>Fiat money isn't a pyramid scheme. You don't buy in on the assumption of future market growth that will drive up the value of what you have. You expect your fiat to become worth less, not more, over time.
Wow, so if bitcoin is or isn't pyramid scheme depends on your assumption when you buy it? That's a new one. Than i guess I'm safe because i bought it to buy goods with it, never expected that price will soar so much.
You buy goods with bitcoin by converting it to usd. Nothing is priced (at least for extended lengths of time) in bitcoin, because of the price voltaility, because of the pyramid scheme.
And yes, your perception of the value of something does influence whether or not it is a pyramid scheme. If you buy 10,000 scented soaps because you want a ton of scented soap that isn't a pyramid scheme. If you buy 10,000 scented soaps thinking you can find 1,000 people to buy them off you at more than you paid for them, then you are dealing with a pyramid scheme.
Fundamentally, the price growth most bitcoin users (you would be in the minority) want depends on a definitional pyramid scheme of attracting new money to drive up the price of bitcoin. It isn't even debatable - the coin minting model of btc that declines over time directly maps to how to run a pyramid scheme on it, where early adopters get the most return.
Most IPOs are pyramid schemes. The stock traded price of gold is a pyramid scheme. Any system where you participate on the assumption of scarcity going up, and thus your piece becoming more valuable on the backs of new entrants to the market is a pyramid scheme.
> If you buy 10,000 scented soaps thinking you can find 1,000 people to buy them off you at more than you paid for them, then you are dealing with a pyramid scheme.
I'd argue that is run-of-the-mill wholesale / retail sales.
Expecting to make a profit doesn't cause a thing to be a pyramid scheme.
There is a distinction between pyramid schemes and ponzie / multi-level marketing schemes. Pyramid schemes aren't implicitly bad - they just mean the last "ladder rung" of the pyramid will lose on the promise of the scheme while anyone who got in before the last profit.
You expect to make a profit on the foundational principles of pyramid schemes. Someone will eventually, inevitably, have to not make a profit because the market of bitcoin will be fully saturated. At which point the value of bitcoin has to be reconsidered - it no longer would be poised to grow through increasing scarcity, so it would need to derive value through other measures.
Whether that happens in a year or a century is the gamble.
You usually don't know if the address is known drug site wallet, dark markets usually generate unique address for each transaction.
Even if you do know it, you can't know if the user bought something illegal, there is also legal stuff sold on dark markets.
Keeping everyone legal interests in mind means that you don't give personal data to police or anyone else without proper warrant.
The article mentions the specific site and it seems to deal only drugs. They don't keep the money at the generated address, but transfer it to another wallet I suppose?
"A person in the US who, for example, wants to watch all but the latest season of Game of Thrones"
This is simply not true. In my experience, only the most mainstream content is available legally on portals like itunes or netflix. If you want to watch something more rare (art film, old foreign film, film with subtitles in different language) you can try to buy very expensive DVD+shipping and wait few weeks for it to arrive or you have to use illegal sources.
> A computer on the other hand does have access control. The default response then becomes "wow the authorised user of this computer set the background image to 2 gay men kissing".
I wonder what is so bad about two men kissing? Would man and woman kissing spur same reaction? Or are there any anti-homosexual propaganda laws in USA similar to Russia?
It's even worse, copyright is regulated by international treaties[1]. Every time someone comes up with an idea to reform copyright, shorten the terms etc. it's immediately shot down by the argument that we are bound by those agreegments and cannot change anything ourselves.
I don't see it as a real problem. Copyright internationalization is mostly pushed by the USA. If USA itself decides to reform copyright, everybody else will jump on the bandwagon.
Of course, it's the money. It would be interesting seeing copyright rents by country.
Marijuana legalization is the very same story. Other countries wouldn't do it, fearing the wrath of USA. But now USA states are opening that mellon.
>and if you take away the ability for people to monetize media
He is talking about figuring out another way for creators to monetize their media without artificial restrictions on sharing/copying. He doesn't want to take away money from creators, just the copyright. And i couldn't agree more with this idea.
I worded my initial post incorrectly, but I'm not at odds with whats hes saying. What I'm trying to point out is that in many cases media has already begun to shift to this model. The model where there aren't any restrictions on sharing/copying is quickly becoming ad-sponsered content. And while it hasn't begun to effect music yet, its definitely in video (no one pays a cent to watch YouTube) and print (with advertisers astroturfing as legitimate articles on websites).
If its the case you agree with the idea, does that come at the cost where you open up a newspaper and 75% of the articles are actually written by corporations pretending to be journalists?
On the other hand -- I'd be happy to pay to avoid ads on youtube. It's one of the few streaming services I'd consider paying for (if I could) -- precisely because it's mostly user-curated.
>"On devices running iOS 8, your personal data such as photos, messages (including attachments), email, contacts, call history, iTunes content, notes, and reminders is placed under the protection of your passcode. Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data"
Too bad they (and other phone manufacturers) don't protect phone calls with some kind of end-to-end encryption.
There's not much one company can do about the standards. [1] They can only control their own output.
Apple asserts that Facetime and Facetime Audio are end-to-end encrypted. And Google claims Hangouts are encrypted as well.
I don't know whether there are caveats (or how many) to either of those claims. But that's about as much as one could hope for in the current climate. [2]
[1] Particularly upstart computer companies dealing with the telecom oligopoly. Long cozy with governments and law-enforcement, if not an explicit part of government.
[2] It's a serious bummer that FaceTime never developed into the open standard they claimed at introduction. I've been curious about where that fell apart. (Competitor disinterest, patent liability, carrier terms, etc)
>But if you have a billion dollars of gold in your basement, you should be very, very paranoid.
If i had so many bitcoins as Satoshi Nakamoto i would certainly not store them in my basement. I'd split my private key using n:m scheme and store them in secure deposit boxes in banks.
>DNS is useful because it is authoritative. What would happen if two parts of this 'distributed' ICANN disagreed on something? Different parts of the internet would see a completely different state (e.g. who owns gov.uk?), Thus rendering DNS effectively useless.
This problem can be solved in distributed system using bitcoin-like proof of work scheme. If two parts of the network disagree, the bigger part is considered right. Namecoin project is trying to implement distributed DNS using this technique - http://namecoin.info/ .
Namecoin is one way. But why do you really need an authoritative registry? Think about Google's Real Names policy. Who does it benefit? If I don't want you to see my real name, why would I want you to find me by my real name? You should be able to find me only through existing connections you already have established in internet space.
If you want some authoritative distributed hash map, you can use namecoin like you said. But think about why you actually need an authoritative registry.
Hyperlinks? The document embedding the hyperlink can also embed the IP number. In fact, that's how the underlying IP routing system works. BGP isan interesting target for spoofing as of late.
At the very least, a website wishing for others to find it by its domain name should tell more than one registry, so there isn't a single point of failure. In the trade-off between consistency and having no single point of failure, you can think of the latter as failover or backup plan.
Wow, so if bitcoin is or isn't pyramid scheme depends on your assumption when you buy it? That's a new one. Than i guess I'm safe because i bought it to buy goods with it, never expected that price will soar so much.