That is a line from Paul Krugman that the popular media has been spreading around.
Given I'm not American, I'd never heard of Paul Krugman till I just looked him up. And I haven't seen any popular media pronouncing on the Bitcoin. But I don't find it the slightest bit surprising that others also realise that Bitcoin has no intrinsic worth.
it has the same intrinsic value that gold has in that there are people who value it enough to exchange it for other goods.
That's not intrinsic value. Gold has intrinsic value because it's an attractive, non-tarnishable raw material that can be made into jewellery. It's value followed from the supply not meeting it's demand for that purpose. And of course in modern days it a useful raw material for other purposes, such as electrical contacts.
Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, it just has scarcity. A string of bits that represent an MP3 file does have intrinsic value, it doesn't have scarcity (except to the partical extent that some people obey the copyright law.)
Is scarcity enough to create value? Of course not. DirectX creates a 128 bit UID for every object, Each one is almost certainly a binary string that has never been expressed by mankind before. How much do you think they are worth?
Every snowflake is unique! What Am I bid?
They only ever created 100 of this Beanie Baby! Quick lets hoard them!
Finally, you seem to thing that a drug baron with a website currently accepting bitcoins guarantee the future of bitcoins. How insane is that!
All your nonsequiturs about Keynes and government control just mark you out as a Libertarian, and underline how appropriate my sig is.
But I'm just arguing because I enjoy an argument. Really, I don't want to persuade any libertarian not to believe in bitcoins. Better they waste their time and their money on that than guns.
Of course we're running out of oil. Oil is not infinite. Sorry, just being pedantic.
No, you just think you're being pedantic. The true pedant knows that all though oil is finite it'll never run out.
Why? Because it's like the connundrum with the frog in a pond that jumps half the distance to the bank each time. The frog never reaches the bank, even though it's a finite distance.
No matter how much man tries to take all the oil out of the ground, he can only ever extract part of what's there. There will always be some, clinging on in he cracks, or hidden in some small pocket we never discovered.
That too is encapsulated in peak oil theory. A bell curve gets ever closer to the x-axis at it's extremities, but it never actually reaches it.
yeah so where is this renewable energy that's cheaper than oil and isn't hydro dams? and you know when the oil companies will start dumping their pricing? the minute you have an alternative that's cheaper(taxes and subsidies excluded).
I repeat: Economics is not God. It doesn't need your worship.
It's kind of hard to argue that it remains a bubble when the panic button already hit and is past, and now it's relatively stable.
He he! So funny to see people coming out with all the same arguments as they did in the last bubble. Stable? It dropped $26 today. Stable?! That's a 5% drop. Real currencies don't do that, except in huge crisis.
Likewise, carry that globally and you see barely a 17% increase since 1980.
Who would have thought it. As we approach peak production the rate of increase of consumption slows. I'm sure someone somewhere must have predicted this...
You'll be telling me next that at some point soon after peak production, consumption starts to go down.
Erm... That says the study polled 400 commerical developers. In a random sample of commercial developers I'd be surprised to find a more than 1 Blackberry developer. Lets be generous and say there were 8. What significance then is "13% earn over $100,000? It means one developer earned over $100,000. Statistical significance? None.
Now, was it one of these surveys where they get a list of telephone numbers, and ring them up and ask if they'll cooperate with a survey? Or was it one of those ones where you get a modal pop-up on a web page, before you can access some article? Or was it one of those warez download pages where you have to fill out a survey before you can download the warez?
Are we really just believing any old nonsense that a company said were results of a survey?
We already do this when we store energy with a loss in various ways (fuel cells, batteries, etc).
Not the same. This isn't "storing" energy. That oil from the ground is a one time deal. It's not storing 1 unit to get 0.7 units later. It's expending 2.1 units to get 1 unit now.
Hubbert's mistake was thinking of oil reserves as all being more or less alike.
Says who? He did nothing of the sort.
When we look at the alternative hydrocarbon sources, we see that he was wrong to do so. What we can say about most of the newly-discovered reserves is that vast though they may be, they are much more expensive to extract than the traditional oilfields.
