Topic: The Writing on the Wall - page 2. (Read 9848 times)

Nicely written... though a bit theatrical.

Bitcoin is part of a meme shift of unparalleled proportions. Information has escaped a draconian stage and everyone who views Bitcoin sees a facet of this newness drawing everyone down the rabbithole. Cavalier attitudes are garnered for the way some profiteers have played their hands, while other attitudes are thinly disguised intent bought and paid for by who knows.
If I told you a little know program developed to be some joke about banks or world finance would devour such feverish attention in a tiny span of time, you would think me daft. Information is coming out of the darkness and into the light. That is what Synaptic was sent here to control.
In this thread there are several handlers that try to drive conversation along well-thought out lines of challenge. Everyone else is just along for the ride. This Dragon is a "methane" dragon full of foul stench and hot upon every challenge. There are plenty of other dragons in other postings. Last Saturday many Moderators had their profiles spoofed as quick clones. I saw Atlas appear as Atas, Alas, _Atlas in a matter of minutes. Me thinks we have professionals that will simply goad serious posters to endless depths and chase newbies off at any cost.
The media fails to cover their own shark-infested comment sections, what makes you think they care about ours?
This is not a battle to be won, the battle was over the minute that a new meme escaped the realm of human thinking. This meme is just the edge of a sword, the strike of a match, the dust of a tempest, and a distant echo of thunder. Weeks of Synap'tick won't change that, so how do you like them apples?

You just don't get it do you?

All of you kiddos have this incestuous love for bitcoins and keep saying that a family that plays together stays together.

Well guess what dude, bitcoin is fucking dead to the eyes of the public now. That's it. What happened today is the end of anything that was going to happen in the wider market.

I'm not over-reacting in the least bit.

See me in a week/month/year and tell me I'm wrong.

Those who hold the most Bitcoins have created them with computing power, NOT by exchanging them for money. Where was the real capital behind all of this? Before you jump to the "but gold was the same" argument, know that gold had value among the world long before the Goldrush. It's not the same thing, by a mile. This is the fallacy.

This isn't the first time mtgox got attacked.  The attack in Oct 2010 was actually far more disruptive than this one because the result was that mtgox users could no longer deposit or withdraw USD for several weeks.

Absolutely, this is one of the more fascinating inventions I've ever seen.  Also maybe we can find in it something we believe in and put that in our arsenal of things we are actively attempting to will into existence to make the world better/more beautiful/more fair/more fitting with some preconceived notion of the way the world works/whatever...

It's funny, Bitcoin seems to be (or is definitely about to be) one side of what I assume will be an epic battle but in itself it's a huge battleground with so many sides laying claim to it for so many different reasons.

An axiom is what you base your logic on. How far down does logic go? Is it turtles all the way down? Each step being preceded by a perfectly logical step before it, preceded by a perfectly logical step before it etc.

First, we're arguing about what went on inside another person's mind who we have never met before, which is necessarily an argument based on faith.

Second, the turtles all the way down argument: his logic had to have been based on something right? And that something couldn't really be based on logic or else that wouldn't be what the logic was based on but a step in the logical system he created.

Third, why is faith a weakness? He had an idea, however it came to him, he had that idea and then (I assume) he decided it was the right idea and an extremely powerful idea and he didn't doubt himself, or at least he didn't doubt himself to a point that kept him from seeing his idea through to its manifestation in the real world. That takes a huge amount of faith. That is not a crutch but a massively important virtue. Faith and Will are intertwined and without them all the logic in the world won't get you out of bed.

One of the biggest problems right now in our world I think is that people have an unquestioning and unanalyzed religious sense of Logic and Rationality and Science that makes us attribute all sorts of completely unreasonable things to them and to think that important dimensions like morality can be emergent traits of systems as long as these systems follow logical paths.

all any of us can do by surrounding ourselves in this is sharpen out minds.

