Ah ha. Projections based on historical figures won't work, but predictions (based on what else besides historical figures and market research) would work?
Predictions based on experience. Experience is based on history, but it includes subjective observations and details which aren't easily quantifiable in a report. Perhaps the biggest difference is that you're trying to put together enough information in one place to come up with a single ideal way, where free individuals would try many different ways. While it has more waste initially, the latter has a much better chance of coming up with something that closely approximates the ideal. Since it's based on the overall result rather than a model, it takes into account information we didn't even know we needed and can't directly observe.
You're assuming skills and observations can be freely extracted from individual's minds and turned into nice, neat algorithms or figures in a report which can substitute on equal terms for the original person making the decision. The real world doesn't work like that. Statistical analysis is all well and good, but there are aspects of personal experience relating to decision making which we have no way to quantify or automate.
... nothing would keep a gouvernment from hiring those "artists/scientists" if that is needed to have things running smoothly.
Sure, but to do any good, they would have to leave the experts free to run their businesses as they choose in real-time. Those skills are based on live interaction with the market, and don't translate into coming up with a plan beforehand. If you did this you'd have a market economy, not a centralize, planned economy.
We're discussing a small group owning 95% of a public resource, and Chavez pushed it back to 70% or 50%.
First, it's not a public resource. It's just a resource. Second, it doesn't matter how small the group was or how much they owned. Nationalization of private property is nationalization of private property.
There's only one set of airwaves so whoever regulates it will have a monopoly.
"One set of airwaves" is a gross over-simplification. Broadcast radio can easily be divided into distinct non-interfering sets by frequency, location, time, or any of a number of other ways. The only reason a monopoly exists here is that the state has created one for its own benefit. Homesteading a particular use of the airwaves is no different than homesteading a particular plot of land. There is no need for anyone to regulate it (i.e. nationalize it). Just recognize that the first user has a negotiable prior claim which must not be infringed.
The airwaves are a limited resource and they're supposed to serve the public.
Nonsense. They are a limited resource, like nearly everything else, but they don't exist "to serve the public" any more than any other good. They exist to serve those who can find a use for them which doesn't interfere with prior uses by others. The government has no place getting involved apart from arbitrating disputes, which could be done equally well—or perhaps better, with politics out of the picture—by a private arbiter.
government has to legislate to some extent to establish an environment that is necessary for prosperity
Even if true (and I'm not saying it is), that is hardly "legislating prosperity". That would only be removing one of many possible obstacles to prosperity. The actual prosperity is created by the people, not the law. At best the law reduces the likelihood that someone other than the government will get away with destroying whatever prosperity you've managed to create.
(The fact that many people persist in thinking it necessary to have government protect property rights, when governments are, by a large margin, the greatest violators of property rights around, is truly awe-inspiring. No lesser thief could brazenly take half your income year after year with no fear for the consequences.)
An example of attempting to legislate prosperity would be the minimum wage or the proposal for a basic income. You can legislate people money but you can't legislate them wealth. The more freely you hand out money, the less it's worth.
P.S. That word "utopian", it doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. Anarcho-capitalists are well aware that a society without government would not be perfect, any more than any other society can be said to be perfect. We don't even necessarily believe that an aggression-free society is an achievable goal. We simply refuse to legitimize aggression, which would contribute to the imperfection. What we find inexplicable is how others manage to justify to themselves the idea that there is any legitimacy at all in harming those who have not harmed them first. That's really all there is to our position: if someone hasn't harmed you, and doesn't want to get involved with you, leave them well enough alone!
(I think that even libertarian minarchists will agree that government is necessary, at minimum, to protect private property).
This amounts to a tautology, as "minarchist" in the common use excludes anarchists, and the state monopoly over defensive force is pretty much the only element separating minarchists from anarchists. There are plenty of libertarians who recognize that private property can be protected in the absence of governments through private security and arbitration; they just aren't considered minarchists.
So these media companies weren't part of the free press, they were just a very powerful lobby group for a very small part of the country
The free press necessarily includes minority groups whose opinions you disagree with.
and they were abusing a state-granted monopoly (the right to use a section of the public airwaves)
The problem here is the state monopoly itself—nationalization of the airwaves. Even putting aside the issue of centralized state control over the airwaves, withholding or revoking a license to use the airwaves to communicate with the public based on the content of that communication is just as much censorship as if the medium were print rather than radio.
Dismantling or nationalising those excessively powerful lobby groups was a good start toward fixing democracy, no?
No. Any democracy, presuming that's even a desirable concept to begin with, must include the minorities, not suppress them. To be anything other than tyranny of the majority, the rights of minorities must be protected when when it goes against the majority's interests. The "excessive power" you're railing against is nothing more than a minority group defending its rights against a majority intent on driving the entire country off a cliff, dissenting minorities included, in support of an overly charismatic leader.
A democratic form of government is really nothing more than a tool, a way of avoiding revolutions and making not-entirely-unpopular public policy decisions by committee. The goal should not be democracy, but rather liberty.
Aehmm... a gouvernment with an overview over internal and external politics and economic data HAS more information available than any businessman on its own. For example who - if not the gouvernment - has access to census data and can use that data to estimate the need for certain goods?
