I will stand by that sweeping statement until you can give me 1, and it only needs to be 1, large publicly funded project that was delivered under budget in the last 20 years.
How big is large? I live in an area that has seen several local and regional projects (regional = serving a mostly-urban/suburban population of 5-15 million people - bigger than some countries) in the $0.1-2.0b range that came in under-budget and before-deadline, and that's just in the last 3-4 years.
There's a thing about high-profile publicly-funded projects: They tend to attract people who want to be in charge, which leads to costs related to fighting over how things will or won't be done and costs associated with the "losing" side either sabotaging the effort or just "auditing it to death" in hopes of finding some reason to either kill it or to make the proponents look bad so they (the proponents) will be politically weaker when the next high-profile project comes around. Since high-dollar non-black-budget projects tend to be high-profile, well, you get the picture.
1) Even in ancient times, coins generally contained less metal value than their stated sovereign-imposed value. Unless I've been misinformed, during certain times in the Roman Empire, the metal value was less than half of the stated value, making this the 1950s-equivalent of a paper dollar bill with a silver quarter taped to it.
2) Unlike some other rare metals, gold has the property of being easily identifiable by its color and softness.
3) Shiny, malleable, low-melting-point items can be turned into things of beauty like jewelry, which gives them a non-monetary value to any society that shares our sense of aesthetics and which has developed the ability to melt and shape metals. This and other uses provide the "intrinsic" portion of the metal's value. Any value above this is a result of people's faith that people in the future will buy the metal back at today's prices and is therefore non-intrinsic and subject to fluctuation based on human-emotional and other factors not related to the metal's intrinsic value.
4) some of the disadvantages of modern money that you mention I see as advantages. For example, if I don't have to keep my money on my person or stored on my property, that makes me less of a target for what used to be called bandits.
Other examples of things that were once in demand in the USA but now are not, or at least not as much:
* Tobacco * Anything supporting the Whaling industry that isn't used elsewhere * Raw paper for newspapers * Typewriters and carbon paper * leaded gasoline * ivory, other than "old" (legal) ivory * silk clothing
And the list goes on.
There are also many things that have gotten less valuable over time in inflation-adjusted dollars even though demand has remained high or increased, either because the cost of providing the good or service has gone down or because alternatives exist that put an ever-lowering ceiling on the prices people are willing to pay.
Examples for the United States include:
* Most "silicon-based" technologies and the services they provide (e.g. telecommunications costs) * Food staples (commodity prices have slowly fallen over the last 80+ years) * Out-of-season foods (including non-staple foods) * Non-local transportation
and the list goes on.
As to which one(s) of these, if any, will prove to be the closes match for Bitcoin's future value trajectory, I have no clue. But I agree with you, it's probably not tulips.
Who knows, BC's long-term trend against the dollar might even be parity or positive.
There is a completely different use for alt-coins besides as an alternative currency: As the equivalent digital paper money of an existing currency or an existing commodity?
The nice thing about paper currency is that it is relatively anonymous. Sure, theoretically the serial numbers can be tracked and fingerprints can be scanned but that's impractical and wouldn't cover every transaction anyways.
Imagine a bitcoin-like setup where all of the coins were "pre-mined" by a sponsoring country, bank, or other entity and that entity backed all of the "coins" by something that already exists, such as United States Dollars, Euros, or even grams of gold.
As long as the sponsoring country is stable enough that people have faith in it to protect the actual items that back it and to buy back or redeem the virtual coins on demand, you now have a functioning electronic way of conducting business in US dollars, Euros, gold, or whatever with the limited-anonymity advantages of bitcoin.
In the case of gold, it would be equivalent to how gold certificates or gold coins used to work way back in the day.
By the way, if you think this can't work, a non-virtual equivalent of this is in use in many communities in the United States: "Local currency." In many communities, banks and business get together and agree to print and accept "local money" that is backed 1-for-1 by real United States dollars. This is usually done to promote spending money locally but sometimes as a novelty for tourists.
