Topic: Early speculator's reward antidote - page 8. (Read 22161 times)
Food for thought. Snack on this.
This is how I would solve the problem of the early speculators profiting disproportionately at the expense of newer comers.
it's amazing how those without imagination persist in attempting to define a problem in those who have that quality...
to quote james coburn in the magnificent seven: "no - you lost."
deal with it.
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absolutely nothing guarantees that. there's an arbitrary relationship between the two,
Nothing guarantees what? That the block chain becoming more secure was essential in its reaching its present level of adoption, or that the benefit you accrue will be a drop in the bucket compared to the benefit bitcoin will provide society if it becomes widely adopted?
well, either, but i meant the latter.
Quote from: unk
as i said, the point is apparently difficult to understand, but it is not a 'fiat' that forces you to use dollars to trade with others. it's your choice and other people's choices
Yes it is. Fiat forces me to pay taxes in dollars, and fiat punishes me with capital gains taxes if I use a non-inflating currency in trade. I have a choice, but that choice is between facing coercive action and using the fiat currency.
I think you are confused. Men with guns force you to pay taxes in dollars.
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absolutely nothing guarantees that. there's an arbitrary relationship between the two,
Nothing guarantees what? That the block chain becoming more secure was essential in its reaching its present level of adoption, or that the benefit you accrue will be a drop in the bucket compared to the benefit bitcoin will provide society if it becomes widely adopted?
Securing the block chain was essential in it becoming more widely accepted. The benefit you will accrue is a drop in the bucket compared to the benefit bitcoin will provide society if it becomes widely adopted.
absolutely nothing guarantees that. there's an arbitrary relationship between the two, unless you adopt an extremely strong and untenable view of voluntariness (which you've already refused to apply to people's choice to use dollars).
Quote from: unk
as i said, the point is apparently difficult to understand, but it is not a 'fiat' that forces you to use dollars to trade with others. it's your choice and other people's choices
Yes it is. Fiat forces me to pay taxes in dollars, and fiat punishes me with capital gains taxes if I use a non-inflating currency in trade. I have a choice, but that choice is between facing coercive action and using the fiat currency.
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(also, as an aside, it's just not true practically that it's inconvenient to avoid holding dollars or other fiat currencies.
You have to pay a significant transaction expense every time you trade in and out of a store of value and a fiat currency.
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in any event, my point is that if you don't like using dollars in daily transactions, then by your own critique you should blame the 'private' parties that are asking you to pay in them, not the government.
There are mandates that punish private parties who do not use fiat currencies.
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Quote from: amincd on Today at 05:43:16 am
You provided funding for a useful currency, just as the early investors in Facebook/Google provided funding for useful internet services.
what about me? i've never bought or sold a bitcoin, but i mined about 12000 of them early on. what did i provide that's of any value? presumably your answer is more than 'securing the block chain', which was at best of hypothetical value and, more realistically, was in fact of no value to anyone.
You provided funding for a useful currency, just as the early investors in Facebook/Google provided funding for useful internet services.
what about me? i've never bought or sold a bitcoin, but i mined about 12000 of them early on. what did i provide that's of any value? presumably your answer is more than 'securing the block chain', which was at best of hypothetical value and, more realistically, was in fact of no value to anyone.
Securing the block chain was essential in it becoming more widely accepted. The benefit you will accrue is a drop in the bucket compared to the benefit bitcoin will provide society if it becomes widely adopted.
Quote from: casascius
Quote from: amincd on Today at 05:43:16 am
Quote from: casascius
How is my example beneficial? In profiting from BTC, I have given nothing to society.
You are creating an incentive to try to find and invest in companies/products/assets that have fast appreciation rates. This results in more value and innovation in the long run.
It does? How did me taking money from others help innovation? It would be different if those others gave me money to help me create something. That is not the case, I created nothing.
Quote from: casascius
How is my example beneficial? In profiting from BTC, I have given nothing to society.
You are creating an incentive to try to find and invest in companies/products/assets that have fast appreciation rates. This results in more value and innovation in the long run.
It does? How did me taking money from others help innovation? It would be different if those others gave me money to help me create something. That is not the case, I created nothing.
I've already answered this:
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You provided funding for a useful currency, just as the early investors in Facebook/Google provided funding for useful internet services.
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Quote from: amincd on Today at 05:43:16 am
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Zuckerberg and Brin got rich in the process of giving mankind something of useful value. I gave nothing.
You provided funding for a useful currency, just as the early investors in Facebook/Google provided funding for useful internet services.
