What a false dichotomy. So people are either buying Bitcoin purely for its use as a currency or purely speculating? You're missing the forest for the trees.
Do you want to see real political and economic change in your lifetime? Campaign finance reform: not the answer. Term limits: not the answer. Voting Libertarian: waste of time. "Balance the budget": too little, too late. Political activism: occupy my asshole.
The only solution: flip societal power structures upside down, and let us geeks take the reigns.
Now, you may argue that everything is Hunky Dory like tptacky, but I'd beg to differ. We need real social and economic change, right now, to ensure our continued prosperity into the forseeable future, and we're just not getting it from Washington. Make excuses or justify a Big Brother Statist tyranny driven by propaganda and ignorance all you want, ultimately none of that shit works long term and meanwhile we have a lot less freedom.
What I find amazing is how people continue to push for political solutions like "term limits" while ultimately taking no action. Even as we lurch towards an obvious fiscal iceberg, undoubtedly responsible for the abrupt hike in tyrannical measures we've seen as of late, there are plenty of otherwise capable, intelligent people, and even hackers who are seemingly unable to abandon ship.
Whatever. History has shown the rich are always the first to leave. I suspect it's because they know more truths about human nature than some would like to believe.
Political action towards positive change is absolutely pointless. There's nothing any political party - not left, right nor libertarian - can do to stop America's path to inevitable fiscal crisis and subsequent self-destruction. Not with the political gridlock in Washington. Not with the bozo Ivy League clowns and TBTF banks running the show. Not with more and more people waking up every day to the corruption and lies spewing from the mouths of virtually everyone in Washington DC and all of their supporters and cronies. In short their shit just stinks too badly, and the average person has become too educated and capable to sit there and take all the abuse.
America is $16.5 trillion in debt and rising, and there's nothing you can do to make that debt disappear short of printing trillions more dollars to debase it and insodoing completely wipe out the average individual's savings, not to mention piss off other countries. All viable economic and political solutions are too little, too late. You'd better pray for our continued military might every night before you go to sleep, because that's the end game given the way things are going.
The only viable move for the U.S. elite is to sink America like Enron, and pray they can keep things under control. Thus the advent of tyrannical control measures.
Let the elite continue to have their follies with the savings of average Americans and others who are too blind to see the storm brewing, or too proud to abandon ship. Let them have their gold, their silver, and their perceived political capital aka giant circle jerk. Let them have their warplanes and battleships. Let them continue to send our young to die in their places in exchange for worthless paper green rectangles.
The only viable move for the individual is to evacuate the USD before their savings are wiped out. Everyone on HN has the capacity and the short-lived opportunity to move their economic and political activities into the cryptographic realm, where any and all central planning efforts are rendered irrelevant. Therein lies the only remaining true safe haven for economic activity.
Love it or hate it, you have no other option but to embrace strong encryption and Bitcoin before your nation, and perhaps the entire global economy descends into a fiscal default scenario right out of your worst nightmares. If you fail to see this risk and the danger it entails, I implore you to utilize public transportation extensively.
"Truthfully I do not expect much to change. Practically speaking, history has demonstrated the ability of sovereign nations to justify themselves, and postpone the moment of crisis. This will be even more true for the United States as the largest economy by far with the strongest central bank. As a result, over the course of your lives, you will experience withering but stealthy attacks on your quality of life, as government attempts to manage its faltering finances. You will see declines in the quality of healthcare, the quality of education, the quality of public safety, and the quality of our currency. Of course this is a false prophecy. I am simply describing what is already happening."
> Gold is inherently useful as a tangible object with exploitable physical properties. Gold, for example, has good conductivity and is used to plate electrical connections. Gold is also useful for its rust-resistance.
Do you really mean to say gold's rust-resistant properties are to blame for it's exceedingly high price on the market?
Fact: In 2013, Bitcoin is the world's easiest way to send a standardized indicator of wealth from one person to another. Forget anonymity, forget open source, forget deflation, forget amateurs building Ruby on Rails websites poorly!
Bitcoin's #1 benefit is the ousting of intermediaries. Because Bitcoin transactions can occur directly between two people without any third party involvement, the platform upon which people trade Bitcoin for goods and services becomes irrelevant. With Bitcoin, the platform only matters to the extent it aids in the market discovery process.
I for one see inherent value in a currency I have control over 24/7, that I can literally park in my brain never to touch the public Internet, carry with me everywhere I go, send to anyone, anywhere at any time, instantly and without an intermediary. If you see no value in that, honestly, what is there to say. Good luck with your financial goals in 2013.
As a founder, it's often better to start where your own pain points are, because sometimes you'll stumble upon an incredibly massive pain felt by the entire world. Now you're ready to do business.
Be advised, however, because even if you manage to identify one such sharp pain point, and even if you have a solution, only rarely will you successfully be able to repackage it and market it to the masses. But to put in perspective, if you're working towards an affordable solution 99% of the world is compelled by extreme pain to use, you might very well be working on a billion dollar business.