That isn't nearly enough. You can't just base demand projections on historical figures and census data. That doesn't tell you anything about how supply and demand are likely to change. You have to predict what people are going to want, and what they're going to be willing and able to give up in exchange, whether that means money, barter, or simply goods which won't be available due to limited production capacity.
The government has tons of information (mostly collected by the local businesses), but it's the wrong kind of information. The idea that you can manage supply and demand with nothing but high-level statistics and census data is why planned economies are doomed to experience shortages and surpluses. You can't even trust people to report their own preferences accurately on a survey; their actions often contradict their words. Running a profitable business is as much as art as it is a science, and as with any other art, details matter. The local business owner has a much better idea of what his customers want and are willing to pay for his goods than any central planner working from a "big picture" perspective. Moreover, the local business owner has far more at stake in getting his estimates right.
Incomplete information about the enemies capabilities never stopped anyone from waging war against someone.
Indeed not. It has led to losing more than a few, though, and starting some which needn't have started at all. I hope you're not trying to make this sound like a good thing. People can deal with incomplete information—the world won't end even if botched central planning leads to widespread starvation in the midst of luxuries—but better information makes for better decisions. That is particularly true of local and relevant information, which is where central planning falls short.
1) I have a BC in a wallet I control that I don't plan on spending any time soon. I place its last transaction on a "freeze list." This tells the world "don't accept the coin until I take it off the list."
You would need to somehow authenticate yourself as the owner of the bitcoins. This can be done by signing the message with the private key matching the Bitcoin address, but the result is no different from what the network would do anyway. The bitcoins will stay at their current address ("frozen") until a new transaction is signed with the corresponding private key (until you "take it off the list").
2) I have an BC that I am about to deposit with a particular online "bank". I place its last pre-deposit transaction on a "freeze after 1 transaction" list and include the address that I am transferring it to along with a reasonable timeout (say, 1 hour). This tells the world "if you aren't this address, don't accept the BC."
There is only one reason to deposit BTC with a bank, and that is to earn interest. In terms of "safekeeping", you're better off keeping the bitcoins at an address you control. However, no bank is going to pay interest on funds they can't access. They need to be able to invest the money, so they wouldn't accept "frozen" funds.
If you wanted some kind of insured storage, a better system which can be implemented right now would be to use a two-part address, where you control one private key and the insurer controls the other. Either or both of the keys could be kept offline for "cold storage". Once you send your funds to that address, both keys would be required to move it anywhere else. It's normal for addresses to have only a single key, but the system is actually rather flexible. You could also use a 2-of-3 address scheme where a third-party arbiter holds the extra key, in case any one party becomes unavailable or tries to defect.
In the actual paper, not the article they admitted their plan included the pool using the sybil attack to increase the chance that its block would be accepted at a greater percentage rate than the other.
Yes, but an effective Sybil attack was perhaps the least believable thing in the original paper. To begin with, the larger mining pools connect directly to each other, so the other pools are among the first to find out about each new block. The "selfish" miners wouldn't have a chance to intercept the announcements and forward their own blocks first no matter how well-connected they were. By the time they find out about the new block, the pools already know as well.
As others have already said, the attack relies on it being easier to suppress information than to spread it, which is why it will ultimately fail.
If money is an I.O.U., who owes me what, exactly? When does it come due and where can it be redeemed?
Money is a commodity, not an I.O.U. It can't be redeemed, only traded, and it has value only so long as other people say it has value.
I.O.U.s can be used as money, but that isn't the only kind of money there is, or the kind which makes up the USD or Euro or Peso. Old-style bank notes redeemable for base money would count, but those haven't been prevalent for some time.
To continue on that analogy, the spectrum of light emmited is not continuous so you don't have to have black to get most or all of it. With solar radiation it's the same deal and something not that far off a terracotta colour gets almost as much as black.
With solar radiation the cells can absorb just the IR & UV frequencies and still get a reasonable fraction of the energy. Modern interior lighting is designed to emit mostly in the visible spectrum. You could still absorb some of the light, of course, assuming your walls aren't plain white, but even if you could capture 50% of the total energy emitted, that only adds up to a few watts per bulb. We're probably talking less than $10 in energy savings per year for a whole house. I just can't see the value proposition in papering your house with solar cells to capture such a small amount of energy. The solar wallpaper would almost have to be cheaper than normal wallpaper. There are far easier ways to save $10.
If people would buy the Kindle at the bookstore were they to sell it then, yes, of course not selling will slow adoption.
If people would only buy the Kindle were the bookstore to sell it, then not selling would slow adoption. But how likely is that? A much more realistic scenario is that a person might have bought the Kindle at their favorite bookstore if it was available, but if not then they'll buy it at Best Buy or Wal-Mart or amazon.com, or even the bookstore down the street that's participating in the program. Either way they get their Kindle.
At most the bookstore might be advertising the Kindle a bit by carrying it, increasing adoption by a miniscule amount, but by this point most people know what a Kindle is and where they can get one. Keeping them out of the bookstores won't change that.
Thus "solar"-powered wallpaper to re-absorb energy from lightbulbs sounds stupid but makes perfect sense, if it could be produced cheaply enough.
Not everyone wants to wallpaper the interior of their house in black. All that "wasted" light reflecting off the wallpaper is what allows you to see the walls.
