idea because...
Second, there is no escape hatch. The biggest flaw in the gold standard was that it was difficult to impossible to depreciate currencies if a country were to run chronic deficits. The Euro is experiencing this problem right now in Greece - exchange rates are effectively fixed within the Euro zone and there are limited ways for Greece to devalue its currency - basically the only option is austerity measures. (The US doesn't experience this because labor and capital mobility is easier within a political union) Bitcoin would share the same fatal flaw as the gold standard. In certain inevitable circumstances it would be extremely difficult to influence the money supply in helpful ways. Effectively bitcoin would severely limit options in the event of a fiscal crisis by replicating the single worst feature of the gold standard.
Third, I find it deeply unlikely that most people will ever trust bitcoin and trust is fundamental to any currency. People (sort of) get that the dollar can be created by the Fed and taxed by the government and used pretty much anywhere. It's complicated but fundamentally run by people. People feel they can wrap their head around that even if they get some of the details wrong. Asking them to trust the bitcoin creation and storage process which uses untested (for this purpose) and highly technical cryptography that sounds scary and incomprehensible to most people is going to be asking a lot. I cannot imagine successfully explaining how bitcoin works or why she should use it to my grandmother. Furthermore, bitcoin presently is apparently being used by most accounts primarily to launder money and facility transactions of dubious legality. If you want to be able to trust a currency, having the perception (right or wrong) of potential criminals as counterparties isn't a good start.
Fourth, exchange rate risk. Given that it isn't going to be supported by a government, bitcoin is almost certainly going to remain a niche currency. This means that it probably is going to remain thinly traded and subject to wild fluctuations in exchange rates. Inflation/deflation will be severe problems. You can facilitate transactions in bitcoin but eventually you will have to turn those bitcoins into dollars or euros or some kind of good. Without the support of governments it will be virtually impossible to achieve the kind of scale needed to provide enough liquidity to mitigate the exchange rate risks. As such it will effectively be more expensive to exchange goods in bitcoin once you fully account for the risks
In general, as stocks decline, gold goes up as people shift money from one market to another. So if you buy both, when one goes down, the other will go up faster, helping limit losses.
Gold and real estate may tend to have a negative correlation with stock prices but there is little actual relationship between the two assets in most cases. Gold can just as easily go up at the same time as stock prices go up and that often happens. Our current financial crises was caused by real estate dropping in value (for complicated reasons) and taking other assets (including stocks) along for the ride. A futures contract creates a perfect hedge for a defined amount of the underlying commodity. A perfect hedge is not always possible so sometimes we use proxy commodities (oil for gasoline for instance) but "hedging" stocks with gold or real estate is merely diversification with negatively correlated assets. Might work but it is a rather poor hedge if that is the actual goal.
All currencies are ethereal, the difference is belief that it has value.
That's completely true for any asset - currency or otherwise. However there are proven mechanics regarding how to administer a currency such that it is actually useful to a society. While confidence in the value of a currency is a necessary condition it is not a sufficient one. Bitcoin is terribly flawed in a variety of ways that go well beyond whether people actually believe it has value - which they largely do not.
Pro-tip for life, instead of just saying someone is wrong, tell them why you think they are wrong, and maybe even how you think they can fix it.
Since you asked so nicely.... Bitcoin is a stupid thing to use because it introduces a lot of unnecessary risk and there is a very strong chance that it is either a pyramid scheme or an outright scam. Bitcoin is thinly traded, difficult to exchange, accepted almost nowhere and fluctuates wildly in value. It is used primarily for illegal activities including purchasing of controlled substances and money laundering. It has a dubious and complicated method of currency creation which is fairly incomprehensible to anyone who isn't a crypto-geek. It replicates most of the problems of a gold standard based economy plus rampant inflation/deflation cycles and extremely poor liquidity. Bitcoin is a pet project conceived and executed by a few geeks who think they know more about economics than they actually do. I have difficulty conceiving of a more perfect vehicle for losing a lot of money than bitcoin.
How to fix it? Stop using bitcoin and stop wasting everyone's time with pointless articles about it on slashdot.
Buying gold futures, by contrast, does not have any use, except to then sell those futures, hopefully at a profit.
You mean except for the actual purpose of a gold future which is to take delivery of a defined amount of gold at a specified price on a specified date?
Methinks you are confusing speculation on a financial instrument with the actual purpose of the instrument. The purpose of a gold future contract is to lock in a price on a delivery of a defined amount gold. The primary purpose of futures contracts is to hedge against future price fluctuations in commodities like gold or corn or frozen concentrated orange juice. [/movie reference] If you are a farmer and you are growing corn, you are carrying a lot of risk if you wait until the end of the growing season. Not only do you not know how much corn you'll have but you don't know what the price will be. So you sell a contract to deliver X bushels of corn on Y date for Z price. Your price is locked in and if there is a drought you can simply sell the contract on the futures market instead of delivering the corn.