Thats EXACTLY what Hubbert said! The easy stuff is extracted first, and then the hard to get stuff. New discoveries of hard to get stuff are absolutely part of the theory from the very start.
False. I know the chemistry, I know the quantities of the various chemicals within, I can make a pretty highly-accurate prediction (one that can be tested, no less) of the number of joules of energy in my battery - and hence, the number of electrons.
No you can't. I give you two batteries, same label. One's straight out of the packet. One's been in my kids remote control car for a week. How is your chemistry going to tell the difference. It can't.
What if they're both new. Both labelled "Alkaline Battery" but from different manufacturers. They'll last a different length of time. How's your chemistry going to tell me which how long each will last? It can't.
You don't know what's in the can. The point is, you don't need to go into the can. You can predict the end of the useful energy from charting the output over time.
So, how can we test the prediction of "peak oil"? How do we know the original capacity of oil? Short of that, it's a guess - not a theory, not even a hypothesis. It's a sound bite, nothing else.
Take bag of jelly beans. Blind folded, you have to pick out a jelly bean. If it's red you get to eat it. If not, it's back in the bag. Repeat over and over.
How many red jelly beans in the bag? You can't tell at first. But plot your rate of finding jelly beans on a chart, and you can see pretty closely when your rate of finding red jelly beans will dry up.
What if you take a peek, and notice that there's a few more red beans on the left of the bag than the right? Well then you can temporarily improve your rate of finding them. But it makes no difference to the long term. The number of jelly beans doesn't change, no matter what. That 100% of jelly beans is always the same 100%, and that early prediction is still a good one.
What if you start panicing and notice that some of the sugar and jelly crumbs at the bottom of the bag are red... Makes no difference. It was already known about before, and just shows how desperate you've become.
Can you imagine if we had actually large-scale invested in solar 20 years ago? Those panels would've cost an arm and a leg, for marginal output, and would need replacing right about.. nowish.
Not only can I imagine, I can remember on a personal basis. Not PV but solar water heating. Free hot water for 6 months of the year from 2 homemade solar panels. What good would waiting have done me? I'm financially better off that you have been from not doing it.
No one was calling for mass PV 20 years ago. Back then it was mostly wind turbines and hydro, along with solar heating. But in the last 10 years PV has certainly become worthwhile.
Also, I'm a libertarian, and so far I've made a lot more from bitcoins than they have cost me. I've paid about an extra $5 per month in electricity costs for mining over the last 4 months since I started, and I've already acquired about $200 worth of goods bought from bitcoins.
As ever in these speculative bubbles, be it tulip bulbs, dotcoms or beanie babies, the question is did you get in early enough, and will you exit before the crash.
I think liberals just hate bitcoins
No more than I hate tulips, websites or cloth bags of beads. Bitcoins just give me a deja-vu feeling, and a bit of amusement as to who's falling for the latest fad, and why.
~sigh~ as you're so sure of yourself could you please provide a proof or the references to back up your statement.
How many Hubbert Peak Oil theories do you think there are? What other reference do you need? If this stuff is unfamiliar to you, Amazon has plenty of books on the topic. Twilight in the Desert is comprehensive on the evidence, but quite a heavy tome. There's probably something lighter there if you look.
Slashdot Mirror
That is a line from Paul Krugman that the popular media has been spreading around.
Given I'm not American, I'd never heard of Paul Krugman till I just looked him up. And I haven't seen any popular media pronouncing on the Bitcoin. But I don't find it the slightest bit surprising that others also realise that Bitcoin has no intrinsic worth.
it has the same intrinsic value that gold has in that there are people who value it enough to exchange it for other goods.
That's not intrinsic value. Gold has intrinsic value because it's an attractive, non-tarnishable raw material that can be made into jewellery. It's value followed from the supply not meeting it's demand for that purpose. And of course in modern days it a useful raw material for other purposes, such as electrical contacts.
Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, it just has scarcity. A string of bits that represent an MP3 file does have intrinsic value, it doesn't have scarcity (except to the partical extent that some people obey the copyright law.)
Is scarcity enough to create value? Of course not. DirectX creates a 128 bit UID for every object, Each one is almost certainly a binary string that has never been expressed by mankind before. How much do you think they are worth?
