Indeed. We have been inadequately teaching economics.
Fiat money is mostly backed by a debt of the same amount. For every $ I have at the bank, somebody owes 1$ to the bank. So, my money at the bank is as "real" as the debt backing it. I trust that my bank will be able to recover the value of an unpaid debt, and this is the reason why our banking system mostly works.
By contrast, the value of 1 BTC is backed by nothing, because nobody "owes" me its value, and that's the reason its value may be $500 one day and $1000 another day. Calling this "money" is a joke.
Then you've never watched it's 25%+ fluctuations up and down over the last 10 years.
You can't measure the stability of a currency just by comparing it to your own currency.
If we followed that line of reasoning, the only stable currency to you would be one which is pegged to the US Dollar.
The price of one Euro fluctuates if you measure it in Dollars, yes, but that does not speak against the stability of the Euro more than it does against the stability of the Dollar.
Nobody can enforce the value of anything. At most, central banks have the power to avoid their own money to be overvalued, by using the printing press and selling their own money in the market. But this is just a one-way power that does not work in the opposite direction: If the market decides that your currency is not worth what is worth, you will run out of dollars (or whatever foreign money you have) trying to buy your own currency to "sustain" it before you can convince the market otherwise. As bitcoin does not have a central bank, and more importantly, bitcoin is not a fiat currency that you can make out of thin air, your idea of "buy and sell bitcoins" is fatally flawed.
No "chain" here. This is not SSL, this is GPG, and the term used here is "web of trust".
To consider the web of trust broken you would need to find that one of those fake GPG keys is signed by someone you trust.
I see dropbox still tries to mislead people into thinking their client is Free (and according to you, succeeds in it). Their website weasels around the subject but the truth is that only the small piece that integrates with the file manager is open source and the actual client is not.
Exactly. This is from the nautilus-dropbox Debian package available in non-free:
Installing this package will download the proprietary dropbox binary
from dropbox.com.
That's far from being free software, unfortunately.
Unfortunately, RMS seems to be a little bit
confused about this. The current ISO CD
image for the distribution he recommends
contains some non-free packages (for java and nvidia support), while Debian (official) CDs do not contain any non-free software at all.
Being a Debian maintainer myself, I'm of course absolutely delighted to see a lot of people here in Extremadura to use a Debian-derived distribution, but I have mixed feelings
about the fact that it's advertised
as a free-software-only distribution when it's not completely true.
Slashdot Mirror
In the reproducible builds effort, "gzip -n" is the norm.
One size doesn't fit all, so it should come as no surprise that a currency made for industrial nations doesn't work so well for a tourist economy.
What? Do you mean a tourist economy somehow *needs* to have an inflationary currency? Please explain why.
Indeed. We have been inadequately teaching economics. Fiat money is mostly backed by a debt of the same amount. For every $ I have at the bank, somebody owes 1$ to the bank. So, my money at the bank is as "real" as the debt backing it. I trust that my bank will be able to recover the value of an unpaid debt, and this is the reason why our banking system mostly works. By contrast, the value of 1 BTC is backed by nothing, because nobody "owes" me its value, and that's the reason its value may be $500 one day and $1000 another day. Calling this "money" is a joke.
Version 1.0 of Perl 6.0? Why not just "Version 6.0 of Perl"?
Euro, is very spendable, mostly stable.
Then you've never watched it's 25%+ fluctuations up and down over the last 10 years.
You can't measure the stability of a currency just by comparing it to your own currency. If we followed that line of reasoning, the only stable currency to you would be one which is pegged to the US Dollar. The price of one Euro fluctuates if you measure it in Dollars, yes, but that does not speak against the stability of the Euro more than it does against the stability of the Dollar.
Nobody can enforce the value of anything. At most, central banks have the power to avoid their own money to be overvalued, by using the printing press and selling their own money in the market. But this is just a one-way power that does not work in the opposite direction: If the market decides that your currency is not worth what is worth, you will run out of dollars (or whatever foreign money you have) trying to buy your own currency to "sustain" it before you can convince the market otherwise. As bitcoin does not have a central bank, and more importantly, bitcoin is not a fiat currency that you can make out of thin air, your idea of "buy and sell bitcoins" is fatally flawed.
They are using git, so this is "I'm not pulling changes from you" instead.
No "chain" here. This is not SSL, this is GPG, and the term used here is "web of trust". To consider the web of trust broken you would need to find that one of those fake GPG keys is signed by someone you trust.
I see dropbox still tries to mislead people into thinking their client is Free (and according to you, succeeds in it). Their website weasels around the subject but the truth is that only the small piece that integrates with the file manager is open source and the actual client is not.
Exactly. This is from the nautilus-dropbox Debian package available in non-free:
Installing this package will download the proprietary dropbox binary from dropbox.com.
That's far from being free software, unfortunately.
Being a Debian maintainer myself, I'm of course absolutely delighted to see a lot of people here in Extremadura to use a Debian-derived distribution, but I have mixed feelings about the fact that it's advertised as a free-software-only distribution when it's not completely true.