How is this any worse for the small bookstores than their customers buying a Kindle from some other retailer, or direct from amazon.com? They'd still be browsing in the store, checking online prices, buying the e-books, and eventually ceasing to be a customer. The bookstore would simply have deprived itself of an opportunity to be the one selling the Kindles and getting a cut of e-book revenues in the meantime.
Do these bookstores really think that refusing to sell the devices themselves will slow adoption?
Physical dollars are no different than virtual dollars, and you have to trust that it is not counterfeit.
Physical dollars are very different from virtual dollars. One is a physical object, the other is an entry in an accounting system saying that a bank owes you a dollar. In the same way, you hold real bitcoins if you know the private key matching an entry in the blockchain, which is different from an entry in input.io's computers saying that they owe you a bitcoin.
(Good) counterfeit dollars, on the other hand, really are no different from non-counterfeit dollars. Sometimes they're even made with the same materials and equipment. The difference is all in whether whoever made the dollars had authorization to do so, not in the dollars themselves.
All programs eventually get turned into math by the compiler or interpreter, yes.
Wrong. The input to the compiler or interpreter is just as much math as the output. All programs are math, from beginning to end. Study Haskell sometime—it makes the connection really obvious. A program is a mathematical function which transforms a set of inputs into a set of outputs. Even side effects (like drawing on the screen) are just another form of output; it's the computer, not the program, which makes them real.
New inventions built using gears are patentable. New inventions built using wheels are patentable. New inventions built using software are no different.
Sure, but if you're just running software on a computer you don't have a new "invention", you have math. Including software doesn't make an otherwise patentable invention unpatentable, but having nothing novel and non-obvious apart from the software does.
A computer is just a tool to evaluate mathematical algorithms. Patenting software running on a computer is like patenting evaluation of an algorithm using a pencil and paper. It's equivalent to patenting just the algorithm.
You can buy physical bitcoins if you want something simpler, just like you can get physical dollars if you don't want to deal with complexity of virtual dollars.
There is no such thing as a "physical" bitcoin; that's just marketing-speak. The objects marketed as "physical bitcoins" are nothing but storage devices for private keys, fundamentally no different than a piece of paper or a USB stick, apart from a (theoretically) tamper-evident seal. You have to trust that whoever applied the seal handled the private key properly and didn't retain a copy, since anyone with a copy of the key can instantly render your "physical bitcoin" worthless.
Physical dollars correspond to virtual bitcoins. The equivalent of virtual dollars would be something like inputs.io, where rather than holding bitcoins yourself (with exclusive access to the private keys) you only have an account with someone who holds them for you, with all the potential for error and fraud which that implies.
In this case inputs.io appears to have done something extraordinarily stupid in keeping all their customer's bitcoins online, where attackers can get at them, instead of leaving the majority in offline "cold storage". Past attacks have shown why this is a bad idea, but it seems some people never learn.
"Voluntarily" is not the same as "volunteered". If they had volunteered the data, that would mean that they weren't getting paid for it. Turning it over voluntarily just means that they weren't coerced (e.g. with a subpoena or search warrant).
I'd like some evidence before I believe that claim that the claims are nearly true.... the claim that there are "no cost to entering a market"...
There are fairly high barriers to entry, but for the most part they're regulatory barriers, or otherwise based on force. To the extent that force is treated as legitimate, the system is not capitalistic.
... that "all players have perfect knowledge"...
No one has perfect knowledge, but individuals tend to have better knowledge of those things which directly concern them than anyone else. They certainly have the most incentive. An impartial, benevolent expert, if such a thing actually existed, might be able to claim more accurate and in-depth knowledge on a particular subject, but they couldn't possibly apply that knowledge in the proper context, taking into account all the other things the individual cares about. At best they could advise the individual of the pros and cons of various options.
For capitalism to work,... One must assume that the consumers act perfectly rationally and will not buy from someone who will screw them over later or externalize costs to them. One must assume that marketing and PR will have no effect because capitalism requires the assumption that all players have perfect knowledge of the product and costs associated with it. One must assume that there is no cost to entering a market and therefore all markets will be subject to competition any time the other producers start to abuse their market position.
These things are necessary only for capitalism to result in an optimal allocation of resources: each resource put to its highest-valued use. If they aren't true, the result isn't failure, it's just a suboptimal allocation of resources. If they're nearly true—and they are—then the result will be nearly optimal. (And the effect of any of these things not being true is at least as bad in any other economic system, most of which don't even aim for optimal allocation of resources to begin with, instead prioritizing "fairness" or some other such subjective quality.)
Would you agree that parents generally know better what is good for 2 year old than the child?
I don't know about where you live, but around here we don't ration authority over people's lives on the basis of who is most likely to know what's good for them. We let people choose what they think is best for themselves.
The real standard is whether a person takes responsibility for the consequences his or her choices have on others. Two-year-olds don't take responsibility for hardly anything, but it is certainly possible to reach that point well before you're 18, or 16, or even 14. At any age, your freedom should correlate with your willingness to accept responsibility.
Of course, for the topic under discussion the effects on others are minimal; ergo, so is the level of responsibility required. Any attempt to limit relationships between individuals of different ages should take place through social channels, not legal ones. If the contact is truly non-consensual (by adult standards) then treat it as such; otherwise the law has no place here.