The "problem" with both of those routes [a currency-exchange-trade model or a commodities-futures-exchange model] is that there is heavy auditing on every stage of every transaction, so the anonymity aspect of Bitcoin goes right out of the window.
This would only apply at the "big-money" level. "Retail" users would continue to use retail-oriented exchanges like we have today or perhaps some other model, such as direct bartering such as you might find over Craigslist. Government regulations would ensure that in countries like the United States, any legal trade over a certain US-dollar-equivalent amount was not anonymous.
Here's how I see it:
If a local or online (but US-based) merchant is willing to sell dollars for bitcoins 10 years from now, you'll be able to buy small amounts without any government-mandated paperwork, but if you want to buy large amounts either all at once or over time in a way that should arouse suspicion that but for the government rules you would have done it all at once (i.e. "willful blindness" on the part of the money-exchange business won't protect them from government penalties), you'll need to prove your identity.
then anything that can be used to pay tax will have intrinsic value, including funny paper issued by the government.
To quote Granny from a pre-1965 TV episode of The Beverly Hillbillies when she went to the bank and tried to make a large withdrawal and the bank tried to pay her in paper money:
I heard recently on NPR or BBC radio that the number was closer to 10-13% that was used in manufacturing and other non-jewelry/non-bullion uses, but I could be wrong. Whatever it is, it's well over 80% split between bullion-or-other-pure-store-of-value uses and jewelry/art/aesthetic uses.
If I have a wallet full of bitcoins and give you the whole wallet in exchange for something, there won't be record of that in the ledger unless one of us wants there to be a record of it.
The downside is that such transactions are subject to being "beaten to the ledger" by an unscrupulous double-spender, limiting their application.
there's no intrinsic value to small bits of paper in a post-collapse economy.
I'm not sure what you mean by "post-collapse." If you mean "post-cancellation-of-the-currency" economy like after a civil war and the losing side's currency is declared worthless, then you are mostly right - the only intrinsic value is the value of burning, recycling, or otherwise using the paper itself. There may be some non-intrinsic value as a collectable (e.g. Zimbabwe's gazillion-dollar bank notes have no currency value but have fetched over USD 5 as collectables "post-collapse").
If you mean "post-collapse" as in "post-depression" or "post bank panic" then I'll point to United States currency printed before 1929 - a paper dollar backed by "the full faith in credit of the United States" printed in 1928 and a silver dollar minted in 1928 were both worth a dollar at the end of the Great Depression. Prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve system, a bank note denominated in US dollars and issued before a bank panic by a bank that survived and which did not devalue or de-monitize its notes likely had the same value relative to the United States Dollar after the panic ended as before the panic.
Other forms of cash, such as the United States penny and nickle, do have "intrinsic" value in that the metal is worth about as much or more than the face value of the coin. This value comes largely from the value of the zinc, copper, and nickle in industrial uses. This is in contrast to US silver coins before 1964, where the non-currency value was based on the non-intrinsic value people placed in silver as a "store of value." I call this a "non-intrinsic" value because, like gold, the value of silver is largely based on the belief that it will hold its value over generations and the demand that such belief creates, on on the demand for its use in industry or artistic works such as jewelry.
As long as I live in a society with a stable government and a stable economy, I'd rather use a fiat currency that the central bank can manipulate to mitigate a recession or inflation than a currency or "currency" like BitCoin or precious metals that are largely outside of its control.
On the other hand, if I'm in a society where I don't trust the central bank to look out for the interests of the whole economy (i.e. one that is incompetent, corrupt, or just plain ineffectual) then I might look to use another country's currency, precious metals, Bitcoin, or just chuck the whole thing and go to barter.
Now, as to whether I use a physical medium or its equivalent (say, a bitcoin wallet stored on my own device) or use a "cashless" means such as checks, credit/debit cards, direct wire transfers from one bank account to another, bitcoins stored on a device I don't control, etc., is going to be a matter of "do I trust that the cashless system is stable now AND do I trust that it will not SUDDENLY become unavailable without giving me time to make necessary withdrawals?"
