I thought Islamists was a term created specifically to differentiate the bad Muslims. (e.g. Muslims aren't bad, it's the Islamists that are bad). I don't think this is unreasonable. I don't think it's fair to say "Christians are bad" whenever some Jesus cult does some crazy shit, but at the same time, I wouldn't expect google to come with good results for "christian fundamentalists" or similar terms.
All it takes is one unpatched bug and an entire election can be hacked at the press of a button.
I think you are talking about the sort of electronic voting that exists currently. What I am talking about is electronic voting where you receive information that serves as verification that your vote was counted, as well as a publicly available records of all the ballots. While this could be hacked, we would certainly find out about it and void the results.
What I am saying is that this verification is traditionally done by paper, but this has a lot of disadvantages. We can do verification electronically (we don't currently). That said there is nothing to prevent you from writing down your electronic verification on paper or printing it out, but I don't think this is necessary.
No. You fundamentally misunderstand the role of paper ballots in modern elections.
That is *a* role of paper ballots, not *the* role, and I think it is a role that will become obsolete if our elections become more secure through verification. Adding cost to potential hackers in this case also needlessly adds a lot of cost to the legitimate operation of the elections.
What we need is a robust system of verification. It's true that existing paper ballot systems provide more robust verification than existing electronic-only systems, but that doesn't mean this is some kind of universal truth.
Paper has been the de facto source of verification of authenticity for human beings for a very long time, but I think we are reaching the end of the life of this technological advancement. I think technology provides a lot of promising solutions to this problem. While electronic records, if done without care, are very easily tampered with. Paper records are have an inherent resistance to tampering, but this resistance is limited.
One of the greatest technological advancements to prevent tampering is actually cryptographic techniques like digital signatures, block chains, etc.
Long story short, I don;t think paper records are a bad thing, but I'd like us to focus on what we really want and not get too hung up on dead trees as the goal in itself.
1) This is already possible. I take pictures of all my ballots for my own records, but you could easily coerce someone into doing this as proof of voting a certain way. It's still possible to take a picture of a forgery or a to-be-discarded ballot, but the potential for coercion is still there given that the benefit of voting your conscience for a victim of said coercion will in many cases not be worth risk, cost, or effort of creating a forgery.
My opinion is that forced secrecy is an unrealistic goal that creates bad tradeoffs. We can have voluntary secrecy (i.e. a person can prove how they voted if they want to), and in my opinion get some really good tradeoffs.
I view voting coercion the same way that I view voter fraud. It's theoretically a problem that doesn't seem to be a significant problem to warrant implementing any policies that create any tangible downsides, until it becomes a significant problem.
By allowing people to vote without an ID we allow the possibility of some insignificant amount of voter fraud but also enfranchise lots of people would not otherwise have been. By allowing people to prove how they voted, we open the possibility for some more coercion but we also gain a system where we can be confident that our votes were actually counted the way they were supposed to have been.
2) Presumably you could make ballot "images" that are not literal photographs of the actual ballots, but rather just "snapshots" of the data on the ballot that can be verified by voters after an election.
3) there is no reason to make any identifiers sequential or predictable in any way other than laziness or ignorance.
I would like a system where everyone can remain anonymous if they want to, but everyone can verify that their votes were counted correctly via a publicly available database. And if individuals notice their ballots are not being counted correctly, they can make their ballots public and call attention to whatever flaws may exist.
That doesn't mean the dollar can't crash. I don't think the fact that the US government accepts USD for tax purposes has any effect on the dollar in the short term. If the dollar crashed to 1% of what it was tomorrow, it would mean that I could pay 1% of the taxes I would otherwise have had to in terms of value. I wouldn't necessarily be happy about this if I had a bunch of money in a bank account, but most of my money goes towards child care home improvements, and a mortgage.
In the long term, it would mean that employers would have to pay their employees 100x as much to get them to do the same work, as well as goods and services costing 100x more, and within a year this would lead to people paying roughly 100x higher taxes.
Paying 40% (or whatever %) of your income to the government in taxes is independent of the value of 1 unit of local currency.
The fact that I am forced to pay my taxes in USD does not even require me to hold USD. I simply need to convert some assets to USD just prior to paying my taxes (either in april or every 2 weeks). It would be theoretically no different than if the US government only accepted bitcoin as payment for taxes.
There certainly is speculation, in bitcoin. But I think bitcoin is actually more similar to gold than USD. The supply of USD is controlled by an authority. If the price of USD is too high for you to "buy" you don't have an option to make your own USD as a check on the price. If the price of gold gets high enough, at some point it becomes cost effective to start panning for gold, and if the price drops it stops being cost effective depending on how efficient your method is.
It's possible for the price of bitcoin or gold to drop to 0, but for the time being there is quasi a cap to the price of bitcoin which is the cost of mining. It makes no sense to buy a bitcoin for $20K if it can be mined for $10K of electricity. So $10K becomes the new cap (sortof)
There is the issue of mining difficulty increasing as more blocks are found which can (And I think clearly did) drive this cap higher (so I guess it's not a real cap in that it's not static), but it is a cap in that the market couldn't really bear a $1M bitcoin, unless there was a lot more mining happening.
