If you count the dawn of civilization as 8000 BC (wikipedia), then 5 minutes is about 14 years. If this was the mean time until nuclear doomsday, we beat the odds (about 16 to 1 or 4 coin flips) of a nuclear doomsday from 1947 until now.
I guess I would expect something like nuclear doomsday to follow an exponential distribution. So that would mean the units is time, but it is the time which before which there is a 50% chance of the event happening. So 5 minutes would mean there is a 50% chance of it happening before 5 minutes and a 50% chance of it happening after 5 minutes at every point in time. The odds that nuclear doomsday was actually 5 minutes is almost 0 given how many "5 minutes" have passed in 60 years. If you set the mean to 60 years, then that means that the fact that we avoided a nuclear doomsday for this long means we were as lucky as someone who guesses a coin flip correctly (a bit more believable).
What is the point of a nuclear holocaust clock if it's *not* 5 minutes to midnight? If they ever set it to the true likelihood of nuclear war, and it was back at like 6, no one would care. Speaking of which, this is not a well defined metric for probabilities. What does being 5 minutes to midnight actually mean? Does it mean we are 99% likely to have a nuclear war? Over what period of time? In the next year? In the next century? In the next millennium? I would be pretty scared of a clock that was way back at 715 minutes to midnight if it meant there was a 1% chance of a nuclear war in the next year, so what the hell could this clock possibly mean?
The problem is that the people who come up with this crap, despite claiming to be experts, don't understand units. A doomsday clock should only be in minutes if the thing is happening in x minutes for sure. If it is a probability, then the units need to be in something like %*years. Also using minutes as a unit for something that hasn't happened in 60 years makes you look like you are full of shit. I become pretty disinterested in something once I smell hyperbole. This might be a really dangerous thing if nuclear war is actually likely. All you "experts" need to take a course in how to use units properly and read "the boy who cried wolf", so we can get something even resembling an accurate measure of the danger.
I didn't say that every single one of those would be in your deck. I said that they would be available to you. Moxes and dual lands are just plain better than basic lands in 99.9% of circumstances. If you have a deck with 20 basic land in it, it can be made just plain better with a lotus and a mox if you use 1 color. If you use more than one color, then dual lands and more moxes will make your deck better by an even greater margin.
Also, if I am not mistaken, it is only certain specific combinations of cards on the the table that are turing complete. I have a feeling that the vast majority of games do not involve decks that contain the cards necessary to constitute a turing machine. So I think most magic games are solvable (they have an optimal strategy that is computable).
OK I see what you are saying. When you said "solving the halting problem", I immediately thought "you can't do that". But if by "solving" you mean running the program and determining that for that program and input, the program halts (if it does) and finding out nothing if it doesn't halt, then yes you can do that.
And sometimes to combat this "abuse" it is tempting to create very strict rules to prevent players from doing abusive things. In government this is called red tape. In games it can kill creativity. You are never able to do anything that wasn't specifically considered and sanctioned by the game designer. It's a fine line.
The Turing completeness of magic is referring to specific configurations of the game where automatic effects from cards can cause a certain conclusion depending on a the starting conditions. This is independent of strategy of individual players or trying to win. If you set up a carefully crafted magic game in progress (with many cards, tokens, life points, etc already on the table), and you start the game, the process of resolving all the automatic effects can be used to make computations.
This is just an example. Lets say you set up a board with a bunch of cards, where card A has 10 tokens and card B has 23 tokens. You might be able to set it up so that card C will end up with 33 tokens after one turn before the next player is even allowed to do anything. You have just made a computer that adds 2 numbers out of magic cards and rules.
The fact that magic was proven to be turing complete means that not only can it compute *some* things (lots of machines can compute things, but that it can compute anything that is computable given enough time and memory (tokens). This elevates magic to the computational power of any other turing equivalent machine (like a PC). It can solve the same kinds of problems, but a modern PC will just solve them faster. There is also a good chance that a modern computer will have more "tokens" (i.e. more than the number of atoms in the universe), something that you physically can't do in magic even if you used every atom as a token. There are some things turing machines can't compute, like solving the halting problem. Magic being a turing machine also can not solve it.
A bigger budget gives you more options. A person with an infinite budget can build any deck (including a sligh deck), and a person with a small budget can only build decks within the budget. If the best deck happens to be very inexpensive, then hooray, even poor magic players can have the best deck. This is pretty unlikely as MTG is a business and there are bound to be at least a few really powerful cards that are rare, and therefore going to be expensive.
A well crafted deck will always beat a deck that has a bunch of incoherent rare cards. Having a black lotus, 5 moxes, and 40 dual lands, will give you a pretty good advantage, Even if all you build is a sligh deck.
Magic is not the greatest game ever made. It's not a bad game. I used to play it (1994 - 1997), and I had a lot of fun, but have since moved on to other games. The game design was a pretty good design for it's time. It was the pioneer in CCGs, but it hasn't really changed for 20 years. There have been a lot of games that have come out since that have been more fun in my opinion. Maybe I just have different taste than you, but having 100 cards on the table doesn't seem like fun to me. That sounds like one of those games that takes an hour before each round of turns because everyone is trying to think.
I actually feel like the worst part of mtg is the CCG aspect of it. It just sucks money out of people. It stops being about deck building strategy for many people, and more about what people are willing to spend on trying to get good rare cards. I think magic would be a better game if it didn't require such a financial commitment to be competitive. The "collectibleness" of magic doesn't, in my opinion, add anything to the "card game". I think it just appeals to people who need to collect things.
If bitcoin were adopted widely enough, we wouldn't need physical money anymore. In fact it is arguable that we don't even need physical money right now. The government can limit the supply of dollars by simply raising interest rates and halting the creation of money through the treasury and fed (i.e. halting the creation of debt). But it cannot do these things for bitcoin.
