You may be right; the fall of Soviet communism may have been inevitable or (most generously) an accidental side effect of US policies. It's a tough slog, but I would recommend reading Goldwater's "Conscience of a Conservative", in which he outlines a plan for bringing down the Soviet Union. The policies he recommends were followed almost to a tee by the Reagan administration, and the fall of the USSR follows very closely what Goldwater predicted.
A lot of the policies call for things that are very questionable: supporting terribly repressive dictatorships to prevent communism from gaining a foothold in the Americas, pushing for escalation in arms development, etc., things that the US did engage in during that era.
Whether the ends justified the means, or if the ends were inevitable and the means were just an expression of a stupidly imperialistic US policy is a question that will probably never be answered, but the fact that the policy and expected results matched up so well is pretty interesting.
You're not wrong. That is also true of most of the Austrian economists that I know. I also think that my statements about the negative aspects of gold would probably be enough to get me hanged in the wrong circles; and my statement of the positives of fiat money would likely get me shot as well (I'm sure that there's something else I said that could get me defenestrated for the whole Rasputin treatment). So even by Austrian standards, I'm somewhat heterodox. My reading of von Mises, though, centers more around the "why" of money arises from commodities. And if I really need to defend my view from first principles, I see no way that Bitcoins are not a commodity; they satisfy all the fungibility requirements that one would apply to a commodity.
I shouldn't let myself be dragged into this, but here goes. The serious part of my answer was the first one -- if uranium were in fact useless, then we could use uranium-backed paper notes; with the same caveats that apply to gold-backed paper notes. But uranium is not useless, so it doesn't fit my definition. So based on my criteria for a currency, uranium does not qualify prima facie, and for the same reason that coal doesn't.
The second part of my answer, which was a weak attempt at humor, has been addressed by your post, and I hereby retract. That said, many people do overestimate the danger of radiation, especially in small amounts, and much of the danger comes from refined radioactives or the attempt to refine them. Just be careful that you don't fall on the other side of that equation.
Well, clearly the value of a currency doesn't disappear just because you cross a border. You and I disagree on why that is the case. It strikes me that collecting taxes in a currency is an impediment to its adoption, rather than facilitating it. That's why barter transactions are taxed based on their value in the local currency, and why legal tender laws were passed to force people to except these currencies. Because otherwise, people would never touch the currency so that they could legally avoid paying taxes.
You're just defining currency to mean something that can be exchanged for goods and services. I don't think anyone is arguing that that is the meaning of the word. The question is, what makes a thing, or a concept, a currency? If the theory is "shared delusion" then that's fine but offers little power.
The real question remains -- are there things that are scarce, fungible, and useless, that do not serve as currencies?
Honest answer: It's not useless. The fact that it has applications means that the demand for it as a currency (as an exchange commodity) is competing heavily with the demand for it as a fuel. This means it tilts towards being a consumable commodity.
Let's be clear here -- no currency is backed by anything, ever. Sure, "old currencies" were backed by a precious metal. What was that backed by? The answer to "why do currencies have value" is that _nobody knows_. The different schools of economics all have different theories, but macroeconomics is not, despite what people say, a science.
The theory backing bitcoins is largely based on the (non-mainstream) ideas of Austrian economics; which claim that currencies have value almost entirely because they are scarce, fungible, and useless. That is, their value as an exchange medium far exceeds their value as physical objects. Incidentally, Austrian economics is pretty much the only school of economics to openly acknowledge that it is not a scientific theory.
Fiat money qualifies easily -- nobody is burning dollars for heat or using them for wallpaper, and the scarcity is guaranteed by the issuing government (although easily abused, and sometimes catastrophically, which is why Austrian's tend not to like fiat currencies).
Gold qualifies with caveats; it's clearly "money", but it suffers from portability and verifiability problems unless it's minted into a form that is hard to reproduce (the old-old-school approach) or vouchers are issued that can be redeemed for stored gold (the newer-old-school approach). The vouchers then become money in their own right, since their scarcity is tied to the scarcity of the underlying metal, and they're just as fungible and useless. But almost universally, governments (and unscrupulous banks, and sometimes even scrupulous banks) abuse the fact that the holder of a voucher can't see the gold to steal the gold; effectively disconnecting the scarcity of the two. Same goes for silver, though less dramatic.
It's surprisingly hard to come up with examples of things that are scarce, fungible, and useless that are have not been used as currencies. Even things that violate one of these things is often used as money in a barter sense or in the short term (i.e. cigarettes in prison, wampum among east-coast Native Americans, Facebook game fun-dollars, baseball cards, or the Iraqi Swiss Dinar).
