lzim

So from what little I had picked up over the years without really researching what BitCoin was about, I think I had the right impression of BitCoin.

The digital and decentralized aspect of BitCoin is all great but the implementation of it, which is explained here,

(And I wrote this all out part way through the doc and realized half of the shit that I was talking about and still wondering about was covered later so I had to delete and start over. Really have to stop doing that XD)

tells of a currency that could be what the whole world needs, and not just one convenient for people looking to get away from fees.

From my perspective BitCoin had always been weird because each coin isn't tracked and the value of each coin changes.

Apparently that's wrong because the fundamental aspect of BitCoin is that each coin can be tracked and the whole decentralized system keeps track of transactions. I don't understand how that can be so while people governments and law enforcement insist that the decentralized system means transactions can't be tracked back to the owners of a particular account. And if theft has occurred, why can't those coins be restored? Fundamentally then the system is flawed because transactions can be carried out in the dark (net).

I also wasn't aware that there's a finite number of coins to be mined either.

That's a good thing I suppose but like Oil or any other finite resource with a value subject to change, so what if it was designed to grow, that growth isn't steady against other currencies, if you reach a point where you know there aren't many left what's to stop more people from stealing them? Just as they should have once they realized what a single coin would be worth later one.

Still a few thousand and wait. Sell them off when you've hit a point where you can buy your lifestyle and live comfortably.. eventually buy more back and repeat as required. The other thing was that the creator has a significant amount of them that could be sold off at any given time.. right when it seems sure to fail, otherwise he's living off the interest like any ultra rich person would.

He's entitled to if the BitCoin revolution tips over and saves the world. :/ you have to be fucking kidding me.

What I'm after is the answer to the question WHY does a currency need a value. As a digital currency BitCoin doesn't have any value at all. So that should be a good thing.

Without a value you're dealing with credit. But when all of that credit isn't controlled by a single entity that charges interest and transactional fees.. we should all be much better off in the short term..

That kind of Credit and being a slave to that credit is the thing BitCoin is trying to get away from. Credit and the ability to borrow is what is causing classic currency systems to fail.. but something that has no value, especially one that is growing, to stand in for how much a person is worth or has earned doesn't make sense. Both systems, classic money and BitCoin and basically all currency can be taken away. Once it is taken away.. you have nothing to buy things with. I mean if each account was tied to someone's DNA or something.. something concrete the system loses some anonymity but at least then it is really open and secure for each individual user. I don't have an account so much as the system knows how many coins belong to ME.. as in me as a human being by my DNA.. and those coins can't be taken away.

After the recent news that the BitCoin community was planning to split in two.. the suspicions that BitCoin would only have a short shelf life before it encountered major issues, before the tipping point as in broad adoption which would mean many very wealthy people converting their established wealth into BitCoin wealth while they still can swap back without losing anything if the digital crypto-currency fails. Versus then cashing out of BitCoin right now is probably growing.

I mean the tipping point itself is when a major bank says fuck it.. Or like Estonia, when a very tech savvy nation starts pushing for BitCoin to be the main currency so that all the banks and companies start converting.. the citizens follow.

Yes the doc says NL has a great level of public support from consumers and business, but they are far from reaching a tipping point. I don't think any nation's government is ready to dump their currency and go digital or if on the global economy level that they could yet.

While these ultra BitCoin rich elite can still cash out the rest of us have to worry. We aren't going to get rich mining and trading one currency system for another doesn't necessarily change the lending systems that have us spending money we don't have. Granted NOT burning so much money on interest or transaction fees will ease many of our problems.

Anyone buying in to BitCoin, they claim, prior to the tipping point can still earn money because there's still more coins to be mined and value being added to the system... But until when? And Yeah Ok Right and when I have converted all my money and credit to BitCoin.. what then? Pay off my credit balance because my BitCoins are appreciating in value faster than the interest rate on my loans? I'm close enough to paying them off that I would be earning money again. Not burning anything fees, again would be a godsend. Even if I help mine some of the remaining coins.. in theory I'd eventually makes some gains. but what if the system crashes?