If the concept of "inherent value" means anything other than "value", than it must mean something that is valuable beyond just it's perception of value in the minds of people. If it inherent value can be value only in the minds of people, then there is no reason that bitcoin can't be inherently valuable as well. All that would be required for this is for some people to think it's valuable (a condition which has clearly been met).
Traditionally the concept of inherent value is reserved for stuff like gasoline, which can be used as a fuel regardless of the perception of value in the minds of people. Presumably even aliens would value things like fuel even if they may not highly value primitive fuels like gasoline.
Gold has inherent value, proven by the fact that every single civilisation in human history has considered it valuable and a tradeable commodity
That's not "inherent" value. That is value that only exists in the minds of people.
US dollars are useful in that they are necessary for the payment of taxes, and as legal tender must be accepted for payment of a debt.
Once again, this is not intrinsic value. This is value that is given to the dollar by the US government.
They are also a reserve currency, accepted all over the United States and many places worldwide.
Once again, not inherent or intrinsic value
This sort of argument is "Gold and the US dollar are valuable because people all agree that it's valuable." "Bitcoin is not inherently valuable because it has no value beyond people agreeing that it's valuable".
Also, for your statement of needing to pay taxes in US dollars, this is possible to do regardless of the value of the dollar. If the value of the dollar plummets, my income is going to sky rocket due to inflation, causing me to pay higher taxes in dollars (but not higher taxes in value)
Requiring people to pay taxes in US dollars only requires me to convert some of my % of my income to X dollars (how ever many that is at any given time) to then pay my taxes. This is completely independent of how valuable the US dollar is.
No rebuttal or counterargument? All you can muster is a re-assertion that you are right? Congratulations, you just violated the rules of civil discourse and therefore lose the argument.
A. Gold is valuable.
B. Gold is useful for some things for which there is no good substitute.
A and B are both true, but A is not true *because of* B.
If it were, we'd be melting down most of the worlds gold for engineering tasks. What's the point of having a valuable resource if you don't utilize it?
Gold is not useful enough to warrant actually using it. It is much more useful as a store of value than as an hdmi cable. That's why we keep most of our gold in bars or chains, etc, and not in forms related to engineering applications that would make it hard to reextract. Whatever use gold has is surpassed by it's value as a currency, which is why we don't really use it.
Gold would actually become *more* useful (aside from a currency) if it's value dropped to zero.
Incidentally, unlike Gold, Bitcoin is now actually worthless.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
With these severe changes in value, it has no worth as an actual currency, and that was its only worth.
A currency is useful as both a medium of exchange and a store of value
The volatility is preventing bitcoin from being a reliable store of value (depending on how you look at it), but it is still an amazing medium of exchange.
When it crashes, it will crash down to zero. The only worth of Bitcoin is that you may still find a greater fool than yourself who is willing to buy it, in turn hoping for an even greater fool.
So lets say hypothetically a giant gold meteor hits earth and now gold is more common than iron. All the people who held gold as a store of value just lost that value. The planet as a whole is better off because now we can make sold gold hdmi cables for everyone. Gold's utility is huge now, and it's value didn't drop to zero. It's just just $300/ton rather than $40million/ton. As a person who owned a lot of gold you are really no better off than the bitcoin owner who's bitcoins dropped to literally zero.
So you think there is no inherent value in a bitcoin. I agree with you. Where I think we differ, is that you seem to think that other currencies are fundamentally any different in that regard.
Gold's isn't useful either. It is also energy intensive to "create" (i.e. mine). It is useful for somethings, but it's limited uses are not the cause of it's price. U.S. dollars are not useful aside from their ability to be exchanged for goods. Dollars were previously backed by gold making their exchange rate fixed. Now it's variable. Bitcoin is not useful, but it can be exchanged for some goods or dollars (and therefore all goods including gold).
One of the benefits of a good currency is it's lack of utility outside being a medium of exchange and a store of value. This is part of what makes gold and dollars good currencies as opposed to barrels of gasoline. We don't want the supply of the currency to be affected by a sudden demand for traveling or something like the rising utility of the electric car.
The fact that bitcoin is energy intensive to create is by design. If it were easy to create, then it would be worthless. Everyone would simply create a bitcoin rather than paying $10,000 for one. Just like how gold and dollars would be worthless if everyone could easily create gold and dollars in their basement.
Anyway, luckily for him, science doesn't require that he "believes" in it. When he's doing his calculations to figure out how big his parachutes need to be to put him safely on the ground, he can just plug in 9.8 meters per second squared into his formula. He doesn't need to understand why we know that value, he can just use it. It doesn't require him to believe in anything.
It requires him to to believe the believe the 9.8 m/s^2 "constant" is accurate, as well as the formulas he's plugging that number into are accurate.
Even if he measured this constant himself rather than relying on scientists, what was his methodology for measuring the acceleration due to gravity? How does he even know what acceleration is and how to measure it?
This whole endeavor requires him to believe lots of things, explicitly or implicitly, whether it's "the scientific community" or some random web page with a javascript acceleration calculator.
