Even at US$1000 per bitcoin, that's not enough value to be mainstream.
If you tell someone that they can buy a car for 10 BTC, that price quote has to remain relatively stable, for at least a day, otherwise you're either going to either have to constantly re-quote. On the back end, if you tell someone you'll host their website for 0.2 BTC a year, any variation in BTC price could be cataclysmic, if you're paying your suppliers and yourself in dollars.
This can be avoided if you just quote prices in dollars and merely offer BTCs as a conduit of exchange, with prices constantly re-quoted. But this just makes BTCs shadow-dollars and defeats the whole ideological purpose of having a "decentralized currency" in the first place. In order for BTCs to be a currency-like, people have to be able to save them, at least short term, and people won't save them unless prices have to be pegged to them. If prices are pegged to dollars, they'll just convert BTCs to dollars, because it'll be more reliable and there's no risk of losing their savings in a future exchange.
One thing that would probably do a lot to tamp down volatility would be a deep BTC options market, where you could make bets like this on a regularized basis.
Massive currency volatility makes long term business planning impossible.
What makes business impossible is having only one mainstream exchange, and that one exchange constantly changing, canceling and amending its withdrawal policies and methods.
I sold when it broke $150 earlier this year. Then I bought back in at $70, and sold earlier this week at $800. When you're up over 1000% in 6 months you don't tempt fate.
The complete and utter disregard for the sanctity of privacy and anonymity as a basic human right in the most selfish way possible.
On what ground do you claim this as a right? What is the historical basis for anonymity and privacy as a "right," not just from the government but from others?
- The ridiculous sense of entitlement that you be compensated richly for intellectual property you never even contributed to at all. It was daddy that made those contributions 50 years ago and you want to ride his accomplishments for the rest of your life.
I uh... I don't know how this particular wrong, as egregious as it can be, is particularly exceptional compared to any other abuse of dynastic wealth. I believe in a 90% death tax, but I'm not going to be copacetic with breaking the back of the copyright regime while hedge fund execs get to pass on their billions through trusts. The weird crazy-long limitation on copyrights was demanded by artists (and their corporations, ha ha) in order to keep parity with other bizarre state-supported wealth diversion schemes.
Right, I mean with that Harry Potter statement, the word "profit" appears nowhere on it. Net participants don't get "profit," they get "proceeds," as you can clearly see there.
Movies can be very profitable, and studios, where publicly traded, report their profits pursuant to completely legitimate GAAP standards (which suck and are gamed by all corporations, not just "Hollywood studios").
Look into your contract sucker, do you really believe your payment was somehow related to how much money movie made?
I'm very grateful I don't pay my rent with that kind of deal — no one does, though some producers would love to switch to that model. They call it "innovative" and dangle tales of Kickstarter millionaires in front of the desperate and stupid. I read my deal memo very carefully.
I have a union, thank god. Actually my pension is paid by profit sharing that counts as a "cost" from a "net" writer's profit computation (tee hee).
I think you need to do some more reading. No one is promised a profit in the situations you're talking about. Have you ever read a screenwriters contract? Or participated in WGA arbitration?
How would you feel if I told you I thought you weren't being paid enough at your job, therefore I was morally entitled to steal from your boss?
Zero Dark Thirty was paid for by Larry Ellison's daughter. Different company. Voltage has gone back to producing million dollar genre films and international acquisitions, which is to say, producing a Oscar winner for best picture has gotten them absolutely nowhere, but for the money, of which there was very little.
they weren't trying to redistribute it for free, they were trying to get a fee for redistributing it.
With respect, nobody is trying to redistribute anything for free. Either the creator distributes it and gets paid admission, or Kim Dotcom distributes it and gets millions in ad impressions. Ad revenue pays for the "free media revolution".
We need ten-year copyrights, not seventy. And "personal-consumption piracy" needs to be separated from corporate hijacking of someone's work, what happened right here.
How did you arrive at that number? Kinda arbitrary. I'd agree that the present system is pretty unworkable, though.
