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Friday 19 July 2019

Gold Bugs are Getting Shilled

So many gold bugs feel they have to rebut the #dropgold buy bitcoin campaign. They don't realise they have been shilled. Greyscales add is a great example of Bitcoiners mastery of online tactics. Do we really care, most of us like gold, but it gets lots of attention, #Dropgold is the ultimate shill, gold bugs should stop fighting and jump on board.
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Power Behind Bitcoin Will Reduce

When people talk about bitcoin mining they often bring up the energy costs. They are not however considering how bitcoin is set up over time. The reward for miners is reducing over time to near zero.

In the beginning the mining reward was a high number of bitcoin, say 250 bitcoins, but the price of bitcoin was very low, say 1c.  This meant that you only got rewarded $2.50 worth for each block you mined, so not so many people felt it was worth mining. Bitcoin needed enough people to mine so that some other people who didn't like bitcoin, with more computer power, couldn't get in and mine and effectively kill it. It needed to be strong enough so that a government super computer couldn't hack it.

Now bitcoin computer power is way beyond what any one bad actor can harness. This security challenge is surpassed, likely by more than a 1000x at the moment and the mining reward has halved to 12.5 bitcoins. That reward comes to around $120,000 per ten minute block.

People are complaining that it has gone too far, and they might be right.  It uses as much power as a decent size country, but I would argue that this is short sighted. Next year the reward will be 6.125 bitcoins and if the price does not go up we will see less bitcoin mining happening and do we really know what amount of mining is enough to keep a potentially world changing technology safe? We are high now, but the percentage of bitcoin resource being allocated to this reduces and is only counteracted by price.

This counteracting effect only works so much, eventually (in something like 100 years) the mining reward is programmed to go to zero which will make $0 per block. We can expect the mining to be much less power intensive as compared with the whole bitcoin economy at this point. At this stage mining will still happen though as voluntary transaction fees also go to miners. This type of payment needs to counteract the block reward completely at this stage to make sure that bitcoin has enough computer power.

When the block reward is zero, bitcoin mining power consumption will be directly proportional to how much value we place on security and transactions. I would argue at this point it is nearly 100% efficient.

Wednesday 17 July 2019

Do you have your one in 21 million?

All you need is one bitcoin to potentially transcend money. Right now it takes less than 10k. Dropping from $13000 this month people are saying this may be your last chance.

Sunday 14 July 2019

Bitcoin Derangement Syndrome

People get really rich then they go crazy.  Same story now it's bitcoin.

Richard Heart
John McAfee
Roger Ver
Craig Wright
Gavin Andresen
Max Keiser

Need I say anymore? It's a thing.

Collective is Decentralised

Society seems to be increasing complex. I can hardly imagine what it would be like to be a kid at high school at the moment, but some common themes are developing that can bring it back together for everyone are emerging. One of them is decentralisation. In itself it seems a sophisticated idea but it can be really simple.

In the past 50 years community and the collective good have found a partner with centralised control systems. Clubs, neighborhood associations, charities, union representatives, and philanthropic executives. These have all faded and proven insufficient. Clubs community groups and sports associations have no money and actually no a day's struggle to stay legal with government regulation. A different aggregate of centralization.

I think the major causes of the destruction of community centers has been social digitisation and people having less and less spare time. Computers and the ever enslaving economy. Bitcoiner would argue this is because of macro economics but for normal people it's just a general trend of work becoming you are, computers making it easy to get a social kick and real social contact dwindlingvtovthe obscure.

This phenomenon is exaggerated by internet organisations like you-tube or spotify restricting features . It is more bizarre because these features have zero marginal costs to them, despite the negativity they restrict them in order to generate subscription charges. Everything online starts to become commercialized.

The only escape from this online is decentralization. A place where people volunteer their time and where dedicated patrons are fairly and evenly supported. Decentalisation on the internet allows for everyone to participate as much as they can and stops elites from pressing  an unfair advantage. 

Collective organisations have been growing. A common theme in any hipster cafe graphity scene. Organisations where unanimous agreement and donative subscriptions allow the support of many in a cultural niche. Not al that different from bitcoin if you ask me. Opensource developers  work for free sharing their work just for the love of it.

Coders are not hipsters. Bankers and economists are even further from it. I would argue that the opensource movement is very collective and Bitcoin as the currency is the ultimate collective for savers.

Thursday 11 July 2019

Deflation Favors Working People

Every working person has a contract to sell their labour at a certain date ongoing into  the future. This contact is protected by some pretty strong labour laws in some countries it can be hard to get fired. For many people, especially those without many assets, this is the biggest financial thing they have.

Inflation reduces the value of this contract a lot because it stretches perpetually. Any 1% of inflation reduces the value of your employment contract by that amount times however many years you expect to be employed.

Some may say but you can renegotiate your contract to adjust for inflation. The problem with this is that it requires a negotiation, one you don't have power over. Also it's not saying much because contract negotiations are always possible with or without inflation.

With deflation you get the opposite. Your working contract increases in value and if you decide to stay working it increases even more. This is one big reason why Bitcoin favors working people. 

Tuesday 9 July 2019

There is No Early

Max Hillebrand interviews a guy named Boris here and they have a good chat about psychological effects of growing personal wealth of Bitcoiners in society. Missing out, victim hood politics and toxic bullshit. As the price hits 13000 USD again its starting to feel impossible for new comers to get a whole bitcoin and feel like they are get ahead in comparison to early adopters. Inequality starts to appear in a way that the invention of bitcoin is supposed to prevent. My thoughts are that there really is no early adopter advantage there is only acting in the now. At the time it was risky and now it is more safe. Saving for the future is always hard in the now and you only need to put away what you can. There was a time when it was cheap in the past and then there is now. Bitcoin is not designed to end, but even now we can't be sure what the future holds. So in many ways it's much the same as it always was.