1) The expansion curve has nothing to do with the volatility BTC is currently experiencing; that's because it's a new currency with an uncertain future (in terms of who will accept it later).
2) People's expectations of a nascent currency's volatility are way too high. Any new currency is going to be that way! This expectation is effectively ruling out any new currency that can't get its volatility down to that of the USD immediately -- which means you're against any new currencies that don't start with some stabilizer. (Btw, no you can't tell me how much gasoline a USD will buy tomorrow.)
3) Inflation and deflation are caused by changes in *expectation* of the growth the money supply. That is, it's only unexpected money shocks that change the price level/inflation rate. Bitcoin has broadcast how many there will be at all points in time, eliminating this uncertainty. This means that there will be no unexpected growth (though their could be unexpected velocity, liquidity, or acceptance level), and so the limited (final) quantity of bitcoins is *already priced in*.
So you won't have a scenario where, in 20xx, people say, "golly, they just stopped minting bitcoins, now they're suddently ultra scarce so we have to bid MORE MORE MORE for them." No: everyone will price in this event well in advance of the termination of growth.
4) No matter how rockin' you think inflation of bitcoin will be, that doesn't give you the right to sodomize existing users by retroactively breaking the protocol. Sorry. If you don't like their growth curve, you're free to start a currency with the same protocol as bitcoin, but which is more inflationary (as long as you can overcome the chicken-and-egg network effect problem). That was the point of me bringing up the ethicist.
5) Looks like I was 100% right about your pro-inflation subtext. And you can GTFO of the existing bitcoin community, and take your inflation-pimping ideology with you... to another project with more ideological confederates.
No, there isn't a viable laundry system, so it certainly isn't trivial. There's no effort to get the requisite users involved, and the code doesn't handle the very vital tasks of:
- making sure bitcoins are finely dispersed and not returned to the person who puts them in
- ensuring that people can't steal from it
- most importantly, providing transparency to the user, so that they don't have to think about the new addresses they'll have to create, or the timing on all the transactions (both via the laundry, and on purchases with multiple addresses).
And stop posting as a fucking A/C sockpuppet, Amir.
I have the nagging suspicion that your comment was code for "they need to turn bitcoin into an inflationary currency but don't realize it because they're so economically illiterate".
In that case, I would suggest that, more than an economist, Bitcoin's developers need an ethicist nearby. You know, someone who can tell them that, "Hey, you got everyone involved in this currency on the promise of a very specific rate of money supply growth. If you default on this promise you made to every user, you are an asshole, no matter what your economic rationalization."
Why is it that no one can get an inflationary currency up and running without horribly defaulting a previous promise or custom? Hm...
I was thankful that my question was selected despite it not having been modded up:
Is there any serious development underway to make the privacy more robust?... for this to seriously work, it needs a lot more people to be involved in [laundry], and it has to be integrated in a way that's secure (against someone just keeping coins in the middle of a shuffle) and transparent to the user (so they don't have to think about the new addresses they generate, or which coins are optimal to send where for the maximum shuffle). How soon can we expect something like this?
But then in his reply, he just repeats back what I just told him, and then said it "will be trivial". Well, no, they've tried, and it's not trivial now, because it needs a concerted effort, both for user involvement, and in new coding. Total blow-off answer! See for yourself:
A.T.: A bitcoin laundry already exists. The volume on it is very low, but if demand increases in the future then such a service is trivial to setup. A mixing service (as they're called) requires a large volume and therefore a persistent demand.
If you're going to pick a question, actually answer it, "Amir". If I wanted to talk to a wall, there are four already around me.
I'm sorry, no matter how bad that hostage taker is, that seems excessive. Imagine I'm coming over to my friends's apartment and I see a bunch of police around. I check facebook and my friend has an update, "in a bit of a bind lol".
Now, note that's a bit ambiguous -- maybe he means he's the target, maybe it just means he can't leave his pad because the police are going after someone nearby.
So I reply to his update with, "yeah, what's going on, man? There are SWAT dudes all over the front lot?"
Suddenly I'm an accessory to murder for "giving tactical information"??? WTF?