Zuckerberg and Brin created useful tools with practical daily applications. My funding did nothing to help create the currency or the concept or the software.
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Zuckerberg and Brin got rich in the process of giving mankind something of useful value. I gave nothing.
You provided funding for a useful currency, just as the early investors in Facebook/Google provided funding for useful internet services.
Zuckerberg and Brin created useful tools with practical daily applications. My funding did nothing to help create the currency or the concept or the software.
Your funding gave the currency market value which made it more attractive to merchants. You helped its adoption along. Your funding also provided for hashing power to secure the currency.
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It simply paid off earlier participants (who likely created nothing) and put me in a position to be paid off by later ones, while I meanwhile created nothing. That's exactly how a pyramid scheme works, and yet we know those are detrimental to society.
Pyramid schemes provide nothing for society. A secure currency provides a medium of exchange that facilitates trade. For a currency to get a large enough user-base and attain a high enough value to become useful in large-scale commerce, it needs early adopters/investors that will use/invest-in it.
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And if me exploiting this community this much with just 25,000 BTC was this lucrative, just imagine how lucrative it is for whoever is holding those 2,000,000 BTC in their original generation blocks.
It's not exploitation since you provided value in making an early investment.
Quote from: casascius
How is my example beneficial? In profiting from BTC, I have given nothing to society.
You are creating an incentive to try to find and invest in companies/products/assets that have fast appreciation rates. This results in more value and innovation in the long run.
It does? How did me taking money from others help innovation? It would be different if those others gave me money to help me create something. That is not the case, I created nothing.
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Zuckerberg and Brin got rich in the process of giving mankind something of useful value. I gave nothing.
You provided funding for a useful currency, just as the early investors in Facebook/Google provided funding for useful internet services.
Zuckerberg and Brin created useful tools with practical daily applications. My funding did nothing to help create the currency or the concept or the software. It simply paid off earlier participants (who likely created nothing) and put me in a position to be paid off by later ones, while I meanwhile created nothing. That's exactly how a pyramid scheme works, and yet we know those are detrimental to society. In a pyramid scheme, some take, and many others get taken from... all voluntarily... all while nothing, or nearly nothing, of intrinsic worth, is created. How exactly is this good for society?
And if me exploiting this community this much with just 25,000 BTC was this lucrative, just imagine how lucrative it is for whoever is holding those 2,000,000 BTC in their original generation blocks.
You provided funding for a useful currency, just as the early investors in Facebook/Google provided funding for useful internet services.
what about me? i've never bought or sold a bitcoin, but i mined about 12000 of them early on. what did i provide that's of any value? presumably your answer is more than 'securing the block chain', which was at best of hypothetical value and, more realistically, was in fact of no value to anyone.
this is turning into an ideology argument, there's a subforum for this
There is? Can it be true? How I've longed for a "Hello, I'm new to Bitcoin, and I have some really bad ideas to fix things that I think are broken because I don't understand them" subforum. Oh, happy day!
Avoiding long-term holding of the main currency of trade to avoid inflation is an inconvenience. The point is the decision to use or not use a fiat currency does not come about through absolute freedom of contract. Your choices are limited and constrained by mandates.
as i said, the point is apparently difficult to understand, but it is not a 'fiat' that forces you to use dollars to trade with others. it's your choice and other people's choices - exactly the same kinds of 'choices' that may affect the price of coins in the current chain and that will likely turn that chain functionally into a pyramid scheme, even though the bitcoin technology has the potential to be so much more.
(also, as an aside, it's just not true practically that it's inconvenient to avoid holding dollars or other fiat currencies. i can't imagine anyone with significant enough holdings to care about long-term inflation saying that. the costs are low and the effort is trivial. i do it routinely without a second thought.)
in any event, my point is that if you don't like using dollars in daily transactions, then by your own critique you should blame the 'private' parties that are asking you to pay in them, not the government. in america, there are only two required uses of dollars: to accept debt payments and to pay taxes. that is insufficient on its own to lead to the sort of 'convenience' factors that you're describing. it's fundamentally people's 'voluntary choices' that are making your life inconvenient.
Quote from: unk
you don't have to hold them long-term and experience inflation.
Avoiding long-term holding of the main currency of trade to avoid inflation is an inconvenience. The point is the decision to use or not use a fiat currency does not come about through absolute freedom of contract. Your choices are limited and constrained by mandates.
Quote from: casascius
How is my example beneficial? In profiting from BTC, I have given nothing to society.