In the United States, if you live in an area where ATMs, banks, etc. may become "suddenly unavailable" to you and you are smart, you have several days worth of cash stored somewhere on your premises. For example, before a hurricane comes, most people are going to hit the bank or ATM and load up on cash, in case the stores re-open as soon as the storm passes but the credit-card machines aren't working.
the only thing better than cold hard cash that can not be directly seized from you Cold hard cash can be directly seized from you. In fact, if it's in your physical possession (vs. in a bank's safety-deposit box or "on deposit" with a bank that takes gold deposits) that's the only way it can be taken from you - directly.
subjected to computer or human errors, or denied to you during emergencies are things with intrinsic value (gold, silver and other items mankind puts real value into as a thing unto itself)
Gold, silver, etc. have industrial uses and aesthetic uses. Beyond that, their value is based only on faith that others will consider it of value in the future. If, hypothetically, the world started believing that owning gold for the sake of owning gold was unethical (as is the case in some influential circles with ivory that isn't "old" and with "conflict minerals," for example), the demand and therefore the value would go down. If a cheaper replacement were found for its industrial uses, its value would go down or at least not rise as fast (if gold were still used in dentistry as it once was, the demand and therefore the value would be higher than it is).
My point is that a large part of the value of gold and silver is the "faith" that people have in it that people will still want it when it is time to sell - whether that time is later today (day traders), during the next period of inflation (for those buying as an inflation hedge), or decades or centuries from now (for those buying so their kids/grandkids will have something "when the revolution comes").
There are many small and medium-sized banks out there who aren't out to put their stockholders so far ahead of their customers that they deserve the label of a "screw-u" business.
However, if you asked what the average "screw-u" level of consumer-oriented* banks were weighted by influence, capitalization, or assets, then you'd have a valid point.
*Since this is about "screwing customers" i.e. ordinary individuals and small businesses and organizations, I'm not counting banks that don't cater to such customers. Those banks may have a "screw u" mentality too, but their customers are "big boys" and can stand up for themselves.
By the way, in America at least, individuals and in some cases small businesses and non-profits have an alternative to banks: They are called credit unions.
The "last mile" is from the company's local office out to either the node or the curb (depending on how the topology is setup). The portion from the curb or node to the structure is referred to as a "drop".
This may be technically true but in many people's "common sense" understanding - including my own until I read your post - the "last mile" is the "last" portion of the "line" not owned or controlled by the customer which connects directly to customer-owned/managed equipment.
In my mind and probably that of many others not in the telephone industry, the "drop" is the part of the "last mile" where the "wire" (or fiber, or whatever) leaves the "bundle" that feeds the neighborhood (or whatever) and goes to the where it connects to the customer's equipment. For typical home phone customers in the United States, this would be from someplace on the pole or someplace in a telco box typically near the edge of the homeowner's property or perhaps on a neighbor's property to the "DMARC" where it connects up with the customer's "inside wiring."
Correction: In the mind of probably most non-industry people, terms like "last mile" and "drop" probably fall into the "don't know/don't care, just give me service that does what I need it to at a fair price, dammit!" category.
Depends on how the provider splits the "asymmetry" of the line
If you had a high-upload/low-download requirement then your needs should technically be doable using this technology.
Whether or not your provider will offer such a service or if they will offer it at a price that isn't "designed to never sell" (i.e. above the cost of a high-capacity line that offers oodles of bandwidth in both directions) is a business decision, not a technical one.
God I'd kill to be able to get designs and data to my clients without an overnight upload.
By the way, for uses like yours, you may want to just do everything except local i/o (e.g. printing, scanning, typing, teleconferencing, etc.) either "in the cloud" or on a server that's hosted someplace with good connectivity. Yes, you'll give up some control and you'll have to pay a monthly fee that you don't currently pay, but it may be your best - or only - option.
