It's easy for the price someone is willing to pay to be significantly different to the production cost of a coin.
If you don't take into account all costs, including overhead, opportunity costs in time, human effort, in the investment of efficient hardware, and the risk associated with investment, etc, it makes sense for the actual price of a bitcoin to be higher than the amount of money it takes to mine bitcoins.
If you actually account for these costs, the prices will be much closer. IN fact from an economic point of view you could argue that the costs become equal, and that the price of a bitcoin defines the cost of mining, in the same way that you are defining the price of bitcoin as the price someone is willing to pay.
Though it is likely that the production cost will follow, or be slightly above the exchange value. The causal relationship is the other way around. Miners will turn their rigs on and off based on the price. The price is not set based on the energy consumed.
The price is set by supply and demand and the free market, and the supply and demand is determined by the cost of mining. Miners will turn off their machines when there is excess supply (the price of bitcoin below the cost of mining), and on when their is excess demand (the price is above the cost of mining). The more demand there is, the more miners are turned on and the more supply is generated, until the supply and demand come to an equilibrium point.
You cant assume that the exchange value and production cost are in equilibrium.
You can't safely assume assume anything with 100% certainty or accuracy. You can;t assume supply and demand works, you can;t assume anything works. But these are just simple economic principles that have been around for a long time, and have been shown to be both true in principle and in practice if you accept a little noise and fluctuation. You can't assume people are rational actors and be right all the time, but you can assume it and be right most of the time.
Plus the current rate that new coins are being created is insignificant when compared to the number of coins being traded.
That's by design. Mining is only supposed to be done by the most efficient miners. This is *because* the price is driven up to the point where only the most efficient miners can profit and with thin margins. If the profit margins were higher then everyone would do it, and the price would drop until an equilibrium was reached.
The problem was that he tried to blackmail a government. If you try to blackmail a person with limited resources, it might turn out that the cheapest thing for them to do is to give into your demands, especially when the government is only really motivated to get their own money back and not other people's money back. If you try to blackmail someone very rich, you will probably just anger them enough to be willing to lose more money just to see you go down out of spite. You could try to make the blackmail consequences really severe, but chances are that there is a limit to the amount of damage you can really cause. If you try to blackmail a government that can levy taxes to generate revenue, controls the justice system and has a public image to uphold. You are really going to have to do something bigger than hijack some infrastructure passwords. You need to takeover Alcatraz and point some missiles with vx gas at the city.
1. You can make this argument for anything. Ferraris can be produced for free too. All you need to do is steal one. Or you can use a botnet to mine $200,000 bitcoins and buy one with money you got for free.
2. I said the upper bound is determined by the cost of mining (not that it equals the short term cost once you already have a mining operation going). The cost of mining includes the risk inherent in getting into the mining business. There is overhead costs of buying machines, and opportunity cost of time and money invested into the operation. There is the risk that bitcoin will crash after you have already invested in the machines. There is a chance that your machines can become damaged. By simply buying bitcoins you are mitigating this risk, and you pay a premium for that.
This is true of just everything. The price of a nexus 5 is $350. It doesn't matter if the retailer gets them at wholesale prices for $300 or whatever it is. They have added costs and risks associated with running a store.
I've heard people suggest that miners will create more and sell them which will drop the market rate but why would I sell a bitcoin worth $100 for the equivalent of $99 when I could either hold onto it, buy something worth $100 etc?
Because it's a currency and currency is used to buy and sell things. Currency facilitates trade. Even if bitcoin was the best investment ever, you still need to eat. You sell/exchange bitcoins to get other things you need. It's not supposed to be for investment, although it can and has been used for that. It is supposed to be a currency.
Look at what silk road did. They hedged against the value of bitcoin, so it's volatility didn't have to factor into the actual transactions. The people that used it were using it the way it was intended to be used.
