I believe you can opt out of it. I was annoyed for a while at having Hangouts foisted on me but now (in Gmail at least) I've gone back to the old interface which, while not jazzy, is perfectly functional.
255 karma · joined November 14, 2007
http://i.imgur.com/CFtOzAD.jpg
;)
Consider where that initial cash came from. You worked your ass off between 18 and 60 and you got a bunch of cash in exchange. Some you spent on consumption, some you saved for use later. In fact, cash is just 'tokens for exchange later' where later is a time window that varies from 1 hour (hand-to-mouth) to 50+ years (surplus productive capacity people).
Wouldn't it be great if you could use your tokens for their promised exchange-value through your retirement and see those years of hard work payoff? In fact, multiply, because as you said the population grows, more goods are produced, and your cash tokens buy more and more of those goods.
It's a great way to retire. Unfortunately for the retired, they are on fixed incomes (pensions) in an inflationary world: those people get SCREWED to the extent where they can't afford heating in some US States.
These are people who worked hard all their lives and just wanted to live off the proceeds, the surplus they had generated.
Think of the chi^H^H^H grandparents!
Saving means keeping something aside that people will want in the future. Which means you can save without someone spending at the same time.
Now don't say "conspiracy" because then you're just being faddist and contrarian.
Saving is a matter of time preference, specifically, preferring to consume in the future. That implies carrying forward surplus value from today to be spent tomorrow. Let's say you have a choice of how to go about it: G, or W.
Strategy G is to stash gold in a mattress. Strategy W is to buy stock of Webvan/Amazon.
Let X = present value to save T = timestamp at present d = value delta t = time delta
Now at time T+t you want to have X+d value where d=0 is okay, but (d < 0) is unacceptable.
Now the choice between G and W is as follows: W has to offer you a higher rate of return than merely holding the gold in strategy G.
Gold will increase in value (price) if more produce is offered in exchange at time T+t, assuming stock of gold is constant (which it is, to an approximation).
So what Webvan/Amazon must offer a rational investor is a better return than the rest of the aggregate efforts of human-kind. They must have high productivity.
This is precisely what makes capitalism and free-floating interest rates so efficient, capital is allocated to the most productive enterprises.
The ratio between spending preferences now and in the future determines the interest rate. A high interest rate implies that only higher-credit (in the sense of faith in their success) companies will get money.
The highly risky investments will simply not happen. There won't be any bubble mania.
In your conception, the idea that stashing gold is not productive is merely another way of saying "gold stashers don't fund Webvan" when looked at through this lens.
But it is good they don't! Everybody should have the right to sit on the side-lines and watch.
When the word "unproductive saving" and "hoarding" are used, they usually refer to this leave-me-alone strategy.
In periods of hard-money we saw great advancements in the standard of living of peoples around the world [ref Thiel?].
The free market always beats a planned economy. It doesn't matter if the planning is overt like the Soviet model or merely a plan to distort time preferences.
I would like my healthcare to get cheaper and better over time just as my Android phone does.
> Don't conflate "zero growth of the money supply" with "zero inflation".
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, according to Milton Friedman.
Tightened version has been put in the right place: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6553774
Saving is a matter of time preference, specifically, preferring to consume in the future. That implies carrying forward surplus value from today to be spent tomorrow. It matters not whether you stash gold in a mattress of buy stock of Webvan: you merely hope to have X+delta at T+t time where {X, T} represent the present and {d,t} represent increments and can be zero.
In order for you to then invest your gold in Webvan, said company has to offer you a higher rate of return than merely holding the gold.
Gold will increase in value if more produce is offered in exchange at time T+t; assuming stock of gold is constant (which it is, to an approximation). Of course, I prefer the word price since gold has no intrinsic value.
So what Webvan has to offer you (a sane investor) is a better return than the rest of the aggregate efforts of human-kind, assuming of course, that said aggregate efforts are barter-able with gold (that is, can be bought with gold).
This is precisely what makes unbridled capitalism and free-floating interest rates so wonderfully efficient. That damn company cannot get away with peddling something that doesn't improve all our lives. It has a high return on investment barrier to cross in a hard-money economy (defined in this case as a fixed supply of gold).
Conversely, when Greenspan is pumping money, it's pets.com's time to shine! And of course, what most don't seem to realize is that the current crop of startups is mostly just Bernanke's easy money that needs a place to park itself. That's why VCs just can't get enough flow and bitch about deal-sizes.