And really when the government decreases the money supply and/or raises interest rates, they are only able to do this by undoing the artificial increase in the money supply. If they were not able to create money, their would be no increase to back away from. The money supply would just always be at some base level.
I don't even think it's necessarily a bad system. Using debt as currency and raising and lowering interest rates and money supply to control the amount of investment vs. savings of the whole economy. I think it is actually quite an elegant system. I just don't necessarily trust the people in charge not to manipulate it for their own benefit.
Bitcoin is just a better version of gold. It provides protection from from easy manipulation. But unlike gold it can be transferred electronically. The fact that the US dollar is backed (i.e. controlled) by the US government does not in my mind make it a safe investment. Rather, it guarantees that it will be constantly and easily manipulated by the people in charge. It's like betting on a Pro wresting match. You can still win or lose, but the whole thing is rigged and some people already know whats going to happen. With bitcoin, there is nobody pulling all the levers. Everybody is pulling a small lever (although some levers are smaller than others).
It was a simple example. Also the crash (if it happened) wouldn't prevent me from doing it, it would only discourage me. If everyone knew the crash was going to happen, it wouldn't be an abrupt crash. There would be a sharp jump in bitcoin prices the day after tax day and then a gradual decline until just before the next tax day, then another sharp jump (i.e. a sawtooth pattern).
What's the point of a $1 million cruise missile? Sometimes the government expresses its dislike of something, or exerts control through the power to destroy.
A $1 million cruise missile gives you power to impose your will on others and/or prevent someone else from imposing their will on you (the same as any other weapon).
A bank can't exist if there's a nation that dislikes it, unless there's a strong nation that protects it. The same is true of a bitcoin exchange. If bitcoin continues to grow in significance, it will eventually be controlled/regulated by some government. And almost every currency that collapesed in history started out as the sensible way to prevent the government from doing what led to the previous collapse. The story of government control of any currency seems to have the same ending.
Bitcoin *can't* be controlled by a government. It's an inherently decentralized design. Aside from arresting anyone they catch using bitcoin, shutting down the internet, or taking people's private keys through coercion, they can't stop people from issuing signed transactions. If you have an internet connection and a working computer, you can use bitcoin without any government sanction. The only thing limiting you is the number of people that will accept it as currency and be willing to pay you with it.
Seriously, markets just don't work without a government to forbid the outrageous shit speculators have actually done in the past.
That's my point here: you need goverment regulation/control of any signficant currency, commodity, market, bank, whatever, to protect it: both from speculators and from the first government that takes a dislike to it.
Bitcoin is no more prone to speculation that gold or silver. And before you say it, the bitcoin market can't be cornered like silver (not yet). You can mine bitcoins without owning a bitcoin mine. All you need is a computer. The price of bitcoins is capped by the power of computers. The price of a bitcoin can't be driven up to $1000 by speculation (today) because I can just spend $3 to mine a bitcoin and sell it for $1000, and if enough people do this, it will drive the price of bitcoins back down to $3.
In the context of specie-based currency that's flat wrong, as proven repeatedly by history. It's purely a logistical issue: the money supply limits the economy, but in avery practical way economies and nations will collapse if the average guy wanting to buy or sell simply can't get his hands on any currency. Bitcoins are infinitely divisible, and fiat currencies infinitely inflatable, and fractional reserve banking vastly inflates the effective money supply, but if all you have is gold coins then there had better actually be some physically left in your country, and that's not at all a safe assumption.
Bitcoins are near infinitely divisible. Each bitcoin can be divided into 2.1 quadrillion units. Thats way more than the number of pennies in existence. Why can't the average guy wanting buy or sell something not get any bitcoins? Does he not have access to a computer or the internet? Thats all you need. Bitcoins aren't physically anywhere. Countries are irrelevant in the context of bitcoin. A person in russia can mine or transfer bitcoins just like someone in kenya or the US. You don't need to physically find them. You find them in the realm of mathematics (which everyone has access to).
You might want to read that again. Currency has utility as currency, or it's just seashells. My definition was the accepted practical one, however: in practice whatever commodity (even fiat currency) is the easiest to exchange and store is what folks use as currency. Right now bitcoins flourish on the black market for just that reason.
Currency has utility as currency, or it's just seashells. Yes but dollars and bitcoins *only* have utility as a currency. This is what separates dollars and bitcoins from other commodities like corn, which can be used regardless of the perceived value.
All of which is true of silver, and yet the market on silver was in fact cornered in modern times, and there's vastly more dollars-worth of silver out there. When theory and facts conflict, it's never good to try to hand-wave the facts away.
The market can't become cornered on bitcoins (at least not yet). The fact that other are mining bitcoins, doesn't hinder you from doing the same. In fact if speculators drive up the price of bitcoin, it becomes all the more profitable to mine it yourself and try to sell it before the market crashes. Unlike precious metals, the "bitcoin mines" can't be monopolized because they are virtual. No hand waiving here. This is just economics 101.
Think of it this way: Mt Gox has already had security issues that have pushed it (and thereby bitcoin) to the brink of collapse. If Mt Gox hadn't made people whole after their last intrusion, things would have been pretty desparate for bitcoin. Bitcoins in your wallet are safe, sure, but they're nearly useless without a trusted exchange, and you give the exchange the ability to rob you in order to use it, so withoiut that trust there's no exchange.
There is nothing inherent about bitcoin that causes exchanges that deal with it to be insecure. It's just the case that currently the bitcoin exchanges have less security because they are smaller. There is no reason a more secure exchange can't be made, or that an already trusted exchange could add bitcoins.
The government can't easily take cash buried in your back yard (until they know you have it), but money in a bank account? They don't need the account info ahead of time, the bank will give it to them, or the bank will cease to exist. The same will be true of any bitcoin exchange (unless a government friendly to bitcoins and not to the government that wants your info offers haven, but then you're just choosing which government is in control).
