There is definitely a middle ground on that issue but little chance we'll find it. If you think any discretion rather than just publicly exposing yourself and excreting bodily fluids is appropriate you are an evil sexist woman hater and on the other end of the spectrum you have the kind of nuts you refer to.
Some people aren't trying to protect the children, they actually don't find human larva and all things related to them beautiful and they don't all deserve to have their stomachs turned when you excrete fluids into one. Have some consideration for the rest of the world and personal modesty and at least cover up if you have an irrational psychological roadblock and refuse to go into both the most private and clean space in any building... the restroom or the less clean but still private bedroom before engaging in activities which expose your bathing suit parts.
I think filtering the news YOU deem inaccurate from a stream that goes out to billions of people rather than topics and stories trend naturally matters.
Seems like a poor way to collect and use solar to me. Let the Earth be the solar panel/battery and use deep wells/deep heat pipes to extract the heat converting with high efficiency. This makes far more sense especially since environmental temperature regulation is one of our biggest energy drains. No need to cover anymore surface with panels, heat loss from energy usage is recycled automatically as it warms the air which in turn replaces the heat lost to the Earth.
We are never going to put up enough solar panels to compare with the solar energy the Earth gathers across its entire surface, including/especially oceans.
Actually there is a huge cost in most places. First all of all those "other than battery replacement" costs are a huge part the system and second anywhere you actually have a period of winter you have hail damage escalating what would have been a $10,000 roof replacement to at least a $50,000 roof/solar replacement.
They can and do report. This request is for the period of time before questions of the status of virtual currency and how and if it qualified to taxation were determined. This fishing expedition is so the IRS can retroactively apply those determinations on everyone they left to guess in the meantime. If they succeed they'll not only tax anyone who guessed wrong but apply retroactive penalties as well.
Okay, come back an explain how Warren buffet makes tens of billions then pays 15% on only $30 million of it so he can claim he has a 15% effective tax rate while I don't make even one million and pay 20+% on all but maybe 10% of it.
Also forget the 1%, that is a very carefully chosen category so it includes those who have worked hard to earn more than others and includes doctors, lawyers, and engineers. It is the 0.1% by wealth who have 40% of our nations wealth and continue to do so year on year so they are gaining 40% of the wealth we produce each year. We need them to stop getting more than 0.1% of new wealth and start paying their fair share.
Unless of course you still pay sales tax when you buy something and property tax... then you are entitled to everything you mentioned above since they are all funded with state level taxation and not federal tax.
Lets stop pretending this fishing expedition to retroactively punish people who used bitcoin before there were rules regarding how they should "pay [their] feckin taxes."
Therein lies the crux of the problem the IRS is demanding history on users during the period before "right" had been determined. Bitcoin users were required to guess what to do. This is akin to determining traffic cams will constitute sufficient cause to punish jay walking and then demanding the footage from the past five years to retroactively punish... and given the way the IRS operates to assess penalties for being late paying the fines on the retroactive citations.
"None of the exchanges report income in 1099's or as financial transactions, so they're either blatantly, flagrantly violating securities laws (oh yeah, they're selling securities without license to non-accredited investors) or they're violating money laundering laws by exchanging currencies (you do believe bitcoins are a currency, don't you?) without reporting to the IRS under money laundering laws."
Incorrect, Coinbase does report. This is from the period of time before it was legally ruled that bitcoin exchanges counted as money exchanges and needed to do so. The IRS also had not made a determination during this period. People who utilized and exchanged virtual currencies who did report to the IRS had to make something up to put it under and how they did so could have drastic repercussions to tax rates. A bit part of the issue here is the IRS is trying to apply later determinations retroactively.
"The exchanges have reported publicly some number of users, and if the net number of users to reported exchanges is significantly less than the number of entities reporting capital gains, then there's probable cause to believe that tax fraud is occurring in bitcoin earnings."
Not at all, large numbers of users may have suffered a net loss in which case there is no penalty for not reporting and certainly not tax fraud.
"Either the bitcoin is a good to be sold or exchanged, in which case it's liable to sales tax, and clearly tax fraud has been occurring"
Actually all sales which are covered federally fall under interstate commerce and are exempt from sales tax. The IRS has zero authority to collect or police anything but income tax.