Because bitcoin doesn't become inflated, it *can* actually be a good investment, unlike the dollar, which is a terrible investment in itself, but you aren't required to participate in the investment. You can simply use it. Similarly miners don;t have to invest in bitcoin as a currency either. They can simply invest in their own mining hardware and sell the bitcoins to invest in something else, like houses or treasury bonds, or whatever. Just because you can mine them efficiently doesn't mean you believe they are a good long term investment.
Some gold miners probably keep the gold they mine. I suspect most sell it for the stuff they need. Gold miners don't keep all their gold for the same reason I don't spend all my money on gold.
Why would deflation even be a problem? If everybody destroyed half their dollars, the other half would be worth twice as much and everyone would have the same amount of money relative to eachother. This would be a huge amount of deflation that has no effect. The same is true of inflation. The only time when deflation and inflation are problematic is when you have an asymmetrical reduction or increase of the money supply. This is common with inflation due to governments printing money to spend, but this is not what would happen with random people occasionally losing their wallets. This loss will be basically random and not transfer the money to a single entitiy, it will be proportionally distributed to the other bitcoin owners.
Since the supply is limited, if the demand goes up, so should the exchange value.
The supply is not currently limited, in the sense that anyone can mine more of them if they are willing to spend money on electricity. There is just not an advantage to mining over buying them, because the costs are always relatively equal. This will change in the future, but it has no effect now.
Secondly, bitcoins have absolutely no inherent value. You can't create anything with them directly. You might say that their implicit scarcity gives them some value in the same way that gold, silver and platinum are considered to be valuable, but at least those metals have some utility value as well.
The value of gold and platinum due to their utility other than as currency is insignificant. In fact part of what makes them such good currency candidates is their lack of utility.
But the production cost of bitcoins has no direct impact on the exchange value of existing coins. Instead I'd suggest that the relationship is the other way around.
This is wrong. Why on earth would I pay $400 for a bitcoin if I can mine one for $200. All bitcoins are the same. If the current price of mining a bitcoin is $200, then nobody is going to be willing to pay much more than that for a bitcoin. This will change in the future, but not soon.
If the exchange value is higher than the production cost, more people would be encouraged to join the mining operation and vice versa.
This is agrees with my argument, not yours. If people decide to mine rather than pay people for bitcoins, this actually lowers the value of bitcoins in the short term, because it increases the supply and lowers the demand. Eventually as more bitcoins are mined, the price will go up when the reward is decreased.
You are mostly wrong. The only parts you were right about, are the parts where you inadvertently agreed with me without realizing it.
Botnets can steal computing power to do anything not just mine bitcoins. The cost of electricity is still an upper bound on bitcoin. There will always be thieves. The price of a Ferrari is not $0 because someone can use a botnet to mine (i.e. steal) $200,000 in bitcoins.
A very slow loss of bitcoins is not a problem, especially if the level of granularity left in the existing pool is enough to allow for small transactions. Even if half the bitcoins are lost, 10.5 million bitcoins translates to 105 trillion units of currency. This is about 15,000 units of currency per person on the earth. It's not ideal, but still pretty good.
Consider the problem of people losing paper money. It's true that new money is issued to compensate for lost/destroyed money, but it doesn't go to the person that lost it. When bitcoins are lost, more can be mined. When the cap is nearly reached, then lost bitcoins will just make the other coins more valuable. This is equivalent to printing more bitcoins and distributing them proportionally among all bitcoin owners.
You said that new coins should be issued under a majority vote, but what would this accomplish? It would simply cause a waste of more electricity to put more bitcoins in circulation. It doesn't really change anything. When mining actually stops, it will mark a point when resources are no longer wasted for the purpose of proving work.
yes people losing private keys will eventually lead to deflation when we actually get close to the 21 million cap. Until then, the fact that bitcoins are disappearing due to lost wallets only has an effect if the cost of mining is significantly higher than the current price. Otherwise, it's cheaper to mine new bitcoins than it is to buy existing bitcoins in an environment when low supply compared to high demand.
So yes bitcoin does have some deflation built in, but it is insignificant at the current time.
