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The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

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Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#91

Post by xiphias2 »

kkdaemas wrote: post #80
xiphias2 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't look at the price, it's the most stable and predictable service and protocol in the existence of the internet (maybe after the internet / IPv4). It's uptime is 99.987%, last time it was down in 2013, and the cool thing is that even if it gets down, it has self healing property in the case of network separation / sybil attack. https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/ I dare you to find another…

The problem is Bitcoin Core may have (will have) unknown vulnerabilities and those might not get patched correctly once discovered.

Yes, this is true, I'm mostly worried about the elliptic curve signature part, as everything else could be fixed with an emergency hard fork (except SHA256).

Sadly OP_CAT operation is disabled (or substring equality operation), which would make lamport signatures available again for high value transactions. I would love it if lamport signatures would be enabled again (it would be quite easy to do), but I'm afraid that there isn't enough concensus to do it at this point, because some people would think that it's wasteful, and also lamport signatures are dangerous, as they can be used only once.

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#92

Post by koolba »

slg wrote: post #47
treeman79 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of people that think we can print spend endless amounts of money without consequences. Heck an alarming amount of people don’t understand that bonds need to be paid back.

I made that comment because I know people are going to use the linked example of what happened in Argentina as the predicted fate of what will happen in the US. That seems to be what you are implying here by drawing parallels between the two. But I simply want to make it clear that the US is at 8% inflation for the last year while Argentina spent decades with the average annual inflation rate measured in the hundreds…

> But I simply want to make it clear that the US is at 8% inflation for the last year while Argentina spent decades with the average annual inflation rate measured in the hundreds. The two aren't close to the same.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#93

Post by FabHK »

imtringued wrote: post #14
teddyh wrote: post #2

Ah, the magic of interest: http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/at-the-bank

Why exactly do we want to reward already rich people at the expense of poorer people? Somehow, people convinced themselves that giving money to those who don't need it is efficient.

If everyone puts their money in the bank and gets 5% (say), then the proportion of wealth will remain unchanged. (FWIW, a similar argument against Proof of Stake (that it will inevitably lead to greater and greater inequality) is similarly flawed. (This doesn't mean that PoS is a good idea.))

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#94

Post by moonchrome »

Certhas wrote: post #8
t43562 wrote: post #3

I remember my dad encouraging me to save my dollars and not spend them on choc-99 double ice-creams ($2.13). These were soft whip ice-creams with 2 cadbury's flake chocolates stuck in the side and they seemed like the closest thing to heaven on earth to me. What my dad said seemed logical though and I saved. When I was 16 I had a holiday job that earned me many ice-cream-worths but I kept it - didn't buy a bicycle or…

As a childhood lesson you don't need crazy inflation for this to hold true though. Anything that takes more than a few of months to save up to just doesn't make sense as a kid. Your disposable income goes up by factors of ten every few years. You have 2$ to spend at 5, 20$ at 10, 200$ at 15. Then it slows down but you might still get to 2000$ at 25. Saving as a kid really never seemed worth it to me.

>Saving as a kid really never seemed worth it to me.

Also saving during 20s for this reason - if you're just starting out in a career and expecting your income to rise rapidly the money you save on interest is going to be irrelevant.

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#95

Post by once_inc »

clamprecht wrote: post #13

I'm from the US but I lived in Argentina for about 5 years (2013-2018). It was a great lesson, and I'm seeing things in the US now that I used to see in Argentina. At the bank recently, they had a sign about the national shortage of coins. That was common in Argentina. Sizes of products getting smaller in order to keep the price the same - "inflacion escondido" (hidden inflation).

Shrinkflation is such a visible invisible sign.