I know the real situation was a bit more damning for the captor, but what if I thought, "oh, this is just another joke of his, making fun of hostage operations" when he posts a picture of the "cute hostage babe lol".
At the very least, they should have to establish that the friends really knew what was going on.
But Apple's patent wouldn't be like patenting the wheel -- it would be even worse. It would prevent you from having any remotely-circle-like shape that rolls (say, a decagon).
That seems to be the pattern with all the worst patents: they claim an *end* rather than a means. Patents are supposed to protect the inventor of a *way* of doing something (such as a *way* of accomplishing multitouch, or of buying a product with one click), and yet they're being used to cover _anything_ that accomplishes some end goal whatsoever!
Someone explain to me, seriously, how the fuck is this kind of patent even granted? You can patent the very idea of allowing multipe touches on a touchscreen, no matter how it is implemented? Isn't that like patenting the idea of rolling to your destination, no matter if you do it by chariot, train, car, etc?
I thought they had some way of solving this problem in the Harry Potter books. Like, if you obliviate yourself, that increases the presumption of guilt for actions taken immediately preceding?
Maybe they had a better procedure in one of the fanfics...?
Re:BitCoins are simply a hobby, not a currency
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I'm always mystified as to how people are convinced by this argument.
Attention, folks: inflation does not solve the problem of getting loans, nor of encouraging productive activity; it just rearranges it.
Look at it from the lending side: do I gracious lend to you in a way that gives me 0% real return, just because there's inflation? No. Lenders will increase interest rates to cover inflation *plus* get the premium for risk and loss of liquidity that they would get anyway. So it has not become easier or safer to get a loan.
Look at it from the savers side: do savers suddenly become hedge funds and VCs, capable of knowing where they need to invest? No. They don't have time for all that, and they just want their money to at least keep its value. But with inflation, in order to do that, they *must* take on the additional profession of discerning which places to put their money will cover the loss from inflation with minimal risk.
So you have hundreds of millions of small-time savers naively and uninformedly throwing their money at random ventures, hoping to keep their original purchasing power. This is *NOT* economic productivy, it's a clusterfuck. Economic growth of the kind we care about involves people investing when and where -- and only when and where -- they reasonably expect a gain in productivity, adjusting for risk. The simple fact of investing does not equal economic growth, no matter what the nominal records or GDP figures show. If everyone spends all day digging and refilling holes, and GDP is growing at 10%, it's still a woefully unproductive economy, and all the GDP numbers in the world won't change that.
Of course, the above is a simplification: people aren't going to invest in The Next Big Thing to protect their purchasing power -- way too risky. Instead, they'll have to go through a financial intermediary, who will charge them for the service -- typically, enough to *eliminate* (after taxes, at least) the inflation-canceling effect -- so you lose purchasing power that way, too. (And that's before the Fed and Chinese central bank buy billions of dollars worth of bonds without even *caring* if the interest rate covers inflation!)
In contrast, a currency that holds its value or deflates will make it so people won't be throwing around money for the sake of throwing around money: investments happen when justified *on their merits*, not when someone has to keep running just to stay in the same place.
Re:Is it even possible to roll back a bitcoin trad
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I love my monkey in a platonic sense, asshole. >:-[
The only correlation between your critiques and what happened is that both of them suggest "bitcoin = bad". (Other than lampooning idiots who think something will always go up in value. Fair point.)
What happened is that the biggest market for trading between bitcoins and dollars was compromised. Not a problem with bitcoin per se, but with a site dealing in it.
If you claimed that "oh, this buying-stuff-on-the-internet fad isn't going to last long", would you claim to have been vindicated if ebay had to abruptly shut down for a few days in 1998? Of course you would, because right now you're claiming that if the dominant non-official site for a nascent technology goes down, that must be a problem with the technology, not the site. Even though that makes no sense.
You seem to have this view that if a new currency does not immediately drop in volatility to that of the US dollar, it must be fundamentally flawed, and anything bad that happens is confirmation of that judgment. Well, no, it doesn't work like that.
Re:Is it even possible to roll back a bitcoin trad
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Bitcoin Price Crashes
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Noooo! The brokerage can't keep my monkey!!!! I love him!
I can sympathize with the suspicion about something new, especially a financial idea, but I can't sympathize with these particular points.
