Not really. They pay a lot of money and they just don't get that much in return. That was the original poster's point. Basic services are a monopolized protection racket.
While I understand that fraud and corruption in regards to public utilities are a problem, that's not what I'm talking about here. If some office or store didn't exist, then there would be less car traffic of customers and employees. There would be less need for other infrastructure that is only required because of the increased demand caused by the commerce. This commerce then financially enriches the capitalist. I don't have a problem with charging capitalists for the infrastructure that is used in their commercial ventures.
Having hidden, tax sheltered accounts is another way to increase the return on their capital. If it wasn't saving more than it cost, it wouldn't be happening. The natue of a capitalist is that they must keep getting "much in return", if not, they have to either change in some way or they become former capitalists.
What is worth rich peoples' money is the minting of favorable law, regulation, and selective contracts which creates all sort of profitable rent seeking opportunities. But I think you probably wouldn't want rich peoples' tax money paying for that.
Use of those tactics in no way excludes the use of others. Buying lawyers, lobbyists, regulations, and contracts are just expenses with expected paybacks. Decreasing costs (lowering tax obligations, decreasing benefit and salary) and increasing revenue by buying favorable treatment, both increase the bottom line.
what happens when Goldman et al discover there's money to be made by manipulating that market, and have nothing to stop their centuries-old bag of tricks.
After articles about it in Wired, Forbes, and who knows where else, I would be surprised if more than one cost / benefit survey hadn't already been completed at each of the too-big-fail banks.
The way our system works: the rich subsidize the social benefits to the poor.
I'm starting to think this is a requirement if you do not want a society that doesn't devolve into a small, private group that owns and controls all the resources, natural and human.
Since these folks enjoy the same public roads, military, police and fire protection, etc as everyone else, then they can help pay for them.
Is there any reason they should pay orders of magnitude more for the same services as everyone else?
Do the companies they own and profit from, and the employees engaged in work for those companies, drive more, fly more, require more police and fire protection, phone lines, clean water, solid waste disposal, waste water disposal?
While some capitalist can only use so many resources as an individual, the total usage by those employed by them can be considerably more.
So, now we have the owners at the top of the pyramid dodging payment of their share of taxes, the corporations dodging payment of the same. This leaves the non-owning class to pay for the infrastructure used by the capitalists to generate their profits.
I didn't make any claims about how likely these events are, or what other ramifications would come with them. Someone asked about potential ways bitcoin could fail, that is all I was trying to show.
it's bought for entertainment value and forgotten. it's just collecting for most that own some.
the crap about cyprus events etc pushing it up.. well, that's just crap.
flooz... there is no backing, and who's behind it?
flooz was backed by a private company with no requirement to limit or control the volume of their product.
Bitcoin has the backing of current cryptographic techniques, the bitcoin protocol, and the compute power of the bitcoin mining network. While you can mine bitcoins with commodity hardware, it's not like you just get to instantly make as much of them as you want. You are limited by the cost of hardware, the cost of electricity, and at the same time you are competing with other miners on the network.
unless I convert it into real dollars, it'll never be taxed
That is income and you should be reporting it
Are you trying to say he should report his mined bitcoins as income, even if they are not converted to some other currency? Does the IRS expect someone to report WoW gold or other virtual currencies as well?
the U.S. homicide rate has fallen 50% since the early 90s, the decline starting before the Brady bill and the "assault weapons" ban and continuing after the ban expired, while more and more states liberalized CCW laws and the number of guns in private hands increased.
There seems to be growing evidence that the increase in crime in the 70s,and eventual decrease in the 90s, is related to environmental lead pollution from the rise and fall of the use of lead in gasoline
BTC isn't a real currency, I can't pay my taxes with it
Right. Nor can you pay them with gold, euros, pogs, flooz, sports trading cards, or a zillion other things. Government authority in the US accepts dollars. So what?
I can't pay any of my debts with it and nobody is forcing anybody to accept it.
You can buy software, web hosting, domain names, precious metals, gamble, clothes, electronics, dental service, legal service, books and fuck all else with it. Just because you can't pay your cable bill with bitcoins yet doesn't mean they aren't useful to others.
It's not backed by gold, silver or the promise of anybody with the means to back it.