"Of course, every search warrant ever, and every subpoena ever has been issued with assumed guilt?"
This is not a search warrant, a search warrant must be specific and name a specific target and what they hope to find. It is supposed to require probable cause a justice believes sufficient to indicate the warrant will enable law enforcement to find the evidence they seek. The bar is much lower than beyond a reasonable doubt but there is a bar.
This is, hey give us all your records just in case there might be something in there somewhere that suggests someone might have done something even though we have no idea who that might have been, what they might have done, or even a reason to think anyone did anything at all.
Right, sounds like all you have to do is identify yourself and thereby, according to the IRS, prevent Coinbase from including you in anything they disclose. If everyone who had an account in that period does so coinbase would be required to turn nothing over to the IRS.
If the IRS public position is that the request only covers unidentified individuals does that mean anyone can send certified mail to the IRS indicating they used coinbase and be excluded from the request without anything further being sent to the IRS?
The furthest I've traveled down a road because of something was that time I invented the digital book reader, even had a custom low power linux built for it and interface made. I was inspired by my old sony clie palm counterpart and discovering what a great experience it was to read on it. I was even working on the prototype hardware when in my spare time while working at an office depot when some third party company you've never heard of (which was later purchased of course, Amazon or B&N can't remember) announced they'd developed one. I'd have beaten them by a heavy margin if I'd hadn't been trying to buy everything and live on like $300 a week even still only being able to work on it in my spare time.
Granted this more kindle fire than kindle and at the time the battery life would have been more like 6-8hrs than the 3-5 days I get with my kindle and e-ink. Had I finished it, it still probably would have taken me months more to get money together for a patent and I'd have needed to research and put together the application myself.
What an odd idea. I work on a fortune 500 dotcom and my experience is very little of importance happens in the browser. That is just an interface, everything important happens on the backend. If you are building your backend in javascript you are making poor choices akin to the previous extremely popular bad decision of writing backends in java.
Python and Perl are solid options, arguably Ruby will pass but then Python and Perl glue in C/C++ code to give a good combination of ease and performance. Honestly, well written Perl 5 on a current interpreter probably offers the best performance these days and has absorbed the best features of newer high level languages but sadly is nowhere near as popular as it was when it was an overchosen slow and bug prone CGI monger. Python is good enough and has enough momentum that it will catch up in a decade or so. Plus Perl 5 could be tough for someone new... searching for information on how to x or y yields tons of results and someone new has no way of knowing which are old cruft and not, especially because the old cruft answers all still work.
They are right, this would be a huge boost to revenue if done correctly. Unfortunately they will never do it correctly. First, this is a far cheaper distribution option so why are they charging more than the theater ticket price? Just cut out the theater middle man and keep his cut of the profits. The studios could even collaborate and build their own MPAA non-profit distribution service so studios pay only operating costs and all the profits pass through and then lay off all the obsolete middle men. Offer direct to consumer ultra high quality streams and site direct blu-ray sales from the get go, use an algorithm that accounts for the film budget and gradually lowers price inversely to purchase rate and time and at some point shifts to a bucket that is available for on demand streaming with a fixed monthly fee Netflix style that after expenses simply gets divided out according to proportion of views. All playstation vue style with 5 simultaneous devices.
If existing boxes of this sort are any indication they will lock down playback controls and not allow you to pause or replay the movie. This obsession with reducing the quality of experience for the consumer in order to keep third party services alive is what is hurting. Instead of fully embrace the kind of enhanced experience you could provide as well as the cost reduction of optimized distribution. The better the legal avenues the less it will be worth the hassle and risk of piracy. Forget legal risks, you have to find content, risk fakes, risk bad quality, and pay for equipment to store content. If someone is doing it as a cost saving measure they either couldn't have afforded much content in the first place or couldn't afford the volume of content they consume.