Supposedly, it isn't anonymous, which makes it even less useful as that would make it unsuitable to replace bags of cash for criminal deeds.
True, but how do you securely send large bags of cash 100+ miles for free?
You get bitcoins by doing the calculations which are required to use bitcoins, so, it's not based upon anything other than the belief that it's valuable.
You get them by trading something for bitcoins -- just like how you get USD. You can also get *newly created bitcoins* in the minting process by contributing cycles to authenticating the validity of the transaction data. It's a bit strange to object to this method of minting money, but not one in which a sovereign can costlessly print as much money as they want.
When did you ever get an invitation to partake in a share of the US Mint's next run?
so, it's not based upon anything other than the belief that it's valuable. On top of that, the rate at which ones gets bitcoins slows as time goes by to a fixed amount, meaning that early adopters get bitcoins for basically nothing, while the people later on get screwed.
Just like everything else. Early adopters of the next big thing benefit if it takes off and provides a network or infrastructure that is beneficial to others. I think you forget all the people who adopt something that *doesn't* take off. There seems to be this mentality that, "I should get to partake in the fruits of a successful enterprise [not that Bitcoin is an "enterprise", strictly speaking], but not have to put any skin in the game or take the risk of losing a lot when it doesn't succeed."
Sorry, you can't have it both ways. You probably knew about Bitcoin long before, and had every opportunity to be an early adopter. Didn't want to take the risk? Then don't complain about not getting the reward.
Additionally, unlike other fiat currencies, you're not guaranteed to be able to buy anything with them later on, or even doing anything with them. USDs are essentially just paper, but you're guaranteed to at least be able to pay your taxes with them, pay debt, or exchange them into whatever your local currency is via most banks.
Sure, but at what rate? It's little consolation that your dollars will cancel your $10,000 tax bill, if the government is going to keep injecting trillions to wipe out whatever savings you had.
Yes, currencies have a risk of gaining or losing value. Bitcoin is no different in this respect.
Now: they could easily be a complete fraud - with the number of bitcoins in circulation being far more than claimed.
Not really. The blocks (basically, sets of serial numbers like you'd have on paper currency) are known to all users and defined in the protocol everyone is using. If there is any deception in the number of bitcoins "out there", then it doesn't matter, because none of the nodes will recognize the validity of a transaction based on one of those bitcoins.
There will only ever be ~210,000 blocks in total, and there can't be any "secret" ones out there. If someone tries to spend a coin originating from "block 400,000", every node on the network implementing the protocol correctly will reject it and refuse to propagate such a record.
Alternatively, if they try to spend a coin claiming to originate from a valid block, then the publicly-known block chain must record them as the real owner, requiring the last owner to have signed it over to them.
So, it's nigh-impossible for there to be any deception about the number of usable bitcoins out there.
After thinking about this some, one idea would be to change the proof-of-work problem to one of protein folding. Say, take the data-block that you're currently supposed to search for a nonce that hashes with the block to meet a target. Instead, take that block and convert it to a chain of Amino acids (preferably in a way that truncates the size and is weighted toward matching realistic protein primary structures).
The proof-of-work problem then is to find a stable tertiary structure of that chain (the canonical protein folding problem). To avoid making solutions too fuzzy and hard to judge, simply require that it have some weaker criterion of stability that is easy to check. Then, the network should occasionally spit out the solution to a useful protein folding problem, and biologists in the field can just scan blocks for useful protein info.
It would probably be optimal for different mining rig hardware than is currently used, though.
So, any time falling prices are good, you count that as "not deflation"? Great! Then how about we have *all* prices fall, "but in a way that doesn't count as deflation", by having a fixed (expected) money supply!
Oh wait -- we just re-invented bitcoin!
Btw, one test for whether or not your beliefs are bullshit is this: if everything about the topic were deleted from everyone's mind, but you studies it scientifically thereafter, would you reach the same conclusions for the same reasons? If you hadn't been told ex cathedra money has to dissipate in order for people to make productivity enchancements, would you eventually rediscover that, "I have to rob people through inflation for the good of society", or would it perpetually seem like a retarded idea?
