The Space Shuttle is the Edsel of the space industry. It looks cool, is real shiny, and when you really get down to brass tacks it sucks big time. The Edsel is the very definition of a lemon of a vehicle. The Space Shuttle is a spacecraft designed by committee, incredibly dangerous for its crew, and could have done a much better job had there not been so many compromises on its design that it couldn't really do any of the missions it was intended to accomplish. It was also a system drastically overbudget and way, way behind schedule even when it launched, and that never really improved on subsequent flights.
The largest problem with the Space Shuttle is that the era is now over anyway. No more will be built, the production line for external tanks and SRBs has been killed, and the tooling for even putting up another flight simply can't happen. It would cost almost as much as simply finishing the Constellation program now as it would to restart the Shuttle program again... including building a new shuttle or two to replace the Columbia. Ideally if the Shuttle program was to continue, it would need six to eight orbiters and a whole bunch of effort that neither NASA nor Congress really want to get into doing.
Considering the last manned spaceflight program to actually make it into orbit was started under the Johnson administration (the Space Shuttle), I would say that the established record for getting into space is pretty dismal indeed. Every single manned spaceflight vehicle that has ever been proposed since then (and in particular since the Nixon administration) has been systematically killed either the the subsequent or even current administrations involved. The question isn't why did this particular program (Constellation) die, but why did any succeed in the past at all?
Don't forget it also apparently keeps prices down on ICBM parts, because the DOD is so strapped for cash they need NASA to subsidize their equipment(?!)
Oh well. At least the pointless moon mission is dead. Hopefully this compromise doesn't cripple the actual useful and new projects that will expand our capabilities. And hey, maybe we'll actually find a good use for our HLV to LEO, and not just find arbitrary ways to justify its existence.
The Moon mission was dead a couple of years ago... it just took Congress this long to recognize that fact and a change in the presidency (or rather a new NASA administrator to wake up to the fact). Constellation, as it was proposed, was simply unsustainable and required federal spending on spaceflight to be proportional to what NASA got in the 1960's to get it to happen. There is no possible way that Congress would have ever forked out that kind of money for a sustained effort that would have lasted decades.
In terms of orbital rocketry being similar to ICBMs, it should be pointed out that they are two very different engineering regimes and they don't really support each other... except for perhaps rocket nozzles and some minor parts like what would be in common between a farm tractor and a semi truck. They may technically do the same thing, but really are designed for very different tasks and aren't nearly as common as you would think.
The largest argument that seems to be in favor of NASA having continued development of the shuttle boosters and the Ares I is that it would act as a consumer for Ammonium Perchlorate.... the "solid" rocket fuel that is used in the SRBs. For myself, I think it would be far and away more profitable and perhaps even do better for public support of NASA to use the same money, consume even more rocket fuel, and simply make some fireworks for a really awesome 4th of July party. It would actually involve more workers to make the stuff and at least be something that ordinary Americans appreciate. Either that or cancel the program and save the money altogether... but if the money is going to be spent on merely keeping people employed and to keep this particular industry (the solid rocket fuel manufacturing companies) going at least it could be for something that will actually fly up into the sky. $10 billion USD will buy one heck of a lot of fireworks and put on a display that would be impressive as hell.
It might just help advance the development of rocketry at the same time... something that the Ares I simply won't do.
What is sad is that what you are expressing here is so close to some outstanding and excellent advise that blowing it with a joke is precisely the problem. Yeah, I got the joke.
You are displaying some immaturity here that in most situations can be ignored, treated as simply a joke, and then move on. Unfortunately there are times where you have to show just a little bit more maturity and become a part of the adult world. It sounds like you are one of those kind of people who screw around at an airport talking about how you would bomb the place with a security guard standing right next to you. Let me know how that turns out if you try that stunt.
A police officer can still perform an investigation in another state, and if they have probable cause and plenty of information to indict the suspect it would seem rather pointless for a law enforcement agency in another state to refuse to perform the arrest.
They certainly could go an knock on some doors if that was necessary, but calling up the ISP on the phone and sending a fax with a formal request to reveal information about a network user from a bona fide law enforcement agency is likely going to be honored. State lines or even for the most part international boundaries generally don't stop that kind of police work.
By crossing state lines in the commission of a crime, it also invokes other laws including federal statutes that are not exactly pretty for the individual being prosecuted. Let's just say that crossing state lines was a mistake on the part of the idiot who stole the laptop and is going to have the law really come down hard if they are identified.
The IP address resolves to a residential customer.... see the posting above. The real trick for what this guy is facing right now is trying to get past privacy laws. That would require either a warrant, or at least a bona fide law enforcement agent making the request to the ISP to access the information to find the name of the actual customer and the service address for that IP number.
Until you got to the issue of suggesting that you are going to head off to that particular jurisdiction with a gun, this is a fairly sound letter: Short, simple, and to the point.
I wouldn't suggest that I'm bringing a gun, even if I had a legal concealed weapons permit or a federal firearms permit. Police and Sheriff's offices tend to get real jumpy if you hint that you have a gun, particularly if you explicitly mention it in some form of communications. In this case the implication is that you are exasperated and want to take the law into your own hands... again something no law enforcement agent would look on favorably for many reasons (some valid and others not).
If you do say that you are hiring a private investigator, make sure that you do. Again, this is something unnecessary in the letter of this nature, at least for an initial letter and perhaps is better left out. Don't lie or even stretch the truth as that can and will come back to bite you hard.
Remember, it is easier to attract flies with honey than with vinegar. Doing all of the leg work for a felony arrest and having that land on an officer's desk is a godsend, and something most officers really don't mind. Police love to brag about arrests of that nature. Odds are high that the thief stole much more than the simple laptop too, and it gives probable cause to search the house with the information that you could provide in this situation.
Saying that you would like to personally visit the county (and actually do so) also helps, as it shows you are serious about the issue and would like to get some resolution. Again, that is a big plus, as long as you avoid the stuff that would make a law-enforcement officer's skin crawl. It is also not strictly necessary, but suggesting that you would like a phone conversation with that department to confirm receipt of the letter and to see what is happening with the investigation could be useful too.
The purchase of stolen merchandise is being an accessory to the crime itself, unless you can provably argue that there was no criminal intent in the purchase of that item. That would still require you to get a paper trail (as the owner of a 2nd hand computer that is stolen property) to document just who you got that computer from and to demonstrate in a provable fashion that you had no idea that the merchandise was stolen.
Buying from a pawn shop is such a proof, but then again the pawn brokers routinely register the serial numbers of everything they buy and require photo identification associated with that purchase. Those pawn brokers who don't can and often do end up in jail.
