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what is that? like the satoshi? and if that is a PART of the bitcoin? you own a "share" what happens if the core of that bitcoin is lost/stolen? your share is no longer valid?

varikonniemi wrote:And this is the thing most people have against Bitcoin, they do not think you should get money based on your merits, they think money should be just given out as welfare like we do in fiat banking systems.

o_O

Becoming rich by literally doing nothing (besides perhaps using your computer capital to generate hashes that have no use outside of bitcoin) is as far from any concept of merit as it's possible to get.

KingRaptor wrote:

varikonniemi wrote:And this is the thing most people have against Bitcoin, they do not think you should get money based on your merits, they think money should be just given out as welfare like we do in fiat banking systems.

o_O

Becoming rich by literally doing nothing (besides perhaps using your computer capital to generate hashes that have no use outside of bitcoin) is as far from any concept of merit as it's possible to get.

^ That, is my major problem with BitCoin. It's just value created out of wasting electricity.

Also, it doesn't actually fix any problems in current currencies and economics. As I see it, the biggest single issue with the current economics is how the ownership of the currency is pretty stacked to just a tiny partition of people. BitCoin is not immune to this problem whatsoever. The decentralized nature also means that there's no way to control its value in any manner beyond what those, who own most of 1) BitCoins and 2) most of actual resource production, do.

Back in them days (like, thousands of years ago), money was supposed to be a kind of a vouch - that whoever had it, had done work roughly equivalent to the amount of money he had. BitCoin is not that and no currency really is.

And again.. I don't see why overall wealth of people at large changed at all due to BitCoin. Why would it? The control of money is not the most important thing. The control of resource production and land is, when it goes to who has the most power. There's little interest to actually bring economical equality about, since fact kinda is, that every person on Earth can not have two cars. That's just impossible. So there'll just continue to be that 10%, who get to have things 90% can't because it'd be impossible for the 90% to have, and things that 20% have but 80% can't, etc.. No change whatsoever, except in the name of the currency. Oh, and the fact that a decentralized currency is even more ridiculously prone to bubbles and such.

varikonniemi wrote:Astronomical gains are only for the early investors, on wall street these are the so called venture capitalists.

And no, Bitcoin will not stop economies from growing. It will make them prosper because it has the possibility to eliminate a whole modern banking class that does nothing beneficial for society.

What about bitcoins will eliminate banking?

The idea of banking makes a lot of sense. Doing things consumes resources and have some chance to produce more resources. But there is a risk, maybe you won't get your resources back. If you have a large pool of resources then you can try many things and the risk will average out to some fairly certain return. So money makes money.

I agree that the modern banking system has gone a bit crazy. Instead of investing in things people are investing in stuff like "the promise that other people will be able to invest in things". These more and more abstract things to invest in probably came about in ways that originally made sense. For example a farmer might want a guarantee that he can sell his produce for a certain price. But now it seems that there are so many abstract things to invest in that nobody has any idea of the risks. When something in the system snaps people just frantically try to save themselves.

But the basics of the system make sense. If you start up any economic system people will want to do things like take out home loans. Once people think they understand the dynamics of the basics they will continue to layer abstractions onto it. Eventually we will reach something with the complexity, volatility and apparent uselessness of the current banking system.

To me it looks like bitcoins will give us a worse start than the current system. Bitcoins are a risk like anything else and the people with more money are more able to take that risk.

Google_Frog wrote:To me it looks like bitcoins will give us a worse start than the current system. Bitcoins are a risk like anything else and the people with more money are more able to take that risk.

^ This, too.

If you do not agree that Bitcoin (or another p2p currency) may turn out to be more significant for mankind than the internet, then you may not agree with me on the details either.

smoth: are you trolling or not? i really cannot tell. A satoshi is the smallest denomination of a Bitcoin. A Bitcoin account nr + a balance of 0.00000001 on that account = 'a satoshi'. Bitcoins are created by transfering a balance of 25 to the account specified by the miner who solves the block.

googlefrog: it can eliminate modern banking and still save traditional banking functions. The difference being that using Bitcoin anyone can function as a bank. Not only a small club of insiders who enjoy the benefit of creating money and spending money before the inflation takes effect. And on top of that charge interest on that money which was created from nothing.

Modern banking has gone totally to hell after we went off the gold standard, and even deeper when legislation was changed so that finance banking and investment banking can be done by the same bank.

So the problem with the current banking system is that governments have special treatments for banks? You're still going to end up with few people who have most of the money.

I don't see what this statement is for:

If you do not agree that Bitcoin (or another p2p currency) may turn out to be more significant for mankind than the internet, then you may not agree with me on the details either.