Yeah, it has been soooooo fucking disastrous the way computer prices have fallen and general prices fell throughout the late 19th century. Those were ONLY accomplished by the financial sodomization of everyone who ever started a business, right?
Do you ever actually spend critical thought on the dogma you were fed? Because you can't seem to do anything but parrot it with no evidence of understanding.
Nope, everything after 1920-s is considered a modern economy.
ROFL!!! Are you for real? You cut off all the time EXCEPT for when (pro-inflation) central banks were instituted in all developed economies, and refuse any evidence *outside* of that arbitrarily chosen period?
You clearly have dropped any pretense of accomplishing any goal but Fed-shilling.
You don't get it. Without inflation chances are they WOULDN'T have these savings in the first place. It's very hard to make savings in a deflating economy, it turns out.
Really? It's hard to delay purchases, buy them for less, and stow away the price difference you saved?
Can you find any bad example of deflation that *doesn't* involve a recession already playing out? Or does your whole theory revolve around "the money supply contracts when the economy sputters, therefore falling prices must CAUSE the disaster".
And people during a crisis are much better helped by rising economy then by a small deflation of their savings.
Phew! It's a good thing an economy doesn't need inflation to grow! Oh, wait, you get to assume it does because of your ideology. Well, I guess that settles it then! We have to sodomize savers because we can't distinguish correlation from causality (even when the correlation is weak to begin with...).
Everything post-1500 is considered a modern economy, unless you want to use the standard of "if the economy was succeeding without inflation, it must not be modern". So everything but the IGA would count for that.
And the Victorian Era was just ~100 years ago FFS!
And I said "every developed economy in the late Victorian Era", not "Victorian Britain". Have a hotshot revistionist paper about Britain? Fine, you've still got the US, Canada, Germany, Japan. Oh, and the industrial revolution.
So, once we ignore all the counterexamples to your power-worshipping ideology, there are no counterexamples. Nice!
Economic collapse hurts hard working people. Not having their savings evaporate helps them. Don't equate the former with "deflation" and therefore the latter.
Slashdot Mirror
1) The expansion curve has nothing to do with the volatility BTC is currently experiencing; that's because it's a new currency with an uncertain future (in terms of who will accept it later).
2) People's expectations of a nascent currency's volatility are way too high. Any new currency is going to be that way! This expectation is effectively ruling out any new currency that can't get its volatility down to that of the USD immediately -- which means you're against any new currencies that don't start with some stabilizer. (Btw, no you can't tell me how much gasoline a USD will buy tomorrow.)
3) Inflation and deflation are caused by changes in *expectation* of the growth the money supply. That is, it's only unexpected money shocks that change the price level/inflation rate. Bitcoin has broadcast how many there will be at all points in time, eliminating this uncertainty. This means that there will be no unexpected growth (though their could be unexpected velocity, liquidity, or acceptance level), and so the limited (final) quantity of bitcoins is *already priced in*.
So you won't have a scenario where, in 20xx, people say, "golly, they just stopped minting bitcoins, now they're suddently ultra scarce so we have to bid MORE MORE MORE for them." No: everyone will price in this event well in advance of the termination of growth.
4) No matter how rockin' you think inflation of bitcoin will be, that doesn't give you the right to sodomize existing users by retroactively breaking the protocol. Sorry. If you don't like their growth curve, you're free to start a currency with the same protocol as bitcoin, but which is more inflationary (as long as you can overcome the chicken-and-egg network effect problem). That was the point of me bringing up the ethicist.
5) Looks like I was 100% right about your pro-inflation subtext. And you can GTFO of the existing bitcoin community, and take your inflation-pimping ideology with you ... to another project with more ideological confederates.
No, there isn't a viable laundry system, so it certainly isn't trivial. There's no effort to get the requisite users involved, and the code doesn't handle the very vital tasks of:
- making sure bitcoins are finely dispersed and not returned to the person who puts them in
- ensuring that people can't steal from it
- most importantly, providing transparency to the user, so that they don't have to think about the new addresses they'll have to create, or the timing on all the transactions (both via the laundry, and on purchases with multiple addresses).
And stop posting as a fucking A/C sockpuppet, Amir.