Don't confuse fluctuations caused by day trading and a small market that can be moved by many players with instability of system itself to be able to function as a unit of trade. Some types of jet engine aren't able to produce sustained thrust until brought up to full speed. Also don't confuse the current price of speculators with the actual value. Just because a handful of people were willing to give away an island like Manhattan for a handful of beads and trinkets doesn't mean that is the actual value either islands or beads and trinkets. In a small pocket market it is possible to make or lose a great deal of money speculating and for things to be greatly overvalued or undervalued. That has nothing to do with government regulation and everything to do with the size of the market.
I guess what I'm saying isn't that bitcoin price stability isn't a real problem today, it is. But given the size of the market this is expected. If dollars were exchanged in a similar market you'd see similar stability. If you'd sat on a trillion dollars over that 5 year period you'd have lost as much as the total value of all the bitcoin while others would point and say that you still have a trillion dollars. Where would that value have gone? It would have been given away to other people who already have more than they know what to do with by that government you are so fond of.
Is the island that is bitcoin being sold for trinkets or is the box of trinkets that is bitcoin valued like an island? The truth is probably somewhere in between but the concrete determining factor of supply only moves in one direction with bitcoin, demand can go either way but as the total amount of demand grows so with the constant and always present demand that does not fluctuate. I think that a floating unit bitdollar traded to five decimal places would help perception because there is a long long way for bitcoin to go and that is going to mean the common unit of trade will need to shifted several decimal places over. Eventually 1.0 BTC can and should be a unit that nations might trade not people, so people flinching at having trouble to understand $2,000 or even $10,000 for "just one bitcoin" are going to do nothing but get in the way as more and more bitcoin transactions occur and more units of trade worth about a dollar are needed.
Greed eventually gets you. Investing in bitcoin early paid off for you, will you hold a grudge against others bought the same BTC and risked holding it against instability, fluctuation, competing digital currencies, etc and sell it for $100,000 or even a million some day? Eventually you sold and eventually they will too and that BTC will go in circulation because it will eventually be too tempting to have what that BTC can buy. They will spend it, and then it will circulate, rinse and repeat which is what debunks the early adopters ponzi scheme nonsense. Early adopters are essentially early investors. What they pull out is no worse than a Zuckerburg or a Gates.
You are missing the most important aspect of a currency and it isn't prices. It is how units are distributed because if the smallest units of gold you can get are quarter grams and gold is worth $1000 a gram what will you use to buy bread in a gold based currency? Fiat currencies use credit, so don't forget the impact on existing credit in the event of deflation or inflation. Deflation is devastating in a fiat system because the entire system is based on debt and suddenly the value owed is substantially higher than it was yesterday and the debts are structured on the assumption the currency used to pay them will be more plentiful and worth less tomorrow and suddenly it is worth more. Prices will have to drop because people will be getting fewer units of currency, but businesses generally run off credit what happens when they have to pay the same number of dollars tomorrow but take in less due to lower prices and can't successfully sell goods at higher prices to offset it because the entire market for their goods is now worth less each day? New costs will be lower so that will help but they'll have to cut wages and/or layoff staff to meet existing debts. Next year they won't be able to do either, etc. The number of years is of course made up but the pattern is not.
In a system mathematically guaranteed to deflate deflation is not such an issue, overly rapid deflation is similar to inflation in a fiat system since a floating unit of trade should exist suddenly your 1.0 btc is worth dramatically more bitdollars and prices would increase. You don't have such a large issue with credit freezing because the system isn't based on using credit to distribute currency. Really there is no inflation in such a system, only deflation rate. A severe reduction in deflation rate relative what any creditor anticipated would mean paying back more value than expected which might be huge for certain borrowers but would far less dramatic across the whole economy since there would be far less debt in the first place.
On the contrary, the purchasing power of any major government fiat currency shifts by far more daily than the purchasing power of bitcoin. If you held half the worlds bitcoin and half the worlds US dollars in your pocket the bitcoin would have moved by a greater percentage value relative to euros but your actual wealth would change far more dramatically on a down dollar day than bitcoin day.