If you are buying something from another person, you had better trust their reputation enough to know if you are purchasing something stolen or not. If you have knowledge of a past criminal history with a friend, buy something from them that you aren't sure they got legally, you would simply be screwed if you just happen to be in possession of that stolen property.
Regardless, even if you can prove that you were acting on good faith to buy the stolen merchandise, it can still be confiscated from you and your only recourse to get your money back (if you paid money for it) is to sue the person who sold it to you as a breech of contract. Presuming that you have ratted them out, a friend sitting in jail is not likely to have much money to give to you in that situation either.
Who sets the exchange rate? You do, together with everybody else around who either chooses to get involved with the exchange or ignore it.
If you set the exchange rate for yourself to purchase all 21 million bitcoins, then you have established an initial rate of exchange. Fortunately for others involved with that currency, there are others who are willing to offer more.
RTFA and read the links I provided. You were acting like a troll demanding that the links to exchange pages be provided, and then proved you were a troll by contradicting yourself saying that nobody provided these links time and again.
BTW, I'll pay USD $5 for all 21 million of them... so there! Let the auction begin, just like a real market!
An apples to oranges comparion, using multiple sources of data that don't always agree. It is also easy to take a cheap pot shot if you don't explain yourself.
That was not the cause of the Great Depression, and certainly was not the cause of World War II.
If anything, Germany faced a problem not of deflation but of hyper inflation, where the German government was forced (at gunpoint by France and the UK) to pay money they simply didn't have and printed it to make up the difference. The political and economic instability of Germany did give rise to Adolph Hitler, but it was not the deflation which was a major cause of the problems.
Much of the problem with the Great Depression in America was the policies of FDR and how he tried to tweak the economy from a central planning authority. By most measures, the "New Deal" policies prolonged the recession to a depression in America and put the American Republic in a dangerous position when idiots like Hitler finally did come to power. Of course Roosevelt also followed up on similar policies by Hoover that weren't all that smart either, so this isn't necessarily an indictment of a particular political party.... both Democrats and Republicans were screwed up in the 1930's.
The root causes of World War II can be found with the policies enacted by the governments involved with World War I, including policies of what happened in the Pacific basin too. Deflation and inflation, other than causing political instability, had little to do with the war that eventually happened.
Deflation is just not good for an economy. Large amounts of inflation aren't either. Really a perfectly flat lien might be the best, no inflation or deflation, but that doesn't seem possible. Looking at historical data it doesn't seem like you can hold it steady state. That being the case, a small amount of controlled inflation is by far a better choice than swings back and forth.
I believe that inflation as something good for the economy is a myth that has been perpetuated by those who take advantage of the situation and make a profit off of that inflation. Unfortunately, it has been so ingrained into modern industrial societies for so long that very few if any people really understand just what life without inflation could possibly be like, and too many people do long term financial planning on the presumption of future inflation that any other scenario is seen as foolish or not welcome.
Yes, deflation stinks if your are borrowing money from a lender that uses compound interest for repayment. With few exceptions, however, most ordinary consumers rarely if ever get any sort of loan at an interest rate which beats inflation, so to suggest that the only way a modern banking system can function is via modest inflation is sort of a red herring too.
I get the theory that inflation tends to encourage investment, while deflation tends to encourage people putting money into the bank of the master bedroom mattress. It isn't quite as simple as that either, and even with an inflationary monetary policy people still tuck money away in a cookie jar or some other place for temporary safe keeping.
Inflation tends to favor bankers and people dealing with "financial services" through a variety of means. Since they are also the ones in control of the money supply and the other fiscal management tools, it also implies why their point of view is followed. For more ordinary folks, all they are really interested in is a stable currency and even a little bit of fluctuation isn't necessarily a bad thing.
For most of the 19th Century, the U.S. Dollar stayed relatively stable compared to the labor needed to get things done. Generally speaking, a dollar paid for a full day's labor of a semi-skilled or unskilled laborer. While there certainly were periods of modest deflation, America was certainly able to grow into a mighty industrial power without the need of constant inflation of the kind that has been dominant in the 20th Century.
The only times in history when you have seen wild swings of hyper-inflation or huge deflation are usually when the government or some scam artist (often the same but not always) gets involved in the picture and tries to manipulate the currency as a way to make personal profit without having to work. The massive deflation happens usually with something like a Ponzi or pyramid scheme (and related scams) and the scam collapses. Sort of like is happening right now in the U.S. economy, other than the fact that the current U.S. President is also simultaneously spending money on a hyper-inflation model as well. I'm not convinced that those who are trying to perform this balancing act of moderating simultaneously massive deflation through hyper inflation are necessarily going to get the right balance.
Farmers did not have to take out loans to purchase seed.... most of them kept seed on hand for the next season's planting. This whole notion of borrowing money up front to pay for next year's harvest is something that is relatively new, but something also due to hybridized food stocks and the belief on the part of many farmers that farming is a capital intensive business.
It sort of is true in the sense that the land is capital intensive, but most farmers get way over their head with fancy gizmos and gadgets to "help" them with their farming, often buying equipment that does way more than they really need.
The real problem that deflation made was that it was difficult to make change, and the liquidity of the market was exceptionally low when you had entire regions that simply lacked cash as a medium of exchange. Think about it this way: If the smallest unit of exchange is enough to buy an automobile, how are you going to be able to pay for a loaf of bread? Also if nobody has money of any kind, what money is going to be used to make that purchase? Those are the problems with massive deflation, and something that can be solved in a manner similar to hyper inflation too.
Unfortunately, there is usually a politician or two that gets greedy and want to run a printing press to make currency so they can buy votes or public favor (even if it isn't a democracy) by spending money they simply don't have in the first place.... causing inflation.
BTW, I do agree with the other poster in regards to "spiral deflation" not really being a problem.
State-based (and territory-backed) currencies existed in the United States well into the 19th Century and even partly into the 20th Century in the case of the Alaskan Gold Rush. It was something directly tied to a lack of liquidity and the fact that the economies of those regions needed an extra jump start to get something going.
Usually state-backed currencies in the 19th Century had a one to one relationship with the U.S. Dollar, so it wasn't as big of a deal. The Federal Reserve wasn't established until 1913, and has always been built around the concept of electronic funds transfers... starting with the telegraph.
There was "cheating" involved with private and state notes and it has caused other sorts of problems with them including bank runs and panics, particularly when the money couldn't be paid back to the commodity (usually gold) or federal currency that it represented.
America hasn't always had a central bank, and arguably it isn't needed either on the principle it may do more harm than good. That, however, is the subject of a whole other thread or better yet another story.
What, exactly, makes the Department of Defense a part of the Federal Government again?
Seriously, you are talking in circles here and not really understanding what is being said here. The Federal Reserve owes its existence to legislation passed by the United States Congress and has the board of governors all appointed by the President of the United States.