Bitcoin is backed by the compute power of the bitcoin mining network, the bitcoin protocol, and modern cryptographic techniques. Can a 51% attack break it? Maybe. Will a flaw in the protocol kill it? If one is found and exploited, certainly. How about some breakthrough in cryptographic analysis or technique, like say quantum computing? Another possible killer.
In fact, it's designed to result in crushing deflation in a way that no currency is. If there aren't enough USD, you can print more, if there are too many, you can take them out of circulation when they come back.
There are some issues here. Hard drive crashes and no backup of your wallet? Barring some heroic drive recovery, or crypto breaking technique (which would likely break the system as well) those coins are gone forever, further lowering the number of potential bitcoins. But really, not much different than cash being destroyed.
A bitcoin can currently be broken up into 10^-8 pieces. There is room in the protocol for that to be increased. There could be 1 bitcoin in the world, and the pieces would still be useful.
Seeing how an elastic money supply controlled by private bankers has only caused larger boom/bust cycles since the Federal Reserve System was implemented, I'm at least interested in how the bitcoin system plays out. Even if it eventually dies, lessons will be learned, and the next iteration will be better.
In the US states of Colorado and Washington, it is if you are over 21. 14+ (including Colorado and Washington) states also have laws allowing cannabis to be used as medicine.
so I stop paying, how can you collect "your" goats
I was not considering the case where a third party is brought in to arbitrate a dispute. I don't know enough about contract law to know if you are correct or not.
If the government is brought in, I could see where they might want the settlement to be in the terms of their currency.
It might also be an option for my suit to request "specific performance" of the contract, where my victory generates an order for you give me my goats on the previously agreed upon terms.
You are required, by law (force, as you like to say) to accept them for debts, but not as currency.
Them? Dollars, bitcoins, IOUs? By definition, currency is generally accepted as a medium of exchange. Dollars are currency, but I do not have to accept them for debts owed to me, assuming I structure the transaction that way from the beginning. If I don't mind the limited number of trading partners available, I can accept barter, bitcoins, Deutch Marks, or any other commodity or currency I choose. But if I want to have the largest available number of trading partners, I better bring and accept dollars.
If I attempt to use bitcoins, euros, pesos, rubles, or some other non-dollar denominated item to pay my taxes, I will be refused. Eventually that will lead to either payment of that tax in the government approved form, or forced incarceration.
There is no backing of it at all. A bitcoin is worth $0 by definition (or, the amount of electricity to calculate some number). So if "they" default, you've lost nothing. It's backed by nothing because it does not assert to have any value at all. That doesn't make it better or worse, just harder to define based on current words.
The bitcoin community believes that the computers using electricity to do the work of hashing on the bitcoin network has value. You don't have to follow this belief, there is no threat of force if you do not accept or make payments in bitcoins.
The backing for that bitcoin is the further work done by the network to validate transactions and maintain the blockchain. This is obviously not backing in the sense that physical gold and silver used to back the US Dollar. It is backing in the sense that a bitcoin represents a very well defined unit of work requiring electricity, an algorithm, and some type of electronic computing device having been completed.
If the entire bitcoin network went down, and I had a validated bitcoin sitting in my wallet, did I lose something? I would think so. If I had mined that bitcoin, I lost the money invested in energy and the computing device that generated it. I lost the ability to trade that bitcoin for a good or service. If I had purchased it, then I have lost the ability to purchase that good or service. A bitcoin doesn't have some specified dollar value, but that doesn't mean a bitcoin has $0 value.
Yes, we could have better words for all this. That part will come.
Yes, like hand-written IOUs are debts, and not currency
Hopefully not too far off on a tangent, but we have to, by force, accept IOUs from an institution as currency. The Federal Reserve (not a 100% government agency, with no reserves) is owned primarily by private banks. It can take direction from the US government, if they want.
If you want to get paid in Euros, dollars, or any other IOU where the issuing authority can up and say "We're going to raise/lower/ignore the money supply", who am I to tell you no.
gold-backed is not considered fiat, and unbacked is considered fiat
I think that "backed by something tangible" is a (still with some wide, grey area), where the fiat line gets drawn. Gold, silver, steel, oil? Base a currency off them and I probably wouldn't call it fiat. Full faith and credit of the US (or any other government, or per your previous example, corporation)? Smells like fiat to me. Full faith of the bitcoin network? Until someone attempts to launch a 51% attack on the network, I'll at least believe a bitcoin is worth a bitcoin. As long as that is possible, there will be someone willing to exchange them for other currencies, an exchange rate, and by definition, some value in owning a bitcoin.
