For all I know, computer types were first attracted to bitcoin for the pleasure of helping to test a smart solution to an old technical problem.  Then libertarians got interested because they saw in bitcoin a way to build an economy independent of  government and banks.  Then drug users and sellers adopted it as a way to pay for drugs without the DEA knowledge (so they thought).  At some point, others noticed the value going up like crazy, and bought into it as a get-filthy-rich-quick scheme.

I suspect that a majority of the people in this forum are from the latter group.  The finite supply of bitcoins is important only for that group, because it is part of the argument that "proves" that the price will be astronomical one day.  But it is not essential, even to them; that argument would have been only a little less convincing if the supply was programmed to increase 5%/year, forever.  So much so, that they are not bothered by the current 5-10% inflation rate.

IIRC, ordinary members were not consulted in Brock's election, were they?  It seems that his election was an unwelcome surprise to many.

Is this the kind of math that is supposed to make bitcoin work? 

It is all a matter of degree.  If you spend most of your income within a month, and invest the remainder, you will hardly notice an inflation of 5%/year.

Yes, Brazil too had a bank account freeze, around 1990. That hurt  a lot.  But it was not so much a consequence of inflation, rather a very stupid attempt to curb it.

Many people were hurt badly when the current unit (the Real) was devalued 50%, immediately after the president was re-elected.  The Real was guaranteed to be "inflation-free", pegged to the dollar, and therefore  bank savings were no longer corrected for inflation.


Hoarding currency is a very stupid way of saving. 

Saving is a tax on workers: you work now, but instead of buying a car right away with your salary, you buy it only months or years later; in the meantime someone else uses that car.  That may benefit capitalists, but what drives capitalism is productive investment in factories etc., and what makes the capitalist economy spin is spending, not saving. 

Inflation is a diffuse tax, whereby government takes from society an amount equal to the amount of currency that exists times the inflation rate.  Each person pays that tax proportionally to the amount of currency that he has and how long he keeps it before spending it.

Like any tax, inflation tax not inherently evil: a good government should give it back to society as public services and infrastructure.  A  bad government may waste it (for example by rescuing failed banks), or use it for evil ends, but that is a separate problem.  But it is debatable whether inflation tax, as way to support the government, is more fair and effective than revenue tax, consumption tax, etc.. Experience seems to say it isn't: countries that abuse it generally have lousy economies.  Anyway, it is not a simple, black on white issue.

 

Sorry about that, sometimes my other personalities get on my nerves.  Never mind.

My holdings are easy to compute: I learned about bitcoin ~350 days ago, and I have been doubling my hoard every day since then. 

I am not the Great Manipulator, of course.  Watashi-wa Nakamoto Satoshi-san desu, but don't tell that to anyone.

I used those, and several other versions of the currency, each defined as 1000 of the previous unit.  IIRC, at one point inflation got to 40% per month [ sic ].

But guess what, the economy kept working in spite of that.  badly, of course, but it did.  Sorry if that disappoints some, but civilization did not collapse.

And people did not get utterly ruined.  No sane person "invests" in cash; when the inflation gets too high, banks will offer inflation-corrected savings and investment funds, that allow fast deposit and withdrawal at any time.

Inflation, like salt on food, is good in small doses, disastrous otherwise.  It must be just big enough to dissuade people from hoarding the currency.  Inflation of 5% per year requires adjustments in salaries and prices, each year or every 6 months, and must be explicitly taken into account in planning or contracts spanning many months.  Beyond that, inflation begins to be a real pain: prices and salaries have to be adjusted all the time, people must rush to invest the salary, etc.

The last paragraph in my quote above is not mine, of course; it was inserted by @walsoraj.

A weird sense of humor, or the desperation of a bag-holder? 

But it is true: I did sell all my BTC to invest in XRP, months ago.  And I have been doubling my XRP holdings every day since then, as I did before with BTC.

The problem would be if they DIDN'T pay.

But what is the sense and point of saying "we only accept bitcoin" if they use Bitpay?  To accept bitcoin they don't need BitPay.  If they use BitPay they receive dollars, not bitcoins.  No?