You seem to be running the implication in the wrong direction. I hope that nobody has "Bitcoins are the most significant thing for mankind" as an axiom which they then use to derive many other opinions. The overarching opinion on whether bitcoins are significant should be based entirely on their details. Otherwise you approach the topic with a bias and are likely to warp each detail slightly such that it fits in with your high level axiom.

Actually that applies in general. I think that implications should flow from small details to larger ideas.

It should have been addressed to kingraptor, who does not agree there is value or merit in funding Bitcoin's startup.

The real world has shown there is so much value that it has been the best asset class on earth for several years. So if not even this most basic understanding aligns, then you should not post to this thread because your issues are ideological fanaticism, not factual debate.

Work and resources have true value. Fiat currency does not. And BitCoin is a fiat currency; The means of having a lot of BitCoins are just as varied as the means to having a lot of any other money. You can pile up BitCoins by borrowing them with interest. You can pile them up by having the resources to get a lot of hardware to mine effectively. You can pile them up by controlling oil or food production and asking prices which are higher than the actual cost of producing the aforementioned.

When the initial phase of the mining is over and the amount of BitCoins becomes fixed, there's nothing in the system to stop exactly same from happening that has happened with other currencies; People with the combination of ruthlesness, intelligence, luck and initial resources (of which the latter most, I reckon, is the most important) will have more BitCoins than others and will be able to affect the market just as they do now with other currencies.

What's even worse is that if 90% of BitCoins end up to the hands of 10% of population, there's no way of creating more of them. Then the market has become extremely inequal.

I get the feeling that the basis of argumentation for BitCoin's ability of being a more equal, more fair and less prone to problems of traditional currencies, is at its core, very same as the core of arguments of WW2 era Swizz libertarian economical theories: That the behaviour of people in handling money is 1) selfish and 2) rational. Using those two axioms, it was (and still is) argued that a completely free capitalistic market is the best way to have a working and substainable economy which also is as fair as is possible. Unfortunately, neither of those axioms is fully correct.

Majority of people will easily be led to use their BitCoins poorly and for the benefit of selected few.

EDIT, add: I feel that banks are given too much credit here. It's not really as much the banks and middle-men that create the economical inequality and the problems of modern currencies; It's more the fact that majority of world's resources, land, work hours and so on, are owned by a handful of huge global corporations. BitCoin does not lighten this ownership - it merely removes a potentially limiting factor, which would be the central banks.

varikonniemi wrote:smoth: are you trolling or not? i really cannot tell. A satoshi is the smallest denomination of a Bitcoin. A Bitcoin account nr + a balance of 0.00000001 on that account = 'a satoshi'. Bitcoins are created by transfering a balance of 25 to the account specified by the miner who solves the block.

So 1 bitcoin is really 25?

I am not trolling feel free to make the accusation. I just don't "get" how these are supposed to work. We have some "block" that could be worth say 1000$ how would that 1 block buy me a coke? i cannot see how this works

I think what smoth means is that it is hard to use bitcoins as everyday-life currency because of slow transaction validation process and complexities with how to represent them physically (even if physical btc "container" coins exist).

Presumably, both tech hurdles are surmountable. If the network capacity increases sufficiently, transaction validation period might become quicker, and as for physical cash...

I haven't seen physcash for a while. I buy coke with a debit card.

I carry around cash at all times. No one uses my debit card and credit card is only for stuff that is too large for my on hand cash. For something like a coke, I would not use my credit card. Where I am from we have hurricanes which can knock out the power grid for weeks, not having cash on you is:

Didn't say i wasn't biased by living in country where you can't walk out of wifi coverage even if you try.

However, there are those little portable things called GSM card terminals, which run out of battery power. I mean, i also do pay for taxi with card...

Funny how you guys talk about buying (a) coke. For one of the two that is apparently one of the major uses of bitcoins.

I was wondering how that works when all transactions are public. Or is there no way to link a transaction to a person?

lol, it completely went under my radar man, I was just choosing it because it is something cheap I know people buy a lot. Wasn't trying to make a big joke about the black market stuff or anything.

I like the non-bank system of trust they use in the muslim world for moneytransfer.

Bought 0.3 bitcoins a week ago and they just spiked up and now they're worth 20% more, woo!

Well hello! Glad to know you're making a fortune already :p

I am still on the fence about all this. I don't know if buying bitcoins will put you on a watch list or something like that. My dad and I have been mistaken in the past for a massively unsavory guy and we just recently cleared that up. I am not sure if the "guilt by association" is worth fooling with bitcoins.

Silentwings wrote:Well hello! Glad to know you're making a fortune already :p

I just sold them and made 20 euros profit! 20 euros!!