Funny how the only reason those were made illegal was overt racism...
Those kill people
So do pharmaceuticals, and more importantly, America's favorite recreational drugs: alcohol and tobacco.
The war on drugs is, in general, an attack on American freedoms, for the benefit of big businesses, racists, and a few social conservatives. It has never been about public health, nor will it ever be about health.
Not sure whether to blame the issuers for not really caring as long as they get their overpayment, browser manufacturers for their root acceptance policy, or customers for not caring as long as the little lock icon is there.
The first two are only a problem because of the last -- if people actually knew and cared about TLS, none of these shenanigans would have. CAs would be vastly more secure, they would check identities far more closely, and browser manufacturers would be more strict about which signing certificates they include.
It's funny how you manage to leave out the really great minds in computer science. Church, Cook, and Levin should be the ones you mention, since their work is at least on par with Turing's. Lady Ada makes for a nice story about programming, but it pales in comparison to:
Church and Turing settling the Entscheidungsproblem and proving that different models of computability are equivalent (Church-Turing thesis).
Cook and Levin establishing the existence of the NP-complete problems.
Micali and Goldwasser's early work on provable security (this probably makes more of a difference in your daily use of crypto than Turing's work).
Just curious, what would happen if your work pays you in BTC? That would mean you haven't been paid (e.g. I work from Australia for a Multinational company that pays me in BTC from one of their off shore subsidiaries) if it has no value, does that mean I don't have to pay taxes?
Well, the question at that point would be "what is BTC worth?" i.e. in terms of barter. Keep in mind, however, that you would still have to pay property taxes, possibly sales taxes, and various other government fees, and so at the end of the day you would still be forced to exchange your BTC for some other currency (AUD?).
Get rid of offshoring, and Johnny will want to code.
You make programming sound like some kind of a chore, a typical day job that someone is only going to do because they are paid to do it. I am sure that such programmers exist, but the best programmers out there are the ones for whom programming is as natural as breathing, who would be hacking even if they were unemployed, and who are enjoy the work that they do. This is not terribly different than the situation with mathematicians -- the best mathematicians are the ones who love math.
America has a lot of trouble teaching math to middle school and high school students, at least by comparison with other countries. It should come as no surprise that we have trouble teaching computer programming, which is very close to mathematics. It also doesn't help that we have a mass media that portrays computer programmers as these nerdy anti-social types (yes they sometimes become rich, but we glamorize people who were born into wealth).
Well, you are assuming we are dealing with some subset of the real numbers. I prefer to do all of my work using modular arithmetic, in which case it is possible to add or multiply three negatives and get a positive...and where your "negatives" are also "positives."
What makes you think any of this is about animosity? They are greedy, that's all -- they didn't get billions they only got millions and they weren't satisfied with that. The fact that they could live comfortable for the rest of their lives without having to do any work whatsoever is irrelevant to them.
Where do you buy the tinfoil for your hats? I think I know which company to invest my money in.
Yes, there was something strange about the source of money that went into creating Facebook, but somehow I doubt that the CIA thought that social networking websites were going to help track down targets. More likely, they wanted to see what sort of technology social networking websites would produce, which might be useful for their own intelligence gathering operations.
Except that it was not voluntary (he was kind of forced to make a settlement, since the court case was going to be pretty tough) and that it is enough money that the twins will never have to work again, if they choose not to. They say $1 million is not what it used to be; somehow I get the feeling that $65 million is what it used to be.
is that a jab? what is your point and why should i care? i know the definitions, maybe if you come down off your high pony you can see that.
You equated price increases with deflation. In a deflationary situation, we would expect to see decreases in the price of goods, as currency becomes more valuable.
Nobody would issue a Bitcoin loan
oh please, you know that's not true. same sentence...
Deflation makes loans harder to repay which means anyone issuing a loan with a deflationary currency would be less likely to be repaid. Sure, you could try to issue a loan at a very high interest rate, to account to the enormous risk that a Bitcoin loan entails, but the rate would be absurd and I doubt there would be enough people seeking loans to even make it worthwhile.
and only a complete idiot would take out a Bitcoin loan
duuuuhhh yeah. are you high? who are we talking about here? if bitcoins become more broadly accepted you betcha bitcoin loan sharks will come out of the woodwork. where have you been?