Can you buy a sandwich with gold shavings? Can you accurately and efficiently measure 1/10millionth of an ounce of gold to make small purchases? Can you send gold electronically?
People have hacked gold in a way that bitcoin has not yet been hacked. I can send bitcoins to people electronically or printed on a piece of paper via snail mail, and non of the servers or postal workers that handle the packages can steal the bitcoins. If you send 20 lbs of gold through the usps or fedex, anybody handling the package along the way can just take the gold.
This is not even a hack. It's worse than a hack. It's something that is so easy to do that it's not even considered a hack and nobody is stupid enough to sends large quantities of gold in the mail, because the risk is too high.
To do something like this with bitcoin *requires* a hack, and with gold it is trivial.
bitcoin doesn't have built in deflation. The deflation is caused by the influx of people due to increasing popularity. It is true that the problems that are solved to successfully mine bitcoin get harder over time, computers also get faster and more energy efficient over time. The upperbound of bitcoin value is kept in check by the electricity cost of mining bitcoins. This limits the size of bitcoin bubbles. The value of bitcoin is not purely speculative. There is a real world limit to how valuable they can be at any time.
The part about law enforcement was an example. Why should the government allowed to put people in prison, but we the people can't? Why can the government start wars with a foreign country but we the people can't? Why should the government be allowed to decide what the immigration laws are, but we the people can't?
There are LOTS of things the government has the power to do, that people are NOT allowed to do and for very good reasons. I am not saying that every single thing the government does is good. I am saying that just because the government has the power to do something does not necessarily mean that the people should have that power automatically.
Maybe there's a good reason to allow people to have guns, but it's not just because the government gets to have them. If this were true people should be allowed to have nuclear weapons as well.
It is not a citizens job to enforce the law. It is the government's job to enforce the law. I am American, but the role of government in regards to law enforcement is not unique in the US.
At no point in this article does it explain why her problems are the result of Obamacare. Obama said you can keep your current insurance, but the implication is that Obamacare will not stop you from keeping your insurance, not that Obamacare will force every insurance company to keep offering the same insurance to it's customers whether they want to or not.
The government and people have different obligations and prohibitions. The word hypocrisy doesn't make any sense in terms of the relationship between these to groups.
Are you made that the government is allowed to enforce the law and you as an individual are not? Is that hypocritical of the government to keep law enforcement to itself?
I don't think it was ever the government's policy that the people and the government should have equal amounts of guns, so I don't see where the hypocrisy is.
Otherwise you could say, the US government gets to have nuclear weapons, but they don't let the people have nuclear weapons, therefore they are hypocrites.
You cited one example where the outcome of speculation is bad. If you recall, I said:
I am not saying that all speculation that has happened in history has been a good thing, but I think overall it has been.
One fraud firm, excuse me, financial institution sells a "financial product" (note that there was never produced anything) that forces losses on the buyers and then sells the risk of losing to someone else.
Do sales/marketing people ever produce anything? Do you believe that sales/marketing people serve any legitimate purpose in the economy?
How are losses "forced" on the buyer, when the buyer is a willing participant?
There is no way that the original fraud can lose anything, and the money to pay for this all will eventually have to be worked for.
How do sales/marketing people ever lose anything? It is possible for them to spend a bunch of time and energy trying to sell something and coming up with no sales. It's like you are saying a door to door salesman will always make money because he sells vacuum cleaners for more than what he bought them for. This view ignores opportunity costs.
Speculators are parasites because they are also helpful.
Let's say I know that some new band is going to be huge. I buy 100 t-shirts when they are still not very popular in order to resell them at a higher price later. You can look at this situation and say that I am a parasite. But look at what else happened.
After I bought all the t-shirts, the band recognized a shortage in inventory and started producing 100 more t-shirts. They actually get an influx of $1000 before they hit it big, When the band hits it big, there is a larger supply of t-shirts than there would be otherwise, and more fans can get t-shirts. Due to the speculator, rather than only 100 people getting t-shirts for $10, in addition 100 more people get t-shirts for $20 and the speculator makes $1000 profit.