The fact that he says he doesn't believe in science is more of a semantic problem than an epistemological problem. You can just as easily "believe in science", not know anything about Newton's laws, and end up using the same javascript calculator.
It seems that he might believe some of the right things (e.g. he's using math formulas rather than prayer to come up with his numbers) but for the wrong reason.
I was obviously not talking about MS Paint and notepad. There are a TON of applications that only run in windows, many of which don't run well in wine. The primary example is games. I personally have windows on my laptop just to be able to run Autodesk Fusion 360.
I suspect governments have lots of legacy software that does not have an easy open source drop in replacement.
Obviously a good cost benefit analysis should be done. What I am saying is that I think the cost benefit analysis will likely reveal that running windows has a lot of benefit for little cost if you already have lots of software that runs on windows. Even if you plan on migrating to Linux long term, running windows as you migrate individual applications to open source alternatives, provides a way to do the migration gradually rather than all at once.
I am as opposed to vendor lock in as anybody. I use linux every day for work and personal projects. But I write cross platform software for a reason. Most software I write ends up running on linux, but if we have to run it on windows, it's not a problem. This provides flexibility. Having the option to do a gradual migration is better than not having that option.
Software made to run on linux typically runs pretty well on windows. Windows runs linux programs much better than linux runs windows programs. But this isn't because of anything Microsoft did. It is a byproduct of people writing cross platform code for Linux that is easily ported to windows.
If these people have a ton of programs that only run in windows thaen they should use windows. That doesn;t mean you need to use MS Office. You can (not surprisingly) run LibreOffice in windows just fine.
If you think investing is no different than betting on games of chance, I feel for you. You obviously don't get what I'm saying and will have issues holding on to your "investments" because you are playing games.
I think I obviously do get what you are saying, and I am trying to explain to you why I think you are wrong. Thinking you are wrong is not the same as not understanding what you are saying.
Based on what you have said, I think you don't understand what I am saying.
The wolves will have their way with you. Good luck, I hope you win the lottery or what ever game you think you are playing.
I keep telling you that I am not investing in bitcoin or casino gambling, so I don't know why you keep assuming that I am.
As for BitCoin... It's a crap shoot, literally.
As I said, it's not literally a crapshoot, because craps is engineered to have a negative ROI by casinos, and the ROI of bitcoin is determined organically.
This thing is driven by all the same market forces that made fidget spinners, pet rocks and PokimonGO popular.
This statement makes me suspect that you don't actually know that much about bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, or what makes them useful in general.
My recommendations on BitCoin are to stay out, or if you must, mine if the ROI is competitive.
That's everyone's recommendations on bitcoin mining. This is obvious to anyone who does 10 minutes of research.
Being an Exchange operator isn't a bad deal either if you can charge enough fees.
This is no different than just owning a normal business that charges fees for services.
But buying BitCoin to hold, hoping it will be worth more later is literally worse than flipping coins and betting it will come up heads.
The ROI of "flipping a coin" is basically 0. So you are claiming to know that the ROI of bitcoin at it's current price is less than 0. I don't think anybody knows the answer to this question. The risk is certainly too high for me to feel comfortable with it. Which is why in addition to not mining any, I also did not buy any to speculate.
The value of the currency has shot up recently to record levels, there is no reason to think this run up is sustainable because nobody is offering a reason for it.
I suspect you are not looking very hard.
Do YOU have an idea why BitCoin is so high?
Yes, kindof. While the popularity of bitcoin is based on the whims of society, the price of bitcoin is based on the cost of mining at the current level of difficulty. The price of bitcoin can not be much higher than the cost of mining, because people will just mine the currency rather than buying it. It works similar to gold. You aren't going to pay $2000 for an ounce of gold, if it can be mined it at a cost of $1000 an ounce. Long story short. The price is high because people have decided to mine enough bitcoin to *make* mining very expensive (mining gets harder as more bitcoins have been mined), driving up the price to what it is.
If everyone stopped mining, the price would gradually decrease as mining becomes cheaper due to computers becoming faster and cheaper (computational power becoming cheaper) over time.
Is this like how the price of fidget spinners is determined? In some sense yes. The price of fidget spinners is capped by the cost of producing them. You can't really get away with selling commodity fidget spinners at $10,000 a piece if the cost to make a fidget spinner is $1. The market will not bear it. The cost of producing a bitcoin is reflected in it's current price.
And no the rate of increase is not sustainable. That doesn't mean it is not a good investment. It just means that it can no longer be the amazing investment it was up until now.
There is a big difference between placing a bet and investing...
I would say there is not.
If you look at investments like you are placing bets, you will lose in the long run. Betting is speculating on chance, and speculation on chance is not a good investment strategy in the long term. The house always wins in the end when you are betting.
It's all chance. Betting in a casino (i.e. gambling) is almost always a bad idea only because the games have all been carefully engineered to all but guarantee a negative expected return. There are a few rare but well known exceptions (e.g. the MIT blackjack team, etc).