The government can absolutely take money you have buried in your backyard. They can double the money supply and now half the money in your backyard is gone. They can also seize your money from your bank account without your consent. They can not take your bitcoins. You only need a bitcoin exchange to change to other currencies controlled by governments. If you can spend bitcoins at the super market and amazon, you'd never need to exchange your bitcoins for money. If bitcoin only ever amounts to a proxy for US dollars, I would say it failed. Luckily the idea is out there and if botcoin doesn't succeed, something else will. The fact that you think a currency requires government control to function, I believe is simply lack of imagination.
Bitcoin is not a commodity because it has no utility. It is a currency. Also there is a limit to how much the value can be increased by speculators. The fact that bitcoin can be mined means that if the price ever gets too high, it will become profitable to mine it and sell it at the inflated higher price, therefore driving the price down.
You can't steal all the botcoins by taking "all the servers". I feel like you don't understand how bitcoin works. The data describing who owns which bitcoins is on every single computer with a botcoin wallet. You'd have to steal every computer from every person who deals in bitcoin. There is no central server. Even if you stole every computer, you couldn't transfer any money without the private key (which is not stored on the computer). You don't even need to steal this data, it is publicly available. The only data stored is the the complete transaction history of bitcoin, not the keys needed to make more transactions. The thing that gives you the ability to steal bitcoins is knowing the private key of someone with bitcoins. This however is no different than knowing someones bank account information and sending yourself money through western union.
You're thinking in terms of you or I buying power from our wall socket. That doesn't apply to a government with the power of taxation (not to mention the ablilty to build nuclear power stations to its You're thinking in terms of you or I buying power from our wall socket. That doesn't apply to a government with the power of taxation (not to mention the ablilty to build nuclear power stations to its heart's content).
I am not saying the government doesn't have the ability to make a lot of bitcoins. I am saying that it will be very expensive. Why would the government spend a bunch of money to make roughly the same amount of money? This is like spending $1 million dollars to get $1 million dollars worth of gold. What's the point? It only makes sense when you can print money and spend $0 dollars to make $1 million.
Your pretty far off about economics and commodities here. The amount of actual dollar currency in circulation, billas and coins, is a small percentage of the money supply. The Fed can do all sorts of things to increase the money supply, to a vast extent, but it can't literally print money. The amount of physical currency in circulation only matters if it's to small, and the problem with bitcoins is the total pool is too small.
First of all I said "the treasury" not "the fed", and second of all it doesn't matter whether the money is digital or physical. The pool size of bitcoin doesn't matter. the number of dollars in circulation doesn't matter. If every 50% of US dollar were destroyed randomly, the value of the dollar would double and everyone would have the same amount of money (i.e. the same amount of represented wealth). The only thing that is required of a currency is that there is enough granularity to accomodate small transactions. It doesn't matter if I have $100,000 or 100000000 yen or 100000000 euros or 100000 bitcoins. Those are just units that are arbitrary. The value is determined by the supply. If there is less supply, then each one is just worth more.
There is vastly more value in all the worlds silver, or all the worlds gold, than in all the world's bitcoins, and the silver market has been cornered in my lifetime. You're being naieve if you think that has anything to do with minig equipment. A couple of speculators effectively controlled all the worlds silver markets for weeks, driving the price of silver through the roof for their profit. They were shut down because of an existing legal framework to prevent that sort of thing - a framework that does not protect bitcoins.
Why is there more value in gold and silver than bitcoins? It's just perception. If there was more gold, then the gold would be worth less per ounce. Gold prices change. Bitcoin prices change. If bitcoin prices go up to $1 billion then the total value of bitcoins will be $21 quadrillion dollars and represent more value than the total gold in the world. Why are people willing to pay so much more for such a small amount of gold? It's only because they feel confident they can sell it for that amount. It's arbitrary.
Seriously, it's really easy to manipluate commodity prices, without a legal defense, and there are speculators out there with more money to leverage than the current value of all bitcoins combined. It's completely trivial for either these specualtors or any large governement to just decide what price bitcoins will be. When central banks start playing currency manipluation games, their games are several orders of magnitude bigger than the bitcoin supply.
Maybe it's easy to manipulate commodity prices by your definition of easy. It's orders of magnitude easier to manipulate currency.
Which, BTW, has been a recurring historical problem for most specie-based currencies. When you base your currency on a limited supply, you open yourself to all sorts of commodity games. Governments can protect you fro
I never advocated for the gold standard. I was just saying what a gold standard is, and what it means for a currency to be backed. Whether any currency has ever been truly backed is not something I think is even important.
The fact that governments cheat the gold standard is all the more reason that bitcoin is better than a gold standard. We could just go back to using gold rather than a gold standard and this kind of manipulation would disappear, and we'd run into a whole new set of problems. We'd all have to buy devices to measure gold dust to buy things. It would be a giant waste of time and resources. Bitcoin has most of the advantages of gold without most of the drawbacks. It has the convenience of credit cards (not having to carry gold bars with you to buy things) with the safety of a gold standard (can't be easily manipulated by a central authority).
No gold is not adding another turtle. It's adding a different animal. You don't need to trust governments not to print more gold. The amount of gold available on the planet is limited, and it is continually getting harder and harder to mine as it becomes more scarce which roughly matches the fact that we are getting better and better at it, but eventually gold production will approach 0. it will cost more money to make more gold than the gold is worth.
Gold is a fiat currency just like dollars, but it comes with the guarantee that more can't be made easily. Barring a giant gold meteor crashing into the earth, the supply of gold is fairly predictable. Bitcoin is modeled in a similar way. Bitcoins get harder and harder to generate as more are created and eventually it will hit a cap and no more will be made.
If a person wants to censor themselves, fine, that's their decision.