I have the nagging suspicion that your comment was code for "they need to turn bitcoin into an inflationary currency but don't realize it because they're so economically illiterate".
In that case, I would suggest that, more than an economist, Bitcoin's developers need an ethicist nearby. You know, someone who can tell them that, "Hey, you got everyone involved in this currency on the promise of a very specific rate of money supply growth. If you default on this promise you made to every user, you are an asshole, no matter what your economic rationalization."
Why is it that no one can get an inflationary currency up and running without horribly defaulting a previous promise or custom? Hm...
I was thankful that my question was selected despite it not having been modded up:
But then in his reply, he just repeats back what I just told him, and then said it "will be trivial". Well, no, they've tried, and it's not trivial now, because it needs a concerted effort, both for user involvement, and in new coding. Total blow-off answer! See for yourself:
If you're going to pick a question, actually answer it, "Amir". If I wanted to talk to a wall, there are four already around me.
I'm sorry, no matter how bad that hostage taker is, that seems excessive. Imagine I'm coming over to my friends's apartment and I see a bunch of police around. I check facebook and my friend has an update, "in a bit of a bind lol".
Now, note that's a bit ambiguous -- maybe he means he's the target, maybe it just means he can't leave his pad because the police are going after someone nearby.
So I reply to his update with, "yeah, what's going on, man? There are SWAT dudes all over the front lot?"
Suddenly I'm an accessory to murder for "giving tactical information"??? WTF?
I know the real situation was a bit more damning for the captor, but what if I thought, "oh, this is just another joke of his, making fun of hostage operations" when he posts a picture of the "cute hostage babe lol".
At the very least, they should have to establish that the friends really knew what was going on.
But Apple's patent wouldn't be like patenting the wheel -- it would be even worse. It would prevent you from having any remotely-circle-like shape that rolls (say, a decagon).
That seems to be the pattern with all the worst patents: they claim an *end* rather than a means. Patents are supposed to protect the inventor of a *way* of doing something (such as a *way* of accomplishing multitouch, or of buying a product with one click), and yet they're being used to cover _anything_ that accomplishes some end goal whatsoever!
Someone explain to me, seriously, how the fuck is this kind of patent even granted? You can patent the very idea of allowing multipe touches on a touchscreen, no matter how it is implemented? Isn't that like patenting the idea of rolling to your destination, no matter if you do it by chariot, train, car, etc?
That's what I used to think, too. But it turns out, most of California's present (huge) population arrived a lot later.
I thought they had some way of solving this problem in the Harry Potter books. Like, if you obliviate yourself, that increases the presumption of guilt for actions taken immediately preceding?
Maybe they had a better procedure in one of the fanfics...?
I'm always mystified as to how people are convinced by this argument.
Attention, folks: inflation does not solve the problem of getting loans, nor of encouraging productive activity; it just rearranges it.
Look at it from the lending side: do I gracious lend to you in a way that gives me 0% real return, just because there's inflation? No. Lenders will increase interest rates to cover inflation *plus* get the premium for risk and loss of liquidity that they would get anyway. So it has not become easier or safer to get a loan.
Look at it from the savers side: do savers suddenly become hedge funds and VCs, capable of knowing where they need to invest? No. They don't have time for all that, and they just want their money to at least keep its value. But with inflation, in order to do that, they *must* take on the additional profession of discerning which places to put their money will cover the loss from inflation with minimal risk.
So you have hundreds of millions of small-time savers naively and uninformedly throwing their money at random ventures, hoping to keep their original purchasing power. This is *NOT* economic productivy, it's a clusterfuck. Economic growth of the kind we care about involves people investing when and where -- and only when and where -- they reasonably expect a gain in productivity, adjusting for risk. The simple fact of investing does not equal economic growth, no matter what the nominal records or GDP figures show. If everyone spends all day digging and refilling holes, and GDP is growing at 10%, it's still a woefully unproductive economy, and all the GDP numbers in the world won't change that.
Of course, the above is a simplification: people aren't going to invest in The Next Big Thing to protect their purchasing power -- way too risky. Instead, they'll have to go through a financial intermediary, who will charge them for the service -- typically, enough to *eliminate* (after taxes, at least) the inflation-canceling effect -- so you lose purchasing power that way, too. (And that's before the Fed and Chinese central bank buy billions of dollars worth of bonds without even *caring* if the interest rate covers inflation!)