How is this different from the Joint Chiefs of Staff?
This isn't the same thing as religious expression, or can you tell me when the last Episcopal bishop was appointed by the U.S. Congress (or any religious authority other than a Chaplin)?
This is a fiat currency just as any other fiat currency has been, and there are conventions within the accounting protocols to make sure that the currency can't easily be inflated. It is the inflation aspect of this currency that is the big issue.
There isn't much in terms of groups or individuals engaged in the exchange of bitcoins to anything else, but that is something relative. That is both because it is a new concept, and because of the nature of those who are running this.
This currency is depending upon scarcity and basic economics of supply and demand, where those who are investing into the concept are hoping that the demand will eventually drive up the value of these virtual coins. That isn't necessarily a bargain I would want to buy into, and the allocation of the wealth is sort of egalitarian instead of relying upon a single person hoarding all of the wealth at the beginning. If you strip away the crazy initial wealth distribution system, it is no different than other fiat currencies.
An interesting counter point here is the establishment of the Deutschemark in West Germany following WWII. In order to get the German economy going again, every German citizen was issued a certain amount of money (I think about 1000 marks but I'm not sure of the exact amount) and then told to spend or keep that money as they saw fit. The Mark has never had any sort of backing other than the faith of the German people to buy something with it in the future. It was eventually replaced with the Euro, but even the Euro still is based in a large part on this initial wealth give-away to jump start the German economy in the late 1940's. Other than buying products in Germany with a Mark, it never had any real value at all.
Most people don't understand economics other than having the largest pile of money compared to their neighbors (or complaining that their neighbor has a bigger pile than they do). Wealth creation isn't generating the money itself, but rather what you can do with that money in order to get others to do things for you. If you don't understand that distinction, then it is a hopeless cause at trying to understand economics at its most basic form.
Wealth is ultimately the blood, sweat, and tears of somebody working their behind off to make something, and all of the rest of money flows from that effort. There may be physical materials involved along the way, but you are paying either directly or indirectly for somebody to extract those materials, to shape it and mold it or do something with it. The currency then becomes a more or less averaged value of whatever it is that you are doing compared to what everybody else is doing. Yes, governments can get in the way via taxes and subsidies to screw the system up and give incentives and disincentives for certain kinds of activities... and to suck up some of that wealth by the "rulers" of that society in exchange for hopefully some civil tranquility, but it all ends up being an exchange of goods (made with labor) or services (simply paying for somebody's time more directly).
It really makes no difference in the long run between a fiat currency and a commodity currency anyway. Both require acts of faith, and the medium is relatively neutral in terms of whatever it is that you are trying to obtain above and beyond the pile of money in the first place. Even gold requires faith that somebody will accept it in the future, and it has the additional problems of extreme weight and being useful only for major transactions (due to its high intrinsic value). Any concentration of gold also requires couriers and potentially body guards and other sorts of security that end up simply costing more money than it is worth. It is also placing faith that the gold won't be devalued at some point in the future.
If, for example, somebody discovers a gold nugget on an asteroid that is the size of a house and can relatively cheaply bring it to the Earth, it would cause the gold markets to crash real hard. Gold would still have some value afterward, but it wouldn't be pretty for those who have invested large amounts of their labor into gold.
A currency is stable when the means to duplicating that currency are far and away higher than the "coining" authority can efficiently produce that currency. In particular for paper currency, a simple rule of thumb also needs to be observed:
A 10x increase in the volume of a print job only costs about 2x the price. Or to put it more plainly, Coining and printing money is something that has huge economies of scale and the benefit goes to those who produce this stuff on the largest possible scale. Large regional governments (aka China, USA, EU, etc.) would have the largest advantages for doing this when they have dedicated printing facilities to create this money.
It should be noted that generally national governments don't screw each other over, although there was an effort by Nazi Germany to counterfeit the English Pound which proved to be such a good copy that Winston Churchill was quite concerned about the destabilizing effects of the wartime British economy.
This also applies to coinage as the act of coining metal is to imply a guarantee of metal purity (or composition), weight, and intrinsic value where the value of the coin exceeds that of the raw bullion (in most normal circumstances for coins used as currency). Setting up your own private mint is by design to be difficult to perform... especially if the government tries to keep the profit margin for coining the metal at a very modest rate where a counterfeiting operation would tend to lose money in the attempt.
Interest lending has nothing to do with monetary policy and is a separate issue entirely... as long as you aren't talking fractional reserves from a central bank that is artificially creating money out of thin air. That is a separate issue entirely.
My point with the Iraqi Dinar is that the people of Iraq believed in it, and believed that in the future they would be able to purchase stuff with it. Iraqis even were confident enough in the currency to exchange it for other global currencies (Euros & Dollars) and trade those currencies back into Iraqi Dinars too. That made it a stable currency, not some sort of central bank or planning authority.
The only real function that such a central bank really provides is the distribution of the initially coined (or printed) currency, and perhaps as a central record repository for electronic transactions using normal accounting practices.
One of the reasons that many U.S. states got into the game of printing their own currency was because the U.S. Federal Government wasn't printing it fast enough to meed the ordinary needs of citizens. Basically it is the same problem that this Bitcoin proposal is trying to address, where micro transactions aren't being dealt with due to the fact that the minimum transaction size is insufficiently small to handle ordinary needs. Back when somebody worked a whole 10-12 hour day for a single dollar of earned income (for skilled labor!), the money simply wasn't around to pay for much of anything. There is more to the issue too, but it was a shortage of money where people couldn't even find the currency to spend for the things they needed, and couldn't make change even. That isn't really a problem at the moment with paper currency.
I'm trying to get this picture straight: The whole purpose of the blocks and CPU time metric is to get involved with the distribution of the initial set of money, not necessarily that the currency itself necessarily requires massive quantities of computing power.
BTW, it seems like this coin generation issue is something that can be used as an attack vector, and is a different issue than the problems associated with double spending the money. What kinds of safety protocols or protection protocols are in place to keep somebody from simply "minting" money at will?
"He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth."
I don't buy this argument, as found in the PDF file about Bitcoin. Mind you, I'm just skeptical here and not trying to say it is impossible to resolve, but I don't see the protocols or transactional security which is dealing with this issue.
"Although it would be possible to handle coins individually, it would be unwieldy to make a separate transaction for every cent in a transfer. To allow value to be split and combined, transactions contain multiple inputs and outputs. Normally there will be either a single input from a larger previous transaction or multiple inputs combining smaller amounts, and at most two outputs: one for the payment, and one returning the change, if any, back to the sender.
"It should be noted that fan-out, where a transaction depends on several transactions, and those transactions depend on many more, is not a problem here. There is never the need to extract a complete standalone copy of a transaction's history."