If you make an AI program that is to act like a real human, it needs to know what all the words mean and decide for itself when it is appropriate to use them (i.e. like a real human). I am a computer science purist and sacrificing the purity of a design with bullshit social mores is fucking lame.
Bitcoins cannot be stolen without your private key. Keeping your private keep a secret is basically up to you. You can be tortured into giving it up or hacked, etc, but that wasn't what I was talking about insuring. The instances of theft were at exchanges where a people were trading bitcoins for US dollars. They signed ownership of the bitcoins to the exchange and before they received their US dollars, it was discovered that the bitcoins were stolen from the exchange. The exchange was going to get the dollars to pay you by selling the bitcoins that were stolen from them. This means that they can't give you dollars or bitcoins. Proving that you gave an exchange bitcoins and never received your money is pretty easy. They fully admit they were hacked and tied to pay as many people back as possible already.
"With bitcoin, it's simply gone, or it's not and the owner simply lied about it." This is true with regular US dollars too. People commit insurance fraud all the time. They pretend something is stolen from them, when really they simply sold it, and they are reimbursed by the insurance company. Bitcoin is no different in that respect.
The *deposits* are backed in the sense that if the bank mismanages the money of the depositors, the bank is legally responsible to pay back depositors through bankruptcy or even FDIC insurance. The dollars themselves are not backed.
If you deposit $100,000 in the bank and the bank becomes insolvent, you are reimbursed for the $100,000 by the FDIC.
If you deposit $100,000 and the dollar collapses, the bank's only obligation is to give your $100,000 worthless dollars back to you.
If the gold standard was being honored and the dollar collapses, you could still trade in your $100,000 for $100,000 worth of gold. The fact that you could do this actually pegs the value of the dollar at the value of gold, preventing it from collapsing unless the value of gold collapses.
As I mentioned in a previous reply to one of your comments. I am not arguing that the US government always maintained a perfect gold standard (was able to perform a 100% gold payout if needed) at all times before it was officially abandoned. I am pointing out what it means to say a currency is backed with something.
The NSA does have a large computing capacity. That doesn't mean that they get free bitcoins. They still need to pay for the electricity to run those computers, and every second a computer us being used to mine bitcoins is a second it's not doing something else. It's not about how fast you can mine bitcoins. Computer processing power isn't free. It's about how efficiently you can mine bitcoins.
Yes the value of bitcoins can be manipulated (like the value of anything). It's harder to manipulate than the US dollar. In order to manipulate bitcoins you need to build a giant NSA size computer farm and use it for that as opposed to something else. In order to manipulate the US dollar the treasury department just prints more. In fact physically printing it might slow them down so they just change a number in a computer to say they have more money without actually needing to use paper or ink.
I am saying that trying to manipulate bitcoin is like trying to manipulate the gold market. You could spend billions of dollars buying mining equipment and flooding the market with gold, but that's not likely profitable because of the work required to do it. Manipulating US currency requires almost no work for unlimited manipulation power. You just need to be the one in control of it all. Nobody is in control of all the gold on the planet, and nobody is in charge of math and physics.
Right, so that is an instance of *saying* the dollar is backed by gold, when it really isn't.
My point was not that money *was* truly backed by gold at all times before the gold standard was officially abandoned. My point was that the US dollar is currently not backed by *anything*, and that this is in contrast to the idea of a gold standard which is a true currency backing, regardless of whether the US government would have been able to make a 100% gold payout for what it promised at any given point in history.
I should have said harder to create, but the terminology is different. You create money, and you find or mine bitcoins, but these are essentially the same thing (adding money to the money supply). To create money you just need to have the authority to do it. To create (mine) bitcoins, you need to find the answer to an incredibly hard problem that is guaranteed on average to require a great deal of work (calculations) to be performed to come up with a correct answer. If you have a normal computer you will almost certainly spend more money on electricity to find this answer than how much a bitcoin is worth. The inventor of bitcoin doesn't have a secret way to make them faster. The people running the exchanges can't just edit some files in their own computers to give themselves more money.
How would you even run a shady exchange? I suppose you could pretend to be hacked and say all the bitcoins were stolen and you don't have enough bitcoins or real money to reimburse everyone, then move to a foreign country and spend the money there. But that's no different than what a shady banker could do with digital US dollars. That's not a failing of the bitcoin system.
There are 6 cases of theft and fraud listed in the wikipedia entry for bitcoin. How many times has US dollars been stolen from banks or currency exchanges? I have no idea. It has happened enough times where noting individual instances of theft on the wikipedia article for "US dollar" is ridiculous. People do not regard indiviudal instances of theft of US dollars at banks and exchanges by crooks as valid reasons to abandon the whole financial system.
People are legitimately concerned about bitcoin theft because it is new. The same thing happened when online banking first started and people were worried that it would be possible for criminals to steal all their money over this mysterious internet thing. That actually does happen, it's just not more prevalent than regular theft, so people got over their fears.
Yes, but there is nothing that prevents me from converting every dollar I make, immediately to bitcoins, and changing some of my bitcoins back into US dollars only on April 15th to pay my taxes. In fact if I suspected the collapse of the dollar was imminent, this would be exactly the thing to do. Once the dollar crashes, I could buy enough dollars to pay my taxes with far fewer bitcoins. Even if the government recognized runaway inflation and decided to raise everyone's taxes to compensate, I would still be better off than people who kept their wealth as dollars (assuming we all pay).
If the dollar was backed by gold, the value of the dollar could never fall below a fixed X amount of gold. The value of gold could still crash and if that happened, it would probably take the dollar with it, but it's possible that the dollar could stay up even in a gold crash unless a reverse gold standard were instituted (where the government can confiscate your dollars and pay you the gold value if gold values crash), but I think in that case it would be easier to just print more money to represent all the new cheap gold the government could easily acquire.
