A Cryptocurrency Based On a Dog Meme Is Now Worth Over $1 Billion (vice.com) 141
Earlier today, the market capitlization of dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on a meme about a Shiba Inu dog, passed the $1 billion mark for the first time. VICE News reports: Dogecoin was created back in the early days of the cryptocurrency craze. Launched in December 2013 as somewhat of a joke, the meme-inspired coin was dubbed "the internet currency" and designed to promote a sense of community and generosity rather than simply looking to make money. It gained fame during 2014 when it was used to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Winter Olympics in Sochi and it even sponsored a Nascar team. The currency has been in relative stasis since, and despite no software updates being released in over two years, the cryptocurrency has risen more than 400 percent in the last month -- though one dogecoin is still worth just over 1 cent.
Even Jackson Palmer, one of the founders of the coin, expressed concern about the hyperinflation of dogecoin. "It says a lot about the state of the cryptocurrency space in general that a currency with a dog on it which hasn't released a software update in over 2 years has a $1 billion+ market cap," Jackson told Coindesk.
Even Jackson Palmer, one of the founders of the coin, expressed concern about the hyperinflation of dogecoin. "It says a lot about the state of the cryptocurrency space in general that a currency with a dog on it which hasn't released a software update in over 2 years has a $1 billion+ market cap," Jackson told Coindesk.
Commodity "currency" makes no sense (Score:5, Insightful)
It only works because people have convinced enough other people that it makes sense to invest in it. When that stops being the case it's gone overnight.
The value is completely artificial from start to finish, there's nothing backing it, there's no massive value behind it to stabilize a run. But it exists, and people love new cons.
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Re:Commodity "currency" makes no sense (Score:5, Insightful)
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well now, there are physical Casascius bitcoin with cute little holograms on top. They seem to have gone out of business...
I see that a lot in stories about bitcoin, particularly around businesses that loudly announced they accept them.
but I assume the readable code on top is still "good", I dunno.
Nobody seems to know.
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No, NicknameUnavailable. Cryptocurrencies are not commodities.
Yes, ignorant-but-outspoken-CrankyOldEngineer. Cryptocurrencies are treated as commodities by the IRS. Everything I stated was based on the current and ideal legal definitions of the words used, not what you pulled out of your ass.
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Commodity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and https://www.investor.gov/intro... [investor.gov]. They tend not to agree. You can not really claim marketing as a commodity, bitcoin worth is an illusion created by marketing because it is backed by nothing but itself. It's worth is an illusion and unfortunately for those investing in it, once the illusion collapses, so will the worth of bitcoins evaporate, held up by those trapped by it, desperate not so sell coins that are worth much less than they paid for them. Bitcoins
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Re: Commodity "currency" makes no sense (Score:2)
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No. One intrinsic value is "the government has promised that if I pay them enough of this they won't steal my stuff".
It may not be a very nice intrinsic value, and you may not really trust that the government won't change their mind, but it's still an intrinsic value, and it's *the* intrinsic value that fiat currencies are based on.
Re: Commodity "currency" makes no sense (Score:1)
Fuck off crypto-shills.
Re:Commodity "currency" makes no sense (Score:4, Insightful)
It only works because people have convinced enough other people that it makes sense to invest in it. When that stops being the case it's gone overnight. The value is completely artificial from start to finish, there's nothing backing it, there's no massive value behind it to stabilize a run. But it exists, and people love new cons.
That's more or less money in a nutshell.
Money is abstract and it's only valuable because people believe it's valuable.
Once people stop believeing it's valuable, it stops being valuable and that's when hyperinflation happens. At that point being backed by a state or not makes little difference.
That applies as much to "normal" money as it does to cryptocurrencies.
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Except of course if you have no USD in the US, you cannot own real estate (Give us USD each year or it is taken away), drive a car (Give us USD each year or no license plate), or get a passport.
Other countries also insist on being paid in your local currency.