Only an idiot would take out a loan in a deflationary currency, because repaying the loan would be difficult. It would be like taking out a loan at %1000 interest.
try a world without loans? try living within your means. it's called responsibility.
Tell that to all the people who built successful businesses that started with a loan. We are not just talking about billionaires; there are plenty of small businesses out there that were started with loans, which are owned by middle class people who would never have been able to start a business if they couldn't get a loan. Money lending has been fundamental to business and economics for centuries.
If you think loans are only about buying expensive toys, you are living in another world.
On the other hand, there are lots of private currencies out there, and I do not see any particular reason that a private digital currency would be illegal, if the issuing authority were in full compliance with the law. There already exist gold-backed ETFs, whose shares can be traded on the open market; a digital cash system backed by gold would not be terribly different, except in how trade is actually performed.
Personally, I am not a fan of gold-backed currency and would choose to back digital cash with non-digital cash if I were to set up such a system. Still, although IANAL I do not see why a gold-backed digital cash system could not operate in compliance with the law.
If the $ were exclusively used to pay taxes, it would be fairly worthless, people would burn cash in the winter to keep warm, or use it as toilet paper.
...and then the IRS would come and arrest them, because they wouldn't have any money available to pay their taxes with.
I never said the only thing USD was useful for was paying taxes. However, at least in theory anything that BTC can be used for USD could also be used for; yet there are things that USD can be used for (settling debts with the government, paying fees to the government, etc.) which BTC cannot be used for. There is therefore an imbalance in demand, at least among US users of BTC.
Except for secure electronic payments. Luckily, there is a boatload of research on digital cash protocols, and it would be relatively straightforward to establish digital cash that is backed by gold.
Here's the difference: nobody is converting other currencies into BTC in order to pay their taxes. That undermines the demand for BTC and doesn't say much for its long-term prospects. Nobody is punished for not having BTC, but people can be punished for not having other currencies (i.e. because they are punished for not paying taxes), which leads me to believe that over time people will sell their BTC more rapidly than they buy (or in other words, that BTC needs to keep getting more people to buy into the system in order to remain viable, which is not even close to a sustainable policy).
The big difference I can see is that one can pay tax in USD.
More importantly, you can be arrested and lose your property if you refuse to pay your taxes, and you need to use USD to do so. Nobody is punished for not having BTC, but people can be punished for not having USD, which creates some serious imbalance in the demand for BTC.
The bitcoin effort needs the involvement of some economists with experience studying and understanding currencies
Funny how mainstream economists connect currency with banking and government, and how they advocate the role of governments and banks in regulating and stabilizing currency.
I suspect that bitcoin needs to be replaced with a new system that has the advantages of the current without the raging disadvantages
Most digital cash systems call for a bank to issue the digital currency in exchange for physical currency. I would like to see those systems more widely deployed, although I get the feeling that the current banks would not be too enthusiastic about introducing an electronic payment system that deprives them of transactions fees.
You can use Bitcoin to pay taxes or government fees
Prove it. Find me a country that accepts Bitcoin as payment for taxes.
I've paid French taxes using British sterling, just the bank exchanged currency behind the scenes.
Emphasis mine. You did not pay your taxes using British currency, you exchanged your British currency. Likewise with Bitcoin, except that unlike British currency, nobody is going to exchange a different currency for Bitcoin when they pay their taxes. This creates something of an imbalance in the demand for Bitcoin.
The dollar seems more like Chuck-e-Cheese tokens than Bitcoin, as the government or Chuck-e-Cheese can print off as many notes as they want. Bitcoin is different in that there is no single issuing body that can manipulate the currency.
Yet unlike the dollar, nobody will lose their property if they fail to have enough Chuck-e-Cheese tokens. Nor will anyone lose their property if they fail to have enough Bitcoins. Property owners in the United States pay taxes on their property, and those taxes are both compulsory and must be paid in dollars. Hence, a US property owner could lose their property for not having enough dollars.
I also don't see a problem with lending or borrowing Bitcoins
You don't see a problem with borrowing an inherently deflationary currency? Deflation makes it harder to repay a loan. That means that the borrower would be in a tough situation, and the lender would be issuing a loan that is not likely to be repaid. That is one of the reasons that modern economic policies are inflation oriented, and why deflation is considered to be disastrous.
