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The fact that there is a limit to the amount that can exist alone makes it impossible to become a viable currency.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 05:21 |
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| # ? May 23, 2013 21:31 |
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This is pretty stupid, that about sums it up
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 05:21 |
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JakeP posted:The fact that there is a limit to the amount that can exist alone makes it impossible to become a viable currency. There's a limit to the amount of gold on this planet. What definition of 'viable currency' are you using? And do you believe your particular definition of 'viable currency' is useful in determining if a given commodity has value?
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 05:22 |
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I'm imagining a very self-sustaining little economy in my house. I invite fishmech over as my guest, and he takes up residence in one of my spare rooms, decorating it in the way of his kind, with broken computer equipment he hopes to sell on ebay and empty mountain dew cans. I would provide him sustenance, housing, the occasional vehicle privilege, and crude, amateurish medical care when he needs a pilondial cyst drained or he gets stuck in the shower stall. His standard of living would probably be much improved under my tender care. When his bitcoin reserves eventually run low, I can invent little jobs he can do for me around the house in exchange for some more local currency, so our economy is "self-sustaining." I'll be bringing in the dollars our economy needs to make its imports, so naturally, the things he does for me will facilitate my ability to do this... little household chores; I can probably train him a bit to do the things he's not accustomed to, like cleaning and cooking. I could pay for access to that creepy, extensive database he keeps on SA forum users, and perhaps employ his artistic talents at designing those big red custom titles he buys the people that enrage him online. If this isn't enough to earn him his keep, I would probably invent make-work for him, like capering for me, or rolling around, thrashing his stubby little arms and legs, and screeching hysterically in his little shrill piggy voice while I laugh and laugh and laugh. Those will be good times, won't they, fishmech? Good times. Good times.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 05:23 |
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Solus posted:my main problem is, you cna just bust open the code and manufacture your own bitcoins... No, you can't, and given the cryptographic security of bitcoins it's a lot easier to detect a fake one than literally any sort of physical currency. EDIT: And you couldn't bother to use apostrophes, spellcheck, or consistent capitalization as well as not bothering to read the [strike]thread[/strike] OP or even the barest summary of bitcoins? Really?
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 05:27 |
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Martin Random vs. fishmech Round 2. Who will sperg the hardest? Only time will tell.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 05:27 |
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Shasta Orange Soda posted:Martin Random vs. fishmech Round 2. Who will sperg the hardest? Only time will tell. Martin Random has experience typing up an average post size of 15 paragraphs with a very professional atmosphere. Or so I've heard. 15 bitcoins on Martin.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 05:41 |
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Uglycat posted:There's a limit to the amount of gold on this planet. What definition of 'viable currency' are you using? And do you believe your particular definition of 'viable currency' is useful in determining if a given commodity has value? This is why we don't use gold as a currency anymore? A viable currency is not something that I am going to write an essay about defining, but it can't fluctuate in value like bitcoins do. The ability to establish monetary policy is important in a currency. A commodity has value as long as someone will pay for it.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 05:45 |
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Oh man, bitcoins being compared to gold, bet no one thought of that until page 31 of this thread.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 05:59 |
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Uglycat posted:I'd very much like to be able to quote you as saying, in these exact words, "Bitcoin may well prove to be a viable currency." I make no statement as to the future, only as to right now.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 06:01 |
