The coriolis effect on the inner ear would make any astronauts in such a centrifuge permanently nauseous and disoriented. You need a _much_ large diameter to get a good enough approximation of linear gravity..
This is a legitimate issue that needs to be addressed, although it should be pointed out that rotations of 1 RPM or less generally don't cause the nausea associated with a centrifuge. That sets the minimum diameter of a wheel to achieve at least a partial simulated gravity (aka something like the gravity on the Moon) that may resolve some of the problems, and that diameter certainly is well within reasonable engineering limits on both the material and size for placing such a thing on a spacecraft.
Even having a tether or a "rope" of some kind connecting two masses where the astronauts are sleeping in one of the ends would be more than sufficient.... and it wouldn't have to be that large of a vehicle. It would be on the order of about 100 meters of cable that could "hold" something the size of a space capsule. I don't think that is necessarily a huge engineering requirement to get that to work.
It sounds like they would be able to conceive, and be able to carry to term, but any girls born would have a significant chance of being born sterile; I think they indicated this of boys born as well (or the adult males becoming sterile, not sure, but either circumstance is not a good situation). Myself, I think the article intends this as somewhat of a best-case (or, a not-worst-case) scenario; there are certainly worse outcomes that could come of such a pregnancy.
Where in any scientific literature is that "fact" ever suggested or derived from? How do you know that the offspring would be sterile?
I'm not saying that such a result is completely impossible, but the available literature says nothing to that effect with the exception of pure speculation about what might happen. That is speculation and not experimental proof. Until somebody or something (hopefully a rat or a mouse to start with) gets pregnant after conceiving in space and their babies are born, then have a 3rd generation, we won't know. If those babies can't have babies of their own, that would certainly be something worth speculating about at that point.
Unfortunately, no such experiment has ever been performed and you can't possibly come to any sort of conclusion of any kind at all. Wild ass speculation about sex belongs in fiction, not as a scientific discussion.
My guess: other than trying to find some way to mitigate against radiation hazards (which are legitimate both here on the Earth as well as in space), there isn't going to be a single difference and kids born in space will be able to come to the Earth and live a normal life if they choose. There may be some issues of decalcification in space (aka some "brittle bones") or some other issues, but the truth is we simply just don't know. The ability to reproduce in space is something that is just a huge question mark because nothing has ever been done to realistically study the issue at all. We simply don't know what will happen if you try to raise a kid in space.
Heck, we don't even know what the physiological effects of spaceflight are on a teenager for that matter as nobody under 20 has ever gone into space. We know a little about old folks as some senior citizens have certainly been in space, but not young kids. There was a study done of a pregnant rat who flew into space on the Shuttle and delivered in space, and the kids came back and were completely healthy. But that wasn't a long-term study and the conception took place on the Earth before the spaceflight, not to mention that two weeks in a Shuttle wasn't long enough to really note other long-term health issues that might come into play.
Relativity is really an extension of Newton's laws of mechanics, and ought to be seen in that light. Isaac Newton explained the laws of motion with some rather simple equations that even now mostly work correctly. What Einstein did was to refine those equations with some tweaking when you start getting to the speed of light and having to deal with major gravity wells. If you throw out those extra "fudge factors", you still have to deal with Newton and general Celestial Mechanics.
Where a successful theory proves useful is if it can make predictions on a scientific experiment when that experiment hasn't happened yet. Better yet, when the theory suggests results from an experiment that hasn't even been designed yet before the theory was put together. Relativity does all that and much more. In every case where relativity was put to the test, the results have always come back confirming relativity to within the experimental margin of error. Every single bloody time it is tried those results come back.
More to the point, if you are doing anything in space, including using something mundane like the global positioning satellite system, you have to take into account relativity for any of those calculations about where you are or what time it is. It doesn't have to be exotic stuff like an inter-galactic space probe but something much more mundane and ordinary and certainly with the technology we are using today here and now on the Earth. Relying strictly on Newton's equations for the position of an object in space is going to cause you to miss that object as it will be somewhere else instead. When traveling between planets, much less travel between stars, knowing the full extent of relativity is very much important to those calculations.
Only a theory? Yeah, but it is a pretty successful theory and it would take an extraordinary person to show either a refinement to that theory or a flat-out replacement of the concepts to come up with something better that agrees with actual experimentation or life experiences. Having airplanes falling on your head because of a faulty GPS guidance system wouldn't be a good thing for your health.
Do you really think if a man and a woman really want to get together to copulate, that there will be any real problem?
The issue at hand is that the astronauts that go up on most of the current space missions are almost all married and older, which implies they generally won't put too much effort into the act.
On the other hand, if you get a couple of horny teenagers together, I have no doubt that they will be able to figure out how to get it accomplished. When I think about the stuff I did with my wife when I was first married (and before.... well I'll let you speculate) I can't even imagine doing that now that a couple of decades have passed.
As for interpersonal relationship, that will all mostly work itself out. If somebody wants to be real stupid, there certainly are dozens or hundreds of ways to kill yourself in space. Most people picked for spaceflight will generally be those who are of a stable mental temperament where doing stupid things is not going to be in their nature. If they do something stupid, their genes will be removed from the gene pool, so who cares? I don't know of any colonization effort that presumes just one or two couples going.
On the other hand, I've heard that generally you want to either have an all man, all woman, or keep the ratio of men to women at 50:50 for any extended trip of this nature. Even if you dismiss the issues of sexual dynamics, having just a single woman or a small minority of women is a bad thing for morale for a whole lot of reasons... and it is speculated that the same thing applies to just a single guy among a whole bunch of women. Keeping that ratio reasonably close to 50:50 really helps out just to keep everybody sane and not getting hung up over sexual issues like even moving onto somebody else if a relationship doesn't work out.
There is no energy source at our disposal and no technology whatsoever to make these delusions real. Yes, we can move more and more bits around, but that's the only thing that has changed in decades.
The energy source needed to travel to Mars and elsewhere in the Solar System is abundantly clear: a nuclear reactor. The U.S.S. Nautilus under the direction of Hyman Rickover showed exactly how such a vehicle could be built. If you can drive a submarine under the oceans for millions of miles only surfacing to get fresh food supplies, you can certainly drive a similar kind of vehicle in space... and to build a similar vehicle for a comparable price too.
Yes, you wouldn't want to necessarily launch a vehicle being propelled by a nuclear reactor, but you don't have to get that to happen. Flying between planets is not the same as landing or taking off from that planet, where you ought to have dedicated landing vehicles made just for that purpose.... at "both" ends of the trip. The spacecraft being used for travel between planets does not have to be aerodynamically shaped and can have features that don't have to survive re-entry and take off.
Essentially, take a "conventional" rocket to LEO, dock with the "spaceship" that travels to Mars, "park" the spacecraft on Phobos and then land in a small landing craft on Mars to get the "colony" built or whatever you want to do down there. When you want to make the trip back home, get the launcher from Mars built (or deal with the "landing craft" with a launch option) and return to your "spacecraft" for the return trip.
The energy needed for the whole trip is certainly something that can come from a nuclear reactor. It does take a rethinking about how you get around and a bit of creative engineering, but we don't have to discover new kinds of physics or even need a scientific breakthrough in order to make the trip. The "reactor" doesn't even have to be turned on until all of the parts are in space. We know how to build spaceships, as the ISS and MIR more than amply demonstrate. It is just pure engineering principles that are needed to make the trip, not something exotic like a warp drive.
The sad thing is there has yet been any sort of long-term study of mammalian reproduction in space of any kind. A whole lot of theories and speculation, but absolutely nothing in terms of actual results or hard data to suggest that it may be a problem.
The speculation about radiation is a legitimate issue, and reproduction on the part of people who have either gone through radiation therapy or have been involved with nuclear "incidents" (Chernobyl and Hiroshima). The effects upon human reproduction certainly are well documented, so at least that aspect of the speculation is based upon "hard science" that is reasonable.
