* Posts by JulianMorrison

5 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Sep 2009

Cleaning up the Bitcoin act

JulianMorrison

Don't be ignorant

What's to stop people creating as many coins as they like? How about the public, open source, cryptography based Bitcoin protocol which was designed to do exactly that. You shouldn't express an opinion which is so clearly and utterly contrary to fact, it makes you look like a fool.

JulianMorrison

The assets that back Bitcoin

...are the present and expected real goods you can purchase with it. Just like other fiat currencies.

But perhaps you are thinking of the junk mortgage derivatives, unregulated and not backed? Bitcoin doesn't change people's ability to make and trade - or regulate - derivatives markets, any more than if they were denominated in $. However it would starve banks of the cash of savers, who win under deflation simply by holding onto "cash" in their digital wallets. Potentially it could eliminate the concepts "fractional reserve" and "a run on the bank" and thus "too big to fail". Banks would lose their ability to nationalize risk via government guarantees. They would be forced to become more conservative. So the effect here would be good too.

JulianMorrison
Pirate

The point of Bitcoin

Is power to the people. It's not just a libertarian thing. Do you dislike having a bunch of bankers, central or otherwise, manipulating you and ripping you off, then making you eat the pain of the economic downturn their foolishness caused? The control of money is a huge source of unequal power. Bitcoin is money with nobody in control.

The Twitter storm that saved freedom of speech

JulianMorrison
Megaphone

Petition?

I don't know the legalese to phrase it, but someone should put up a petition on http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ to strip the ability to issue "gagging orders" out of the law entirely.

Pull the plug on Pandas, declares BBC man

JulianMorrison
Dead Vulture

Pandas were doomed anyhow

They live exclusively on a food so low in nutrition that they can barely spare the energy to move. Humans turned out to be the ecological perturbation that wiped them out, but any significant change would have obliterated them anyhow. Something like the next natural ice age would have been quite sufficient. They have no evolutionary flexibility to dodge that or any other bullet.