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If you count the dawn of civilization as 8000 BC (wikipedia), then 5 minutes is about 14 years. If this was the mean time until nuclear doomsday, we beat the odds (about 16 to 1 or 4 coin flips) of a nuclear doomsday from 1947 until now.
I guess I would expect something like nuclear doomsday to follow an exponential distribution. So that would mean the units is time, but it is the time which before which there is a 50% chance of the event happening. So 5 minutes would mean there is a 50% chance of it happening before 5 minutes and a 50% chance of it happening after 5 minutes at every point in time. The odds that nuclear doomsday was actually 5 minutes is almost 0 given how many "5 minutes" have passed in 60 years. If you set the mean to 60 years, then that means that the fact that we avoided a nuclear doomsday for this long means we were as lucky as someone who guesses a coin flip correctly (a bit more believable).
What is the point of a nuclear holocaust clock if it's *not* 5 minutes to midnight? If they ever set it to the true likelihood of nuclear war, and it was back at like 6, no one would care. Speaking of which, this is not a well defined metric for probabilities. What does being 5 minutes to midnight actually mean? Does it mean we are 99% likely to have a nuclear war? Over what period of time? In the next year? In the next century? In the next millennium? I would be pretty scared of a clock that was way back at 715 minutes to midnight if it meant there was a 1% chance of a nuclear war in the next year, so what the hell could this clock possibly mean?
The problem is that the people who come up with this crap, despite claiming to be experts, don't understand units. A doomsday clock should only be in minutes if the thing is happening in x minutes for sure. If it is a probability, then the units need to be in something like %*years. Also using minutes as a unit for something that hasn't happened in 60 years makes you look like you are full of shit. I become pretty disinterested in something once I smell hyperbole. This might be a really dangerous thing if nuclear war is actually likely. All you "experts" need to take a course in how to use units properly and read "the boy who cried wolf", so we can get something even resembling an accurate measure of the danger.
I didn't say that every single one of those would be in your deck. I said that they would be available to you. Moxes and dual lands are just plain better than basic lands in 99.9% of circumstances. If you have a deck with 20 basic land in it, it can be made just plain better with a lotus and a mox if you use 1 color. If you use more than one color, then dual lands and more moxes will make your deck better by an even greater margin.
Also, if I am not mistaken, it is only certain specific combinations of cards on the the table that are turing complete. I have a feeling that the vast majority of games do not involve decks that contain the cards necessary to constitute a turing machine. So I think most magic games are solvable (they have an optimal strategy that is computable).
OK I see what you are saying. When you said "solving the halting problem", I immediately thought "you can't do that". But if by "solving" you mean running the program and determining that for that program and input, the program halts (if it does) and finding out nothing if it doesn't halt, then yes you can do that.
And sometimes to combat this "abuse" it is tempting to create very strict rules to prevent players from doing abusive things. In government this is called red tape. In games it can kill creativity. You are never able to do anything that wasn't specifically considered and sanctioned by the game designer. It's a fine line.
The Turing completeness of magic is referring to specific configurations of the game where automatic effects from cards can cause a certain conclusion depending on a the starting conditions. This is independent of strategy of individual players or trying to win. If you set up a carefully crafted magic game in progress (with many cards, tokens, life points, etc already on the table), and you start the game, the process of resolving all the automatic effects can be used to make computations.
This is just an example. Lets say you set up a board with a bunch of cards, where card A has 10 tokens and card B has 23 tokens. You might be able to set it up so that card C will end up with 33 tokens after one turn before the next player is even allowed to do anything. You have just made a computer that adds 2 numbers out of magic cards and rules.
The fact that magic was proven to be turing complete means that not only can it compute *some* things (lots of machines can compute things, but that it can compute anything that is computable given enough time and memory (tokens). This elevates magic to the computational power of any other turing equivalent machine (like a PC). It can solve the same kinds of problems, but a modern PC will just solve them faster. There is also a good chance that a modern computer will have more "tokens" (i.e. more than the number of atoms in the universe), something that you physically can't do in magic even if you used every atom as a token. There are some things turing machines can't compute, like solving the halting problem. Magic being a turing machine also can not solve it.
A bigger budget gives you more options. A person with an infinite budget can build any deck (including a sligh deck), and a person with a small budget can only build decks within the budget. If the best deck happens to be very inexpensive, then hooray, even poor magic players can have the best deck. This is pretty unlikely as MTG is a business and there are bound to be at least a few really powerful cards that are rare, and therefore going to be expensive.
A well crafted deck will always beat a deck that has a bunch of incoherent rare cards. Having a black lotus, 5 moxes, and 40 dual lands, will give you a pretty good advantage, Even if all you build is a sligh deck.
Magic is not the greatest game ever made. It's not a bad game. I used to play it (1994 - 1997), and I had a lot of fun, but have since moved on to other games. The game design was a pretty good design for it's time. It was the pioneer in CCGs, but it hasn't really changed for 20 years. There have been a lot of games that have come out since that have been more fun in my opinion. Maybe I just have different taste than you, but having 100 cards on the table doesn't seem like fun to me. That sounds like one of those games that takes an hour before each round of turns because everyone is trying to think.
I actually feel like the worst part of mtg is the CCG aspect of it. It just sucks money out of people. It stops being about deck building strategy for many people, and more about what people are willing to spend on trying to get good rare cards. I think magic would be a better game if it didn't require such a financial commitment to be competitive. The "collectibleness" of magic doesn't, in my opinion, add anything to the "card game". I think it just appeals to people who need to collect things.
If bitcoin were adopted widely enough, we wouldn't need physical money anymore. In fact it is arguable that we don't even need physical money right now. The government can limit the supply of dollars by simply raising interest rates and halting the creation of money through the treasury and fed (i.e. halting the creation of debt). But it cannot do these things for bitcoin.