Bitcoin needs two things to be perceived as more stable. The first and biggest is a floating unit of exchange call it a bitdollar. 1.0 BTC is not A bitcoin, it's just a 1 in a decimal place. As long as that unit roughly correlates a relative point such as typical single unit major fiat values or a commodity such as the largest unit required to purchase a gram of gold or barrel of oil at a given moment. If the currency deflates by a factor of ten relative to that point, the bitdollar would shift a decimal place so your wallet that held 1 bitdollar before now holds 10 bitdollars. So long as fiat is in major use 1 bitdollar should always be able to purchase more than zero but less than two of any major fiat currency. This and wider adoption would create a better perception of the stability of bitcoin. The value of bitcoin relative to anything is just perception, but we know it is mathematically always more over time so while there should probably be a cooking period before the value shifts and a central reference to check the status, maybe a month cooking before the bitdollar shifts, once it has shifted it should not go backwards. It also means the stability problem with bitcoin is a perception problem.
Actually you are incorrect. Currency systems must either inflate or deflate because actual economies grow and shrink. Currency is the representation of an economy, it's design goes hand in hand with the success of the actual economy it represents. These structures are based on greed, in order for currency to function correctly it must flow. A small amount of inflation or deflation isn't something a currency can't recover from but a currency designed to inflate can't continue to function in the face of extended deflation even at a low rate similarly a deflationary currency that inflates.
A currency that is designed to introduce more units is an inflationary currency, a currency where existing units increase in value is deflationary. Inflationary currencies require a system of distributing new units, in the case of fiat currencies that system is generally credit based. Deflationary currencies have a problem with scarcity of trading units, there may not be enough for all who need them to facilitate trade to actually be able to possess enough to easily do so. Gold units ran into this issue, bitcoin solves this issue by being a purely logical unit and thus theoretically infinitely divisible into smaller trade units (although there is currently a practical limit as well a technical limit in the implementation meant to reflect it).
Inflationary currencies require the free flow of credit to distribute new units in order to facilitate free movement of the value that currency represents, the minimum motivating factor in distributing currency into circulation is beating the inflation rate + expenses or else your currency will devalue. You must assume some sort of risk in order to generate returns greater than inflation + your expenses and continue to do to offset that inflation over time which creates the pressure in the currency. Inflation in such a system is accounted for in the design and essential but out of control inflation can contribute too much pressure which a large portion of the economy can not keep pace with creating rapid disparity leaving spenders unable to afford goods. Money stops being worth much. This is a short term problem if the source is resolved reasonably quickly because debts can be paid more easily and overall debt will be reduced.
Deflation in such a currency eliminates motivation at the top to exchange trade units reducing their distribution on all levels while at the same time increasing demand. The biggest problem is that because an economy based on credit is filled with outstanding credit those loans now all have be paid back with greater value units at the same rate. Prices and income will adjust to the deflated rate but existing debt will not, meaning you'll have less dollars in your pocket but owe just as much and more importantly everyone who might be a source of more dollars will be in the same position including retailers. Creditors will have a boom at first as the increased returns leave them flush and without need to take on new debt but the lack of demand for new credit, reduced willingness to extend it, and growing default rates will create a boom/bust pendulum and like all pendulums it would eventually grind to a halt.
A currency designed to deflate, such as bitcoin, reacts quite differently. The greed motivation is to assume risk for a return above deflation. Because currency is deflationary and a currency such as bitcoin allows trading infinitely smaller units, once established such a currency has no unit exchange problem. Such a thing is new but there still may be a need for a central organization to set the current standard unit of trade relative to another target (although a market and algorithm would actually be used to determine this unit there needs to be a common reference). A sort of floating bitdollar if you will that refers to the current decimal place that is the highest unit required in the purchase of a barrel of crude or a gram of gold or some such. Provided such a "bitdollar" is what wallet balances reflect and what is traded on exchanges you'd see far less wild fluctuations on exchanges and skepticism of the value of the currency because it would create a more unified perception of value.
Even if correct about Trump, fed rates are currently extremely low and the last hike was only because the market expected rates couldn't stay there forever not due to any kind of inflation. If anything we are close to deflation which is far far worse with a fiat currency. We actually NEED inflation in the US economy.
This is not a statement against a deflationary currency, I honestly think the math works out about the same but the US dollar is not deflationary and fiat systems depend on inflation to function properly.
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There is definitely a middle ground on that issue but little chance we'll find it. If you think any discretion rather than just publicly exposing yourself and excreting bodily fluids is appropriate you are an evil sexist woman hater and on the other end of the spectrum you have the kind of nuts you refer to.
