One can make a similar argument about paper moneies, as they all have hyperinflations built-in. This conclusion is easily reached by simply looking at history; no fiat system has ever survived the abuses politics subject it to, not to mention fractional-reserves being abused to the point of fraud.

Bitcoin won't necesarily enrich the early adopters. It would be more accurate to say that it enriches savers at the expense of spenders. To be fair, unlimited monies (practically all fiat monies) with their inflations do the opposite; they reward spenders and borrowers by undercutting rates of interest, and punish savers by making their savings lose purchasing power. By this measure, if bitcoin is a ponzi scheme, then all other money is at least a pyramid scheme.

I don't see bitcoin as being bad from an economic point of view. The people who want a store of value *can* use this (so long as SHA-256 is safe), as it would benefit them; though they'll probably hold on to their gold instead. They can then use the inflating government money for their loans, and get a good deal both places.

Also, don't be playa hatin' on the money launderers. It's a crime that doesn't exist without income taxation, which is to say not really a crime in the classic sense, as nobody is harmed; it's really just tax evasion -- which itself was not criminal until fairly recently (it was only a tort).

And good luck stamping out stores of value from existence. People have tried outlawing gold, silver, and nearly all other forms of capital; all it has ever accomplished is impoverishing the society that tries. Maybe that's why your post is so heavy on pejoratives, like "buttcoin".

Yeah, but bitcoin is infinitely sub-dividable, so that argument is irrelevant. Everyone will always be able to get enough to transact. The instabilities in hard money economies are due to fractional reserves creating inflations, or centralized debasement (coin clipping, etc). In reality, all economies are difficult to grow. Inflationary economies just front-load the prosperity, which is popular, as we are impatient. The real weakness of bitcoin is that it is only as strong as SHA-256. When that is broken, your bitcoins become basically worthless.

Too bad our patriotic freedom soldiers of love 'accidentally' made the Afghanis 'leak' some material, clearly and presently endangering their health. Surely that must have been Saddam's fault, not those glorious administrators doing 'god's work' in the pentagram.. er pentagon!

24

When I first saw this story I said to myself: "But wait! I thought that the USA (whoo whoo) already does this! Jack Bauer used one to get the terrorists in NYC!" Then I remembered that 24 wasn't real life. *sigh*

That'd be an awesome formatting option when installing Windows 7.

Or we could make the other assumption that most people happily agree on: That the people representing us in the government don't mean what they say, nor do they know what they are doing!
Fa fa fa!

...Unless they're in with the Federal Reserve, who I welcomed as my new overlords long ago, as they seem to be the only ones who have actually gotten things done for good or evil in some time.

It seems that the fundamental problem with financial mathematics is that most models rely on the 'efficient markets hypothesis' which assumes our market is deterministic. Until we find (which we have not) that the human decision making process IS deterministic, the results of EMH backed formulae will never produce consistent results at predicting market behavior. Some of the most interesting research into trying to predict things that normally seem nondeterministic (like markets, human behavior, etc.) was being done by Orlin Grabbe (with fractal modeling techniques), but unfortunately, he seems to have died too early to finish that work.

Even the liberal media agrees that having ice caps at the poles is a relatively odd thing to have in earth's history. I should think that having them melt is probably a good thing.

Here's Why:
Much more biomass can be supported by a hotter earth, as has been shown through the fossil record (fossil as in stones and fuel). Even if the planet obtained a climate more like it had one billion years ago, the temperatures from back then do not seem to have created a worldwide desert. Indeed, quite the opposite occurred.

So... why is global warming a bad thing again?