On the other hand, there are ways to mitigate radiation exposure for a long-term flight in space. Living in something like a Bigelow Aerospace module (less metal for secondary radiation from the cosmic rays) and having a water shell around that to hold back the radiation will do wonders for travel in space. The speculation here is about reproduction, but the issues of general radiation exposure are also significant and there are some pretty good reasons to try to get that under control. It isn't as if we don't know how to build these kind of protective shields against radiation.
Water, if used in conjunction with a nuclear reactor (presuming fission reactor for the sake of the argument here), can be used not just as a shield against radiation but also as reaction mass for a rocket. Basically, for the bulk of the trip you can have some very good radiation protection until you are nearly at the destination. Steam can be sent at insane velocities (for extremely high ISP) or if you need to "turn on the jets" you can fire conventional rockets that consist of "cracked" hydrogen and oxygen. It also can be used for human consumption as well.
Otherwise, the rest of the issues about reproduction in a microgravity environment are flat out pure speculation as there is little really known about what happens in space with sexual reproduction. There have been some mice sent up to the ISS and there has also been a pregnant rat who delivered her babies on the Space Shuttle. Still, the mice have not been allowed to reproduce (they are all kept in separate cages for unrelated studies) and the mama rat was only up in space for a couple of weeks. By long-terms studies, I'm talking about a multi-generational study of the effects of spaceflight on something like a mouse or rat to see not only if they can figure out how to get the equipment together in space (I think most creatures and people will figure something out along the way) but also what sorts of adaptations might happen for critters in terms of how they behave if their entire life from conception to geriatric death occurs in space.
Until that happens, stories and headlines of this nature are pure bullshit and don't deserve any sort of recognition at all. The $100 billion space station to study these effects has already been built including the incubator/housing module to store these rodents and other creatures with a shorter lifespan but are none the less placental mammals who can certainly indicate what the impacts for human reproduction might actually be. Unfortunately NASA is so prudish about the concept of sex that they won't even bother seeing if it could happen and instead want to pretend it won't ever happen. I do not think human reproduction in space is necessarily going to be a problem, but I sure would like to find out... and find out before somebody conceives a baby in space where it is a human child that is the first test subject to find out. That certainly is something I consider to be pure evil... especially when we have the tools available to find out otherwise.
If it is a problem to reproduce in space, it would be nice to find out in the first place, but that should be with "hard science" and not random speculation from uninformed "experts" that don't have a clue about the topic at all.
To be more correct, the "Motion Picture Expert's Group" (or whatever the current acronym means at the moment... it seems to change with video groups from time to time like the definition of DVD) was established well before the MPEG-LA group was ever put together.
The problem is that the MPEG guys were just pure researchers and didn't give a damn about patents, royalties, or if anybody was going to even be using their stuff except as fellow computer hacker/researchers. Then it became political after a fashion when the web took off but that was when some of the leading video companies (Sony, Toshiba, etc.) got involved with the specification and started to commercialize the standards making process.
The MPEG-LA group came along when it turns out that many or indeed most of the concepts used were patented by many of the people who helped to draft the specification. This was by design so far as the techniques were incorporated into the standard both because they were good ideas, but also because these companies wanted to make a profit off of the standardization effort. There was no spirit of giving here, it was just pure business even if the standard was "available under reasonable licensing terms" to anybody who wanted to use it.
There aren't that many video file formats around (certainly far less than image file formats), and almost all of them require licensing and royalties if you want to use them. Open and "royalty free" formats are a rare and unusual thing on the whole.
I still fail to see what harm comes from hoarding money. That keeps getting repeated over and over again as if it is something evil but doesn't make sense to me at all.
Liquidity of the medium of exchange was a problem in the 18th and 19th Centuries simply because a silver dollar represented so much wealth (about a whole day's wage working about 12-14 hours) that it became very difficult to sub-divide its value. Motion Pictures cost a nickle (hence the Nickelodeon) and in some cases the scarcity of the currency in some remote areas was so extreme that trade essentially stalled out completely. Due to this lack of liquidity, some people postulated that the root cause of the liquidity issue was people hoarding the money.
I don't think that was the case. The problem really was that the metal involved was too valuable even as money, as "mere mortals" couldn't make change. It would be like trying to buy a Big Mac with a $5,000 bill, where the cashier receiving the money would just stare at you with a blank look or try to get help from the manager in terms of giving you change.... and wiping out all of the money in the till in the process. Can you imagine if that $5k note was the smallest bill in the drawer, but the burger still cost only $2-$3?
All hoarding does is suck money out of circulation, which drives up the value of the remaining money in circulation. As long as there isn't somebody counterfeiting the money or double spending the money (paying two people with the same coin... essentially a variation of counterfeiting), eventually the hoarder is going to spend the money or it will stay permanently out of circulation. Either way, it doesn't impact the value of the money, and only a fool will deliberately drive down prices if they have a large cache of money. Even then, doing so mostly hurts the person driving the value of the money down instead of the rest of the users of that money.
As for the psychological issues, I think that is mainly from people who are so stuck on living in an economic system that encourages inflation that alternatives aren't ever considered. While it has been the exception rather than the rule in America for sustained inflation to be happening, it has been over the past 70-80 years when that has been the case. There are very few people alive today that remember an era when inflation and deflation were usually fairly well balanced. That certainly was the case for most of the 19th Century, where the value of a dollar compared to the price of most things stayed roughly the same for nearly the entire century. That wasn't central planning, but rather the lack of it after a fashion.
The housing crisis was an example of what deflation is like. Housing values collapsed, making many mortgages worthless, which destroyed a vast amount of money. Banks became unwilling to lend money because it was much more valuable to them invested in securities than it was as a loan. I haven't quite understood explanations of why consumer prices weren't affected. Probably because most people already spend most of their money on necessities.
The reason why consumer prices (aka food, petroleum, etc.) weren't impacted with the "deflation" is because their prices were not impacted by the over inflation of the housing market except indirectly. Besides, the "remedies" used to fix the housing price collapse was to essentially inflate the dollar on a massive scale, and yes I'm talking about TARP as well as other "interventions".
Demand for consumer goods, especially food, has remained the same but the amount of money floating around has gone up. Simple economics suggest that would cause prices to rise, not fall. On the other hand, it is now much, much harder to get a home loan for a house than it was in the past and the people who might have qualified under the new rules are now unemployed and can't afford these homes or certainly have a reduced income. On top of rising food prices and rising prices for other consumer goods, they have even less money available for housing, thus the market for housing keeps dropping.
On top of all of this is the value of the dollar relative to other currencies. Keep in mind that one of the things which drove up housing prices in at least some parts of America was speculators and folks who had dollars from trade imbalances (more money going to other countries than coming to America), so those dollars had to go somewhere. Real estate has been a common investment area for people to spend money, as it is legal for non-nationals to own American real estate. This includes houses... even if it is just luxury houses. With the dollar so viciously devalued, this additional pressure on housing prices is no longer there, and then the real estate price collapse is feeding on itself as many of these "investors" are getting out of the American real estate market. Those that sold at the beginning of the collapse are probably glad they did now as well.
For those that claim that the past two years were deflationary, it was including housing prices and not ordinary consumer goods. It really isn't complicated, but efforts to prop up housing prices now are only making things worse. Rather than one big ouch and letting the prices for housing get to a realistic level, it is taking much longer to reach an equilibrium point... and hurting more people in the process.
Fiddling with the monetary supply (aka "printing" money or forcing inflation) is just another way to tax the citizens of a country.
I've heard it argued that in theory it would be possible to completely eliminate all taxes on the theory that the government merely could "issue" currency.... with the inflation being a more direct form of taxation and having a similar impact on the economic stability of the country. The problem with doing that is most government officials wouldn't know when to stop inflating the money, and there are other problems with a high rate of inflation in terms of impact up citizens. It would also be impossible to set up a "progressive" tax schedule.... but then again that may not be a terrible thing either. Most importantly, the government couldn't set up a complicated tax schedule to encourage/discourage certain kinds of enterprises as everybody.... rich and poor... would be equally impacted with inflation.