Every snowflake is unique! What Am I bid?
They only ever created 100 of this Beanie Baby! Quick lets hoard them!
Finally, you seem to thing that a drug baron with a website currently accepting bitcoins guarantee the future of bitcoins. How insane is that!
All your nonsequiturs about Keynes and government control just mark you out as a Libertarian, and underline how appropriate my sig is.
But I'm just arguing because I enjoy an argument. Really, I don't want to persuade any libertarian not to believe in bitcoins. Better they waste their time and their money on that than guns.
Did you ever hear the phrase "damning with faint praise".
"Bitcoin is not as bad as the Papiermark after the Germans lost World War I!"
Of course we're running out of oil. Oil is not infinite.
Sorry, just being pedantic.
No, you just think you're being pedantic. The true pedant knows that all though oil is finite it'll never run out.
Why? Because it's like the connundrum with the frog in a pond that jumps half the distance to the bank each time. The frog never reaches the bank, even though it's a finite distance.
No matter how much man tries to take all the oil out of the ground, he can only ever extract part of what's there. There will always be some, clinging on in he cracks, or hidden in some small pocket we never discovered.
That too is encapsulated in peak oil theory. A bell curve gets ever closer to the x-axis at it's extremities, but it never actually reaches it.
Check, check, check. Now what part of this do you imagine differs from peak oil theory?
oiljews
Fuck off you bigotted cunt.
yeah so where is this renewable energy that's cheaper than oil and isn't hydro dams?
and you know when the oil companies will start dumping their pricing? the minute you have an alternative that's cheaper(taxes and subsidies excluded).
I repeat:
Economics is not God. It doesn't need your worship.
In fact, during April gold dropped $200, or 17% in value within the period of a few days.
In April, within 7 days Bitcoin dropped 70%. I was just taking issue with you believing in the days since then, Bitcoin had become stable.
Precious metals, I hope you know, are used as a real currency.
Precious metals have intrinsic value. Bitcoin has none.
We've also drained many a AA battery to its end to come-up with and tweak those averages/extrapolations so that they are accurate.
Absolutely, but with more than 50 nations on the far side of the peak, over decades, it's not as if Hubbert Peak theory is untested.
Not that you can prove via analogy anyway.
Indeed, it was just an analogy. People always end up arguing more about the analogies rather than the substantive topic!
It's kind of hard to argue that it remains a bubble when the panic button already hit and is past, and now it's relatively stable.
He he! So funny to see people coming out with all the same arguments as they did in the last bubble. Stable? It dropped $26 today. Stable?! That's a 5% drop. Real currencies don't do that, except in huge crisis.
Likewise, carry that globally and you see barely a 17% increase since 1980.
Who would have thought it. As we approach peak production the rate of increase of consumption slows. I'm sure someone somewhere must have predicted this...
You'll be telling me next that at some point soon after peak production, consumption starts to go down.
Now you're just trolling.
There's no handwaving. This is Hubbert Peak Theory. Be ignorant of it if you want.
Erm... That says the study polled 400 commerical developers. In a random sample of commercial developers I'd be surprised to find a more than 1 Blackberry developer. Lets be generous and say there were 8. What significance then is "13% earn over $100,000? It means one developer earned over $100,000. Statistical significance? None.
Now, was it one of these surveys where they get a list of telephone numbers, and ring them up and ask if they'll cooperate with a survey? Or was it one of those ones where you get a modal pop-up on a web page, before you can access some article? Or was it one of those warez download pages where you have to fill out a survey before you can download the warez?
Are we really just believing any old nonsense that a company said were results of a survey?
Supporting Obj-C isn't much good unless they also have Cocoa-Touch.
We already do this when we store energy with a loss in various ways (fuel cells, batteries, etc).
Not the same. This isn't "storing" energy. That oil from the ground is a one time deal. It's not storing 1 unit to get 0.7 units later. It's expending 2.1 units to get 1 unit now.
Ha ha ha! File that away with the earth being 6000 years old, and God planting dinosaur bones to test our faith.
I see that you haven't read the book.
