careinke wrote:radon1 wrote:Nobody is controlling the money. Who is?
Nobody it's basically a ledger that is distributed across the globe. It's a new technology, the only way to kill it would be to turn off the internet worldwide destroy all computers and cell phones. Even then, its probably stored somewhere. Outlawing bitcoin is like outlawing the wheel, it's a losing proposition.
On second thought, in bitcoins case, the person owning the bitcoin controls the money. Bitcoin let's everyone be a banker. Plus you don't need anyone's permission to do it.
Greater fool theory
The bitcoin bubble
There may be good reasons for buying bitcoin. But the dominant reason at the moment is that it is rising in price
This enthusiasm is both the result, and the cause, of the sharp rise in the Bitcoin chart in recent months. The latest spike was driven by the news that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange will trade futures in Bitcoin; a derivatives contract based on a notional currency. More people will trade in Bitcoin and that means more demand, and thus the price should go up.
People are buying Bitcoin because they expect other people to buy it from them at a higher price; the definition of the greater fool theory. Someone responded to me on Twitter by implying the fools were those who were not buying; everyone who did so had become a millionaire. But it is one thing to become a millionaire (the word was coined during the Mississippi bubble of the early 18th century) on paper, or in "bits"; it is another to be able to get into a bubble and out again with your wealth intact.
If everyone tried to realise their Bitcoin wealth for millions, the market would dry up and the price would crash; that is what happened with the Mississippi and the contemporaneous South Sea bubbles. And because investors know that could happen, there is every incentive to sell first. When the crash comes, and it cannot be too far away, it will be dramatic.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
evilgenius wrote:There is another problem with debt, other than that it risks blowing up the economy when debtors renege on their promise to repay. Debt can, at least in theory, hold down wages. The specific example of it working that way I would like to cite is retail in the US.
For me, this is a shaky argument, as I perceive wages as the result of market forces. . . . . I think this kind of low margin for profit built into the equation debt is more to blame.
Often the debt these companies incur amounts to a death sentence. . . . They were taken over by another who used this debt in order to purchase them, and then moved the obligation to pay the debt to the company they purchased. . . . The shareholders essentially fell down in their duty as owners who represented what ownership looks like when it comes from all sectors of society. They became an easy bribe.
Yeah, so I can also criticize debt, even this popular form of debt which hasn't been pointed out much as profligate. I have criticized debt in this thread, but only profligate debt on the part of individuals, mostly as consumers. I spoke of debt used to purchase an asset that brought in a greater return than the cost of that debt as good debt. I think of this kind of corporate debt which doesn't have enough margin, however, as profligate as well. It works against the idea of the corporation as a collection of stakeholders and centers the purpose solely with those who take over. Then it only takes the normal perturbations of a working economy to distort the positions of those who belong, but don't have any say.
The anthropologist David Graeber, who has died suddenly aged 59, was remarkably successful in marrying research with direct action. He was influential in the Occupy Wall Street movement and is reputed to have coined the statement: “We are the 99%.”
In 2011, for instance, he wrote a classic work of anthropology, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, in between organising with Occupy Wall Street in New York. In the book Graeber called for a biblical-style “jubilee”– meaning a wiping out of sovereign and consumer debts. “Debt,” he wrote, “is the most efficient means ever created to take relations that are fundamentally based on violence and violent inequality and make them seem right and proper.”
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