However in ten or twenty years what kind of bandwidth requirements will we have?
In the United States, the analog "plain old telephone" network was designed to handle 300 to 3400Hz voice traffic, which in practice allowed for 9600bps communication at 2400 baud even if the telephone switches were using 1970s (or older?) technology and the wire from the switch to the end user was who-knows-how-old. By the 1980s, we had developed mathematics and modems that could use the same lines to get up to about 33.6kbps at 3,429 baud.
Disclaimer: The above is from unreferenced text available at Wikipedia (Modem, as of 22:53, 26 November 2013). Caveat reader.
In any case, odds are, whatever we put in the ground today, in 20 years we'll be able to do more with it than we can today.
Fiber to the node is fine as long as whatever goes from the node to the end-user device can get the job done. If you are within 90 meters, CAT6 can do 1GHz.
Now, as for squeezing good speeds out of the existing telephone-grade "last mile," well, if there is money to be made, someone will be working on this problem.
Realistically though, most users would be fine if they could record a handful of HDTV-channels at once, surf the web or watch YouTube videos on 3-4 computers at once, and download Windows Updates in a timely manner, all at the same time. Those who need more should have the option of paying for a direct fiber line to their home.
There is a big difference between "permanently" and "probably for the lifetime of anyone alive today and possibly the lifetimes of their children and grandchildren."
Odds are at least one of these states will have greatly improved socioeconomic status relative to the rest of America within, oh, 100-200 years.
Slashdot Mirror
I will stand by that sweeping statement until you can give me 1, and it only needs to be 1, large publicly funded project that was delivered under budget in the last 20 years.
How big is large? I live in an area that has seen several local and regional projects (regional = serving a mostly-urban/suburban population of 5-15 million people - bigger than some countries) in the $0.1-2.0b range that came in under-budget and before-deadline, and that's just in the last 3-4 years.
There's a thing about high-profile publicly-funded projects: They tend to attract people who want to be in charge, which leads to costs related to fighting over how things will or won't be done and costs associated with the "losing" side either sabotaging the effort or just "auditing it to death" in hopes of finding some reason to either kill it or to make the proponents look bad so they (the proponents) will be politically weaker when the next high-profile project comes around. Since high-dollar non-black-budget projects tend to be high-profile, well, you get the picture.
Thanks for this. Now I understand why I can't just assume Oz's urban and suburban infrastructure or lack of it is comparable to that of where I live.
1) Even in ancient times, coins generally contained less metal value than their stated sovereign-imposed value. Unless I've been misinformed, during certain times in the Roman Empire, the metal value was less than half of the stated value, making this the 1950s-equivalent of a paper dollar bill with a silver quarter taped to it.
2) Unlike some other rare metals, gold has the property of being easily identifiable by its color and softness.
3) Shiny, malleable, low-melting-point items can be turned into things of beauty like jewelry, which gives them a non-monetary value to any society that shares our sense of aesthetics and which has developed the ability to melt and shape metals. This and other uses provide the "intrinsic" portion of the metal's value. Any value above this is a result of people's faith that people in the future will buy the metal back at today's prices and is therefore non-intrinsic and subject to fluctuation based on human-emotional and other factors not related to the metal's intrinsic value.
4) some of the disadvantages of modern money that you mention I see as advantages. For example, if I don't have to keep my money on my person or stored on my property, that makes me less of a target for what used to be called bandits.
The last line should read "stable" rather than "parity."
Other examples of things that were once in demand in the USA but now are not, or at least not as much:
* Tobacco
* Anything supporting the Whaling industry that isn't used elsewhere
* Raw paper for newspapers
* Typewriters and carbon paper
* leaded gasoline
* ivory, other than "old" (legal) ivory
* silk clothing
And the list goes on.
There are also many things that have gotten less valuable over time in inflation-adjusted dollars even though demand has remained high or increased, either because the cost of providing the good or service has gone down or because alternatives exist that put an ever-lowering ceiling on the prices people are willing to pay.