I don't know of any government who has tried the concept, but it is an interesting thing to consider.
I also don't know of anybody who has ascribed a skewing impact mathematically upon the Laffer Curve via inflation, as in high inflation impacts the amount of money that can be raised via taxes too by skewing the maximum tax rate. Perhaps somebody has tried, as I'm not into the academic side of economic that way.
Try it sometime.... if you care. If you "earned" income from any source in any form, it is all taxable and you are liable to report it.... at the current exchange rate when you file (or some other IRS-acceptable accounting system for income). It doesn't matter if you get paid in Euros, Pounds, cattle, or salt. If your total income is practically zero, you don't need to report the income or pay taxes.... but you have to keep the paperwork proving you don't owe taxes for 10 years. If you file you only have to keep the paperwork for 5 years.... they want you to file even if you don't owe or even are legally obligated to file.
The IRS has considered frequent flier miles as taxable income, but an exchange rate to dollars is usually hard to determine... hence why most people can get away with ignoring that as a source of reportable income.
Al Capone discovered the hard way what happens when you fail to report income earned.... even if his method of earning income was from "extra-legal" sources. That is by design. Go ahead and see if you have better lawyers than Al Capone was able to find, in an era now where grocery store receipts can be obtained years after the purchase from the store. I don't think having your income in Linden Dollars or Bitcoins is going to help you out.
The problem with the Japanese economy is multifold and I don't think you can simplify the issue down to just deflation. The problem is that the economy of Japan was structured for an inflationary currency, and it takes time to shift to another economic reality. They are still acting as if it is still an inflationary currency, but when deflation hits, you have to use a different playbook so to say as the rules are different. Some people can't adapt when that happens.
Also, like I said, large companies and government agencies benefit from an inflationary currency... but not necessarily ordinary people. You have things now like income taxes held in escrow where the government has access to the money now, but you don't get the "excess" money until the end of the year as a "refund". The "float" in this case (while the government has the money and you don't) effectively earns interest (or keeps the government from having to pay interest on that money) while the actual value drops due to inflation.
In a deflationary economy, such overpayment of taxes would be in effect interest being paid to you as a taxpayer when the refund comes. Ditto if the bank takes its sweet time in processing "checks" and other similar situations that involve a currency "float". On the other hand, check "kiting" would earn money for a bank and they might even encourage such practice.
It really throws the rules upside down, which is why bankers and government officials usually are against the concept. Ordinary people and small businesses, on the other hand, tend to do rather well and in fact come out ahead when deflation takes hold, as storing money in the equivalent of a penny jar or under your mattress (or the digital equivalent with Bitcoins) is essentially the same as making an investment. Real investing is done for things that beat the deflationary value.... which makes all investments in such a situation to be very conservative or for "sure things" (however you define that).
I hope you do realize that the current inflationary currencies do encourage foolish spending and are at least one of the major contributors to environmental damage around the world. It encourages people to buy larger houses or vehicles than they need, as spending tomorrow's income today is strongly encouraged. It is one of the reasons why debt is so common.... to the point that it is argued that all current fiat currency is just debt alone being sent around from one person to another. I don't think that is necessarily a good thing.
Anonymity of Bitcoin users is a big deal, and there are some on the Bitcoin forums who have raised the issue already and suggested various ways to identify who has used a Bitcoin or not.
As an example, the publicly known address for the EFF has caused a rather clear and public record of how many Bitcoins have been donated to that address. Obviously the EFF could use other addresses if somebody wants an "anonymous" donation, but the record is pretty clear that total anonymity is a false statement being perpetuated by some of the fans in the Bitcoin community.
Another perhaps more sinister example was a scammer who bilked a bunch of early Bitcoin users for about 2-3k Bitcoins early on, and a serious attempt was made to try and trace or even follow the coin transactions of that scammer. The trail ran cold after awhile when the coins were mixed with other transactions and thrown onto one of the exchanges... where the exchange didn't want to reveal who put the money in. For that kind of transaction, it has the anonymity of a paper bank note with a serial number. See also http://www.wheresgeorge.com/ for an example of how cash can be monitored and tracked... where Bitcoins are about as safe as most government currency in terms of preserving anonymity.
Fortunately, new addresses are easy to generate, and most of the websites that allow you to transfer Bitcoins to their service will allow you to generate a "one time" address for that one transaction. I've heard it is good for bookkeeping too as it separates the customers to identify exactly who has made a payment or not. In such a situation, anonymity is pretty strong and hard to break. You know that the coin has been spent, but you don't really know who has it until after it is spent again... likely to another one-off address.
What happens in terms of keeping double spending of the currency from happening is that any attempt to put in a transaction that has already been "spent" has that transaction simply rejected from the transaction block chain. Each block is created by a "block miner", and in order to "win" the block they have to trace all of the other incorporated transactions and verify that no double spending has happened. So they "earn" some Bitcoins (how new coins are created) plus get "transaction fees" for processing the block as well.... only if no double spending has happened. Yes, a meticulous search is done on each block to make sure that the complete history of all transactions has been followed to the origin.
There is a proposal to simplify the protocol a little bit in terms of eliminating transaction histories where all of the "outputs" have been spent in subsequent transactions, but that currently isn't happening yet. If that happens, it will improve anonymity a bit more so far as once you have spent the money you have received, the record of your even having it may be eventually eliminated too unless somebody is preserving that extended and expanded transaction history.
Start an M&M exchange where you trade M&Ms for Bitcoins. You might get some traction there.
The problem is that since Mars, Incorporated insists upon being paid in dollars, it ends up being a variation of a dollar exchange with a variation depending on the price of sugar and cocoa beans in dollars.
BTW, http://www.biddingpond.com/ is a good place to consider if you want to start small and sell M&Ms for Bitcoins.
Significant in this context is in comparison to other "private" currencies and scrip. There are local scrips that are used (such as Ithica Dollars or Canadian Tire Money) which are commonly used as alternative currencies, and Bitcoin seems to be doing at least as good as the best of these private currencies. Yes, that is a big fish in a small pond, but it does indicate that Bitcoin is "graduating" out of that circle of anti-government crusaders and moving into the hands of more normal people.
There are right now about 10 million Ithica Dollars in circulation at the moment (pulled from a quick Google search), so Bitcoins is in good company in terms of outreach and the depth of the market.
In terms of the volume of transactions in the currency, I'd have to look through the block explorer to see how much is actually changing hands. The interesting thing about that is how all of the transactions are published and in theory it is possible to trace at least where each "coin" has been spent (at least to what addresses it has gone to) traced back to the original generator. That is part of the protocol. Unfortunately, I'm at a loss right now to tell you how many are being exchanged or "traded" via transactions as I'm not sure the statistic is being monitored.... although it can be derived from the data.
The trade volume on Mt. Gox (the main currency exchange site) on the other hand is published and monitored.... with a daily volume at between 10k-50k bitcoins for conversions between dollars and bitcoins. While not huge, that is a fair bit of churn and certainly represents at least some people putting in what I would consider to be real money even if it is below the radar of most governments. With parity, I'd still put that in the realm of thousands of dollars being processed on a daily basis... something that a guy living in his mother's basement is unlikely to have. On average, about 70-100 offers are listed at any given time, and there are "dark offers" on that exchange (made but not listed to keep from skewing the market). Again, not huge, but compares to the cash flow of a small business and the exchange is starting to earn the exchange owner some real money off of the small fee he charges per transaction.
One thing that might kill Bitcoins overnight is somebody discovering a way to make an arbitrary hash with the SHA-256 algorithm in a fixed amount of time. Essentially, break the algorithm.