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fishmech posted:I make no statement as to the future, only as to right now. You don't have to do anything so strenuous as beating the floor with your arms and legs while rolling around and shrieking. I could hire you to do more sophisticated stuff... like modelling my dead mother's clothing for me while I take photographs of you from the bushes outside. Come on, under your definition, that makes it a viable currency. I give you food, shelter, vehicle access, medical care, electricity, and clothing... after a fashion... and you give me bitcoins.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 06:07 |
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Martin Random posted:You don't have to do anything so strenuous as beating the floor with your arms and legs while rolling around and shrieking. I could hire you to do more sophisticated stuff... like modelling my dead mother's clothing for me while I take photographs of you from the bushes outside. Look if you want to keep sperging about your magic bittree bitfortress go ahead but it's dumb as hell and so are you. You ain't got poo poo to sell for bitcoins, simple as that.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 06:09 |
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Hellsau posted:Martin Random has experience typing up an average post size of 15 paragraphs with a very professional atmosphere. Or so I've heard. Since you've posted this, Bitcoins have fallen from 1 per paragraph to 22 per paragraph.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 06:09 |
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http://eu1.bitcoincharts.com/map/ ONLY works in Chrome. It shows BTC transactions as they happen around the world. Give it about 20 seconds to get going, it's kinda interesting.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 06:18 |
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Justice posted:Since you've posted this, Bitcoins have fallen from 1 per paragraph to 22 per paragraph. poo poo no, I'm ruining financially through Bitcoins maybe! Who would have guessed except everyone.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 06:19 |
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fishmech posted:You ain't got poo poo to sell for bitcoins, simple as that. I have exactly the things to sell that you said I would need to sell to make it a viable currency. You can move in at any time. I've got a little fishmech terrarium with sawdust and a little licky bottle filled with mountain dew, a tray filled with cheeto powder so you can dust-bathe, and a motorized scooter you can ride over to the grocery store for more pop tarts or to get a refill on the perscription for your flaking skin condition. All of that and more for bitcoins, which you'll have ample opportunity to earn back by, say, giving me some of your bath water or letting me watch you while you sleep. What's wrong, fishmech? Isn't that a viable currency? It can buy all the things you said it needed to buy to be a viable currency.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 06:26 |
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UrbanFarmer posted:How can BTC NOT be at critical mass at this point? They're hitting major news sources, people are buying computer rigs just to mine, Google Trends are off the chart, it's being talked about all over the place, the computing power of the network is going off the charts, and it is a GLOBAL phenomenon. You know what else hit major news sources?
Second Life, the virtual world where we can have virtual meeting rooms, shops and classrooms with people all over the world. Or simulate sex with anthropomorphic animals and make flying dongs. Electric cars! Okay, these are making a come back, but the buzz back when the EV1 was launched back in 1996 never came to much of anything. Buzz doesn't guarantee success.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 06:33 |
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I can't wait for the next open source currency to open up so we get to see the arguments over which one is the most free. We need a BitFork.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 06:40 |
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Martin Random posted:I have exactly the things to sell that you said I would need to sell to make it a viable currency. You can move in at any time. I've got a little fishmech terrarium with sawdust and a little licky bottle filled with mountain dew, a tray filled with cheeto powder so you can dust-bathe, and a motorized scooter you can ride over to the grocery store for more pop tarts or to get a refill on the perscription for your flaking skin condition. All of that and more for bitcoins, which you'll have ample opportunity to earn back by, say, giving me some of your bath water or letting me watch you while you sleep. Actually, you can't. 