An axiom is something that is considered obvious, yet is unproven. I don't think that it is evident that at any point there was an aspect of his work that was unproven to him, if he could envision the entire project and then set about to create it, then faith was never involved any more then i have faith that when i combine the ingredients of a cake and stick it in an oven that it will become a cake. I think that by calling part of what he did faith it gives one an excuse to not be able to create something just as amazing oneself, as if he was 'given' something instead of him 'earning' it through sheer hard work. As if he got lucky that his faith was correct and someone else could work just as hard and merely not be lucky because they had 'faith' in the wrong thing. Faith is a roll of the dice, logic creates weighted dice that land the way the creator of the dice wishes. Bitcoin is to wonderful for me to be able to chock it up to luck or chance, it is a carefully planned piece of art work, a machine.

I guess one of my points is that both the lovers and the haters of Bitcoin are appealing to logic to support their positions. And both sides have proponents who reason impeccably... and those who reason horribly so it's best to look deeper and broader to examine what it is we're doing.

No, faith is what defines the axioms and logic is how they derive a workable system from their axioms. My guess is Satoshi created the seed of his idea with faith (epiphany?) and used what seems to be an amazing gift of logic to flesh it out into a system that (my faith tells me) will basically blow up the authority structures defined by the previous faith based monetary system. How are faith and logic antitheses to one another? My view is that they are different dimensions of a powerful system (which Satoshi has created).

Asking me why I'm here is a fair question, so I'll answer it.

I was drawn to Bitcoin as the idea of a "digital currency" was very interesting, and from a technical standpoint, the design and implementation of Bitcoins themselves is very impressive - perhaps there are technical faults with the network itself, but I wouldn't know as do not have the level of technical skill to fully appreciate what they've done.

The problems I have with this "game" is that there has not been any meaningful use of this technology, apart from attempting to anonymize illicit transactions. I believe that this largely stems from the failure of those creating the bitcoin "system" (although it may not have even been in their interest to do so) to provide a means of liquidity. Initial adoption through mining is quite an ingenious way to disseminate Bitcoins, but no other infrastructure was put into place to allow adoption of this currency. Add to that the forced deflation of the currency by a solid cap on the upper limit of Bitcoins, and Bitcoins became nothing more than a system where by growing media exposure allowed for unsuspecting later-adopters (like some of the poor saps here) to inject USD to buy coins and pass value downstream to the miners. Those who hold the most Bitcoins have created them with computing power, NOT by exchanging them for money. Where was the real capital behind all of this? Before you jump to the "but gold was the same" argument, know that gold had value among the world long before the Goldrush. It's not the same thing, by a mile. This is the fallacy.

Regardless, that wasn't even the biggest problem. The biggest problem was/is security (as I mentioned in a thread yesterday). I don't feel like repeating myself, so you can go read that.

Now, I stay on here, to hopefully convince some unsuspecting person not to piss away their life's saving or tuition (as someone here has apparently done) on this gambling.

How far back does this faith go? did satoshi use faith or logic to create something that has allready impacted the entire world so greatly? Faith is what people use when logic looks like to much work for them, this is why you often see faith and hate so often on the same side of an argument.

Insofar that none of the logic is based on anything quantitative, I agree with you. Even if we call it faith, this forum seems to be trouncing one faith in favour of another when there is no reason to do so.

People here have got to see the other side of the coin (no pun intended). If they just want to deny the obvious then that is more likely to lead to this currency's oblivion than anything else.

This forum is starting to sound like the Iraqi Information Minister. In the eyes of the world = laughable.

Insofar that none of the logic is based on anything quantitative, I agree with you. Even if we call it faith, this forum seems to be trouncing one faith in favour of another when there is no reason to do so.

People here have got to see the other side of the coin (no pun intended). If they just want to deny the obvious then that is more likely to lead to this currency's oblivion than anything else.

This forum is starting to sound like the Iraqi Information Minister. In the eyes of the world = laughable.

What "logic" does it fly in the face of? I think that there are a million different sets of axioms flying around here and people are using them to derive logics of all sorts which are all necessarily based on faith (including yours and mine)