It's not a stretch to imagine the same sort of restrictions being mandated for 3D printers and CNC machines.
Sure, but such restrictions and mandates are ultimately futile because there exists enough open hardware advocates and hobbyists out there where such attempts are futile unless they mandate making things for yourself to be illegal(3d printers can make 3d printers) and than proceed to investigate and arrest everyone of us. We understand that these efforts are futile and will reflect poorly upon them thus leading to their undoing.
Understand that this project has very little to do with making a gun while simultaneously everything to do with making a gun. It represents an Anarchist attempt to force the issue by asking hypocrites to show their cards and call their bluff and is more about the first amendment than the second. We welcome capitulation or draconian regulation as neither effects us and removes the facade and any false pretenses.
Why use a copier instead of a scanner? Why photocopy a 20 dollar bill with paper when it is made of cotton and linen? What was your point in the first place as only a crackhead would be fooled by a photocopied 20 if they could be copied?
So do claymores (the exploding kind), and minguns. What's your point?
Those can be fun to use but tend to be a bit impractical for home/business defense. A 12 gauge shotgun has a large spread to easily hit the target with a variety of rounds to choose from where a load can be selected to avoid over-penetrating through walls - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
AR-15s 5.56 will be stopped at the exterior wall of most homes and makes a great easy to use rifle when facing multiple assailants.
Miniguns are a bit bulky and impractical, and claymores tend to upset the neighbors a bit when their dog comes over to smell my garden of flowers.
Contradictory and unethical regulations will simply be ignored. There is no way to prevent 3D printers and CNC mills from being manufactured. What represents a fantasy are gun control advocates and regulators dreams of being able to control this technology. The consequences, good and bad, will unfold regardless of politics or philosophical opinions.
If it's possible to offer some compelling new service for 1-2 dollars per month, why not just charge that directly, instead of the Rube Goldberg method?
Excellent question. One of bitcoins main problems is its lack of user friendliness or its odd and complicated nature. What 21 Inc is trying to do is mainstream the use of bitcoin by treating it more as a protocol instead of currency. No longer will users have to learn about bitcoin, buy some, learn how to secure it, find all the services and apps that allow them take advantage of bitcoin individually. With a BTC enabled device it will just allow them to use these features built in without them having to acquire bitcoin or even know it exists. Widespread adoption and the decentralization of mining will benefit both 21 Inc and the users at the same time. If 21 Inc just created and app with preloaded bitcoins than they would have a more difficult job of getting unique new users and would not be strengthening the ecosystem by further increasing the hashrate and decentralizing it.
Any mining chip is doomed to failure. Within 6 months it will be worthless, incapable of mining more value than it costs to manufacture and run.
See all the other Bitcoin mining chips that have been released. They look powerful when announced, by the time people get them they are average, and six months later the difficulty level has risen far enough to make them worthless bricks or expensive room heaters. The more of them in existence the faster this will happen. That is how Bitcoin is designed to work.
Since ASIC miners become obsolete fairly quickly it may be a good idea to install them in disposable items the public typically upgrades regularly or items that serve multiple roles where they continue to be useful even after they stop being profitable. 21 Inc may be onto something.
8 dollars per device assuming it is in every net-enabled device.
They are necessarily projections. The 8 dollar figure is the projected cost of a small rollout and not every net enabled device. 8 dollars is actually quite expensive for a single chip.
No capital expenditure assuming chip manufacturers decide to embed this in their products. Those seem like rather large assumptions to me.
They already have Qualcomm on board with a large personal investment. Isn't a 48 billion dollar company with a large list of skews good enough to start?
you logic seems interesting to me...
people are willing to pay more for something subsidized!!?? wouldn't the device by being subsidized be less and not more?
i think you need to reread the shilling material again.
21 Inc is planing on giving away free or heavily subsidized products, that may end up costing the user more over several years of use because of the added energy costs.*
It is well understood among psychologists that most people opt for short term deals and opportunities vs long term projected costs.
There are many business models that are built around this fact. I.E..Cell phones, media entertainment systems, rent to own , car leases , and in many developing countries every single product sold in stores is offered rent to own with low to no initial cost and larger longterm costs over the life of the product.
*It is possible that the costs will be lower for the users however, but I am assuming the worst possible outcome for consumers. Some users do not pay for electrical costs because they rent, have already invested capital in renewable power. These IoT devices will offer more services than traditional devices thus negating some or all of the higher electrical costs. The unused mined bitcoins will appreciate in value and likely grow to cover the electrical costs if unspent. Any appliance that reuses waste heat like space heaters, water heaters , ect... will be an added bonus for consumers.