Gambling on stocks, commodities, real estate, currencies, etc is still gambling in the sense that it is based on luck, it's just not gambling on a game that's been engineered specifically to make you lose. The things that actually matter are risk vs. ROI, and being a successful investor is about knowing what level of risk you can tolerate at any given time.
The difference that matters between investing in the stock market vs a casino is not that one is investing and one is gambling. They are booth gambling. The difference is that gambling in a casino comes with a negative ROI, and gambling in the stock market comes with a positive ROI.
Does investing in bitcoin come with a positive ROI? I don't think we have enough data to say that it does conclusively in the long term, but so far it's been very positive, albeit highly volatile.
Investing is just non-stupid gambling. Casino gambling is mathematically proven stupid gambling.
My point is that BitCoin has zero intrinsic value and owning one gives you nothing except the perceived market value. You own nothing but a pile of digital bytes.
Not exactly true. You don't own the bytes either. The only thing you "own" is a private encryption key that makes you the only person in the world able to solve a really hard math problem.
Gold, on the other hand, DOES have value, is something you can hold in your hand, is used for a lot of industrial processes
Golds value is not from industrial processes. The price/value of gold would be nearly identical if it had no uses at all. In fact there are probably lots of things it is very useful for, but not used for, *because* it is gold and more valuable as an inert precious metal sitting in a vault.
Stocks have a "book value" where the holder of the share actually owns a part of the company and possibly gets a share of the profits.
I don't see why owning part of an instance of an abstract concept (i.e. a company) is inherently any better than owning a digital currency. One comes with rights upheld by a government, the other comes with rights upheld by nature/math. You also get a share of the profit if the value of bitcoin goes up. There is no difference there.
My second point is that if you insist on trading in BitCoin, THINK about what you are doing
I don't insist on trading in bitcoin. I own zero bitcoins.
Understand the risks.
You can lose *all* the money you invest in any currency if the value of that currency falls. In the case of bitcoin, you can also lose all your bitcoins if you forget your private encryption key. With physical currency you can have it physically stolen, etc. I'm well aware of the risks.
And if you insist on trying this, try to make sure YOU are the one who's making money on market movements, not the other guy.
I don't think you can insist on this. Investing is gambling. That's like telling someone in a casino to insist that he gets jackpots when playing the slot machines.
All investing is risky and I do not recommend investing in bitcoin. What I am saying is that it's not any worse than the other risky traditional investments that are out there.
In fact it being a digital currency (being made only of ones and zeroes) is not relevant. Only like 10% of US dollars exist as physical money. 90% of it is just digital. And the physical money is not any more real than the digital stuff, because paper isn't worth anything. It doesn't matter. It's all the same.
Even when gold is only a hedge against inflation, it is a better investment than a savings account in a bank.
Again, I don;t personally invest in gold, but I can see why some people might.
With a chunk of land, I can lease it out.
Grandparents on both sides of my family have had their homes/land taken from them by either invading armies or their own government. My family members that lived through world war 2 have a bias for valuable things that are small enough to be taken with you if you need to leave behind everything else you own. One of those grandparents also experienced the kind of inflation where you need literally buckets of money to buy something.
With stocks, I can get dividends.
With some stocks you do get dividends. This is either a good or a bad investment depending on the size of those dividends relative to what you paid for the stock. If they are less than the interest you'd get from a savings account, and the stock price isn't going up, then it's probably better to have the savings account.
Why buy something that only is worth anything when it is sold, when you can get something that pays out over time?
It's this kind of thinking en masse that contributes to overvaluing real estate and the stock market, and causes those things to become poor investments as their prices rise relative to their return. The same thing is true for thinking "Why not invest in precious metals you can flee a war with?". In reality there are no easy answers for what a good investment is. Having biases the prevent you from considering every opportunity fairly is likely to prevent you from seeing the value in some good investments and choose some relatively bad ones.
They can keep climbing in definitely... I guess the heat death of the universe will eventually put a stop to... everything, but before that, there is no reason the value of bitcoin can't keep going up. I don't think it can keep going up at the rate it's at, but even if it just plateaus no one need lose their shirt.
If it were true that nothing can keep going up in value indefinitely, then gold would have become worthless by now.
As long as there is limited supply of something, and no cap on the amount of potential demand, then there is no cap to the price of that thing.
Wait? People were protected from the Bernie Madoffs of the world?! I can think of at least one Bernie Madoff in particular people weren't protected from.
Maybe gold is not worth anything and never was. It seems to have been an ok investment overall for most of recorded human history.
Sticking to investing only in things with intrinsic value shields you from one way in which your investment can fail. (e.g. Everyone deciding that beanie babies are not cool anymore), but there are plenty of ways that investments in intrinsically valuable things can go horribly wrong. Houses have lots of intrinsic value. People still got destroyed over house purchases.
I don't think bitcoin is a good investment now either. (or I would have invested).
There are no safe investments with good returns. Every investment is gamble somewhere on the risk/return spectrum.
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I thought Islamists was a term created specifically to differentiate the bad Muslims. (e.g. Muslims aren't bad, it's the Islamists that are bad). I don't think this is unreasonable. I don't think it's fair to say "Christians are bad" whenever some Jesus cult does some crazy shit, but at the same time, I wouldn't expect google to come with good results for "christian fundamentalists" or similar terms.