It would make sense if they received bitcoins from members and THEN used BitPay to pay their expenses.


I wonder whether thay paid the fee (if they did) before or after they voted as Platinum Member.

If KnC used Bitpay, shouldn't BitPay have sent dollars to the Foundation, rather than bitcoin?  (But TBF promised to take only bitcoins, didn't they?)

Could it be that KnC paid the invoice "timely" well after the election?

Back in april I made the following plot, using the data from this thread:



The bitcoin price is 10 times the nominal share value (top red line).  The the pink circles are the actual BTC holdings, as published by SMBIT every now and then.  The blue ascending curve that interpolates those circles is their BTC holdings day by day, as estimated by the Original Poster.  The steps and jerks in that line may be artifacts of the interpolation method. 

I don't think it is viable to correlate their buys with the market movements: the data is too coarse and uncertain for that.

Bitcoin was meant to be an e-payment method (decentralized, trutless, etc.).  A fixed bitcoin supply is not necessary for that goal.  Indeed, bitcoin is being used in that role, in spite of still having 10%/year inflation (and even higher in the past).  And dollars and euros work fine as payment methods, in spite of their "horrendous" 1-2%/year inflation rate.

Thus, the argument that "raising the emission limit would destroy the value of bitcoin" does not sound convincing.  Hoarders would be very unhappy, of course.  Miners, however, may someday find it advantageous, especially by the time they are expected do depend on transaction fees instead of block rewards.  Block reward is steady and predictable, whereas fees depend on transaction volume -- which will probably shrink substantially if fees became mandatory.   People who use bitcoin for payments may not care, or may prefer block rewards because they provides "free" transactions.

It has been argued that, if some miners tried to change the protocol, the rest of the network would stick to the old one.  However, this correction mechanism has never been tested, and it seems difficult to predict what would happen, in all possible scenarios.  (After all, it was "proved", with the same certainty, that altcoins would die as soon as they were born.)  What if those "some miners" had 70% of the hash rate?  What if a large subset of the users became convinced that the change was necessary for the health of the network, or got some immediate benefit from it (such as no-fee transactions)? What if payment processors and merchants accepted only the "new" bitcoin?  

(By the way, some bitcoiners seem to be trying to convince people to adopt bitcoin by telling them that money sucks.  I sense a problem with that marketing strategy: it seems that many people have used money sometime in their lives, and may even have enjoyed the experience -- unlikely as that may sound.  )

Nothing to coment on Marc Andreessen specifically.  My objection was about the implication "he defends bitcoin, therefore he is a good guy".

Wait, all the fellows in the Bad Guys list did that.  Even Mark Karpelès.

That is one of the things that attract so many scammers to bitcoin.  Many bitcoiners seem to assume that "those that say bad things about bitcoin are bad guys, therefore anyone who praises bitcoin must be a good guy."  And they give him their coins, without even asking his real name.

Not everyone who praises Jesus is a honest Christian. Not everyone who praises bitcoin is a honest bitcoiner.



 

Or (just to ask a stupid question) is it rather fun that is supposed to be trivial?

A gaussian is just a parabola in log scale.  So, here is the result, in linear and log scale:


 

(Seriously now: these are NOT my predictions.  The point of these plots is only to show that the choice of the mathematica model (straight line or parabola, linear or log scale, ...) determines the conclusion about future prices, even before the fitting.  In particular, by choosing a straight line, one will necessarily conclude that there "must" be another huge bubble "soon".)

Should we fit a parabola through those three points, and see what it predicts? 

2014-06-05: 660 USD/BTC
2014-11-05: 330 USD/BTC
2015-04-05:

#trollout 

Intersango:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=317729.msg6618948#msg6618948
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140034.msg1490385#msg1490385

Bitcoin Savings & Trust:
https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2013/comp-pr2013-132.pdf

The MtGOX collapse alone ate 660'000 BTC, about 0.2 billion dollars at today's price, 0.5 billion in February.