Lets say that the random numbers this bitcoin chip uses to generate hashes is designed to be breakable, or just bad.
What effect could that have?
You aren't exactly clear but I assume you are asking about backdoors being introduced within these devices to compromise bitcoin. If introduced this would undermine the devices themselves and not the blockchain. The exception to this rule is if over 51% of mining occurred by 21 Inc devices and there was a backdoor which was abused. In this case we must be concerned and prevent 21 Inc from mining all of its devices on a central pool regardless if their investors are mostly libertarians who have no interest in undermining bitcoin. Trusting ones intentions isn't good enough security for us.
So you think it's a good idea? This is what it sounds like to me, you will be of mining collective of which the lions share of Bitcoin will go to some corp, and the bit (no pun intended) you get will be used to pay your "micro transactions".
A snake eating its tail, and the monetization of simple things like browsing.
I can't imagine a bigger sucker deal.
68% of bitcoin has already been mined. 21 Inc will be competing with traditional miners and other companies that will be forced to adopt like IBM, MSFT, AMD, Google, ect... I am quite fine with 75% of the bitcoins being used to pay for high tech engineering and programming jobs in these sectors to continue to roll out and secure blockchain based technologies.
This shows the next stage have a total capital expenditure of 8 dollars per device and after that near 0 CapEx. No wonder they were able to attract so much VC capital so quickly and are promising free and heavily subsidized devices. Traditional miners won't be able to compete with those margins and quickly become obsolete. Consumers won't mind the 1-2 dollars in higher electrical costs a month for the ability to get a free phone that has extra features. Additionally, when they start introducing devices that recycle the waste heat as a product the consumers will benefit even more.(space heater, hot water heaters, dehydrators, ect..)
I'm going to use my Bitcoin to buy another battery for my phone, lately it seems to run down quickly.
These chips will be rolled out in many devices, not just cell phones. Most people leave their phones plugged in for hours after they are fully charged. This is where the mining will occur.
They're going to love a new currency. Look at how much they can manipulate a regulated currency to fuck over people and enrich themselves. Image what they can do with an unregulated one.
Correct, except Bitcoins primary use will become their vehicle to launder their profits which are stolen from other markets. Many of their useful techniques to steal money such as quantitative easing, inflation, bail ins and bail outs, do not work within bitcoin.
Why feign incredulity when the evidence over the last 30+ years reflects most people already are willing to pay slightly more per month for the opportunity of subsidized devices?
If the chip was efficient enough to actually cover it's own cost, shouldn't 21 just build it's own cluster and print it's own money? Oh, it's not? Maybe we can get someone to pay for all of the electricity this thing uses and just throw them a few pennies every once in a while to keep them happy......
21 Inc revenue model isn't solely dependent upon 75% mining reward and tx fees but on the value added services that the devices take advantage of. The end user won't care about or even know their device is using bitcoin. All they will care about is the device being less expensive initially, and all the features like trust-less escrow, smart contracts, reselling and sharing bandwidth, ect.. that their devices will now provide them.
Correct, but the end user wouldn't notice or care about the electrical cost increase of 1-2 dollars a month. What they will notice is a subsidized or free device that can do things that other devices cannot do.
First and foremost it is looking like 21 has developed extremely inexpensive and efficient chips to embed in smart devices which will have a very nominal power usage and only mine a few satoshi's per hour for the sake of profiting off of IoT services and not primarily off the value of the mined bitcoins themselves.
Reasons -
1) Allowing for micropayments for services, sites and products where the user doesn't even need to signup for a service or provide a credit card.
2) More secure authentication which depends upon the security of the very secure blockchain instead of any built in software. This will be completely transparent to the user as they just need to use 1 satoshi and than they can have the ability to use trustless escrow or smart contracts on the blockchain.The intention here is to make bitcoin useful without the user even knowing about it or having to purchase any.
3) Free SAAS services which depend upon the bitcoins being mined.
4) The ability to pay for and resell bandwidth, where routers and cell phones may become part of a decentralized Small Cell network - https://www.youtube.com/watch?... This is likely why Qualcomm is invested.
5) Reducing the costs of devices by subsiding a bit of the upfront costs with SaaS, mining reward, and BTC tx fees all possible with adding a mining chip.
One good consequence will be in the reversal of the trend of the centralization of mining and the further strengthening of bitcoin. I expect other companies like google, MSFT, AMD, IBM, ect... to form partnerships and start to develop their own competing chips which may use bitcoin or another alt.
