Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 331. (Read 2032265 times)

If you desire BTC and micropayments. The target market desires only the smartphone. Shoehorning through deception rarely creates mass movements. Somebody at 21 Inc flunked Marketing 101.

The elite are trying so hard to get the developing world onto the electronic currency in an accelerated timeline but they can't erase the natural inertia of the developing world.

It takes me numerous instances of repetitive teaching just to get people here to understand what message forwarding does. They don't even know how to enter a URL in the browser, they search the url in google! They don't easily adapt to a new site with a similar paradigm of sign up, sign in, send message. If the UI is slightly different than Facebook, they get confused. In my site they are not asked to input an email address on signup/in and instead their mobile. This confuses the hell out of them.

The adopters of crypto are in the developed world. We are the movers and shakers. Sorry Dirty Larry.

Which is non-existent on both economics and Bitcoin amongst the target market segment.

And you don't have a shred of hope of educating them in a premature acceleration. I've tried and realized it was futile.

You focused only on the less salient point that I made. My point is energy efficiency for excess heat is not a target market in the developing world. Severely resource constrained people don't heat their homes, they wear extra clothing instead. They use cold water for the most part, or boil their water in a pale, or us a hot water heater at the shower head which only runs a few minutes per day. Go take a look around your area and confirm it for those who are not wealthy enough that the savings is irrelevant to their core opportunity costs. For those who can afford to heat their homes, the opportunity cost is only going to make sense for a fraction of them. It is an incremental target market, not a huge sweeping one.

Please make sure you understand my point about tsuris and opportunity cost before retorting me.

A lot has happened since then more than 50% of the world's population now live in urban environments. I'm from Africa and electricity is more prevent than water, moreover cell reception is more prevent than electricity, cell reception is ubiquitous and governments are spending a lot of printed money to bring electricity to urban areas, I can't see your vision because it conflicts with some things I see that are tangent to your circular view of the world.

I agree that is the only market target that makes sense.

I guess it is true that we are forced to plug in our phones often because we use the damn thing incessantly. Yet i think they will need to increase the battery size else they risk some consumer rejection (also a warm to the touch phone may be undesirable at least in hot climates), although it is disheartening the level of tsuris that users here put up with on their cheap smartphones (e.g. single core molasses).

I don't see how adding millions of nodes which are not fully nodes adds to decentralization when this micropayment volume can only accelerate blockchain size increase thus accelerating the degree of IBLT centralization of mining. Unless the BTC is not going to the users, but...

The device makers core vocation is not running pools so of course they will outsource that. The Sybil pool attack is alive and well.

Appears to me the only way this scales quickly is to give the BTC to the providers and the free phones or connectivity to the users. Thus this is not a network effects paradigm for Bitcoin. If they instead give BTC to the users, the users need to first buy the phone and connectivity, which would not scale in the developing world. I can't get anyone here to put up their own capital for anything. It is always I must pay them first to do anything. They have no capital. Probably they will do a split that gives a token amount of BTC for micropayments to the users. That could create some network effects. Such a micropayments ecosystem will require some time (24 months?) to gain critical masses inertia. The users are not entering the deal for the BTC, but for the free connectivity or phone price discount. Many may ignore the token level of BTC as tsuris. It is much better to market a micropayments ecosystem to those who need it badly (which is my plan).

The economics doesn't work well. It doesn't drive a lot of demand where it didn't exist before. It is an incremental attempt. But it is a wake up call that the bastards are trying to think of a way to enslave the developing world.

Edit: I see smooth made a similar point:

Wanted to hear of your opinion of why billionaire VC's only claim to hold a few coins in public and invest millions into BTC companies.
Is this their way of taking a bet and hedging against Bitcoins failure? Wont their ROI be better just owning BTC.
Is there more money to be made building services around Bitcoin than the store of value property of BTC.

In this video: http://livestream.com/theNYPL/bitcoin Fred Wilson and his wife claim to own 500 - 1000 Bitcoin.

Anyone want to refute this guy:

http://www.clearmatics.com/2015/05/no-bitcoin-is-not-the-future-of-securities-settlement/

Only sort of valid point he brings up is the Sybil attack.

I have never seen in a developing country a centralized water heater for a home, except for the wealthy. It is also the one at the shower head that only runs for a few minutes per day. Often developing world homes don't even have separate hot and cold water lines run through the home.

The market for energy efficiency is not the developing world because they already conserve energy where it would be significant. Most of the electricity is expended on the refrigerator and perhaps the TV and electric fan at least in the tropics.