You are creating an incentive to try to find and invest in companies/products/assets that have fast appreciation rates. This results in more value and innovation in the long run.
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Zuckerberg and Brin got rich in the process of giving mankind something of useful value. I gave nothing.
You provided funding for a useful currency, just as the early investors in Facebook/Google provided funding for useful internet services.
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GREAT! So I should feel good that I can buy a Ferrari for nothing thanks to Bitcoin, right?
Yes, you should. The example of your success is beneficial for society, as it creates an incentive for others to try to develop the next big thing. What do you think motivated the Mark Zuckerbergs and Sergey Brins of the world? Mark Zuckerberg was motivated specifically by the success of the Napster p2p network.
How is my example beneficial? In profiting from BTC, I have given nothing to society. I have only taken. Zuckerberg and Brin got rich in the process of giving mankind something of useful value. I gave nothing. I didn't invent Bitcoin, I didn't do anything other than perhaps share my opinion that cryptocurrency (as a concept) is sound, something I'd have offered for free. And yet I was able to receive goods and services in exchange for nothing. What is that an example of? Promoting the idea that others too can receive goods and services in exchange for nothing? Unsustainable, and the basis of a pyramid scheme.
The difference is you KNOW how much bitcoins could possibly flood the market at any given time. There will never be more than 21 million, so the worse case scenario is that many are suddenly sold off. It can never be more than that. The Fed can print trillions of dollars and expand the money supply many fold over a course of decades. The inflation of dollars never ends, and through the force of government mandates, you have to use them over alternatives.
you don't have to hold them long-term and experience inflation.
casascius's analogy is apt. as i've pointed out many times before (though it is apparently a difficult point to get people to understand), nobody is required to hold federal reserve notes long-term and thus experience the long-term inflation that is so often critiqued here. in other words, all the 'inflation' that everyone's railing against is completely 'voluntary' in exactly the same way that people are claiming bitcoin is. it would be nice if people's criticisms and arguments were at least consistent; e.g., if you assume every bitcoin sale is fully 'voluntary' and that no pyramid scheme is possible with bitcoins, you should at least assume that anyone holding federal reserve notes long-term is doing so voluntarily. merely needing them to pay taxes means you stand to benefit from inflation at the point in the future at which you need to convert whatever you're holding instead into your fixed dollar-tax liability.
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GREAT! So I should feel good that I can buy a Ferrari for nothing thanks to Bitcoin, right?
Yes, you should. The example of your success is beneficial for society, as it creates an incentive for others to try to develop the next big thing. What do you think motivated the Mark Zuckerbergs and Sergey Brins of the world? Mark Zuckerberg was motivated specifically by the success of the Napster p2p network.
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Let me say what you just said, but instead, substitute Federal Reserve notes:
Quote from: amincd on Today at 05:06:32 am
An asset that provides economic value to the vast of people who buy it, like Federal Reserve notes doesn't fit this description.
Quote from: amincd on Today at 05:06:32 am
An asset that provides economic value to the vast of people who buy it, like Federal Reserve notes doesn't fit this description.
You're taking this out of the context of my overall argument.
As I noted earlier, the Federal Reserve note gets its value through mandates, not purely through voluntarily exchange.
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If the asset can lose value on somebody else's whim, is it as squeaky clean as you say it is? The USD is scorned because Bernanke can turn on the printing press and steal a little bit from every holder of dollars out there.
If an asset can lose value in the short run through a sell-off by a big holder, then that makes it inherently less valuable, and this uncertainty will be priced into the market price for the asset.
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If that weren't so, running the press would be good not bad! I scorn BTC because the holders of those 2M+ virgin coins can move them at any time. The outcome (hyperinflation) will be identical.
They can move it exactly one time. After they've spent it they will have no control over subsequent transactions.
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If the Federal Reserve suddenly pumps $30B into the economy and says, "We didn't just print these, honest! We printed them years ago and have just been saving them for a rainy day and just didn't tell you all about them"... will it make a single iota of difference in the hyperinflation outcome? NO
The difference is you KNOW how much bitcoins could possibly flood the market at any given time. There will never be more than 21 million, so the worse case scenario is that many are suddenly sold off. It can never be more than that. The Fed can print trillions of dollars and expand the money supply many fold over a course of decades. The inflation of dollars never ends, and through the force of government mandates, you have to use them over alternatives.
It essentially voids the purchasing power of all the easily mined coins so that those coming into Bitcoin now do not have to plan on having their purchasing power vastly cut when those old coins come out of their generation blocks and onto the market.
