Bitcoin is a deflationary currency. The more people use it (and our economies do grow) the more it is worth. That is how it expands.

That means anyone holding Bitcoin in savings, or in their wages, will share in the "growth" (via growth in value) of the money supply with Bitcoin.

The current system inflates the money supply. And not just to meet new demand, but to insure increasing prices of a set of consumer goods. This is pretty much done by providing money at way below market prices to banks and large corporate entities. Thus the benefits of the growth of the money supply are concentrated with these groups (Bankers and Wall Street).

The consumer is thus faced with a simple choice. How would you like your Wages? In a currency that mostly goes up in value? Or in a currency that certainly (by design and policy) goes down in value?

Thus Thier's Law: When the exchange rate is allowed to float, Good Money drives out Bad Money.

The value of a Bitcoin (unique to anything not patterned after Bitcoin) is the ability to engage in a transaction without the aid of any centralized third parties.

That is an intrinsic property of Bitcoin. And relatively unique to Bitcoin (and other crypto currencies).

You may not value that property, but it does exist, and some people do value it.

If I could demonstrate a Magic Spell to you, would that Spell have worth? What if it could allow you to moving any number (or fraction) of coins from your possession to anyone else in the world without the help of any centralized third party?

Would that have value?

Because that is what Bitcoin is. The ability to engage in transactions without involving any centralized third party. You might not consider that important, but some people do. What is Paypal worth? VISA? MasterCard? American Express? Hint: It isn't zero.

If Miners leave the system, then the computational complexity goes down for verifying blocks. If the price of Bitcoin goes up (which it must with greater usage), then mining becomes more profitable, and will attract more minors.

Really the system works pretty well to balance itself, and likely has nothing to do with a possible crash in price.

If you look over at LiteCoin, a much less popular crypto currency derived from Bitcoin, they just has a large run up, then dropped over half their value. But in the end, they still didn't fall back to their original run up price. They are likely to continue to rise in price as compared to other options.

Really, I think the fears of Bitcoin crashing are overblown. Right now Bitcoin has a capitalization of almost 800 million. Quite a bit, but nothing like the 68 billion capitalization of eBay (PayPal). At LEAST a billion or two of that can be contributed to PayPal. And people think Bitcoin is over valued at a fraction of that? When Bitcoin arguably better addresses the same problems of facilitating transactions, only better, cheaper, more securely?

Especially to the Bankers who are used to a currency expanding by letting them print money.

The horrors that monetary expansion should go to wages and savings!

That was 34 years ago. Some of us are that old.

I would like to do actual development on a smart phone, and why not? It has more hundreds of times the computing power of mainframe I, as a student, shared with the entire university!

I want an app that lets me use any computer and keyboard to connect to my phone, and use it as a gateway to the cloud, to hold my personal work, etc.

Walling yourself up and limiting consumer choices and controlling the platform ...

It works for Apple for the natural 20 percent of the market where people will tolerate limited choices. Apple got ahead of the curve with the IPod, IPhone, and IPad. But they are destine to drop back to their natural 20 percent. The rest of us demand more control, more chaos, and more competition.

Seriously, Germany's copyright views should be canned by anyone willing to take up the fight.

It is the secure boot technology. I don't want to buy a laptop or desktop that does not easily let me use the Operating System of my own build and choice.

The price of Gas is not reacting to a Supply vs Demand price rise. 2005 remains the peak of oil consumption in the U.S.

http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MTTUPUS2&f=M

On the other hand, we are producing more oil. Why hasn't the price fallen?

We have embarked on QE3 (after QE2 and QE1). We are printing money and injecting it into the Financial Institutions on Wall Street. Obviously countries who have been producing products for the United States (like oil) for decades and decades know that the value of the dollar is going to slide. Not saying crash necessarily, but there isn't any doubt in the world it is going to slide.

What do you do if you are such a country? You raise your prices. Because the dollar isn't going to be worth as much going forward.

This is the stated goal of Paul Krugman. Get Inflation up to 5 percent or 6 percent even. That is going to increase (he claims) employment. But prices lag the actual inflation, and wages lag the actual inflation even more.

So the result is going to be higher prices and lower real wages, less ability to buy goods (because we increasingly uses foreign components and raw materials even in domestic goods).

We are proudly following Japan into 20 years of dragging economic activity. And I think that is the up side.

The costs of developing drugs is more like 55 million (on average, including the costs of drug failures) than the 1.3 billion that the drug companies claim. On the face of it, there isn't any way drugs cost as much to develop as the drug companies claim, or (given their revenue) they would be losing money rather than making money (which they most certainly are).

Competition is a good thing. We have never had an industry anywhere in the world that has failed as an industry due to competition. But what the drug companies are saying is that they cannot stand up to competition. Well, why not? Innovation comes from solving problems, not sitting behind government enforced monopolies.

Big Pharma pushes the myth that their investment is Big and is Important, so they really need patents. All the while, they are pulling in huge margins on drugs that are not provably better in many cases than placebos.

You want to do the one thing today that would have the biggest impact on reducing Healthcare costs?

End Patents on Drugs, Genes, Medical devices, and Medical procedures.

All of them.

You still have the FDA to approve quality and safety. Anyone wanting to produce the latest anti-depression drug, or blood pressure medication still must jump through those hoops in insure quality and safety. That is barrier enough for drug companies to recoup R&D costs and gain position in the market place.

But wait! What about the profits?!? Think of the money that drug companies won't be able to make! Think of all the little competitors that will be able to leverage existing technology and undercut our costs! Think of all the little stinking improvements little companies could make to drugs and devices to displace the big companies on which we all depend!

Exactly.

And this is how it begins. First the computers keep you from crashing your car. Then they are injected into every car.

Then they eliminate us all.

It is totally naive to think that just because someone can look at your product, they can execute the production, distribution, and support for your product.

IP is not our primary resource. And if it is, we deserve to fail utterly.

Companies should be successful for building, selling, distributing, and supporting products. There isn't any reason to Tax the world for their willingness to compete just because we pass a law that says they have to.

Today there are nearly 200,000 patents on various aspects of smart phones. Maybe even more! If we gave every patent holder a penny, a cell phone would cost 2,000 dollars for IP alone.

Get over it. IP is important to some extent. But Apple's abuse of the system is unethical and shouldn't be tolerated.