Some people aren't trying to protect the children, they actually don't find human larva and all things related to them beautiful and they don't all deserve to have their stomachs turned when you excrete fluids into one. Have some consideration for the rest of the world and personal modesty and at least cover up if you have an irrational psychological roadblock and refuse to go into both the most private and clean space in any building... the restroom or the less clean but still private bedroom before engaging in activities which expose your bathing suit parts.
I think filtering the news YOU deem inaccurate from a stream that goes out to billions of people rather than topics and stories trend naturally matters.
Seriously? Puritanbook.
Seems like a poor way to collect and use solar to me. Let the Earth be the solar panel/battery and use deep wells/deep heat pipes to extract the heat converting with high efficiency. This makes far more sense especially since environmental temperature regulation is one of our biggest energy drains. No need to cover anymore surface with panels, heat loss from energy usage is recycled automatically as it warms the air which in turn replaces the heat lost to the Earth.
We are never going to put up enough solar panels to compare with the solar energy the Earth gathers across its entire surface, including/especially oceans.
Actually there is a huge cost in most places. First all of all those "other than battery replacement" costs are a huge part the system and second anywhere you actually have a period of winter you have hail damage escalating what would have been a $10,000 roof replacement to at least a $50,000 roof/solar replacement.
They can and do report. This request is for the period of time before questions of the status of virtual currency and how and if it qualified to taxation were determined. This fishing expedition is so the IRS can retroactively apply those determinations on everyone they left to guess in the meantime. If they succeed they'll not only tax anyone who guessed wrong but apply retroactive penalties as well.
Okay, come back an explain how Warren buffet makes tens of billions then pays 15% on only $30 million of it so he can claim he has a 15% effective tax rate while I don't make even one million and pay 20+% on all but maybe 10% of it.
Also forget the 1%, that is a very carefully chosen category so it includes those who have worked hard to earn more than others and includes doctors, lawyers, and engineers. It is the 0.1% by wealth who have 40% of our nations wealth and continue to do so year on year so they are gaining 40% of the wealth we produce each year. We need them to stop getting more than 0.1% of new wealth and start paying their fair share.
Unless of course you still pay sales tax when you buy something and property tax... then you are entitled to everything you mentioned above since they are all funded with state level taxation and not federal tax.
Lets stop pretending this fishing expedition to retroactively punish people who used bitcoin before there were rules regarding how they should "pay [their] feckin taxes."
" If they're doing no wrong,"
Therein lies the crux of the problem the IRS is demanding history on users during the period before "right" had been determined. Bitcoin users were required to guess what to do. This is akin to determining traffic cams will constitute sufficient cause to punish jay walking and then demanding the footage from the past five years to retroactively punish... and given the way the IRS operates to assess penalties for being late paying the fines on the retroactive citations.
"None of the exchanges report income in 1099's or as financial transactions, so they're either blatantly, flagrantly violating securities laws (oh yeah, they're selling securities without license to non-accredited investors) or they're violating money laundering laws by exchanging currencies (you do believe bitcoins are a currency, don't you?) without reporting to the IRS under money laundering laws."
Incorrect, Coinbase does report. This is from the period of time before it was legally ruled that bitcoin exchanges counted as money exchanges and needed to do so. The IRS also had not made a determination during this period. People who utilized and exchanged virtual currencies who did report to the IRS had to make something up to put it under and how they did so could have drastic repercussions to tax rates. A bit part of the issue here is the IRS is trying to apply later determinations retroactively.
"The exchanges have reported publicly some number of users, and if the net number of users to reported exchanges is significantly less than the number of entities reporting capital gains, then there's probable cause to believe that tax fraud is occurring in bitcoin earnings."
Not at all, large numbers of users may have suffered a net loss in which case there is no penalty for not reporting and certainly not tax fraud.
"Either the bitcoin is a good to be sold or exchanged, in which case it's liable to sales tax, and clearly tax fraud has been occurring"
Actually all sales which are covered federally fall under interstate commerce and are exempt from sales tax. The IRS has zero authority to collect or police anything but income tax.
