Apr 16
So NBC has a new show Hannibal and in the second episode we have a mushroom psycho that buries people alive named “Eldon Stammets.”
I find this upsetting given there is a respected, if not visionary Paul E. Stamets, Mycologist. http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world.html
Cool show and all but this pissed me off.
I’d say Paul deserves an apology and a fat check/percentage of every rerun.
Posts like this one illustrate the double-edge sword of freedom itself, in the context of a technology designed expressly to resist authority.
Given that bitcoin allows for great ease of manipulation outside the context of hacking due to it’s diffuse and anarchic nature I predict there will eventually be two distinct markets for bitcoin. The dark and the light. Light traders will trade on open markets what trade anonymity for assurance of “fair” play. Dark traders will play in the unregulated playground of the dark net with all the risk and rewards that entails. There will be professionals and amateurs on both sides.
Indeed in a way you can already see this. Many exchanges have distinct tiers for users who are willing to identify themselves and users who aren’t.
It would be wise to not fall into the trap of assuming that refusal to disclose identity is equivalent to announcing malicious intent. But since when have people ever been wise?
There will be translators selling and buying from one to the other.
One advantage of bitcoin’s blockchain is the ability to detect patterns and manipulations by their impact. Eventually it will be impossible to both manipulate the market and hide the fact from the market that it is being manipulated. Eventually the tools will adapt and participants in the market will have a choice of responding (or not) with (automated?) buys and sells. Some will respond by attempting to thwart manipulation while others will attempt to cash on on it as well. Still others will carry on as usual without regard for either case because their purposes will be more utilitarian than speculative. (Like currency converting pizza buyer for example.)
The exchanges that offer the best tools in addition to standard quality will fare better than their peers. The double auction, and built in graphing/forensic tools and manipulation detection and disclosure systems are exactly the kind of tools I mean.
To those who would gripe in a pro-authority way that bitcoin is weak precisely because such freedom exists, I respond by saying that I’m glad this is the only real option, as obviously the authoritarian approach creates again and again a worst of both worlds scenario. (See stock exchange/financiers circa 1602-now. See also: Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke) I think a large number of legitimate people will choose to live in a deregulated and darkish world where crime is obviated and technically prevented as opposed to an authoritarian world where bad behavior is marginally “punished” or otherwise merely deterred. (Cryptoparty+bitcoin?) It would behoove exchanges and the like to develop and provide these tools asap both individually and collectively. It would behoove bitcoin advocates to ask for them.
As I’m sure you know there was a recent explosion of interest in bitcoin leading to a short lived but sizable bubble. Poverty conditions forced me to sell my coins around 13$ each back when that was market value. As of this sentence they are at 108$ each, and during the bubble they got up over 200.
(If you don’t know what a bitcoin is start here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Introduction)
A quick Google of bitcoin leads to some truly hilarious crap. Bitcoin haters crack me up. The total value of bitcoins right now is just under 3 billion dollars according to Forbes. At what point will the haters admit it’s a real and viable thing? I mean if I made 3 billion dollars with my writing. I think it would be fair to say that at a minimum I was a successful writer.
In my opinion, at this point, informed bitcoin hate is a nearly flawless ulterior motive detector. Including some people who I think are hoping to exploit their influence among investors to suppress the value of bitcoins so they can secretly buy them more cheaply.
Sure investing in bitcoin to X degree might be a bad idea for Y group of people, but that’s true of any investment.
What I can assure the world of is that bitcoin value will NEVER hit zero because I promise to buy whatever is up for sale if that ever comes close to happening, just for bragging rights. And I’m sure I’m not alone there. So then it behooves us to think about other “worst case” scenarios above that threshold. The price set by people who are willing to say “meet my arbitrary/fixed price or take a hike” as a whole more or less divided by outstanding coins represent the floor and there is no going below that floor precisely because some people are irrational.
And that’s completely aside from all the other reasons bitcoin has utility above and beyond all other currencies. I’m not even going to try and lay them out, I’m just saying there is a rising baseline wholly independent of what you might call market pressures. I would literally burn physical money before I sell my last bitcoin. It will not leave me by my choice for anything other than life changing money/technology or a black swan event. I have a price, everyone does, but a drop in bitcoin value relative to the fiat currency of my country, is a non-factor.
I consider my last bitcoin my first bitcoin, a status symbol from when I was lucky enough to value something now at 100$ each that was at the time 5$ each. It’s also a piece of history and a piece of my era.
Bitcoin for me and many others has become not just an investment, but a symbol. And there is just no getting people to give that up once it becomes true for them. Bitcoin in this sense has become a little bit like firearms. They have utility and market value but for some, including me, they have also come to have meaning above and beyond the nuts and bolts of their function and operation.
They are a non-violent attack on banks and all architects of debt and oppression. They are a clear and present danger to anyone who wants unilateral control over your assets. They are a leveling factor. They are a protest song. They are proof that the information wants to be free. They are the best chance for a resurrection of real class class mobility my generation has ever personally seen. They are the future.
And call me crazy but I don’t ever see the value of a symbol which represents those things going under 20$ a share again for any meaningful length of time.
Now I do expect bubbles and crashes, technical problems and political problems, and I’ll admit that a severe enough combination of those factors could cause the price to temporarily dip below that new lowermost level, but I don’t believe it would ever stay there. And I think that level will rise.
I look at it like this. The total size the the global economy is somewhere around 70 trillion. The maximum number of bitcoins cannot exceed around 21 million. You divide one by the other and you get a ratio of around 3.5 million USD per BTC. So if around 10% (by asset, not population) begins treating BTC like a legitimate currency you’re looking at a possible value well over a quarter million each.
With potential like that it’s going to take something truly catastrophic to permanently kill its value. And I’m thinking that if something that big happens to us we might all be dead already anyway.
Which reminds me of my favorite whine about BTC being worthless. The zombie apocalypse argument. The crux of which is to remind me that I can’t spend BTC in a black out. (Forgeting the fact that I can’t use an ATM card during a blackout either, yet they remain popular.)
These people seem to forget we are an interconnected species and we only live in our current numbers because we have collectively learned to capture economy of scale. Think about NYC. Now imagine putting a wall around it and not letting anyone or any item in or out for 10 years. After that 10 years are up what do you think the population would be inside the wall? If you said something like “probably zero because nyc lacks farms” “or probably zero because of the fire/plague/riot) congratulations. You have a better grasp of reality and the price of interconnectedness and urban specialization than the ZA survivalist type.
Something like 90% of all existing currency is digital already. All the world has to decide is whether or not unilateral government control of a currency adds to or subtracts from its value. And the nature of bitcoin prevents the government from meaningfully participating in that decision. Sure they could declare war on it, and there are lots of discussions out there about how to kill bitcoins. But I don’t think it can be done or else someone would have done it by now.
The idea of killing bitcoin reminds me of something my dad said once about what it would take to exterminate kudzu. “You’d have to kill everything green.”