Home heating in cooler environments perhaps, but I doubt they heat their homes in Ecuador or Nepal rather burn firewood and wear heavy clothing. I have been in the mountains in Guatemala and the major city. That was 1993 though. I was in Cali, Colombia in 2001.

And will you even have internet connectivity in all rural and slum areas of the developing world.

Enjoy your dinner, you're describing first world problems, $50 goes a long way in the 3rd world.

 :-) Does ________ quality as "digital influencer" it's one of the fiew growth opportunities in the job market at the moment.

Sorry I don't have time for that. I will spend $100 on dinner tonight for my guests. Opportunity costs.

Btw, my water heater is already installed. No time to hassle with replacing it just for $50 in monthly Bitcoins that I have to hassle with and figure out how to report on my income taxes, etc..

It isn't my core vocation. I focus on my core vocation of ________ which nets me $4,000+ per month.

Didn't I make it clear from my upthread posts that I was talking about fact that heat has to be transferred to the environment over spacetime, and the assumption of the integral of transfer being contained with the duty cycle of the effective use of the heat may not be perfectly aligned. If I am not mistaken the differential temperature is one of the metrics on the calculation of the spacetime performance characteristics of a thermal exchange.

Smooth retorted that for example the miner could be turned off before the use of the hair dyer ceased, but that is not a fungible use case of the normal usage of a hair dyer where I don't need to inform my hair dyer how many minutes I will be using it. He also retorted that the thermal exchange with high air flow was sufficient to obviate my concern in that example case. I am not sure if my concern is obviated in all cases. Nevertheless I moved on from that point to argue the more salient point that the efficiency gains are irrelevant or insignificant to the markets they apply to.

Just a fiew posts back I gave cypher a reason - free instillation and subsidized electricity (cash in your bank account), to me that's win win.

I believe you've missed my point. Users of water heaters don't have an incentive to install these devices.

It's the price of bitcoin that driver the energy input needed to secure the value stored on the blockchain it's competition that drives efficiency, utilizing the heat just gives individual miners a relative advantage to be more profitable.

If efficiency a market driven phenomenon causes centralization, that is a reflection of progress, it is not a failure of the protocol.  it will still be disrupted every 4 years.

It is difficult to argue for benefits. It is reasonable to argue that Bitcoin is already so centralized it doesn't matter. Any case, I think the entire concept fails on the economics. Mass movements are not created from offers of incremental improvements. Humans have too many opportunity costs on their attention.

The most vulnerable market is the developing markets where people there lack enough capital for the basic things they want.

In that case the price of Bitcoin would plummet, because the efficiency is not registered with the miner and thus they are not a HODLer and rather a seller. And you remove all that existing hardware from the market cap.

Rather I think you will find there just isn't much interest because there is no significant efficiency gains for the miners (100% of 1% = 1%) and they have opportunity costs on their time, hassle, etc.

This is trying top-down shoehorn something that doesn't fit into a market.

That's why we have the halving, the efficiency comes as a byproduct of the protocol. There are no industry's that can not feel a disruption when production costs stay the same and output is halved.

The only miners that will be competitive are the distributed ones with distributed costs.

Buy an established pizza restaurant and keep your oven filled with waste heat from mining. Problem is that the cost of that heat is a small portion of the operating cost and hassles of the business.

Stirling engines are very inefficient (compared to combustion engines) otherwise transportation might be a viable market. Adding unfocused heat to a combustion engine lowers the efficiency.

This is why smooth's efficiency arguments are irrelevant.

The Knowledge Age is not about physical constraints. It is about mental ones. Our ROI is coming from our mental efforts not incremental tangible efficiencies. I wouldn't waste an hour of my life on saving $10 a month. My opportunity cost is too great.

we joke but you know what?  this is one of the most important things that caught my eye back in Jan 2011 and why i got into Bitcoin back then:  the sheer, raw, unadulterated ingenuity of miners.  those videos of guys with equipment scattered all over their garages or basements, cords everywhere, fans blowing loud as hell, nuts, bolts, screwdrivers lying in wait.  these guys will do anything to make money.  that's what convinced me of what a true grassroots movement this is.  no gvt is going to have the willpower or manpower to go and kick in all these guys doors.  it just can't be done.  and yes, while mining has become more industrialized and more professional, these same guys are still the ones pointing their custom asics at the pools.  they are still independent.

Cropping what he wrote doesn't help you. It is clear to me he was asking what the overall economic point is, and he introduced energy efficiency as one of the aspects that doesn't give him a holistic understanding. If you then argue that efficiency is improved in irrelevant and insignificant markets, you create holistic myopia instead of understanding.

Larry Summers participation is irrelevant to whether there is a usage case for the excess heat which makes a significant economic argument. I can't think of such a usage case.