Since there's so much real value in BitCoin the powers that be from the old currency systems can still make their own digital currency systems, putting us back to square one, and remain the powers that be with regard to controlling those systems and nothing gets solved. Especially if there's some type of shiny short term incentive to convert to a proprietary digital currency.

The decentralization issue being part of the problem. How can you trust an open system they might suggest and say look, we'll offer you all the convenience of BitCoin but you still pay us for peace of mind because We're the Credit card companies.. or Nation Bank of whatever nation.. we aren't going to go bankrupt and the system won't fail.

Any significantly tech savvy nation again that might have enough money troubles as it is could thus convert to digital currency at a profit just to save their own asses. It costs money to run a currency system even if ultimately they are earning money from them. They'd earn more and spend less going digital.

Right now the problem stated in the video is that when current money systems create money that devalues it.. and people are spending money to store their money in big banks, each transaction costs money etc and borrowing actual money instead of just leaning on credit? Maybe you're just not entitled to more credit... In some ways most of us are losing more than we can earn. Student loans for example.

Compared to the book The Unincorporated Man.. the idea of a student loan in personal shares and otherwise transactions based on those shares instead of money (as if BitCoins were individual and again tied back to their origin and value, more are created when people are born and their value is based on each individuals net worth) makes more sense if that currency system is digital.

Lets say at the very least you HAVE some personal shares attributed to you at birth and they are given a value based on what your parents/family are worth and bequeath to you at the time of your birth, we all would at birth based on our legastic circumstances either wealthy or pauperous have a start up value. Instead of spending money as the book suggests for stuff like education, the school gets some of your shares which they can cash out when they choose to. They benefit in the long term and so do you assuming your education pans out. But money is only half that issue.. the other is health care.

Health care is exactly the same thing.. A hospital would have more invested in you, assuming not just a digital currency system tied to your DNA.. but that they know before hand what you're potentially worth as a healthy person based on your DNA. It would be horrible think about a situation where a child would, either not be allowed to be born because for starters no hospital or insurance would bother.. or that the family not being able to find a hospital looking to have that child be born through them with a lifetime of support should that child remain healthy.. IF they found that there was some type of genetic problem that couldn't be fixed. etc. GATACA or wtv. Shit should go hand in hand though. Like yeah we see your kind potentially has a shit heart.. but we think he has an earning value in the millions so we'll support this person and will deal with the heart condition when or if it comes up. We will of course drop his ass if he fails to at least live a healthy lifestyle etc.

That system based on personal worth and schools and companies sponsoring you with endorsements and basically credit because you HAD a market value and the book says you as a person had potential value. The value of a coin is one thing, but if that coin is tied to a life and its value is tied to the earning power of that living person..

OR

What would be interesting to see is if a digital currency appears that doesn't have a changing value, again if one of the powers that be says whoa nelly, BitCoins inflating value and existing super rich gold rush era folks just isn't fair to everyone else, and isn't based on earning based on its use etc, like transactional fees. Something like the Kilogram. Something static and metric. How could it (a standard digital currency) be a rival currency if there's not a finite amount of it and there's no potential for it to be stolen because we know who each SI currency unit belongs to and where it has been since it was created. This one again can be tied to an owern's DNA so it can't be stolen. With a static value you can be physical or digital. The issue again is theft. How can you avoid the issue of double spending?

For example, I own 10000 unit of a standard digital currency. IF I cash it call out and turn it into credit chips.. then the entire digital payment network would have to know I did that. There would have to be a transaction that says that money is now converted into a physical form. From that point it would not be possible to accept it in a digital form. Easy. However if I need to actually buy something while my currency is in a physical format like a credit chip.. as a standard currency that's also easy unlike BitCoin because the value is standard. It doesn't change. I'm spending a kilogram or a fraction of one and each impossible to duplicate unit in my possession should be genetically coded to me, or would have been re-encoded to my DNA when the physical credit chip was issued.