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Except of course if you have no USD in the US, you cannot own real estate (Give us USD each year or it is taken away), drive a car (Give us USD each year or no license plate), or get a passport.
Other countries also insist on being paid in your local currency.
All true, but my point still stands, because countries with similar systems have suffered hyperinflation because people have stopped believing the money has value.
It's very easy to pay a 1,000,000,000 Zimbabwe Dollar tax bill when you have a 100 trillio
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Your tax bill rises every year with inflation.
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Your tax bill rises every year with inflation.
It did in every country where hyperinflation happened too.
Seriously this is a thing.
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Once people stop believeing it's valuable, it stops being valuable and that's when hyperinflation happens. At that point being backed by a state or not makes little difference.
You ducked the main argument with a distraction, by simply handwaving that the gov't does not matter, which is a stupid fantasy only popular among bullion sheep, well, and now crypto sheep. Of course, it is always possible for chaos to engulf the US gov't or US economy, and the USD take a beating -- but that is not saying anything everyone doesn't already know. By handwaving that everyone stops believing in, say, the USD, you are handwaving on the scale of "oh, the US gov't ceases to exist" or "oh, the zo
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You ducked the main argument with a distraction, by simply handwaving that the gov't does not matter
No you misunderstood very fundamentally my argument. Ultimately it's people's collective belief in the currency that matters. If the currency is an instrument of the government, then that is very heavily influenced by people's belief and trust in the government.
Every actual currency which has undergone hyperinflation has been backed by a government.
Somehow you managed to misinterpreted what I said as somehow
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The USD isn't backed by a commodity but instead the entire US economy and US fiscal policy. The fed has shown a willingness to create domestic debt in order to maintain currency stability. That kind of reliability is why it's seen as the safest currency worldwide.
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The value is completely artificial from start to finish, there's nothing backing it, there's no massive value behind it to stabilize a run
Perhaps the same could be said about fiat currencies, since they're not backed by gold reserves anymore.
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Perhaps the same could be said about fiat currencies, since they're not backed by gold reserves anymore.
They're backed by governments with the means to enforce the currency being honoured.
Cryptocurrency is backed by hope.
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No. Wealth are things that you use directly. Food, shelter, companionship, that kind of thing. Money is not wealth, it's a tool that can be used to obtain wealth. For it to be so used it depends on others being willing to accept it in exchange for actual wealth. The value of money is how much wealth you think you can get for it. I'm not sure that the value of wealth even makes sense, but if it does it would be how much money you would require in a fair trade to part with it.
Wow - what r you doing? (Score:2)
Gud doge (Score:1)
All of my Doge got stolen. Such sad. So angery.
Pronuncification (Score:3, Funny)
Is it pronounced doggycoin, Dogecoin (as in the onetime rulers of Venice) or something else? I have to know before i invest.
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Is it pronounced doggycoin, Dogecoin (as in the onetime rulers of Venice) or something else?
such leters many pronunciation
wow
TO THE MOON!
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Is it pronounced doggycoin, Dogecoin (as in the onetime rulers of Venice) or something else? I have to know before i invest.
Do-ge-coin: "Do" as in dog, "ge" as in gene so sounds like gee which is also the dgy sound in kludgy, "coin" as in coin.
Put it all together and its "dodgycoin". And that's also all you need to know before investing in it.
Please explain cryptocurrency (Score:1)
What functionality or value does any cryptocurrency provide that normal cash and banks don't?
I don't get it.
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Re: Please explain cryptocurrency (Score:2)
Bank tellers tell you what you can do with your money?
What African shithole do you live in mate?? USAmerica?
Re: Please explain cryptocurrency (Score:2, Insightful)
Thats what you get living in a third-world police state.
That doesnt happen Australia. or Canada. or the UK.
Move or shut up.
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Eh... What? I'm presuming you're a fellow westerner and as such you're doing a fucking poor job in defending western values and people's right to govern themselves.