In contrast, a currency that holds its value or deflates will make it so people won't be throwing around money for the sake of throwing around money: investments happen when justified *on their merits*, not when someone has to keep running just to stay in the same place.
I love my monkey in a platonic sense, asshole. >:-[
The only correlation between your critiques and what happened is that both of them suggest "bitcoin = bad". (Other than lampooning idiots who think something will always go up in value. Fair point.)
What happened is that the biggest market for trading between bitcoins and dollars was compromised. Not a problem with bitcoin per se, but with a site dealing in it.
If you claimed that "oh, this buying-stuff-on-the-internet fad isn't going to last long", would you claim to have been vindicated if ebay had to abruptly shut down for a few days in 1998? Of course you would, because right now you're claiming that if the dominant non-official site for a nascent technology goes down, that must be a problem with the technology, not the site. Even though that makes no sense.
You seem to have this view that if a new currency does not immediately drop in volatility to that of the US dollar, it must be fundamentally flawed, and anything bad that happens is confirmation of that judgment. Well, no, it doesn't work like that.
Noooo! The brokerage can't keep my monkey!!!! I love him!
I can sympathize with the suspicion about something new, especially a financial idea, but I can't sympathize with these particular points.
Supposedly, it isn't anonymous, which makes it even less useful as that would make it unsuitable to replace bags of cash for criminal deeds.
True, but how do you securely send large bags of cash 100+ miles for free?
You get bitcoins by doing the calculations which are required to use bitcoins, so, it's not based upon anything other than the belief that it's valuable.
You get them by trading something for bitcoins -- just like how you get USD. You can also get *newly created bitcoins* in the minting process by contributing cycles to authenticating the validity of the transaction data. It's a bit strange to object to this method of minting money, but not one in which a sovereign can costlessly print as much money as they want.
When did you ever get an invitation to partake in a share of the US Mint's next run?
so, it's not based upon anything other than the belief that it's valuable. On top of that, the rate at which ones gets bitcoins slows as time goes by to a fixed amount, meaning that early adopters get bitcoins for basically nothing, while the people later on get screwed.
Just like everything else. Early adopters of the next big thing benefit if it takes off and provides a network or infrastructure that is beneficial to others. I think you forget all the people who adopt something that *doesn't* take off. There seems to be this mentality that, "I should get to partake in the fruits of a successful enterprise [not that Bitcoin is an "enterprise", strictly speaking], but not have to put any skin in the game or take the risk of losing a lot when it doesn't succeed."
Sorry, you can't have it both ways. You probably knew about Bitcoin long before, and had every opportunity to be an early adopter. Didn't want to take the risk? Then don't complain about not getting the reward.
Additionally, unlike other fiat currencies, you're not guaranteed to be able to buy anything with them later on, or even doing anything with them. USDs are essentially just paper, but you're guaranteed to at least be able to pay your taxes with them, pay debt, or exchange them into whatever your local currency is via most banks.
Sure, but at what rate? It's little consolation that your dollars will cancel your $10,000 tax bill, if the government is going to keep injecting trillions to wipe out whatever savings you had.
Yes, currencies have a risk of gaining or losing value. Bitcoin is no different in this respect.
Now: they could easily be a complete fraud - with the number of bitcoins in circulation being far more than claimed.
Not really. The blocks (basically, sets of serial numbers like you'd have on paper currency) are known to all users and defined in the protocol everyone is using. If there is any deception in the number of bitcoins "out there", then it doesn't matter, because none of the nodes will recognize the validity of a transaction based on one of those bitcoins.
There will only ever be ~210,000 blocks in total, and there can't be any "secret" ones out there. If someone tries to spend a coin originating from "block 400,000", every node on the network implementing the protocol correctly will reject it and refuse to propagate such a record.
Alternatively, if they try to spend a coin claiming to originate from a valid block, then the publicly-known block chain must record them as the real owner, requiring the last owner to have signed it over to them.