If you want to call bitcoins a commodity instead of a currency, I could understand that. What I don't understand it applying the fiat label to them.
Also, Wikipedia
Fair enough. I grabbed the first thing I could find, which doesn't often turn out to the be best way.
You must have some non-standard definition of fiat that I have not encountered before. In the wikipedia fiat money article, we see a few definitions:
any money declared by a government to be legal tender.
state-issued money which is neither convertible by law to any other thing, nor fixed in value in terms of any objective standard.
money without intrinsic value.
Not being state backed would eliminate the first 2. You might personally question the "intrinsic" part of item 3 and you might not place value on it, some bitcoin mining machine performed a specific, well defined, item of work to create a bitcoin, giving it value within the community.
Merriam-webster gives:
a command or act of will that creates something without or as if without further effort
an authoritative or arbitrary order
Creation of bitcoins requires effort, maintaining the blockchain requires effort, and there is no authority that can arbitrarily create bitcoins without doing the work, so I don't see how any of those would apply.
You seem to be equating bitcoins with floozor beenz.
Slashdot Mirror
Do the companies they own and profit from,
Not really. They pay a lot of money and they just don't get that much in return. That was the original poster's point. Basic services are a monopolized protection racket.
While I understand that fraud and corruption in regards to public utilities are a problem, that's not what I'm talking about here. If some office or store didn't exist, then there would be less car traffic of customers and employees. There would be less need for other infrastructure that is only required because of the increased demand caused by the commerce. This commerce then financially enriches the capitalist. I don't have a problem with charging capitalists for the infrastructure that is used in their commercial ventures.
Having hidden, tax sheltered accounts is another way to increase the return on their capital. If it wasn't saving more than it cost, it wouldn't be happening. The natue of a capitalist is that they must keep getting "much in return", if not, they have to either change in some way or they become former capitalists.
What is worth rich peoples' money is the minting of favorable law, regulation, and selective contracts which creates all sort of profitable rent seeking opportunities. But I think you probably wouldn't want rich peoples' tax money paying for that.
Use of those tactics in no way excludes the use of others. Buying lawyers, lobbyists, regulations, and contracts are just expenses with expected paybacks. Decreasing costs (lowering tax obligations, decreasing benefit and salary) and increasing revenue by buying favorable treatment, both increase the bottom line.
what happens when Goldman et al discover there's money to be made by manipulating that market, and have nothing to stop their centuries-old bag of tricks.
After articles about it in Wired, Forbes, and who knows where else, I would be surprised if more than one cost / benefit survey hadn't already been completed at each of the too-big-fail banks.
Hopefully you got the pre-1983 pennies, double the melt value for the same face value.
The way our system works: the rich subsidize the social benefits to the poor.
I'm starting to think this is a requirement if you do not want a society that doesn't devolve into a small, private group that owns and controls all the resources, natural and human.
Since these folks enjoy the same public roads, military, police and fire protection, etc as everyone else, then they can help pay for them.
Is there any reason they should pay orders of magnitude more for the same services as everyone else?
Do the companies they own and profit from, and the employees engaged in work for those companies, drive more, fly more, require more police and fire protection, phone lines, clean water, solid waste disposal, waste water disposal?
While some capitalist can only use so many resources as an individual, the total usage by those employed by them can be considerably more.
So, now we have the owners at the top of the pyramid dodging payment of their share of taxes, the corporations dodging payment of the same. This leaves the non-owning class to pay for the infrastructure used by the capitalists to generate their profits.
//*What a waste of potential utility.
Yes, this. Being a wage slave in the fiat money system created by the bankters, for the banksters, is a MUCH better use of my time.
Now, Where did that <sarcasm> tag get off to?
I didn't make any claims about how likely these events are, or what other ramifications would come with them. Someone asked about potential ways bitcoin could fail, that is all I was trying to show.
it's bought for entertainment value and forgotten. it's just collecting for most that own some. the crap about cyprus events etc pushing it up.. well, that's just crap.