I don't agree that "what Slashdot hates is not copyright, it is the abuse of power by the wealthy and the corporations." I know a lot of people just squeaking by, and hoping that their next project hits, and if it does, copyright will be how they benefit. I think what Slashdot hates is certain ways of making money, I think Slashdot is producerist and technophilic: they think creative artists are phonies and not real creators, that people who do marketing and promotion are rentiers, and that the only people actually earning their wealth are coding, doing tech support, and possibly 3D printing Kickstarter prototypes.
FWIW, I haven't watched your movie, probably never will. And I consider your studio's attempt to blackmail people they suspected of piracy to be little better than thuggish banditry.
Voltage Pictures is a production company, not a studio. Kathryn Bigelow actually produced her following picture with Annapurna Pictures, which is funded by one of Larry Ellison's kids.
My actual studio is Sony Pictures. You guys are cool with Sony, right? =D
Let me ask you something: do the "Voltage Pictures" standard contracts in any way, shape, or form conform to the common definition of Hollywood Accounting?
What's the problem with Hollywood Accounting? Do you have any actual complaint here? The way writers are paid for work is completely regular and legal, and all people outside the business ever hear are the stories, heavily promoted, of certain individuals who thought they could get a better deal by taking their case to the press. They always lose, but behold, a new "evil" has been created, completely out of whole cloth. I have many writer friends and I can tell you the entire critique of "Hollywood Accounting" profoundly ignorant. In the specific case of Art Buchwald, he wasn't screwed by Hollywood Accounting, he was screwed by Eddie Murphy stealing his story.
Tell me this: by what right does a screenwriter deserve more than the wages of "Hollywood Accounting"? How is Hollywood Accounting more fair than, say, the common dot-com tactic of paying an employee with stock options and then diluting them? Or the technology company policy of paying a patent filer with a flat bonus? The difference is moral opprobrium and marketing, nothing more.
The entire concept is fatuous; and the name "Hollywood Accounting" is meant to appeal to naive, parochial prejudices of Americans who assume that LA is filled with effeminate phonies, sin, whores and exploiters. I could call the GPL "Berkeley Dope-Smoker Copyright" by the same turn and be just as right.
I would strongly agree with this, and I've been here for 15 years. I'm willing to accept this fact about the GPL— smartasses will however argue that the GPL is actually a kind of culture jamming, or "taking the system down from the inside." Casuistry I say.
Information wants to be free for me, but not for thee.
Was AFP wrong to take the images because it violated the profoundly-honored institution of copyright, which everyone on Slashdot naturally adores (heh), or because they're a rich corporations, and rich corporations are always wrong compared to "working men"?
I eagerly awate assemblerex's demand for Voltage Pictures to be compensated millions of dollars for the bittorrented distribution of The Hurt Locker. I bring this up as someone who was employed on that film, and note that that money pays my salary on the next film...
These problems apply to all large organizations, not just governments, s/constituent/shareholder, s/congressman/management. Large corporations are often profoundly mismanaged, work is diverted to friends, mistakes are covered up, and the management hand-pick their oversight and their replacements. Large corporations don't have to be efficient, they simply have to make more than the competitor in a give period of time, that leads to
What's more important is the kind of organization, the values, and the stakes– the behavior you describe would be considered absolutely unacceptable from a general in a war, even though the size of the organization is comparable. We'd never accept that "It's human nature" for a general to sell secrets to the enemy, or order millions to their death, just because he doesn't have a concrete economic incentive to delivery military victory on a quarterly or annual basis.
Eisenhower didn't win World War II because of the bonus, Hitler didn't start it because of defense industry kickbacks; Walt Disney didn't create Mickey Mouse because he wanted to be a billionaire, nor did Van Gogh paint a starry night to make a killing at an art auction. The Pope doesn't get a premium for every convert, and frankly I doubt Larry Page and Sergey Brin had dollar signs in their eyes when they created PageRank, those came later.
The profit motive is best understood as a sustaining activity, something that incentivizes corrupt, uncreative people from becoming criminals. It cannot actually advance civilization though, this responsibility falls upon people who set their sights higher than a Lambo in the driveway.
It seems like Apple changes arch on something every two years, constantly and at different times in all their lines. They have this issue utterly figured out, if you stick with their toolchain things just work.
The most common reason I usually get from non-technical people on why they want or why they purchased an iPhone (or iPad) was because they are 'cool' or 'trendy'.