Examples for the United States include:
* Most "silicon-based" technologies and the services they provide (e.g. telecommunications costs)
* Food staples (commodity prices have slowly fallen over the last 80+ years)
* Out-of-season foods (including non-staple foods)
* Non-local transportation
and the list goes on.
As to which one(s) of these, if any, will prove to be the closes match for Bitcoin's future value trajectory, I have no clue. But I agree with you, it's probably not tulips.
Who knows, BC's long-term trend against the dollar might even be parity or positive.
There is a completely different use for alt-coins besides as an alternative currency: As the equivalent digital paper money of an existing currency or an existing commodity?
The nice thing about paper currency is that it is relatively anonymous. Sure, theoretically the serial numbers can be tracked and fingerprints can be scanned but that's impractical and wouldn't cover every transaction anyways.
Imagine a bitcoin-like setup where all of the coins were "pre-mined" by a sponsoring country, bank, or other entity and that entity backed all of the "coins" by something that already exists, such as United States Dollars, Euros, or even grams of gold.
As long as the sponsoring country is stable enough that people have faith in it to protect the actual items that back it and to buy back or redeem the virtual coins on demand, you now have a functioning electronic way of conducting business in US dollars, Euros, gold, or whatever with the limited-anonymity advantages of bitcoin.
In the case of gold, it would be equivalent to how gold certificates or gold coins used to work way back in the day.
By the way, if you think this can't work, a non-virtual equivalent of this is in use in many communities in the United States: "Local currency." In many communities, banks and business get together and agree to print and accept "local money" that is backed 1-for-1 by real United States dollars. This is usually done to promote spending money locally but sometimes as a novelty for tourists.
The "problem" with both of those routes [a currency-exchange-trade model or a commodities-futures-exchange model] is that there is heavy auditing on every stage of every transaction, so the anonymity aspect of Bitcoin goes right out of the window.
This would only apply at the "big-money" level. "Retail" users would continue to use retail-oriented exchanges like we have today or perhaps some other model, such as direct bartering such as you might find over Craigslist. Government regulations would ensure that in countries like the United States, any legal trade over a certain US-dollar-equivalent amount was not anonymous.
Here's how I see it:
If a local or online (but US-based) merchant is willing to sell dollars for bitcoins 10 years from now, you'll be able to buy small amounts without any government-mandated paperwork, but if you want to buy large amounts either all at once or over time in a way that should arouse suspicion that but for the government rules you would have done it all at once (i.e. "willful blindness" on the part of the money-exchange business won't protect them from government penalties), you'll need to prove your identity.
then anything that can be used to pay tax will have intrinsic value, including funny paper issued by the government.
To quote Granny from a pre-1965 TV episode of The Beverly Hillbillies when she went to the bank and tried to make a large withdrawal and the bank tried to pay her in paper money:
SILVER!!!!!!!!!!
I heard recently on NPR or BBC radio that the number was closer to 10-13% that was used in manufacturing and other non-jewelry/non-bullion uses, but I could be wrong. Whatever it is, it's well over 80% split between bullion-or-other-pure-store-of-value uses and jewelry/art/aesthetic uses.
the sheriff of Nottingham is going to come after you for some US dollars.
Now why would some English Sheriff want US Dollars? What's wrong with British money???
delta between the assigned value and the value in utility is usually pretty noticeable.
I think you just created a new definition for the term "delta-v" :).
If I have a wallet full of bitcoins and give you the whole wallet in exchange for something, there won't be record of that in the ledger unless one of us wants there to be a record of it.
The downside is that such transactions are subject to being "beaten to the ledger" by an unscrupulous double-spender, limiting their application.
there's no intrinsic value to small bits of paper in a post-collapse economy.