I'm really curious about this particular issue and how a complete copy of the transaction's history doesn't need to be maintained. Again, it gets to the coining of the money issue, where it would seem as if the transaction trace would have to go back to when the money was coined in the first place. Some sort of planned decay of the history certainly could be used in terms of suggesting that after a certain amount of time it can be presumed that a certain bit of transaction history if valid (using a variety of metrics to make that happen that could even go beyond a pure timestamp measurement). Still, the option to view the full transaction history for what fan outs and inputs were associated with that transaction seems like a critical feature.
It is the decentralized nature of this project that is so ground breaking here, and not necessarily the currency itself. When you are working with a physical commodity-based currency, you have something which can be separately bartered and has some intrinsic value for others to recover your "investment" into that currency.
Almost every other kind of virtual currency system requires some sort of central bookkeeping server to make sure that somebody isn't spending that virtual money twice. It is that central server which those involved with this project are trying desperately to avoid, and to come up with a scheme where mostly honest people will try to stay honest and will have dis-incentives to game the system in a distributed record keeping system.
A central transaction system does a lousy job of scaling to meet demand, and this system of record keeping can be used to keep costs down for keeping track of that kind of data.
It has some interesting applications for MMORPG development, where conceivably you could set up some sort of system of authentication of not just the "virtual currency" but also other things within the game such as monster drops, virtual commodities, and even keeping track of earned experience and character levels. If you could set up a completely de-centralized MMORPG game system that could set up trust metrics and cull out attackers, it might just be a real winner of a game.
As an attempt to solve a tough computational problem, this certainly deserves some merit and attention. Even beyond games, it also has applications in terms of authenticating non-monetary data in a distributed environment that requires certification of one-way transmittal of that data.
I've really got to think about the potential applications here, but I don't think its use as a currency alternative is necessarily the only or even best use of this concept.
Arguments about source quality can and do happen on Wikipedia, and self-published sources can be rooted out. Blogs in particular are highly suspect in terms of sources and generally don't hold up to review when examined. References to an "official site" can be useful as it does give factual information, but it is also treated as a primary source and sometimes can have biases that need to be accounted for as well.
There is no way that a page like this would ever get featured article status or even be considered a "good" article. In fact, since there is absolutely no discussion on the "talk page" it is even reasonable to presume that this page hasn't even really been reviewed at all by anybody trying to improve the page to any sort of standard at all. If you want to know the status of an article, at least check out the discussion page and try to find what biases may be in the article too.
There are efforts to improve Wikipedia quality, and it is unfortunate that an article of this nature is linked so prominently on Slashdot too. In fact, given the nature of the deletionists that I've been dealing with lately, I'm very much surprised that some sort of AfD discussion hasn't already taken place with this article. It passes the initial smell test, but the lack of sources could make it fail the Wikipedia Notability policy (WP:NOTE).
The track record for gold is that it is generally a scarce metal, has incredible value due to its many varied applications and attributes (a highly malleable metal that doesn't oxidize very easily and melts at "modest" temperatures, has a high electrical conductivity, hardly any toxic side effects when in contact with organisms, and can be pounded into incredibly thin strips for decorative purposes.... plus one of the few metals that doesn't have a "silver" metallic color) and has been historically difficult to extract from raw materials.
In other words you have both high demand and low supply. Even if the supply of gold were to increase 100x in the world, there would actually be sufficient applications that demand would rise considerably with a modest drop in price. In other words, on a supply/demand chart, increases in supply generally don't offset with a corresponding drop in value overall. In fact, the "market cap" of the overall gold market (the total value of gold to some alternate non-gold based currency) would actually increase with increased supply. To put it yet another way, if somebody does figure out how to extract gold from seawater or comes up with some sort of alchemy process to make gold via "cold fusion" or some other crazy method that hasn't been discovered so far, increasing the supply of gold, it would still be considered a valuable metal. The only difference is that you would likely be buying it at grocery stores for wrapping up sandwiches or something else in a fashion much more pedestrian than simply hoarding it as bars of metal or coins. It may even be used as coins still, but for things like cent coins.
It would take a significant change in technology or even a new kind of physics to come up with a way to make gold as common as iron. I just don't ever see that happening.
i would say that any currency is backed by the goods and services one can buy with it.
the one way to make sure a currency is usable in daily trade is for it to be accepted as tax payment by local government.
More correctly, any fiat currency (to clarify things... as opposed to a commodity-based currency such as a gold, silver, or grain backed currency) is based upon the faith of those who participate in and use that currency to buy goods and services with it in the future.
That is a huge deal and is much different than simply the mere ability to buy goods and services. A government could collapse, the currency could be devalued, or that faith in general could be broken through a variety of other means.
Perhaps the most significant example of a faith-based currency (faith in the currency, not based upon religion) was the Iraqi Dinar. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, there were many people who thought that it was going to collapse just as other currencies issued by governments that no longer exist have also collapsed. The Nazi German Mark and the Confederate Dollar are both examples of currencies that inflated in value to infinity (aka became worthless). In the case of the Iraqi Dinar, the Iraqi people were both not exactly pleased with the American occupation, and there really wasn't anything to replace the currency. Surprisingly, due to scarcity (no more money was being printed as the government bureaus making the money were destroyed) and a desire by the Iraqi people to continue on economically, the Dinar actually increased in value. In other words, the Iraqi people continued to have faith in that currency to buy future goods and services.
While certainly governments getting involved with deliberately inflating currency can destabilize that currency, it is also true that at least for awhile a currency can remain stable due to the faith of the people possessing that currency to buy something with it in the future.
It should also be noted that this is true not just for fiat currencies "in the real world" but it also applies to virtual economies in video games and MMORPGs. Surprisingly even a single-player video game can still have this impact, where a player may hoard or spend with abandon any virtual money found based upon the principle that either the money is plentiful (or without stuff to buy) or of significant value based upon the supply of that money and the potential to obtain things with it. In the case of multi-player games, it becomes a huge issue if virtual markets open up for exchange of goods and "services".
This is more akin to some company in China that makes a perfect copy of a DVD or CD and mass produces them for retail sales... including sales in countries where it might be illegal. The "good" copies are often indistinguishable from the "real" merchandise, including the holographic seal or other anti-theft devices.
International copyright recognition has been an issue, and for me I think it is legitimate for some sort of cross-border recognition of copyright. Perhaps the most blatant example was with the works of Charles Dickens, where his books were mass produced in such quantities in the USA (without regards to copyright) that ship loads of them occasionally came back to England for sale in a "grey/black" market. The only time Charles Dickens actually made some money off of the books printed in America was when he did a tour of America and got a modest (even at the time) speaking fee and the benefit of touring the western states by rail paid for by his fans.
