Topic: What the Early Adoptors Don't want you to know - page 4. (Read 8637 times)

Has truthcracker responded to the multitude of questions about how a "fair" distribution would be?

Btw, since the number of active users are growing, it's certain that earlier adopters have more coins than late adopters on average, but that doesn't mean that it would hold for individuals. I suspect most devs have much less than miners that came actually later. I don't see them whining though...

now you are making me wonder is i should just forget about bitcoins for now

Everyone who uses Bitcoin anytime in 2011 is an early adopter. Probably 2012 also.

I guess I'm an early adopter? But I don't care what you know.
Oh and now I'm an early adopter at my local food co-op. As such I get a good deal from my farmer. Also I bought into some radio frequency licenses early on and now my shares are worth more than if I bought them today. 

"The early bird catches the worm."

Yes, I had already looked at bitoption.org.  Nothing worthwhile is there for buying, and I won't be leaving open orders to write contracts unless I can babysit the market 24/7.

The other thing I thought of is mining contracts, which are effectively short BTC.  I could sell a "mining contract" with no hardware at all, and purchase the BTC to cover it at a later time.


This is a good point.  I was wrong, that the nature of the vehicle (anonymous cash) does not really prevent lending.  It's the trust that the lender has that they will be repaid, which could be interpersonal trust, legal recourse, or maybe collateral.

Lending is about growing trust with third parties, not so much about the type of money involved.

So if you withdraw cash from an ATM off of your credit card (therefore, a loan), the bank doesn't care whether they could ever trace the serial numbers on those particular bills later on.

With bitcoin, even though the money can be almost anonymous, the users don't have to be.  If you so chose, your brokerage could know all your relevant details, and you could know theirs, and if you failed to send them bitcoins you lost in a bad short trade, or to meet margin calls, or whatever, in many countries they would be able to pursue collections through the legal system just as they could enforce their contracts with those paying in older currencies.  (Contract law is about agreeing to do something beneficial to both parties, and the law doesn't reject agreements just because they might be unusual.  That is, except where politicians may react by restricting the legal rights of bitcoin holders.  In that case, your broker must fall back to a "sorry, no more business with you" stance.)

Amazingly, since senders and recipients can actually undeniably prove whether or not bitcoins have been sent and received as promised (see below), your broker would have to wait at most a few hours before beginning collections, rather than the 90 days it can take for some banks and money order companies to confirm & process claims.

(However, even though it's possible, I'm not advocating running to authorities to enforce bitcoin contracts.  We should solve these problems mostly with technology.)


Now back to your regular bank that totally loses track of their paper bills once they hand them over the counter to you.

Tracing that money might be easier with bitcoin, since there's a globally available database tool called Block Explorer that anyone can use to see certain aspects of the entire history of every "coin".  To a very foolish criminal, a bitcoin bank could conceivably say "You're actually still holding the money we gave you, so you can pay it back!" -- something impossible with paper currencies.  However a careful user's privacy is only slightly compromised.

(This also could allow you to verify YOUR bank is still holding YOUR money separately for you as agreed, but only if things were set up with that in mind.  I don't want to mislead anyone into thinking you can do this with today's companies like mybitcoin.com, which tend to pool the funds they receive.  Once funds are transferred even once after you deposit them, they can* become vastly harder to trace unless your "bank" takes steps to help you do so.)

*For completeness I should add that there is a peculiarity in the bitcoin client which may leave unexpected traces if someone sends funds directly back to themselves after receiving them.  This is processed differently from standard transfers to other parties.

The seen and the unseen.

Let's say that we take the OP suggestion that btc's design creates or created an unfair distribution.  I ask the following with no malice intended and am just interested to know what an alternative might look like.

What would an alternative cryptocurrency look like and how would interest in such a currency be promulgated?

Let's say further that this cryptocurrency was introduced with a finite supply.  How would it be distributed with a subjective fairness or otherwise?  How would interest be generated for use by users, merchants, speculators, market exchanges, etc.?

Don't forget that this is new and has never been tried.  The design in and of itself whereby people mine to bring the currency units into existence builds interest in and of itself.  That is IMO brilliant.  Then the market makers follow providing liquidity and then hopefully more minds are focused on the challenges to make this useful in POS systems, online sales, gaming, etc.

The fact that I can accept a payment wile vacationing in Vietnam by somebody working on a ship crossing the Indian Ocean while my wallet is on a USB stick in a safe in Mexico City and then confirm the transaction online is simply mind blowing.  

Also this endeavor must be compared against the use of fiat currency which are at this time the most widely used tool for commerce .  This is somewhat philosophical but so was the original question.  Centrally controlled inflationary currencies are the single most criminal and destructive thing to be wielded against individuals throughout time other than outright murder.  They steal purchasing power over time in a hidden manner while reducing the ability for participants to effectively plan how to allocate assets and time thus throwing a wrench into the works of civilization itself and its progress.  Once the distribution of coins evens out over time this type of thing will seemingly become nonexistent.  

With regard to the benefits or detriments to fractional reserve banking I have not read the threads on btc and the impact to fractional reserve banking or lending in particular.  

It's good to be able to take brief short positions, although that is probably not the ultimate direction of this market, despite all the recent news.

Fortunately, it appears possible already.  Have you looked at https://bitoption.org/ ?  All bitcoin markets are in their early stages but already the machinery exists to buy put options.

Their FAQ explains how that's possible: "Is this Escrowed trading?  YES. You are guaranteed to be able to execute once you've purchased a contract."

Of course you said "reliably" and there you may disagree, because the site has so far relied on using the MtGox exchange.  But since these are separate businesses (AFAIK), they'll change that if enough of their users don't regain faith in MtGox.

what a bunch of rear view drivers   

Maybe try here:
https://bitoption.org

Truthseeker: Why is the initial distribution unfair? What would be a fair distribution? What changes do you think should be made for your hypothetical bitcoin II?

A very good commentary on the Doug Casey interview posted above:

The Economics Of Bitcoin – Doug Casey Gets It Wrong
http://webabuser.blogspot.com/2011/06/economics-of-bitcoin-doug-casey-gets-it.html

The initial distribution was unfair. Bitcoin's are still have advantages over every other currently existing medium of exchange.

You'll get over it.

Yes, everybody not agreeing with you is either inserious or crowd aka idot.

Your "sorry" makes it only worse.

I read this thread subject in this guys voice

Any new technology has early adopters who invest time, effort and money to make it successful. As it is usually the case, the early adopters will profit more than late users. This is not something characteristic only to bitcoin. Actually (IMHO!) the users with the largest stashes of bitcoins are NOT the early adopters, but the ones who first developed GPU mining. There were some users who were doing it long before the first open source miners were released etc. However, I don't think the system was designed to give an advantage to early adopter, it's just how things work in real life 

The fact that 25% of the bitcoins are owned by 10 people does not make vendors want to subsidise this otherwise worthless stock.  THEY are creating the value, and the coins are only worth what THEY say you can spend them on.  No, this is the only way to get it up and running.  The rest of you have just give cash to people who generated coins for free, and you'll be left holding the tokens.

The better model is to get vendors and customers interested via market research first, target groups of people you know want the service then launch it.  This 'service' has the conceptual mantra of a religion with suitable punishments for the heretics, trance like followers and a wary population.

Aint a choice between the two.

I'd say truthcracker knows more than 95% of people around here.

I've been looking for a way to reliably take a short position, but anonymous cash does not really lend itself to lending.