41–50 of 102 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much does it cost to change bits of data on a computer? That's what happens with quantitative easing. Bernanke isn't calling up the printing presses to print $2 trillion in paper currency.
How much does that program represent an economic rent dragging down the rest of the economy?
Krugman obviously don't know what he is talking about. The resources he is talking about are used to process the transactions between bitcoin owners. The mining is just a side effect. How did a nobel prize winner made a so basic mistake on a topic that has been covered before by him so many times? Bet one Btc that he did that on purpose.
Can you explain this in more detail for those of us who don't fully understand how bitcoins come in to existence, because it sounds like one of those things that violate some laws of thermodynamics, like the "hydrogen generator" that you strap to your car to increase fuel economy. I ask because I know I've heard about people building huge computers with lots of expensive video cards for the purpose of mining bitcoins…
In short: no, it doesn't really need so much computing power; miners upgrade to improve their relative chances of finding the solution first (which gives them the newly minted coins), and the software automatically increases the difficulty of the process in response. The result is an arms race among miners.
Krugman obviously don't know what he is talking about. The resources he is talking about are used to process the transactions between bitcoin owners. The mining is just a side effect. How did a nobel prize winner made a so basic mistake on a topic that has been covered before by him so many times? Bet one Btc that he did that on purpose.
Can you explain this in more detail for those of us who don't fully understand how bitcoins come in to existence, because it sounds like one of those things that violate some laws of thermodynamics, like the "hydrogen generator" that you strap to your car to increase fuel economy. I ask because I know I've heard about people building huge computers with lots of expensive video cards for the purpose of mining bitcoins…
A block contains several pieces of information: a list of transactions, a link to the previous block, some other stuff and a nonce. The nonce is a value used by the mining process. "Solving" a block means finding the value for the nonce that, together with the proper contents of the block, hashes to a hash value that starts with a given number of zeroes. You can't really find a correct nonce any other way than by trying new nonces until you find a correct one, hashing the block each time. This is what the mining process is, in short.
Funny thing,I called MG Seigler a hack, and was attacked. Even PG came out of the word works to say he was "embarrassed" by the comment. Now we are calling Nobel prize winning economists hacks and asses?
The economic illiteracy of this place is what is embarrassing.
Maybe, just maybe, it's not Adam Smith who hates bitcoin like this misleading title suggest, but Krugman. The guy may have a nobel prize, but his strong leftist views seems to be clouding his judgement. Never before in history was there anthing like bitcoin. It's not a commodity like gold - is is pure fiat money, fully based on trust. Hoarding gold or silver or any metal or rare thing was a bad idea because of the al…
I may not be an economist, but the method used for mining seemed.. illogical to me as well. If a bitcoin was released into the wild based on running real world problems like folding@home or something else it would have much more sense to me.
Maybe, just maybe, it's not Adam Smith who hates bitcoin like this misleading title suggest, but Krugman. The guy may have a nobel prize, but his strong leftist views seems to be clouding his judgement. Never before in history was there anthing like bitcoin. It's not a commodity like gold - is is pure fiat money, fully based on trust. Hoarding gold or silver or any metal or rare thing was a bad idea because of the al…
The only way bitcoins are being generated is by wasting computer cycles solving problems that are of no use to anyone. Krugman's problem is not with the concept of bitcoin, but the process of mining. I may not be an economist, but the method used for mining seemed.. illogical to me as well. If a bitcoin was released into the wild based on running real world problems like folding@home or something else it would have m…
Krugman obviously don't know what he is talking about. The resources he is talking about are used to process the transactions between bitcoin owners. The mining is just a side effect. How did a nobel prize winner made a so basic mistake on a topic that has been covered before by him so many times? Bet one Btc that he did that on purpose.
Can you explain this in more detail for those of us who don't fully understand how bitcoins come in to existence, because it sounds like one of those things that violate some laws of thermodynamics, like the "hydrogen generator" that you strap to your car to increase fuel economy. I ask because I know I've heard about people building huge computers with lots of expensive video cards for the purpose of mining bitcoins…
As to the question how Bitcoins come into existence, the miners are in control of the accounting and by design whoever "finds a new block," is allowed to create some Bitcoins (currently 25) out of thin air. The advantage of this is, that even if some very large miner is considering that he could try a 50+1 % attack, he has a strong incentive to stay honest because that way he earns half of the newly mined Bitcoins.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is being used as a currency, and any metric on this far exceeds where people thought it would be a few years ago. It's also having massive adoption from a wide number of people. The reason the price is moving is not "speculation" as people seem to assume, but adoption. MtGox said they were getting 20,000 new accounts a day recently. By definition, new accounts are not "speculators" putting in trades to manipulate…
"It is being used as a currency" Do you have a source for this? As far as I know, and I know this is a theory but I suspect a good theory, people used bitcoin as a currency when it was relatively stable and before it skyrocketed in value, and became extremely volatile. I highly doubt they're using it as a currency now because the value of a bitcoin changes dramatically within a day. Say it stabilizes at this price (~…
I think his previous statements are also significant. "[bitcoin] has fluctuated sharply, but overall it has soared. So buying into [bitcoin] has, at least so far, been a good investment. But does that make the experiment a success? Um, no. What we want from a monetary system isn’t to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that’s not at all what…
Your quote is relevant, but it's a shame he doesn't address the implied claim that bitcoin doesn't "facilitate transactions". And while it is relatively small in that use now, he really needs to make a compelling argument to why it won't work that way in the future. Further, it's worth pointing out that Krugman endorses a monetary system that makes people poor, via inflating the money supply by printing funds to unde…
I think the field of economics disagrees with you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Krugman isn't being a political partisan hack here. Every mainstream economist from the Republican and Democratic administrations agree that a currency backed similarly to gold (as opposed to a central bank) is not a good idea.
Central planners like central banking? Get out.