The example they gave was calculating the average shade of grey in a large image of 1000 by 1000 pixels. The running total could be held in an approximate variable since the error incurred by adding one pixel incorrectly out of a million would be small...
What makes them think that the kinds of errors you'd get in a variable in low-refresh-rate RAM would be small? Flip the MSB from 1 to 0 and your total is suddenly divided in half. Or, if it's a floating-point variable, flip one bit in the exponent field and your total changes from 1.23232e4 to 1.23232e-124.
BTRFS is meant for large multi disk arrays, hardly something you see on typical user desktops.
BTRFS work with large multi-disk arrays, but it also has quite a few features suitable for single-disk systems and "typical user desktops", like subvolumes, snapshots, reflinks, data checksumming, compression, online filesystem checks, and optimizations for SSDs. And you never know when you might want to add a new hard drive to an existing desktop; with BTRFS it's trivial to extend an existing single-disk filesystem to include the new drive.
There are still some rough edges, of course, but I think we'll see BTRFS as the default filesystem for at least some user-oriented distributions before too long.
it's not always going to be clear cut what's 'in the ledger' and what's in circulation, surely?
Agreed, but so long as it's only in the ledger and not in circulation it shouldn't have any significant influence on prices. The same principle applies whether the funds are permanently lost or merely hoarded temporarily.
Saying that money is in circulation is just another way of saying that it's being used to bid for goods and/or services. Money which is lost or hoarded isn't part of the effective demand. Naturally, vendors still need to find the price which balances supply and effective demand, which takes some time, so there is a period of adjustment whenever the amount of money in circulation changes. However, it's not necessary to know which money is available and which isn't; the normal process of price discovery bypasses all of that in the course of finding the price which maximizes revenues.
Let's say the Mona Lisa is the last surviving piece of DA Vinci's work. No notes, books, or stories are left. How valuable is it? The answer is in reality nothing. There is no more DA Vinci, so there is no value in a random old painting. Since we don't know who or what he was the result is the value plummets.
And you say I don't understand scarcity? That's rich. You're assuming that the Mona Lisa only has value because it was made by Leonardo da Vinci. I'm no art historian, but I'm sure plenty of people would consider that crazy. Sometimes a "random old painting" is just a "random old painting", but sometimes a work of art commands a price for the art itself regardless of who made it. Museums hold plenty of very expensive works of art with unknown authors. The Mona Lisa would probably be in that class even if its author's name were lost to history.
Obviously value depends on both supply and demand. Limited supply won't result in a high price if demand is zero. However, you haven't presented any argument to support the idea that the demand for bitcoins will fall, as a result of diminishing supply or otherwise.
Bitcoin has a finite life. After all the coins are mined. There is no way to inject more into the system.
Bitcoin has a finite time during which more currency is created, after which the amount of currency will remain steady or decline asymptotically. There is no need to inject more into the system. The only reason to have any quantity growth at all, rather than simply fixing the total at 21 million from the start, was to bootstrap the system and ensure the initial distribution was provably fair. (Or at least more fair than starting with all bitcoins owned by the developers—not everyone approves of the way those who were lucky or prescient enough to get involved early on were able to scoop up sizable chunks of bitcoins while they were still cheap.)
Take cash. When cash was based on gold the value only increased as governments hoarded gold. However it took centuries for value to increase. As we slowly moved away from physical currency to perceived value.... The perceived value has rocketed upwards.
You've got this backward. Gold was a stable currency, unlike Bitcoin which is just getting started. That means its value increases or decreases based on the demand for currency; if the supply of a good is constant, as it was for gold, then the price becomes proportional to demand. Changes in the purchasing power of stable currencies reflect the growth (or decay) of the overall economy.
Since the switch away from gold, the quantity of currency has increased enormously, but its value has dropped like a rock. According to the BLS inflation calculator, a good which cost $1.00 in 1913 would cost $23.65 today. That's a 95.8% loss in perceived value over the past century—hardly "rocketing upward".
The economy has grown significantly over that period, of course, but that's due to technological progress—particularly the invention of computers, and widespread automation—and has nothing to do with switching away from gold.
... at one point the number of coins lost will be worth more than the coins in circulation. Shortly after that, bitcoins will crash in value.
You keep repeating this, but what you don't give is any model or reasoning which would explain this miraculous reversal. For that matter, you're trying to compare a unitless scalar quantity (number of bitcoins lost) with an economic value (the worth of the coins in circulation), so your units don't even make sense.
What does the number of lost coins have to do with anything? They're lost, out of the picture. It's as if they never existed. We keep going with the coins that are left, which are worth a bit more than they used to be since they're no longer competing for goods and services with the ones that were lost. Nothing changes significantly. There
Some guy steals something and you spend $250K to lock him up for five years, not to mention the cost of prosecuting him. That's just how it is.
In a sane system, theft would carry a civil liability sufficient to cover all the costs of catching the thief and making the victim whole. If the victim wants to go further (proportional retribution) that is their right, but it's also their own free choice and consequently their responsibility to fund. In any case being locked up for five years is hardly a proportional response to theft.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah ha. Projections based on historical figures won't work, but predictions (based on what else besides historical figures and market research) would work?
