A bad idea run by someone who has no clue about what he's doing combined with another bad idea supported by people who have no clue about what they're doing? Sign me up.
Both nutrition and pecuniary economics are far more complex then Soylent and Bitcoin allow for -- additionally, the history of both of these fields is seeded with innumerable failures to couch each of their fundamentals in terms of simple concepts (for nutrition: protien/fats/carbs, vitamins, micronutrents, and so on -- for economics, Smith, Marx, Keynes, Laffer, et cetera). The idea that either, as a phenomenological consequence of human interaction, has a simple solution is technically possible but foolhardy.
I don't deny that there may be a food that is easy to make but perfect for humans; or that there may be such a currency as well. But for any rational actor to believe it would require not only extraordinary evidence, but specific refutations of the previous failed attempts (rather, the theory would provide those refutations). Such a failure to both acknowledge and rebut historical failures in the same vein is strong evidence of crankism/crankitude/crankosity/I Can't Believe They're Not A Crank.
Somewhat ironically, the foodstuff I might be most inclined to believe would satisfy this requirement is exactly what "soylent" should be -- complete raw human. Om nom nom.
If bitcoin circulation is, in practice, much lower than it's generally believed to be -
“We isolated all the large (≥ 50,000 Bitcoins) transactions which were ever recorded in the system, and analyzed how these amounts were accumulated and then spent. We discovered that almost all these large transactions were the descendants of a single large transaction involving 90,000 Bitcoins which took place on November 8th 2010, and that the subgraph of these transactions contains many strange looking chains and fork-merge structures, in which a large balance is either transferred within a few hours through hundreds of temporary intermediate accounts, or split into many small amounts which are sent to different accounts only in order to be recombined shortly afterwards into essentially the same amount in a new account.”
- Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir, Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph.
Then the perceived value and the actual value would be off significantly.
So, while I might not phrase it in quite as strong terms as the person you're responding to does, I do find reason to be somewhat cautious about the whole enterprise.
2. Bitcoin can be "attacked" (for some vague notion of what it means to attack a system that has no security definition) in polynomial time.
3. The economics of Bitcoin are extremely suspect and based on a poorly developed economic model, supported by neither the Austrian school nor by modern monetary theory. This is probably the underlying cause of the lack of a security definition, as the security definition of a digital cash system will almost certainly be driven by the system's economic model.
These issues have been covered ad nauseam by many people, and have been largely dismissed by the Bitcoin community. All the while we have seen increasing amounts of energy sunk into Bitcoin mining, we have seen a major block chain fork that left transactions in question, and we have seen wild fluctuations in the value of Bitcoin currency.
Widdershin|12 years ago
crygin|12 years ago
I don't deny that there may be a food that is easy to make but perfect for humans; or that there may be such a currency as well. But for any rational actor to believe it would require not only extraordinary evidence, but specific refutations of the previous failed attempts (rather, the theory would provide those refutations). Such a failure to both acknowledge and rebut historical failures in the same vein is strong evidence of crankism/crankitude/crankosity/I Can't Believe They're Not A Crank.
Somewhat ironically, the foodstuff I might be most inclined to believe would satisfy this requirement is exactly what "soylent" should be -- complete raw human. Om nom nom.
jafaku|12 years ago
6d0debc071|12 years ago
“We isolated all the large (≥ 50,000 Bitcoins) transactions which were ever recorded in the system, and analyzed how these amounts were accumulated and then spent. We discovered that almost all these large transactions were the descendants of a single large transaction involving 90,000 Bitcoins which took place on November 8th 2010, and that the subgraph of these transactions contains many strange looking chains and fork-merge structures, in which a large balance is either transferred within a few hours through hundreds of temporary intermediate accounts, or split into many small amounts which are sent to different accounts only in order to be recombined shortly afterwards into essentially the same amount in a new account.”
- Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir, Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph.
Then the perceived value and the actual value would be off significantly.
So, while I might not phrase it in quite as strong terms as the person you're responding to does, I do find reason to be somewhat cautious about the whole enterprise.
betterunix|12 years ago
2. Bitcoin can be "attacked" (for some vague notion of what it means to attack a system that has no security definition) in polynomial time.
3. The economics of Bitcoin are extremely suspect and based on a poorly developed economic model, supported by neither the Austrian school nor by modern monetary theory. This is probably the underlying cause of the lack of a security definition, as the security definition of a digital cash system will almost certainly be driven by the system's economic model.
These issues have been covered ad nauseam by many people, and have been largely dismissed by the Bitcoin community. All the while we have seen increasing amounts of energy sunk into Bitcoin mining, we have seen a major block chain fork that left transactions in question, and we have seen wild fluctuations in the value of Bitcoin currency.