A police state is one in which the citizens have no means of changing the way they're ruled and policed. North-Korea being the most blatant example but there are plenty of others, like China, which is not a third world countr
Re:Please explain cryptocurrency (Score:5, Interesting)
2) Anyone can follow your transactions, not just the bank guys
3) Counterparty risk lies with the buyer. No fraud protection
Fiat money is hardly a scam. Central banks can and do manipulate the value of money, and generally they do so to keep inflation at healthy levels. They do not always succeed, but in general the value of your money is pretty stable when it's managed by a decent central bank.
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Anyone can follow the transactions, but unlike banks they cannot block them.
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Let's say I start a project. I can easily put a Dogecoin or any other crypto-currency wallet address on the website so people can make donations.
There wouldn't be a PayPal blocking the withdrawal of funds because of "reason X", no credit card company taking their cut and no bank freezing my account.
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Let's say I start a project. I can easily put a Dogecoin or any other crypto-currency wallet address on the website so people can make donations.
There wouldn't be a PayPal blocking the withdrawal of funds because of "reason X", no credit card company taking their cut and no bank freezing my account.
At least until you try converting your cryptocurrency into govt money and the exchange is "down for maintenance". The exchanges (well, *somebody*) also take a cut when you make a transfer, it's just not of the magnitude that credit card companies do.
NetJ (Score:5, Interesting)
I will just remind our younger readers of the dotcom boom, where tech stocks were seen as the new big thing and pumped up a bubble that eventually crashed. You can tell the top of this by looking at a tech company that was registered on the NASDAQ called NETJ.COM,
This had all the right words in the name, "net", "J" (for Java, hot at the time) and ".com" but its description of what the company did was:
and this raised several $110 million in IPO funding from ordinary investors when it floated.
So a dog coin cryptocurrency "worth" $1bn... just same shit, different day.
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Amen.
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I will just remind our younger readers of the dotcom boom, where tech stocks were seen as the new big thing and pumped up a bubble that eventually crashed. You can tell the top of this by looking at a tech company that was registered on the NASDAQ called NETJ.COM,
This had all the right words in the name, "net", "J" (for Java, hot at the time) and ".com" but its description of what the company did was:
and this raised several $110 million in IPO funding from ordinary investors when it floated.
So a dog coin cryptocurrency "worth" $1bn... just same shit, different day.
Some odd shapes painted on a canvas, by some guy named Picasso. A used baseball, that some guy named Babe scribbled on. A beat-up old guitar strung upside-down that some weird guy named Jimi used to play with his teeth. An old book of notes by a guy named da Vinci. Old bottles of rotten grapes. Shiny rocks and yellow rocks we mine out of the ground that we melt and polish.
The formula for value (1% subjective and 99% bullshit) was established long before the .bomb or cryptocurrency came around.
Snapchats
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So a dog coin cryptocurrency "worth" $1bn... just same shit, different day.
many prospectus such IPO
wow
NetJ didn't do anything.
Dogecoins is going TO THE MOON!
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I will just remind our younger readers of the dotcom boom, where tech stocks were seen as the new big thing and pumped up a bubble that eventually crashed. You can tell the top of this by looking at a tech company that was registered on the NASDAQ called NETJ.COM,
This had all the right words in the name, "net", "J" (for Java, hot at the time) and ".com" but its description of what the company did was:
and this raised several $110 million in IPO funding from ordinary investors when it floated.
So a dog coin cryptocurrency "worth" $1bn... just same shit, different day.
I avoided all the garbage dotcom stocks because I didn't want to get left holding the bag when they collapsed.
Unfortunately when they collapsed they took the whole market with them.
During the real estate and mortgage insanity I avoided going into massive debt to buy property I couldn't afford because I didn't want to go broke when the housing market "which could never go down" collapsed.
Unfortunately when it collapsed it crashed the economy.
Yet again I'm avoiding a gain for the same reasons.
