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Bitcoin is the first technology for the final transfer of digital goods online, facilitating instant global payments without intermediation. Economics beyond Financial Intermediation: Where are these made? We can see them on the map. We are adding one Bitcoin ATM per day on average right now around the world. But it seems more people are buying bitcoin these days; we can safely ignore the recent Hearn debacle. How was it for you? And notice the addresses here, there are a few that start with a 3, and most of the rest start with a number 1.
The number at the beginning of the addresses tell you something. A 3 tells you that it belongs to a multi-signature wallet. You can distribute these keys around the world, or have your neighbor or a friend hold a third key for you while you hold two. If you lose one, your neighbor can still help you sign off on the transaction so it can be sent. It seems rather foolish. We could expect more multi-sig addresses to be taking up the top richest address spots in the next few years.
Not only is the key separated from the network offline , but you need to enter an pincode with on-screen obfuscated number pad, but also you need to confirm two times by pressing a button on the device before you can send money to someone.
You could take two and trust me to hold the third as a backup. For example, they could distribute 15 keys to members of the board of directors. Maybe they give one to a law firm they hire to arbitrate in the case consensus cannot be reached or if, heaven forbid, more than half of the board members die or lose their keys.
You can set the minimum number of keys needed to send a transaction to whatever you want: They use the same kind of chip technology and everything. As of right now, there is no standard way of securing your bitcoin with hardware wallets. The bitcoin ecosystem is still in its infancy, but it is developing quickly. What do you think about this? You can donate to any given cause around the world. But the developers in the space are working at a frantic pace to build it out and make it better and easier to use.
Listen to the audio: Bitcoin is a strong currency: The above-listed network effects can only serve to strengthen it. Speculative Attack, by Pierre Rochard. Bitcoin will not be eagerly adopted by the mainstream, it will be forced upon them. Contrary to popular belief, good money drives out bad. It will rapidly escalate into Class IV hemorrhaging due to speculative attacks on weak fiat currencies. The end result will be hyperbitcoinization, i.
So as you watch know that there is some oversimplification going on. Is it the Occupy protesters who are engaging in oversimplification, or is it the media that is oversimplifying their arguments? Not all of the Occupy protesters are anti-capitalist!
Thus, corporate taxes discourage growth and development in the economy. Personally, I believe growth and development in the economy are a good thing. Unhindered growth allows for innovation. Just look at the smartphone in your pocket. Any state-run phone company would produce half the product for twice the cost, and it would take twice as long at that! Fortunately for us, the Market always finds a backdoor or a workaround to allow innovation to continue. That was perhaps the first step in the dissolution of the telephone monopoly.
The Hush-a-Phone decision paved the way for and bit per second acoustically-coupled computer terminals, like the one shown below. One of the very first modems! That was the Carterfone Decision of The communications regulatory bodies in those countries clearly saw the benefits of allowing their citizens to connect new devices which allowed for both voice and data to be transmitted. But wait, it gets better. Personally, I want as many people in the world as possible to be able to purchase and own devices such as the Cherry Mobile Ace.
It is a form of empowerment through technology that nary a socialist would promote if they understood that only through deregulation can such things come to pass. They would have to relinquish political power and their thirst for it in order to allow such empowering trends to fully develop.
And whether we ever stop to think about it or appreciate it, the credit is due to Free Market Capitalism: People being incentivized to work and provide valuable products and services to one another of their own volition. People doing business without being hindered by regulations or sucked dry by the tax man for some vaguely-defined and for-all-intents-and-purposes bankrupt social contract. Just look at our public schooling systems, modeled as they were after Nazi Germany to encourage compliance, complacency, and the production of anti-intellectual, subservient factory workers.
It just drives me nuts. Innovation is not commanded, nor is learning imparted through coercion. Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
So who is responsible for this mess? The lobbyists and the lobbied are quite suspect. Increasingly, for me, the activists and the politically-active mainstream are too, though. Have things gotten tangibly better because of the state? It seems, instead, that the assumptions and presuppositions of the state are reinforced at every turn.
It takes a brave and steeled soul indeed to lock eyes with the system and keep on walking. Plutocrats and Peasants is what we are. To be a politician is to be a bought-and-sold man.
And to believe so fervently in the potential of another politician, another movement, to pin our hopes on some new Inflatable Jesus Figure each election cycle, are we not succumbing to Uncle Tom Syndrome? Let them believe they are making a difference, but avoid them like the plague at dinner parties. Reason is not automatic.
Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. We certainly have massive socioeconomic and ideological inertia propelling the prevailing, dysfunctional, political machine, but we also have a budding trend of disintermediation, divergent thinking, open-sourcing-of-everything, and a renewed optimism in the world. It becomes apparent when looking at many of the volunteer-based projects which have benefited humanity, say Wikipedia, or the Linux Operating System.
But there are True Capitalists who continue to raise the bar too: Elon Musk is one example. Did I mention he plans to travel to Mars himself in one of his rockets? There are other ways to pursue peace, order, and prosperity for our lands and our communities. They rest upon the nullification and disenfranchisement of the individual, as opposed to his empowerment.
To take from Ayn Rand again:. The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. A popular idea in our world today is that yes, I am inherently evil, that profit is inherently exploitative of, most certainly, my employees, but likely the environment, and the rest of my society as well.
What do people think is done with profits anyways? What should be done about these evil corporate profits, he asks! Profits incentivize and propel future business ventures. If you think profits are truly evil, then what you should probably do right now is this:. Surely the fat cats at the top are keeping all that money for themselves, right? Forbes did a breakdown of how Apple is using its huge cash reserves — all from profits — in order to evolve and stay relevant as a company:.
No one else could have done it cheaper. I find this baseless demonetization of profits tiresome. But, there is another more pernicious form of ignorance to contend with: That people readily dismiss how businesses compete to buy labor. Our naivete in this area leads to the creation of policies which fundamentally harm both minority groups and individuals: Because markets go where labor is cheaper, artificially increasing demand i.
Artificially raising labor costs through minimum wages hurts low-skill, impoverished, and minority workers the most. The law would simply gentrify the service industry, eventually getting to the point that only rich white college kids could work legally. Instead of lofting idealistic legislation into the congressional fighting pits, as in the example of Minimum Wage regulations, and hoping our proposal comes out on top, we should deregulate the markets so that more people can participate in them.
Innovation and wealth-creation cannot be commanded. We should stop trying to limit the market from doing what it does best: