Well, the Italians blotched it too, several times ...

You may (or may not) enjoy this

[ click on the image for a bigger non-truncated version ]
But of course the architecture is not accurate, and the symbols are totally anachronic...
[/quote]

Why didn't you answer with a question?

Well, true, that could happen too...

Why wouldn't it be real, namely fog (which is just low clouds) over Dubai, photographed from a tall skyscraper or helicopter?

The blue part explains what non-bitcoiners mean when they say "Bitcoin is a ponzi".

The red part says what bitcoiners usually reply to that.

Both sentences are true descriptions of what the two communities think or say about the issue.  So there is no contradiction.


I am pretty sure that the Ancient Greek philosophers who invented logic would not invest in bitcoin, even if (or especially if) they understood how it works... 

The first sentence in the Wikipedia quote is the definition.  The rest tells what ponzi operators usually have been doing. It is not part of the definition, and nee not be true for something to be a ponzi.

Bitcoin does have an organization: the collection of miners and other players, that interact according to a definite protocol.  It does not have a central authority, true, but note that the Wikipedia definition does not requre one.  

Bitcoin surely pays return to investors (and that is why most bitcoiners, including most people here, invest in bitcoin).  It does not pay dividends, but the Wikipedia entry does not require that either.  The key thing in the ponzi is that the profit of early adopters comes entirely from the investments of later entrants.  

Bitcoin certainly requires an increasing flow of new investment money to pay the mining bills and to enable the early entrants to spend and sell the coins at a profit.  Mining alone now consumes 1 million dollars per day of new investment.  If the price were to rise 10x,  the mining network would consume 10 million dollars per day, still coming entirely from new investments.  The extra investment going in now, above that 1 M$/day -- say, another 500'000 $/day -- feeds the profit of those who bought at 30 $/BTC and are cashing out now.  In order for the current investors to make the same level of profit, more investors will have to be found that will buy bitcoins at 3000 $/BTC, providing 5 million dollars per day.  And so on.

New investors are obviously lured with the "almost certain" prediction of fabulous profits, "guaranteed by math", "critics are retards or statist shills", and so on.   How many bitcoin entrepreneurs and holders are now saying that the price may never again rise above 270 $/BTC?  What do they say instead, when asked about future prices?  (Didn't the Winkles say "maybe a trillion" to reporters? )

So, bitcoiners may quibble at whether it fits exactly the definition of a ponzi, or whether it is another knind of pyramid scheme, or belongs to a new category of its own -- but the essence of Bitcoin, as an investment, is the same as a standard ponzi: some people will get rich by taking money from new investors, which are lured by the promises of fabulous profits.

EDIT: Sorry, I posted this before seeing the other posts that say the same thing.

A veterinarians's paper cited in that WP article says:


So there seems to be some reason to think that cats reach terminal velocity at relatively low height (8-10 stories); that the terminal velocity is quite a bit less than 100 km/h, perhaps half of that; and that a cat could indeed survive a fall from the Empire State Building (if it does not die of boredom along the way  )

"Terminal velocity" is the maximum velocity of a body as it falls through air.   Mathematically, the velocity at ground increases with the starting height, but beyond a certain height the increase is negligible.

The article says that (1) the terminal velocity for a cat is 100 km/h and (2) that velocity is pretty much attained when falling from 5-6 stories.  One of these must be wrong, since a cat falling from 18 meters (6 generous stories) in vacuum would hit the ground at ~70 km/h only.

Great! 

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was taken for granted that humans would soon be colonizing the Moon and other planets, and space travel woudl become as banal as air travel in those days, and that getting out to space  should be the first priority of mankind, etc..  I recall a Life Magazine timetable, provided by space specialists, that predicted of humans landing on Mars by 1980.

Well, that was a naive prediction, of course.  With better knowledge of the limitations of human physiology and of space travel technology, that schedule had to be pushed to an indefinite future.