It's easy to view the speculator as a parasite because he didn't produce anything. But he created economic efficiency. Had he been wrong and the band never became popular, he would have lost $1000. It was the risk that he incurred that is the benefit he provides.
In your example you say the the speculators incurred no risk. But if this is true then they aren't even speculators. The risk is part of what makes a speculator a speculator. Maybe you are angry at something other than speculation.
That's because they slow down all the consumers to guarantee certain speeds for corporate customers, and corporations pay a lot more money for their internet for this priority service.
But you can't offer this type of service to everyone, or else you are actually offering it to no one.
Why is #2 not "AI"? #2 has been considered AI since the beginning of AI. Are you saying we need to change the name of #2 to something else? Why?
#1 has not been a complete failure because #1 and #2 are related. What is "thinking"? It's true that we aren't close to an artificial intelligence passing the Turing test, but we are getting closer every day.
You could say that every day before 2008 was a complete failure in regards towards quantum computing, and every day afterwards a success. Or you could look at all the little advancements up until the point of the first functional quantum computer as minor successes rather than complete failures.
It all depends on whether your only goal is "create a machine that can pass the Turing test" and everything short of that is a complete failure, or whether "get closer to passing the Turing test" counts as a minor success. We are several orders of magnitude closer to creating AI than we were a century ago. Surely that counts for something even if we are far from complete success.
If you have 10000 computers trying to hack accounts into 600000 sites, the timers will do nothing. Each computer will make one attempt on each server once every 10 minutes. But the computers as a group will be making 166 attempts per second on each server.
I agree it is more useful to the consumer if 25Mbps was advertised. But the idea that the ISP should advertise the speed that they can guarantee, I think, is an overreaction, because I don;t think people understand that the speed that can be guaranteed is much smaller than they think it is, and too small to be useful.
Slashdot Mirror
It's easy for the price someone is willing to pay to be significantly different to the production cost of a coin.
If you don't take into account all costs, including overhead, opportunity costs in time, human effort, in the investment of efficient hardware, and the risk associated with investment, etc, it makes sense for the actual price of a bitcoin to be higher than the amount of money it takes to mine bitcoins.
If you actually account for these costs, the prices will be much closer. IN fact from an economic point of view you could argue that the costs become equal, and that the price of a bitcoin defines the cost of mining, in the same way that you are defining the price of bitcoin as the price someone is willing to pay.
Though it is likely that the production cost will follow, or be slightly above the exchange value. The causal relationship is the other way around. Miners will turn their rigs on and off based on the price. The price is not set based on the energy consumed.
The price is set by supply and demand and the free market, and the supply and demand is determined by the cost of mining. Miners will turn off their machines when there is excess supply (the price of bitcoin below the cost of mining), and on when their is excess demand (the price is above the cost of mining). The more demand there is, the more miners are turned on and the more supply is generated, until the supply and demand come to an equilibrium point.
You cant assume that the exchange value and production cost are in equilibrium.
You can't safely assume assume anything with 100% certainty or accuracy. You can;t assume supply and demand works, you can;t assume anything works. But these are just simple economic principles that have been around for a long time, and have been shown to be both true in principle and in practice if you accept a little noise and fluctuation. You can't assume people are rational actors and be right all the time, but you can assume it and be right most of the time.
Plus the current rate that new coins are being created is insignificant when compared to the number of coins being traded.
That's by design. Mining is only supposed to be done by the most efficient miners. This is *because* the price is driven up to the point where only the most efficient miners can profit and with thin margins. If the profit margins were higher then everyone would do it, and the price would drop until an equilibrium was reached.