Predictions based on experience. Experience is based on history, but it includes subjective observations and details which aren't easily quantifiable in a report. Perhaps the biggest difference is that you're trying to put together enough information in one place to come up with a single ideal way, where free individuals would try many different ways. While it has more waste initially, the latter has a much better chance of coming up with something that closely approximates the ideal. Since it's based on the overall result rather than a model, it takes into account information we didn't even know we needed and can't directly observe.
You're assuming skills and observations can be freely extracted from individual's minds and turned into nice, neat algorithms or figures in a report which can substitute on equal terms for the original person making the decision. The real world doesn't work like that. Statistical analysis is all well and good, but there are aspects of personal experience relating to decision making which we have no way to quantify or automate.
... nothing would keep a gouvernment from hiring those "artists/scientists" if that is needed to have things running smoothly.
Sure, but to do any good, they would have to leave the experts free to run their businesses as they choose in real-time. Those skills are based on live interaction with the market, and don't translate into coming up with a plan beforehand. If you did this you'd have a market economy, not a centralize, planned economy.
We're discussing a small group owning 95% of a public resource, and Chavez pushed it back to 70% or 50%.
First, it's not a public resource. It's just a resource. Second, it doesn't matter how small the group was or how much they owned. Nationalization of private property is nationalization of private property.
There's only one set of airwaves so whoever regulates it will have a monopoly.
"One set of airwaves" is a gross over-simplification. Broadcast radio can easily be divided into distinct non-interfering sets by frequency, location, time, or any of a number of other ways. The only reason a monopoly exists here is that the state has created one for its own benefit. Homesteading a particular use of the airwaves is no different than homesteading a particular plot of land. There is no need for anyone to regulate it (i.e. nationalize it). Just recognize that the first user has a negotiable prior claim which must not be infringed.
The airwaves are a limited resource and they're supposed to serve the public.
Nonsense. They are a limited resource, like nearly everything else, but they don't exist "to serve the public" any more than any other good. They exist to serve those who can find a use for them which doesn't interfere with prior uses by others. The government has no place getting involved apart from arbitrating disputes, which could be done equally well—or perhaps better, with politics out of the picture—by a private arbiter.
government has to legislate to some extent to establish an environment that is necessary for prosperity
Even if true (and I'm not saying it is), that is hardly "legislating prosperity". That would only be removing one of many possible obstacles to prosperity. The actual prosperity is created by the people, not the law. At best the law reduces the likelihood that someone other than the government will get away with destroying whatever prosperity you've managed to create.
(The fact that many people persist in thinking it necessary to have government protect property rights, when governments are, by a large margin, the greatest violators of property rights around, is truly awe-inspiring. No lesser thief could brazenly take half your income year after year with no fear for the consequences.)
An example of attempting to legislate prosperity would be the minimum wage or the proposal for a basic income. You can legislate people money but you can't legislate them wealth. The more freely you hand out money, the less it's worth.
P.S. That word "utopian", it doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. Anarcho-capitalists are well aware that a society without government would not be perfect, any more than any other society can be said to be perfect. We don't even necessarily believe that an aggression-free society is an achievable goal. We simply refuse to legitimize aggression, which would contribute to the imperfection. What we find inexplicable is how others manage to justify to themselves the idea that there is any legitimacy at all in harming those who have not harmed them first. That's really all there is to our position: if someone hasn't harmed you, and doesn't want to get involved with you, leave them well enough alone!
(I think that even libertarian minarchists will agree that government is necessary, at minimum, to protect private property).
This amounts to a tautology, as "minarchist" in the common use excludes anarchists, and the state monopoly over defensive force is pretty much the only element separating minarchists from anarchists. There are plenty of libertarians who recognize that private property can be protected in the absence of governments through private security and arbitration; they just aren't considered minarchists.
So these media companies weren't part of the free press, they were just a very powerful lobby group for a very small part of the country
The free press necessarily includes minority groups whose opinions you disagree with.
and they were abusing a state-granted monopoly (the right to use a section of the public airwaves)
The problem here is the state monopoly itself—nationalization of the airwaves. Even putting aside the issue of centralized state control over the airwaves, withholding or revoking a license to use the airwaves to communicate with the public based on the content of that communication is just as much censorship as if the medium were print rather than radio.
Dismantling or nationalising those excessively powerful lobby groups was a good start toward fixing democracy, no?
No. Any democracy, presuming that's even a desirable concept to begin with, must include the minorities, not suppress them. To be anything other than tyranny of the majority, the rights of minorities must be protected when when it goes against the majority's interests. The "excessive power" you're railing against is nothing more than a minority group defending its rights against a majority intent on driving the entire country off a cliff, dissenting minorities included, in support of an overly charismatic leader.
A democratic form of government is really nothing more than a tool, a way of avoiding revolutions and making not-entirely-unpopular public policy decisions by committee. The goal should not be democracy, but rather liberty.
Aehmm... a gouvernment with an overview over internal and external politics and economic data HAS more information available than any businessman on its own. For example who - if not the gouvernment - has access to census data and can use that data to estimate the need for certain goods?
