"And they disable SELinux because they probably don't have anyone who understands how to use it, much less use it well. MAC is great for security, but requires a depth of knowledge of your systems that most places just don't have."

Not talking about government agencies but there certainly are a lot of people who don't understand SELinux, mostly because it is confusing as hell and poorly documented. But even if you do understand it, it is cumbersome, it never becomes a silent player that just works, and to get any real benefit out of it requires TONS of additional time and overhead in system configuration.

What I usually see is people leave it on until the first instance of cryptic failures that can be traced back to SELinux problems.

Admins want certain core systems needed to admin a box to be standardized. It's an init system, there is only so much benefit you can have from one over another and those benefits don't outweigh the problems of distributions all being different.

An admin should be able to log in to a box and perform basic administration without having to care what distro it is running.

The United States made claim the moon in the same manner as early explorers, by planting the nation's flag. Unless China is looking for war with the US it wouldn't seem wise to steal US resources from the moon.

Agreed. I answered another post and talked about how using idea of a floating reference called the "bitdollar" (all rights reserved) which equates to the decimal place of the bitcoin unit that has reached dollar parity we can actually turn it in to an inflationary currency and that as the BTC decimal that corresponds with the Bitdollar shifts it becomes more stable. For instance now the bitdollar is the bitmil or .001 BTC and when the market shifts by $100 it shifts $0.10 fluctuations of the bitdollar. If BTC were valued at $10,000 that $100 shift would represent $0.01 change in the bitdollar relative to the dollar, and so on with a factor of 10 reduction in variation with each shift.

It's much like a stock split really. I wish the clients and exchanges would express BTC this way because there is a psychological barrier that makes it easy to accept small price variations in something like a Bitdollar and difficult to embrace ever higher values of a single BTC.

Of course the market has to reflect the higher values for a whole BTC. I guesstimate based on how many dollars are moving around the exchange that BTC should be at least $1081 (see my other post to see where I got that number) to cover the amount of money flowing through MT GOX in a day extrapolated over a year. So it is currently under valued but the current 'bitdollar' would still correctly equate to .001 BTC. If people speculated and traded on bitdollars we'd see a couple slower than now but relatively fast splits and then the bitdollar would stabilize to something much more reasonable.

Theoretically, this can work as far as 1 BTC being a lot of $100,000,000 BTD and something likely traded by national banks and not individuals and the BTD would be the most stable unit of currency we've ever known. It would be solidly backed by BTC with zero chance anyone has miscalculated the global supply of this limited resource and no chance of counterfeiting. It survives the rise and fall of nations, corporations, deaths, etc and can't be manipulated by any of them as long as there are others to keep them in check.

P.S. "And if it were to shift 4 more times from there fluctuations of $600 in the price of 1.0 BTC on the Bitdollar could not be expressed in something as unstable as the dollar even on the FOREX." There are only 3 more shifts to make... leaving something that could just be expressed with the fifth decimal on the FOREX and I'd have inflated my original bit dollar to 100,000,000 BTD's that are more stable than any currency in the world.

Prior to a couple hundred years ago all money was based on precious metals, gems, and other physical goods of innate value which are by definition deflationary.

"By the way, can you explain to me why it matters that BitCoins can only be dived by 100,000,000? Why is this limitation important? If I have 1 BitCoin, and there is deflation, I can now convert my BitCoin to 1.0 coins. Or maybe 1.0000 coins? How does adding extra digits to the precision of the value affect the effects of deflation on value."

Because the most critical purpose of inflating or deflating a currency is provide more units of it so that there are enough units of currency to readily facilitate trade. If there is not enough supply of currency the price goes up, by creating more units you drop the price back down. That is creating units by shifting the decimal to the left. You theoretically you can shift the decimal point an unlimited number of times so there is no limit to the amount you can inflate the currency.

People are used to this because that is how inflationary currency always worked. Deflationary currency has the same effect except that it creates units by shifting the decimal to the right. This also theoretically allows the supply to grow to unlimited quantity but in practice deflationary currencies have always been based on physically limited goods that ultimately could not be subdivided.