If I have $500 of Bitcoin at current rates, and a $500 tax bill, I will be able to pay my bill as there are currently enough people trading Bitcoins to ensure my tax bill gets paid.
Hence eroding the demand for Bitcoin, since nobody is likely to find themselves in the reverse situation, where they are forced to exchange dollars for Bitcoin tokens. This is one of the failure scenarios for Bitcoin: people keep finding themselves forced to dump their Bitcoins for other currencies, and demand is eroded until Bitcoin's value collapses. Such devaluation is fairly likely to happen, since most of Bitcoin's value (practically all of it) is derived from speculation about the exchange rate and about the number of new people who will buy into the system.
The second half of your conclusion is also wrong in that it is a scam designed to reward early adopters
Let's see...early adopters got their Bitcoin tokens at almost no cost, since they could get them by spending a few CPU cycles, and late adopters find it harder to compute new Bitcoin tokens and thus buy into the system (e.g. by buying already generated tokens from the early adopters). The late adopters are only going to realize a profit as long as even more late adopters arrive to the system, and as long as Bitcoin continues to see deflation. This leads to another failure scenario for Bitcoin: when there are no more late adopters to be found, all the speculation about Bitcoin will dry up, and those who were last to enter the system will be stuck with nearly worthless Bitcoin tokens. This is related to the previously described failure scenario, in that it is worsened by the way demand for Bitcoin will ultimately be eroded.
The executive summary is this: Bitcoin is very likely to fail, and the last people to buy into the system will find themselves totally screwed by it.
The problem is getting people to see enough value in the money that you printed to accept it as a medium of exchange for goods and services
That is a problem that is easily solved: give people a fixed exchange rate, and back your private currency with the government's currency. Over time, people will accept the private currency, perhaps out of regional pride, or perhaps because it has some useful property (e.g. maybe you put more private-currency dispensing ATMs in the region than there are other ATMs, or you give merchants some special incentive, etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
go after cocaine, heroin, pcp etc
Funny how the only reason those were made illegal was overt racism...
Those kill people
So do pharmaceuticals, and more importantly, America's favorite recreational drugs: alcohol and tobacco.
The war on drugs is, in general, an attack on American freedoms, for the benefit of big businesses, racists, and a few social conservatives. It has never been about public health, nor will it ever be about health.
Not sure whether to blame the issuers for not really caring as long as they get their overpayment, browser manufacturers for their root acceptance policy, or customers for not caring as long as the little lock icon is there.
The first two are only a problem because of the last -- if people actually knew and cared about TLS, none of these shenanigans would have. CAs would be vastly more secure, they would check identities far more closely, and browser manufacturers would be more strict about which signing certificates they include.
http://www.cacert.org/
Or just issue self-signed certificates, and tell your users to verify the fingerprint manually.
Andy Wiles was over 30 when he proved Fermat's Last Theorem...
Just curious, what would happen if your work pays you in BTC? That would mean you haven't been paid (e.g. I work from Australia for a Multinational company that pays me in BTC from one of their off shore subsidiaries) if it has no value, does that mean I don't have to pay taxes?
Well, the question at that point would be "what is BTC worth?" i.e. in terms of barter. Keep in mind, however, that you would still have to pay property taxes, possibly sales taxes, and various other government fees, and so at the end of the day you would still be forced to exchange your BTC for some other currency (AUD?).
Get rid of offshoring, and Johnny will want to code.
You make programming sound like some kind of a chore, a typical day job that someone is only going to do because they are paid to do it. I am sure that such programmers exist, but the best programmers out there are the ones for whom programming is as natural as breathing, who would be hacking even if they were unemployed, and who are enjoy the work that they do. This is not terribly different than the situation with mathematicians -- the best mathematicians are the ones who love math.
America has a lot of trouble teaching math to middle school and high school students, at least by comparison with other countries. It should come as no surprise that we have trouble teaching computer programming, which is very close to mathematics. It also doesn't help that we have a mass media that portrays computer programmers as these nerdy anti-social types (yes they sometimes become rich, but we glamorize people who were born into wealth).
