(Part 2) Top products from r/Buttcoin

Your last line is the point. I'm not saying we shouldn't innovate our payment systems. ApplePay, the new chip technology in debit/credit cards, the ability to just tap my card against a reader, paypal, all those cool things that don't try to fundamentally change our monetary system are great! Innovation!

Going to a defaltionary system is a step back.

Don't buy the stupid YEN book. I'm reading that for fun and I've got a weird definition of fun.

http://www.amazon.ca/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke-World/dp/0143116800

Lords of Finance is a fantastic book! It won the damn Pulitzer! It does a good job of explaining the difficulties of our pre-bretton woods system. I highly advise you read that. It's also pretty entertaining. It completely destroyed any thought in my head about reverting back to the gold standard. Convinced me thoroughly that the gold standard would be a serious step backwards.

I think all people who want to change our monetary system should know about the history of it first.

> Really, your points are mostly about social structure.

My points are 100% about social structure. I tried my best not to make any conclusions about the technology itself. Technology and social structures are different things, and even when we use the same words to describe them (network, decentralized, etc), we're actually talking about different concepts.

> Bitcoin is not a "political movement".

Bitcoin may not be a political movement, but it does have a social movement and social structure surrounding it. That is what the article is about.

> It's a technological leap forward.

And this is where you go wrong. Technology doesn't do things on its own. Technology is only successful insomuch as people use it. If you analyze bitcoin the technology in a theoretical vacuum that does not ask "why do people use this, why do they want to, what does it help them do?", then you will not make accurate predictions about that technology and the ways in which it will be adopted.

This is one of the major mistakes bitcoin proponents make, thinking that bitcoin is some force that can sweep the world and leave people behind. It's not. A technology will not change the world without adoption.

My next article in this series is going to be about The Lever of Riches by Joel Mokyr (link). It's an economic history that asks "why do some cultures see more technological progress than others?", and in answering that question also answers "how do technologies change the world?". The answer is that invention (coming up with new technologies) is relatively easy, but innovation (having those technologies adopted to the point of changing human behavior) is hard. Innovation happens through making people want to use the tech.

Thanks, it was nice talking to you. I'll take a look at the book and article you mentioned.

As a counter point, for the credit theory of money, I highly recommend the book 'Money: The Unauthorized Biography' by Felix Martin.

Take care.

I'm not upset about it, but USA certainly does tolerate National Socialist videos, since they're protected by the 1st amendment.

You can even buy National Socialist books like "Mein Kampf" on Amazon.com

https://www.amazon.com/Mein-Kampf/dp/0395925037

/u/nickjohnson has it summed up in this comment:

> Does NOBODY write unit tests?

A unit test is not a complicated thing. It takes one small, self-contained piece of code, sets up some situational context, runs the code with parameters set to interesting values, and then checks that certain conditions are met. (Conditions include things like: the correct result is returned, certain messages are sent, certain messages are not sent, the result is returned in less than X seconds, or whatever.)

It is important to note that while unit tests are not complicated, this does not mean they are not difficult to write. It is somewhere between art and science to write good unit tests, but it is possible. There is something like 20 years of work in this field, especially since the (capital A) Agile movement started. There are whole books on the subject, such as Kent Beck's effortlessly enlightening Test Driven Development: By Example.

Unfortunately, the number of programmers is growing so fast, that new programmers are joining the field faster than they can encounter experienced programmers, and so they are relearning lessons that were first learnt when they were still young, or even before they were born.

This problem didn't used to matter so much, but the situation has changed. Now that people know how to create money with code, code quality is not just a matter of late-night bug-fixing to get a small app released on time, it could potentially make or lose the entire net worth of a person, or even millions of people.

This is exactly the reason I've never bought a single ETH token. When I saw Etheruem, I said exactly this: "It seems to combine the properties of Bitcoin and OpenTransactions in the riskiest possible way". Some time later, The DAO showed the potential downside of that risk.