Then again, if that algorithm is broken, a whole lot of people are going to be pissed and the value of Bitcoins is going to be the least of their concerns. A gradual degradation of the algorithm (aka like the MD5 hacks) would merely result in the Bitcoin developers switching to another algorithm. It still is a big deal, but it would be something that would also be public knowledge if it happened and would earn somebody either a Nobel Prize or some similar recognition in mathematics or computer science.
Or if you don't trust the client software, you can "roll your own" software and provide an alternate implementation of the client with your own code. The "official" Bitcoin client itself is completely optional.
The computational power of the network is not the basis of Bitcoins. What matters is that generating the coins is difficult or even next to impossible (more the current situation as it will take an ordinary computer running nonstop about a year or more to generate coins now), so that introduces scarcity in the currency. It is this forced scarcity that allows some stuff to be generated but not a whole lot that gives the value to the Bitcoins. Any other similar mechanism that only allocates a few coins to somebody at a time would work, and it doesn't have to be CPU cycles.... although that is perhaps one of the easiest ways to make it work.
An economic system that works with systems of plenty has happened before. It is called a "gift culture", where your status in the community is based upon how much "giving" you have done. It did exist among some hunter/gather groups during times of abundance, and of particular note among the Polynesians in some islands where resources were abundant and population relatively low.
The most current example in a modern context is the open source/free software movements where people provide services as a way to "give back" to the community in some substantial fashion. What makes that culture work is that the resources are abundant (CPU time and network bandwidth) and the marginal transaction costs (aka "downloading" images, music, and software) are essentially free too.
If that starts to happen with things other than software, it would require 3D printers to become much more common. Yes, it is possible that you could print out a Colt.45 replica with such a device and do harm with it, but there are many other useful things with the technology too. When 3D printers can "print" a 3D printer with all of the microcontrollers and parts, that is when you will see such a thing really take off. Self-replication isn't happening yet. Until then, and perhaps even after that happens, there still will be a need for money as there still will be scarcity.... and printing "food" is going to be much harder than even printing out a door hinge.
Barter existed quite a bit before that, and trade networks have been a part of most human cultures for anything that can resemble being "human".
Yes, "money" is perhaps an "invention" of historic times with the concept of a medium of exchange.... although things like cattle and measures of grain have been used as a medium of exchange too. Many of the terms associated with money like cash, bucks, salary, and others are derived from this attempt to find a medium of exchange which works. In other words, it is a very successful idea, even if the exchange medium has changed from time to time.
People don't get paid salaries in salt any more as a general rule, nor in gold sovereigns for that matter. But the concept of a medium of exchange is still there as an abstraction.
The first transaction of note for Bitcoins was a Pizza sold in Florida. Some guy offered 1000 BTC for the next couple of people that called up a Pizza delivery service and had a pizza dropped off at his home. He gave the address in a post, and there were a couple of people who took him up on the offer. As long as the pizza was paid for by credit card, the delivery guys didn't care, and the person with the extra Bitcoins got some Pizza.
Assuming that the pizza cost about $10-$15, that would put the initial value of Bitcoins at between $0.001 and $0.002 per BTC.
Mt. Gox started trading with the price somewhere between 1 cent and about a 5 cents, which was the exchange rate when Bitcoin was first mentioned on Slashdot (about when I got involved). A little as just before Christmas it was still worth about 30 cents per Bitcoin. As a matter of fact, I had a bunch of Bitcoins and sold them for dollars.... then thought better of it and purchased Bitcoins again (losing a little bit in the process). I'm glad that I moved the money back to Bitcoin as the value tripled for my small pile.
Reaching parity is a big deal here, and it was something I wasn't expecting for at least another year. Yes, the relative value is no big deal (like how a Big Mac may cost 1000 Yen), but the issue here is the massive deflation of the currency and how surprisingly strong that it has become against the U. S. Dollar. BTW, Bitcoins are also trading at about 30-40 BTC per Ruble (near what the Ruble/Dollar conversion rate is) and other currency conversions show a similar parity to the Dollar. I'd suggest that the Ruble is perhaps the #2 most commonly traded currency with Bitcoins right now, as the trade with Euros is relatively new and nobody is trading with the British Pound at the moment. Give it some time, but there will be some people doing just that.... I would suppose.
There are groups like Silver Shire (and many others I might add too.... these are but one example) who produce gold and silver in units small enough to be used as a common currency for everyday transactions. In this case they have cards with as little as one gram of silver or gold that can be exchanged for products or services. Being "too scarce" is a false notion that doesn't really work.
What caused inflation and deflation for gold and silver was inefficient transportation & communications networks (which you must admit were pretty lousy in the 18th Century) which resulted in local concentrations of the metal and other localized scarcity from time to time. Fractional reserve banking of gold coins also caused problems, not to mention that the physical moving of gold and silver is still difficult when you need to conduct a major cash transaction. Buying a factory or making monthly payroll for 1000+ employees is the kind of thing that really made gold and silver unworkable. Keep in mind that many of the infamous bank robbers of the 19th Century (Jessie James, Butch Cassidy, and others) often hit a bank or train when payroll was being delivered.
The 8 "decimal places" subdivisions of Bitcoins are merely a protocol limitation, of which can be "upgraded" and changed in some fashion without really breaking the system. Even if only 1 Bitcoin existed for all world trade, it could still be subdivided into as many smaller pieces as needed. There is no "quantum" Bitcoin.
In terms of people hoarding the money, eventually there reaches a point people have to eat, pay rent, and do things where they have to "spend" the money in some fashion. Once it gets spent, it is used in the economy and thus somebody else gets the money. It really isn't a big deal and only represents a temporary situation that time eventually solves.
If you want the coffee, you'll buy the coffee this week and not next week.... because you want the coffee. What deflationary currency does is makes you want to save for the future, stay out of debt, and do the kind of spending that your grandfather or great-grandfather who lived through the Great Depression of the 1930's would tell you to do. IMHO it would also discourage wasteful consumption of natural resources as you would only be buying and using what you need now and not be seduced into purchases that you can't afford due to easy credit. Business expenses would happen only if you could get an ROI that exceeds deflation.
On the whole, I think deflationary currencies tend to be very beneficial to ordinary people, and it is big businesses that extend easy credit who get hurt in such a system. Extending a line of credit in Bitcoins would be seen as a business investment rather than a way to "park" excess money and certainly would be treated differently.
In theory, it is possible to print out a Bitcoin "note" on your home computer printer... or at least come up with a system where a physical piece of paper can be given some value of Bitcoins and used in a fashion similar to "old fashioned cash". The "official forums" of the Bitcoin website have several proposals, some of which have had some considerable thought put into them in terms of how that would be accomplished.
The most promising proposal I've seen along those lines is to print out "Bitcoin notes" with the "scratch off" ink/paint used for lottery games, where a serial number/wallet identifier would allow you to transfer the value of the note back to the digital realm again once you scratch off the paint. As long as the paint is still there, the note would generally have value for petty commerce (like buying a candy bar or a loaf of bread at the local bakery). Other "security" features could be in place so you would trust the issuer as well.
See also Canadian Tire money for something similar in terms of private scrip that maintains value in spite of it not being issued by a government entity. Such private scrip certainly could be created by a local grocery store or chamber of commerce and "backed" by Bitcoins. The "scratch off" system wouldn't even necessarily be required, but that gets into fractional reserve banking if you aren't careful.
While Zimbabwe is an interesting example of run-away hyper inflation, the economy of that country was and is so small that it is lost in the noise of international foreign exchange.
The country that does show world-wide consequences is the Weimar Republic and its 1000%+ annual inflation that arguably led to World War II. When a major world power sees its currency collapse, particularly when it is intimately tied to international trade, serious stuff can and does happen. The collapse of the Dollar or Euro would most certainly have some major consequences world-wide no matter where you live.