Anyone who buys a futures contract using bitcoin is an idiot or a scam artist. No one who is actually hedging risk is going to use bitcoin to do it so all that is left is speculators. Speculating in futures contracts is highly risky even without adding an additional level of exchange rate risk in using bitcoins. Furthermore, I'm rather doubtful that if you purchased a futures contract through this "market" that you could actually take delivery of the products that underlie the contract.
I have no idea why there is this obsession with bitcoin by a few people here on slashdot. Bitcoin is an incredibly stupid idea used mostly by people doing illegal things. Anyone who uses bitcoin either has no concept of exchange rate risk or is doing something illegal that carries an even higher risk like jail time. At best bitcoin is an ill-conceived and fatally flawed virtual currency. At worst it is a pyramid scheme and/or a money laundering scheme. Either way it is something to stay away from.
The Bible says in the New Testament in 1 Corinthians 15 that the church's judgment is to be enforced only within the church.
The bible means whatever people want it to mean. I'm pretty sure I can find some verse in the bible to directly contradict the one you cite. Christians have never been particularly bashful about trying to force the church's judgement upon others. Evangelizing (sometimes at the point of a sword) is a huge part of the history of christianity. This is simply one more instance.
It'd cost me $2100 to replace every bulb in my home (not including the 8 flood lamps).
Bull**** it would cost that much.
CFLs can be had for under $5. So you are saying you have 420 light bulbs in your house? A house that you claim costs $90/month to heat even in summer? Even if we go with LED lights which can be had for under $25 you are saying you have 84 lights in the house. If you are going to make stuff up, at least do it in a way where we can't do the math.
Some people prefer incandescent bulbs, do you want to take away their freedom to choose?
People like all sorts of things that are a bad for them. I don't really give a crap if people prefer incandescent bulbs. I do think they are an inefficient relic that people need to stop buying. To do this the alternatives are either make it illegal or provide incentives to make a better choice. I'd prefer they just be taxed heavily but that's politically impossible. A ban isn't an ideal solution but it does have the desired effect. If you have a better solution that is politically possible I'm all ears however.
Should be a tax. Encourage people to make the right choices, but don't screw people who have special circumstances or are willing to compensate society for the cost of their preference.
Should be but won't be. Republicans break out in hives if you try to raise taxes even for a good reason. Economically it makes sense but politically it is impossible.
Let consumers decide which bulbs they prefer.
No. People continue to buy wasteful incandescent bulbs. They consume too much energy, emit too much heat, and take up landfill space since they have to be replaced all the time. They are cheap to produce so people buy them even though in the long run they cost more. We regulate lots of things because people have proven they are unwilling or unable to act in their own or collective self interest. This is a perfect example. It's example like people not choosing fuel efficient cars. I would be fine with a tax on incandescent bulbs (if it was high enough) instead of a ban but since too many people in the US break out in hives at the hint of being taxed the only alternative left is to essentially ban them.
This is not a problem that needs to be solved by expensive regulation and legislation.
Apparently it is since people continue to use bulbs that are unnecessarily wasteful despite there being viable alternatives. However much this regulation might have cost (not much I think), the energy savings will easily recoup the cost in the long run.
Always great to see Slashdot accepting article intros with obvious bias built in! Drop the political stuff, PLEASE?
In spite of your user ID you must be new here...
I'd rather look forward than back - I want electric vehicles to improve to beat gasoline ones; not handicap gasoline ones so EVs win despite their disability.
Don't get me wrong, I'd prefer the same thing. However we know how to raise the price of gas. Dropping the cost of EV powertrains is a lot less certain and more unpredictable. It's unclear how much or how fast the technology will advance though I'm fairly confident that a significant rise in the cost of gasoline would likely be followed by a lot of research and a subsequent drop in the cost of EVs.
15-20 mins is not competitive
I don't pretend to know exactly where the tipping point is. Might be 10 minutes or even less but I suspect 15-20 would be acceptable to enough people to get people to look more closely at the advantages of electric power. What I am certain of is that it does NOT have to be just as fast as a gasoline fill up - it just has to be close enough. Most disruptive technologies are inferior in some ways early on but have other advantages that make them worth it.
With all the extra waiting you now have to have larger stations, which will have problems for cities, or you make it so that parking lots provide fueling which has other problems.
That's actually a potential opportunity. Gas stations typically don't make much money on gasoline. They actually make money on groceries or repairs or some other part of the business. If people can be induced to hang around longer there is more opportunity to sell them things.
I'd be more than happy with a low cost electric vehicle with a range of around 50-100 miles as long as it's clearly priced and marketed as a supplementary vehicle (ie you'd be expected to buy one in addition to a regular car)
Really? You'd buy a $10,000+ extra vehicle to save money on gas? You can buy an awful lot of gas for the cost of a second vehicle. I like electric vehicles too but I can't even begin to pretend that they make any kind of economic sense, even as a second vehicle.