The question is, when are more startups going to realize that the biggest pain in the room is as clear as day? It's right in front of every single one of us. It's only a matter of time before people in massive numbers realize that 24/7 surveillance of all telecommuncations isn't fucking cool. People are already flocking to VPNs to get around downloading restrictions, so what happens when people realize they need a VPN to send a private email? Here the truth is contagious, and government elements can only repeat lies successfully for so long. The problem of the surveillance state is the very definition of sharp pain:
Compared to the markets for cosmetic surgery, real estate, knee pain, back pain, ANY market you can think of - the prospect of having all of your telecommunications stored indefinitely if not monitored in real time by regimes teetering on the edge is an order of magnitude more concerning. When you consider that a 24/7 surveillance state by definition constitutes neverending pain, it's really no contest.
Unwanted, unconstitutional surveillance measures are creating a seering hot, absolutely intolerable pain for the entire human population. This is a pain that demands a solution, ASAP.
As a startup and as a developer, there are very few pursuits more worthy of your time than furthering human rights and averting absolute tyranny.
Curiously, thanks in large part to Bitcoin, the startup community now has the power to fund itself anonymously and innovate solutions that actually matter, without outside interference.
The moral of the following retail pricing story is that it's profoundly difficult to assess the value of any product in a vacuum. Subjectively evaluating government acts presents the same difficulties as evaluating products; in both cases display makes all the difference in the world.
For the story, imagine you're a plastic surgeon in Los Angeles, and you want to buy your wife a fur coat this Christmas.
To be expedient, you visit Hunky Dory Coat Factory on Rodeo Drive. A delightful antique display and friendly faces greet you upon entry. Decorative plants, backlit with colorful lights, are beautifully positioned next to a grandiose marble checkout desk. You make your way forward and an unobtrusive attendant smiles kindly in your direction. Dark mahogany wooden floors span the interior, glimmering in the light as you see the coat you came for. As you inch closer, you know it's the one, but you can't help noticing every coat at Hunky Dory costs over $5,000. You pick up your wife's desired coat despite much apprehension. You go straight for the price tag, slowly turn it over, and incredibly, it's only $1000. "What a tremendous deal," you think to yourself.
Now take a look at what happens if we repeat the above at Dilapidated Coat Factory.
Dilapidated Coats is located in a crummy old warehouse with high ceilings and noisy industrial fans. The coats hang from a dusty rack on the opposite wall with no organization. The floors are unfinished concrete and the walls are chipping paint. As you move closer, you notice that most coats on the rack cost under $50. But to your surprise, you come across the perfect fur coat for your wife. You inspect the price tag, and you're shocked to find it's $1000. You leave disgusted.
The point is, when the product's environment changes, the price you expect to pay changes too. Perceived value is driven by environmental factors. Display makes all the difference.
It follows that how you perceive isolated US government actions greatly depends on whether you favor the state of America's economic and political affairs. Just like Hunky Dory's extravagant display made a $1,000 coat look like a deal next to $5,000 coats, if you think America is truly incapable of repeating history, you may think all American laws are passed in good faith, or rationalize all government efforts away as positive.
Surveillance, being a precursor to force, is at least worthy of extra scrutiny.
First and foremost, the U.S. Constitution was expressly designed to limit government power. By this logic, in order for the US Government to make good faith interpretations to the Constitution, legislative measures must err on the side of limiting government power, surveillance measures included. Under no circumstances should any new measure conceivably facilitate tyranny, nor should the measure employ clever word games to enable such a scenario.
If you can entertain the notion that the American government has been corrupted by money and outside influence, and that the US Dollar isn't infallible, you may start to consider the possibility of a scenario where surveillance measures like this one are used to restrict freedoms, and increase government power during stressful times in order to perpetuate failed systems. Therefore it matters greatly whether the political and economic environment looks Dilapidated to you. You're free to think it's Hunky Dory. That is your choice.
Assuming the US government is acting in its own interest, even if it were OK to monitor international communications for increased security, it doesn't compel the government to codify rules into law with hedge words like "intentionally". To think, the subversion of your Constitutional rights now hinges upon whether surveillance qualifies as "intentional" according to a legal scholar's interpretation. The use of the word "intentional" here shares the same audacity as the NSA's classifying of American communications as "intercepted" vs. "stored". Either way the NSA gets to summon your records on demand, so who cares whether it's technically "intercepted". Just the same, who cares whether surveillance is intentional or not? This bill appears in effect legalizes dragnet surveillance over the American populace. According to William Binney, surveillance is already done dragnet style across the entire US populace, so it's not like they're ever going to "Intentionally" surveil most American citizens anyway. They do it by default, they do it today, but now they get to point at this word "Intentionally", and claim state secrets privileges while strong-arming the populace out of their Constitutional rights.
I urge you to watch billionaire investor Dr. Michael J. Burry's commencement address at the 2012 UCLA Department of Economics [1].
Do you want to see real political and economic change in your lifetime? Campaign finance reform: not the answer. Term limits: not the answer. Voting Libertarian: waste of time. "Balance the budget": too little, too late. Political activism: occupy my asshole.
The only solution: flip societal power structures upside down, and let us geeks take the reigns.
Now, you may argue that everything is Hunky Dory like tptacky, but I'd beg to differ. We need real social and economic change, right now, to ensure our continued prosperity into the forseeable future, and we're just not getting it from Washington. Make excuses or justify a Big Brother Statist tyranny driven by propaganda and ignorance all you want, ultimately none of that shit works long term and meanwhile we have a lot less freedom.
Let's play a different game now ...