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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Snowshoe who wrote (104240)	1/17/2014 8:18:32 AM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Recommended By gg cox Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217588

Snowy, that's how gold is run: <Under it's current structure, the supply of bitcoins will peak and then gradually decline. The peak supply will occur when the built-in max quantity is reached. The attrition will result from lost bitcoin wallets that can never be replaced. It's a funny way to run a "currency"...> Gold is a limited resource. Unlike bitcoin, the mining process can continue as long as somebody is willing to keep expending energy to run the mining process, which gets increasinly expensive as time goes on due to the more and more difficult production process. The easy gold in the Klondike and in river beds around the world has long ago been depleted. Now people are scratching for a living in old gold workings, looking for gold that previous miners considered not even worth bothering with. Once Peak Gold has been reached, which will happen when a good quality digital currency [mine] has taken over savings and payments processes, then gold will go into terminal decline. The amount of gold in circulation will decline as wedding rings get thrown off bridges, teeth are eroded and die, gold chains are lost at sea as aircraft crash, ships sink and adventurers make mistakes. It might be a funny way to run bitcoin, but that method has 1000s of years of history to suggest it's a reliable way to run a currency, namely gold. It's interesting seeing the attempts to denigrate bitcoin. When arguments lack substance, it suggests that maybe bitcoin is going to be successful. My argument is that it is wasteful of energy and inefficient in processing data to maintain security, so it can be replaced by a better design. But if it gets full scale before competition gets going, it could yet win. The fact that the supply will peak then dwindle doesn't matter at all. The rate of attrition will simply determine the escalation rate of its value. It's the opposite of inflation, which is dilution by another name. Deflation is supposed to be bad, but in fact people love it when things get cheaper. They like it when the asset they hold, namely bitcoin in this case, goes up in value rather than down. So a reduction in the supply of bitcoin will be a good thing, not a bad thing, from the point of view of people who own some bitcoins, provided it is not their bitcoins which are lost at sea. Whether they throw a gold ring or bitcoin record over the side of a ship, doesn't matter to other people who hold gold or bitcoins, except that their value goes up a minuscule amount which will please them, even if they feel sympathy for the loser. Mqurice

To: Snowshoe who wrote (104240)	1/17/2014 8:39:35 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217588

In this case, the real loss was the value of the laptop. He lost the right to spend a whole lot of money, but that doesn't mean that the total value of bitcoin or anything real was harmed one iota. <A digital 'wallet' containing 7,500 Bitcoins that James Howells generated on his laptop is buried under four feet of rubbish> The amount of energy a laptop can consume is trivial. The bitcoins will be replaced with bitcoins which are generated using thousands of times more energy than his laptop expended. James Howells is worse off, but nobody else is. In fact, other bitcoin holders had his value transferred to them, which was nice of him to do. James' loss is their gain. There was no overall economic harm, other than the laptop. Mqurice