And really when the government decreases the money supply and/or raises interest rates, they are only able to do this by undoing the artificial increase in the money supply. If they were not able to create money, their would be no increase to back away from. The money supply would just always be at some base level.
I don't even think it's necessarily a bad system. Using debt as currency and raising and lowering interest rates and money supply to control the amount of investment vs. savings of the whole economy. I think it is actually quite an elegant system. I just don't necessarily trust the people in charge not to manipulate it for their own benefit.
Bitcoin is just a better version of gold. It provides protection from from easy manipulation. But unlike gold it can be transferred electronically. The fact that the US dollar is backed (i.e. controlled) by the US government does not in my mind make it a safe investment. Rather, it guarantees that it will be constantly and easily manipulated by the people in charge. It's like betting on a Pro wresting match. You can still win or lose, but the whole thing is rigged and some people already know whats going to happen. With bitcoin, there is nobody pulling all the levers. Everybody is pulling a small lever (although some levers are smaller than others).
It was a simple example. Also the crash (if it happened) wouldn't prevent me from doing it, it would only discourage me. If everyone knew the crash was going to happen, it wouldn't be an abrupt crash. There would be a sharp jump in bitcoin prices the day after tax day and then a gradual decline until just before the next tax day, then another sharp jump (i.e. a sawtooth pattern).
What's the point of a $1 million cruise missile? Sometimes the government expresses its dislike of something, or exerts control through the power to destroy.
A $1 million cruise missile gives you power to impose your will on others and/or prevent someone else from imposing their will on you (the same as any other weapon).
A bank can't exist if there's a nation that dislikes it, unless there's a strong nation that protects it. The same is true of a bitcoin exchange. If bitcoin continues to grow in significance, it will eventually be controlled/regulated by some government. And almost every currency that collapesed in history started out as the sensible way to prevent the government from doing what led to the previous collapse. The story of government control of any currency seems to have the same ending.
Bitcoin *can't* be controlled by a government. It's an inherently decentralized design. Aside from arresting anyone they catch using bitcoin, shutting down the internet, or taking people's private keys through coercion, they can't stop people from issuing signed transactions. If you have an internet connection and a working computer, you can use bitcoin without any government sanction. The only thing limiting you is the number of people that will accept it as currency and be willing to pay you with it.
Seriously, markets just don't work without a government to forbid the outrageous shit speculators have actually done in the past. That's my point here: you need goverment regulation/control of any signficant currency, commodity, market, bank, whatever, to protect it: both from speculators and from the first government that takes a dislike to it.
Bitcoin is no more prone to speculation that gold or silver. And before you say it, the bitcoin market can't be cornered like silver (not yet). You can mine bitcoins without owning a bitcoin mine. All you need is a computer. The price of bitcoins is capped by the power of computers. The price of a bitcoin can't be driven up to $1000 by speculation (today) because I can just spend $3 to mine a bitcoin and sell it for $1000, and if enough people do this, it will drive the price of bitcoins back down to $3.
In the context of specie-based currency that's flat wrong, as proven repeatedly by history. It's purely a logistical issue: the money supply limits the economy, but in avery practical way economies and nations will collapse if the average guy wanting to buy or sell simply can't get his hands on any currency. Bitcoins are infinitely divisible, and fiat currencies infinitely inflatable, and fractional reserve banking vastly inflates the effective money supply, but if all you have is gold coins then there had better actually be some physically left in your country, and that's not at all a safe assumption.
Bitcoins are near infinitely divisible. Each bitcoin can be divided into 2.1 quadrillion units. Thats way more than the number of pennies in existence. Why can't the average guy wanting buy or sell something not get any bitcoins? Does he not have access to a computer or the internet? Thats all you need. Bitcoins aren't physically anywhere. Countries are irrelevant in the context of bitcoin. A person in russia can mine or transfer bitcoins just like someone in kenya or the US. You don't need to physically find them. You find them in the realm of mathematics (which everyone has access to).
You might want to read that again. Currency has utility as currency, or it's just seashells. My definition was the accepted practical one, however: in practice whatever commodity (even fiat currency) is the easiest to exchange and store is what folks use as currency. Right now bitcoins flourish on the black market for just that reason.
Currency has utility as currency, or it's just seashells. Yes but dollars and bitcoins *only* have utility as a currency. This is what separates dollars and bitcoins from other commodities like corn, which can be used regardless of the perceived value.
All of which is true of silver, and yet the market on silver was in fact cornered in modern times, and there's vastly more dollars-worth of silver out there. When theory and facts conflict, it's never good to try to hand-wave the facts away.
The market can't become cornered on bitcoins (at least not yet). The fact that other are mining bitcoins, doesn't hinder you from doing the same. In fact if speculators drive up the price of bitcoin, it becomes all the more profitable to mine it yourself and try to sell it before the market crashes. Unlike precious metals, the "bitcoin mines" can't be monopolized because they are virtual. No hand waiving here. This is just economics 101.
Think of it this way: Mt Gox has already had security issues that have pushed it (and thereby bitcoin) to the brink of collapse. If Mt Gox hadn't made people whole after their last intrusion, things would have been pretty desparate for bitcoin. Bitcoins in your wallet are safe, sure, but they're nearly useless without a trusted exchange, and you give the exchange the ability to rob you in order to use it, so withoiut that trust there's no exchange.
There is nothing inherent about bitcoin that causes exchanges that deal with it to be insecure. It's just the case that currently the bitcoin exchanges have less security because they are smaller. There is no reason a more secure exchange can't be made, or that an already trusted exchange could add bitcoins.
The government can't easily take cash buried in your back yard (until they know you have it), but money in a bank account? They don't need the account info ahead of time, the bank will give it to them, or the bank will cease to exist. The same will be true of any bitcoin exchange (unless a government friendly to bitcoins and not to the government that wants your info offers haven, but then you're just choosing which government is in control).