This said, I think that the move to internationalize copyright terms and standards has gone too far where terms are being extended to the maximum time of any country and the silly concept of automatic copyright without the need of registration.
Slashdot Mirror
The Space Shuttle is the Edsel of the space industry. It looks cool, is real shiny, and when you really get down to brass tacks it sucks big time. The Edsel is the very definition of a lemon of a vehicle. The Space Shuttle is a spacecraft designed by committee, incredibly dangerous for its crew, and could have done a much better job had there not been so many compromises on its design that it couldn't really do any of the missions it was intended to accomplish. It was also a system drastically overbudget and way, way behind schedule even when it launched, and that never really improved on subsequent flights.
The largest problem with the Space Shuttle is that the era is now over anyway. No more will be built, the production line for external tanks and SRBs has been killed, and the tooling for even putting up another flight simply can't happen. It would cost almost as much as simply finishing the Constellation program now as it would to restart the Shuttle program again... including building a new shuttle or two to replace the Columbia. Ideally if the Shuttle program was to continue, it would need six to eight orbiters and a whole bunch of effort that neither NASA nor Congress really want to get into doing.
Considering the last manned spaceflight program to actually make it into orbit was started under the Johnson administration (the Space Shuttle), I would say that the established record for getting into space is pretty dismal indeed. Every single manned spaceflight vehicle that has ever been proposed since then (and in particular since the Nixon administration) has been systematically killed either the the subsequent or even current administrations involved. The question isn't why did this particular program (Constellation) die, but why did any succeed in the past at all?
Don't forget it also apparently keeps prices down on ICBM parts, because the DOD is so strapped for cash they need NASA to subsidize their equipment(?!)
Oh well. At least the pointless moon mission is dead. Hopefully this compromise doesn't cripple the actual useful and new projects that will expand our capabilities. And hey, maybe we'll actually find a good use for our HLV to LEO, and not just find arbitrary ways to justify its existence.
The Moon mission was dead a couple of years ago... it just took Congress this long to recognize that fact and a change in the presidency (or rather a new NASA administrator to wake up to the fact). Constellation, as it was proposed, was simply unsustainable and required federal spending on spaceflight to be proportional to what NASA got in the 1960's to get it to happen. There is no possible way that Congress would have ever forked out that kind of money for a sustained effort that would have lasted decades.
In terms of orbital rocketry being similar to ICBMs, it should be pointed out that they are two very different engineering regimes and they don't really support each other... except for perhaps rocket nozzles and some minor parts like what would be in common between a farm tractor and a semi truck. They may technically do the same thing, but really are designed for very different tasks and aren't nearly as common as you would think.
The largest argument that seems to be in favor of NASA having continued development of the shuttle boosters and the Ares I is that it would act as a consumer for Ammonium Perchlorate.... the "solid" rocket fuel that is used in the SRBs. For myself, I think it would be far and away more profitable and perhaps even do better for public support of NASA to use the same money, consume even more rocket fuel, and simply make some fireworks for a really awesome 4th of July party. It would actually involve more workers to make the stuff and at least be something that ordinary Americans appreciate. Either that or cancel the program and save the money altogether... but if the money is going to be spent on merely keeping people employed and to keep this particular industry (the solid rocket fuel manufacturing companies) going at least it could be for something that will actually fly up into the sky. $10 billion USD will buy one heck of a lot of fireworks and put on a display that would be impressive as hell.
It might just help advance the development of rocketry at the same time... something that the Ares I simply won't do.
What is sad is that what you are expressing here is so close to some outstanding and excellent advise that blowing it with a joke is precisely the problem. Yeah, I got the joke.
You are displaying some immaturity here that in most situations can be ignored, treated as simply a joke, and then move on. Unfortunately there are times where you have to show just a little bit more maturity and become a part of the adult world. It sounds like you are one of those kind of people who screw around at an airport talking about how you would bomb the place with a security guard standing right next to you. Let me know how that turns out if you try that stunt.
A police officer can still perform an investigation in another state, and if they have probable cause and plenty of information to indict the suspect it would seem rather pointless for a law enforcement agency in another state to refuse to perform the arrest.
They certainly could go an knock on some doors if that was necessary, but calling up the ISP on the phone and sending a fax with a formal request to reveal information about a network user from a bona fide law enforcement agency is likely going to be honored. State lines or even for the most part international boundaries generally don't stop that kind of police work.
By crossing state lines in the commission of a crime, it also invokes other laws including federal statutes that are not exactly pretty for the individual being prosecuted. Let's just say that crossing state lines was a mistake on the part of the idiot who stole the laptop and is going to have the law really come down hard if they are identified.
The IP address resolves to a residential customer.... see the posting above. The real trick for what this guy is facing right now is trying to get past privacy laws. That would require either a warrant, or at least a bona fide law enforcement agent making the request to the ISP to access the information to find the name of the actual customer and the service address for that IP number.
Until you got to the issue of suggesting that you are going to head off to that particular jurisdiction with a gun, this is a fairly sound letter: Short, simple, and to the point.
I wouldn't suggest that I'm bringing a gun, even if I had a legal concealed weapons permit or a federal firearms permit. Police and Sheriff's offices tend to get real jumpy if you hint that you have a gun, particularly if you explicitly mention it in some form of communications. In this case the implication is that you are exasperated and want to take the law into your own hands... again something no law enforcement agent would look on favorably for many reasons (some valid and others not).
If you do say that you are hiring a private investigator, make sure that you do. Again, this is something unnecessary in the letter of this nature, at least for an initial letter and perhaps is better left out. Don't lie or even stretch the truth as that can and will come back to bite you hard.
Remember, it is easier to attract flies with honey than with vinegar. Doing all of the leg work for a felony arrest and having that land on an officer's desk is a godsend, and something most officers really don't mind. Police love to brag about arrests of that nature. Odds are high that the thief stole much more than the simple laptop too, and it gives probable cause to search the house with the information that you could provide in this situation.
Saying that you would like to personally visit the county (and actually do so) also helps, as it shows you are serious about the issue and would like to get some resolution. Again, that is a big plus, as long as you avoid the stuff that would make a law-enforcement officer's skin crawl. It is also not strictly necessary, but suggesting that you would like a phone conversation with that department to confirm receipt of the letter and to see what is happening with the investigation could be useful too.
The purchase of stolen merchandise is being an accessory to the crime itself, unless you can provably argue that there was no criminal intent in the purchase of that item. That would still require you to get a paper trail (as the owner of a 2nd hand computer that is stolen property) to document just who you got that computer from and to demonstrate in a provable fashion that you had no idea that the merchandise was stolen.
Buying from a pawn shop is such a proof, but then again the pawn brokers routinely register the serial numbers of everything they buy and require photo identification associated with that purchase. Those pawn brokers who don't can and often do end up in jail.