That isn't nearly enough. You can't just base demand projections on historical figures and census data. That doesn't tell you anything about how supply and demand are likely to change. You have to predict what people are going to want, and what they're going to be willing and able to give up in exchange, whether that means money, barter, or simply goods which won't be available due to limited production capacity.
The government has tons of information (mostly collected by the local businesses), but it's the wrong kind of information. The idea that you can manage supply and demand with nothing but high-level statistics and census data is why planned economies are doomed to experience shortages and surpluses. You can't even trust people to report their own preferences accurately on a survey; their actions often contradict their words. Running a profitable business is as much as art as it is a science, and as with any other art, details matter. The local business owner has a much better idea of what his customers want and are willing to pay for his goods than any central planner working from a "big picture" perspective. Moreover, the local business owner has far more at stake in getting his estimates right.
Incomplete information about the enemies capabilities never stopped anyone from waging war against someone.
Indeed not. It has led to losing more than a few, though, and starting some which needn't have started at all. I hope you're not trying to make this sound like a good thing. People can deal with incomplete information—the world won't end even if botched central planning leads to widespread starvation in the midst of luxuries—but better information makes for better decisions. That is particularly true of local and relevant information, which is where central planning falls short.
1) I have a BC in a wallet I control that I don't plan on spending any time soon. I place its last transaction on a "freeze list." This tells the world "don't accept the coin until I take it off the list."
You would need to somehow authenticate yourself as the owner of the bitcoins. This can be done by signing the message with the private key matching the Bitcoin address, but the result is no different from what the network would do anyway. The bitcoins will stay at their current address ("frozen") until a new transaction is signed with the corresponding private key (until you "take it off the list").
2) I have an BC that I am about to deposit with a particular online "bank". I place its last pre-deposit transaction on a "freeze after 1 transaction" list and include the address that I am transferring it to along with a reasonable timeout (say, 1 hour). This tells the world "if you aren't this address, don't accept the BC."
There is only one reason to deposit BTC with a bank, and that is to earn interest. In terms of "safekeeping", you're better off keeping the bitcoins at an address you control. However, no bank is going to pay interest on funds they can't access. They need to be able to invest the money, so they wouldn't accept "frozen" funds.
If you wanted some kind of insured storage, a better system which can be implemented right now would be to use a two-part address, where you control one private key and the insurer controls the other. Either or both of the keys could be kept offline for "cold storage". Once you send your funds to that address, both keys would be required to move it anywhere else. It's normal for addresses to have only a single key, but the system is actually rather flexible. You could also use a 2-of-3 address scheme where a third-party arbiter holds the extra key, in case any one party becomes unavailable or tries to defect.
In the actual paper, not the article they admitted their plan included the pool using the sybil attack to increase the chance that its block would be accepted at a greater percentage rate than the other.
Yes, but an effective Sybil attack was perhaps the least believable thing in the original paper. To begin with, the larger mining pools connect directly to each other, so the other pools are among the first to find out about each new block. The "selfish" miners wouldn't have a chance to intercept the announcements and forward their own blocks first no matter how well-connected they were. By the time they find out about the new block, the pools already know as well.
As others have already said, the attack relies on it being easier to suppress information than to spread it, which is why it will ultimately fail.
Money is an IOU.
If money is an I.O.U., who owes me what, exactly? When does it come due and where can it be redeemed?
Money is a commodity, not an I.O.U. It can't be redeemed, only traded, and it has value only so long as other people say it has value.
I.O.U.s can be used as money, but that isn't the only kind of money there is, or the kind which makes up the USD or Euro or Peso. Old-style bank notes redeemable for base money would count, but those haven't been prevalent for some time.
To continue on that analogy, the spectrum of light emmited is not continuous so you don't have to have black to get most or all of it. With solar radiation it's the same deal and something not that far off a terracotta colour gets almost as much as black.
With solar radiation the cells can absorb just the IR & UV frequencies and still get a reasonable fraction of the energy. Modern interior lighting is designed to emit mostly in the visible spectrum. You could still absorb some of the light, of course, assuming your walls aren't plain white, but even if you could capture 50% of the total energy emitted, that only adds up to a few watts per bulb. We're probably talking less than $10 in energy savings per year for a whole house. I just can't see the value proposition in papering your house with solar cells to capture such a small amount of energy. The solar wallpaper would almost have to be cheaper than normal wallpaper. There are far easier ways to save $10.
If people would buy the Kindle at the bookstore were they to sell it then, yes, of course not selling will slow adoption.
If people would only buy the Kindle were the bookstore to sell it, then not selling would slow adoption. But how likely is that? A much more realistic scenario is that a person might have bought the Kindle at their favorite bookstore if it was available, but if not then they'll buy it at Best Buy or Wal-Mart or amazon.com, or even the bookstore down the street that's participating in the program. Either way they get their Kindle.
At most the bookstore might be advertising the Kindle a bit by carrying it, increasing adoption by a miniscule amount, but by this point most people know what a Kindle is and where they can get one. Keeping them out of the bookstores won't change that.
Thus "solar"-powered wallpaper to re-absorb energy from lightbulbs sounds stupid but makes perfect sense, if it could be produced cheaply enough.
Not everyone wants to wallpaper the interior of their house in black. All that "wasted" light reflecting off the wallpaper is what allows you to see the walls.