However, that seems an awful lot like counting to me, even when combined with averaging and extrapolation you still counted first.
Which is no different than counting the number of barrels of oil that come out of the ground each month. No one is disputing you can count that.
Hubbert's mistake was thinking of oil reserves as all being more or less alike.
Says who? He did nothing of the sort.
When we look at the alternative hydrocarbon sources, we see that he was wrong to do so. What we can say about most of the newly-discovered reserves is that vast though they may be, they are much more expensive to extract than the traditional oilfields.
Thats EXACTLY what Hubbert said! The easy stuff is extracted first, and then the hard to get stuff. New discoveries of hard to get stuff are absolutely part of the theory from the very start.
Can you point to a link where you did answer it?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3704679&cid=43600651
False. I know the chemistry, I know the quantities of the various chemicals within, I can make a pretty highly-accurate prediction (one that can be tested, no less) of the number of joules of energy in my battery - and hence, the number of electrons.
No you can't. I give you two batteries, same label. One's straight out of the packet. One's been in my kids remote control car for a week. How is your chemistry going to tell the difference. It can't.
What if they're both new. Both labelled "Alkaline Battery" but from different manufacturers. They'll last a different length of time. How's your chemistry going to tell me which how long each will last? It can't.
You don't know what's in the can. The point is, you don't need to go into the can. You can predict the end of the useful energy from charting the output over time.
So, how can we test the prediction of "peak oil"? How do we know the original capacity of oil? Short of that, it's a guess - not a theory, not even a hypothesis. It's a sound bite, nothing else.
Take bag of jelly beans. Blind folded, you have to pick out a jelly bean. If it's red you get to eat it. If not, it's back in the bag. Repeat over and over.
How many red jelly beans in the bag? You can't tell at first. But plot your rate of finding jelly beans on a chart, and you can see pretty closely when your rate of finding red jelly beans will dry up.
What if you take a peek, and notice that there's a few more red beans on the left of the bag than the right? Well then you can temporarily improve your rate of finding them. But it makes no difference to the long term. The number of jelly beans doesn't change, no matter what. That 100% of jelly beans is always the same 100%, and that early prediction is still a good one.
What if you start panicing and notice that some of the sugar and jelly crumbs at the bottom of the bag are red... Makes no difference. It was already known about before, and just shows how desperate you've become.
Efficiency alone is a poor argument
Good thing no one was using efficiency as their only argument then.
Can you imagine if we had actually large-scale invested in solar 20 years ago? Those panels would've cost an arm and a leg, for marginal output, and would need replacing right about.. nowish.
Not only can I imagine, I can remember on a personal basis. Not PV but solar water heating. Free hot water for 6 months of the year from 2 homemade solar panels. What good would waiting have done me? I'm financially better off that you have been from not doing it.
No one was calling for mass PV 20 years ago. Back then it was mostly wind turbines and hydro, along with solar heating. But in the last 10 years PV has certainly become worthwhile.
What increased consumption? Consumption (in the US at least)
You're so near to answering your own question, why didn't you continue that line of thought?
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Resources/2013/04/11/OPEC-China-leads-in-oil-demand-growth/UPI-60091365683719/
Also, I'm a libertarian, and so far I've made a lot more from bitcoins than they have cost me. I've paid about an extra $5 per month in electricity costs for mining over the last 4 months since I started, and I've already acquired about $200 worth of goods bought from bitcoins.
As ever in these speculative bubbles, be it tulip bulbs, dotcoms or beanie babies, the question is did you get in early enough, and will you exit before the crash.
I think liberals just hate bitcoins
No more than I hate tulips, websites or cloth bags of beads. Bitcoins just give me a deja-vu feeling, and a bit of amusement as to who's falling for the latest fad, and why.
~sigh~ as you're so sure of yourself could you please provide a proof or the references to back up your statement.
How many Hubbert Peak Oil theories do you think there are? What other reference do you need? If this stuff is unfamiliar to you, Amazon has plenty of books on the topic. Twilight in the Desert is comprehensive on the evidence, but quite a heavy tome. There's probably something lighter there if you look.
Space cadet.