The tax cheating you should be concerned about is generally labeled by the IRS as "tax planning."
"Of course, every search warrant ever, and every subpoena ever has been issued with assumed guilt?"
This is not a search warrant, a search warrant must be specific and name a specific target and what they hope to find. It is supposed to require probable cause a justice believes sufficient to indicate the warrant will enable law enforcement to find the evidence they seek. The bar is much lower than beyond a reasonable doubt but there is a bar.
This is, hey give us all your records just in case there might be something in there somewhere that suggests someone might have done something even though we have no idea who that might have been, what they might have done, or even a reason to think anyone did anything at all.
Since neither of those America's represent most of us real people I'm going with the same group of us vote for... none of the above.
Right, sounds like all you have to do is identify yourself and thereby, according to the IRS, prevent Coinbase from including you in anything they disclose. If everyone who had an account in that period does so coinbase would be required to turn nothing over to the IRS.
If the IRS public position is that the request only covers unidentified individuals does that mean anyone can send certified mail to the IRS indicating they used coinbase and be excluded from the request without anything further being sent to the IRS?
All my life brotha.
The furthest I've traveled down a road because of something was that time I invented the digital book reader, even had a custom low power linux built for it and interface made. I was inspired by my old sony clie palm counterpart and discovering what a great experience it was to read on it. I was even working on the prototype hardware when in my spare time while working at an office depot when some third party company you've never heard of (which was later purchased of course, Amazon or B&N can't remember) announced they'd developed one. I'd have beaten them by a heavy margin if I'd hadn't been trying to buy everything and live on like $300 a week even still only being able to work on it in my spare time.
Granted this more kindle fire than kindle and at the time the battery life would have been more like 6-8hrs than the 3-5 days I get with my kindle and e-ink. Had I finished it, it still probably would have taken me months more to get money together for a patent and I'd have needed to research and put together the application myself.
What an odd idea. I work on a fortune 500 dotcom and my experience is very little of importance happens in the browser. That is just an interface, everything important happens on the backend. If you are building your backend in javascript you are making poor choices akin to the previous extremely popular bad decision of writing backends in java.
Python and Perl are solid options, arguably Ruby will pass but then Python and Perl glue in C/C++ code to give a good combination of ease and performance. Honestly, well written Perl 5 on a current interpreter probably offers the best performance these days and has absorbed the best features of newer high level languages but sadly is nowhere near as popular as it was when it was an overchosen slow and bug prone CGI monger. Python is good enough and has enough momentum that it will catch up in a decade or so. Plus Perl 5 could be tough for someone new... searching for information on how to x or y yields tons of results and someone new has no way of knowing which are old cruft and not, especially because the old cruft answers all still work.
They are right, this would be a huge boost to revenue if done correctly. Unfortunately they will never do it correctly. First, this is a far cheaper distribution option so why are they charging more than the theater ticket price? Just cut out the theater middle man and keep his cut of the profits. The studios could even collaborate and build their own MPAA non-profit distribution service so studios pay only operating costs and all the profits pass through and then lay off all the obsolete middle men. Offer direct to consumer ultra high quality streams and site direct blu-ray sales from the get go, use an algorithm that accounts for the film budget and gradually lowers price inversely to purchase rate and time and at some point shifts to a bucket that is available for on demand streaming with a fixed monthly fee Netflix style that after expenses simply gets divided out according to proportion of views. All playstation vue style with 5 simultaneous devices.
If existing boxes of this sort are any indication they will lock down playback controls and not allow you to pause or replay the movie. This obsession with reducing the quality of experience for the consumer in order to keep third party services alive is what is hurting. Instead of fully embrace the kind of enhanced experience you could provide as well as the cost reduction of optimized distribution. The better the legal avenues the less it will be worth the hassle and risk of piracy. Forget legal risks, you have to find content, risk fakes, risk bad quality, and pay for equipment to store content. If someone is doing it as a cost saving measure they either couldn't have afforded much content in the first place or couldn't afford the volume of content they consume.