If there is one thing I absolutely need the bank issuing me a credit card to do, it is to prevent from buying things that I may not realize are risky.
All it takes is one unpatched bug and an entire election can be hacked at the press of a button.
I think you are talking about the sort of electronic voting that exists currently. What I am talking about is electronic voting where you receive information that serves as verification that your vote was counted, as well as a publicly available records of all the ballots. While this could be hacked, we would certainly find out about it and void the results.
What I am saying is that this verification is traditionally done by paper, but this has a lot of disadvantages. We can do verification electronically (we don't currently). That said there is nothing to prevent you from writing down your electronic verification on paper or printing it out, but I don't think this is necessary.
No. You fundamentally misunderstand the role of paper ballots in modern elections.
That is *a* role of paper ballots, not *the* role, and I think it is a role that will become obsolete if our elections become more secure through verification. Adding cost to potential hackers in this case also needlessly adds a lot of cost to the legitimate operation of the elections.
What we need is a robust system of verification. It's true that existing paper ballot systems provide more robust verification than existing electronic-only systems, but that doesn't mean this is some kind of universal truth.
Paper has been the de facto source of verification of authenticity for human beings for a very long time, but I think we are reaching the end of the life of this technological advancement. I think technology provides a lot of promising solutions to this problem. While electronic records, if done without care, are very easily tampered with. Paper records are have an inherent resistance to tampering, but this resistance is limited.
One of the greatest technological advancements to prevent tampering is actually cryptographic techniques like digital signatures, block chains, etc.
Long story short, I don;t think paper records are a bad thing, but I'd like us to focus on what we really want and not get too hung up on dead trees as the goal in itself.
1) This is already possible. I take pictures of all my ballots for my own records, but you could easily coerce someone into doing this as proof of voting a certain way. It's still possible to take a picture of a forgery or a to-be-discarded ballot, but the potential for coercion is still there given that the benefit of voting your conscience for a victim of said coercion will in many cases not be worth risk, cost, or effort of creating a forgery.
My opinion is that forced secrecy is an unrealistic goal that creates bad tradeoffs. We can have voluntary secrecy (i.e. a person can prove how they voted if they want to), and in my opinion get some really good tradeoffs.
I view voting coercion the same way that I view voter fraud. It's theoretically a problem that doesn't seem to be a significant problem to warrant implementing any policies that create any tangible downsides, until it becomes a significant problem.
By allowing people to vote without an ID we allow the possibility of some insignificant amount of voter fraud but also enfranchise lots of people would not otherwise have been. By allowing people to prove how they voted, we open the possibility for some more coercion but we also gain a system where we can be confident that our votes were actually counted the way they were supposed to have been.
2) Presumably you could make ballot "images" that are not literal photographs of the actual ballots, but rather just "snapshots" of the data on the ballot that can be verified by voters after an election.
3) there is no reason to make any identifiers sequential or predictable in any way other than laziness or ignorance.
I would like a system where everyone can remain anonymous if they want to, but everyone can verify that their votes were counted correctly via a publicly available database. And if individuals notice their ballots are not being counted correctly, they can make their ballots public and call attention to whatever flaws may exist.
That doesn't mean the dollar can't crash. I don't think the fact that the US government accepts USD for tax purposes has any effect on the dollar in the short term. If the dollar crashed to 1% of what it was tomorrow, it would mean that I could pay 1% of the taxes I would otherwise have had to in terms of value. I wouldn't necessarily be happy about this if I had a bunch of money in a bank account, but most of my money goes towards child care home improvements, and a mortgage.
In the long term, it would mean that employers would have to pay their employees 100x as much to get them to do the same work, as well as goods and services costing 100x more, and within a year this would lead to people paying roughly 100x higher taxes.
Paying 40% (or whatever %) of your income to the government in taxes is independent of the value of 1 unit of local currency.
The fact that I am forced to pay my taxes in USD does not even require me to hold USD. I simply need to convert some assets to USD just prior to paying my taxes (either in april or every 2 weeks). It would be theoretically no different than if the US government only accepted bitcoin as payment for taxes.
There certainly is speculation, in bitcoin. But I think bitcoin is actually more similar to gold than USD. The supply of USD is controlled by an authority. If the price of USD is too high for you to "buy" you don't have an option to make your own USD as a check on the price. If the price of gold gets high enough, at some point it becomes cost effective to start panning for gold, and if the price drops it stops being cost effective depending on how efficient your method is.
It's possible for the price of bitcoin or gold to drop to 0, but for the time being there is quasi a cap to the price of bitcoin which is the cost of mining. It makes no sense to buy a bitcoin for $20K if it can be mined for $10K of electricity. So $10K becomes the new cap (sortof)
There is the issue of mining difficulty increasing as more blocks are found which can (And I think clearly did) drive this cap higher (so I guess it's not a real cap in that it's not static), but it is a cap in that the market couldn't really bear a $1M bitcoin, unless there was a lot more mining happening.