So this is what Bitcoins are -- they are nothing but pure scarcity, fungibility, and uselessness. The portability is nice, except that transactions are tricky (since there's no real "receipt" mechanism -- verifying that a customer has paid his bill requires funky gymnastics), all use of it is dependent on the accessibility of the internet, and the scarcity is conditional on there being sufficient computing power applied to the problem. But aside from those, it really should work. And the fact that they are worth anything at all (that people are willing to buy them at any non-zero price) is a big deal.
In terms of price stability, this is a complicated phenomenon; Austrian's generally do not consider price increases to be the same as inflation (a purely semantic distinction). What causes price changes are complicated, and can not be reduced to a simple rule, because at any moment, technological progress and other myriad phenomenon are messing with prices that affect, to a small extent, everyone in the supply chain of every business in the world, and that effect get compounded over time. The most visible form of this is the supply chain of money itself, through the mechanisms of banking and credit.
So why is the Bitcoin value so volatile? (Now we're in the realm of pure speculation on my part) Because there's no supply chain to keep prices stable. No supply chain of any sort; a restaurant that accepts bitcoins can not buy silverware, or food, or paper cups, or cash register tape, or POS systems, or pay rent in Bitcoins. There are no mechanisms for loaning bitcoins; in either direction -- there are no banks that will pay you to lend them your bitcoins, and no banks that will assess your trustworthiness and income and lend you the money lent to them. So the price floats, while people try to figure out how to provide baseline services (like web hosting), s
Your definition of NP is not expansive enough -- NP includes P; it is the set of problems verifiable in polynomial time (period).
NP-complete problems are the hardest problems in NP -- if you can solve any of them in polynomial time, then you can solve every problem in NP in polynomial time.
Why would you think that? Even in a libertarian utopia you wouldn't always get what you want -- you get what the market can provide. You can express preferences; but in the end, TV would have loud ads because people value the programming more than they hate the loud ads.
As for copyrights and patents, without them, the current television model gets harder to envision, so it's hard to make a direct comparison. But given that copyrights exist, you would expect that commercial-free sources of original programming would start to appear, offering network-like television on a premium basis, and other alternate media sources offering additional options on the internet, as well as home devices designed to circumvent the ads themselves.
There's a part of me that is pissed off at politicians for wasting time with this crap, but a much larger part that is happy they are doing this instead of fucking up more important things with unnecessary regulation.
The claim that having tons of different currencies in circulation so that you can introduce anti-counterfeiting measures actually makes it harder to counterfeit is kind of absurd on the face of it.
Don't get me wrong; I would love to have plastic money. Personally, I just wish they'd change the face design back to the "classic" version (conceding a large-print denomination somewhere), and make all the anti-counterfeiting stuff more subtle (e.g. plastic money, clear windows, watermarks, strips, heat-sensitive ink, etc.) rather than make the bills look like play money.
But we're still in a position where a merchant has to accept the oldest, easiest to counterfeit money. The Europeans made the switch once just by saying the old money is worthless after a certain date; but let's not go crazy -- that's happened exactly once, and for a very practical reason that people could get behind. Counterfeiting is not a crime that directly affects individuals until it's detected.
For what it's worth, many of the positions which you think may be undecidable are in fact solvable. Check out this paper (warning, PDF) from the guy who proved that it was NP-complete; it has a bunch of examples of non-trivial setups that appear to be unsolvable without guessing, but actually are. You don't necessarily encounter these in every game, but you might be surprised if you do some analysis before you make a guess.
The fun thing about doctrines set by decree is that we're one decree away from doing whatever we want to do anyway. The commander-in-chief can change strategic doctrine at any point for any reason. In a Crimson Tide (the movie) situation maybe this means that a nuclear submarine won't retaliate with nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear threat, but otherwise this does almost nothing to change the actual military capabilities of the United States.
Hopeless to explain jokes, I think, but all the poster meant is that he starred in the movies alongside Sir Ian McKellen -- the balance alluded to is that both the good guy and the bad guy would be knights rather than just the one.
For me, the reason that I am curious about the difference is that I wonder whether there is a much better "secret" phone and a conspiracy to prevent it from reaching the American audience.
Either it's just a cultural bias, in which case I can buy an iPhone and not worry about missing out, or it's a real difference, and I want to know more about these phones that are so much better.
The final possibility is that this is just Wired Magazine, publishing the usual made-up story.