[citation needed]
flooz ... there is no backing, and who's behind it?
flooz was backed by a private company with no requirement to limit or control the volume of their product.
Bitcoin has the backing of current cryptographic techniques, the bitcoin protocol, and the compute power of the bitcoin mining network. While you can mine bitcoins with commodity hardware, it's not like you just get to instantly make as much of them as you want. You are limited by the cost of hardware, the cost of electricity, and at the same time you are competing with other miners on the network.
What is the failure mode of bitcoin?
The NSA executes a 51+% attack on the network and corrupts the blockchain?
EMP wipes out a large portion of the electric grid and/or the internet?
unless I convert it into real dollars, it'll never be taxed
That is income and you should be reporting it
Are you trying to say he should report his mined bitcoins as income, even if they are not converted to some other currency? Does the IRS expect someone to report WoW gold or other virtual currencies as well?
Why the hell can't these indoor bulb idiots use what everyone else in the world is already using?
How would that allow them to lock the world, or even a small group, into THEIR bulbs, sockets, controllers, and hardware?
Any time a question in the form of "Why can't/don't/won't X do the the logical thing Y?", the most likely answer is some form of "money/greed/control"
the U.S. homicide rate has fallen 50% since the early 90s, the decline starting before the Brady bill and the "assault weapons" ban and continuing after the ban expired, while more and more states liberalized CCW laws and the number of guns in private hands increased.
There seems to be growing evidence that the increase in crime in the 70s ,and eventual decrease in the 90s, is related to environmental lead pollution from the rise and fall of the use of lead in gasoline
Bitcoin is backed by absolutely nothing.
except the current cryptographic techniques, the bitcoin protocol, and the compute power of the bitcoin mining network.
need an internet connected device to send/receive money
Not exactly cash, but you can make transactions via SMS.
BTC isn't a real currency, I can't pay my taxes with it
Right. Nor can you pay them with gold, euros, pogs, flooz, sports trading cards, or a zillion other things. Government authority in the US accepts dollars. So what?
I can't pay any of my debts with it and nobody is forcing anybody to accept it.
You can buy software, web hosting, domain names, precious metals, gamble, clothes, electronics, dental service, legal service, books and fuck all else with it. Just because you can't pay your cable bill with bitcoins yet doesn't mean they aren't useful to others.
It's not backed by gold, silver or the promise of anybody with the means to back it.
Bitcoin is backed by the compute power of the bitcoin mining network, the bitcoin protocol, and modern cryptographic techniques. Can a 51% attack break it? Maybe. Will a flaw in the protocol kill it? If one is found and exploited, certainly. How about some breakthrough in cryptographic analysis or technique, like say quantum computing? Another possible killer.
In fact, it's designed to result in crushing deflation in a way that no currency is. If there aren't enough USD, you can print more, if there are too many, you can take them out of circulation when they come back.
There are some issues here. Hard drive crashes and no backup of your wallet? Barring some heroic drive recovery, or crypto breaking technique (which would likely break the system as well) those coins are gone forever, further lowering the number of potential bitcoins. But really, not much different than cash being destroyed.
A bitcoin can currently be broken up into 10^-8 pieces. There is room in the protocol for that to be increased. There could be 1 bitcoin in the world, and the pieces would still be useful.
Seeing how an elastic money supply controlled by private bankers has only caused larger boom/bust cycles since the Federal Reserve System was implemented, I'm at least interested in how the bitcoin system plays out. Even if it eventually dies, lessons will be learned, and the next iteration will be better.
Smoking pot is legal?
In the US states of Colorado and Washington, it is if you are over 21. 14+ (including Colorado and Washington) states also have laws allowing cannabis to be used as medicine.
so I stop paying, how can you collect "your" goats
I was not considering the case where a third party is brought in to arbitrate a dispute. I don't know enough about contract law to know if you are correct or not.
If the government is brought in, I could see where they might want the settlement to be in the terms of their currency.
It might also be an option for my suit to request "specific performance" of the contract, where my victory generates an order for you give me my goats on the previously agreed upon terms.
You are required, by law (force, as you like to say) to accept them for debts, but not as currency.