If you are buying something from another person, you had better trust their reputation enough to know if you are purchasing something stolen or not. If you have knowledge of a past criminal history with a friend, buy something from them that you aren't sure they got legally, you would simply be screwed if you just happen to be in possession of that stolen property.
Regardless, even if you can prove that you were acting on good faith to buy the stolen merchandise, it can still be confiscated from you and your only recourse to get your money back (if you paid money for it) is to sue the person who sold it to you as a breech of contract. Presuming that you have ratted them out, a friend sitting in jail is not likely to have much money to give to you in that situation either.
Who sets the exchange rate? You do, together with everybody else around who either chooses to get involved with the exchange or ignore it.
If you set the exchange rate for yourself to purchase all 21 million bitcoins, then you have established an initial rate of exchange. Fortunately for others involved with that currency, there are others who are willing to offer more.
RTFA and read the links I provided. You were acting like a troll demanding that the links to exchange pages be provided, and then proved you were a troll by contradicting yourself saying that nobody provided these links time and again.
BTW, I'll pay USD $5 for all 21 million of them... so there! Let the auction begin, just like a real market!
An apples to oranges comparion, using multiple sources of data that don't always agree. It is also easy to take a cheap pot shot if you don't explain yourself.
That was not the cause of the Great Depression, and certainly was not the cause of World War II.
If anything, Germany faced a problem not of deflation but of hyper inflation, where the German government was forced (at gunpoint by France and the UK) to pay money they simply didn't have and printed it to make up the difference. The political and economic instability of Germany did give rise to Adolph Hitler, but it was not the deflation which was a major cause of the problems.
Much of the problem with the Great Depression in America was the policies of FDR and how he tried to tweak the economy from a central planning authority. By most measures, the "New Deal" policies prolonged the recession to a depression in America and put the American Republic in a dangerous position when idiots like Hitler finally did come to power. Of course Roosevelt also followed up on similar policies by Hoover that weren't all that smart either, so this isn't necessarily an indictment of a particular political party.... both Democrats and Republicans were screwed up in the 1930's.
The root causes of World War II can be found with the policies enacted by the governments involved with World War I, including policies of what happened in the Pacific basin too. Deflation and inflation, other than causing political instability, had little to do with the war that eventually happened.
Deflation is just not good for an economy. Large amounts of inflation aren't either. Really a perfectly flat lien might be the best, no inflation or deflation, but that doesn't seem possible. Looking at historical data it doesn't seem like you can hold it steady state. That being the case, a small amount of controlled inflation is by far a better choice than swings back and forth.
I believe that inflation as something good for the economy is a myth that has been perpetuated by those who take advantage of the situation and make a profit off of that inflation. Unfortunately, it has been so ingrained into modern industrial societies for so long that very few if any people really understand just what life without inflation could possibly be like, and too many people do long term financial planning on the presumption of future inflation that any other scenario is seen as foolish or not welcome.
Yes, deflation stinks if your are borrowing money from a lender that uses compound interest for repayment. With few exceptions, however, most ordinary consumers rarely if ever get any sort of loan at an interest rate which beats inflation, so to suggest that the only way a modern banking system can function is via modest inflation is sort of a red herring too.
I get the theory that inflation tends to encourage investment, while deflation tends to encourage people putting money into the bank of the master bedroom mattress. It isn't quite as simple as that either, and even with an inflationary monetary policy people still tuck money away in a cookie jar or some other place for temporary safe keeping.
Inflation tends to favor bankers and people dealing with "financial services" through a variety of means. Since they are also the ones in control of the money supply and the other fiscal management tools, it also implies why their point of view is followed. For more ordinary folks, all they are really interested in is a stable currency and even a little bit of fluctuation isn't necessarily a bad thing.
For most of the 19th Century, the U.S. Dollar stayed relatively stable compared to the labor needed to get things done. Generally speaking, a dollar paid for a full day's labor of a semi-skilled or unskilled laborer. While there certainly were periods of modest deflation, America was certainly able to grow into a mighty industrial power without the need of constant inflation of the kind that has been dominant in the 20th Century.
The only times in history when you have seen wild swings of hyper-inflation or huge deflation are usually when the government or some scam artist (often the same but not always) gets involved in the picture and tries to manipulate the currency as a way to make personal profit without having to work. The massive deflation happens usually with something like a Ponzi or pyramid scheme (and related scams) and the scam collapses. Sort of like is happening right now in the U.S. economy, other than the fact that the current U.S. President is also simultaneously spending money on a hyper-inflation model as well. I'm not convinced that those who are trying to perform this balancing act of moderating simultaneously massive deflation through hyper inflation are necessarily going to get the right balance.
Farmers did not have to take out loans to purchase seed.... most of them kept seed on hand for the next season's planting. This whole notion of borrowing money up front to pay for next year's harvest is something that is relatively new, but something also due to hybridized food stocks and the belief on the part of many farmers that farming is a capital intensive business.
It sort of is true in the sense that the land is capital intensive, but most farmers get way over their head with fancy gizmos and gadgets to "help" them with their farming, often buying equipment that does way more than they really need.
The real problem that deflation made was that it was difficult to make change, and the liquidity of the market was exceptionally low when you had entire regions that simply lacked cash as a medium of exchange. Think about it this way: If the smallest unit of exchange is enough to buy an automobile, how are you going to be able to pay for a loaf of bread? Also if nobody has money of any kind, what money is going to be used to make that purchase? Those are the problems with massive deflation, and something that can be solved in a manner similar to hyper inflation too.
Unfortunately, there is usually a politician or two that gets greedy and want to run a printing press to make currency so they can buy votes or public favor (even if it isn't a democracy) by spending money they simply don't have in the first place.... causing inflation.
BTW, I do agree with the other poster in regards to "spiral deflation" not really being a problem.
State-based (and territory-backed) currencies existed in the United States well into the 19th Century and even partly into the 20th Century in the case of the Alaskan Gold Rush. It was something directly tied to a lack of liquidity and the fact that the economies of those regions needed an extra jump start to get something going.
Usually state-backed currencies in the 19th Century had a one to one relationship with the U.S. Dollar, so it wasn't as big of a deal. The Federal Reserve wasn't established until 1913, and has always been built around the concept of electronic funds transfers... starting with the telegraph.
There was "cheating" involved with private and state notes and it has caused other sorts of problems with them including bank runs and panics, particularly when the money couldn't be paid back to the commodity (usually gold) or federal currency that it represented.
America hasn't always had a central bank, and arguably it isn't needed either on the principle it may do more harm than good. That, however, is the subject of a whole other thread or better yet another story.
What, exactly, makes the Department of Defense a part of the Federal Government again?