Well, you are assuming we are dealing with some subset of the real numbers. I prefer to do all of my work using modular arithmetic, in which case it is possible to add or multiply three negatives and get a positive...and where your "negatives" are also "positives."
What makes you think any of this is about animosity? They are greedy, that's all -- they didn't get billions they only got millions and they weren't satisfied with that. The fact that they could live comfortable for the rest of their lives without having to do any work whatsoever is irrelevant to them.
Where do you buy the tinfoil for your hats? I think I know which company to invest my money in.
Yes, there was something strange about the source of money that went into creating Facebook, but somehow I doubt that the CIA thought that social networking websites were going to help track down targets. More likely, they wanted to see what sort of technology social networking websites would produce, which might be useful for their own intelligence gathering operations.
Except that it was not voluntary (he was kind of forced to make a settlement, since the court case was going to be pretty tough) and that it is enough money that the twins will never have to work again, if they choose not to. They say $1 million is not what it used to be; somehow I get the feeling that $65 million is what it used to be.
What makes that the "plus side?"
...and your comment is based on what, exactly?
is that a jab? what is your point and why should i care? i know the definitions, maybe if you come down off your high pony you can see that.
You equated price increases with deflation. In a deflationary situation, we would expect to see decreases in the price of goods, as currency becomes more valuable.
Nobody would issue a Bitcoin loan
oh please, you know that's not true. same sentence...
Deflation makes loans harder to repay which means anyone issuing a loan with a deflationary currency would be less likely to be repaid. Sure, you could try to issue a loan at a very high interest rate, to account to the enormous risk that a Bitcoin loan entails, but the rate would be absurd and I doubt there would be enough people seeking loans to even make it worthwhile.
and only a complete idiot would take out a Bitcoin loan
duuuuhhh yeah. are you high? who are we talking about here? if bitcoins become more broadly accepted you betcha bitcoin loan sharks will come out of the woodwork. where have you been?
Only an idiot would take out a loan in a deflationary currency, because repaying the loan would be difficult. It would be like taking out a loan at %1000 interest.
try a world without loans? try living within your means. it's called responsibility.
Tell that to all the people who built successful businesses that started with a loan. We are not just talking about billionaires; there are plenty of small businesses out there that were started with loans, which are owned by middle class people who would never have been able to start a business if they couldn't get a loan. Money lending has been fundamental to business and economics for centuries.
If you think loans are only about buying expensive toys, you are living in another world.
Bitcoin...Esperanto or Linux.
Hm...
I see your point.
Since bitcoin seems to be completely resistant to any manipulation
Except that a single compromised account on an exchange caused severe devaluation:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/22/compromised-account-leads-to-massive-bitcoin-sell-off-eff-recon/
On the other hand, there are lots of private currencies out there, and I do not see any particular reason that a private digital currency would be illegal, if the issuing authority were in full compliance with the law. There already exist gold-backed ETFs, whose shares can be traded on the open market; a digital cash system backed by gold would not be terribly different, except in how trade is actually performed.
Personally, I am not a fan of gold-backed currency and would choose to back digital cash with non-digital cash if I were to set up such a system. Still, although IANAL I do not see why a gold-backed digital cash system could not operate in compliance with the law.
If the $ were exclusively used to pay taxes, it would be fairly worthless, people would burn cash in the winter to keep warm, or use it as toilet paper.
I never said the only thing USD was useful for was paying taxes. However, at least in theory anything that BTC can be used for USD could also be used for; yet there are things that USD can be used for (settling debts with the government, paying fees to the government, etc.) which BTC cannot be used for. There is therefore an imbalance in demand, at least among US users of BTC.
Except for secure electronic payments. Luckily, there is a boatload of research on digital cash protocols, and it would be relatively straightforward to establish digital cash that is backed by gold.
Here's the difference: nobody is converting other currencies into BTC in order to pay their taxes. That undermines the demand for BTC and doesn't say much for its long-term prospects. Nobody is punished for not having BTC, but people can be punished for not having other currencies (i.e. because they are punished for not paying taxes), which leads me to believe that over time people will sell their BTC more rapidly than they buy (or in other words, that BTC needs to keep getting more people to buy into the system in order to remain viable, which is not even close to a sustainable policy).