"First of all Bitcoin isn't deflationary, but disinflationary."
My argument states as long as the premise it answers to: ""BitCoin, should it survive will ultimately be deflationary currency, meaning it gains value the longer you hold it."
If this is true, my argument also must be true: any currency that gains value the longer you hold it, leads to economic stagnation.
First of all this is demonstrably untrue as shown by a years worth of capitulation due to a high inflation of 10%. We don't know how bitcoin will behave longterm is the correct answer. Secondly, lets assume that bitcoin always "behaves" deflationary (despite it being disinflationary till 2140)... what historical evidence do you have that a planned disinflationary currency leads to economic stagnation? Upon reflection you should begin to understand that this experiment hasn't happened before and the only data we have thus far(bitcoin payment processors) reflects the opposite to be true.
Or perhaps he understood more than you, and those spending spikes reflect idiot speculators trying to unload bitcoins before they fall too far? Kind of like the spike in unloading any speculated currency or commodity when it starts to crash?
Always a possibility, but until there is more data in this experiment they should withhold judgment. Perhaps it would be a good idea to also expose students to different economic schools of thought as well, rather than all Keynesian theory.
Also - honest question - you keep referring to "disinflationary." That's not a term I have heard before, can you explain where this term came from and how it differs from deflation?
Certainly. Bitcoin is intrinsically is disinflationary till 2140 and than it will have no inflation. Since there is a planned and fixed money supply without central planners manipulating the supply it can and does sometimes act inflationary or deflationary in the wild based upon market demand and thus why it has been so volatile. It is important that you understand that inflation is really high (Starting around ~20% and now ~10%) in the context of understanding the capitulation over the last year to the new support. What this is telling you is that speculators are taking profits correcting the inflated price and bitcoin has downward pressure from the fact that miners are forced to sell most of their coins to cover costs. This has happened many times in bitcoin's history and will continue to happen. Expect another bubble to happen shortly before mid 2016 when inflation drops to ~5%. What we do not know is whether or not bitcoin will stabilize as the disinflation rate slows and the market cap grows. On a macro level Bitcoin has been stabilizing but we cannot be sure if this trend will continue. Interestingly enough it has been more stable than the euro over the past few months however.
I wouldn't recommend anyone invest everything into bitcoin and do agree that it is a high risk / high reward investment. I use it daily for its utility because it allows me to do things that paypal or my credit cards cannot replicate. If it goes up in value great, if not that is fine as well because I am using it now tipping micropayments to strangers who don't even know bitcoin exists, wiring money across the world for 2 pennies to pay employees, and just saved 24% using bitcoin with a large amazon order.
Additionally there are ethical reasons to use bitcoin as I am a conscientious objector.
Again, bitcoin is an awesome payment/transaction technology but it is not a good store of value.
I agree with this comment. It will be interesting to see if Bitcoin continues its trend of becoming more stable or remains unstable. But as a general rule Bitcoin has been as unstable as some small currencies lately which in itself is very impressive for a 6 year old project.
Bitcoin is already moving out of the era of speculation and into the era of everyday use. I buy items, tip and pay employees all the time in bitcoin. I just saved 24% on a large amazon purchase with bitcoin.
You are conflating currency supply with inflation/deflation, which muddies the waters. Inflation/deflation depends on both the amount of currency in circulation, AND the amount of economic activity represented by that currency. The only way Bitcoin inflates at 10% is if the amount of economic activity conducted in Bitcoin grows 10% slower than the currency supply.
Of course at present the value of BTC is dominated by currency speculators, which throws everything off, but the basic principle remains.
What you are saying is valid but I was clarifying the difference between a disinflationary currency going through volatile bubbles because of speculators and capitulating because of high inflation and a deflationary Fiat currency with governments and banks printing more than ever in a depressed economy.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a stretch to imagine the same sort of restrictions being mandated for 3D printers and CNC machines.
Sure, but such restrictions and mandates are ultimately futile because there exists enough open hardware advocates and hobbyists out there where such attempts are futile unless they mandate making things for yourself to be illegal(3d printers can make 3d printers) and than proceed to investigate and arrest everyone of us. We understand that these efforts are futile and will reflect poorly upon them thus leading to their undoing.
Understand that this project has very little to do with making a gun while simultaneously everything to do with making a gun. It represents an Anarchist attempt to force the issue by asking hypocrites to show their cards and call their bluff and is more about the first amendment than the second. We welcome capitulation or draconian regulation as neither effects us and removes the facade and any false pretenses.
