Let's suppose for a minute that Rossi actually has a working device, and that he's been unfairly snubbed by the patent offices in major regions, and that he's trying to slowly build up his business from the bottom rather than get investors and go big quickly.
Where are his satisfied customers? According to the Wayback Machine he's had this thing on the market for three years. He was supposed to deliver 30-100 of them in 2012. Is there not one of his customers willing to say "I bought this thing and it works as advertised, and it's saved me a lot of money on my power bills?"
I will be patronizing places that allow a lower price for cash. I don't want to have to pay money to the credit card companies, I'd rather get the discount.
There are a number of services that will exchange Bitcoin for Amazon gift cards.
This one does Amazon, Sears, Newegg, and a few others: http://www.btcbuy.info/
An assault *rifle,* by definition, has the capability of firing single shots per trigger pull, or full automatic when you hold the trigger down. The AR-15 is not an assault *rifle* because it does not allow for full automatic fire.
An assault *weapon* has no definition besides the 1994 law that basically invented the concept - and the AR15 in general does fall under this definition, except for the weapons manufactured between 1994 and 2004 that remove certain features (flash suppressor, bayonet lug, collapsible stock, maybe pistol grip) but shoot the same. The definition of assault *weapon*, per this law, is based on the presence of the features I mention that most people would not consider especially important to lethality.
With Mtgox (Japan-based), the largest exchange, you can use a service called Dwolla to transfer money from your US bank account to the exchange. They also accept bank transfers from many countries (but not the US.) There is a service called Liberty Reserve (Costa Rica-based.) You can also deposit cash at places like CVS and Walmart through a service called BitInstant.
IE - government can force Visa and Mastercard to shut down all bitcoin exchanges whenever they want to, effectively killing the currency for all intents and purposes. They only reason they don't do this is because it is not relevant enough to care.
Bitcoin exchanges don't accept Visa or Mastercard. Paypal specifically disallows its use for Bitcoin.
There is intrinsic value in a thing that can be used for making quick payments to anyone across the Internet, with low fees and no regulators standing in the way.
From the NBC/WSJ link you posted, this is the poll question they asked:
"There are many important issues in this presidential campaign. When it comes to deciding for whom you will vote for president, which one of the following is the single most important issue in deciding for whom you will vote? The economy. Social issues and values. Social Security and Medicare. Health care. The federal deficit. Foreign policy and the Middle East. Terrorism." If "all": "Well, if you had to choose the most important issue, which would you choose?"
Climate change, the drug war, and civil liberties aren't even options in the poll! You can't use a poll that doesn't allow these options to conclude that people don't care about these options.
It depends on whether he can exchange those Bitcoins for the same amount of Maker's Mark, at an exchange rate that takes into account the learning curve of Bitcoin and the recipient's calculation of the risk of holding Bitcoins.
Darwinism has a farcical and humorous good kind when discussing people's own stupidity removing them from the gene pool. 'Good Darwinism' is not intended to be a scientific theory.
Well, it's not Darwinism (at least not the good kind) when someone driving recklessly crashes into someone driving safely, and the increased speed results in the safe driver's death.
The way I think it is going to work - I'm not 100% sure - is that the Bitcoin network will not process transactions from two-factor addresses without having two ECDSA signatures from two separate keys. So there is no single point that a trojan could compromise to send payments.
Bitcoin enables a person, anywhere on Earth, to receive computer-based services from anyone anywhere on Earth, very quickly and with very little charged in transaction fees. Additionally you can send large amounts of money anywhere on Earth without incurring what banks charge for international wire transfer fees. I think it will also be good for micropayments - a website that wants to charge its visitors 15 cents doesn't have any good way of doing this presently without being destroyed by credit card fees.
A stolen briefcase can be broken into, a stolen encrypted Bitcoin wallet file with a secure password cannot. Additionally, Bitcoin is supposed to be introducing two-factor authentication soon, which would, for example, require keys from both a smartphone and a PC to decrypt a wallet and send Bitcoin payments. While it's possible and feasible to make and distribute a trojan that could infect a computer and both copy the wallet.dat file and log keystrokes to determine the wallet password, it would be incredibly harder to do so on both of a single person's computer and smartphone. Whether that is easy enough and safe enough for the masses remains to be seen.
The difference is that most of the reasons that people have for accepting silver/gold certificates instead of actual gold/silver coins do not apply to Bitcoin. Bitcoin can be carried anywhere (and sent anywhere in the world) without a weight or volume problem. You don't have to physically travel to a Treasury office to redeem Bitcoin certificates for real Bitcoins. You don't have to worry about counterfeit Bitcoins as you might with gold/silver coins. With a moderate amount of encryption and backup you don't have to worry about them being stolen from your computer.
