Posted on 01/18/2014 9:17:00 AM PST by Errant
There are many reasons to be excited about bitcoin: it could enable totally new business and technology models; it resembles the Internet in the early 90s in the sense that it is a network that no one owns and everyone can contribute to; it could revolutionise legal concepts of ownership; it could disrupt the payments industry; and it could even become a huge tax haven. It could also flop.
(Excerpt) Read more at coindesk.com ...
Don't worry, they will.
And he causes all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, and he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name.
Revelation: 16-17
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Guess what, more tulips!
Just another kind of “paper gold”, certificates that are traded based on what is a presumed store of gold bars held in a vault somewhere.
We have only the word of the custodian of that vault that the gold is really there.
Who keeps tabs on the actual number of “bitcoins” that exist? Even easier to replicate than the “electronic dollars” the Fed is pumping into the favored few banks and other institutions “too big to fail”.
I sense a “con game”. Kind of like Al Gore’s “carbon credits”.
A currency must be hard to duplicate, but flexible to allow growth. Above all, what backs a currency is faith. Faith that it won’t be diluted haphazardly, or to benefit someone in power. I am not convinced that the people who created Bitcoin won’t succumb to greed and create a few million for their own account. Not yet anyway.
Maybe they have to explin how to get enough to actually be worth the trouble ... but not the fact itself
algore is SO pissed ... HE thought of carbon credits first ... I'll betcha' he'll sue for copyright infringement.
makin' popcorn right now
Answer: Anyone who wants to. The concept revolves around a distributed ledger that anyone can have access to call the blockchain. You can see the transactions as they occur in real time here:
Think Fractional Lending.
Crytocurrency (e.g., Bitcoin) is of the people, by the people, for the people.
And instead of making popcorn, you could be making one of these: http://www.wheretomine.com/
Just sayin'...
Why?
Why should I learn a new language to understand a fantasy ?
I was elected to the school board in November and I just attended my second meeting.
The priciple of the HS offered a "new" way of grading.
Instead of using "quality points" (yeah, I DID ask what they were .. ), he wants to take the number scores and average them, giving a student a real picture of his grade(s)
I welcomed him to 1959 and cautioned him that in a few years something very terrible will happen in America and he aught to prepare for it.
Yes I DID say that publically and got everyone's attention, their glance and a few supportive comments (later)
I'm going to like this school board thing
You really think that the U.S. Government couldn't build a bigger bit-mining supercomputer complex than any consortium of private programmers? Ha.
They're building one now in Utah.
To what avail? To reach the theoretical 51% control point, only to destroy the asset? Counter-intuitive.
"These goals have considerable support in Congress. Last November a bipartisan group of 24 senators sent a letter to President Obama urging him to approve continued funding through 2013 for the Department of Energys exascale computing initiative (the NSAs budget requests are classified). They cited the necessity to keep up with and surpass China and Japan. The race is on to develop exascale computing capabilities, the senators noted. The reason was clear: By late 2011 the Jaguar (now with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops) ranked third behind Japans K Computer, with an impressive 10.51 petaflops, and the Chinese Tianhe-1A system, with 2.57 petaflops."
The latest data from http://bitcoinwatch.com/ gives the current processing power working just Bitcoin hashs at 185,509.82 PetaFLOPS with more processing power added daily.
Look at this chart from http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/bitcoins-computing-crisis posted on 31 Oct 2013:
Interesting curve to say the least.
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