How is this any worse for the small bookstores than their customers buying a Kindle from some other retailer, or direct from amazon.com? They'd still be browsing in the store, checking online prices, buying the e-books, and eventually ceasing to be a customer. The bookstore would simply have deprived itself of an opportunity to be the one selling the Kindles and getting a cut of e-book revenues in the meantime.
Do these bookstores really think that refusing to sell the devices themselves will slow adoption?
Physical dollars are no different than virtual dollars, and you have to trust that it is not counterfeit.
Physical dollars are very different from virtual dollars. One is a physical object, the other is an entry in an accounting system saying that a bank owes you a dollar. In the same way, you hold real bitcoins if you know the private key matching an entry in the blockchain, which is different from an entry in input.io's computers saying that they owe you a bitcoin.
(Good) counterfeit dollars, on the other hand, really are no different from non-counterfeit dollars. Sometimes they're even made with the same materials and equipment. The difference is all in whether whoever made the dollars had authorization to do so, not in the dollars themselves.
All programs eventually get turned into math by the compiler or interpreter, yes.
Wrong. The input to the compiler or interpreter is just as much math as the output. All programs are math, from beginning to end. Study Haskell sometime—it makes the connection really obvious. A program is a mathematical function which transforms a set of inputs into a set of outputs. Even side effects (like drawing on the screen) are just another form of output; it's the computer, not the program, which makes them real.
New inventions built using gears are patentable. New inventions built using wheels are patentable. New inventions built using software are no different.
Sure, but if you're just running software on a computer you don't have a new "invention", you have math. Including software doesn't make an otherwise patentable invention unpatentable, but having nothing novel and non-obvious apart from the software does.
A computer is just a tool to evaluate mathematical algorithms. Patenting software running on a computer is like patenting evaluation of an algorithm using a pencil and paper. It's equivalent to patenting just the algorithm.
You can buy physical bitcoins if you want something simpler, just like you can get physical dollars if you don't want to deal with complexity of virtual dollars.
There is no such thing as a "physical" bitcoin; that's just marketing-speak. The objects marketed as "physical bitcoins" are nothing but storage devices for private keys, fundamentally no different than a piece of paper or a USB stick, apart from a (theoretically) tamper-evident seal. You have to trust that whoever applied the seal handled the private key properly and didn't retain a copy, since anyone with a copy of the key can instantly render your "physical bitcoin" worthless.
Physical dollars correspond to virtual bitcoins. The equivalent of virtual dollars would be something like inputs.io, where rather than holding bitcoins yourself (with exclusive access to the private keys) you only have an account with someone who holds them for you, with all the potential for error and fraud which that implies.
In this case inputs.io appears to have done something extraordinarily stupid in keeping all their customer's bitcoins online, where attackers can get at them, instead of leaving the majority in offline "cold storage". Past attacks have shown why this is a bad idea, but it seems some people never learn.
"Voluntarily" is not the same as "volunteered". If they had volunteered the data, that would mean that they weren't getting paid for it. Turning it over voluntarily just means that they weren't coerced (e.g. with a subpoena or search warrant).
I'd like some evidence before I believe that claim that the claims are nearly true. ... the claim that there are "no cost to entering a market" ...
There are fairly high barriers to entry, but for the most part they're regulatory barriers, or otherwise based on force. To the extent that force is treated as legitimate, the system is not capitalistic.
... that "all players have perfect knowledge" ...
No one has perfect knowledge, but individuals tend to have better knowledge of those things which directly concern them than anyone else. They certainly have the most incentive. An impartial, benevolent expert, if such a thing actually existed, might be able to claim more accurate and in-depth knowledge on a particular subject, but they couldn't possibly apply that knowledge in the proper context, taking into account all the other things the individual cares about. At best they could advise the individual of the pros and cons of various options.
For capitalism to work, ... One must assume that the consumers act perfectly rationally and will not buy from someone who will screw them over later or externalize costs to them. One must assume that marketing and PR will have no effect because capitalism requires the assumption that all players have perfect knowledge of the product and costs associated with it. One must assume that there is no cost to entering a market and therefore all markets will be subject to competition any time the other producers start to abuse their market position.
These things are necessary only for capitalism to result in an optimal allocation of resources: each resource put to its highest-valued use. If they aren't true, the result isn't failure, it's just a suboptimal allocation of resources. If they're nearly true—and they are—then the result will be nearly optimal. (And the effect of any of these things not being true is at least as bad in any other economic system, most of which don't even aim for optimal allocation of resources to begin with, instead prioritizing "fairness" or some other such subjective quality.)
Would you agree that parents generally know better what is good for 2 year old than the child?
I don't know about where you live, but around here we don't ration authority over people's lives on the basis of who is most likely to know what's good for them. We let people choose what they think is best for themselves.
The real standard is whether a person takes responsibility for the consequences his or her choices have on others. Two-year-olds don't take responsibility for hardly anything, but it is certainly possible to reach that point well before you're 18, or 16, or even 14. At any age, your freedom should correlate with your willingness to accept responsibility.
