rkbabang

So it will be taxable? Kind of like stocks? Yes the IRS declared years ago (2012 or 13 maybe?) that it was going to treat bitcoin as an asset and selling it is a taxable event, like stocks.

Someday that will show up on the blue square in Jeopardy and the contestant will say: "What is the method Libertarians used to take over the world?" Posting this reddit link from 4 years ago without comment, because I have no idea what to say.

Oh crap! This is devastating. It's now only 20% above where it was last week. I can't believe it. That may be true. But stores of value are not supposed to do that and this thread is about bitcoin as a store of value not how much money you've made on bitcoin. Bitcoin isn't a store of value. It may become a store of value. There is a huge difference. If it evolves into a store of value to replace gold it will have to be worth trillions and it will be volatile as all holy hell getting there.

Oh crap! This is devastating. It's now only 20% above where it was last week. I can't believe it.

There is no reason a government couldn't issue money on a blockchain. But you know they would never relinquish control over it. It wouldn't be a mined public blockchain, it would be a private blockchain running on government servers. They would have complete control and could issue new units at will just as they do now only they would have perfect record keeping over who owns what and where they got it from. It's the IRS's dream come true. Man I really hope this happens. No more panama/paradise papers! They could also freeze the entire economy and everyone's assets simply by shutting down their servers. A hacker/terrorist could do so as well.

<groan> That joke was definitely a zero though.

I'm having no problem in my browser, but the mobile app is giving me an error message as soon as I log in: "ERROR: Due to a technical error, the system is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please try again later."

There is no reason a government couldn't issue money on a blockchain. But you know they would never relinquish control over it. It wouldn't be a mined public blockchain, it would be a private blockchain running on government servers. They would have complete control and could issue new units at will just as they do now only they would have perfect record keeping over who owns what and where they got it from. It's the IRS's dream come true.

I wasn't judging. I started my comment about the book with "I suspect this book probably ...". I know nothing of this book, but I do have my suspicions. All presidents are outliers and they are all sociopaths and narcissists to one extent or another. What is different about Trump is that he might not be as bright as most of his predecessors, he really doesn't care to behave like he's "supposed to", he has no interest in pretending to play the game, and he really enjoys going out of his way to say things that the liberal elites will get outraged about. On that last point I have no doubt at all that he does this on purpose and enjoys it immensely. The Pocahontas comment this week was great.

Is this like one of those jokes where you pretend it happened to you, or are you Michael Goldstein? Maybe he was at the airport too.

Someday that will show up on the blue square in Jeopardy and the contestant will say: "What is the method Libertarians used to take over the world?"

Government bonds are backed by the taxes the government will collect in the future, government fiat currencies are only protected by the fact that government has a lot of guns and can pass legal tender laws to force businesses to accept it.

Not a single one. ::) Which, coincidentally, is the same number of anarchists I've met who have started an anarch-state ;D I haven't read the book...but I agree with rk on this one. I'm not sure what there is to gain from reading a psycho-analysis of Trump. An anarch-state? Is that like an atheist church? :)

Serious question: Has anyone ever met a Psychiatrist that didn't have serious mental problems themselves? I suspect this book probably reveals a lot more about fears and mental issues of the 27 Psychiatrists than it does about Trump.

Sometimes they kill cows, abduct and rape people and surgically put implants in their heads.

