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Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

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Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#21

Post by olalonde »

hasenj wrote: post #14
chc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your viewpoint is only sensible if one is neutral or negative toward capitalism and assumes everyone else must be as well. If you think capitalism is a good thing, then of course something being at odds with it is problematic.

Even if you think it's a great idea; it's still possible to be ok with new good ideas even if they happen to be at odds with capitalism. For instance, I think Open Source is a great idea, but this alone is not good enough reason to think that selling iPhone apps is evil. Acting very cautious and defensive around capitalism makes it look like a holy untouchable ideology; this is what annoys me.

Again, Open Source is not at odds with capitalism. Capitalism doesn't mean making money or selling stuff. In fact, charities aren't at odds with capitalism. Did you know that Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Whales, is a libertarian?

Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#22

Post by corin_ »

contactdick wrote: post #16

Just on a brief look at BitCoin the question I have is generating blocks of bitcoins which requires computational power earns 50 bitcoins. Firstly that seems fairly arbitrary but secondly, what would happen if the currency became commonly used and a large company with a lot of computational power decided to get involved i.e google / facebook / microsoft. Wouldn't they end up monopolising a large portion of the bitcoi…

A good description of why that won't happen comes from a comment made on HN a week ago by Construct.

"Meanwhile, hardware enthusiasts all over the internet are rushing to buy GPUs to dedicate to mining. They don't seem to realize that the bitcoin system automatically adjusts to keep the bitcoin generation rate constant at 50 BTC per 10 minutes. As the mining market becomes flooded with new 'miners' the difficulty will climb rapidly, until it becomes unprofitable to run a GPU if you have to pay for electricity."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2501154

Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#23

Post by [deleted] »

hasenj wrote: post #15
[deleted] wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

This is not RMS's point of view. RMS doesn't care if you give him back your changes; he cares that you have the freedom to make any changes you wish. He wants you to be free from artificial restrictions imposed by copyright laws . He doesn't care if you share your changes with him.

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#24

Post by Tichy »

contactdick wrote: post #16

Just on a brief look at BitCoin the question I have is generating blocks of bitcoins which requires computational power earns 50 bitcoins. Firstly that seems fairly arbitrary but secondly, what would happen if the currency became commonly used and a large company with a lot of computational power decided to get involved i.e google / facebook / microsoft. Wouldn't they end up monopolising a large portion of the bitcoi…

Bitcoins are only generated every 10 minutes (on average), so it would probably not be worth it for a company to dedicate a huge cluster of computers to it. At most they could earn 50 BTC/10 minutes, no matter how much computing power they'd throw at it.

It get's more interesting if a company could calculate blocks faster than all the other nodes combined. Then that company could forge the complete chain of transactions.

I think there are even numbers floating around in the BitCoin forums as to how much it would cost to build such a server farm atm. So yeah - with enough money you could ruin BitCoin, but why would you be motivated to do so? Also, it gets harder every day, as the network of nodes grows.

Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#25

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #11
hasenj wrote: post #3

I don't like how people get defensive around capitalism; "our ideas are not at odds with capitalism", ok, so what if they were? If an idea is at odds with capitalism, that doesn't necessarily make it a bad idea. For instance, I think the idea of free software (RMS style) really is at odds with capitalism; but so what? This is not a good reason to agree or disagree with the idea.

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#26

Post by geon »

hasenj wrote: post #15
[deleted] wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

This is not RMS's point of view. RMS doesn't care if you give him back your changes; he cares that you have the freedom to make any changes you wish. He wants you to be free from artificial restrictions imposed by copyright laws . He doesn't care if you share your changes with him.

> He doesn't care if you share your changes with him.

Well, he does care if you make your changes available to the users of your software so that they too can make the changes they need. That's the whole point of the license, or you should just use MIT/BSD.

Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#27

Post by Myrth »

If someone still didn't get it - the whole original post was a hilariously executed troll. The author very clearly states this:

"See, a bitcoin rant is almost too over-the-top for me. Asking why I think bitcoin won't work is like asking why the sky isn't red. I mean, wait, you think it is red? You actually took that seriously? Oh boy. Where do I even start?"

"For the record, I'm stupid and trolling. That's why it was hard to tell."

Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#28

Post by hasenj »

jsn wrote: post #8
hasenj wrote: post #3

I don't like how people get defensive around capitalism; "our ideas are not at odds with capitalism", ok, so what if they were? If an idea is at odds with capitalism, that doesn't necessarily make it a bad idea. For instance, I think the idea of free software (RMS style) really is at odds with capitalism; but so what? This is not a good reason to agree or disagree with the idea.

Free software isn't at odds with capitalism (you don't have to extract monetary profit from everything you do in capitalism). Neither is bitcoin. Government-controlled paper money, on the other hand, definitely is at odds with free market.

I think free software is at odds with certain capitalistic ideas:

As a private owner of a "production" factory, you have control over your products, and through this control you gain profit.

Contrast this with communism, which views private control over things which are needed by the public (like food) as a bad idea because the person in charge gets to limit the freedom of others (or some idea similar to that).

Free Software is similar in this regard: software is ubiquitous, and so it's unethical (according to the philosophy of the FSF) to let it be under the control of corporations. Apple has complete control over iPhones, and they decide what you can and cannot do with it: this is "evil", according to FSF's philosophy.

From a purely capitalistic point of view: a software developer gets an incentive to create and evolve software if it was closed source and hard to crack so that he could sell it and get profit. From a market perspective, this is more efficient.

But, from RMS's perspective, market efficiency shouldn't matter here because the act of putting artificial restriction on software usage is unethical.

While I don't agree with RMS about this thing being necessarily unethical in and of itself; I do find his arguments very compelling, and I'm inclined to say that it's best if one was able to make money doing open source. However, I think one has to be realistic, and in reality developers need money, and so it's ok to sell closed apps (as in iPhone apps, or SaaS webapps like 37signals).

As you can see, my position doesn't have anything to do with capitalism as an ideology.

Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#29

Post by hasenj »

olalonde wrote: post #21
hasenj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you think it's a great idea; it's still possible to be ok with new good ideas even if they happen to be at odds with capitalism. For instance, I think Open Source is a great idea, but this alone is not good enough reason to think that selling iPhone apps is evil. Acting very cautious and defensive around capitalism makes it look like a holy untouchable ideology; this is what annoys me.

Again, Open Source is not at odds with capitalism. Capitalism doesn't mean making money or selling stuff. In fact, charities aren't at odds with capitalism. Did you know that Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Whales, is a libertarian?

Ah careful. RMS's Free Software is not the same thing as Open Source. Open Source in and of itself is not at odds with capitalism. But Free Software is at odds with some ideas of capitalism. (In my humble opinion anyway, which is really irrelevant to my original point).

Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#30

Post by contactdick »

Tichy wrote: post #24
contactdick wrote: post #16

Just on a brief look at BitCoin the question I have is generating blocks of bitcoins which requires computational power earns 50 bitcoins. Firstly that seems fairly arbitrary but secondly, what would happen if the currency became commonly used and a large company with a lot of computational power decided to get involved i.e google / facebook / microsoft. Wouldn't they end up monopolising a large portion of the bitcoi…

Bitcoins are only generated every 10 minutes (on average), so it would probably not be worth it for a company to dedicate a huge cluster of computers to it. At most they could earn 50 BTC/10 minutes, no matter how much computing power they'd throw at it. It get's more interesting if a company could calculate blocks faster than all the other nodes combined. Then that company could forge the complete chain of transacti…

well the motivation to make money is a fairly strong one for a lot of people - many worse things are done every day because of it.
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