Lets hope we all
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Same if you watch The Big Short where one chap interviewed a stripper about her real estate deals, and she revealed (fnarr!) that she had leveraged up tot he eyeballs on property as "it only goes up". He figured that was the time it was all going to crash. And then she told him she didn't have 1 property but half a dozen condos she was basically buying through debt and speculation.
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Hyperinflation (Score:2, Insightful)
That's not hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is when the currency loses value so quickly you can't print new bills with high enough numbers in time to keep up. It's the opposite to what is happening here. Dogecoin is inflationary (it doesn't have a coin cap like Bitcoin), but its value per unit growing is the opposite of inflation.
It really bugs me when people mix this up.
That's called deflation, not inflation (Score:2, Interesting)
Inflation is where your coin gets worth less and less. In this case the coin gets worth more and more. That's called "deflation", and economists and politicians want you to believe that it is incredibly bad for you if you can buy more stuff with the same money.
Their reasoning is as follows: "if your money is going to be worth more, you'll wait before buying anything, and that's bad for the economy." Let's investigate that strange claim. Which of the following statements is true?
"I will wait with buying food
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Woot! Free money! Oh, wait... that one doesn't happen does it?
You are missing the effect on wage rises - that they become wage drops. This is where the system breaks. If everything is 5% cheaper next year then that includes the value of your labor. Your company is getting 5% less income because the price of its products is dropping. That filters through to you...
But people don't really believe in symmetry - so they refuse wage drops in a deflationary economy. Companies go bust. Banks break. The economy impl
Re:That's called deflation, not inflation (Score:5, Interesting)
You are missing the effect on wage rises - that they become wage drops. This is where the system breaks. If everything is 5% cheaper next year then that includes the value of your labor. Your company is getting 5% less income because the price of its products is dropping. That filters through to you...
Yes, all these people hyping deflationary currencies miss this. And they miss the next important consequence of that. Most people have more debt than they do savings. Deflation is good for you if you have lots of savings, but not lots of debt. Most people owe $100k or more on a mortgage, but have only a few $k (if that) in savings. Deflation is a benefit for your meager savings, but is a huge hindrance for your much more sizable debt.
When you buy a mortgage, you owe a fixed amount of currency. With inflation, over time your income tends to increase slightly year to year, and over the years the mortgage becomes a smaller and smaller part of your income, making it more and more affordable. This is great because if you buy something you can afford, you can generally count on being able to afford it until it's paid off (job loss and severe employment cut being the exception, but that will hold true for deflation also, so lets not consider that). But with deflation, it's the opposite. You get your mortgage, and the payment amount stays the same, but every year your income drops slightly, and thus every year your mortgage payment becomes a bigger and bigger portion of your income. A mortgage that is affordable when you buy it will one day become unaffordable for you.
I don't think that's what people intend, but that is the natural consequence of a deflationary currency.
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Lenders know about inflation, so they will increase the interest on the loan to compensate for it.
Of course they can't do that on a fixed-rate loan (at least not until end of the loan's fixed rate period if it's an ARM). They try to account for that risk by making the interest rates higher on fixed-rate loans than on variable-rate loans, of course, but they have to try to thread the needle there -- if they guess too low, they could lose money in the event of unexpected inflation, or if they guess too high, their loans won't be competitive and and they'll lose business to the competition.
TLDR; it is pos
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Most people have more debt than they do savings. Deflation is good for you if you have lots of savings, but not lots of debt.
And how many of them have debt because the currency is inflationary? For them, it's better to invest in a house and take on that debt than to have the money sitting around. Unfortunately, all that does for the economy is drive up housing and rent prices, which benefit the least productive bunch: land owners.
When you buy a mortgage, you owe a fixed amount of currency. With inflation, over time your income tends to increase slightly year to year, and over the years the mortgage becomes a smaller and smaller part of your income, making it more and more affordable.
The banks are not morons. They know money is worth less in the future, and their interest rate takes that into account. You're not getting a free ride because your currency is constantly being devalued.