The problem was that he tried to blackmail a government. If you try to blackmail a person with limited resources, it might turn out that the cheapest thing for them to do is to give into your demands, especially when the government is only really motivated to get their own money back and not other people's money back. If you try to blackmail someone very rich, you will probably just anger them enough to be willing to lose more money just to see you go down out of spite. You could try to make the blackmail consequences really severe, but chances are that there is a limit to the amount of damage you can really cause. If you try to blackmail a government that can levy taxes to generate revenue, controls the justice system and has a public image to uphold. You are really going to have to do something bigger than hijack some infrastructure passwords. You need to takeover Alcatraz and point some missiles with vx gas at the city.
1. You can make this argument for anything. Ferraris can be produced for free too. All you need to do is steal one. Or you can use a botnet to mine $200,000 bitcoins and buy one with money you got for free.
2. I said the upper bound is determined by the cost of mining (not that it equals the short term cost once you already have a mining operation going). The cost of mining includes the risk inherent in getting into the mining business. There is overhead costs of buying machines, and opportunity cost of time and money invested into the operation. There is the risk that bitcoin will crash after you have already invested in the machines. There is a chance that your machines can become damaged. By simply buying bitcoins you are mitigating this risk, and you pay a premium for that.
This is true of just everything. The price of a nexus 5 is $350. It doesn't matter if the retailer gets them at wholesale prices for $300 or whatever it is. They have added costs and risks associated with running a store.
I've heard people suggest that miners will create more and sell them which will drop the market rate but why would I sell a bitcoin worth $100 for the equivalent of $99 when I could either hold onto it, buy something worth $100 etc?
Because it's a currency and currency is used to buy and sell things. Currency facilitates trade. Even if bitcoin was the best investment ever, you still need to eat. You sell/exchange bitcoins to get other things you need. It's not supposed to be for investment, although it can and has been used for that. It is supposed to be a currency.
Look at what silk road did. They hedged against the value of bitcoin, so it's volatility didn't have to factor into the actual transactions. The people that used it were using it the way it was intended to be used.
Because bitcoin doesn't become inflated, it *can* actually be a good investment, unlike the dollar, which is a terrible investment in itself, but you aren't required to participate in the investment. You can simply use it. Similarly miners don;t have to invest in bitcoin as a currency either. They can simply invest in their own mining hardware and sell the bitcoins to invest in something else, like houses or treasury bonds, or whatever. Just because you can mine them efficiently doesn't mean you believe they are a good long term investment.
Some gold miners probably keep the gold they mine. I suspect most sell it for the stuff they need. Gold miners don't keep all their gold for the same reason I don't spend all my money on gold.
Why would deflation even be a problem? If everybody destroyed half their dollars, the other half would be worth twice as much and everyone would have the same amount of money relative to eachother. This would be a huge amount of deflation that has no effect. The same is true of inflation. The only time when deflation and inflation are problematic is when you have an asymmetrical reduction or increase of the money supply. This is common with inflation due to governments printing money to spend, but this is not what would happen with random people occasionally losing their wallets. This loss will be basically random and not transfer the money to a single entitiy, it will be proportionally distributed to the other bitcoin owners.
Since the supply is limited, if the demand goes up, so should the exchange value.
The supply is not currently limited, in the sense that anyone can mine more of them if they are willing to spend money on electricity. There is just not an advantage to mining over buying them, because the costs are always relatively equal. This will change in the future, but it has no effect now.
Secondly, bitcoins have absolutely no inherent value. You can't create anything with them directly. You might say that their implicit scarcity gives them some value in the same way that gold, silver and platinum are considered to be valuable, but at least those metals have some utility value as well.
The value of gold and platinum due to their utility other than as currency is insignificant. In fact part of what makes them such good currency candidates is their lack of utility.
But the production cost of bitcoins has no direct impact on the exchange value of existing coins. Instead I'd suggest that the relationship is the other way around.
This is wrong. Why on earth would I pay $400 for a bitcoin if I can mine one for $200. All bitcoins are the same. If the current price of mining a bitcoin is $200, then nobody is going to be willing to pay much more than that for a bitcoin. This will change in the future, but not soon.
If the exchange value is higher than the production cost, more people would be encouraged to join the mining operation and vice versa.