I'm not sure what you mean by "post-collapse." If you mean "post-cancellation-of-the-currency" economy like after a civil war and the losing side's currency is declared worthless, then you are mostly right - the only intrinsic value is the value of burning, recycling, or otherwise using the paper itself. There may be some non-intrinsic value as a collectable (e.g. Zimbabwe's gazillion-dollar bank notes have no currency value but have fetched over USD 5 as collectables "post-collapse").
If you mean "post-collapse" as in "post-depression" or "post bank panic" then I'll point to United States currency printed before 1929 - a paper dollar backed by "the full faith in credit of the United States" printed in 1928 and a silver dollar minted in 1928 were both worth a dollar at the end of the Great Depression. Prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve system, a bank note denominated in US dollars and issued before a bank panic by a bank that survived and which did not devalue or de-monitize its notes likely had the same value relative to the United States Dollar after the panic ended as before the panic.
Other forms of cash, such as the United States penny and nickle, do have "intrinsic" value in that the metal is worth about as much or more than the face value of the coin. This value comes largely from the value of the zinc, copper, and nickle in industrial uses. This is in contrast to US silver coins before 1964, where the non-currency value was based on the non-intrinsic value people placed in silver as a "store of value." I call this a "non-intrinsic" value because, like gold, the value of silver is largely based on the belief that it will hold its value over generations and the demand that such belief creates, on on the demand for its use in industry or artistic works such as jewelry.
Erase the wallet, the coins inside are destroyed.
As long as I live in a society with a stable government and a stable economy, I'd rather use a fiat currency that the central bank can manipulate to mitigate a recession or inflation than a currency or "currency" like BitCoin or precious metals that are largely outside of its control.
On the other hand, if I'm in a society where I don't trust the central bank to look out for the interests of the whole economy (i.e. one that is incompetent, corrupt, or just plain ineffectual) then I might look to use another country's currency, precious metals, Bitcoin, or just chuck the whole thing and go to barter.
Now, as to whether I use a physical medium or its equivalent (say, a bitcoin wallet stored on my own device) or use a "cashless" means such as checks, credit/debit cards, direct wire transfers from one bank account to another, bitcoins stored on a device I don't control, etc., is going to be a matter of "do I trust that the cashless system is stable now AND do I trust that it will not SUDDENLY become unavailable without giving me time to make necessary withdrawals?"
In the United States, if you live in an area where ATMs, banks, etc. may become "suddenly unavailable" to you and you are smart, you have several days worth of cash stored somewhere on your premises. For example, before a hurricane comes, most people are going to hit the bank or ATM and load up on cash, in case the stores re-open as soon as the storm passes but the credit-card machines aren't working.
the only thing better than cold hard cash that can not be directly seized from you
Cold hard cash can be directly seized from you. In fact, if it's in your physical possession (vs. in a bank's safety-deposit box or "on deposit" with a bank that takes gold deposits) that's the only way it can be taken from you - directly.
subjected to computer or human errors, or denied to you during emergencies are things with intrinsic value (gold, silver and other items mankind puts real value into as a thing unto itself)
Gold, silver, etc. have industrial uses and aesthetic uses. Beyond that, their value is based only on faith that others will consider it of value in the future. If, hypothetically, the world started believing that owning gold for the sake of owning gold was unethical (as is the case in some influential circles with ivory that isn't "old" and with "conflict minerals," for example), the demand and therefore the value would go down. If a cheaper replacement were found for its industrial uses, its value would go down or at least not rise as fast (if gold were still used in dentistry as it once was, the demand and therefore the value would be higher than it is).
My point is that a large part of the value of gold and silver is the "faith" that people have in it that people will still want it when it is time to sell - whether that time is later today (day traders), during the next period of inflation (for those buying as an inflation hedge), or decades or centuries from now (for those buying so their kids/grandkids will have something "when the revolution comes").
There are many small and medium-sized banks out there who aren't out to put their stockholders so far ahead of their customers that they deserve the label of a "screw-u" business.
However, if you asked what the average "screw-u" level of consumer-oriented* banks were weighted by influence, capitalization, or assets, then you'd have a valid point.