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The coriolis effect on the inner ear would make any astronauts in such a centrifuge permanently nauseous and disoriented. You need a _much_ large diameter to get a good enough approximation of linear gravity..
This is a legitimate issue that needs to be addressed, although it should be pointed out that rotations of 1 RPM or less generally don't cause the nausea associated with a centrifuge. That sets the minimum diameter of a wheel to achieve at least a partial simulated gravity (aka something like the gravity on the Moon) that may resolve some of the problems, and that diameter certainly is well within reasonable engineering limits on both the material and size for placing such a thing on a spacecraft.
Even having a tether or a "rope" of some kind connecting two masses where the astronauts are sleeping in one of the ends would be more than sufficient.... and it wouldn't have to be that large of a vehicle. It would be on the order of about 100 meters of cable that could "hold" something the size of a space capsule. I don't think that is necessarily a huge engineering requirement to get that to work.
It sounds like they would be able to conceive, and be able to carry to term, but any girls born would have a significant chance of being born sterile; I think they indicated this of boys born as well (or the adult males becoming sterile, not sure, but either circumstance is not a good situation). Myself, I think the article intends this as somewhat of a best-case (or, a not-worst-case) scenario; there are certainly worse outcomes that could come of such a pregnancy.
Where in any scientific literature is that "fact" ever suggested or derived from? How do you know that the offspring would be sterile?
I'm not saying that such a result is completely impossible, but the available literature says nothing to that effect with the exception of pure speculation about what might happen. That is speculation and not experimental proof. Until somebody or something (hopefully a rat or a mouse to start with) gets pregnant after conceiving in space and their babies are born, then have a 3rd generation, we won't know. If those babies can't have babies of their own, that would certainly be something worth speculating about at that point.
Unfortunately, no such experiment has ever been performed and you can't possibly come to any sort of conclusion of any kind at all. Wild ass speculation about sex belongs in fiction, not as a scientific discussion.
My guess: other than trying to find some way to mitigate against radiation hazards (which are legitimate both here on the Earth as well as in space), there isn't going to be a single difference and kids born in space will be able to come to the Earth and live a normal life if they choose. There may be some issues of decalcification in space (aka some "brittle bones") or some other issues, but the truth is we simply just don't know. The ability to reproduce in space is something that is just a huge question mark because nothing has ever been done to realistically study the issue at all. We simply don't know what will happen if you try to raise a kid in space.
Heck, we don't even know what the physiological effects of spaceflight are on a teenager for that matter as nobody under 20 has ever gone into space. We know a little about old folks as some senior citizens have certainly been in space, but not young kids. There was a study done of a pregnant rat who flew into space on the Shuttle and delivered in space, and the kids came back and were completely healthy. But that wasn't a long-term study and the conception took place on the Earth before the spaceflight, not to mention that two weeks in a Shuttle wasn't long enough to really note other long-term health issues that might come into play.
Relativity is really an extension of Newton's laws of mechanics, and ought to be seen in that light. Isaac Newton explained the laws of motion with some rather simple equations that even now mostly work correctly. What Einstein did was to refine those equations with some tweaking when you start getting to the speed of light and having to deal with major gravity wells. If you throw out those extra "fudge factors", you still have to deal with Newton and general Celestial Mechanics.
Where a successful theory proves useful is if it can make predictions on a scientific experiment when that experiment hasn't happened yet. Better yet, when the theory suggests results from an experiment that hasn't even been designed yet before the theory was put together. Relativity does all that and much more. In every case where relativity was put to the test, the results have always come back confirming relativity to within the experimental margin of error. Every single bloody time it is tried those results come back.
More to the point, if you are doing anything in space, including using something mundane like the global positioning satellite system, you have to take into account relativity for any of those calculations about where you are or what time it is. It doesn't have to be exotic stuff like an inter-galactic space probe but something much more mundane and ordinary and certainly with the technology we are using today here and now on the Earth. Relying strictly on Newton's equations for the position of an object in space is going to cause you to miss that object as it will be somewhere else instead. When traveling between planets, much less travel between stars, knowing the full extent of relativity is very much important to those calculations.
Only a theory? Yeah, but it is a pretty successful theory and it would take an extraordinary person to show either a refinement to that theory or a flat-out replacement of the concepts to come up with something better that agrees with actual experimentation or life experiences. Having airplanes falling on your head because of a faulty GPS guidance system wouldn't be a good thing for your health.
Do you really think if a man and a woman really want to get together to copulate, that there will be any real problem?
The issue at hand is that the astronauts that go up on most of the current space missions are almost all married and older, which implies they generally won't put too much effort into the act.
On the other hand, if you get a couple of horny teenagers together, I have no doubt that they will be able to figure out how to get it accomplished. When I think about the stuff I did with my wife when I was first married (and before.... well I'll let you speculate) I can't even imagine doing that now that a couple of decades have passed.
As for interpersonal relationship, that will all mostly work itself out. If somebody wants to be real stupid, there certainly are dozens or hundreds of ways to kill yourself in space. Most people picked for spaceflight will generally be those who are of a stable mental temperament where doing stupid things is not going to be in their nature. If they do something stupid, their genes will be removed from the gene pool, so who cares? I don't know of any colonization effort that presumes just one or two couples going.
On the other hand, I've heard that generally you want to either have an all man, all woman, or keep the ratio of men to women at 50:50 for any extended trip of this nature. Even if you dismiss the issues of sexual dynamics, having just a single woman or a small minority of women is a bad thing for morale for a whole lot of reasons... and it is speculated that the same thing applies to just a single guy among a whole bunch of women. Keeping that ratio reasonably close to 50:50 really helps out just to keep everybody sane and not getting hung up over sexual issues like even moving onto somebody else if a relationship doesn't work out.
There is no energy source at our disposal and no technology whatsoever to make these delusions real. Yes, we can move more and more bits around, but that's the only thing that has changed in decades.
The energy source needed to travel to Mars and elsewhere in the Solar System is abundantly clear: a nuclear reactor. The U.S.S. Nautilus under the direction of Hyman Rickover showed exactly how such a vehicle could be built. If you can drive a submarine under the oceans for millions of miles only surfacing to get fresh food supplies, you can certainly drive a similar kind of vehicle in space... and to build a similar vehicle for a comparable price too.
Yes, you wouldn't want to necessarily launch a vehicle being propelled by a nuclear reactor, but you don't have to get that to happen. Flying between planets is not the same as landing or taking off from that planet, where you ought to have dedicated landing vehicles made just for that purpose.... at "both" ends of the trip. The spacecraft being used for travel between planets does not have to be aerodynamically shaped and can have features that don't have to survive re-entry and take off.
Essentially, take a "conventional" rocket to LEO, dock with the "spaceship" that travels to Mars, "park" the spacecraft on Phobos and then land in a small landing craft on Mars to get the "colony" built or whatever you want to do down there. When you want to make the trip back home, get the launcher from Mars built (or deal with the "landing craft" with a launch option) and return to your "spacecraft" for the return trip.
The energy needed for the whole trip is certainly something that can come from a nuclear reactor. It does take a rethinking about how you get around and a bit of creative engineering, but we don't have to discover new kinds of physics or even need a scientific breakthrough in order to make the trip. The "reactor" doesn't even have to be turned on until all of the parts are in space. We know how to build spaceships, as the ISS and MIR more than amply demonstrate. It is just pure engineering principles that are needed to make the trip, not something exotic like a warp drive.
The sad thing is there has yet been any sort of long-term study of mammalian reproduction in space of any kind. A whole lot of theories and speculation, but absolutely nothing in terms of actual results or hard data to suggest that it may be a problem.
The speculation about radiation is a legitimate issue, and reproduction on the part of people who have either gone through radiation therapy or have been involved with nuclear "incidents" (Chernobyl and Hiroshima). The effects upon human reproduction certainly are well documented, so at least that aspect of the speculation is based upon "hard science" that is reasonable.