The government can absolutely take money you have buried in your backyard. They can double the money supply and now half the money in your backyard is gone. They can also seize your money from your bank account without your consent. They can not take your bitcoins. You only need a bitcoin exchange to change to other currencies controlled by governments. If you can spend bitcoins at the super market and amazon, you'd never need to exchange your bitcoins for money. If bitcoin only ever amounts to a proxy for US dollars, I would say it failed. Luckily the idea is out there and if botcoin doesn't succeed, something else will. The fact that you think a currency requires government control to function, I believe is simply lack of imagination.
Bitcoin is not a commodity because it has no utility. It is a currency. Also there is a limit to how much the value can be increased by speculators. The fact that bitcoin can be mined means that if the price ever gets too high, it will become profitable to mine it and sell it at the inflated higher price, therefore driving the price down.
You can't steal all the botcoins by taking "all the servers". I feel like you don't understand how bitcoin works. The data describing who owns which bitcoins is on every single computer with a botcoin wallet. You'd have to steal every computer from every person who deals in bitcoin. There is no central server. Even if you stole every computer, you couldn't transfer any money without the private key (which is not stored on the computer). You don't even need to steal this data, it is publicly available. The only data stored is the the complete transaction history of bitcoin, not the keys needed to make more transactions. The thing that gives you the ability to steal bitcoins is knowing the private key of someone with bitcoins. This however is no different than knowing someones bank account information and sending yourself money through western union.
You're thinking in terms of you or I buying power from our wall socket. That doesn't apply to a government with the power of taxation (not to mention the ablilty to build nuclear power stations to its You're thinking in terms of you or I buying power from our wall socket. That doesn't apply to a government with the power of taxation (not to mention the ablilty to build nuclear power stations to its heart's content).
I am not saying the government doesn't have the ability to make a lot of bitcoins. I am saying that it will be very expensive. Why would the government spend a bunch of money to make roughly the same amount of money? This is like spending $1 million dollars to get $1 million dollars worth of gold. What's the point? It only makes sense when you can print money and spend $0 dollars to make $1 million.
Your pretty far off about economics and commodities here. The amount of actual dollar currency in circulation, billas and coins, is a small percentage of the money supply. The Fed can do all sorts of things to increase the money supply, to a vast extent, but it can't literally print money. The amount of physical currency in circulation only matters if it's to small, and the problem with bitcoins is the total pool is too small.
First of all I said "the treasury" not "the fed", and second of all it doesn't matter whether the money is digital or physical. The pool size of bitcoin doesn't matter. the number of dollars in circulation doesn't matter. If every 50% of US dollar were destroyed randomly, the value of the dollar would double and everyone would have the same amount of money (i.e. the same amount of represented wealth). The only thing that is required of a currency is that there is enough granularity to accomodate small transactions. It doesn't matter if I have $100,000 or 100000000 yen or 100000000 euros or 100000 bitcoins. Those are just units that are arbitrary. The value is determined by the supply. If there is less supply, then each one is just worth more.
There is vastly more value in all the worlds silver, or all the worlds gold, than in all the world's bitcoins, and the silver market has been cornered in my lifetime. You're being naieve if you think that has anything to do with minig equipment. A couple of speculators effectively controlled all the worlds silver markets for weeks, driving the price of silver through the roof for their profit. They were shut down because of an existing legal framework to prevent that sort of thing - a framework that does not protect bitcoins.
Why is there more value in gold and silver than bitcoins? It's just perception. If there was more gold, then the gold would be worth less per ounce. Gold prices change. Bitcoin prices change. If bitcoin prices go up to $1 billion then the total value of bitcoins will be $21 quadrillion dollars and represent more value than the total gold in the world. Why are people willing to pay so much more for such a small amount of gold? It's only because they feel confident they can sell it for that amount. It's arbitrary.
Seriously, it's really easy to manipluate commodity prices, without a legal defense, and there are speculators out there with more money to leverage than the current value of all bitcoins combined. It's completely trivial for either these specualtors or any large governement to just decide what price bitcoins will be. When central banks start playing currency manipluation games, their games are several orders of magnitude bigger than the bitcoin supply.
Maybe it's easy to manipulate commodity prices by your definition of easy. It's orders of magnitude easier to manipulate currency.
Which, BTW, has been a recurring historical problem for most specie-based currencies. When you base your currency on a limited supply, you open yourself to all sorts of commodity games. Governments can protect you fro
I never advocated for the gold standard. I was just saying what a gold standard is, and what it means for a currency to be backed. Whether any currency has ever been truly backed is not something I think is even important.
The fact that governments cheat the gold standard is all the more reason that bitcoin is better than a gold standard. We could just go back to using gold rather than a gold standard and this kind of manipulation would disappear, and we'd run into a whole new set of problems. We'd all have to buy devices to measure gold dust to buy things. It would be a giant waste of time and resources. Bitcoin has most of the advantages of gold without most of the drawbacks. It has the convenience of credit cards (not having to carry gold bars with you to buy things) with the safety of a gold standard (can't be easily manipulated by a central authority).
No gold is not adding another turtle. It's adding a different animal. You don't need to trust governments not to print more gold. The amount of gold available on the planet is limited, and it is continually getting harder and harder to mine as it becomes more scarce which roughly matches the fact that we are getting better and better at it, but eventually gold production will approach 0. it will cost more money to make more gold than the gold is worth.
Gold is a fiat currency just like dollars, but it comes with the guarantee that more can't be made easily. Barring a giant gold meteor crashing into the earth, the supply of gold is fairly predictable. Bitcoin is modeled in a similar way. Bitcoins get harder and harder to generate as more are created and eventually it will hit a cap and no more will be made.