With Bitcoin, the owner encrypts his wallet so the police can't use it, and the owner has a backup copy somewhere else where he can retrieve it whenever he's free. Or his trusted friend retrieves it.
If you give the average investor the choice between a) freedom, capitalism, and free markets, and b) higher profits through having the law favor his investments, he will choose B every time.
I don't think Bitcoin will work in the long run. The main reason is that it's designed to be limited to a fixed amount. This leads to three problems:
1) And financial transaction that requires interest is a problem. Anything from a business loan to a mortgage is basically impossible in a fixed money supply.
Interest on loans does not require an inflationary money system. The money that a person pays as interest either reduces his future spending or will require him to sell more of the future goods/services he produces.
2) Assuming the economy grows, there would be deflation, which will mean people try to hoard their bitcoins instead of spending them. This in turn increases the deflation.
Bitcoin will always have a value less than infinity, and therefore there will always be some fraction of Bitcoin you can take to represent any value to send to someone, and thus Bitcoin will still "work." A deflationary money system does mean that people ought to adjust their prices accordingly, but this is easier than in the past due to fast modern communications and a liquid exchange market.
3) Related to the first two points: One person can over time become the owner of all bitcoins if this person has a sizeable initial stack of bitcoins, and lends them out at interest, and keeps spending well below the gained interest, you end up gaining a larger and larger share of the total bitcoin supply.
How does that work with real estate? Say someone owns a lot of properties, and charges people rent for people to live there, and keeps spending less than he takes in from rent, and buys more land with the difference. Will he then someday own all the land in the world? And thus can we say that the system of land ownership and rent is doomed to fail? No, because first, he won't live that long, and second, the value of the remaining land will increase as its supply decreases. (And third, a human being will find things to spend his money on sometime before he owns all the land in the world.)
In the same way, if one person's Bitcoin wealth is great and increasing, it becomes asymptotically hard for him to gain all the Bitcoins in the world, because the value of remaining Bitcoins will approach infinity.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's suppose for a minute that Rossi actually has a working device, and that he's been unfairly snubbed by the patent offices in major regions, and that he's trying to slowly build up his business from the bottom rather than get investors and go big quickly.
Where are his satisfied customers? According to the Wayback Machine he's had this thing on the market for three years. He was supposed to deliver 30-100 of them in 2012. Is there not one of his customers willing to say "I bought this thing and it works as advertised, and it's saved me a lot of money on my power bills?"
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
Health insurance company stocks are near all time highs. I don't think they're going out of business any time soon.
I will be patronizing places that allow a lower price for cash. I don't want to have to pay money to the credit card companies, I'd rather get the discount.
The actual legislation regulates "feeding devices" which covers both clips and magazines.
There are a number of services that will exchange Bitcoin for Amazon gift cards. This one does Amazon, Sears, Newegg, and a few others: http://www.btcbuy.info/
An assault *rifle,* by definition, has the capability of firing single shots per trigger pull, or full automatic when you hold the trigger down. The AR-15 is not an assault *rifle* because it does not allow for full automatic fire.
An assault *weapon* has no definition besides the 1994 law that basically invented the concept - and the AR15 in general does fall under this definition, except for the weapons manufactured between 1994 and 2004 that remove certain features (flash suppressor, bayonet lug, collapsible stock, maybe pistol grip) but shoot the same. The definition of assault *weapon*, per this law, is based on the presence of the features I mention that most people would not consider especially important to lethality.
With Mtgox (Japan-based), the largest exchange, you can use a service called Dwolla to transfer money from your US bank account to the exchange. They also accept bank transfers from many countries (but not the US.) There is a service called Liberty Reserve (Costa Rica-based.) You can also deposit cash at places like CVS and Walmart through a service called BitInstant.
IE - government can force Visa and Mastercard to shut down all bitcoin exchanges whenever they want to, effectively killing the currency for all intents and purposes. They only reason they don't do this is because it is not relevant enough to care.
Bitcoin exchanges don't accept Visa or Mastercard. Paypal specifically disallows its use for Bitcoin.
Not quite as useful as Amazon, but WordPress accepts Bitcoin. That's probably the closest to a household name that accepts it. http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/pay-another-way-bitcoin/
There is intrinsic value in a thing that can be used for making quick payments to anyone across the Internet, with low fees and no regulators standing in the way.
Everyone has widely different definitions of what they "need."
I can't believe I missed your sarcasm. Brilliant, sir.
If you can get prison time for "praising" the wrong country, I can't think of any better example of a totalitarian restriction on speech.