On the other hand, there are ways to mitigate radiation exposure for a long-term flight in space. Living in something like a Bigelow Aerospace module (less metal for secondary radiation from the cosmic rays) and having a water shell around that to hold back the radiation will do wonders for travel in space. The speculation here is about reproduction, but the issues of general radiation exposure are also significant and there are some pretty good reasons to try to get that under control. It isn't as if we don't know how to build these kind of protective shields against radiation.
Water, if used in conjunction with a nuclear reactor (presuming fission reactor for the sake of the argument here), can be used not just as a shield against radiation but also as reaction mass for a rocket. Basically, for the bulk of the trip you can have some very good radiation protection until you are nearly at the destination. Steam can be sent at insane velocities (for extremely high ISP) or if you need to "turn on the jets" you can fire conventional rockets that consist of "cracked" hydrogen and oxygen. It also can be used for human consumption as well.
Otherwise, the rest of the issues about reproduction in a microgravity environment are flat out pure speculation as there is little really known about what happens in space with sexual reproduction. There have been some mice sent up to the ISS and there has also been a pregnant rat who delivered her babies on the Space Shuttle. Still, the mice have not been allowed to reproduce (they are all kept in separate cages for unrelated studies) and the mama rat was only up in space for a couple of weeks. By long-terms studies, I'm talking about a multi-generational study of the effects of spaceflight on something like a mouse or rat to see not only if they can figure out how to get the equipment together in space (I think most creatures and people will figure something out along the way) but also what sorts of adaptations might happen for critters in terms of how they behave if their entire life from conception to geriatric death occurs in space.
Until that happens, stories and headlines of this nature are pure bullshit and don't deserve any sort of recognition at all. The $100 billion space station to study these effects has already been built including the incubator/housing module to store these rodents and other creatures with a shorter lifespan but are none the less placental mammals who can certainly indicate what the impacts for human reproduction might actually be. Unfortunately NASA is so prudish about the concept of sex that they won't even bother seeing if it could happen and instead want to pretend it won't ever happen. I do not think human reproduction in space is necessarily going to be a problem, but I sure would like to find out... and find out before somebody conceives a baby in space where it is a human child that is the first test subject to find out. That certainly is something I consider to be pure evil... especially when we have the tools available to find out otherwise.
If it is a problem to reproduce in space, it would be nice to find out in the first place, but that should be with "hard science" and not random speculation from uninformed "experts" that don't have a clue about the topic at all.
To be more correct, the "Motion Picture Expert's Group" (or whatever the current acronym means at the moment... it seems to change with video groups from time to time like the definition of DVD) was established well before the MPEG-LA group was ever put together.
The problem is that the MPEG guys were just pure researchers and didn't give a damn about patents, royalties, or if anybody was going to even be using their stuff except as fellow computer hacker/researchers. Then it became political after a fashion when the web took off but that was when some of the leading video companies (Sony, Toshiba, etc.) got involved with the specification and started to commercialize the standards making process.
The MPEG-LA group came along when it turns out that many or indeed most of the concepts used were patented by many of the people who helped to draft the specification. This was by design so far as the techniques were incorporated into the standard both because they were good ideas, but also because these companies wanted to make a profit off of the standardization effort. There was no spirit of giving here, it was just pure business even if the standard was "available under reasonable licensing terms" to anybody who wanted to use it.
There aren't that many video file formats around (certainly far less than image file formats), and almost all of them require licensing and royalties if you want to use them. Open and "royalty free" formats are a rare and unusual thing on the whole.
I still fail to see what harm comes from hoarding money. That keeps getting repeated over and over again as if it is something evil but doesn't make sense to me at all.
Liquidity of the medium of exchange was a problem in the 18th and 19th Centuries simply because a silver dollar represented so much wealth (about a whole day's wage working about 12-14 hours) that it became very difficult to sub-divide its value. Motion Pictures cost a nickle (hence the Nickelodeon) and in some cases the scarcity of the currency in some remote areas was so extreme that trade essentially stalled out completely. Due to this lack of liquidity, some people postulated that the root cause of the liquidity issue was people hoarding the money.
I don't think that was the case. The problem really was that the metal involved was too valuable even as money, as "mere mortals" couldn't make change. It would be like trying to buy a Big Mac with a $5,000 bill, where the cashier receiving the money would just stare at you with a blank look or try to get help from the manager in terms of giving you change.... and wiping out all of the money in the till in the process. Can you imagine if that $5k note was the smallest bill in the drawer, but the burger still cost only $2-$3?
All hoarding does is suck money out of circulation, which drives up the value of the remaining money in circulation. As long as there isn't somebody counterfeiting the money or double spending the money (paying two people with the same coin... essentially a variation of counterfeiting), eventually the hoarder is going to spend the money or it will stay permanently out of circulation. Either way, it doesn't impact the value of the money, and only a fool will deliberately drive down prices if they have a large cache of money. Even then, doing so mostly hurts the person driving the value of the money down instead of the rest of the users of that money.
As for the psychological issues, I think that is mainly from people who are so stuck on living in an economic system that encourages inflation that alternatives aren't ever considered. While it has been the exception rather than the rule in America for sustained inflation to be happening, it has been over the past 70-80 years when that has been the case. There are very few people alive today that remember an era when inflation and deflation were usually fairly well balanced. That certainly was the case for most of the 19th Century, where the value of a dollar compared to the price of most things stayed roughly the same for nearly the entire century. That wasn't central planning, but rather the lack of it after a fashion.
The housing crisis was an example of what deflation is like. Housing values collapsed, making many mortgages worthless, which destroyed a vast amount of money. Banks became unwilling to lend money because it was much more valuable to them invested in securities than it was as a loan. I haven't quite understood explanations of why consumer prices weren't affected. Probably because most people already spend most of their money on necessities.
The reason why consumer prices (aka food, petroleum, etc.) weren't impacted with the "deflation" is because their prices were not impacted by the over inflation of the housing market except indirectly. Besides, the "remedies" used to fix the housing price collapse was to essentially inflate the dollar on a massive scale, and yes I'm talking about TARP as well as other "interventions".
Demand for consumer goods, especially food, has remained the same but the amount of money floating around has gone up. Simple economics suggest that would cause prices to rise, not fall. On the other hand, it is now much, much harder to get a home loan for a house than it was in the past and the people who might have qualified under the new rules are now unemployed and can't afford these homes or certainly have a reduced income. On top of rising food prices and rising prices for other consumer goods, they have even less money available for housing, thus the market for housing keeps dropping.
On top of all of this is the value of the dollar relative to other currencies. Keep in mind that one of the things which drove up housing prices in at least some parts of America was speculators and folks who had dollars from trade imbalances (more money going to other countries than coming to America), so those dollars had to go somewhere. Real estate has been a common investment area for people to spend money, as it is legal for non-nationals to own American real estate. This includes houses... even if it is just luxury houses. With the dollar so viciously devalued, this additional pressure on housing prices is no longer there, and then the real estate price collapse is feeding on itself as many of these "investors" are getting out of the American real estate market. Those that sold at the beginning of the collapse are probably glad they did now as well.
For those that claim that the past two years were deflationary, it was including housing prices and not ordinary consumer goods. It really isn't complicated, but efforts to prop up housing prices now are only making things worse. Rather than one big ouch and letting the prices for housing get to a realistic level, it is taking much longer to reach an equilibrium point... and hurting more people in the process.
Fiddling with the monetary supply (aka "printing" money or forcing inflation) is just another way to tax the citizens of a country.
I've heard it argued that in theory it would be possible to completely eliminate all taxes on the theory that the government merely could "issue" currency.... with the inflation being a more direct form of taxation and having a similar impact on the economic stability of the country. The problem with doing that is most government officials wouldn't know when to stop inflating the money, and there are other problems with a high rate of inflation in terms of impact up citizens. It would also be impossible to set up a "progressive" tax schedule.... but then again that may not be a terrible thing either. Most importantly, the government couldn't set up a complicated tax schedule to encourage/discourage certain kinds of enterprises as everybody.... rich and poor... would be equally impacted with inflation.