Seriously, you are talking in circles here and not really understanding what is being said here. The Federal Reserve owes its existence to legislation passed by the United States Congress and has the board of governors all appointed by the President of the United States.
How is this different from the Joint Chiefs of Staff?
This isn't the same thing as religious expression, or can you tell me when the last Episcopal bishop was appointed by the U.S. Congress (or any religious authority other than a Chaplin)?
Interestingly, since you mention Linden Dollars, there is an exchange rate between Linden Dollars and Bitcoins:
http://bitlex.co.cc/
There is also a whole page dedicated to those who are involved in converting Bitcoins to other currencies:
http://www.bitcoin.org/trade
This is a fiat currency just as any other fiat currency has been, and there are conventions within the accounting protocols to make sure that the currency can't easily be inflated. It is the inflation aspect of this currency that is the big issue.
There isn't much in terms of groups or individuals engaged in the exchange of bitcoins to anything else, but that is something relative. That is both because it is a new concept, and because of the nature of those who are running this.
This currency is depending upon scarcity and basic economics of supply and demand, where those who are investing into the concept are hoping that the demand will eventually drive up the value of these virtual coins. That isn't necessarily a bargain I would want to buy into, and the allocation of the wealth is sort of egalitarian instead of relying upon a single person hoarding all of the wealth at the beginning. If you strip away the crazy initial wealth distribution system, it is no different than other fiat currencies.
An interesting counter point here is the establishment of the Deutschemark in West Germany following WWII. In order to get the German economy going again, every German citizen was issued a certain amount of money (I think about 1000 marks but I'm not sure of the exact amount) and then told to spend or keep that money as they saw fit. The Mark has never had any sort of backing other than the faith of the German people to buy something with it in the future. It was eventually replaced with the Euro, but even the Euro still is based in a large part on this initial wealth give-away to jump start the German economy in the late 1940's. Other than buying products in Germany with a Mark, it never had any real value at all.
Most people don't understand economics other than having the largest pile of money compared to their neighbors (or complaining that their neighbor has a bigger pile than they do). Wealth creation isn't generating the money itself, but rather what you can do with that money in order to get others to do things for you. If you don't understand that distinction, then it is a hopeless cause at trying to understand economics at its most basic form.
Wealth is ultimately the blood, sweat, and tears of somebody working their behind off to make something, and all of the rest of money flows from that effort. There may be physical materials involved along the way, but you are paying either directly or indirectly for somebody to extract those materials, to shape it and mold it or do something with it. The currency then becomes a more or less averaged value of whatever it is that you are doing compared to what everybody else is doing. Yes, governments can get in the way via taxes and subsidies to screw the system up and give incentives and disincentives for certain kinds of activities... and to suck up some of that wealth by the "rulers" of that society in exchange for hopefully some civil tranquility, but it all ends up being an exchange of goods (made with labor) or services (simply paying for somebody's time more directly).
It really makes no difference in the long run between a fiat currency and a commodity currency anyway. Both require acts of faith, and the medium is relatively neutral in terms of whatever it is that you are trying to obtain above and beyond the pile of money in the first place. Even gold requires faith that somebody will accept it in the future, and it has the additional problems of extreme weight and being useful only for major transactions (due to its high intrinsic value). Any concentration of gold also requires couriers and potentially body guards and other sorts of security that end up simply costing more money than it is worth. It is also placing faith that the gold won't be devalued at some point in the future.
If, for example, somebody discovers a gold nugget on an asteroid that is the size of a house and can relatively cheaply bring it to the Earth, it would cause the gold markets to crash real hard. Gold would still have some value afterward, but it wouldn't be pretty for those who have invested large amounts of their labor into gold.
A currency is stable when the means to duplicating that currency are far and away higher than the "coining" authority can efficiently produce that currency. In particular for paper currency, a simple rule of thumb also needs to be observed:
A 10x increase in the volume of a print job only costs about 2x the price. Or to put it more plainly, Coining and printing money is something that has huge economies of scale and the benefit goes to those who produce this stuff on the largest possible scale. Large regional governments (aka China, USA, EU, etc.) would have the largest advantages for doing this when they have dedicated printing facilities to create this money.
It should be noted that generally national governments don't screw each other over, although there was an effort by Nazi Germany to counterfeit the English Pound which proved to be such a good copy that Winston Churchill was quite concerned about the destabilizing effects of the wartime British economy.
This also applies to coinage as the act of coining metal is to imply a guarantee of metal purity (or composition), weight, and intrinsic value where the value of the coin exceeds that of the raw bullion (in most normal circumstances for coins used as currency). Setting up your own private mint is by design to be difficult to perform... especially if the government tries to keep the profit margin for coining the metal at a very modest rate where a counterfeiting operation would tend to lose money in the attempt.
Interest lending has nothing to do with monetary policy and is a separate issue entirely... as long as you aren't talking fractional reserves from a central bank that is artificially creating money out of thin air. That is a separate issue entirely.
My point with the Iraqi Dinar is that the people of Iraq believed in it, and believed that in the future they would be able to purchase stuff with it. Iraqis even were confident enough in the currency to exchange it for other global currencies (Euros & Dollars) and trade those currencies back into Iraqi Dinars too. That made it a stable currency, not some sort of central bank or planning authority.
The only real function that such a central bank really provides is the distribution of the initially coined (or printed) currency, and perhaps as a central record repository for electronic transactions using normal accounting practices.
One of the reasons that many U.S. states got into the game of printing their own currency was because the U.S. Federal Government wasn't printing it fast enough to meed the ordinary needs of citizens. Basically it is the same problem that this Bitcoin proposal is trying to address, where micro transactions aren't being dealt with due to the fact that the minimum transaction size is insufficiently small to handle ordinary needs. Back when somebody worked a whole 10-12 hour day for a single dollar of earned income (for skilled labor!), the money simply wasn't around to pay for much of anything. There is more to the issue too, but it was a shortage of money where people couldn't even find the currency to spend for the things they needed, and couldn't make change even. That isn't really a problem at the moment with paper currency.
I'm trying to get this picture straight: The whole purpose of the blocks and CPU time metric is to get involved with the distribution of the initial set of money, not necessarily that the currency itself necessarily requires massive quantities of computing power.
BTW, it seems like this coin generation issue is something that can be used as an attack vector, and is a different issue than the problems associated with double spending the money. What kinds of safety protocols or protection protocols are in place to keep somebody from simply "minting" money at will?
I don't buy this argument, as found in the PDF file about Bitcoin. Mind you, I'm just skeptical here and not trying to say it is impossible to resolve, but I don't see the protocols or transactional security which is dealing with this issue.
