Do you make more than minimum wage? If so, why is your employer paying you more than minimum wage? Why don't they just exploit you by paying you the minimum wage?

I really dislike using the term "inflation" to mean "higher prices". I know people use it that way but it confuses the issue. I prefer using inflation to mean strictly "increased money supply" and deflation to mean "decreased money supply". Thus your post reads "the minimum wage certainly affects prices in an upward direction", which is pretty straightforward. If the same amount of labor now costs more then either prices go up or less stuff is produced.

Nice post. I agree in that I don't know what they would end up doing. Ideally they'd find a job doing something, but what if no one wants to hire them and they have no familial or friend-based support network? You could pay them not to work but then that also encourages other people not to work. OTOH letting them starve and die if they can't help themselves seems less than ideal given the wealth of the entire society. Damned either way. Ideally we'd get to the point where food and shelter are so ridiculously cheap that it's essentially free, but we're not quite there yet.

What about the people whose labor is worth less than the minimum wage? At least some of those people will lose their jobs. Zero income is worse than some income. True, though, the ones that still keep their jobs at the higher wage are better off.

Do you make more than the minimum wage? If yes: why don't you have to work 3 jobs to make ends meet? Why on earth does your employer pay you more than the minimum wage when he could legally get away with that?

Not only the employers. Consumers also benefit from the lower prices resulting from cheaper costs of production. Basically the only ones that are worse off are those people who did the jobs that are now automated. That's only in the short-run since increased production always ends up leading to new jobs, be it in that industry in other capacities or in other industries that wouldn't have existed otherwise (consider whether we'd ever have something like a computer industry if 90% of the population were still farmers as in 1862).

What would really fix a bunch of stuff is outlawing fractional-reserve banking. With anything besides currency, it would be considered fraud. It creates currency out of thin air, as you put it. Depositing money in an account should yield zero interest, or even charge a fee, as it's just providing a service: convenience and safety of your money. Loaning your money out should be a totally separate concern, which gives you interest, but your money isn't usable in the meantime since you just gave it to somebody else. Then interest rates would naturally adjust to what the price of money is, there wouldn't be inflation constantly devaluing everybody's money, saving would be encouraged. The more savings, the lower interest rates, which makes borrowing money cheaper. Lower interest rates would encourage businesses to borrow money and expand, and they would do this precisely at that point where consumers have savings, i.e. money to spend, which is precisely the time when new businesses or expanding businesses have a chance to succeed.

As it is now, banks can make profit off of something they never had in the first place, and if they gamble too much they get bailed out by the government. The net result is the screwing over of everybody else.

That should work. People would spend that money so it'll stimulate the economy.

The higher the minimum wage, the more incentive there will be to automate those minimum-wage jobs. If it'd average out to $11/hr to have a robot do some cleaning, and the minimum wage is $10/hr, then a janitor willing to work for $10/hr will have a job. If the minimum wage goes to $12/hr, the robot will take the job instead.

I read somewhere an essay written around the time the minimum wage was being increased a few decades ago. This was during a time when there were still elevator operators. The author predicted that after the increase, elevator operators would get phased out in favor of automated elevators. That probably would've happened anyway, but raising the minimum wage probably helped speed up that process.

If it gets really bad there will be pressure to illegalize automation of certain classes of jobs.

It's not free-to-play though it's free-to-try, as in, a demo. Like the shareware of old. They would require each game to have a shareware version, but now they have removed this requirement.

Yes... I know. And what would be the problem with that? If you say it's because some miners will decide to pull out, I will pull out my own hair, because that's exactly what my post was addressing.

Sorry, by "inflation" I meant "increase in money supply". It would be really easy to have constant inflation - just set the block reward such that every 52600 blocks mined (~1 year) would increase the amount of bitcoins in circulation by 2%. This would also be predictable. However it would constantly devalue everybody's bitcoins, just like with fiat money, so I don't know if it'd be ideal. It would incentivize mining though.

This is patently false. A 51% attack cannot steal anybody's bitcoins. Stealing coins requires knowing somebody's private key, which amounts to cracking ECDSA, and if somebody can do that they don't need 51% of the computing power to mount it.

Here is what a 51% attacker can and cannot do:

As to:

Right. Everyone who actually uses bitcoin will have an interest in making sure there's enough computing power out there to prevent even those weaknesses that remain. Plus, note that a 51% attacker doesn't gain that much, financially, from exploiting those weaknesses. They can't really steal very many coins. The most they can do is double-spend, but for large transactions, people will want to wait for at least a few confirmations, which makes the double-spending almost impossible. What a 51% attacker can really do is screw over the network and attempt to destroy it, but if they're investing that much in the computing power, they're financially better off just legitimately mining for the fees. Then they too have a vested interest in perpetuating the integrity of the network.

I RTFA. I countered this point in each of my replies. Here it is again. I'll even bold the important parts:

As miners pull out, it will get easier to mine blocks. There will never be a shortage of computation power to run the network, because if half the miners pull out, it'll get twice as easy to mine blocks. If 75% of the miners pull out, it'll be 4x easier to mine blocks. If 90% of the miners pull out, it'll become 10x easier to mine blocks.

Get it? Whatever the number of miners, transactions will continue to be verified at exactly the same rate. Look at the hashrate chart. The network was chugging along just fine in July when there were < 1,000 terahashes/second. Now there are over 40,000 terahashes/second. So if 97.5% of the miners drop out, the network will run just as well as it did in July, that is, perfectly fine.

So when you reply, tell me again why it is a problem if some miners decide to pull out? Please don't just repeat once again that the article says that the fees will be too low and thus the miners will pull out. I get that that's what the article says. Why is this an issue, given the above?

Miners can simply choose to never include transactions below a certain fee. If enough miners do this then people can keep trying to freeload by posting free transactions, but they're going to take a really long time to get into the blockchain. Miners can and will choose to only mine blocks where the total fees are worth it to try to mine. So high-fee transactions will get in quicker, and low-fee transactions will take longer.

Besides, if miners do start to drop out, the difficulty will decrease (built-in network rule), and it'll become easier (and thus cheaper) to mine. Miners will drop out until the difficulty is such that it's worth it to mine the blocks, whatever the fees are. There's no danger of not having enough computation power to run the network.