I don't know of any government who has tried the concept, but it is an interesting thing to consider.
I also don't know of anybody who has ascribed a skewing impact mathematically upon the Laffer Curve via inflation, as in high inflation impacts the amount of money that can be raised via taxes too by skewing the maximum tax rate. Perhaps somebody has tried, as I'm not into the academic side of economic that way.
What if your income in US dollars is zero?
Try it sometime.... if you care. If you "earned" income from any source in any form, it is all taxable and you are liable to report it.... at the current exchange rate when you file (or some other IRS-acceptable accounting system for income). It doesn't matter if you get paid in Euros, Pounds, cattle, or salt. If your total income is practically zero, you don't need to report the income or pay taxes.... but you have to keep the paperwork proving you don't owe taxes for 10 years. If you file you only have to keep the paperwork for 5 years.... they want you to file even if you don't owe or even are legally obligated to file.
The IRS has considered frequent flier miles as taxable income, but an exchange rate to dollars is usually hard to determine... hence why most people can get away with ignoring that as a source of reportable income.
Al Capone discovered the hard way what happens when you fail to report income earned.... even if his method of earning income was from "extra-legal" sources. That is by design. Go ahead and see if you have better lawyers than Al Capone was able to find, in an era now where grocery store receipts can be obtained years after the purchase from the store. I don't think having your income in Linden Dollars or Bitcoins is going to help you out.
The problem with the Japanese economy is multifold and I don't think you can simplify the issue down to just deflation. The problem is that the economy of Japan was structured for an inflationary currency, and it takes time to shift to another economic reality. They are still acting as if it is still an inflationary currency, but when deflation hits, you have to use a different playbook so to say as the rules are different. Some people can't adapt when that happens.
Also, like I said, large companies and government agencies benefit from an inflationary currency... but not necessarily ordinary people. You have things now like income taxes held in escrow where the government has access to the money now, but you don't get the "excess" money until the end of the year as a "refund". The "float" in this case (while the government has the money and you don't) effectively earns interest (or keeps the government from having to pay interest on that money) while the actual value drops due to inflation.
In a deflationary economy, such overpayment of taxes would be in effect interest being paid to you as a taxpayer when the refund comes. Ditto if the bank takes its sweet time in processing "checks" and other similar situations that involve a currency "float". On the other hand, check "kiting" would earn money for a bank and they might even encourage such practice.
It really throws the rules upside down, which is why bankers and government officials usually are against the concept. Ordinary people and small businesses, on the other hand, tend to do rather well and in fact come out ahead when deflation takes hold, as storing money in the equivalent of a penny jar or under your mattress (or the digital equivalent with Bitcoins) is essentially the same as making an investment. Real investing is done for things that beat the deflationary value.... which makes all investments in such a situation to be very conservative or for "sure things" (however you define that).
I hope you do realize that the current inflationary currencies do encourage foolish spending and are at least one of the major contributors to environmental damage around the world. It encourages people to buy larger houses or vehicles than they need, as spending tomorrow's income today is strongly encouraged. It is one of the reasons why debt is so common.... to the point that it is argued that all current fiat currency is just debt alone being sent around from one person to another. I don't think that is necessarily a good thing.
Anonymity of Bitcoin users is a big deal, and there are some on the Bitcoin forums who have raised the issue already and suggested various ways to identify who has used a Bitcoin or not.
As an example, the publicly known address for the EFF has caused a rather clear and public record of how many Bitcoins have been donated to that address. Obviously the EFF could use other addresses if somebody wants an "anonymous" donation, but the record is pretty clear that total anonymity is a false statement being perpetuated by some of the fans in the Bitcoin community.
Another perhaps more sinister example was a scammer who bilked a bunch of early Bitcoin users for about 2-3k Bitcoins early on, and a serious attempt was made to try and trace or even follow the coin transactions of that scammer. The trail ran cold after awhile when the coins were mixed with other transactions and thrown onto one of the exchanges... where the exchange didn't want to reveal who put the money in. For that kind of transaction, it has the anonymity of a paper bank note with a serial number. See also http://www.wheresgeorge.com/ for an example of how cash can be monitored and tracked... where Bitcoins are about as safe as most government currency in terms of preserving anonymity.
Fortunately, new addresses are easy to generate, and most of the websites that allow you to transfer Bitcoins to their service will allow you to generate a "one time" address for that one transaction. I've heard it is good for bookkeeping too as it separates the customers to identify exactly who has made a payment or not. In such a situation, anonymity is pretty strong and hard to break. You know that the coin has been spent, but you don't really know who has it until after it is spent again... likely to another one-off address.
What happens in terms of keeping double spending of the currency from happening is that any attempt to put in a transaction that has already been "spent" has that transaction simply rejected from the transaction block chain. Each block is created by a "block miner", and in order to "win" the block they have to trace all of the other incorporated transactions and verify that no double spending has happened. So they "earn" some Bitcoins (how new coins are created) plus get "transaction fees" for processing the block as well.... only if no double spending has happened. Yes, a meticulous search is done on each block to make sure that the complete history of all transactions has been followed to the origin.
There is a proposal to simplify the protocol a little bit in terms of eliminating transaction histories where all of the "outputs" have been spent in subsequent transactions, but that currently isn't happening yet. If that happens, it will improve anonymity a bit more so far as once you have spent the money you have received, the record of your even having it may be eventually eliminated too unless somebody is preserving that extended and expanded transaction history.
Start an M&M exchange where you trade M&Ms for Bitcoins. You might get some traction there.
The problem is that since Mars, Incorporated insists upon being paid in dollars, it ends up being a variation of a dollar exchange with a variation depending on the price of sugar and cocoa beans in dollars.
BTW, http://www.biddingpond.com/ is a good place to consider if you want to start small and sell M&Ms for Bitcoins.
Significant in this context is in comparison to other "private" currencies and scrip. There are local scrips that are used (such as Ithica Dollars or Canadian Tire Money) which are commonly used as alternative currencies, and Bitcoin seems to be doing at least as good as the best of these private currencies. Yes, that is a big fish in a small pond, but it does indicate that Bitcoin is "graduating" out of that circle of anti-government crusaders and moving into the hands of more normal people.
There are right now about 10 million Ithica Dollars in circulation at the moment (pulled from a quick Google search), so Bitcoins is in good company in terms of outreach and the depth of the market.
In terms of the volume of transactions in the currency, I'd have to look through the block explorer to see how much is actually changing hands. The interesting thing about that is how all of the transactions are published and in theory it is possible to trace at least where each "coin" has been spent (at least to what addresses it has gone to) traced back to the original generator. That is part of the protocol. Unfortunately, I'm at a loss right now to tell you how many are being exchanged or "traded" via transactions as I'm not sure the statistic is being monitored.... although it can be derived from the data.
The trade volume on Mt. Gox (the main currency exchange site) on the other hand is published and monitored.... with a daily volume at between 10k-50k bitcoins for conversions between dollars and bitcoins. While not huge, that is a fair bit of churn and certainly represents at least some people putting in what I would consider to be real money even if it is below the radar of most governments. With parity, I'd still put that in the realm of thousands of dollars being processed on a daily basis... something that a guy living in his mother's basement is unlikely to have. On average, about 70-100 offers are listed at any given time, and there are "dark offers" on that exchange (made but not listed to keep from skewing the market). Again, not huge, but compares to the cash flow of a small business and the exchange is starting to earn the exchange owner some real money off of the small fee he charges per transaction.
One thing that might kill Bitcoins overnight is somebody discovering a way to make an arbitrary hash with the SHA-256 algorithm in a fixed amount of time. Essentially, break the algorithm.