There is a big difference between life and intelligent life. There is another big difference between intelligent life and life capable of leaving its home planet. Then there is another huge leap (one we have yet to make and have no near or medium term prospects of making) to life capable of interstellar travel within its home galaxy. Then, probably the largest leap will be between life which can travel interstellar distances and life which has figured out how to travel intergalactic distances. Unless there is new physics which we haven't figured out both of the last two categories may not even be possible. Maybe all lifeforms to date have been trapped within their solar system of origin. There is also the time scales to consider. The universe is only 13 billion years old and Earthlike planets have only been possible for less time than that. How likely is life really to appear on a planet that supports it? The Earth is pretty life friendly yet it only originated here once in over 4.6B years (as far as we can tell). If life was a sure thing, you would think that new completely unrelated lifeforms would be originating on earth all the time. Even if it only happened every billion years there would be 4 completely different families of life on Earth, but there is only one. What if whatever happened that day that life started on Earth failed to happen? Maybe Earth would still be barren of life and would remain that way forever. It certainly hasn't happened again in over 4B years. Then there is the question, if life does develop how likely is intelligent life? I'd propose that it is rare indeed. It took 4.2B years for intelligent life to evolve on earth which was capable of leaving the planet. What if in all that time we had one more mass-extinction event (or one fewer) it may have never happened at all. The Earth might exist without intelligent life right up until the sun burned out. The universe has only been around for 13B years and it took us over 4B years to evolve, what if it usually takes a lot longer than that? Maybe there hasn't been enough time yet for many intelligent life forms to exist. Then there is the question, if intelligent life does form, what is the chance that it will be able to leave its planet? Dolphins are intelligent, they communicate with each other and they have a culture passed down from one generation to the next. Yet, they will live in the water, raise their families, hunt fish, play, etc, but because of the limitations of their biology they will never use tools or harness fire, etc... How far would humans have gotten without opposable thumbs? I think many intelligent species in the universe are probably evolutionary dead ends as far as settling the stars goes. And how many "great filters" are there for even life like ours? How many species destroy themselves with nuclear bombs or antimatter or nanotechnology or AI or something else long before settling their galaxies? Like I said, I suspect intelligent life capable of interstellar travel is so rare that it is not at all surprising that we haven't been visited yet and I suspect that intergalactic travel will never be possible for any lifeform anywhere. I also suspect that intelligent life itself is so rare that we may be the only ones in the Milkyway. Whether we might find someway to detect life in the universe someday is an open question, but I seriously doubt we will ever meet up with any intelligent lifeforms in person.

Just wanted to bump this thread up. I re-read it from the beginning and found it interesting how I went from highly sceptical of Bitcoin in 2014 to buying my first bitcoins in January 2015. Wachtwoord's post are really good and worth it to re-read.

Don't make trades that scare you. I'm not talking about me making trades. Well yes, anyone who buys bitcoin (or any of the others) needs to understand volatility could be extreme at times. If you are holding for the long term that shouldn't matter, you might get nice buying opportunities from time to time. However if you are 100x leveraged....good luck. I'm not too worried. If my cryptocurrency portfolio drops by 95% tomorrow I'll still be in the black.

Don't make trades that scare you.

Even the high estimate is under 25%. http://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/ "3.79 million bitcoins are already gone for good based on a high estimate—and 2.78 million based on a low one. Those numbers imply 17% to 23% of existing bitcoins" AND: "both estimates make a critical assumption that coins belonging to bitcoin’s inventor, Satoshi, are gone for good" Take Satoshi's coins out of the estimates and you get 2.75M to 1.73M lost coins or 10% to 16% And these estimates are considering a large amount of coins which haven't moved in a while to be lost (30-50%), no one really knows which are lost and which are simply being held.

There are a lot of exchanges trading BTC for USD, as well as foreign currencies, as well as other cryptocurrencies. I'm not saying fraud can't take place, but it would take hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars spread across multiple currencies (both fiat and crypto) in dozens of exchanges to fix the price of BTC right now. I think what you are seeing isn't fraud, but simply increased demand. https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/all/

Mars gravity is 38% of Earth's so it won't be quite as difficult to re-adjust from weightlessness, but with no medical teams waiting to take care of those 1st pioneers who will be landing in rough shape anything that goes wrong could be deadly. It won't be easy, but some will survive (hopefully) to build a civilization. My question is what will happen to the human body once you've lived on Mars for 10+ years, or the people born and raised there, could you ever come back to Earth? Probably not. The book sounds interesting, I'm going to order it.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1/text

Yes you are exactly correct in the paragraph above. The conclusion I draw is that we have not been visited, or at least we are no longer being visited. My personal opinion based on nothing concrete is that intelligent life is rarer than most scientists think and we may be the only intelligent species in the Milkyway right now. There are surely others in other galaxies (there are just too many of them to think otherwise), but we may have this one to ourselves.