A friend pointed out to me once that one way to think of this whole thing, to make it make a little more sense, is to put the business model on its side.
A company like Google, for example -- most people would say that you and I, as searchers, are Google's customers. Instead, let's say that Google's "customers" are the advertisers, and their "product" is users (or, more concretely, the users' attention). By delivering "products" to "customers", they make money.
So a site that makes no money -- an early-stage dot-com that doesn't advertise yet, what are they doing? They're building up a warehouse of product, in the hope that once they have enough products, they can sell them to customers at a good price.
No drop. It's an illusion. This quarter last year MS recognized revenue from upgrade sales of Vista that had not yet been realized. The amount of growth was normal and expected; MS met earnings expectations which accounted for the difference.
Not only that, but they must also show that the oil/coal/etc. companies believed that global warming was real. Keep in mind that the tobacco companies didn't get into serious trouble until the facts of the case for the link with lung cancer were so well established that it was not reasonable that a tobacco executive would be unaware of the link.
Even though the consensus points towards global warming as a fact, there are legitimate scientists who dispute this, not to mention that the climate/weather link runs both ways -- a local cooling does not refute a global warming, so the particular warming of this area is not necessarily caused by a global phenomenon. This makes the whole issue very muddy; if there was a 60% probability of this happening anyway, and global warming made that a 70% probability, then who's to say where the causality lies?
A "$7 trillion" economy backed by $1.4 trillion in actual "money". Gold will have the same multiplying effect as any currency, through deposits and securities.
I buy stock from you for an ounce of gold; you have an ounce of gold, and I have stock worth an ounce of gold; between us, we have two ounces of gold. I deposit an ounce of gold, you borrow an ounce of gold to buy a house from someone for an ounce of gold. Now we have three ounces of gold.
The problem here is simple enough; the fact that the price shot up after the auction is a measure of how much risk there was in the auction process itself.
The fact that the price went up to $100 indicates that people were willing to pay $100 for it when they could have paid $87 for it the day before; thus the market felt that there as a ~15% change that the auction would fail in some way.
Slashdot Mirror
You may be right; the fall of Soviet communism may have been inevitable or (most generously) an accidental side effect of US policies. It's a tough slog, but I would recommend reading Goldwater's "Conscience of a Conservative", in which he outlines a plan for bringing down the Soviet Union. The policies he recommends were followed almost to a tee by the Reagan administration, and the fall of the USSR follows very closely what Goldwater predicted.
A lot of the policies call for things that are very questionable: supporting terribly repressive dictatorships to prevent communism from gaining a foothold in the Americas, pushing for escalation in arms development, etc., things that the US did engage in during that era.
Whether the ends justified the means, or if the ends were inevitable and the means were just an expression of a stupidly imperialistic US policy is a question that will probably never be answered, but the fact that the policy and expected results matched up so well is pretty interesting.
You're not wrong. That is also true of most of the Austrian economists that I know. I also think that my statements about the negative aspects of gold would probably be enough to get me hanged in the wrong circles; and my statement of the positives of fiat money would likely get me shot as well (I'm sure that there's something else I said that could get me defenestrated for the whole Rasputin treatment). So even by Austrian standards, I'm somewhat heterodox. My reading of von Mises, though, centers more around the "why" of money arises from commodities. And if I really need to defend my view from first principles, I see no way that Bitcoins are not a commodity; they satisfy all the fungibility requirements that one would apply to a commodity.
I shouldn't let myself be dragged into this, but here goes. The serious part of my answer was the first one -- if uranium were in fact useless, then we could use uranium-backed paper notes; with the same caveats that apply to gold-backed paper notes. But uranium is not useless, so it doesn't fit my definition. So based on my criteria for a currency, uranium does not qualify prima facie, and for the same reason that coal doesn't.
The second part of my answer, which was a weak attempt at humor, has been addressed by your post, and I hereby retract. That said, many people do overestimate the danger of radiation, especially in small amounts, and much of the danger comes from refined radioactives or the attempt to refine them. Just be careful that you don't fall on the other side of that equation.
Well, clearly the value of a currency doesn't disappear just because you cross a border. You and I disagree on why that is the case. It strikes me that collecting taxes in a currency is an impediment to its adoption, rather than facilitating it. That's why barter transactions are taxed based on their value in the local currency, and why legal tender laws were passed to force people to except these currencies. Because otherwise, people would never touch the currency so that they could legally avoid paying taxes.