People are very used to thinking about money in whole units. Those people are looking at the price of Bitcoin and thinking about the price of 1.0 BTC. They refer to 2.0 as Bitcoins instead of 2 Bitcoin. If valuing against dollars 1.0 BTC was relevant at dollar parity. .1 BTC became the relevant unit of trade when it hit dollar parity. .01 BTC when it hit dollar parity, and .001 BTC when it hit dollar parity, etc. I'd call this the bit dollar. With every shift further back from the decimal point the bitdollar goes the more stable a unit it becomes because it requires an exponentially more significant change of dollar value relative to 1.0 BTC to change it.

We can shift this around and show that by applying the purely logical concept of the bit dollar we can magically turn bitcoin's deflation into inflation and thus prove that mathematically they are equivalent with the only mathematically significant factor being the rate. So if I had 1.0 BTC at parity I had one Bitdollar. When .1 hit dollar parity I would have had 10 bit dollars. When .01 hit parity I would have 100 bit dollars. When .001 hit parity I would have had 1000 bit dollars. So if I'm logically paying attention to the BTC it's deflating. If I'm logically paying attention to the effective unit of trade, the bit dollar or BTD suddenly I have an inflationary currency. This is economically sound because any currency is given value relative to another. These first shifts were fast because the economy is small, it is still relatively small. In order to shift the bit dollar again BTC would have to grow 10 fold. If you are familiar with the FOREX the same thing occurs by on the opposite side of the decimal. Because the currency is inflationary they trade massive quantities of it on sub penny changes.

But does it reflect the real market? Somewhere else I calculated out that the BTC volume of mt gox (the largest BTC exchange) * the average price * days in a year divided by the number Bitcoins that will ever be mined works out to $1081 and we know at least 10% of that amount flows through black market trade alone thanks to the FBI. Thanks to Bitpay and miners we know substantially more is solidly backed with white market trade. Bitcoin is currently floating between $600-$1200 per BTC. The Bitdollar is shifting between $0.60 - $1.20 over the course of a week. The same $600 shifts in BTC price if the bit dollar were to shift would be $0.96 to $1.04, if it were to shift another decimal the prices would be sub penny. And if it were to shift 4 more times from there fluctuations of $600 in the price of 1.0 BTC on the Bitdollar could not be expressed in something as unstable as the dollar even on the FOREX.

It helps keep a distinction between market speculation and the rate at which supply of currency increases/decreases which is pretty important if you don't want to confuse the effects of the two things together (being that they are distinct) in a discussion.

That's a reason it sucks to OWE debt with a deflationary currency not a reason you don't want to be OWED debt. But it comes out in the wash.

In the current world, currency inflating by 1.2% (someone quoted this from bureau of labor and statistics but it might as well be X for this example). Banks have to increase the interest rates they attach to loans by this amount so that they aren't losing money. For example, $100 loaned for 1 year would only have the buying power of $98.80 so I'd have to charge 1.2% interest just to break even and get paid back $101.20 + markup interest.

In another world, currency deflates by 1.2%. In this world banks simply charge markup interest because the money they are paid back will be worth more than the money they loaned. So, the same $100 loaned for 1 year would have the buying power of $101.20 + markup interest when paid back.

Either way the person taking loan has to come up with 101.2% of the borrowed amount of purchasing power plus markup interest. The only real difference is that in the deflationary world the lender doesn't have to try to measure, predict, and include the rate of deflate/inflate in to the interest.

"Say you loan me 25 bc. Let us assume I earn 1 bitcoins per week, and that amount will buy 5 MacBook Pros. At the end of six months, that amount will buy 10 MacBook Pros, and I am earning only 0.5 btc per week."