That’s correct, but the situation will essentially be the same later on. People will call for the same thing when it’s 200k Bitcoin users instead of 20k. Should it really be done this way?Quote
How so? This proposal does not call for a change to the mining rewards, so inflation would be exactly the same. And what's "freicoin"? German for "freecoin"? Nothing would be given for free, so I don't get it. What I want is a system where ten early adopters with a combined BTC balance of 3M BTC or more, who are 100% silent in the face of "who's the richest here", don't have an undeserved claim to a third or a half of my purchasing power. Is that too much to ask?
No, it was meant as a version of Freigeld with demurrage. And I don’t see why it would be undeserved for 10, but for 100 or 1000 it would be? So it really boils down to the "problem" of having a fixed money supply.Quote
That, and 10 people aren't sitting on 1/3 to 1/2 of the world's gold supply having acquired it trivially, waiting to "retire" with it.
I don’t know about the distribution of gold. But in the end, it should turn out to be the same with Bitcoin, when those Bitcoin colossuses spend their riches, right? Quote from: cascasius
By that logic, all pyramid schemes are legal and ethical because each person parts with their money voluntarily.
Pyramid schemes are unethical because there will necessarily be more loser than winners. An asset that provides economic value to the vast of people who buy it, like a useful digital currency, or Google shares, or Facebook shares, doesn't fit this description. It isn't unethical just because those who found it early and risked investing in it subsequently profit more than others.
GREAT! So I should feel good that I can now buy a Ferrari for nothing thanks to Bitcoin, right?
Let me say what you just said, but instead, substitute Federal Reserve notes:
An asset that provides economic value to the vast of people who buy it, like Federal Reserve notes doesn't fit this description.
If the asset can lose value on somebody else's whim, is it as squeaky clean as you say it is? The USD is scorned because Bernanke can turn on the printing press and steal a little bit from every holder of dollars out there. If that weren't so, running the press would be good not bad! I scorn BTC because the holders of those 2M+ virgin coins can move them at any time. The outcome (hyperinflation) will be identical. If the Federal Reserve suddenly pumps $30B into the economy and says, "We didn't just print these, honest! We printed them years ago and have just been saving them for a rainy day and just didn't tell you all we were sitting on them"... will it make a single iota of difference in the hyperinflation outcome? NO
Please explain why your "antidote" would turn out any different in two years. The mining scheme internally stays the same in your proposal.
It essentially voids the purchasing power of all the easily mined coins so that those coming into Bitcoin now do not have to plan on having their purchasing power vastly cut when those old coins come out of their generation blocks and onto the market.
What you want is inflatacoin or freicoin imo.
How so? This proposal does not call for a change to the mining rewards, so inflation would be exactly the same. And what's "freicoin"? German for "freecoin"? Nothing would be given for free, so I don't get it. What I want is a system where ten early adopters with a combined BTC balance of 3M BTC or more, who are 100% silent in the face of "who's the richest here", don't have an undeserved claim to a third or a half of my purchasing power. Is that too much to ask?
I don’t understand the fundamental difference between Bitcoin and Gold in this regard. The only difference is a large and mature market.
That, and 10 people aren't sitting on 1/3 to 1/2 of the world's gold supply having acquired it trivially, waiting to "retire" with it.
Quote from: cascasius
By that logic, all pyramid schemes are legal and ethical because each person parts with their money voluntarily.
Pyramid schemes are unethical because there will necessarily be more loser than winners. An asset that provides economic value to the vast majority of people who buy it, like a useful digital currency, or Google shares, or Facebook shares, doesn't fit this description. It isn't unethical just because those who found it early and risked investing in it subsequently profit more than others.
By that logic, all pyramid schemes are legal and ethical because each person parts with their money voluntarily.
thanks, casascius. there's far too little sensitivity to this sort of concern in the forum generally.
people who opine on the importance of voluntariness with only a surface-level understanding of both contract law and economics may benefit from reading more broadly. a good contract-law casebook, coupled with some reading on the notion of externalities (including what are called 'pecuniary externalities') may be enlightening. we don't get to live in ideal systems just because we dream of them; pragmatic arguments about policy need to be evaluated in the real world.
and rezin, i have to add: talking is a form of doing. i'm not sure what 'do it already' adds to the conversation. we are providing ideas and considering their merit. to say that isn't 'action' of some sort is counterproductive. i've already said i'd be happy to contribute code but will be a little too busy to do it personally until about a month from now. (in any event, the needed coding isn't very difficulty, and i expect it to be done before the end of the summer anyway.)
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