But, mainly, knowledge of the true character of the Martian environment, the experience of all those years of manned space programs, and the development of robotic vehicles, have caused many people to realize that the wish itself was naive.  People asked themselves, why do we exactly want to land and live on Mars; and the answers were no longer as easy as they were in the 1970s.

Scientific research?  Robot vehicles can do it better and much cheaper (for one thing, we do not need to bring them back).  Ensuring mankind survival from a catastrophe?  A space colony will, for many generations, be infinitely more fragile than humans on Earth.  Political independence? A space colony will be unable to survive without lots of support from Earth.  Freedom?  Life in a space colony will be like in a penal colony, only worse.  Making money? There seems to be nothing out there that would be worth mining and bringing back...

So, it turned out that, in the 1970s, we did not quite know what "colonizing space" meant.  Once we understood it better, the wish largely cooled off.   It is quite possible that, in a more distant future, technology will be developed that will make us again want to colonizing space and the planets; but today that no longer a common dream.

Sure, there are still a few enthusiastic scientists and amateurs who keep pursuing that dream, and some state and private projects that cater to them.    Even for those enthusiasts,  space flight seems to be more like a stunt, a nerd's version of climbing Mt Everest, than a dream of living their life in space.

This disillusionement stared already after the first few Apollo landings, when the scientific returns decreased and public got bored. The manned Space Shuttle still made sense at the time, but after the two disasters it came to be seen as a bad idea, and it was allowed to die without offspring.  When the International Space Station project started, there were already many who saw it as a colossal waste of money, that would not bring any significant return, economic or scientific; that would be wasteful even for the purpose of perfecting the technology of manned space travel.  And I believe they were right.  NASA was developed basically to realize the Apollo project, but the ISS project was developed basically to justify the preservation of NASA's budget (and the revenue of the manned space industry). 

So, I think that the wish for eternal youth is naive in that same sense.  Not that it is impossible or somehow "wrong", but that it is based on a fuzzy and probably wrong idea of what "ethernal youth" really means, and why we should want to have it.  Do we wish to live forever as we are, or should we want to become something else?  Do we want to to be children forever, or to grow up?  Do we want to live forever as dinosaurs, or to become monkeys?  How can we change radically, while remaining the same individuals?


But natural evolution did define the average length of human life, just as it defined it as 12-15 years for a cat, or 100-150 years for a Galapagos turtle.  There is nothing teleological there; that lifespan was obviously the best one for our species in our native environment (and note that it is pretty universal -- there are no environments or human populations where people are old at 20, or still young at 200).

Natural selection also resulted in all parts of our bodies and minds being designed to last only that long, because it would be a waste of resources to make them more durable, or self-repairable beyond that.

The fact that technology so far has only doubled our average lifespan (largely by eliminating predators and diseases, and by providing abundant healthy food) actually shows that the obstacles to life extension, even in the biological sense only, are rather formidable. Again, it is not just a matter of preventing the shortening of telomeres...


Sorry, by "you" I meant the bitcoin community in general.

And you seem obsessed with reading things in my words that I did not write, even when I write just the opposite...  Where did I say that we should not be immortal or ethernally young?  Where did I say that things should not change not evolve? Where did I say that we should not improve our lives?  Where did I say that life and youth extension are impossible?


I know old people who say that they are tired of living, and obviously mean it, but would never kill themselves because that takes quite a bit of courage and cold blood, because it is a sin, because it would be bad for their family, because there is the possibility that tey may still be needed or get some unexpected hapiness, because they don't want to part with their dear ones ...  

  Guns aren't lawful;
  Nooses give;
  Gas smells awful:
  You might as well live.
    -- Dorothy Parker

I wrote explicitly that we are absolutely not adapted to our present environment...

I guess that you are missing the point.  We cannot be eternally young while being the same human beings that we are now.  As one gets old, memories and experiences change our view of things.   When thinking about things like bitcoin today, I cannot avoid recalling what I read and thought of nuclear power, space exploration,  nulear fusion, artificlal inteligence, etc, over the past 50 years, and what happened to them.  Those memories and the conclusions that I got out of them are what make me today.  But it is also the past memories and experiences that make old people more cynical, careless, less enthusiastic, less focused, etc. -- even if the intelligene and clarity of memory remain the same.