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 06:44 |
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You Know. I cant get that post of "enjoy your fagot INTERNET money" out of my head...it just cracks me up. I wonder did the creator sell this as an experiment in crypocurency? Like hey lets see how we can make this work, and a bunch of bitcoin bugs got on board? lets say that this honestly takes off, and becomes a new web 3.0 paradigm. The creator is successful. Wouldnt that lead to some other bigger and more powerful group starting their own crypto currency? Could I just whore myself for bitcoins, and then use my bitcoin capital to make my own cryptocurrency call "fagot internet money" As an experiment I think its neat.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 06:54 |
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Nerd interest in this poo poo isn't dying off anytime soon. I gambled a few hundred on that by purchasing some for under $10/bc last week. They're trading at nearly $18/bc now and if they hit $20/bc - should, by July at least - I'll call it a day. I really don't give a poo poo whether it will be the new currency of the future or not (it won't) but lol, just lol, if you're not prepared to exploit the separatist notions of libertarian nerds in the meantime.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 06:58 |
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tetsuo posted:Nerd interest in this poo poo isn't dying off anytime soon. I gambled a few hundred on that by purchasing some for under $10/bc last week. They're trading at nearly $18/bc now and if they hit $20/bc - should, by July at least - I'll call it a day. There are a lot of drug dealers using it as well
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 07:00 |
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Weed Wolf posted:There are a lot of drug dealers using it as well
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 07:02 |
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UrbanFarmer posted:http://eu1.bitcoincharts.com/map/ Assuming that the linked site with the market charts is both accurate and a reasonably representative sample, it looks like there's virtually no actual market for bitcoins outside of MtGox and USD, and that has about 2x as many bitcoins on offer as people who actually want them.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 07:04 |
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fishmech posted:I make no statement as to the future, only as to right now. I'm not asking you to make a prediction about the future. I'm asking you to admit the limits of your ability to predict the future. Thus, by refusing to make that statement, you are claiming clairvoyance. At least, unless you can provide a sound argument to back up your position. In any case, that's all moot - you've already admitted to exactly the statement I asked you to make. You just used wormy language to avoid conceding the point. For you to hold out illustrate the intellectual dishonesty with which you approach this topic.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 07:14 |
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If bitcoins are successful, they will get shutdown.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 09:17 |
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UrbanFarmer posted:If this was a pump and dump, BTC would NEVER have hit current levels. The creator and early adopters would have dumped long ago, STILL make MILLIONS, and be sitting in a tropical location about now. http://www.google.com/trends?q=bitc...date=all&sort=1 Bitcoins seem to be less exciting than a dude that claims our politicians are secretly lizards from another dimension. Global phenomenon indeed!
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 10:38 |
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Patashu posted:What would this bug look like? Everything is locked down hard by cryptography. Although I'm sure inevitably one of the mobile or alternate clients for bitcoin will implement said cryptography wrong and leak private keys. The first time someone found a bug and generated billions of coins it was because of an arithmetic bug. Since the code that handles transactions is fairly complex, I bet there are at least a few more bugs lying around. Cryptography alone doesn't guarantee security.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 11:12 |
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I'm going to go through the textbook definition of currency because y'all retarded arguing about this. There are two textbook definitions: A. Functions of money: 1. Unit of account Money is used to compare the worth of goods. The price may be set in any which way. This is debated in literature. Other definitions are: If you can calculate with it, it works as unit of account. Bitcoints does this but currently not for all goods. 2. Deposit of value We can't always use the potential value we have earned right on the spot, so we use money to deposit it. Functionally Bitcoin does this, however currently it doesn't do it very well. There is a certain point when consumers hold their wealth in a currency and that is when it assumed to be relatively safe to hold that value. Otherwise they stop doing that and the currency stops beeing money. Bitcoin is much too volatile for anyone to deposit all their assets in Bitcoins. So while it theoretically works as mean of deposit, it practically does not. At this point. 3. Means of Payment This is obvious. Bitcoins are limited means of payment. B. Absolute Liquidity Money is the good of highest liquidity for any group of people. The good of highest liquidity is the good that enables the person with money to exchange that money for the greatest variety of different goods at a constant value. For any person living in Europe or America or Asia, Bitcoins is not the good of highest liquidity (it is their legal tender). So: BY TEXTBOOK ECONOMIC DEFINITION BITCOINS ARE NOT YET MONEY, HOWEVER THEY THEORETICALLY COULD BE. Hope this solves this poo poo
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 11:38 |
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ymgve posted:The first time someone found a bug and generated billions of coins it was because of an arithmetic bug. Since the code that handles transactions is fairly complex, I bet there are at least a few more bugs lying around.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 11:45 |