You're just defining currency to mean something that can be exchanged for goods and services. I don't think anyone is arguing that that is the meaning of the word. The question is, what makes a thing, or a concept, a currency? If the theory is "shared delusion" then that's fine but offers little power.
The real question remains -- are there things that are scarce, fungible, and useless, that do not serve as currencies?
Honest answer: It's not useless. The fact that it has applications means that the demand for it as a currency (as an exchange commodity) is competing heavily with the demand for it as a fuel. This means it tilts towards being a consumable commodity.
Also, it's dangerous to carry in your pocket.
Let's be clear here -- no currency is backed by anything, ever. Sure, "old currencies" were backed by a precious metal. What was that backed by? The answer to "why do currencies have value" is that _nobody knows_. The different schools of economics all have different theories, but macroeconomics is not, despite what people say, a science.
The theory backing bitcoins is largely based on the (non-mainstream) ideas of Austrian economics; which claim that currencies have value almost entirely because they are scarce, fungible, and useless. That is, their value as an exchange medium far exceeds their value as physical objects. Incidentally, Austrian economics is pretty much the only school of economics to openly acknowledge that it is not a scientific theory.
Fiat money qualifies easily -- nobody is burning dollars for heat or using them for wallpaper, and the scarcity is guaranteed by the issuing government (although easily abused, and sometimes catastrophically, which is why Austrian's tend not to like fiat currencies).
Gold qualifies with caveats; it's clearly "money", but it suffers from portability and verifiability problems unless it's minted into a form that is hard to reproduce (the old-old-school approach) or vouchers are issued that can be redeemed for stored gold (the newer-old-school approach). The vouchers then become money in their own right, since their scarcity is tied to the scarcity of the underlying metal, and they're just as fungible and useless. But almost universally, governments (and unscrupulous banks, and sometimes even scrupulous banks) abuse the fact that the holder of a voucher can't see the gold to steal the gold; effectively disconnecting the scarcity of the two. Same goes for silver, though less dramatic.
It's surprisingly hard to come up with examples of things that are scarce, fungible, and useless that are have not been used as currencies. Even things that violate one of these things is often used as money in a barter sense or in the short term (i.e. cigarettes in prison, wampum among east-coast Native Americans, Facebook game fun-dollars, baseball cards, or the Iraqi Swiss Dinar).
So this is what Bitcoins are -- they are nothing but pure scarcity, fungibility, and uselessness. The portability is nice, except that transactions are tricky (since there's no real "receipt" mechanism -- verifying that a customer has paid his bill requires funky gymnastics), all use of it is dependent on the accessibility of the internet, and the scarcity is conditional on there being sufficient computing power applied to the problem. But aside from those, it really should work. And the fact that they are worth anything at all (that people are willing to buy them at any non-zero price) is a big deal.
In terms of price stability, this is a complicated phenomenon; Austrian's generally do not consider price increases to be the same as inflation (a purely semantic distinction). What causes price changes are complicated, and can not be reduced to a simple rule, because at any moment, technological progress and other myriad phenomenon are messing with prices that affect, to a small extent, everyone in the supply chain of every business in the world, and that effect get compounded over time. The most visible form of this is the supply chain of money itself, through the mechanisms of banking and credit.
So why is the Bitcoin value so volatile? (Now we're in the realm of pure speculation on my part) Because there's no supply chain to keep prices stable. No supply chain of any sort; a restaurant that accepts bitcoins can not buy silverware, or food, or paper cups, or cash register tape, or POS systems, or pay rent in Bitcoins. There are no mechanisms for loaning bitcoins; in either direction -- there are no banks that will pay you to lend them your bitcoins, and no banks that will assess your trustworthiness and income and lend you the money lent to them. So the price floats, while people try to figure out how to provide baseline services (like web hosting), s
Your definition of NP is not expansive enough -- NP includes P; it is the set of problems verifiable in polynomial time (period).
NP-complete problems are the hardest problems in NP -- if you can solve any of them in polynomial time, then you can solve every problem in NP in polynomial time.
Why would you think that? Even in a libertarian utopia you wouldn't always get what you want -- you get what the market can provide. You can express preferences; but in the end, TV would have loud ads because people value the programming more than they hate the loud ads.
As for copyrights and patents, without them, the current television model gets harder to envision, so it's hard to make a direct comparison. But given that copyrights exist, you would expect that commercial-free sources of original programming would start to appear, offering network-like television on a premium basis, and other alternate media sources offering additional options on the internet, as well as home devices designed to circumvent the ads themselves.