Another way to phrase the 'investment barrier' is to say that the ratio between spending preferences now and in the future determines the interest rate. A high interest rate implies only higher-credit (in the sense of faith in their success) companies will get money. The highly 'speculative investment' in pet-dating will simply not happen. Note again, I don't like the word investment, savings is just fine as a word for deferment of consumption, and speculation itself is not bad. Here 'speculative investment' is a synonym for unproductive stupid shit money's being spent on.
Nor will houses be given to bad-credit home-buyers, incidentally, which really troubles some. But ask yourself -- if Bob-the-builder built a house and the home-buyer promised him ten apples, and couldn't pay him dem apples, would Bob in hindsight have wanted to build that house for him? If he defaults on Bob, Bob is impoverished. If the Fed bails him out (or actually bails the home-builder out) all of us are impoverished (currently above 50K USD per person in the USA approx). Charity is fine, forced-labor is not.
In your (and Krugman's, and most of mainstream (read tenured) economics') conception, the idea that stashing gold is not productive is merely another way of saying "gold stashers don't fund Webvan" when looked at through this lens.
Damn well they don't! Everybody should have the right to sit on the side-lines and watch. It is almost Gandhian in its non-participation (excepting grand-nieces, but that's another story).
That is precisely what stashing your savings under the mattress in a hard-money economy does, allows you to step away from the pets.com frenzy.
Wall Street has another way to say it: While the music's playing, you've gotta get up and dance. If a bank didn't take the bail-outs it would have gotten bought out, lock, stock & barrel by one that did. While Ben's fiddling, you've got to join the orgy. It doesn't matter if the country burns in the meanwhile.
So the problem with this inflationary money supply is simply that it distorts interest rates, thereby funding unproductive enterprises. The Webvan's get funded, Facebook & Twitter IPO, and we wring our hands and say: hey why aren't we flying to Mars, or curing malaria? Why are our best and brightest kids tweaking ad algorithms for Google and writing stupid Miley Cyrus hash-tag trend-divining programs?
This is why.
In periods of hard-money we saw great advancements in the standard of living of peoples around the world[correlation?]. The free market always beats a planned economy. It doesn't matter if the planning is overt like the Soviet model or merely a 'plan' to distort time preferences. From 1600 to 1900, perhaps we didn't have a vast increase in leisure, but damn, we got productive things done first. Now if you really think a John Deere on every lawn, and immediate notification of the latest Miley Cyrus nipslip is so important, sit back and enjoy the end of empire, because it's going to happen anyway.
When the system collapses, the only ones ahead will be those who've moved into "real value" in the Misesian sense. That's why the Wall St types are buying 20mn$ condos in NY and chateaux in the south of France -- they know something you don't. Compared to what they get paid (in newly created funny-money) those condos are at a damn discount. And eating cake in France while the peasants can barely afford bread in Austerity-USA? Well, that's sweet too.
Information is power, and those with it don't want you to have it. Therefore you will always get misinformation first. Don't believe the propaganda. Read and learn (but don't read Krugman, the man's a colossal jackass) but mostly, just work through the logic. Logic won't lead you astray (unless you are Yudkowsky trying to figure out economics).
- Your post is incoherent.
- why, based on the historical record,
- were relieved of their
- They won the central
- what you're getting at
- , for free,
I actually pointed out the mistakes, then worried that the malformed sentences would remain, and so I've posted the corrections instead.
Also, I think you might be responding to a troll. Or at least somebody with no hope of understanding or redemption, which is almost worse. Sigh, such is HN on matters of inordinate privilege.
It's especially a wonder that us hackers don't think it'll work, and that HN is so opposed in general (at least judging by the number of comments against it).
I wonder if this reflects the US-centrism of HN. I believe it's become a lot more popular in Europe (especially Germany, where Satoshi may well have been from).
I've read several different theories of money and I don't find the debt vs coincidence-of-wants bifurcation that Graeber alludes to such a big difference in practice.
He pretty much hangs his whole approach off of that, but the two can be reconciled quite easily in my mind.
I wish everyone would read David Graeber (first) and then Detlev Schlichter.
Unfortunately, most of HN doesn't seem to. Moldbuggery is a good introduction.
moldbuggery.blogspot.in
Instead, as PG and others have hypothesized, the sovereign behind btc will have achieved a new worldwide currency system, that naturally, they will participate in, perhaps from a somewhat advantageous position (premined blocks etc).