*Since this is about "screwing customers" i.e. ordinary individuals and small businesses and organizations, I'm not counting banks that don't cater to such customers. Those banks may have a "screw u" mentality too, but their customers are "big boys" and can stand up for themselves.
By the way, in America at least, individuals and in some cases small businesses and non-profits have an alternative to banks: They are called credit unions.
Okay, I'll grant you that this is important news for everyone, but most of us saw this on mainstream news sites or we soon will.
Now, when Ken Thompson dies, I'll expect his obit to hit /. within minutes if not milliseconds.
The "last mile" is from the company's local office out to either the node or the curb (depending on how the topology is setup). The portion from the curb or node to the structure is referred to as a "drop".
This may be technically true but in many people's "common sense" understanding - including my own until I read your post - the "last mile" is the "last" portion of the "line" not owned or controlled by the customer which connects directly to customer-owned/managed equipment.
In my mind and probably that of many others not in the telephone industry, the "drop" is the part of the "last mile" where the "wire" (or fiber, or whatever) leaves the "bundle" that feeds the neighborhood (or whatever) and goes to the where it connects to the customer's equipment. For typical home phone customers in the United States, this would be from someplace on the pole or someplace in a telco box typically near the edge of the homeowner's property or perhaps on a neighbor's property to the "DMARC" where it connects up with the customer's "inside wiring."
Correction: In the mind of probably most non-industry people, terms like "last mile" and "drop" probably fall into the "don't know/don't care, just give me service that does what I need it to at a fair price, dammit!" category.
Sounds like someone wanted to push customers into using wireless data plans ...
Of the two, which do you think is the more plausible explaination?
At what upload rate?
Depends on how the provider splits the "asymmetry" of the line
If you had a high-upload/low-download requirement then your needs should technically be doable using this technology.
Whether or not your provider will offer such a service or if they will offer it at a price that isn't "designed to never sell" (i.e. above the cost of a high-capacity line that offers oodles of bandwidth in both directions) is a business decision, not a technical one.
God I'd kill to be able to get designs and data to my clients without an overnight upload.
By the way, for uses like yours, you may want to just do everything except local i/o (e.g. printing, scanning, typing, teleconferencing, etc.) either "in the cloud" or on a server that's hosted someplace with good connectivity. Yes, you'll give up some control and you'll have to pay a monthly fee that you don't currently pay, but it may be your best - or only - option.
However in ten or twenty years what kind of bandwidth requirements will we have?
In the United States, the analog "plain old telephone" network was designed to handle 300 to 3400Hz voice traffic, which in practice allowed for 9600bps communication at 2400 baud even if the telephone switches were using 1970s (or older?) technology and the wire from the switch to the end user was who-knows-how-old. By the 1980s, we had developed mathematics and modems that could use the same lines to get up to about 33.6kbps at 3,429 baud.
Disclaimer: The above is from unreferenced text available at Wikipedia (Modem, as of 22:53, 26 November 2013). Caveat reader.
In any case, odds are, whatever we put in the ground today, in 20 years we'll be able to do more with it than we can today.
Fiber to the node is fine as long as whatever goes from the node to the end-user device can get the job done. If you are within 90 meters, CAT6 can do 1GHz.
Now, as for squeezing good speeds out of the existing telephone-grade "last mile," well, if there is money to be made, someone will be working on this problem.
Realistically though, most users would be fine if they could record a handful of HDTV-channels at once, surf the web or watch YouTube videos on 3-4 computers at once, and download Windows Updates in a timely manner, all at the same time. Those who need more should have the option of paying for a direct fiber line to their home.
They are permanently mired in poverty
Oh ye of little faith.
There is a big difference between "permanently" and "probably for the lifetime of anyone alive today and possibly the lifetimes of their children and grandchildren."
Odds are at least one of these states will have greatly improved socioeconomic status relative to the rest of America within, oh, 100-200 years.
do they have an X and Y chromosome or not?
Obligatory geek answer: Yes.