Don't confuse fluctuations caused by day trading and a small market that can be moved by many players with instability of system itself to be able to function as a unit of trade. Some types of jet engine aren't able to produce sustained thrust until brought up to full speed. Also don't confuse the current price of speculators with the actual value. Just because a handful of people were willing to give away an island like Manhattan for a handful of beads and trinkets doesn't mean that is the actual value either islands or beads and trinkets. In a small pocket market it is possible to make or lose a great deal of money speculating and for things to be greatly overvalued or undervalued. That has nothing to do with government regulation and everything to do with the size of the market.
I guess what I'm saying isn't that bitcoin price stability isn't a real problem today, it is. But given the size of the market this is expected. If dollars were exchanged in a similar market you'd see similar stability. If you'd sat on a trillion dollars over that 5 year period you'd have lost as much as the total value of all the bitcoin while others would point and say that you still have a trillion dollars. Where would that value have gone? It would have been given away to other people who already have more than they know what to do with by that government you are so fond of.
Is the island that is bitcoin being sold for trinkets or is the box of trinkets that is bitcoin valued like an island? The truth is probably somewhere in between but the concrete determining factor of supply only moves in one direction with bitcoin, demand can go either way but as the total amount of demand grows so with the constant and always present demand that does not fluctuate. I think that a floating unit bitdollar traded to five decimal places would help perception because there is a long long way for bitcoin to go and that is going to mean the common unit of trade will need to shifted several decimal places over. Eventually 1.0 BTC can and should be a unit that nations might trade not people, so people flinching at having trouble to understand $2,000 or even $10,000 for "just one bitcoin" are going to do nothing but get in the way as more and more bitcoin transactions occur and more units of trade worth about a dollar are needed.
Greed eventually gets you. Investing in bitcoin early paid off for you, will you hold a grudge against others bought the same BTC and risked holding it against instability, fluctuation, competing digital currencies, etc and sell it for $100,000 or even a million some day? Eventually you sold and eventually they will too and that BTC will go in circulation because it will eventually be too tempting to have what that BTC can buy. They will spend it, and then it will circulate, rinse and repeat which is what debunks the early adopters ponzi scheme nonsense. Early adopters are essentially early investors. What they pull out is no worse than a Zuckerburg or a Gates.
You are missing the most important aspect of a currency and it isn't prices. It is how units are distributed because if the smallest units of gold you can get are quarter grams and gold is worth $1000 a gram what will you use to buy bread in a gold based currency? Fiat currencies use credit, so don't forget the impact on existing credit in the event of deflation or inflation. Deflation is devastating in a fiat system because the entire system is based on debt and suddenly the value owed is substantially higher than it was yesterday and the debts are structured on the assumption the currency used to pay them will be more plentiful and worth less tomorrow and suddenly it is worth more. Prices will have to drop because people will be getting fewer units of currency, but businesses generally run off credit what happens when they have to pay the same number of dollars tomorrow but take in less due to lower prices and can't successfully sell goods at higher prices to offset it because the entire market for their goods is now worth less each day? New costs will be lower so that will help but they'll have to cut wages and/or layoff staff to meet existing debts. Next year they won't be able to do either, etc. The number of years is of course made up but the pattern is not.
In a system mathematically guaranteed to deflate deflation is not such an issue, overly rapid deflation is similar to inflation in a fiat system since a floating unit of trade should exist suddenly your 1.0 btc is worth dramatically more bitdollars and prices would increase. You don't have such a large issue with credit freezing because the system isn't based on using credit to distribute currency. Really there is no inflation in such a system, only deflation rate. A severe reduction in deflation rate relative what any creditor anticipated would mean paying back more value than expected which might be huge for certain borrowers but would far less dramatic across the whole economy since there would be far less debt in the first place.
On the contrary, the purchasing power of any major government fiat currency shifts by far more daily than the purchasing power of bitcoin. If you held half the worlds bitcoin and half the worlds US dollars in your pocket the bitcoin would have moved by a greater percentage value relative to euros but your actual wealth would change far more dramatically on a down dollar day than bitcoin day.