(For example, my 4 years as head of department changed completely my view of universities and humans, for the worse...  Sometimes I wish that I had not gone through that experience, and retained a more positive view of some of my colleagues; but at the same time I don't want to forget what I learned then...  It is because of such experiences that I cannot share the respect that you have for people like Gavin, Sielbert, Adreeessen, Antonopoulos, etc., even though I am not aware of them doing anything really wrong...)

So, what does it mean to "be eternally young" --- erase one's memories, and be forever enthusiastic and naive and inexperient as a 20 year old? Or keep piling up memories for centuries, and becoming every time more bored and cynical, thinking more and more about the past rather than the future,  etc? Or modifying the brain in some way, so that it can continue putting up memories without somehow becoming overburdened by them?  Neither option seems to be exactly what we want.

I ask again: if a dinosaur could choose, would it choose to become a monkey, or live forever as a dinosaur?

  Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.
      -- Albert Einstein


I don't know what you mean, but clearly the average length of our lifetime is the result of millions of years of evolution.  While it can be stretched a bit with current technology, our bodies and minds are not built to last more than that.  As in an old car, all the parts start to fail after some time.  (It is not just the telomers getting shorter...)  That average lifetime is clearly what natural evolution found to be best for our species (and all mammal species I know of) until we started making fire and bows.  Since then, it is not clear where evolution is taking us...


Of course.  It is only the libertarians who tell others what to do, like whom they should quote or reply to.  

However, natural evolution does not care for technology or individual wishes, and will continue to work even if reproduction in the future wil be through and Merkle chains and USB ports, rather than DNA chains and whatever.  Things that reproduce and adapt more effectively will reproduce and adapt more effectively.  Darwinism is so powerful because it is only a tautology.  "Guaranteed by math.."

Actually they are a most remarkable people, much more "optimized" than we are.  And they obviously know it:
[NSFW]https://web.archive.org/web/20080617201322/http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/chapter1/Senti-man.jpg

I would not say "undesirable".  I put "want" in quotes because species and natural evolution have no desires (thanks Lamb for seeing that  )  It is just that being mortal is part of being what we are.  


It may be hard to believe, but, after a certain point in life, that desire usually goes away.

But yes, we generally hate succumbing to old age and death, just like we hate getting sick and weak.  That wish must be a naturally evolved trait too, like "you must leave soon, but, as long as you are here, you must try to be as useful as you can" --- and that includes remaining as fit and healthy as you can.

It is not different from how companies treat their older employees.  Indeed, retirement is the corporate version of natural death.  It was invented not for the good of the individual, but for the good of the company: a barely delicate way to remove the old guys whom no one dares to fire, and open space for new blood.


A finite lifetime is nature's solution to make space for new individuals.  Aging is a consequence of that.


Yes.  

Natural evolution is constrained by the laws of physics.  Organisms in most species are optimized to very tight margins, the result of millions of tradeoffs.  We cannot have bigger brains, for example, because that would require many structural changes to the body, different wiring plans, longer learning times.  A bigger brain would need more oxygen and food, hence better ways to get those things there, and would consume more energy.  Anyone who knows something about computers knows that you cannot make a modern processor by taking the design of a 386 and merely tacking more transistors to it, or increasing its clock speed.

A bigger brain might even make us dumber, because signals would take longer to propagate between different parts. (The data processing part of brain is actually the gray matter, a bladder about 1 foot across and 2-3 mm thick; the white matter is just wiring between different parts of this bladder, and the bladder is crumpled up into our skulls both for mechanical reasons and to keep those wires as short as possible.)