Then again, if that algorithm is broken, a whole lot of people are going to be pissed and the value of Bitcoins is going to be the least of their concerns. A gradual degradation of the algorithm (aka like the MD5 hacks) would merely result in the Bitcoin developers switching to another algorithm. It still is a big deal, but it would be something that would also be public knowledge if it happened and would earn somebody either a Nobel Prize or some similar recognition in mathematics or computer science.
Or if you don't trust the client software, you can "roll your own" software and provide an alternate implementation of the client with your own code. The "official" Bitcoin client itself is completely optional.
The computational power of the network is not the basis of Bitcoins. What matters is that generating the coins is difficult or even next to impossible (more the current situation as it will take an ordinary computer running nonstop about a year or more to generate coins now), so that introduces scarcity in the currency. It is this forced scarcity that allows some stuff to be generated but not a whole lot that gives the value to the Bitcoins. Any other similar mechanism that only allocates a few coins to somebody at a time would work, and it doesn't have to be CPU cycles.... although that is perhaps one of the easiest ways to make it work.
An economic system that works with systems of plenty has happened before. It is called a "gift culture", where your status in the community is based upon how much "giving" you have done. It did exist among some hunter/gather groups during times of abundance, and of particular note among the Polynesians in some islands where resources were abundant and population relatively low.
The most current example in a modern context is the open source/free software movements where people provide services as a way to "give back" to the community in some substantial fashion. What makes that culture work is that the resources are abundant (CPU time and network bandwidth) and the marginal transaction costs (aka "downloading" images, music, and software) are essentially free too.
If that starts to happen with things other than software, it would require 3D printers to become much more common. Yes, it is possible that you could print out a Colt .45 replica with such a device and do harm with it, but there are many other useful things with the technology too. When 3D printers can "print" a 3D printer with all of the microcontrollers and parts, that is when you will see such a thing really take off. Self-replication isn't happening yet. Until then, and perhaps even after that happens, there still will be a need for money as there still will be scarcity.... and printing "food" is going to be much harder than even printing out a door hinge.
Barter existed quite a bit before that, and trade networks have been a part of most human cultures for anything that can resemble being "human".
Yes, "money" is perhaps an "invention" of historic times with the concept of a medium of exchange.... although things like cattle and measures of grain have been used as a medium of exchange too. Many of the terms associated with money like cash, bucks, salary, and others are derived from this attempt to find a medium of exchange which works. In other words, it is a very successful idea, even if the exchange medium has changed from time to time.
People don't get paid salaries in salt any more as a general rule, nor in gold sovereigns for that matter. But the concept of a medium of exchange is still there as an abstraction.
The first transaction of note for Bitcoins was a Pizza sold in Florida. Some guy offered 1000 BTC for the next couple of people that called up a Pizza delivery service and had a pizza dropped off at his home. He gave the address in a post, and there were a couple of people who took him up on the offer. As long as the pizza was paid for by credit card, the delivery guys didn't care, and the person with the extra Bitcoins got some Pizza.
Assuming that the pizza cost about $10-$15, that would put the initial value of Bitcoins at between $0.001 and $0.002 per BTC.
Mt. Gox started trading with the price somewhere between 1 cent and about a 5 cents, which was the exchange rate when Bitcoin was first mentioned on Slashdot (about when I got involved). A little as just before Christmas it was still worth about 30 cents per Bitcoin. As a matter of fact, I had a bunch of Bitcoins and sold them for dollars.... then thought better of it and purchased Bitcoins again (losing a little bit in the process). I'm glad that I moved the money back to Bitcoin as the value tripled for my small pile.
Reaching parity is a big deal here, and it was something I wasn't expecting for at least another year. Yes, the relative value is no big deal (like how a Big Mac may cost 1000 Yen), but the issue here is the massive deflation of the currency and how surprisingly strong that it has become against the U. S. Dollar. BTW, Bitcoins are also trading at about 30-40 BTC per Ruble (near what the Ruble/Dollar conversion rate is) and other currency conversions show a similar parity to the Dollar. I'd suggest that the Ruble is perhaps the #2 most commonly traded currency with Bitcoins right now, as the trade with Euros is relatively new and nobody is trading with the British Pound at the moment. Give it some time, but there will be some people doing just that.... I would suppose.
There are groups like Silver Shire (and many others I might add too.... these are but one example) who produce gold and silver in units small enough to be used as a common currency for everyday transactions. In this case they have cards with as little as one gram of silver or gold that can be exchanged for products or services. Being "too scarce" is a false notion that doesn't really work.
What caused inflation and deflation for gold and silver was inefficient transportation & communications networks (which you must admit were pretty lousy in the 18th Century) which resulted in local concentrations of the metal and other localized scarcity from time to time. Fractional reserve banking of gold coins also caused problems, not to mention that the physical moving of gold and silver is still difficult when you need to conduct a major cash transaction. Buying a factory or making monthly payroll for 1000+ employees is the kind of thing that really made gold and silver unworkable. Keep in mind that many of the infamous bank robbers of the 19th Century (Jessie James, Butch Cassidy, and others) often hit a bank or train when payroll was being delivered.
The 8 "decimal places" subdivisions of Bitcoins are merely a protocol limitation, of which can be "upgraded" and changed in some fashion without really breaking the system. Even if only 1 Bitcoin existed for all world trade, it could still be subdivided into as many smaller pieces as needed. There is no "quantum" Bitcoin.
In terms of people hoarding the money, eventually there reaches a point people have to eat, pay rent, and do things where they have to "spend" the money in some fashion. Once it gets spent, it is used in the economy and thus somebody else gets the money. It really isn't a big deal and only represents a temporary situation that time eventually solves.
If you want the coffee, you'll buy the coffee this week and not next week.... because you want the coffee. What deflationary currency does is makes you want to save for the future, stay out of debt, and do the kind of spending that your grandfather or great-grandfather who lived through the Great Depression of the 1930's would tell you to do. IMHO it would also discourage wasteful consumption of natural resources as you would only be buying and using what you need now and not be seduced into purchases that you can't afford due to easy credit. Business expenses would happen only if you could get an ROI that exceeds deflation.
On the whole, I think deflationary currencies tend to be very beneficial to ordinary people, and it is big businesses that extend easy credit who get hurt in such a system. Extending a line of credit in Bitcoins would be seen as a business investment rather than a way to "park" excess money and certainly would be treated differently.
In theory, it is possible to print out a Bitcoin "note" on your home computer printer... or at least come up with a system where a physical piece of paper can be given some value of Bitcoins and used in a fashion similar to "old fashioned cash". The "official forums" of the Bitcoin website have several proposals, some of which have had some considerable thought put into them in terms of how that would be accomplished.
The most promising proposal I've seen along those lines is to print out "Bitcoin notes" with the "scratch off" ink/paint used for lottery games, where a serial number/wallet identifier would allow you to transfer the value of the note back to the digital realm again once you scratch off the paint. As long as the paint is still there, the note would generally have value for petty commerce (like buying a candy bar or a loaf of bread at the local bakery). Other "security" features could be in place so you would trust the issuer as well.
See also Canadian Tire money for something similar in terms of private scrip that maintains value in spite of it not being issued by a government entity. Such private scrip certainly could be created by a local grocery store or chamber of commerce and "backed" by Bitcoins. The "scratch off" system wouldn't even necessarily be required, but that gets into fractional reserve banking if you aren't careful.
While Zimbabwe is an interesting example of run-away hyper inflation, the economy of that country was and is so small that it is lost in the noise of international foreign exchange.
The country that does show world-wide consequences is the Weimar Republic and its 1000%+ annual inflation that arguably led to World War II. When a major world power sees its currency collapse, particularly when it is intimately tied to international trade, serious stuff can and does happen. The collapse of the Dollar or Euro would most certainly have some major consequences world-wide no matter where you live.