Bitcoin needs two things to be perceived as more stable. The first and biggest is a floating unit of exchange call it a bitdollar. 1.0 BTC is not A bitcoin, it's just a 1 in a decimal place. As long as that unit roughly correlates a relative point such as typical single unit major fiat values or a commodity such as the largest unit required to purchase a gram of gold or barrel of oil at a given moment. If the currency deflates by a factor of ten relative to that point, the bitdollar would shift a decimal place so your wallet that held 1 bitdollar before now holds 10 bitdollars. So long as fiat is in major use 1 bitdollar should always be able to purchase more than zero but less than two of any major fiat currency. This and wider adoption would create a better perception of the stability of bitcoin. The value of bitcoin relative to anything is just perception, but we know it is mathematically always more over time so while there should probably be a cooking period before the value shifts and a central reference to check the status, maybe a month cooking before the bitdollar shifts, once it has shifted it should not go backwards. It also means the stability problem with bitcoin is a perception problem.
Actually you are incorrect. Currency systems must either inflate or deflate because actual economies grow and shrink. Currency is the representation of an economy, it's design goes hand in hand with the success of the actual economy it represents. These structures are based on greed, in order for currency to function correctly it must flow. A small amount of inflation or deflation isn't something a currency can't recover from but a currency designed to inflate can't continue to function in the face of extended deflation even at a low rate similarly a deflationary currency that inflates.
A currency that is designed to introduce more units is an inflationary currency, a currency where existing units increase in value is deflationary. Inflationary currencies require a system of distributing new units, in the case of fiat currencies that system is generally credit based. Deflationary currencies have a problem with scarcity of trading units, there may not be enough for all who need them to facilitate trade to actually be able to possess enough to easily do so. Gold units ran into this issue, bitcoin solves this issue by being a purely logical unit and thus theoretically infinitely divisible into smaller trade units (although there is currently a practical limit as well a technical limit in the implementation meant to reflect it).
Inflationary currencies require the free flow of credit to distribute new units in order to facilitate free movement of the value that currency represents, the minimum motivating factor in distributing currency into circulation is beating the inflation rate + expenses or else your currency will devalue. You must assume some sort of risk in order to generate returns greater than inflation + your expenses and continue to do to offset that inflation over time which creates the pressure in the currency. Inflation in such a system is accounted for in the design and essential but out of control inflation can contribute too much pressure which a large portion of the economy can not keep pace with creating rapid disparity leaving spenders unable to afford goods. Money stops being worth much. This is a short term problem if the source is resolved reasonably quickly because debts can be paid more easily and overall debt will be reduced.
Deflation in such a currency eliminates motivation at the top to exchange trade units reducing their distribution on all levels while at the same time increasing demand. The biggest problem is that because an economy based on credit is filled with outstanding credit those loans now all have be paid back with greater value units at the same rate. Prices and income will adjust to the deflated rate but existing debt will not, meaning you'll have less dollars in your pocket but owe just as much and more importantly everyone who might be a source of more dollars will be in the same position including retailers. Creditors will have a boom at first as the increased returns leave them flush and without need to take on new debt but the lack of demand for new credit, reduced willingness to extend it, and growing default rates will create a boom/bust pendulum and like all pendulums it would eventually grind to a halt.
A currency designed to deflate, such as bitcoin, reacts quite differently. The greed motivation is to assume risk for a return above deflation. Because currency is deflationary and a currency such as bitcoin allows trading infinitely smaller units, once established such a currency has no unit exchange problem. Such a thing is new but there still may be a need for a central organization to set the current standard unit of trade relative to another target (although a market and algorithm would actually be used to determine this unit there needs to be a common reference). A sort of floating bitdollar if you will that refers to the current decimal place that is the highest unit required in the purchase of a barrel of crude or a gram of gold or some such. Provided such a "bitdollar" is what wallet balances reflect and what is traded on exchanges you'd see far less wild fluctuations on exchanges and skepticism of the value of the currency because it would create a more unified perception of value.
Even if correct about Trump, fed rates are currently extremely low and the last hike was only because the market expected rates couldn't stay there forever not due to any kind of inflation. If anything we are close to deflation which is far far worse with a fiat currency. We actually NEED inflation in the US economy.
This is not a statement against a deflationary currency, I honestly think the math works out about the same but the US dollar is not deflationary and fiat systems depend on inflation to function properly.
What on earth makes them think people are going to read the articles before responding?