Wow, it sounds like you could have easily become a billionaire with this knowledge.
Who are you selling to if everyone in the market is catching z's?
If the concept of "inherent value" means anything other than "value", than it must mean something that is valuable beyond just it's perception of value in the minds of people. If it inherent value can be value only in the minds of people, then there is no reason that bitcoin can't be inherently valuable as well. All that would be required for this is for some people to think it's valuable (a condition which has clearly been met).
Traditionally the concept of inherent value is reserved for stuff like gasoline, which can be used as a fuel regardless of the perception of value in the minds of people. Presumably even aliens would value things like fuel even if they may not highly value primitive fuels like gasoline.
Gold has inherent value, proven by the fact that every single civilisation in human history has considered it valuable and a tradeable commodity
That's not "inherent" value. That is value that only exists in the minds of people.
US dollars are useful in that they are necessary for the payment of taxes, and as legal tender must be accepted for payment of a debt.
Once again, this is not intrinsic value. This is value that is given to the dollar by the US government.
They are also a reserve currency, accepted all over the United States and many places worldwide.
Once again, not inherent or intrinsic value
This sort of argument is "Gold and the US dollar are valuable because people all agree that it's valuable." "Bitcoin is not inherently valuable because it has no value beyond people agreeing that it's valuable".
Also, for your statement of needing to pay taxes in US dollars, this is possible to do regardless of the value of the dollar. If the value of the dollar plummets, my income is going to sky rocket due to inflation, causing me to pay higher taxes in dollars (but not higher taxes in value)
Requiring people to pay taxes in US dollars only requires me to convert some of my % of my income to X dollars (how ever many that is at any given time) to then pay my taxes. This is completely independent of how valuable the US dollar is.
When you just know you're right, but you can't seem to articulate how or why, maybe you're just wrong.
No rebuttal or counterargument? All you can muster is a re-assertion that you are right? Congratulations, you just violated the rules of civil discourse and therefore lose the argument.
A. Gold is valuable.
B. Gold is useful for some things for which there is no good substitute.
A and B are both true, but A is not true *because of* B.
If it were, we'd be melting down most of the worlds gold for engineering tasks. What's the point of having a valuable resource if you don't utilize it?
Gold is not useful enough to warrant actually using it. It is much more useful as a store of value than as an hdmi cable. That's why we keep most of our gold in bars or chains, etc, and not in forms related to engineering applications that would make it hard to reextract. Whatever use gold has is surpassed by it's value as a currency, which is why we don't really use it.
Gold would actually become *more* useful (aside from a currency) if it's value dropped to zero.
Incidentally, unlike Gold, Bitcoin is now actually worthless.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
With these severe changes in value, it has no worth as an actual currency, and that was its only worth.
A currency is useful as both a medium of exchange and a store of value
The volatility is preventing bitcoin from being a reliable store of value (depending on how you look at it), but it is still an amazing medium of exchange.
When it crashes, it will crash down to zero. The only worth of Bitcoin is that you may still find a greater fool than yourself who is willing to buy it, in turn hoping for an even greater fool.
So lets say hypothetically a giant gold meteor hits earth and now gold is more common than iron. All the people who held gold as a store of value just lost that value. The planet as a whole is better off because now we can make sold gold hdmi cables for everyone. Gold's utility is huge now, and it's value didn't drop to zero. It's just just $300/ton rather than $40million/ton. As a person who owned a lot of gold you are really no better off than the bitcoin owner who's bitcoins dropped to literally zero.
So you think there is no inherent value in a bitcoin. I agree with you. Where I think we differ, is that you seem to think that other currencies are fundamentally any different in that regard.
Gold's isn't useful either. It is also energy intensive to "create" (i.e. mine). It is useful for somethings, but it's limited uses are not the cause of it's price. U.S. dollars are not useful aside from their ability to be exchanged for goods. Dollars were previously backed by gold making their exchange rate fixed. Now it's variable. Bitcoin is not useful, but it can be exchanged for some goods or dollars (and therefore all goods including gold).
One of the benefits of a good currency is it's lack of utility outside being a medium of exchange and a store of value. This is part of what makes gold and dollars good currencies as opposed to barrels of gasoline. We don't want the supply of the currency to be affected by a sudden demand for traveling or something like the rising utility of the electric car.
The fact that bitcoin is energy intensive to create is by design. If it were easy to create, then it would be worthless. Everyone would simply create a bitcoin rather than paying $10,000 for one. Just like how gold and dollars would be worthless if everyone could easily create gold and dollars in their basement.
Yep. Actions speak louder than words.
Anyway, luckily for him, science doesn't require that he "believes" in it. When he's doing his calculations to figure out how big his parachutes need to be to put him safely on the ground, he can just plug in 9.8 meters per second squared into his formula. He doesn't need to understand why we know that value, he can just use it. It doesn't require him to believe in anything.
It requires him to to believe the believe the 9.8 m/s^2 "constant" is accurate, as well as the formulas he's plugging that number into are accurate.
Even if he measured this constant himself rather than relying on scientists, what was his methodology for measuring the acceleration due to gravity? How does he even know what acceleration is and how to measure it?