The body must not only function, it must also build, adjust, and repair itself.  Thousands of our genes get turned on only on specific cells for specific number of generations, or when those cells get specific chemical signals or other stimuli.  Some genes get turned on only when we are 13-14 years old, to set up and turn on the reproduction machinery; and some may get turned on at later age when that machinery is not longer needed and should be shut off.  

For each body part, nature must choose between making that part more durable and repairable, or using the necessary resources for some other purpose.  So, the cells that are destined to become sperm and eggs get better materials, more protection, more redundancy than cells that are destined to die with the individual.  Bones, muscles and skin are capable of repairing some damage; but only to a certain extent --- not every possible kind of damage, not damage that is too extensive or repeated too often.  Apparently, building the brain and nervous system is already such a demanding task that nature basically gave up on making it self-repairing, other than provide some redundancy and fungibility.

So, once nature "invented" the death of the individual, all parts of the body, and the mechanisms for development, maintenance and repair, got optimized assuming about the same mean lifetime.  That happens with human desiged objects, too: each part of a car is made only as durable as needed to last for the expected lifetime of the car.  It would not make sense to make seats of a high-tech material that could last 50 years, if the engine, crankcase, and metal shell are unlikely to be usable in 10 years.

In many species, that have been evolving for millions of years in the same environment, things have evolved to the point that death comes suddenly at a fixed age. For other species, mostly plants (and perhaps some fish), evolution apparently has found it unnecessary to provide for natural death, since long life happened to have advantageous (e.g. taller trees get more light) and accidental death was sufficient to open space.  For most vertebrates, however, the tradeoffs implied a finite but not strictly determined design lifetime.

Actually it seems that, for millions of years, we evolved for a lifestyle like that of chimpanzees, only perhaps in a more open environment like a savannah.  The invention of hunting weapons, fire and clothing changed our lifestyle a lot; we only had a couple hundred million years to adapt our bodies to that change, when the invention of agriculture some 12000 years ago turned our life upside down again.  Our bodies and mind are totally not adapted to our present evironment, and may never have a chance to become so.

Nature does not care for our sadness at seeing out bodies and mind falter.  However, in the millions of years before the first technological explosion, life did end suddenly for most hominids.  As soon as some key function became to falter, the probability of an accidental death -- being eaten by a lion, or falling from a cliff, or catching a fatal infection -- would skyrocket.  The expected lifetime for early humans may have been as low as 35 years or even less.  For the species, it was good (and sufficient) to let a few lucky survivors reach a more advanced age, to keep memories that might be useful in case of rare events like droughts and earthquakes.

(The Andaman islands between India and Myanmar are the home of the Pigmy-like Negritos, one of the few human populations that have changed little since the last ice age.  The islands were devastated by the tsunamis caused by the big Indonesian earthquake, years ago.  People feared that the Negritos may have been wiped out; but they survived fine, because their elders knew that tsunamis often come after a earthquake, so they all fled to high ground well before the waves arrived.)


Not at all. I am as unhappy at getting old as anyone else.  I am just pointing out that eternal youth (which implies eternal life) is a rather complicated concept, perhaps a meaningless one.

Does it make sense to wish for a car that will last forever?

Does it make sense to wish for your dear Volkswagen Beetle to last forever?

Natural evolution does not "want" eternal organisms, not even eternal species; it "wants" life to constantly evolve.

Death is a feature, not a bug.  It evolved in the last billion years together with sex and reproduction, as a way to clear up space for new individuals.

Maybe one day that "solution" will no longer be necessary, because we will have infinitely expandable space and resources for everyone to live forever.  But the fact is that humans inherited death from their ancestors, and have evolved their body and society around it.

Everything in our body and mind was designed and adapted by evolution assuming a finite life of ~80 years plus or minus 20 (rough guesses).  Total planned obsolescence.

Human lifespan has evolved to be among the longest among mammals, actually, because that was needed by our nature and life cycle: a bigger brain takes much longer to program, so we need 14-20 years of learning before we are ready to leave our family and start a new one.

And we live for many years after we are no longer needed as parents, because we still have some use as teachers, babysitters, sentinels, etc..

