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[PA Comic] Monday, March 3, 2014 - What How Why
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
[PA Comic] Monday, March 3, 2014 - What How Why
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Also, so far, everyone I've met who owns any only bought it in the hopes of 'cashing in' on the next price bubble. It doesn't help that occasionally a story comes out about some dude who bought some for like $20 then forgot about it until it was hundreds of dollars a coin, etc... and the cycle continues.
That's not money, that's stock.
Oh, and it could briefly be traded for illegal drugs.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Cause, I mean, I'll write myself a check for 1 trillion skullbux right now.
Well, there's a little more effort involved in it that that. Give the Bitcoin people a little credit.
They also had to convince a hoard of neckbearded libertarian cretins to throw their life savings of real money into it.
A few places accept Bitcoins (indeed I'm fairly certain someone brought a car with it).
It's worth noting though that in general when you 'buy' something in Bitcoin the business almost never actually keeps the data and instead trades it at an exchange for an actual currency. Which should really indicate the confidence most people have in it. The whole thing more or less relies on hype and the hope that it'll increase in value rather than actually acting as a currency.
The best description of Bitcoins I've ever heard is that they are Dunning-Krugerrands.
Bitcoins are a digital currency with no centralized authority and verify every transaction across the whole of people using them while simultaneously providing anonymity in purchasing.
Long story short: Libertarians love them some bad ideas.
Such as dogecoin. or nyancoin.
There is a Cookie Clicker clone about dogecoin.
Then the internet took it seriously and whoops actual 'currency'.
The simplest explanation is that bitcoins are part of a cyptographic function that is treated as a fungible good. To help verify transactions the prossess of verification spits out extra "coins" into the system so people are given an incentive to help keep transactions flowing, cause a slow and steady amount of inflation, and to use the system itself (if you have some money might as well spend or sell it).
So great concept in general, but with the love of code breaking across these mighty tubes and with a large pot of potential money at steak, everyone and their dog are trying to break the cryptography to let themselves effectively print money.
Imma going to save my enthusiasm for BTC until its well out of beta (and maybe until after the first service pack ;P)
I'd love to but nobody knows who created it. I mean, it's open source so we know what the code does... but literally nobody seems to know who created the protocol in the first place.
And the anonymity isn't ironclad, which is part of how they are busting Silk Road users.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Explains what matters from the point of view of owning/using Bitcoin. Still takes effort to understand, but at least it doesn't overload you with irrelevant details (not too much, anyway).
Anyway, thanks for the comic(s) and exposure for bitcoin.
I laughed really hard at this. I work with so many libertarian software engineers, and I am just waiting for them to get burned on this.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
One problem with bitcoin is that people learn this and assume that they have stumbled upon some sort of conspiracy intended to trick them, so they invented their own conspiracy to trick themselves.
Not everyone in Bitcoin is the rabid conspiracy nut type, though they do happen to be some of the louder voices in the group...
I prefer to think that we've realized that money is a mass delusion, but a very useful one. Once you unhinge your mind from the idea that money "just is" it ceases to be sacred and now it's just a tool that can be reinvented. Have you seen the way the current credit card system works? It's outdated, broken, horrifically insecure and the only reason we don't all realize this immediately is that the people running the system put that financial burden on the merchants so most of us never see it. Bitcoin's not perfect, but in a lot of ways it does improve upon the existing concept of money.
It also does this in a way that makes certain people with certain political agendas froth at the mouth, but I think if you look beneath the frothy spittle-covered surface of the Bitcoin community you'll find we're mostly just a bunch of nerds who think money powered by crypto is kind of awesome.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
It doesn't seem like it because the dollar amounts involved are larger, but expressed as percentages the volatility has gone down quite a bit and will hopefully continue to do so. The idea is that eventually that percentage narrows enough that the swing is small regardless of the base number it's acting upon.
I would say bitcoin will teach libertarians why central banks exist. Bitcoin's most obvious current problem is its lack of utility as a medium of exchange, partly due to the fact that very few people or companies take it as payment, but mostly just because of its inherent volatility. If I wanted to sell goods and services for bitcoin right now, I'd have to change my menu every few hours if not in real-time just to keep anything like a consistent profit margin.
Bitcoin has several noteworthy features worth borrowing from in the future, but it is basically useless by design due to the Gold Standard era philosophy with its money supply.
This post is also exemplary of Libertarianism.
I'll admit, I dabbled in it early in college myself. It's most appealing right about when you're first learning about things like the history of money because you're taking some in-depth economics courses for the first time. It's also the point that you think you've stumbled onto some great secret, like for instance, "Money isn't sacred!" and you figure that NO ONE ELSE HAS UNDERSTOOD THIS YET!
Then usually you realize, oh shit, no, almost everyone else was on board too. Huh, banking regulations, alright.
But sometimes you don't, which activates the Ron Paul beacon and you're recruited into his secret super group.
Anyways, that's what I was afraid of "RoboCop 2014." I haven't seen it yet but I'm guessing it lost it's grittiness and social commentary and became "the will of Man vs. Machine."
