291–300 of 302 posts
>Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency. Hah!
People should be required to place a monetary bet whenever they make a bold claim in public. I think we would see less comments like this one.
> jdoliner 1655 days ago | link >Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency. > joedoliner.com jdoliner@gmail.com https://twitter.com/jdoliner
Good idea. We really need to make sure that everybody is forever held accountable for everything that they ever say online. I like where that's going.
Like I said, I quite liked the polarity of the comments and the fact that it was the first post on bitcoin in HN ..
But it snow-balled into this !
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Wow! Books surely have not been replaced by Kindles! Not by a long shot. 40% of readers still use only print books. Here's some random data to back that up. https://www.surveymonkey.com/blog/en/blog/2013/03/25/print-b...
40% is lower than I imagined. That's a frighteningly low figure
40% - That's exclusively print books.
58% of them own an e-book reader, that's including the iPad.
The charts are a bit hard to read but..
Now, only about 5% bought only e-books. This of course doesn't include borrowed books, library books, etc. MUCH much more people haven't purchased either print or e-books than have purchased only e-books! I hate to generalize but some people, many in the HN crowd, seem to think libraries are "beneath" them or "outdated" but the data suggest otherwise. Paper books are not DRMed after all.
About 38% of people bought only print books. A mix between print and e-books wins out.
Here's the important stat. About 50% said they like print books and e-books. Only 10% said they like e-books only. A FULL 90% OF READERS STILL LIKE PRINT BOOKS!!!!
It's incredibly naive to say they have been replaced. Its beyond obvious anyway, just take a commercial flight and observe people around you reading print books.
I am asking, because I tried to find the first post on reddit.com (obviously before /r/bitcoin was created) and couldn't really retrieve anything useful.
I was searching by date ranges on site:reddit.com and was getting user profiles not posts.
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I can say, with 100% that the USD, and the fed will collapse. Nothing lasts forever - and if anyone argues otherwise, I've got some Roman Denarius to sell them (At twice the price of their gold content). Whether or not this happens in my lifetime, and whether BTC is worth speculating on is another question altogether.
Just because every other currency has been devalued doesn't mean that the USD will. The argument typically goes that the USD must collapse because it isn't backed by anything meaningful. Except that the USD is backed by the largest and most powerful stockpile of weapons ever amassed in the history of the world.
I'm no historian, but I'd wager the denarius never collapsed the way - say - the Confederate dollar did. It probably just became rarer and rarer in circulation as old coins were melted down to mint new ones, and then one day it was worth more as a store of historicity than value
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I can say, with 100% that the USD, and the fed will collapse. Nothing lasts forever - and if anyone argues otherwise, I've got some Roman Denarius to sell them (At twice the price of their gold content). Whether or not this happens in my lifetime, and whether BTC is worth speculating on is another question altogether.
Just because every other currency has been devalued doesn't mean that the USD will. The argument typically goes that the USD must collapse because it isn't backed by anything meaningful. Except that the USD is backed by the largest and most powerful stockpile of weapons ever amassed in the history of the world.
In all seriousness, if you really believe this, I suggest you pick up a copy of that book. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and you'd be surprised just how similar this time is.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financia...
and let's revisit this discussion 5 years from now. right now there is so much fluctutation within BC it might as well be tulips. maybe it will become a stable currency, maybe it won't.
Perfectly Fungible
Perfect Liquidity
Perfect Stability
Right now bitcoins are commodities. Any bitcoin is equally valuable as any other bitcoin; bitcoin's value derives from its purchasing power and from its exchange rate to other mediums of exchange. It has great liquidity and fungibility. However it has inherent stability problems as well as ambient ones:
Currently it experiences volatility by virtue of transactions not being demoninated in BTC, and of its exchange rate to other mediums of exchange. A large part of this is because it is consistently attracting large pools of people who wish to acquire it. The recent price spike appears to be a consequence of Chinese interest in acquiring bitcoin rapidly increasing. Eventually the number of people who want to possess bitcoins will grow as a function of the population on the planet, rather than as a function of new groups of people deciding it has become appealing. This will introduce some stability.
However, there's a fundamental flaw in that the pool of bitcoins is fixed, and that possessors know the finite size of the pool of bitcoins a priori. This exerts deflationary pressure on BTC, and as others have noted, discourages its spending. BTC is vastly more liquid than gold is, for example, but the stability of its value will always be an impediment to its usefulness as a currency.
This doesn't spell the doom of Bitcoin; it doesn't need to be a perfect currency, just a better currency than other currencies. It is already the most liquid commodity on the planet. It is at least as fungible as USD; attempts by coinvalidation to ruin this notwithstanding. Should the deflationary pressure of bitcoin compared to its circulation become sufficiently small, it will have inherent qualities to make it the best currency available, which can lead to it becoming more widespread.
A currency with lower transaction costs in time, and which has growth characteristics which trend toward following the value of productive output of the human race will certainly be better. USD are inherently worse.
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And dismissal is different from hating, at least from my understanding of the word used in this context.
I am struggling to come up with a different definition for hating than just dismissal. What do you call it when you don't try to think about how something could change to work or be better, and instead just say thats dumb. Sounds like hating to me. How else can it be defined?
Urban dictionary definition of hater: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hater
A person that simply cannot be happy for another person's success. So rather than be happy they make a point of exposing a flaw in that person.
Hating, the result of being a hater, is not exactly jealousy. The hater doesnt really want to be the person he or she hates, rather the hater wants to knock somelse down a notch.
I don't think his comments are really to do with not being happy about a persons success etc, it's nothing personal, he simply did not believe the idea would take off.
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This post seems like you don't understand the Bitcoin protocol or the exchanges. The current BTC trade goes as: You --> some money handler --> exchange --> bitcoin --> a bunch of nodes which take a cut for processing a transaction (and 20 minutes to hit the network) --> exchange --> another money handler --> recipient. What part of that seems like it has less middlemen? And oh yeah, very few of those parties are beho…
The average credit card processing cost for a retail business where cards are swiped is roughly 1.95% - 2%. The average cost for card-not-present businesses, such as online shops, is roughly 2.30% - 2.50%. However microtransactions cost even more than this and escalate as you have more small transactions. Once you have bitcoins the transaction costs are now 0. Getting USD to bitcoins is obviously hard right now becau…
Those are US numbers. In fact, credit card costs are plummeting across the world [1] and every year more and more shops force a debit swipe where available (spoilers: more and more people) so they pay a dime instead of 1-2%. In addition E-checks are basically free.
[1] http://www.csmonitor.com/var/archive/storage/images/media/im...
Further as sibling notes the argument that bitcoin is free from middlemen is not very convincing. Middlemen would have to exist in a bitcoin world both because of bitcoin's very nature of requiring them and because of the same reasons middlemen exist in the world today.
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to be fair, that comparison isn't too valid. Look at the wild yearly fluctuations in bitcoin, compared to the steady rate(3 percent) of inflation of the dollar throughout history. On the other hand, OP is wrong because bitcoins will eventually slow down massively in production(almost to a halt) and stabilize at that point.
>OP is wrong because bitcoins will eventually slow down massively in production(almost to a halt) and stabilize at that point Eh, quite the contrary. If this rate of growth continues and production becomes 0, it will not stabilize at all because demand increases yet supply stays constant. Which results in the existing supply getting worth even more. This will make it an hoarded asset even more still not able to funct…
