what happens when Goldman et al discover there's money to be made by manipulating that market, and have nothing to stop their centuries-old bag of tricks.
After articles about it in Wired, Forbes, and who knows where else, I would be surprised if more than one cost / benefit survey hadn't already been completed at each of the too-big-fail banks.
The way our system works: the rich subsidize the social benefits to the poor.
I'm starting to think this is a requirement if you do not want a society that doesn't devolve into a small, private group that owns and controls all the resources, natural and human.
Since these folks enjoy the same public roads, military, police and fire protection, etc as everyone else, then they can help pay for them.
Is there any reason they should pay orders of magnitude more for the same services as everyone else?
Do the companies they own and profit from, and the employees engaged in work for those companies, drive more, fly more, require more police and fire protection, phone lines, clean water, solid waste disposal, waste water disposal?
While some capitalist can only use so many resources as an individual, the total usage by those employed by them can be considerably more.
So, now we have the owners at the top of the pyramid dodging payment of their share of taxes, the corporations dodging payment of the same. This leaves the non-owning class to pay for the infrastructure used by the capitalists to generate their profits.
it's bought for entertainment value and forgotten. it's just collecting for most that own some. the crap about cyprus events etc pushing it up.. well, that's just crap.
flooz
flooz was backed by a private company with no requirement to limit or control the volume of their product.
Bitcoin has the backing of current cryptographic techniques, the bitcoin protocol, and the compute power of the bitcoin mining network. While you can mine bitcoins with commodity hardware, it's not like you just get to instantly make as much of them as you want. You are limited by the cost of hardware, the cost of electricity, and at the same time you are competing with other miners on the network.
What is the failure mode of bitcoin?
The NSA executes a 51+% attack on the network and corrupts the blockchain?
EMP wipes out a large portion of the electric grid and/or the internet?
unless I convert it into real dollars, it'll never be taxed
That is income and you should be reporting it
Are you trying to say he should report his mined bitcoins as income, even if they are not converted to some other currency? Does the IRS expect someone to report WoW gold or other virtual currencies as well?
Why the hell can't these indoor bulb idiots use what everyone else in the world is already using?
How would that allow them to lock the world, or even a small group, into THEIR bulbs, sockets, controllers, and hardware?
Any time a question in the form of "Why can't/don't/won't X do the the logical thing Y?", the most likely answer is some form of "money/greed/control"
the U.S. homicide rate has fallen 50% since the early 90s, the decline starting before the Brady bill and the "assault weapons" ban and continuing after the ban expired, while more and more states liberalized CCW laws and the number of guns in private hands increased.
There seems to be growing evidence that the increase in crime in the 70s
Bitcoin is backed by absolutely nothing.
except the current cryptographic techniques, the bitcoin protocol, and the compute power of the bitcoin mining network.
need an internet connected device to send/receive money
Not exactly cash, but you can make transactions via SMS.
BTC isn't a real currency, I can't pay my taxes with it
Right. Nor can you pay them with gold, euros, pogs, flooz, sports trading cards, or a zillion other things. Government authority in the US accepts dollars. So what?
I can't pay any of my debts with it and nobody is forcing anybody to accept it.
You can buy software, web hosting, domain names, precious metals, gamble, clothes, electronics, dental service, legal service, books and fuck all else with it. Just because you can't pay your cable bill with bitcoins yet doesn't mean they aren't useful to others.
It's not backed by gold, silver or the promise of anybody with the means to back it.
Bitcoin is backed by the compute power of the bitcoin mining network, the bitcoin protocol, and modern cryptographic techniques. Can a 51% attack break it? Maybe. Will a flaw in the protocol kill it? If one is found and exploited, certainly. How about some breakthrough in cryptographic analysis or technique, like say quantum computing? Another possible killer.
In fact, it's designed to result in crushing deflation in a way that no currency is. If there aren't enough USD, you can print more, if there are too many, you can take them out of circulation when they come back.
There are some issues here. Hard drive crashes and no backup of your wallet? Barring some heroic drive recovery, or crypto breaking technique (which would likely break the system as well) those coins are gone forever, further lowering the number of potential bitcoins. But really, not much different than cash being destroyed.
A bitcoin can currently be broken up into 10^-8 pieces. There is room in the protocol for that to be increased. There could be 1 bitcoin in the world, and the pieces would still be useful.
Seeing how an elastic money supply controlled by private bankers has only caused larger boom/bust cycles since the Federal Reserve System was implemented, I'm at least interested in how the bitcoin system plays out. Even if it eventually dies, lessons will be learned, and the next iteration will be better.
"Confound these ancestors.... They've stolen our best ideas!" - Ben Jonson