Why use a copier instead of a scanner? Why photocopy a 20 dollar bill with paper when it is made of cotton and linen? What was your point in the first place as only a crackhead would be fooled by a photocopied 20 if they could be copied?
So do claymores (the exploding kind), and minguns. What's your point?
Those can be fun to use but tend to be a bit impractical for home/business defense. A 12 gauge shotgun has a large spread to easily hit the target with a variety of rounds to choose from where a load can be selected to avoid over-penetrating through walls - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
AR-15s 5.56 will be stopped at the exterior wall of most homes and makes a great easy to use rifle when facing multiple assailants.
Miniguns are a bit bulky and impractical, and claymores tend to upset the neighbors a bit when their dog comes over to smell my garden of flowers.
Legally Build your own rifle:
https://ghostgunner.net/
https://thepiratebay.vg/torrent/8598235/DefDist_DEFCAD_MEGA_PACK_v4.4_%28Raiden%29_%5BZIPPED%5D
https://defdist.org/
AR-15s make great home defense weapons along with 12 gauge shotguns.
Contradictory and unethical regulations will simply be ignored. There is no way to prevent 3D printers and CNC mills from being manufactured. What represents a fantasy are gun control advocates and regulators dreams of being able to control this technology. The consequences, good and bad, will unfold regardless of politics or philosophical opinions.
Other possibilities:
6) Once disassembled and made to work for the beholder instead of the creator, it turns any "21-equipped" device into a pair of Nike Air Jordans.
7) It's vapor. It's not as if $121,000,000.00 hasn't been raised on vapor before, and it's not like it won't be again.
The prototypes are already built and you can sign up to be put on a list to test them.
If it's possible to offer some compelling new service for 1-2 dollars per month, why not just charge that directly, instead of the Rube Goldberg method?
Excellent question. One of bitcoins main problems is its lack of user friendliness or its odd and complicated nature. What 21 Inc is trying to do is mainstream the use of bitcoin by treating it more as a protocol instead of currency. No longer will users have to learn about bitcoin, buy some, learn how to secure it, find all the services and apps that allow them take advantage of bitcoin individually. With a BTC enabled device it will just allow them to use these features built in without them having to acquire bitcoin or even know it exists. Widespread adoption and the decentralization of mining will benefit both 21 Inc and the users at the same time. If 21 Inc just created and app with preloaded bitcoins than they would have a more difficult job of getting unique new users and would not be strengthening the ecosystem by further increasing the hashrate and decentralizing it.
Any mining chip is doomed to failure. Within 6 months it will be worthless, incapable of mining more value than it costs to manufacture and run.
See all the other Bitcoin mining chips that have been released. They look powerful when announced, by the time people get them they are average, and six months later the difficulty level has risen far enough to make them worthless bricks or expensive room heaters. The more of them in existence the faster this will happen. That is how Bitcoin is designed to work.
Since ASIC miners become obsolete fairly quickly it may be a good idea to install them in disposable items the public typically upgrades regularly or items that serve multiple roles where they continue to be useful even after they stop being profitable. 21 Inc may be onto something.
8 dollars per device assuming it is in every net-enabled device.
They are necessarily projections. The 8 dollar figure is the projected cost of a small rollout and not every net enabled device. 8 dollars is actually quite expensive for a single chip.
No capital expenditure assuming chip manufacturers decide to embed this in their products. Those seem like rather large assumptions to me.
They already have Qualcomm on board with a large personal investment. Isn't a 48 billion dollar company with a large list of skews good enough to start?
you logic seems interesting to me... people are willing to pay more for something subsidized!!?? wouldn't the device by being subsidized be less and not more? i think you need to reread the shilling material again.
21 Inc is planing on giving away free or heavily subsidized products, that may end up costing the user more over several years of use because of the added energy costs.*
It is well understood among psychologists that most people opt for short term deals and opportunities vs long term projected costs.
There are many business models that are built around this fact. I.E..Cell phones, media entertainment systems, rent to own , car leases , and in many developing countries every single product sold in stores is offered rent to own with low to no initial cost and larger longterm costs over the life of the product.
*It is possible that the costs will be lower for the users however, but I am assuming the worst possible outcome for consumers. Some users do not pay for electrical costs because they rent, have already invested capital in renewable power. These IoT devices will offer more services than traditional devices thus negating some or all of the higher electrical costs. The unused mined bitcoins will appreciate in value and likely grow to cover the electrical costs if unspent. Any appliance that reuses waste heat like space heaters, water heaters , ect ... will be an added bonus for consumers.