Plus I mean we're talking about tomorrow.. Tomorrow the world will be covered with Google's wifi blimps so almost no corner of the map could claim to not have enough bandwidth to process a digital transaction.

The other problem is encryption and processing power. As we're still talking about tomorrow.. there's platform on the horizon that could do the complex decryption necessary for such a standard money system based on our genetic base pairs. If not all of them being sequenced instantly then a hash.

So given:

"The earliest direct estimates of the size of human genome clustered around 3,000 Mb (megabase pairs) or 3.0 ×109 bp (base pairs). The textbooks settled on about 3,200 Mb based mostly on reassociation kinetics.Mar 24, 2011"

Compared to the BitCoin block sized of 750Kb to 1MB,

And then consider that as each base pair is only literally 2 bits of an available 4, GATC, and they each have a position on the pair, and you add 0 bits for the bits not used in each pair. Almost double the maximum size of a block.. add encryption... and without considering the position of each bit in a pair as more data. Hashes can be based on chromosomes if needed. We'd each have a pretty good amount of data for a private key. And it could be used to set up the data need to create a unique 'coin'. Our genetic history could be stored in our money.

So there's a fair amount of data to work with in created a private key for yourself based on your DNA. Considering the rapidly approaching 8 billion living humans.. a 21 million coin limit seems silly.

But the more data you have the more you have to consider the network it will run on. The internet as it is seems saturated. A digital currency doesn't seem to play a big roll but throw ALL of us onto a digital currency network and it might significantly change things. Bottlenecks caused by too many transactions would cause more problems than just staying on cash. Then again when even cash transactions have to validated.. more problems. And if each transaction takes more than 3-5 seconds to complete.. in the time it takes to scan a valid payment and process it.. problems.

Shit just thinking about it.. people that own consoles should be mining. Like the old seti at home systems.. wouldn't it be funny if you split your earning with Microsoft however miniscule for the time your console is on and idle and mining coins?

Anyway..

The doc does actually mention such a system (a standard one like the metric system) which I found surprising but doesn't go into any details about any potential benefits there would be or how it could work.

Thing about BitCoin is that with the process of mining them.. random people are capable of becoming billionaires. A digital currency which should be mean to replace money should be offered by the banks that are currently fucking is all over for trillions in ridiculous profits. If you suddenly came into possession of a machine with enough computing power.. just put it to work mining coins.

So.. they make a digital currency that doesn't require mining. As the process of mining created an advantage for people that mined those first coins.. some type of protracted gold rush because everyone else was still using regular money.

For that standard metric digital currency if all of the units all come out at the same time everyone has a change to start on them with what they have now in terms of currency and credit. Each bit is tracked and the owner of each bit is known.. how can you steal something that has an owner?!

As much as I would love to see a digital currency attributed to each of us based on our current worth keyed to our genetics.. Even if it isn't to complicated... it gives each of us a value. One that can be used against us because we have real tools to change that genetic value. Or at least the ability to erase any genetic time bombs.

Even the aspect of transactional fees being evil rubs me the wrong way. Why the hell shouldn't there be a fee per transaction however minuscule? The money goes to that decentralized and incorruptible system that runs those trades.

Plus it doesn't matter. Regulations could be imposed before the tipping point or after once they are deemed necessary to tax certain transactions. Ecommerce regulation is already in place to deal with such things as taxation anyway.

If it is impossible for people to make more money.. or somehow devalue it.. and machines like DNS servers run the trades and they speak to each other so they all know about all of the individual bits of currency there are floating around everyone wins. We know where all the money is at all times.. where it came from, where it is going.. crime grinds to a halt in certain respects because it is known where all the currency is at all times.