If a person wants to censor themselves, fine, that's their decision. If you make an AI program that is to act like a real human, it needs to know what all the words mean and decide for itself when it is appropriate to use them (i.e. like a real human). I am a computer science purist and sacrificing the purity of a design with bullshit social mores is fucking lame.
Bitcoins cannot be stolen without your private key. Keeping your private keep a secret is basically up to you. You can be tortured into giving it up or hacked, etc, but that wasn't what I was talking about insuring. The instances of theft were at exchanges where a people were trading bitcoins for US dollars. They signed ownership of the bitcoins to the exchange and before they received their US dollars, it was discovered that the bitcoins were stolen from the exchange. The exchange was going to get the dollars to pay you by selling the bitcoins that were stolen from them. This means that they can't give you dollars or bitcoins. Proving that you gave an exchange bitcoins and never received your money is pretty easy. They fully admit they were hacked and tied to pay as many people back as possible already.
"With bitcoin, it's simply gone, or it's not and the owner simply lied about it." This is true with regular US dollars too. People commit insurance fraud all the time. They pretend something is stolen from them, when really they simply sold it, and they are reimbursed by the insurance company. Bitcoin is no different in that respect.
The *deposits* are backed in the sense that if the bank mismanages the money of the depositors, the bank is legally responsible to pay back depositors through bankruptcy or even FDIC insurance. The dollars themselves are not backed.
If you deposit $100,000 in the bank and the bank becomes insolvent, you are reimbursed for the $100,000 by the FDIC.
If you deposit $100,000 and the dollar collapses, the bank's only obligation is to give your $100,000 worthless dollars back to you.
If the gold standard was being honored and the dollar collapses, you could still trade in your $100,000 for $100,000 worth of gold. The fact that you could do this actually pegs the value of the dollar at the value of gold, preventing it from collapsing unless the value of gold collapses.
As I mentioned in a previous reply to one of your comments. I am not arguing that the US government always maintained a perfect gold standard (was able to perform a 100% gold payout if needed) at all times before it was officially abandoned. I am pointing out what it means to say a currency is backed with something.
The NSA does have a large computing capacity. That doesn't mean that they get free bitcoins. They still need to pay for the electricity to run those computers, and every second a computer us being used to mine bitcoins is a second it's not doing something else. It's not about how fast you can mine bitcoins. Computer processing power isn't free. It's about how efficiently you can mine bitcoins.
Yes the value of bitcoins can be manipulated (like the value of anything). It's harder to manipulate than the US dollar. In order to manipulate bitcoins you need to build a giant NSA size computer farm and use it for that as opposed to something else. In order to manipulate the US dollar the treasury department just prints more. In fact physically printing it might slow them down so they just change a number in a computer to say they have more money without actually needing to use paper or ink.
I am saying that trying to manipulate bitcoin is like trying to manipulate the gold market. You could spend billions of dollars buying mining equipment and flooding the market with gold, but that's not likely profitable because of the work required to do it. Manipulating US currency requires almost no work for unlimited manipulation power. You just need to be the one in control of it all. Nobody is in control of all the gold on the planet, and nobody is in charge of math and physics.
Right, so that is an instance of *saying* the dollar is backed by gold, when it really isn't.
My point was not that money *was* truly backed by gold at all times before the gold standard was officially abandoned. My point was that the US dollar is currently not backed by *anything*, and that this is in contrast to the idea of a gold standard which is a true currency backing, regardless of whether the US government would have been able to make a 100% gold payout for what it promised at any given point in history.
I should have said harder to create, but the terminology is different. You create money, and you find or mine bitcoins, but these are essentially the same thing (adding money to the money supply). To create money you just need to have the authority to do it. To create (mine) bitcoins, you need to find the answer to an incredibly hard problem that is guaranteed on average to require a great deal of work (calculations) to be performed to come up with a correct answer. If you have a normal computer you will almost certainly spend more money on electricity to find this answer than how much a bitcoin is worth. The inventor of bitcoin doesn't have a secret way to make them faster. The people running the exchanges can't just edit some files in their own computers to give themselves more money.
How would you even run a shady exchange? I suppose you could pretend to be hacked and say all the bitcoins were stolen and you don't have enough bitcoins or real money to reimburse everyone, then move to a foreign country and spend the money there. But that's no different than what a shady banker could do with digital US dollars. That's not a failing of the bitcoin system.
There are 6 cases of theft and fraud listed in the wikipedia entry for bitcoin. How many times has US dollars been stolen from banks or currency exchanges? I have no idea. It has happened enough times where noting individual instances of theft on the wikipedia article for "US dollar" is ridiculous. People do not regard indiviudal instances of theft of US dollars at banks and exchanges by crooks as valid reasons to abandon the whole financial system.
People are legitimately concerned about bitcoin theft because it is new. The same thing happened when online banking first started and people were worried that it would be possible for criminals to steal all their money over this mysterious internet thing. That actually does happen, it's just not more prevalent than regular theft, so people got over their fears.
Yes, but there is nothing that prevents me from converting every dollar I make, immediately to bitcoins, and changing some of my bitcoins back into US dollars only on April 15th to pay my taxes. In fact if I suspected the collapse of the dollar was imminent, this would be exactly the thing to do. Once the dollar crashes, I could buy enough dollars to pay my taxes with far fewer bitcoins. Even if the government recognized runaway inflation and decided to raise everyone's taxes to compensate, I would still be better off than people who kept their wealth as dollars (assuming we all pay).
If the dollar was backed by gold, the value of the dollar could never fall below a fixed X amount of gold. The value of gold could still crash and if that happened, it would probably take the dollar with it, but it's possible that the dollar could stay up even in a gold crash unless a reverse gold standard were instituted (where the government can confiscate your dollars and pay you the gold value if gold values crash), but I think in that case it would be easier to just print more money to represent all the new cheap gold the government could easily acquire.