The big difference I can see is that one can pay tax in USD.
More importantly, you can be arrested and lose your property if you refuse to pay your taxes, and you need to use USD to do so. Nobody is punished for not having BTC, but people can be punished for not having USD, which creates some serious imbalance in the demand for BTC.
The bitcoin effort needs the involvement of some economists with experience studying and understanding currencies
Funny how mainstream economists connect currency with banking and government, and how they advocate the role of governments and banks in regulating and stabilizing currency.
I suspect that bitcoin needs to be replaced with a new system that has the advantages of the current without the raging disadvantages
Most digital cash systems call for a bank to issue the digital currency in exchange for physical currency. I would like to see those systems more widely deployed, although I get the feeling that the current banks would not be too enthusiastic about introducing an electronic payment system that deprives them of transactions fees.
All the cool kids are doing it now?
You can use Bitcoin to pay taxes or government fees
Prove it. Find me a country that accepts Bitcoin as payment for taxes.
I've paid French taxes using British sterling, just the bank exchanged currency behind the scenes.
Emphasis mine. You did not pay your taxes using British currency, you exchanged your British currency. Likewise with Bitcoin, except that unlike British currency, nobody is going to exchange a different currency for Bitcoin when they pay their taxes. This creates something of an imbalance in the demand for Bitcoin.
The dollar seems more like Chuck-e-Cheese tokens than Bitcoin, as the government or Chuck-e-Cheese can print off as many notes as they want. Bitcoin is different in that there is no single issuing body that can manipulate the currency.
Yet unlike the dollar, nobody will lose their property if they fail to have enough Chuck-e-Cheese tokens. Nor will anyone lose their property if they fail to have enough Bitcoins. Property owners in the United States pay taxes on their property, and those taxes are both compulsory and must be paid in dollars. Hence, a US property owner could lose their property for not having enough dollars.
I also don't see a problem with lending or borrowing Bitcoins
You don't see a problem with borrowing an inherently deflationary currency? Deflation makes it harder to repay a loan. That means that the borrower would be in a tough situation, and the lender would be issuing a loan that is not likely to be repaid. That is one of the reasons that modern economic policies are inflation oriented, and why deflation is considered to be disastrous.
If I have $500 of Bitcoin at current rates, and a $500 tax bill, I will be able to pay my bill as there are currently enough people trading Bitcoins to ensure my tax bill gets paid.
Hence eroding the demand for Bitcoin, since nobody is likely to find themselves in the reverse situation, where they are forced to exchange dollars for Bitcoin tokens. This is one of the failure scenarios for Bitcoin: people keep finding themselves forced to dump their Bitcoins for other currencies, and demand is eroded until Bitcoin's value collapses. Such devaluation is fairly likely to happen, since most of Bitcoin's value (practically all of it) is derived from speculation about the exchange rate and about the number of new people who will buy into the system.
The second half of your conclusion is also wrong in that it is a scam designed to reward early adopters
Let's see...early adopters got their Bitcoin tokens at almost no cost, since they could get them by spending a few CPU cycles, and late adopters find it harder to compute new Bitcoin tokens and thus buy into the system (e.g. by buying already generated tokens from the early adopters). The late adopters are only going to realize a profit as long as even more late adopters arrive to the system, and as long as Bitcoin continues to see deflation. This leads to another failure scenario for Bitcoin: when there are no more late adopters to be found, all the speculation about Bitcoin will dry up, and those who were last to enter the system will be stuck with nearly worthless Bitcoin tokens. This is related to the previously described failure scenario, in that it is worsened by the way demand for Bitcoin will ultimately be eroded.
The executive summary is this: Bitcoin is very likely to fail, and the last people to buy into the system will find themselves totally screwed by it.
The problem is getting people to see enough value in the money that you printed to accept it as a medium of exchange for goods and services
That is a problem that is easily solved: give people a fixed exchange rate, and back your private currency with the government's currency. Over time, people will accept the private currency, perhaps out of regional pride, or perhaps because it has some useful property (e.g. maybe you put more private-currency dispensing ATMs in the region than there are other ATMs, or you give merchants some special incentive, etc.).