Aging is the decomissioning of body and mind parts that are not intended to be used beyond a certain stage in life.  Our very desires and values change, because we are meant to have different roles in society at each stage in life.  

If we were to live forever, we could not be the same humans as we are today, we would have to change our body and mind and become something quite different.

If a dinosaur could wish for eternal life, would it want to evolve to a monkey, or to be an eternal dinosaur?

Does a child of five really wish to become an adult? Or just do the things that only adults can do, while remaining a child?

I would rather say that wealth *is* real properties/posessions (including some "virtual goods" like copyrights, but let's ignore them forsimplicity), and services one uses.  Money is only tokens that can be exchanged for real wealth.  Money can be counted as real wealth for some purposes (e.g. estimating the wealth of a person or company), but should be ignored for other purposes (wealth ofa country).
  

Yes, I tried to mention that -- foreign trade is one area where currency devaluation obviously has large impact.  But that is only if inernal salaries and prices are not properly adjusted.  The loss you mention is actually due to the government taking away some of the citizen's wealth, by issuing more money.


Yes, discussions about national and international economy often seem to consider money as wealth, or are ambiguous/confused about that point.

I would think that the question of what is "real wealth" and what is just tokens that stand for real wealth does not depend on whether the government can seize it or not.  For me, "real" does not imply "permanent".  The government can seize your bank account, your car, your bitcoins, your copyrights.  That is just one of many ways in which you can lose your real wealth, or your tokens.   Your cow may die, your library may burn down, your car may be stolen...

In fact, I think that the desire for "permanent wealth", that cannot be lost or lose its value, is as naive as the desire for eternal youth or eternal life...

I don't know what you mean by "pegged". 

To a first approximation, if the dollar lost 90% of its value tomorrow, the US would not become significantly poorer.  Everybody woudl still own the same homes and cars and tamagochis, the same bridges and roads would still be there,  barbers and doctors would still serve as many patients as before.  By hypothesis, all prices would go up 10 times, and thus all salaries and fees would have to do the same.  (In the countries with hyperinflation, most people manageto survive somehow).

Such a massive devaluation would have plenty of secondary bad effects, for sure.  There would be all sorts of financial disasters due to contracts with fixed payments in the future, dollars held by or owed to foreign parties, etc.. People would need to carry and use a lot more banknotes when paying in cash.  The devaluation presumably would be due to massive emission of new currency by the government, which would result in wealth being taken from citizens, as a form of global tax on money holdings and unindexed credits.  It is these secondary effects that make high inflation and hyperinflation so bad.

But it is precisely because of the possibility of inflation, money printing, and wild excursions in currency exchange rates that one should ignore the money when evaluating a nation's wealth, and focus only on actual things and services.

Of course, central banks and economists who are interested in the money itself, rather than real wealth, will have a different approach.

As I have explained several times before: When you are computing your personal wealth, or the wealth of a company, or even the wealth of a city, it is proper to count banknotes, bank deposits, stock certificates, treasury bonds, and other tokens as wealth, together with the market value of your real wealth -- cars, buildings, furniture, jewelry, etc.  That is because such tokens can be exchanged with people outside the unit (you, the company, etc.) for additional real wealth.

However, when evaluating the wealth of a whole country, or of the whole world, it is wrong to include the tokens that cannot be exchanged with anyone outside that larger unit.   Just as you cannot count the chips issued by a cassino, at face value, as part of the cassino's capital.

Thus, when considering the cost of mining at the global scale, one must look first at the real wealth that is destroyed or created; not at the destruction or creation of of dollar bills and bank balances, which is of course zero.  Mining actually consumes electricity, that could be used to light homes or make aluminum; and electronic equipment, that must be discarded after a year or two of service.  Assuming that mining now must be barely profitable, if at all, we can estimate the dollar value of this consumed wealth as being close to 1 million dollars per day.  That is, the real cost of mining is roughly equivalent to demolishing half a dozen houses in my neighborhood, every day.