Re:That's called deflation, not inflation (Score:4, Insightful)
And how many of them have debt because the currency is inflationary? For them, it's better to invest in a house and take on that debt than to have the money sitting around.
Uhhh, considering the average person's "financial intelligence" (there's probably a better term for it that's escaping me right now), I'm pretty sure their level of debt is not a strategic decision. People are in debt because they are careless with spending, don't plan for the future, don't foresee unexpected expenses. And that's WITHOUT having to foresee the effects of decades of deflation on their spending decisions.
When you buy a mortgage, you owe a fixed amount of currency. With inflation, over time your income tends to increase slightly year to year, and over the years the mortgage becomes a smaller and smaller part of your income, making it more and more affordable.
The banks are not morons. They know money is worth less in the future, and their interest rate takes that into account. You're not getting a free ride because your currency is constantly being devalued.
Of course they aren't moron. Of course they figure inflation into it. On the other hand, by comparison, the average person is fairly stupid when it comes to finances. They often can't look 1 or 2 years down the road, much less 10, 20, or 30 years. They can't think about the other things that are going to happen in life, and whether they will continue to be able to afford that payment that seems reasonable today. Having a kid or 2 (possibly by accident), unexpected health complications, having to care for an elderly parent. These are not things most people will take into account when committing to buying a house.
Inflation provides the vast majority of people with a safety net. Without inflation, a decision you make today that seems financially sound might not be such a good idea when you factor in some future unknown expenses. With inflation, the commitment you make today on buying a house isn't such a large factor in 10+ years when that new expense comes up. On the other hand, deflation is the exact opposite. A seemingly financially sound decision today does not remain financially sound 10 years from now even if no new expenses come up. So now, not only does the average person have to prepare for the unexpected, they are required to look 20-30 years down the road and plan for the expected. They have to take 20-30 years of deflation into account and realize what their income is likely to be that far away to decide if they are likely to be able to afford a house. For the vast majority of people, that's asking a hell of a lot.
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Without inflation, a decision you make today that seems financially sound might not be such a good idea when you factor in some future unknown expenses. With inflation, the commitment you make today on buying a house isn't such a large factor in 10+ years when that new expense comes up. On the other hand, deflation is the exact opposite. A seemingly financially sound decision today does not remain financially sound 10 years from now even if no new expenses come up.
Your future cost is going to be equally risky whether the currency is inflationary or deflationary. If it's inflationary, that cost is going to have a higher number in dollar terms. If it's deflationary, it's going to have a lower number in dollar terms. But the absolute value is going to be the same compared to your income.
In a deflationary system, you can simply save up to protect against the risk. If you start with a satisfactory amount saved, you can be sure that amount is going to cover the risk no
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Re: That's called deflation, not inflation (Score:4, Informative)
If you had a negative rate nobody would lend you the money in the first place. I mean really, you come into my bank, and tell me you want to borrow $1,000 at a -2% interest rate so that, in a year, you can pay me back $980? What kind of moron do you take me for?
That's part of the problem with deflationary economies right there; even without a negative rate, people are unlikely to lend you money.
If an economy is inflationary, at 2% that means my $1,000 sitting under my mattress will be worth $980 next year. So if I don't want to lose that $20 it makes sense for me to lend it to you, at say a 3% interest rate, so that I will retain the value of my money and even make a small profit.
With a 2% deflationary economy, on the other hand, the $1,000 sitting under my mattress will be worth $1,020 next year. I don't need to lend it to you, and take the chance that you won't pay me back; I can just leave it sitting there and it will still be worth more the next year. I would have to be a total moron to risk having you run off with it AND also give you a "negative rate" which guarantees that you pay me back less than you borrowed.
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I mean really, you come into my bank, and tell me you want to borrow $1,000 at a -2% interest rate so that, in a year, you can pay me back $980? What kind of moron do you take me for?
We take you for a moron who does not know what is going on in the world. The EU has negative interests since 2 or 3 years.