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#96

Post by xiphias2 »

FabHK wrote: post #89
xiphias2 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't look at the price, it's the most stable and predictable service and protocol in the existence of the internet (maybe after the internet / IPv4). It's uptime is 99.987%, last time it was down in 2013, and the cool thing is that even if it gets down, it has self healing property in the case of network separation / sybil attack. https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/ I dare you to find another…

Well, I've had BTC transactions drop out of the mempool (so, they were not executed, but you don't know that immediately, you only know days later), and transactions that worked took between a few minutes and more than half a day. The fees ranged from virtually nothing to around 50 USD. I certainly would not call that predictable and stable. I mean, you don't even know when the next block will arrive.

I would be suprised if a valid normal transaction with 50 USD would drop out of a mempool. What was the transaction weight? If you send the transaction data, I would be interested to look at it.

I'm usually overpaying (20 satoshis/byte, usually under $1 for a $2000 transaction), and I always get into the first block, but I never pay $50 fee.

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#97

Post by MerelyMortal »

kingcharles wrote: post #46
t43562 wrote: post #3

I remember my dad encouraging me to save my dollars and not spend them on choc-99 double ice-creams ($2.13). These were soft whip ice-creams with 2 cadbury's flake chocolates stuck in the side and they seemed like the closest thing to heaven on earth to me. What my dad said seemed logical though and I saved. When I was 16 I had a holiday job that earned me many ice-cream-worths but I kept it - didn't buy a bicycle or…

Funny side note: the State of Illinois spent a decent amount of public funds trying to decide whether to charge me with $100 trillion in currency fraud. The state crime lab said the currency I owned was the "most sophisticated piece of currency forgery" they had ever encountered. It was a single (real) $100 trillion bill from Zimbabwe that I carried in my wallet for fun. I assume they thought for some reason it was U…

Did they at least give it back to you?

I don't know how much they sell for now, but I was lucky to get one for $20 when they were normally going for $40 on eBay.

I forgot the exact result, but I once calculated the value of a 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar bill when it was printed, and it came to something like 0.06 USD (6 cents).

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#98

Post by nurettin »

epgui wrote: post #33
Taek wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about the lesson more than anything else. I really want my kids to learn how to save and be well practiced at it, even though the utility function doesn't make a ton of sense.

I don’t understand why so many people “save money” but then just keep cash under a mattress or in a savings or checking account. If you want to win at life, you “save money” by purchasing non-cash assets like stocks.

While generally true, there's the problem of what to buy and when. Then there's the problem of hindsight and the problem of that one stock everyone thought was going to the moon crashing and burning away your life savings. Then there are strategies and strategies that decide which strategy to apply and when, then you realize it isn't as easy as "just buy stonks".

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#99

Post by saagarjha »

epgui wrote: post #33
Taek wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about the lesson more than anything else. I really want my kids to learn how to save and be well practiced at it, even though the utility function doesn't make a ton of sense.

I don’t understand why so many people “save money” but then just keep cash under a mattress or in a savings or checking account. If you want to win at life, you “save money” by purchasing non-cash assets like stocks.

Because investing is non-trivial and nobody tells you how to do it.

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#100

Post by logifail »

epgui wrote: post #33
Taek wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about the lesson more than anything else. I really want my kids to learn how to save and be well practiced at it, even though the utility function doesn't make a ton of sense.

I don’t understand why so many people “save money” but then just keep cash under a mattress or in a savings or checking account. If you want to win at life, you “save money” by purchasing non-cash assets like stocks.

> If you want to win at life, you “save money” by purchasing non-cash assets like stocks.

Except when you don't.

Between 1995 and 2000 I lived in a student house in the UK and one of my housemates (who was also a student, and from my recollection almost as broke as I was back then) was really into investing into the stock market during the dot-com boom.

He bought both Lastminute.com (IPO March 2000 @ 380p/share[1], sold to Travelocity in 2005 @ 165p/share[2]) and Railtrack (IPO 1996[3], went bankrupt 2001[4])

[1] https://money.cnn.com/2000/03/14/europe/lastminute/ [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2005/may/13/business.... [3] https://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/docsummary.php?docID=740 [4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/railtrack-go...

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