On the other hand, we defintely must consider the flows of wealth-representing tokens (mainly dollars and bitcoins) to estimate the transfers of real wealth between the various players.  The flows include the amounts paid and received by traders, the profits of miners, the fees charged by banks, bitcoin exchanges, etc..  However, in order to see the concrete effects of those flows, we must eliminate the tokens at the end of the analysis, and focus on the changes in the real wealth of the individuals that they imply.

Specifically, it is certain that, each average day, the "bitcoin system" must remove more than one million dollars worth of real wealth from some set of "losers", who end the day with less real wealth than they had a day before.   As said above, the system destroys somewhat less than 1 M$ of real wealth per day, in the form of electricity, equipment, and other goods and services that are irrecoverably consumed by mining and other activities such as running the exchanges; and that wealth ultimately must come from the "losers".  The rest of the wealth that is removed from "losers" goes to increase the real wealth of:
* the miners (as mining profits),
* the exchanges and other bitcoin service companies (as fees),
* another set of people, the "winners",  who find themselves richer than they were a day before.

Today's "losers" may become "winners" tomorrow, and then they may recover some of the wealth that they lost, and perhaps even become wealthier than they were before.  But, at the global and individual level, the things will not balance in the end; quite the opposite.  Again, as a whole, the bitcoin system takes almost 1 million dollars worth of real wealth per day from the losers, and destroys it.   Individually, the sets of winners and losers will tend to grow, and the wealth gained by the winners will keep increasing, and the wealth lost by the losers will keep increasing even faster.

Winners who leave the system with a profit, and do not come back, will never become losers; so the wealth that they took from the losers will never return to them.   As I said before, there seems to be no data at all on the magnitude of this "pyramid effect" of the bitcoin system, the amount of wealth it transfers from losers to winners (besides what gets destroyed or passed on to miners and skimmers).  However, we now that many people have left the system with considerable gains.  Given the volume of bitcoins that get traded each day, on the exchanges and privately, I would guess that the losers lose at least 1.5 M$/day, and the winners gain at least 0.5 M$/day.  Does anyone have a better estimate?


BRK is a holding, a company that only owns stock of other companies that actually produce goods and services - like General Electric, Fruit of the Loom, Coca-Cola, etc.   Apart from the indirection, investing on BRK stock is basically the same as investing on stock of all those companies. 

When you buy shares from BRK, you become owner (indirectly, but effectively) of a small slice of each of those companies.  You will also own the same slice of whathever each company produces -- a couple of blenders, a few cotton briefs, a few bottles of Coke.  When each compan sells those things, it gives the money to Warren Buffet, who takes his slice and gives the rest back to you.  When one of those companies invests some of the revenue in more equipment, new buildings, etc., a slice of those extra assets is also yours.  Finally, when you sell the BRK shares, you are selling those slices of GEICO and FotL and Coca-Cola to someone else.

So, the dividends paid by BRK shares, and any increase in BRK's share price while you hold them, are largely the result of real wealth created by those companies, either sold to their markets, or invested in their assets. Shares or BRK therefore can be counted as very real wealth, as much as your home or car.  In fact, they are  productive real wealth, that continuosly creates more real wealth for you.  On a very fundamental level, investing in BRK is not very different than buying a baker's oven and making and selling bread yourself.  Or buying a milk cow, or raising and breeding pigs.

But real wealth can be destroyed, so the shares of any of those companies, and therefore the BRK shares, may lose value unexpectedly -- e.g., if a factory is destroyed by fire, or the US government decides to ban carbonated brown beverages.  That is not different than your bakery or your home being destroyed by fire, or your milk cow being eaten by a chupacabra.  You become poorer -- that is life.

Your bitcoins, on the other hand, are not like BRK or Coca-Cola stocks, because they are not certificaes of property of anything.  They are more like bank notes of an exotic country.  They can be counted as part of your personal wealth, sure, but are nowhere as "real wealth" as a car, or a lot of BRK shares.  That is because the bitcoins, like foreign banknotes, will only become real wealth if and when you find someone who will accept them in exchange for real wealth.  Bitcoins are also unlike BRK shares in that they do not produce real wealth for you while you own them. (These two differences seem to be the reason why most experienced investors won't even consider putting their money into bitcoin.)