I call shenanigans. This may be the underlying reason, but no self-respecting human with a pulse will openly, flatly admit to doing something because it was "cool" or "trendy".
Slashdot Mirror
I used the word "deep" and meant it.
If you tell someone that they can buy a car for 10 BTC, that price quote has to remain relatively stable, for at least a day, otherwise you're either going to either have to constantly re-quote. On the back end, if you tell someone you'll host their website for 0.2 BTC a year, any variation in BTC price could be cataclysmic, if you're paying your suppliers and yourself in dollars.
This can be avoided if you just quote prices in dollars and merely offer BTCs as a conduit of exchange, with prices constantly re-quoted. But this just makes BTCs shadow-dollars and defeats the whole ideological purpose of having a "decentralized currency" in the first place. In order for BTCs to be a currency-like, people have to be able to save them, at least short term, and people won't save them unless prices have to be pegged to them. If prices are pegged to dollars, they'll just convert BTCs to dollars, because it'll be more reliable and there's no risk of losing their savings in a future exchange.
One thing that would probably do a lot to tamp down volatility would be a deep BTC options market, where you could make bets like this on a regularized basis.
What makes business impossible is having only one mainstream exchange, and that one exchange constantly changing, canceling and amending its withdrawal policies and methods.
I sold when it broke $150 earlier this year. Then I bought back in at $70, and sold earlier this week at $800. When you're up over 1000% in 6 months you don't tempt fate.
If you can show me a writer's contract that says "percent of profit," I'll surrender my account.
The entire "Hollywood Accounting" narrative was invented by the lawyers of disgruntled writers.
Both!
Or maybe, Neither! This is the Sony that was once called "Columbia Pictures," bought by the Japanese from the Coca-Cola Company in the late 1980s.
On what ground do you claim this as a right? What is the historical basis for anonymity and privacy as a "right," not just from the government but from others?
I uh... I don't know how this particular wrong, as egregious as it can be, is particularly exceptional compared to any other abuse of dynastic wealth. I believe in a 90% death tax, but I'm not going to be copacetic with breaking the back of the copyright regime while hedge fund execs get to pass on their billions through trusts. The weird crazy-long limitation on copyrights was demanded by artists (and their corporations, ha ha) in order to keep parity with other bizarre state-supported wealth diversion schemes.
Right, I mean with that Harry Potter statement, the word "profit" appears nowhere on it. Net participants don't get "profit," they get "proceeds," as you can clearly see there.
Movies can be very profitable, and studios, where publicly traded, report their profits pursuant to completely legitimate GAAP standards (which suck and are gamed by all corporations, not just "Hollywood studios").
I'm very grateful I don't pay my rent with that kind of deal — no one does, though some producers would love to switch to that model. They call it "innovative" and dangle tales of Kickstarter millionaires in front of the desperate and stupid. I read my deal memo very carefully.
I have a union, thank god. Actually my pension is paid by profit sharing that counts as a "cost" from a "net" writer's profit computation (tee hee).
2012 was a movie, some would call "shitty," that made $700 million. Shitty subjective quality is not, nor has ever been, a valid freetard alibi.
I think you need to do some more reading. No one is promised a profit in the situations you're talking about. Have you ever read a screenwriters contract? Or participated in WGA arbitration?
How would you feel if I told you I thought you weren't being paid enough at your job, therefore I was morally entitled to steal from your boss?
Can't decide if you forgot a smiley at the end or not.
My argument's quality is orthogonal to my employment.
Zero Dark Thirty was paid for by Larry Ellison's daughter. Different company. Voltage has gone back to producing million dollar genre films and international acquisitions, which is to say, producing a Oscar winner for best picture has gotten them absolutely nowhere, but for the money, of which there was very little.
With respect, nobody is trying to redistribute anything for free. Either the creator distributes it and gets paid admission, or Kim Dotcom distributes it and gets millions in ad impressions. Ad revenue pays for the "free media revolution".
How did you arrive at that number? Kinda arbitrary. I'd agree that the present system is pretty unworkable, though.