This whole endeavor requires him to believe lots of things, explicitly or implicitly, whether it's "the scientific community" or some random web page with a javascript acceleration calculator.
The fact that he says he doesn't believe in science is more of a semantic problem than an epistemological problem. You can just as easily "believe in science", not know anything about Newton's laws, and end up using the same javascript calculator.
It seems that he might believe some of the right things (e.g. he's using math formulas rather than prayer to come up with his numbers) but for the wrong reason.
I was obviously not talking about MS Paint and notepad. There are a TON of applications that only run in windows, many of which don't run well in wine. The primary example is games. I personally have windows on my laptop just to be able to run Autodesk Fusion 360.
I suspect governments have lots of legacy software that does not have an easy open source drop in replacement.
Obviously a good cost benefit analysis should be done. What I am saying is that I think the cost benefit analysis will likely reveal that running windows has a lot of benefit for little cost if you already have lots of software that runs on windows. Even if you plan on migrating to Linux long term, running windows as you migrate individual applications to open source alternatives, provides a way to do the migration gradually rather than all at once.
I am as opposed to vendor lock in as anybody. I use linux every day for work and personal projects. But I write cross platform software for a reason. Most software I write ends up running on linux, but if we have to run it on windows, it's not a problem. This provides flexibility. Having the option to do a gradual migration is better than not having that option.
Software made to run on linux typically runs pretty well on windows. Windows runs linux programs much better than linux runs windows programs. But this isn't because of anything Microsoft did. It is a byproduct of people writing cross platform code for Linux that is easily ported to windows.
If these people have a ton of programs that only run in windows thaen they should use windows. That doesn;t mean you need to use MS Office. You can (not surprisingly) run LibreOffice in windows just fine.
If you think investing is no different than betting on games of chance, I feel for you. You obviously don't get what I'm saying and will have issues holding on to your "investments" because you are playing games.
I think I obviously do get what you are saying, and I am trying to explain to you why I think you are wrong. Thinking you are wrong is not the same as not understanding what you are saying.
Based on what you have said, I think you don't understand what I am saying.
The wolves will have their way with you. Good luck, I hope you win the lottery or what ever game you think you are playing.
I keep telling you that I am not investing in bitcoin or casino gambling, so I don't know why you keep assuming that I am.
As for BitCoin... It's a crap shoot, literally.
As I said, it's not literally a crapshoot, because craps is engineered to have a negative ROI by casinos, and the ROI of bitcoin is determined organically.
This thing is driven by all the same market forces that made fidget spinners, pet rocks and PokimonGO popular.
This statement makes me suspect that you don't actually know that much about bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, or what makes them useful in general.
My recommendations on BitCoin are to stay out, or if you must, mine if the ROI is competitive.
That's everyone's recommendations on bitcoin mining. This is obvious to anyone who does 10 minutes of research.
Being an Exchange operator isn't a bad deal either if you can charge enough fees.
This is no different than just owning a normal business that charges fees for services.
But buying BitCoin to hold, hoping it will be worth more later is literally worse than flipping coins and betting it will come up heads.
The ROI of "flipping a coin" is basically 0. So you are claiming to know that the ROI of bitcoin at it's current price is less than 0. I don't think anybody knows the answer to this question. The risk is certainly too high for me to feel comfortable with it. Which is why in addition to not mining any, I also did not buy any to speculate.
The value of the currency has shot up recently to record levels, there is no reason to think this run up is sustainable because nobody is offering a reason for it.
I suspect you are not looking very hard.
Do YOU have an idea why BitCoin is so high?
Yes, kindof. While the popularity of bitcoin is based on the whims of society, the price of bitcoin is based on the cost of mining at the current level of difficulty. The price of bitcoin can not be much higher than the cost of mining, because people will just mine the currency rather than buying it. It works similar to gold. You aren't going to pay $2000 for an ounce of gold, if it can be mined it at a cost of $1000 an ounce. Long story short. The price is high because people have decided to mine enough bitcoin to *make* mining very expensive (mining gets harder as more bitcoins have been mined), driving up the price to what it is.
If everyone stopped mining, the price would gradually decrease as mining becomes cheaper due to computers becoming faster and cheaper (computational power becoming cheaper) over time.
Is this like how the price of fidget spinners is determined? In some sense yes. The price of fidget spinners is capped by the cost of producing them. You can't really get away with selling commodity fidget spinners at $10,000 a piece if the cost to make a fidget spinner is $1. The market will not bear it. The cost of producing a bitcoin is reflected in it's current price.
And no the rate of increase is not sustainable. That doesn't mean it is not a good investment. It just means that it can no longer be the amazing investment it was up until now.
I can explain wh
There is a big difference between placing a bet and investing...
I would say there is not.
If you look at investments like you are placing bets, you will lose in the long run. Betting is speculating on chance, and speculation on chance is not a good investment strategy in the long term. The house always wins in the end when you are betting.