Lets say that the random numbers this bitcoin chip uses to generate hashes is designed to be breakable, or just bad.
What effect could that have?
You aren't exactly clear but I assume you are asking about backdoors being introduced within these devices to compromise bitcoin. If introduced this would undermine the devices themselves and not the blockchain. The exception to this rule is if over 51% of mining occurred by 21 Inc devices and there was a backdoor which was abused. In this case we must be concerned and prevent 21 Inc from mining all of its devices on a central pool regardless if their investors are mostly libertarians who have no interest in undermining bitcoin. Trusting ones intentions isn't good enough security for us.
So you think it's a good idea? This is what it sounds like to me, you will be of mining collective of which the lions share of Bitcoin will go to some corp, and the bit (no pun intended) you get will be used to pay your "micro transactions".
A snake eating its tail, and the monetization of simple things like browsing.
I can't imagine a bigger sucker deal.
68% of bitcoin has already been mined. 21 Inc will be competing with traditional miners and other companies that will be forced to adopt like IBM, MSFT, AMD, Google, ect... I am quite fine with 75% of the bitcoins being used to pay for high tech engineering and programming jobs in these sectors to continue to roll out and secure blockchain based technologies.
Interesting slideshow from 21Inc I found - https://imgur.com/a/q9cbL
This shows the next stage have a total capital expenditure of 8 dollars per device and after that near 0 CapEx. No wonder they were able to attract so much VC capital so quickly and are promising free and heavily subsidized devices. Traditional miners won't be able to compete with those margins and quickly become obsolete. Consumers won't mind the 1-2 dollars in higher electrical costs a month for the ability to get a free phone that has extra features. Additionally, when they start introducing devices that recycle the waste heat as a product the consumers will benefit even more.(space heater, hot water heaters, dehydrators, ect..)
I'm going to use my Bitcoin to buy another battery for my phone, lately it seems to run down quickly.
These chips will be rolled out in many devices, not just cell phones. Most people leave their phones plugged in for hours after they are fully charged. This is where the mining will occur.
They're going to love a new currency. Look at how much they can manipulate a regulated currency to fuck over people and enrich themselves. Image what they can do with an unregulated one.
Correct, except Bitcoins primary use will become their vehicle to launder their profits which are stolen from other markets. Many of their useful techniques to steal money such as quantitative easing, inflation, bail ins and bail outs, do not work within bitcoin.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA o wait... you are serious!
Why feign incredulity when the evidence over the last 30+ years reflects most people already are willing to pay slightly more per month for the opportunity of subsidized devices?
just plain old snake oil
... that can facilitate tasks I cannot accomplish otherwise. Yes, let me have some more.
If the chip was efficient enough to actually cover it's own cost, shouldn't 21 just build it's own cluster and print it's own money? Oh, it's not? Maybe we can get someone to pay for all of the electricity this thing uses and just throw them a few pennies every once in a while to keep them happy ......
21 Inc revenue model isn't solely dependent upon 75% mining reward and tx fees but on the value added services that the devices take advantage of. The end user won't care about or even know their device is using bitcoin. All they will care about is the device being less expensive initially, and all the features like trust-less escrow, smart contracts, reselling and sharing bandwidth, ect.. that their devices will now provide them.
You wouldn't cover the electricity cost.
Correct, but the end user wouldn't notice or care about the electrical cost increase of 1-2 dollars a month. What they will notice is a subsidized or free device that can do things that other devices cannot do.
First and foremost it is looking like 21 has developed extremely inexpensive and efficient chips to embed in smart devices which will have a very nominal power usage and only mine a few satoshi's per hour for the sake of profiting off of IoT services and not primarily off the value of the mined bitcoins themselves.
Reasons -
1) Allowing for micropayments for services, sites and products where the user doesn't even need to signup for a service or provide a credit card.
2) More secure authentication which depends upon the security of the very secure blockchain instead of any built in software. This will be completely transparent to the user as they just need to use 1 satoshi and than they can have the ability to use trustless escrow or smart contracts on the blockchain.The intention here is to make bitcoin useful without the user even knowing about it or having to purchase any.
3) Free SAAS services which depend upon the bitcoins being mined.
4) The ability to pay for and resell bandwidth, where routers and cell phones may become part of a decentralized Small Cell network - https://www.youtube.com/watch?... This is likely why Qualcomm is invested.