Them? Dollars, bitcoins, IOUs? By definition, currency is generally accepted as a medium of exchange. Dollars are currency, but I do not have to accept them for debts owed to me, assuming I structure the transaction that way from the beginning. If I don't mind the limited number of trading partners available, I can accept barter, bitcoins, Deutch Marks, or any other commodity or currency I choose. But if I want to have the largest available number of trading partners, I better bring and accept dollars.
If I attempt to use bitcoins, euros, pesos, rubles, or some other non-dollar denominated item to pay my taxes, I will be refused. Eventually that will lead to either payment of that tax in the government approved form, or forced incarceration.
There is no backing of it at all. A bitcoin is worth $0 by definition (or, the amount of electricity to calculate some number). So if "they" default, you've lost nothing. It's backed by nothing because it does not assert to have any value at all. That doesn't make it better or worse, just harder to define based on current words.
The bitcoin community believes that the computers using electricity to do the work of hashing on the bitcoin network has value. You don't have to follow this belief, there is no threat of force if you do not accept or make payments in bitcoins.
The backing for that bitcoin is the further work done by the network to validate transactions and maintain the blockchain. This is obviously not backing in the sense that physical gold and silver used to back the US Dollar. It is backing in the sense that a bitcoin represents a very well defined unit of work requiring electricity, an algorithm, and some type of electronic computing device having been completed.
If the entire bitcoin network went down, and I had a validated bitcoin sitting in my wallet, did I lose something? I would think so. If I had mined that bitcoin, I lost the money invested in energy and the computing device that generated it. I lost the ability to trade that bitcoin for a good or service. If I had purchased it, then I have lost the ability to purchase that good or service. A bitcoin doesn't have some specified dollar value, but that doesn't mean a bitcoin has $0 value.
Yes, we could have better words for all this. That part will come.
Yes, like hand-written IOUs are debts, and not currency
Hopefully not too far off on a tangent, but we have to, by force, accept IOUs from an institution as currency. The Federal Reserve (not a 100% government agency, with no reserves) is owned primarily by private banks. It can take direction from the US government, if they want.
If you want to get paid in Euros, dollars, or any other IOU where the issuing authority can up and say "We're going to raise/lower/ignore the money supply", who am I to tell you no.
gold-backed is not considered fiat, and unbacked is considered fiat
I think that "backed by something tangible" is a (still with some wide, grey area), where the fiat line gets drawn. Gold, silver, steel, oil? Base a currency off them and I probably wouldn't call it fiat. Full faith and credit of the US (or any other government, or per your previous example, corporation)? Smells like fiat to me. Full faith of the bitcoin network? Until someone attempts to launch a 51% attack on the network, I'll at least believe a bitcoin is worth a bitcoin. As long as that is possible, there will be someone willing to exchange them for other currencies, an exchange rate, and by definition, some value in owning a bitcoin.
If you want to call bitcoins a commodity instead of a currency, I could understand that. What I don't understand it applying the fiat label to them.
Also, Wikipedia
Fair enough. I grabbed the first thing I could find, which doesn't often turn out to the be best way.
the most fiat currency ever conceived
You must have some non-standard definition of fiat that I have not encountered before. In the wikipedia fiat money article, we see a few definitions:
Not being state backed would eliminate the first 2. You might personally question the "intrinsic" part of item 3 and you might not place value on it, some bitcoin mining machine performed a specific, well defined, item of work to create a bitcoin, giving it value within the community.
Merriam-webster gives:
Creation of bitcoins requires effort, maintaining the blockchain requires effort, and there is no authority that can arbitrarily create bitcoins without doing the work, so I don't see how any of those would apply.
You seem to be equating bitcoins with floozor beenz.
You will then be able to replant your own seed to your heart's content.
Unless one of your neighbors plants the Monsanto seed with the terminator gene or a roundup ready gene.
If they use the terminator seed, now you are left with some percentage of your saved seed with this gene.
If they plant the roundup ready version, you'll end up being sued by Monsanto for violating their IP rights.
And if you have a job, you are spending more time working outside normal hours, for the lowest amount of vacation or maternity leave in the 1st world.
If that Michael Phelps guy hadn't been all potted up on the weeds, he would have won all the gold medals.
It hasn't been repeated as far as I know so the results haven't been verfied.
I'm pretty sure there have been additional studies since then.
Many related to health issues other than cancer. A majority of the double blind, human studies seem to show positive effects.