It's all chance. Betting in a casino (i.e. gambling) is almost always a bad idea only because the games have all been carefully engineered to all but guarantee a negative expected return. There are a few rare but well known exceptions (e.g. the MIT blackjack team, etc).
Gambling on stocks, commodities, real estate, currencies, etc is still gambling in the sense that it is based on luck, it's just not gambling on a game that's been engineered specifically to make you lose. The things that actually matter are risk vs. ROI, and being a successful investor is about knowing what level of risk you can tolerate at any given time.
The difference that matters between investing in the stock market vs a casino is not that one is investing and one is gambling. They are booth gambling. The difference is that gambling in a casino comes with a negative ROI, and gambling in the stock market comes with a positive ROI.
Does investing in bitcoin come with a positive ROI? I don't think we have enough data to say that it does conclusively in the long term, but so far it's been very positive, albeit highly volatile.
Investing is just non-stupid gambling. Casino gambling is mathematically proven stupid gambling.
My point is that BitCoin has zero intrinsic value and owning one gives you nothing except the perceived market value. You own nothing but a pile of digital bytes.
Not exactly true. You don't own the bytes either. The only thing you "own" is a private encryption key that makes you the only person in the world able to solve a really hard math problem.
Gold, on the other hand, DOES have value, is something you can hold in your hand, is used for a lot of industrial processes
Golds value is not from industrial processes. The price/value of gold would be nearly identical if it had no uses at all. In fact there are probably lots of things it is very useful for, but not used for, *because* it is gold and more valuable as an inert precious metal sitting in a vault.
Stocks have a "book value" where the holder of the share actually owns a part of the company and possibly gets a share of the profits.
I don't see why owning part of an instance of an abstract concept (i.e. a company) is inherently any better than owning a digital currency. One comes with rights upheld by a government, the other comes with rights upheld by nature/math. You also get a share of the profit if the value of bitcoin goes up. There is no difference there.
My second point is that if you insist on trading in BitCoin, THINK about what you are doing
I don't insist on trading in bitcoin. I own zero bitcoins.
Understand the risks.
You can lose *all* the money you invest in any currency if the value of that currency falls. In the case of bitcoin, you can also lose all your bitcoins if you forget your private encryption key. With physical currency you can have it physically stolen, etc. I'm well aware of the risks.
And if you insist on trying this, try to make sure YOU are the one who's making money on market movements, not the other guy.
I don't think you can insist on this. Investing is gambling. That's like telling someone in a casino to insist that he gets jackpots when playing the slot machines.
All investing is risky and I do not recommend investing in bitcoin. What I am saying is that it's not any worse than the other risky traditional investments that are out there.
In fact it being a digital currency (being made only of ones and zeroes) is not relevant. Only like 10% of US dollars exist as physical money. 90% of it is just digital. And the physical money is not any more real than the digital stuff, because paper isn't worth anything. It doesn't matter. It's all the same.
Even when gold is only a hedge against inflation, it is a better investment than a savings account in a bank.
Again, I don;t personally invest in gold, but I can see why some people might.
With a chunk of land, I can lease it out.
Grandparents on both sides of my family have had their homes/land taken from them by either invading armies or their own government. My family members that lived through world war 2 have a bias for valuable things that are small enough to be taken with you if you need to leave behind everything else you own. One of those grandparents also experienced the kind of inflation where you need literally buckets of money to buy something.
With stocks, I can get dividends.
With some stocks you do get dividends. This is either a good or a bad investment depending on the size of those dividends relative to what you paid for the stock. If they are less than the interest you'd get from a savings account, and the stock price isn't going up, then it's probably better to have the savings account.
Why buy something that only is worth anything when it is sold, when you can get something that pays out over time?
It's this kind of thinking en masse that contributes to overvaluing real estate and the stock market, and causes those things to become poor investments as their prices rise relative to their return. The same thing is true for thinking "Why not invest in precious metals you can flee a war with?". In reality there are no easy answers for what a good investment is. Having biases the prevent you from considering every opportunity fairly is likely to prevent you from seeing the value in some good investments and choose some relatively bad ones.
They can keep climbing in definitely... I guess the heat death of the universe will eventually put a stop to ... everything, but before that, there is no reason the value of bitcoin can't keep going up. I don't think it can keep going up at the rate it's at, but even if it just plateaus no one need lose their shirt.
If it were true that nothing can keep going up in value indefinitely, then gold would have become worthless by now.
As long as there is limited supply of something, and no cap on the amount of potential demand, then there is no cap to the price of that thing.
Wait? People were protected from the Bernie Madoffs of the world?! I can think of at least one Bernie Madoff in particular people weren't protected from.
Maybe gold is not worth anything and never was. It seems to have been an ok investment overall for most of recorded human history.
Sticking to investing only in things with intrinsic value shields you from one way in which your investment can fail. (e.g. Everyone deciding that beanie babies are not cool anymore), but there are plenty of ways that investments in intrinsically valuable things can go horribly wrong. Houses have lots of intrinsic value. People still got destroyed over house purchases.
I don't think bitcoin is a good investment now either. (or I would have invested).
There are no safe investments with good returns. Every investment is gamble somewhere on the risk/return spectrum.