So, it's nigh-impossible for there to be any deception about the number of usable bitcoins out there.
And you know what they call ~50% of medicine that doesn't work? Medicine.
Not defending alternative medicine, just disputing the characterization of mainstream med as some kind of paragon of rigorous empiricism.
After thinking about this some, one idea would be to change the proof-of-work problem to one of protein folding. Say, take the data-block that you're currently supposed to search for a nonce that hashes with the block to meet a target. Instead, take that block and convert it to a chain of Amino acids (preferably in a way that truncates the size and is weighted toward matching realistic protein primary structures).
The proof-of-work problem then is to find a stable tertiary structure of that chain (the canonical protein folding problem). To avoid making solutions too fuzzy and hard to judge, simply require that it have some weaker criterion of stability that is easy to check. Then, the network should occasionally spit out the solution to a useful protein folding problem, and biologists in the field can just scan blocks for useful protein info.
It would probably be optimal for different mining rig hardware than is currently used, though.
Why would you keep that type of cash in bitcoin? Anyone with half a brain would at least put that kind of money in a savings account to get interest.
Yeah, I know! In a savings account, you could get one -- perhaps two -- tenths of a percent per year!
(Though you could get reasonable returns if you had it invested in a balanced, income-generating mutual fund, so fair enough.)
So, any time falling prices are good, you count that as "not deflation"? Great! Then how about we have *all* prices fall, "but in a way that doesn't count as deflation", by having a fixed (expected) money supply!
Oh wait -- we just re-invented bitcoin!
Btw, one test for whether or not your beliefs are bullshit is this: if everything about the topic were deleted from everyone's mind, but you studies it scientifically thereafter, would you reach the same conclusions for the same reasons? If you hadn't been told ex cathedra money has to dissipate in order for people to make productivity enchancements, would you eventually rediscover that, "I have to rob people through inflation for the good of society", or would it perpetually seem like a retarded idea?
Think about it. Or not.
Yeah, it has been soooooo fucking disastrous the way computer prices have fallen and general prices fell throughout the late 19th century. Those were ONLY accomplished by the financial sodomization of everyone who ever started a business, right?
Do you ever actually spend critical thought on the dogma you were fed? Because you can't seem to do anything but parrot it with no evidence of understanding.
Nope, everything after 1920-s is considered a modern economy.
ROFL!!! Are you for real? You cut off all the time EXCEPT for when (pro-inflation) central banks were instituted in all developed economies, and refuse any evidence *outside* of that arbitrarily chosen period?
You clearly have dropped any pretense of accomplishing any goal but Fed-shilling.
You don't get it. Without inflation chances are they WOULDN'T have these savings in the first place. It's very hard to make savings in a deflating economy, it turns out.
Really? It's hard to delay purchases, buy them for less, and stow away the price difference you saved?
Can you find any bad example of deflation that *doesn't* involve a recession already playing out? Or does your whole theory revolve around "the money supply contracts when the economy sputters, therefore falling prices must CAUSE the disaster".
And people during a crisis are much better helped by rising economy then by a small deflation of their savings.
Phew! It's a good thing an economy doesn't need inflation to grow! Oh, wait, you get to assume it does because of your ideology. Well, I guess that settles it then! We have to sodomize savers because we can't distinguish correlation from causality (even when the correlation is weak to begin with...).
Everything post-1500 is considered a modern economy, unless you want to use the standard of "if the economy was succeeding without inflation, it must not be modern". So everything but the IGA would count for that.
And the Victorian Era was just ~100 years ago FFS!
And I said "every developed economy in the late Victorian Era", not "Victorian Britain". Have a hotshot revistionist paper about Britain? Fine, you've still got the US, Canada, Germany, Japan. Oh, and the industrial revolution.
So, once we ignore all the counterexamples to your power-worshipping ideology, there are no counterexamples. Nice!
Economic collapse hurts hard working people. Not having their savings evaporate helps them. Don't equate the former with "deflation" and therefore the latter.
Care to name a few economies with sustained (5 years at least) and significant (3-5% at least) growth but without inflating currency?
Sure: every developed economy in the late VIctorian Era. The Dutch Golden Age. The Islamic Golden Age. The Industrial Revolution.