Topic: Krugman: Is the Computer Revolution Coming To a Close? (Read 4993 times)

Interesting, kaku is a brilliant man and I believe what he is saying. However growth never really stops. It may be the end of exponential growth of "classical computers" but their are other gateways such as quantum computing. Maybe in 20-30 years quantum computers will be made available for everyone and who knows what new advances in computing will be discovered.

So when Krugman says
what he really means is

Photonic computing will be ready one of these decades.

I expect that Krugman would grasp the major concepts of Bitcoin in about 5 minutes...and likely already has.  They are vastly more simple than the complexities of Keynesian economics that he adheres to.  I think that Krugman is on a dead-end along with the current monetary system which is due for a re-set.  Further, that he is probably well aware of this.  But that would not necessarily present itself in his writing in part because it would not serve his purposes which are, at least in his opinion, in the best interests of the American public.

The geniuses who invested in BTC "stocks" and pirateat40 are certainly far wiser and greater people than Krugman.  I should just ignore him and pay attention to people I've never heard of instead.

Let's hope we learn to make use of graphene when silicon reaches its limits.

you DO realize the we're reaching a limit for silicon CPU frequency, right?

Don't expect Krugman to really grasp complex concepts as this one. Here is an accurate description cited from Erik's blog:

http://evoorhees.blogspot.com.es

I think its like any other frontier: most of the easier technological advances have been exploited almost to the limit. Real progress will become more and more difficult with diminishing returns per R&D dollar.

I'm guessing that Kaku is right about milking silicon technology to the limit (and I'm not holding my breath for quantum computers to do almost anything useful in my lifetime.)

I think that one mistake people make (especially those Bitcoiners who are relying on Moore-like principles to solve all problems) is to assume that just because technology exists, it will be readily available.  If anything, what technological improvements that are in the cards will likely produce major and potentially terminal challenges to Bitcoin as it is currently implemented.  As always, just, my gut feeling.

The Collapse of Moore’s Law: Physicist Says It’s Already Happening

As nice as that sounds, I want to see
#4 Decentralized living, end of government monopolies and big corporate : now and onwards

That guys a idiot. How can he think the computer revolution is coming to a close when technology is growing at an exponential rate?

What damages your thesis (or would...see below) is that there is relatively less reason for people not to hold their own BTC and thus have counter-parties, necessary for fractional reserve schemes, involved.  This contrasts with gold in that there are very compelling reason to relinquish control of the medium to a (supposedly) secure custodian.

Of course as it becomes less and less practical to hold one's own BTC, and more and more common to rely on bank-like entities due to the scaling issues popping up, this principle is muted.  A potentially saving grace is that what one actually has are private keys and certain solutions do not require complete surrender of value.  But then again most people are to lazy and/or uneducated and/or not sufficiently paranoid to prefer such solutions I'm guessing.  In any event, a bank-like entity could likely gain control of many people's secret keys by offering some 'interest'.

I am skeptical that Bitcoin can/will permanently change the world in this way, even if it became very popular for a while, if only because bank notes and a new fractional-reserve lending system could easily be constructed on top of Bitcoin (using BTC, instead of gold/silver, as the base asset in terms of which notes are denominated), and, if, at some point, a sufficiently powerful government lacked enough BTC to redeem its outstanding notes, it could simply "close its BTC window" (just like Nixon "closed the gold window" in the early 70s) and then we'd be right back at fiat currency again.  Then we'd be in a precarious situation again, vulnerable to the threat of inflation, just as we are today with the (formerly gold-backed) dollar.  The mere existence of a cryptocurrency like BTC doesn't preclude new fiat currencies (historically derived from it) from ultimately winning out in the marketplace for currency, any more than the existence of gold did.

Yeah I was a bit confused when reading the comments here.  Krugman starts out the article by saying he disagrees with the viewpoint that there will be no more IRs, and proposes a robot labor force.  I have no idea what's wrong with this article - robot labor forces might even be able to generate bitcoins!

A credible threat by a population to choose an alternative to 'legal tender' is, I believe, an immensely powerful thing.  Much more relevant today than what the founders of the U.S. came up with back in the late 1700's when they were mulling over the problems of balances of power between the citizenry and the central government (that is to say the 2nd amendment which is, insofar as it is an invitation to revolt, a pretty unusual thing to have codified in the 'design documents' of a government.)

Anyhow, that is probably the biggest reason why the solution of peer-to-peer crypto-currencies has such a draw to me.  As a potentially credible 'poison pill' against centralized tyranny.  OTOH, it opens the door for more localized tyrannies....so who knows how things could turn out...

Ya, I'm feeling forced to consider the cloud, or worse, putting trust in (and pay fees to) operators I do not know in order to use Bitcoin.  The block-chain is currently 50% of my monthly total network allowance...and I pay extra money to double it else it would be close to 100%.  Of course if I were careful I would not need to download the blockchain monthly or burn my traffic allotment supporting the network, but growth trajectory is such that the end is in sight.  For me.

A real problem with P2P is that in the case where there is an adversarial relationship between classes (which is the only case that is worth putting much thought into whether or not it has cropped up in a major way so far) people are reliant on network providers as a means of struggle.  It's a certain FAIL to rely on one's adversaries for arms.  Now, of course, alternatives like the cloud are that much worse, but anyway...

Although side-band solutions like mesh networks sound good, the technical challenges to getting them working at all, much less to the level of service we've come to enjoy from commercial carries, and much much less to actually keeping them operational in the event that they are needed, are vast.

To me, the most interesting lines of development are ones which are designed to be extremely tight and thus possible to thread their way through commercial networks unmolested.  Bitcoin is NOT on that trajectory and it really detracts from my appreciation of the future potential of the solution.  In a bad case at least...or put another way, in the case where we actually *need* the solution.

I have a feeling the exact opposite is happening... everything is moving to 'the cloud', traditional p2p filesharing services get shut down, people are moving from torrents to download sites or to usenet. And the list goes on...

Nope. Ultimately it's still just exchanging goods/services for other goods/services. A concept that's been around since before governments or even taxes.  Now, you could argue that it's highly efficient exchanging thanks to the global and instant method thank to it being digital...but then it would just piggy back on the computer revolution.  

By your logic, giving a chicken to someone in exchange for a haircut is REVOLUTIONARY.  

Though, I can see that people who like Ron Paul might have a distorted idea of the definition of "revolution".