This is agrees with my argument, not yours. If people decide to mine rather than pay people for bitcoins, this actually lowers the value of bitcoins in the short term, because it increases the supply and lowers the demand. Eventually as more bitcoins are mined, the price will go up when the reward is decreased.
You are mostly wrong. The only parts you were right about, are the parts where you inadvertently agreed with me without realizing it.
Botnets can steal computing power to do anything not just mine bitcoins. The cost of electricity is still an upper bound on bitcoin. There will always be thieves. The price of a Ferrari is not $0 because someone can use a botnet to mine (i.e. steal) $200,000 in bitcoins.
A very slow loss of bitcoins is not a problem, especially if the level of granularity left in the existing pool is enough to allow for small transactions. Even if half the bitcoins are lost, 10.5 million bitcoins translates to 105 trillion units of currency. This is about 15,000 units of currency per person on the earth. It's not ideal, but still pretty good.
Consider the problem of people losing paper money. It's true that new money is issued to compensate for lost/destroyed money, but it doesn't go to the person that lost it. When bitcoins are lost, more can be mined. When the cap is nearly reached, then lost bitcoins will just make the other coins more valuable. This is equivalent to printing more bitcoins and distributing them proportionally among all bitcoin owners.
You said that new coins should be issued under a majority vote, but what would this accomplish? It would simply cause a waste of more electricity to put more bitcoins in circulation. It doesn't really change anything. When mining actually stops, it will mark a point when resources are no longer wasted for the purpose of proving work.
yes people losing private keys will eventually lead to deflation when we actually get close to the 21 million cap. Until then, the fact that bitcoins are disappearing due to lost wallets only has an effect if the cost of mining is significantly higher than the current price. Otherwise, it's cheaper to mine new bitcoins than it is to buy existing bitcoins in an environment when low supply compared to high demand.
So yes bitcoin does have some deflation built in, but it is insignificant at the current time.
The reason I chose 1/10,000,000 is the smallest allowed fraction of a bitcoin.
That's not even a shovel, but a shovel IOU.
Can you buy a sandwich with gold shavings? Can you accurately and efficiently measure 1/10millionth of an ounce of gold to make small purchases? Can you send gold electronically?
People have hacked gold in a way that bitcoin has not yet been hacked. I can send bitcoins to people electronically or printed on a piece of paper via snail mail, and non of the servers or postal workers that handle the packages can steal the bitcoins. If you send 20 lbs of gold through the usps or fedex, anybody handling the package along the way can just take the gold.
This is not even a hack. It's worse than a hack. It's something that is so easy to do that it's not even considered a hack and nobody is stupid enough to sends large quantities of gold in the mail, because the risk is too high.
To do something like this with bitcoin *requires* a hack, and with gold it is trivial.
who is selling the shovels and pans?
bitcoin doesn't have built in deflation. The deflation is caused by the influx of people due to increasing popularity. It is true that the problems that are solved to successfully mine bitcoin get harder over time, computers also get faster and more energy efficient over time. The upperbound of bitcoin value is kept in check by the electricity cost of mining bitcoins. This limits the size of bitcoin bubbles. The value of bitcoin is not purely speculative. There is a real world limit to how valuable they can be at any time.
The part about law enforcement was an example. Why should the government allowed to put people in prison, but we the people can't? Why can the government start wars with a foreign country but we the people can't? Why should the government be allowed to decide what the immigration laws are, but we the people can't?
There are LOTS of things the government has the power to do, that people are NOT allowed to do and for very good reasons. I am not saying that every single thing the government does is good. I am saying that just because the government has the power to do something does not necessarily mean that the people should have that power automatically.
Maybe there's a good reason to allow people to have guns, but it's not just because the government gets to have them. If this were true people should be allowed to have nuclear weapons as well.
It is not a citizens job to enforce the law. It is the government's job to enforce the law. I am American, but the role of government in regards to law enforcement is not unique in the US.