I don't agree that "what Slashdot hates is not copyright, it is the abuse of power by the wealthy and the corporations." I know a lot of people just squeaking by, and hoping that their next project hits, and if it does, copyright will be how they benefit. I think what Slashdot hates is certain ways of making money, I think Slashdot is producerist and technophilic: they think creative artists are phonies and not real creators, that people who do marketing and promotion are rentiers, and that the only people actually earning their wealth are coding, doing tech support, and possibly 3D printing Kickstarter prototypes.
Voltage Pictures is a production company, not a studio. Kathryn Bigelow actually produced her following picture with Annapurna Pictures, which is funded by one of Larry Ellison's kids.
My actual studio is Sony Pictures. You guys are cool with Sony, right? =D
So people are only entitled to royalties if they really really need them? Thus, no rich person (or entity) should ever collect a royalty?
Hurt Locker really didn't profit.
What's the problem with Hollywood Accounting? Do you have any actual complaint here? The way writers are paid for work is completely regular and legal, and all people outside the business ever hear are the stories, heavily promoted, of certain individuals who thought they could get a better deal by taking their case to the press. They always lose, but behold, a new "evil" has been created, completely out of whole cloth. I have many writer friends and I can tell you the entire critique of "Hollywood Accounting" profoundly ignorant. In the specific case of Art Buchwald, he wasn't screwed by Hollywood Accounting, he was screwed by Eddie Murphy stealing his story.
Tell me this: by what right does a screenwriter deserve more than the wages of "Hollywood Accounting"? How is Hollywood Accounting more fair than, say, the common dot-com tactic of paying an employee with stock options and then diluting them? Or the technology company policy of paying a patent filer with a flat bonus? The difference is moral opprobrium and marketing, nothing more.
The entire concept is fatuous; and the name "Hollywood Accounting" is meant to appeal to naive, parochial prejudices of Americans who assume that LA is filled with effeminate phonies, sin, whores and exploiters. I could call the GPL "Berkeley Dope-Smoker Copyright" by the same turn and be just as right.
I would strongly agree with this, and I've been here for 15 years. I'm willing to accept this fact about the GPL— smartasses will however argue that the GPL is actually a kind of culture jamming, or "taking the system down from the inside." Casuistry I say.
It's good, it's pretty ambivalent, if you come out of that thing feeling good about the Iraq War, you're a moron.
It's too late, I worked on Zero Dark Thirty too :P
Information wants to be free for me, but not for thee.
Was AFP wrong to take the images because it violated the profoundly-honored institution of copyright, which everyone on Slashdot naturally adores (heh), or because they're a rich corporations, and rich corporations are always wrong compared to "working men"?
I eagerly awate assemblerex's demand for Voltage Pictures to be compensated millions of dollars for the bittorrented distribution of The Hurt Locker. I bring this up as someone who was employed on that film, and note that that money pays my salary on the next film...
These problems apply to all large organizations, not just governments, s/constituent/shareholder, s/congressman/management. Large corporations are often profoundly mismanaged, work is diverted to friends, mistakes are covered up, and the management hand-pick their oversight and their replacements. Large corporations don't have to be efficient, they simply have to make more than the competitor in a give period of time, that leads to
What's more important is the kind of organization, the values, and the stakes– the behavior you describe would be considered absolutely unacceptable from a general in a war, even though the size of the organization is comparable. We'd never accept that "It's human nature" for a general to sell secrets to the enemy, or order millions to their death, just because he doesn't have a concrete economic incentive to delivery military victory on a quarterly or annual basis.
Eisenhower didn't win World War II because of the bonus, Hitler didn't start it because of defense industry kickbacks; Walt Disney didn't create Mickey Mouse because he wanted to be a billionaire, nor did Van Gogh paint a starry night to make a killing at an art auction. The Pope doesn't get a premium for every convert, and frankly I doubt Larry Page and Sergey Brin had dollar signs in their eyes when they created PageRank, those came later.
The profit motive is best understood as a sustaining activity, something that incentivizes corrupt, uncreative people from becoming criminals. It cannot actually advance civilization though, this responsibility falls upon people who set their sights higher than a Lambo in the driveway.
It seems like Apple changes arch on something every two years, constantly and at different times in all their lines. They have this issue utterly figured out, if you stick with their toolchain things just work.
I call shenanigans. This may be the underlying reason, but no self-respecting human with a pulse will openly, flatly admit to doing something because it was "cool" or "trendy".