From the NBC/WSJ link you posted, this is the poll question they asked:
"There are many important issues in this presidential campaign. When it comes to deciding for whom you will vote for president, which one of the following is the single most important issue in deciding for whom you will vote? The economy. Social issues and values. Social Security and Medicare. Health care. The federal deficit. Foreign policy and the Middle East. Terrorism." If "all": "Well, if you had to choose the most important issue, which would you choose?"
Climate change, the drug war, and civil liberties aren't even options in the poll! You can't use a poll that doesn't allow these options to conclude that people don't care about these options.
It depends on whether he can exchange those Bitcoins for the same amount of Maker's Mark, at an exchange rate that takes into account the learning curve of Bitcoin and the recipient's calculation of the risk of holding Bitcoins.
Darwinism has a farcical and humorous good kind when discussing people's own stupidity removing them from the gene pool. 'Good Darwinism' is not intended to be a scientific theory.
Well, it's not Darwinism (at least not the good kind) when someone driving recklessly crashes into someone driving safely, and the increased speed results in the safe driver's death.
The way I think it is going to work - I'm not 100% sure - is that the Bitcoin network will not process transactions from two-factor addresses without having two ECDSA signatures from two separate keys. So there is no single point that a trojan could compromise to send payments.
Bitcoin enables a person, anywhere on Earth, to receive computer-based services from anyone anywhere on Earth, very quickly and with very little charged in transaction fees. Additionally you can send large amounts of money anywhere on Earth without incurring what banks charge for international wire transfer fees. I think it will also be good for micropayments - a website that wants to charge its visitors 15 cents doesn't have any good way of doing this presently without being destroyed by credit card fees.
A stolen briefcase can be broken into, a stolen encrypted Bitcoin wallet file with a secure password cannot. Additionally, Bitcoin is supposed to be introducing two-factor authentication soon, which would, for example, require keys from both a smartphone and a PC to decrypt a wallet and send Bitcoin payments. While it's possible and feasible to make and distribute a trojan that could infect a computer and both copy the wallet.dat file and log keystrokes to determine the wallet password, it would be incredibly harder to do so on both of a single person's computer and smartphone. Whether that is easy enough and safe enough for the masses remains to be seen.
The difference is that most of the reasons that people have for accepting silver/gold certificates instead of actual gold/silver coins do not apply to Bitcoin. Bitcoin can be carried anywhere (and sent anywhere in the world) without a weight or volume problem. You don't have to physically travel to a Treasury office to redeem Bitcoin certificates for real Bitcoins. You don't have to worry about counterfeit Bitcoins as you might with gold/silver coins. With a moderate amount of encryption and backup you don't have to worry about them being stolen from your computer.
Stock offers from legitimate successful companies also benefit creators and early adopters. By your definition, does that make all stock offers scams?
With Bitcoin, the owner encrypts his wallet so the police can't use it, and the owner has a backup copy somewhere else where he can retrieve it whenever he's free. Or his trusted friend retrieves it.
If you give the average investor the choice between a) freedom, capitalism, and free markets, and b) higher profits through having the law favor his investments, he will choose B every time.
I don't think Bitcoin will work in the long run. The main reason is that it's designed to be limited to a fixed amount. This leads to three problems:
1) And financial transaction that requires interest is a problem. Anything from a business loan to a mortgage is basically impossible in a fixed money supply.
Interest on loans does not require an inflationary money system. The money that a person pays as interest either reduces his future spending or will require him to sell more of the future goods/services he produces.
2) Assuming the economy grows, there would be deflation, which will mean people try to hoard their bitcoins instead of spending them. This in turn increases the deflation.
Bitcoin will always have a value less than infinity, and therefore there will always be some fraction of Bitcoin you can take to represent any value to send to someone, and thus Bitcoin will still "work." A deflationary money system does mean that people ought to adjust their prices accordingly, but this is easier than in the past due to fast modern communications and a liquid exchange market.
3) Related to the first two points: One person can over time become the owner of all bitcoins if this person has a sizeable initial stack of bitcoins, and lends them out at interest, and keeps spending well below the gained interest, you end up gaining a larger and larger share of the total bitcoin supply.
How does that work with real estate? Say someone owns a lot of properties, and charges people rent for people to live there, and keeps spending less than he takes in from rent, and buys more land with the difference. Will he then someday own all the land in the world? And thus can we say that the system of land ownership and rent is doomed to fail? No, because first, he won't live that long, and second, the value of the remaining land will increase as its supply decreases. (And third, a human being will find things to spend his money on sometime before he owns all the land in the world.) In the same way, if one person's Bitcoin wealth is great and increasing, it becomes asymptotically hard for him to gain all the Bitcoins in the world, because the value of remaining Bitcoins will approach infinity.