The last 3 sentences of your post are a non-sequitur imho.
though processing power would seem to be the best proof of stake, as say compared to network connectivity.
i suspect that the only people who read the bills are those trying to sneak something in, or watchdog groups like the eff.
everybody else in washington is there for the hookers n'blow.
[1] Plenty of references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_%28legislation%29 http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/gop-pledge-...
[2] These last two are Monsanto and firearms related bills being snuck through via the "avoid government shutdown" scare: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/03/21/174973235/did-co... http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/03/21/174969923...
One would therefore predict low-to-zero chance of monetizing zerocoin/litecoin/namecoin if they compete for the same resources that bitcoin would compete for, namely miner processing power.
(edit: zerocoin is not subject to this criticism, I stand corrected; thanks nawitus)
Regarding the Fed, QE and USG. The Fed is a private bank (it pays its shareholders 6%, which no government department does!).
USG is different, and currently in thrall to the Fed. Now _I'm_ going to sound like the conspiracy nutcase when I add "in much the same way European sovereigns were to the Rothschilds".
And it doesn't even do that well! It's breathtakingly inefficient.
For instance, one can't tell how many shoes are sold in a country.. that would require a totally different, feet-on-the-ground statistical survey, or an industry association (voluntary reporting). We can't tell who's doing what at all. We're like the suckers in The Wire Season 1 (which seems so quaint by today's standards) trying to reverse-engineer IRL networks.
The hacker solution would be so much more elegant, so much less messy (no meatspace!). It's like your example of hackers in dorms doing voip way before Skype. No self-respecting hacker could (even on the wildest bender) have come up with pushing pieces of paper around as value-tokens. What a hacker cooks up today is what the world will use in the next decade.
With bitcoin, unravelling a network is trivial. Bust one node (a snitch or an undercover sting op) and the rest unravel.
The combination of government and hackers sits somewhat oddly in my mind. So I shall refrain from pursuing that line of thought.
However, in this spirit of prognostication, I like possibility #4. But you understate the case. It's not about USD vs RMB, it's about fractional-banking vs fixed-quantity money.
If #4 is the case, some might argue that USG must have pre-mined a bunch of coins (and conversely, that if they didn't, #4 is not the right answer). This need not hold, of course. One can make some predictions if #4 is indeed the case: with bitcoin, taxation is easy and automatic. Smaller governments would result (State, Local & Federal), deficit spending would end, the free-market would still work, but command-and-control would be much easier.
edit: I see I'm largely of the same opinion as user guylhem.
if they're buying to flip with a short horizon, it's a bubble. the first buyer to feel they might be the greatest fool walks away, and the bubble pops.
> speculation driven
speculation is a normal economic mechanism. taking risk in expectation of reward.
> you can't have an exchange-based economic system without some expected stability in the value of the exchange
yes you can. especially if the value of the currency is only going up. probably not if it's going down.
currently the ratio of stock to flow is rather high. since there is less flow available, and lots of fiat chasing it, the price rises. since the value of the currency rises, people who sell in that currency benefit (especially if they keep the difference in bitcoin).
money is a shared societal delusion. it's a giffen good, where rising price acts as a signal that more should be owned. misesian/mengerian theory requires only an initial direct barter exchange, the rest of it is bootstrapped by historical events (given certain basic properties, which bitcoin has in abundance[2]).
we are living those historical events today, thanks to the ECB & Cyprus.
at the moment bitcoin is a transient medium of exchange (usd->btc->silkroad) on both sides and a few risk-takers are betting on it holding value, where few is relative to world population. most merchants (at least thru bitpay etc) don't hold it either.
for the price to drop consistently, bitcoin-busters would have to take a large position, driving up the price, and then consistently sell enough to trigger other people's latent limit-sell orders. the problem is that naked shorting is not possible, so on the way to building large positions, they will send out the rising-price signal, which will make downward price-pressure quite hard later (aka high prices will be sticky since people's expectations have been reset). [1]
when the price gets high enough, the realization will sink in that the only way to accumulate bitcoin is to participate in the economy with one's labor (ie, sell things for bitcoin).
that's the ultimate win for bitcoin.
[1] oddly, one of the criticisms of btc, namely that Satoshi holds a significant amount, will provide downward stickiness as long as that large cache isn't sold. [2] bitcoin has a lot more properties than most other monies, principally anonymity & distance-agnosticism, and also invisibility via the use of darknets/tor