This kind of problem will not be fixed by developers learning how to write unit tests, it needs a bigger picture than that. But we will be able to put a lot of the world's wealth to much better use, if the developers of cryptocurrencies are able to find and reuse the learnings of software developers in other fields. And as Nick suggested, writing unit tests would be a good start.

> because of ads. omfg. I am jacks complete lack of surprise. everytime secret money comes up its ads. which cash already does, as you point out. and anyone is free to pay in cash. go for it. noone cares.

Yes because privacy is important. Why is that hard to understand? Thats why the entire premise of cryptocurrency (the decentralized immutable public ledger) is a bad idea. It's not because of ads try reading my post or read the news once in a while like right now where cambridge analytica is again in the news. Or try reading a book once in a while like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Save-Everything-Click-Here-Technological/dp/1610393708/

> but thats not what butters are talking about. they are talking about international, anonymous movement of any sum of money. untraceable. thats what they want. can you give me a reason for that? and can you possibly maybe rack your brains for the downsides of that?

I never said that was good and I explicitly explained why their ideas are bad click the links. I can't give you a reason why what the butters want is good because I don't agree, if you had read my comment you would understand that.

Pollution is not possible because the invisible hand of the free market will guide consumers to buy less of the polluting company’s product, thus putting it out of business. Unregulated free markets cannot have externalities because the risks of losing business are prices into the market. It’s true![0]

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Shrugged-Ayn-Rand/dp/0451191145

Yea I tried explaining in this subreddit numerous times about the origins of bitcoin monetary thought but am consistently downvoted when certain descriptions become too much for the American sensibilities in here.

Bitcoin at its defacto core is based on Jewish libertarianism especially Murray Rothbard. If you want to understand Satoshi's bitcoin monetary theory than Rothbards book is an absolute must. It portrays a crude understanding of money but is especially dangerous in that in favors the 'money class' above all and is essentially an apologetic for them. Rothbard wanted his gold shekels to swell in value from the surplus value other people produce. Now what does bitcoin look like?

https://www.amazon.com/What-Has-Government-Done-Money/dp/1610166450/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1478097447&sr=8-1

You should read this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Money-Whence-Came-Where-Went/dp/0691171661

Limited inflation is good because it acts as a tax on stuffing money away under the proverbial mattress.

This doesn't just encourage consumption but it encourages investment. The point is to encouraging putting the money to work. That can be into things like green energy it doesn't necessarily have to go into plastic crap from china. You're conflating the entire economy with consumption. If you get metaphysical its all consumptive, but all that DNA-based organisms have ever done for a billion or so years is consume their environment in one way or another, the goal of humans should be to do so in a balance so we don't destroy it in the process.

And your logic on jobs is bad. People aren't poor because things are too expensive because of inflation, they're poor because they don't have jobs. The way to destroy more jobs would be through deflationary collapse and increasing the value of money, decreasing its velocity and decreasing demand and causing layoffs. That would increase the value of the money of wealth hoarders at the expense of those who hold no wealth.

And given that wages are taxed at up to 35% an additional 2% to 4% tax on money which is held and not reinvested is not a substantial yearly burden. The magnitude is not that great to see negative effects on the economy (although stagflation of 15% clearly had bad effects and the magnitude of that clearly becomes comparable).

Yup. It wasn't a class for me as much an excellent book that surveys the history of economic thought: http://www.amazon.com/New-Ideas-Dead-Economists-Introduction/dp/0452288444

Dark Pools is another good book http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Pools-Machine-Traders-Rigging/dp/0307887189

I read Tulipomania recently because it seemed appropriate for the times. I also read another book on speculation which started with tulips as well of course so covered a bit of the same ground.

I'm planning to read Extraordinary Popular Delusions at some point since it always gets referenced but don't have a copy yet and a lot of other books I do have already that I still want to get through.

Here, eight bucks.

I had a copy of The Internet Yellow Pages that I grabbed at Borders back in 1994. It may have had a few ip addys in it, but it was mostly a listing of domain names.

Many people, not just butters, need to read Enough.

Link:➡️ Hodl 2 The Moon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TWZ22Z3/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_6ociDbNBCKE4W