I'm really curious about this particular issue and how a complete copy of the transaction's history doesn't need to be maintained. Again, it gets to the coining of the money issue, where it would seem as if the transaction trace would have to go back to when the money was coined in the first place. Some sort of planned decay of the history certainly could be used in terms of suggesting that after a certain amount of time it can be presumed that a certain bit of transaction history if valid (using a variety of metrics to make that happen that could even go beyond a pure timestamp measurement). Still, the option to view the full transaction history for what fan outs and inputs were associated with that transaction seems like a critical feature.
It is the decentralized nature of this project that is so ground breaking here, and not necessarily the currency itself. When you are working with a physical commodity-based currency, you have something which can be separately bartered and has some intrinsic value for others to recover your "investment" into that currency.
Almost every other kind of virtual currency system requires some sort of central bookkeeping server to make sure that somebody isn't spending that virtual money twice. It is that central server which those involved with this project are trying desperately to avoid, and to come up with a scheme where mostly honest people will try to stay honest and will have dis-incentives to game the system in a distributed record keeping system.
A central transaction system does a lousy job of scaling to meet demand, and this system of record keeping can be used to keep costs down for keeping track of that kind of data.
It has some interesting applications for MMORPG development, where conceivably you could set up some sort of system of authentication of not just the "virtual currency" but also other things within the game such as monster drops, virtual commodities, and even keeping track of earned experience and character levels. If you could set up a completely de-centralized MMORPG game system that could set up trust metrics and cull out attackers, it might just be a real winner of a game.
As an attempt to solve a tough computational problem, this certainly deserves some merit and attention. Even beyond games, it also has applications in terms of authenticating non-monetary data in a distributed environment that requires certification of one-way transmittal of that data.
I've really got to think about the potential applications here, but I don't think its use as a currency alternative is necessarily the only or even best use of this concept.
Arguments about source quality can and do happen on Wikipedia, and self-published sources can be rooted out. Blogs in particular are highly suspect in terms of sources and generally don't hold up to review when examined. References to an "official site" can be useful as it does give factual information, but it is also treated as a primary source and sometimes can have biases that need to be accounted for as well.
There is no way that a page like this would ever get featured article status or even be considered a "good" article. In fact, since there is absolutely no discussion on the "talk page" it is even reasonable to presume that this page hasn't even really been reviewed at all by anybody trying to improve the page to any sort of standard at all. If you want to know the status of an article, at least check out the discussion page and try to find what biases may be in the article too.
There are efforts to improve Wikipedia quality, and it is unfortunate that an article of this nature is linked so prominently on Slashdot too. In fact, given the nature of the deletionists that I've been dealing with lately, I'm very much surprised that some sort of AfD discussion hasn't already taken place with this article. It passes the initial smell test, but the lack of sources could make it fail the Wikipedia Notability policy (WP:NOTE).
The track record for gold is that it is generally a scarce metal, has incredible value due to its many varied applications and attributes (a highly malleable metal that doesn't oxidize very easily and melts at "modest" temperatures, has a high electrical conductivity, hardly any toxic side effects when in contact with organisms, and can be pounded into incredibly thin strips for decorative purposes.... plus one of the few metals that doesn't have a "silver" metallic color) and has been historically difficult to extract from raw materials.
In other words you have both high demand and low supply. Even if the supply of gold were to increase 100x in the world, there would actually be sufficient applications that demand would rise considerably with a modest drop in price. In other words, on a supply/demand chart, increases in supply generally don't offset with a corresponding drop in value overall. In fact, the "market cap" of the overall gold market (the total value of gold to some alternate non-gold based currency) would actually increase with increased supply. To put it yet another way, if somebody does figure out how to extract gold from seawater or comes up with some sort of alchemy process to make gold via "cold fusion" or some other crazy method that hasn't been discovered so far, increasing the supply of gold, it would still be considered a valuable metal. The only difference is that you would likely be buying it at grocery stores for wrapping up sandwiches or something else in a fashion much more pedestrian than simply hoarding it as bars of metal or coins. It may even be used as coins still, but for things like cent coins.
It would take a significant change in technology or even a new kind of physics to come up with a way to make gold as common as iron. I just don't ever see that happening.
i would say that any currency is backed by the goods and services one can buy with it.
the one way to make sure a currency is usable in daily trade is for it to be accepted as tax payment by local government.
More correctly, any fiat currency (to clarify things... as opposed to a commodity-based currency such as a gold, silver, or grain backed currency) is based upon the faith of those who participate in and use that currency to buy goods and services with it in the future.
That is a huge deal and is much different than simply the mere ability to buy goods and services. A government could collapse, the currency could be devalued, or that faith in general could be broken through a variety of other means.
Perhaps the most significant example of a faith-based currency (faith in the currency, not based upon religion) was the Iraqi Dinar. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, there were many people who thought that it was going to collapse just as other currencies issued by governments that no longer exist have also collapsed. The Nazi German Mark and the Confederate Dollar are both examples of currencies that inflated in value to infinity (aka became worthless). In the case of the Iraqi Dinar, the Iraqi people were both not exactly pleased with the American occupation, and there really wasn't anything to replace the currency. Surprisingly, due to scarcity (no more money was being printed as the government bureaus making the money were destroyed) and a desire by the Iraqi people to continue on economically, the Dinar actually increased in value. In other words, the Iraqi people continued to have faith in that currency to buy future goods and services.
While certainly governments getting involved with deliberately inflating currency can destabilize that currency, it is also true that at least for awhile a currency can remain stable due to the faith of the people possessing that currency to buy something with it in the future.
It should also be noted that this is true not just for fiat currencies "in the real world" but it also applies to virtual economies in video games and MMORPGs. Surprisingly even a single-player video game can still have this impact, where a player may hoard or spend with abandon any virtual money found based upon the principle that either the money is plentiful (or without stuff to buy) or of significant value based upon the supply of that money and the potential to obtain things with it. In the case of multi-player games, it becomes a huge issue if virtual markets open up for exchange of goods and "services".
This is more akin to some company in China that makes a perfect copy of a DVD or CD and mass produces them for retail sales... including sales in countries where it might be illegal. The "good" copies are often indistinguishable from the "real" merchandise, including the holographic seal or other anti-theft devices.
International copyright recognition has been an issue, and for me I think it is legitimate for some sort of cross-border recognition of copyright. Perhaps the most blatant example was with the works of Charles Dickens, where his books were mass produced in such quantities in the USA (without regards to copyright) that ship loads of them occasionally came back to England for sale in a "grey/black" market. The only time Charles Dickens actually made some money off of the books printed in America was when he did a tour of America and got a modest (even at the time) speaking fee and the benefit of touring the western states by rail paid for by his fans.
This said, I think that the move to internationalize copyright terms and standards has gone too far where terms are being extended to the maximum time of any country and the silly concept of automatic copyright without the need of registration.