At no point in this article does it explain why her problems are the result of Obamacare. Obama said you can keep your current insurance, but the implication is that Obamacare will not stop you from keeping your insurance, not that Obamacare will force every insurance company to keep offering the same insurance to it's customers whether they want to or not.
The government and people have different obligations and prohibitions. The word hypocrisy doesn't make any sense in terms of the relationship between these to groups.
Are you made that the government is allowed to enforce the law and you as an individual are not? Is that hypocritical of the government to keep law enforcement to itself?
I don't think it was ever the government's policy that the people and the government should have equal amounts of guns, so I don't see where the hypocrisy is.
Otherwise you could say, the US government gets to have nuclear weapons, but they don't let the people have nuclear weapons, therefore they are hypocrites.
I am not saying that all speculation that has happened in history has been a good thing, but I think overall it has been.
One fraud firm, excuse me, financial institution sells a "financial product" (note that there was never produced anything) that forces losses on the buyers and then sells the risk of losing to someone else.
Do sales/marketing people ever produce anything? Do you believe that sales/marketing people serve any legitimate purpose in the economy?
How are losses "forced" on the buyer, when the buyer is a willing participant?
There is no way that the original fraud can lose anything, and the money to pay for this all will eventually have to be worked for.
How do sales/marketing people ever lose anything? It is possible for them to spend a bunch of time and energy trying to sell something and coming up with no sales. It's like you are saying a door to door salesman will always make money because he sells vacuum cleaners for more than what he bought them for. This view ignores opportunity costs.
Speculators are parasites because they are also helpful.
Let's say I know that some new band is going to be huge. I buy 100 t-shirts when they are still not very popular in order to resell them at a higher price later. You can look at this situation and say that I am a parasite. But look at what else happened.
After I bought all the t-shirts, the band recognized a shortage in inventory and started producing 100 more t-shirts. They actually get an influx of $1000 before they hit it big, When the band hits it big, there is a larger supply of t-shirts than there would be otherwise, and more fans can get t-shirts. Due to the speculator, rather than only 100 people getting t-shirts for $10, in addition 100 more people get t-shirts for $20 and the speculator makes $1000 profit.
It's easy to view the speculator as a parasite because he didn't produce anything. But he created economic efficiency. Had he been wrong and the band never became popular, he would have lost $1000. It was the risk that he incurred that is the benefit he provides.
In your example you say the the speculators incurred no risk. But if this is true then they aren't even speculators. The risk is part of what makes a speculator a speculator. Maybe you are angry at something other than speculation.
That's because they slow down all the consumers to guarantee certain speeds for corporate customers, and corporations pay a lot more money for their internet for this priority service. But you can't offer this type of service to everyone, or else you are actually offering it to no one.
Why is #2 not "AI"? #2 has been considered AI since the beginning of AI. Are you saying we need to change the name of #2 to something else? Why?
#1 has not been a complete failure because #1 and #2 are related. What is "thinking"? It's true that we aren't close to an artificial intelligence passing the Turing test, but we are getting closer every day.
You could say that every day before 2008 was a complete failure in regards towards quantum computing, and every day afterwards a success. Or you could look at all the little advancements up until the point of the first functional quantum computer as minor successes rather than complete failures.
It all depends on whether your only goal is "create a machine that can pass the Turing test" and everything short of that is a complete failure, or whether "get closer to passing the Turing test" counts as a minor success. We are several orders of magnitude closer to creating AI than we were a century ago. Surely that counts for something even if we are far from complete success.
How do you rate limit a botnet?
If you have 10000 computers trying to hack accounts into 600000 sites, the timers will do nothing. Each computer will make one attempt on each server once every 10 minutes. But the computers as a group will be making 166 attempts per second on each server.
Was it batman?
I agree it is more useful to the consumer if 25Mbps was advertised. But the idea that the ISP should advertise the speed that they can guarantee, I think, is an overreaction, because I don;t think people understand that the speed that can be guaranteed is much smaller than they think it is, and too small to be useful.