Of course, for the topic under discussion the effects on others are minimal; ergo, so is the level of responsibility required. Any attempt to limit relationships between individuals of different ages should take place through social channels, not legal ones. If the contact is truly non-consensual (by adult standards) then treat it as such; otherwise the law has no place here.
The example they gave was calculating the average shade of grey in a large image of 1000 by 1000 pixels. The running total could be held in an approximate variable since the error incurred by adding one pixel incorrectly out of a million would be small...
What makes them think that the kinds of errors you'd get in a variable in low-refresh-rate RAM would be small? Flip the MSB from 1 to 0 and your total is suddenly divided in half. Or, if it's a floating-point variable, flip one bit in the exponent field and your total changes from 1.23232e4 to 1.23232e-124.
BTRFS is meant for large multi disk arrays, hardly something you see on typical user desktops.
BTRFS work with large multi-disk arrays, but it also has quite a few features suitable for single-disk systems and "typical user desktops", like subvolumes, snapshots, reflinks, data checksumming, compression, online filesystem checks, and optimizations for SSDs. And you never know when you might want to add a new hard drive to an existing desktop; with BTRFS it's trivial to extend an existing single-disk filesystem to include the new drive.
There are still some rough edges, of course, but I think we'll see BTRFS as the default filesystem for at least some user-oriented distributions before too long.
it's not always going to be clear cut what's 'in the ledger' and what's in circulation, surely?
Agreed, but so long as it's only in the ledger and not in circulation it shouldn't have any significant influence on prices. The same principle applies whether the funds are permanently lost or merely hoarded temporarily.
Saying that money is in circulation is just another way of saying that it's being used to bid for goods and/or services. Money which is lost or hoarded isn't part of the effective demand. Naturally, vendors still need to find the price which balances supply and effective demand, which takes some time, so there is a period of adjustment whenever the amount of money in circulation changes. However, it's not necessary to know which money is available and which isn't; the normal process of price discovery bypasses all of that in the course of finding the price which maximizes revenues.
Let's say the Mona Lisa is the last surviving piece of DA Vinci's work. No notes, books, or stories are left. How valuable is it? The answer is in reality nothing. There is no more DA Vinci, so there is no value in a random old painting. Since we don't know who or what he was the result is the value plummets.
And you say I don't understand scarcity? That's rich. You're assuming that the Mona Lisa only has value because it was made by Leonardo da Vinci. I'm no art historian, but I'm sure plenty of people would consider that crazy. Sometimes a "random old painting" is just a "random old painting", but sometimes a work of art commands a price for the art itself regardless of who made it. Museums hold plenty of very expensive works of art with unknown authors. The Mona Lisa would probably be in that class even if its author's name were lost to history.
Obviously value depends on both supply and demand. Limited supply won't result in a high price if demand is zero. However, you haven't presented any argument to support the idea that the demand for bitcoins will fall, as a result of diminishing supply or otherwise.
Bitcoin has a finite life. After all the coins are mined. There is no way to inject more into the system.
Bitcoin has a finite time during which more currency is created, after which the amount of currency will remain steady or decline asymptotically. There is no need to inject more into the system. The only reason to have any quantity growth at all, rather than simply fixing the total at 21 million from the start, was to bootstrap the system and ensure the initial distribution was provably fair. (Or at least more fair than starting with all bitcoins owned by the developers—not everyone approves of the way those who were lucky or prescient enough to get involved early on were able to scoop up sizable chunks of bitcoins while they were still cheap.)
Take cash. When cash was based on gold the value only increased as governments hoarded gold. However it took centuries for value to increase. As we slowly moved away from physical currency to perceived value.... The perceived value has rocketed upwards.
You've got this backward. Gold was a stable currency, unlike Bitcoin which is just getting started. That means its value increases or decreases based on the demand for currency; if the supply of a good is constant, as it was for gold, then the price becomes proportional to demand. Changes in the purchasing power of stable currencies reflect the growth (or decay) of the overall economy.
Since the switch away from gold, the quantity of currency has increased enormously, but its value has dropped like a rock. According to the BLS inflation calculator, a good which cost $1.00 in 1913 would cost $23.65 today. That's a 95.8% loss in perceived value over the past century—hardly "rocketing upward".
The economy has grown significantly over that period, of course, but that's due to technological progress—particularly the invention of computers, and widespread automation—and has nothing to do with switching away from gold.
... at one point the number of coins lost will be worth more than the coins in circulation. Shortly after that, bitcoins will crash in value.
You keep repeating this, but what you don't give is any model or reasoning which would explain this miraculous reversal. For that matter, you're trying to compare a unitless scalar quantity (number of bitcoins lost) with an economic value (the worth of the coins in circulation), so your units don't even make sense.
What does the number of lost coins have to do with anything? They're lost, out of the picture. It's as if they never existed. We keep going with the coins that are left, which are worth a bit more than they used to be since they're no longer competing for goods and services with the ones that were lost. Nothing changes significantly. There
Some guy steals something and you spend $250K to lock him up for five years, not to mention the cost of prosecuting him. That's just how it is.
In a sane system, theft would carry a civil liability sufficient to cover all the costs of catching the thief and making the victim whole. If the victim wants to go further (proportional retribution) that is their right, but it's also their own free choice and consequently their responsibility to fund. In any case being locked up for five years is hardly a proportional response to theft.