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Topic: Bitcoin Halving 2016 T minus 8 hours and counting! (Read 410 times)

legendary
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Tl; dr all of it.  However I'm sure you're aware that bitcoin isn't backed by anything either, not even debt.  And saying it's backed by electricity and hashing power is silly to me.  I hear that said all the time.

Good you're passionate though. 
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Bitcoin Halving 2016 T minus 8 hours and counting!
Morpheus Titania
Its 2016/7/9 1:54 am Arizona Time, its about 8 hours 6 minutes and 55seconds to the Bitcoin Halving. In just a few hours the Bitcoin mining reward is going to be reduced from 25 bitcoins to 12.5 bitcoins every time the miners find a new block. This is an exciting time in history and an exciting time in crypto-currency. I have been talking about this event to all the people I do buziness with. That's not a typo. When I do business with Federal Reserve Notes (some would call them “Dollars”) its business, when you do it with Bitcoin, it's Buziness.
A great deal of people believe that a Federal Reserve Note IS a Dollar; however, nothing could be further from the truth. The Coinage Act of 1792 says:
Dollars or Units DOLLARS OR UNITS--each to be of the value of a Spanish milled dollar as the same is now current, and to contain three hundred and seventy-one grains and four sixteenth parts of a grain of pure, or four hundred and sixteen grains of standard silver.
This law which is one of the earliest laws enacted by congress and signed by the president George Washington. It declares what a standard of measure a dollar actually is. At the time, Spanish Milled Dollar was one of the global standards of measurement for money. The new government though it would be best to have the united States unit of measurement to be the same as what was standard at that time. This is no different than having the inch or the pound to be the same as what was commonly used at the time. This law has never been repealed.
These Federal Reserve Notes we use as money are not Dollars they are negotiable instruments that are backed by nothing except DEBT. I laugh when I hear that that we live in a capitalist country because there is zero capital.  How can a debt be capital? The Government, Banks and Media have fooled most of the people.  WAKE UP!   
Back when the United States was first founded, it was much more important than today for elected officials to actually pay attention to the founding documents of the country, than they pay lip service to now. Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution, stipulates exactly what the United States congress has the power to legislate:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
The first clause of section 8 are the words “general Welfare” up till 1933 in the Butler case, “general Welfare” meant “distributed equally”. If the government had $100,000 it wanted to distributed and there were 10,000,000 people in the country then everybody gets a penny. However, in the Butler case the court redefined “general Welfare” to mean anything the government thought was good for the country. That's like saying a cup of water is the Atlantic Ocean.
This is how governments operate: if the ones who are “running it” don't like the rules, they just change the definitions. If you don't like the changes they make to “help you” then, they usually say “just move”. This is one of the big benefits of bitcoin it flattens hierarchies by operating on a consensus based model instead of a fear based model, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun", as Mao Zedong would say.
Clause 4 gives them the power to regulate money. They already had experience with hyperinflation and the the continental Dollar's value becoming worthless.
To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
Money is a unit of measurement similar in nature to an inch, a pound or a grain except that a “Dollar” is REQUIRED to be exactly 371.25 grains of pure silver, this was the standard of measurement. The reason for standardization is to facilitate trade. If one person has unit of measure and the other person has a different unit of measure that is going to make trading very difficult as not only do the traders have to agree on value, quality, quantity of the goods or services they also have to agree on the value and quantity of the money.
Thus with standardization, people did business in gold and silver because they were exchanging a thing of value like a chicken, corn or textiles for something else of value, a metal coins that were standardized. The asset being sold, took a raw material like the chicken plus human labor to raise them for another raw material like silver plus human labor to mine, refine, weigh and stamp that gave it, it's value. An equilibrium was achieved and trading was performed. The person with the asset got the silver and the person with the silver got the asset. Both participants lives were improved, as trading is not a zero sum game.
The values of items were based on the immutable laws of supply and demand. For example if I have a common paper cup it has a value however there are millions of cups and they are fairly easy to make. Their value might be 1-5 pennies each. However if all the machines that make paper cups were to break and I have the only paper cup in the world, the value of the cup I own is now much, much more. This is true for anything that human beings desire in the 3 dimensional world. Supply and demand determine the value of everything. Usually it is the attributes of the thing that give it value, not the thing itself. The cup is a machine, it's attributes are that is easily holds more drink than I can hold in my hands.
Bitcoin has attributes that human beings attest to money: scarcity, durability, authentic, portable, divisible, storage of value. Anything that has these attributes IS money. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...its a duck. These attributes have been attested to money for millennia. Because Bitcoin is digital though, it creates a schism in the mind of some people. They somehow believe that money, which is a construct of the mind, has to exist in the 3 dimensional world, in order to be “real”. Many of these people say only gold and silver is real money. That is ok, they don't have to accept Bitcoin for what they think has value.
The challenge I have for these people is right now, I can use bitcoins to buy anything I want from overstocked.com, book a hotel with expedia.com, register a domain with domains4bitcoins.com or namecheap.com, get a gift card at hundreds of business through gyft.com or buy from hundreds of small businesses like delicious pizza from classiccrustpizza.com
The only thing I can do with gold or silver is exchange it for “dollars”. No one I know of does business in precious metals. I wont deny I like having them. They just aren't convenient to do business in. Its really hard to make change with gold and silver. With Bitcoin on the other hand, I can always make change. Like a check, a person could write a check for the exact amount that was owed. The check would clear as long as you had enough money in the bank. You just never really knew until the money was in your bank whether the check was “good” or not. These days most people have direct deposit and online banking so not as many people use these “negotiable instruments” anymore.
On top of the attributes that legacy money has Bitcoin has other features that give it more value than the fraudulent legacy money. Bitcoin is counterfeit proof, it is impossible to have a fraudulent transaction or fake Bitcoins. A bitcoin “account” cannot be frozen or censured because the banks or governments do not create or control them. They cannot regulate Bitcoins because the government cannot control the immutable laws of math. Bitcoin transactions are between 2 parties and therefore difficult to track, governments HATE this. Transactions in bitcoin are validated approximately every 10 minutes so funds are available much quicker than legacy banking systems. All these attributes contribute to the bitcoin price right now of of $654.07
In the next 6 hours and 29 minutes the mining reward is going to be reduced from 3600 new bitcoins per day to 1800 new Bitcoins per day. The supply is going down, and every single day new bitcoin users are born, so demand is going up. I don't know what the price of Bitcoin is going to be in the future, I don't have a crystal ball. I do know that the price of bitcoin was $12.25 on November 28, 2012, the last time the mining reward halved from 50 to 25. One year and a day later it was $1132. Will It do that again, I don't know. I do know this: history doesn't always repeat itself, it does like to rhyme a lot.
Were Bitcoin to go up again like that it would probably be a good idea to have at least one. Worst case scenario you buy bitcoin and goes to zero, yea you loose $650, the other side is it goes up 92.4x and Bitcoin is $64,500 you don't want to think “if only”.
For me I am all in. I believe the crypto-currency phenomenon is the future.  My bitcoin trading pays for everything I do. I haven't had a job, making millionaires rich for the last 2.5 years. I'm semi-retired, I meet my friends all over town, we talk, have some coffee and then they give me money to convert to bitcoins. I do business with only with those I want to and when I want to. My buziness partners want to do buziness with me, because they trust me and we have a solid relationship. No headaches, no customer service, no employees, no building, no bookkeeping; the product one size fits all and colorless, never goes bad, always functions as promised, impervious to the elements or temperature. What could be better than that?
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