There's a part of me that is pissed off at politicians for wasting time with this crap, but a much larger part that is happy they are doing this instead of fucking up more important things with unnecessary regulation.
Looks like the placebo effect is really working!
Facebook wants control of his company back. Some idiots who combined own less than 16% of the company are trying to stop Facebook from moving in.
In fact, before the Enlightenment (in Europe), reason and rational thought were believed to be the province of priests and lawyers.
That's why they call it the Enlightenment. (too easy)
The claim that having tons of different currencies in circulation so that you can introduce anti-counterfeiting measures actually makes it harder to counterfeit is kind of absurd on the face of it.
Don't get me wrong; I would love to have plastic money. Personally, I just wish they'd change the face design back to the "classic" version (conceding a large-print denomination somewhere), and make all the anti-counterfeiting stuff more subtle (e.g. plastic money, clear windows, watermarks, strips, heat-sensitive ink, etc.) rather than make the bills look like play money.
But we're still in a position where a merchant has to accept the oldest, easiest to counterfeit money. The Europeans made the switch once just by saying the old money is worthless after a certain date; but let's not go crazy -- that's happened exactly once, and for a very practical reason that people could get behind. Counterfeiting is not a crime that directly affects individuals until it's detected.
For what it's worth, many of the positions which you think may be undecidable are in fact solvable. Check out this paper (warning, PDF) from the guy who proved that it was NP-complete; it has a bunch of examples of non-trivial setups that appear to be unsolvable without guessing, but actually are. You don't necessarily encounter these in every game, but you might be surprised if you do some analysis before you make a guess.
Regardless, the paper is a good read.
The fun thing about doctrines set by decree is that we're one decree away from doing whatever we want to do anyway. The commander-in-chief can change strategic doctrine at any point for any reason. In a Crimson Tide (the movie) situation maybe this means that a nuclear submarine won't retaliate with nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear threat, but otherwise this does almost nothing to change the actual military capabilities of the United States.
Hopeless to explain jokes, I think, but all the poster meant is that he starred in the movies alongside Sir Ian McKellen -- the balance alluded to is that both the good guy and the bad guy would be knights rather than just the one.
For me, the reason that I am curious about the difference is that I wonder whether there is a much better "secret" phone and a conspiracy to prevent it from reaching the American audience.
Either it's just a cultural bias, in which case I can buy an iPhone and not worry about missing out, or it's a real difference, and I want to know more about these phones that are so much better.
The final possibility is that this is just Wired Magazine, publishing the usual made-up story.
A friend pointed out to me once that one way to think of this whole thing, to make it make a little more sense, is to put the business model on its side.
A company like Google, for example -- most people would say that you and I, as searchers, are Google's customers. Instead, let's say that Google's "customers" are the advertisers, and their "product" is users (or, more concretely, the users' attention). By delivering "products" to "customers", they make money.
So a site that makes no money -- an early-stage dot-com that doesn't advertise yet, what are they doing? They're building up a warehouse of product, in the hope that once they have enough products, they can sell them to customers at a good price.
No drop. It's an illusion. This quarter last year MS recognized revenue from upgrade sales of Vista that had not yet been realized. The amount of growth was normal and expected; MS met earnings expectations which accounted for the difference.
Not only that, but they must also show that the oil/coal/etc. companies believed that global warming was real. Keep in mind that the tobacco companies didn't get into serious trouble until the facts of the case for the link with lung cancer were so well established that it was not reasonable that a tobacco executive would be unaware of the link.
Even though the consensus points towards global warming as a fact, there are legitimate scientists who dispute this, not to mention that the climate/weather link runs both ways -- a local cooling does not refute a global warming, so the particular warming of this area is not necessarily caused by a global phenomenon. This makes the whole issue very muddy; if there was a 60% probability of this happening anyway, and global warming made that a 70% probability, then who's to say where the causality lies?
A "$7 trillion" economy backed by $1.4 trillion in actual "money". Gold will have the same multiplying effect as any currency, through deposits and securities.
I buy stock from you for an ounce of gold; you have an ounce of gold, and I have stock worth an ounce of gold; between us, we have two ounces of gold. I deposit an ounce of gold, you borrow an ounce of gold to buy a house from someone for an ounce of gold. Now we have three ounces of gold.
The problem here is simple enough; the fact that the price shot up after the auction is a measure of how much risk there was in the auction process itself.
The fact that the price went up to $100 indicates that people were willing to pay $100 for it when they could have paid $87 for it the day before; thus the market felt that there as a ~15% change that the auction would fail in some way.