5) Reducing the costs of devices by subsiding a bit of the upfront costs with SaaS, mining reward, and BTC tx fees all possible with adding a mining chip.
One good consequence will be in the reversal of the trend of the centralization of mining and the further strengthening of bitcoin. I expect other companies like google, MSFT, AMD, IBM, ect... to form partnerships and start to develop their own competing chips which may use bitcoin or another alt.
Jobs available backed by 121 million in VC funding- https://21.co/#jobs
Companies investing 121 million in 21INC - https://www.crunchbase.com/org...
More details - http://www.coindesk.com/21-int...
better article - https://medium.com/@21dotco/a-...
Reason Why Qualcomm may be so interested - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"First of all Bitcoin isn't deflationary, but disinflationary."
My argument states as long as the premise it answers to: ""BitCoin, should it survive will ultimately be deflationary currency, meaning it gains value the longer you hold it."
If this is true, my argument also must be true: any currency that gains value the longer you hold it, leads to economic stagnation.
First of all this is demonstrably untrue as shown by a years worth of capitulation due to a high inflation of 10%. We don't know how bitcoin will behave longterm is the correct answer. Secondly, lets assume that bitcoin always "behaves" deflationary (despite it being disinflationary till 2140)... what historical evidence do you have that a planned disinflationary currency leads to economic stagnation? Upon reflection you should begin to understand that this experiment hasn't happened before and the only data we have thus far(bitcoin payment processors) reflects the opposite to be true.
Or perhaps he understood more than you, and those spending spikes reflect idiot speculators trying to unload bitcoins before they fall too far? Kind of like the spike in unloading any speculated currency or commodity when it starts to crash?
Always a possibility, but until there is more data in this experiment they should withhold judgment. Perhaps it would be a good idea to also expose students to different economic schools of thought as well, rather than all Keynesian theory.
Also - honest question - you keep referring to "disinflationary." That's not a term I have heard before, can you explain where this term came from and how it differs from deflation?
Certainly. Bitcoin is intrinsically is disinflationary till 2140 and than it will have no inflation. Since there is a planned and fixed money supply without central planners manipulating the supply it can and does sometimes act inflationary or deflationary in the wild based upon market demand and thus why it has been so volatile. It is important that you understand that inflation is really high (Starting around ~20% and now ~10%) in the context of understanding the capitulation over the last year to the new support. What this is telling you is that speculators are taking profits correcting the inflated price and bitcoin has downward pressure from the fact that miners are forced to sell most of their coins to cover costs. This has happened many times in bitcoin's history and will continue to happen. Expect another bubble to happen shortly before mid 2016 when inflation drops to ~5%. What we do not know is whether or not bitcoin will stabilize as the disinflation rate slows and the market cap grows. On a macro level Bitcoin has been stabilizing but we cannot be sure if this trend will continue. Interestingly enough it has been more stable than the euro over the past few months however.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/disinflation.asp
I wouldn't recommend anyone invest everything into bitcoin and do agree that it is a high risk / high reward investment. I use it daily for its utility because it allows me to do things that paypal or my credit cards cannot replicate. If it goes up in value great, if not that is fine as well because I am using it now tipping micropayments to strangers who don't even know bitcoin exists, wiring money across the world for 2 pennies to pay employees, and just saved 24% using bitcoin with a large amazon order.
Additionally there are ethical reasons to use bitcoin as I am a conscientious objector.
Again, bitcoin is an awesome payment/transaction technology but it is not a good store of value.
I agree with this comment. It will be interesting to see if Bitcoin continues its trend of becoming more stable or remains unstable. But as a general rule Bitcoin has been as unstable as some small currencies lately which in itself is very impressive for a 6 year old project.
Bitcoin is already moving out of the era of speculation and into the era of everyday use. I buy items, tip and pay employees all the time in bitcoin. I just saved 24% on a large amazon purchase with bitcoin.
You are conflating currency supply with inflation/deflation, which muddies the waters. Inflation/deflation depends on both the amount of currency in circulation, AND the amount of economic activity represented by that currency. The only way Bitcoin inflates at 10% is if the amount of economic activity conducted in Bitcoin grows 10% slower than the currency supply.
Of course at present the value of BTC is dominated by currency speculators, which throws everything off, but the basic principle remains.
What you are saying is valid but I was clarifying the difference between a disinflationary currency going through volatile bubbles because of speculators and capitulating because of high inflation and a deflationary Fiat currency with governments and banks printing more than ever in a depressed economy.