Bitcoins are more similar to the so-called "penny stocks": shares of failed or bogus companies that have no signiicant assets, whose products or services are non-existent or have insignificant value.  Owning a slice of such a company adds practically nothing to one's real wealth, and therefore the market price of such shares should normally be near zero.  However, strong or deceptive marketing may induce some people to buy them for a significant price; and then speculators may buy them too for a significant price, in the hope of finding such fools who will buy for even more.  While such speculative distortions may affect also the price of solid stocks, like BRK, they alone may sustain a substantial market price for some penny stocks -- at least for a while.

Bitcoin is supposed to have sort of an intrinsic value because the exceptional qualities of the accounting mechanism that establishes the current ownership of bitcoins, that consists of its miners and relay nodes.  Stocks, including penny stocks, also have an accounting system for that establishes their ownership, consisting of various ledgers and databases maintained by stock exchanges like NYSE and NASDAQ,  brokers, investment funds, etc..  There are many differences between the two ownership tracking mechanisms, such as who is in control, whether the owners are identified, whether transfers can be blocked or reversed, robustness against various types of attack, legal and police support, and so on.  It is debatable whether those differences are advantages or dsadvantages, and how much they are worth.  One main difference is the cost of maintaining the ownership records; which, as said above, is one million dollars per day for bitcoin, and a small fraction of that for a specific stock like BRK or APPL.

As said before, in order to get a rought measure your current wealth, it is customary estimate the dollar value of your material possessions, at their current market prices, and add all those amounts together with your bank accont balances.  Your stocks should be included too, because they are actually slices of companies.  However, is not very meaningful to include your bitcoins in that computation, because you can't know what will be their market value when you decide to spend or sell them.  (Strictly speaking, that holds for your other material possessions, too; but the future market price of a car or home is nowhere as uncertain as that of bitcoin.)  It is better to count your bitcoins separately from your dollars and other possessions with relatively stable value.


Trade was more complicated than now, because there were many more currencies in circulation, and the relatively slow communication channels made their relative values more uncertain.  However, the accountants of the Spanish Empire, for example, used a stadardized currency unit -- the "maravedi" -- from the late 1400s into the 1600s and beyond.  Originally it was a copper coin, but the maravedi remained in use as unit of accounting for a century or more after the coins disappeared from circulation.  Thanks to that standardization, and the extensive bureaucracy of the Empire, we can now learn, for example, how much Columbus's expedition cost, and how expensive it was in relation to the cost of other things.

Australia was a great involuntary experiment to test the theory that criminality is hereditary.  My conclusion is that the theory was thoroughly debunked by that experiment; but there are always those who deduce the facts from the theory, rather than the other way around. 

But aren't smaller groups easily influenced by smaller media?  

No, what I said is "do a trivial hard fork, then follow the protocol".  And explained what happens. Did you even try to understand that?

Once more, that is what Gavin did to fix the OP_MUL bug years ago.  That fork actually created a clone of every bitcoin that existed at the point of the fork, that was (AFAIK) dozens of blocks earlier than the most current block at the time.  On that occasion, everybody agreed that the old protocol was broken and the current blockchain was messed up beyond repair, so everybody started mining and using Gavin's new coins on the new blockchain, and stopped extending the old blockchain; which made the original bitcoins worthless, and everybody agreed that the new bitcoins were the true ones.

(By the way, the old branch, with all the old bitcoins plus the gazillion BTC TXO, must still exist on someone's hard drive.  Someone could start mining it again, just for fun.  On that "true true blockchain",  something like ~2^64 satoshis have already been created, well beyond the intended  ~2^51 limit.  But the old pre-fork software may need a few tweaks in order to swallow that...   )