@TAKFAP
Technically or seeing into things too hard, almost every exchange of money is a ponzi scheme, the difference is the legality, meaning the government recognition of the exchange and currency. Which also simply, loosely, means "I and many other consider and recognise this acceptable, do you?"
I actually thought Bitcoin would be a great idea because it's takes out the government, reserve banks and banks out of the equation and it relies solely on its "nature" (the math), it's what made it secure(-ish). The problem is the abuse/hacking, which was inevitable but more of the treatment of Bitcoin. They treated it as stock instead of privately acceptable tender between groups that recognise Bitcoin as a form of exchange.
Can't disagree more about the new Robocop. I appreciate that Jerry tries to be positive about almost everything, but the new Robocop is, at best, a wannabe Iron Man movie, and at worst, a huge dump on the original.
1. Bitcoins are generated every 10 minutes. Whoever solves "the math problem" with their computing power gets freshly minted bitcoins.
2. The math problem is related to all transactions anyone has initiated since the previous problem has been solved.
3. Sending coins to anyone is as easy as typing their address in, the amount, and a transaction fee to help miners prioritize it. There are minimums based on the size of the transaction/its age/etc. transactions should not ever get caught in limbo but could take a while (hours/days) based on the fee.
4. the math problem is as difficult as it needs to be to take the total amount of computing power on the network so that it is solved every 10 minutes. as more computing power is added, it is less likely for any individual computer (graphics card gpu, cpu, or ASIC) to solve the equation.
5. solving this math problem is a proof that everything up to and including that solved portion is "true" aka, a public ledger of all bitcoin transactions that is proven by the community.
6. the reason why you would throw this computing power at solving it is for the #1 minting as well as the transaction fees within the solution, so when "the coins stop being minted" in the distant future, you would be going after the transaction fees (aside from the idea that you're simply paying in to help make this work).
What these 6 steps mean is that if person_a sends person_b coins, it is non-reversible trading, publicly verifiable, and nearly free barring the transaction fee. It is international, and it is only regulatable if you opt in to some sort of 3rd party service to "prove identities" or possibly "insure" your trade.
For reference, if an online merchant "accepts bitcoins" via a typical service they pay much lower fees than accepting any credit card. If they choose to handle it themselves, they could essentially pay 0 fees if they hold on to the bitcoin at the risk of fluctuating value.
The merchant also pays 0 for services/insurance to defend against chargebacks/fraud because that cannot really be prevented with bitcoin w/o 3rd party services acting as a buffer.
the details about how it can be secured, backed-up properly, and anonymously used are a bit more advance, but all of these are possible. The involvement behind the scenes regarding governments and the developers, how aware they are and how much they control, is speculation. When you see ignorant folks in government "asking questions about it" it is largely assumed to be for public show, and that there are forces behind it who are well aware, and have been well aware, of its inevitability for decades.
to expand on #1: any individual CPU GPU or at this point low end ASIC is pointless to solo mine with, this is why you join a 'pool' where lots of people pool their power into one 'super power' and then divide the take evenly. So instead of waiting years for, say, 10 coins, you get fractions of a coin per day.
The official story isn't hard to find, it isn't that we don't know who created it, its that the person who created it has disappeared, and the project has been taken over by other developers since. Satoshi Nakamoto is the creator, you can find his posts easily.
The anonymity is ironclad.
As soon as you designate "silk road user" you are differentiating them from other, anonymous, users. That's not anonymous.
If I give you my IP address, or details on a unique transaction size, or an email address linking to addresses it isn't hard to put together a dossier on someone to find out which bitcoin addresses they control and then what they've used them for.
Example:
If I say "my address is 1234567890" you can go and see every transaction that that address has been involved with. That doesn't mean bitcoin isn't anonymous.
The ideal use of bitcoin is that every transaction uses a completely unique address. Most people don't use it that way, say, for a permanent donation address.
IMO, money is more convenient, opposed to a crypto currency, because it can be easily detached from its "regulation baggage". In a country with a stable economy goods have a value and you can get a placeholder with a number representing the value and trade it back and forth. One sentence, done. This is a easy to grasp concept, even for silly geese.
If you try to explain crypto currency "You get a bonus (Bit Coin) for solving calculations which are becoming increasingly complex, depending on the amount of bit coins circulating the system and the exchange which is happing in this currency system. These boni can be stored digitally and exchanged against goods and services. The currency stores the information of the trade and generation history in order to verify their legitimacy. And you need a digital device with an bit coin purse application in order to store them." Most likely I would have lost most people after the first sentence - and I am sure the shortened explanation isn't even correct.
Because its sounding like it is.
If Bitcoin itself doesn't succeed, something similar will.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
This mental image is funny enough that I want an animated cartoon of it.
It's curious that the response to, "FIAT MONEY IS WORTHLESS" is, "GOLD IS MAGIC MONEY."
It already has. MtGox, a major exchange, had a bunch of its bitcoins "stolen" from accounts, either due to supreme incompetence or because they themselves ran off into the sunset with the coins. Cue the angry neckbeards complaining about how much USD they lost.
I wouldn't recommend putting your life savings into Dunning-Krugerrands if you like having life savings.
To quote a very quotable tweet,