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ymgve posted:The first time someone found a bug and generated billions of coins it was because of an arithmetic bug. Since the code that handles transactions is fairly complex, I bet there are at least a few more bugs lying around. Problem is that the contents of any account are available in the block chain shared by everyone - if you try to send more than that account's ever been given then everyone working on the chain will reject it as invalid. You can't do overflow/underflow anymore, and you can't send the contents of someone else's wallet because you don't have their private key, etc. Some of these could happen but they won't generate bitcoins: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses EDIT: Might have spoken too soon. This vulnerability looks promising, if you have a botnet handy: http://culubas.blogspot.com/2011/05...itcoin_802.html
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 11:58 |
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Boner Slam posted:So: I hope you can appreciate the irony of trying to add some certainty to the discussion, then essentially saying that you have no definitive answer.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 11:59 |
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Lumberjack Bonanza posted:I hope you can appreciate the irony of trying to add some certainty to the discussion, then essentially saying that you have no definitive answer. But this is a definitive answer? If you are asking if and when Bitcoins will become money according to liquidity preference theory, my answer would be "never". According to money function "theory", I'd say it doesn't matter much except when you already have a reason to use Bitcoins right now. I don't see a single reason why it should spread beyond its current boundaries according to functions of money. But I didn't want to post my opinion, I wanted to post a definition. No one can look into the future with certainty. There's the definition. Bitcoins is at this point not money. The End.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 13:10 |
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Martin Random posted:You're moving goalposts. You said it's a viable currency if you can use it to directly buy the following in one area: housing, electricity, water, fuel, a vehicle, sustenance, medical care, clothing. You can do all of that in one area - my house. It's like a charming little island economy. Anything you need that we don't make, you can import. Martin Random posted:100% agreed. I've based real investment decisions on goons as contrarian indicators, and made real money. There are all kinds of stupid. There are loner-stupids that go off on their own. Goons are crowd-stupid. You can count on it. When they bag on something, you can extrapolate that to the larger population of stupid people in a country, and make actual stock market bets against goonthink. When you see them stampede towards a sentiment that doesn't pencil out, keep your ears pricked. Smithfield foods and BP were two of my "goon investments" that did very, very well.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 13:16 |
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TouretteDog posted:Assuming that the linked site with the market charts is both accurate and a reasonably representative sample, it looks like there's virtually no actual market for bitcoins outside of MtGox and USD, and that has about 2x as many bitcoins on offer as people who actually want them. Now, I'm not an fancy economics professor or anything like that, but doesn't the combination of "lots of something for sale" and "little demand for that thing" usually result in the value of that thing declining pretty quickly? Or does supply/demand work differently in the Bitcoiniverse?
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 13:17 |
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xdrquinnx posted:Now, I'm not an fancy economics professor or anything like that, but doesn't the combination of "lots of something for sale" and "little demand for that thing" usually result in the value of that thing declining pretty quickly? Or does supply/demand work differently in the Bitcoiniverse? That will probably happen eventually. Remember that Bitcoins aren't (yet) money. Because of the deflationary nature of the coins, people like to hold the Bitcoins at this point. With the option to immediately exchange them into dollars, it seems smarter to keep them as investment. If, however, the actual transaction will become more expensive for me than the return, for example when I have to buy weed via coins to trade into dollars to buy food, the coins will have lost their value as investment and they will devalue to almost zero very quickly. This risk has to be outweight by the current yield. Since the yield is unknown, the uncertainty is very high. Ie. People investing in Bitcoins aren't probably thinking very hard about this.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 14:19 |
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Why is "BTC" the accepted shortening for "Bitcoins"? There's no "T" in it besides the end of the first word. That makes no sense. They should be "BCs" or "Bits" or just "Bitcoins".
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 17:25 |
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It turns out BitCoins are good for something: Getting drugs delivered right to your doorstep!
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 17:28 |
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No poo poo.
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 17:41 |
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| # ? May 23, 2013 21:31 |
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rotinaj posted:Why is "BTC" the accepted shortening for "Bitcoins"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_4217 All currencies have three letter acronyms, but the United States Dollar is the only one that has an acronym where the letters come from the initials of three words. E: ...that I could think of when I wrote this post 
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| # ? Jun 5, 2011 17:59 |
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