That's some pretty extreme deflation let's go with a more realistic and still high rate say 10%. Let's make it a year. So I loan you 25BTC for 10% interest so you have to pay back 27.5 BTC. Let's say you selling MacBook Pros and currently sell 5 MacBook Pros a week (0.50 BTC cost and 0.20 BTC profit each, so .70 BTC to consumer) and earn 1 BTC a week. By the end of the year (I'm going to ignore amortization because it doesn't change the concept and I don't want to bother calculating it). At the end of the year your MacBook Pros would be sold for .63 BTC, cost .45 BTC and net .18 BTC profit each. So yes, you'd need to increase your sales to pay back the loan but your potential customers salaries would be worth 10% more year on year so they could afford to buy 10% more of your product. The result of this is that deflation means 10% more goods/services would need to be produced to cover deflation. Just like 10% inflation would mean 10% more goods and services would mean the same.

Unless you are talking about a salary of say 1 BTC a week. It isn't like an employer would be able to cut salaries for deflation, they also wouldn't need to increase salaries to offset inflation like they do now, merely for merit. So you'd still make at least 1 BTC a week, it would just buy 10% more goods and services. That works out because your company and everyone elses increased production by at least 10% to cover salaries and pay back debts. That was easy for them to do because their goods and services are flying off the shelf 10% faster because their clients have 10% more to spend on their goods/services and their costs dropped by 10%.

"right, and for just a small percentage of my income & purchases, I get the privilege of not paying taxes..."

Not sure where this comes in but it wouldn't be with using bitpay... it's crediting to your bank account.

As for whether or not it's worth ones time. There probably aren't enough customers wanting to pay in bitcoin at the moment for it to be. On the other hand, it is trivial to flip it on and costs nothing to maintain. 1% of transactions, no chargebacks, and $0 a month or 0% of transactions, no chargebacks, and $30/mo is better for everyone than any credit card merchant account.

For me it's worth it in the same way it's worth trying to support local businesses. Bitcoin is detached from government meddling, safe from creditors/bankruptcy/divorce, and a handy app on my smartphone that is much more handy than cash or credit cards.

He's talking about economic "theory" (which is hypothesis to anyone who knows what a theory is supposed to be) which has been tested for less than a century on a system with investments that old or older and 20% of that duration common and which was more less debunked when it led to global economic meltdown. Deflation on the other hand was the basis for essentially every economy in the world for a few thousand years before that. Inflation was only implemented because there weren't enough currency units to go around. Bitcoin does not have that problem.

They don't have to auction it that's for goods. It's digital currency in the US. Why do you think the FBI and DOJ were so crazy in favor of it before congress?

If you do enough volume to qualify for the $30/month option with 0% fee it might end up being more desirable than cash as well. It costs money to count and process cash plus there are losses to counterfeits. There is no counterfeit bitcoin, that is it's unique property that gives it innate value.

Except with lower fees and no chargebacks.

"I don't know which comment you're talking about but I definitely said that as a small business owner (which I am) taking BTC just doesnt make sense b/c of the 'last mile' where the BTC become $$$ in my biz bank account in real time."

There might be merchant accounts that do this for credit cards but I've yet to see one. They will often initiate a transfer to your bank daily which is exactly what Bitpay does, it converts the Bitcoin to the dollar amount of the transaction in realtime and initiates a bank transfer daily. There is a 1% fee for a free account or no fee for a $30/month account and unlike credit cards there are no charge backs.

Bitpay gives small businesses the option of accepting Bitcoin easily without any risk of being impacted by fluctuation in the speculative market. I can't understand why just about everyone isn't doing this. At 1% with no chargebacks you can accept and promote a new payment option that highly desirable vs credit card and just or more convenient than a credit card. Other than initial setup costs (labor) there is no ongoing cost, just leave a sticker up letting customers know the option is there and don't sweat it if the volume is low. If you have a high enough volume to need to pay the drop to 0% fee offsets it. Cash carries no fees or chargebacks as well but is less convenient for customers and has costs associated with counting/handling/counterfeits so if you do large quantities of currency Bitpay might be more desirable for you than cash as well.

Why? If I loan you $25 and you pay me back $30 is the $30 not going to be worth just as much when I get it back as it would have been if I'd sat on it? It's not like you'd reduce the amount owed due to deflation.