Re: That's called deflation, not inflation (Score:2)
It's nice of you to assume ignorance on my part, but I'm quite aware of what's been going on in the EU. Their negative interest rates were a result of the fact that the EU was absolutely desperate to try and stimulate the economy. From an individual investor point of view negative rates are absolutely retarded, and anyone with a lick of sense would never put their money into a stock or bond with a negative return. A long term negative rate just drives people to pull their money out of banks and either ho
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It is much more complicated than 'stimulating the economy' (because obviously the evonomy is not stimulated at all).
Anyway, at the moment you ccan ask your self: put the money into a bank and lose 1% each year due to negative interests, lend it to someone for -0.5% or no interest or +0.5% etc. or keep cash at home (or another place).
In other words: it is not moronic to lend money for -0.5% if you save by that another -0.5% bank interests.
A long term negative rate just drives people to pull their money out o
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Negative interest rates are tricky. The central bank may post a negative rate, but that just means the government is giving money to the commercial banks.
The banks themselves are unlikely to actually have a negative lending rate, unless the government strong arms them into it. The banks may well *pay* negative interest though, charging you to keep your money in their bank.
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Erm, yes it is tricky :) ...
Banks are required to deposite a part of their money at the central bank, hence are required to pay negative interest.
On the other hand they 'gain' from the negative interests when they hand out credits and are required to take,a part of the money from the central bank.
Bottom line negative interest is not even the same thing as deflation
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In a deflation scenario your income does not necessarily drop. Why would it? ... you live in the USA ... never mind then!
Ah
Re:That's called deflation, not inflation (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe you should take a look at wage increases vs. inflation for the past 70 years or so.
In the current system, it 'appears' as if your wage is going up, but it is in fact shrinking.
But in a system built on lies... who wants to hear the truth?
You are actually wrong. It is not shrinking. Over the long run it in increasing very slightly. Over the last few decades it has mostly been stagnant. Any (slight) decrease is only in the shorter term. When we are talking about mortgage affordability we are generally talking about 30 year spans.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se... [stlouisfed.org]
But you completely miss the point of my post. Yes inflation adjusted income only changes slightly over time (which is to be expected...cost of all good adjusts to what people are making, otherwise we'd all be living in mansions and driving ferraris). But look at that graphs above and notice the slope of that nominal income line. Now realize that the slope of your nominal mortgage payment over 30 years is zero. Your mortgage payment stays the same every year, while your income grows and grows. Even if that larger income doesn't give you more buying power, it makes your large mortgage debt easier and easier to afford every year.
Now try switching to a deflationary currency. To do that, you just flip the graph upside down. Your real (inflation adjusted) income/buying power stays more or less flat over time, but your nominal income would be sloping down. Buy your mortgage payment would stay flat, and every year get just a little more difficult to afford.
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Wow, that was a very well thought out and informative reply. Thank you for enlightening me with your superior knowledge on the subject. I'm just sad that, unlike your previous reply to me, this reply didn't contain any more inaccuracies.
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Is this a joke? The only example in that set holds true is food, because you might starve before it gets cheaper. I have heard many people say:
"I will wait buying a new car, because next year it is cheaper, and my current one still works fine."
Maybe yours doesn't work fine, but most people have a car that works, and if it doesn't, they can pay someone to repair it. The reason the phone example is better is because phones are much more noticeably improving in performance and lowering in costs than cars do
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"I will fully pay my mortgage this year, because of the tax cuts, my mortgage won't be deductible next year, so I'm paying it now".
That's state and local property taxes, not the mortgage. Local taxes will no longer be deductible like they once were. Mortgages (the interest) haven't been deductible for many years. Some people handle the payment of taxes on their own. Either because they have no mortgage or their mortgage terms allow them to do so (pretty risky on the part of the mortgage company, so it's rare).
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Mortgage interest is deductible in the US. The tax reform bill halved the eligible amount.
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With the exception of food, all those make sense if your currency is deflating as fast as bitcoin is (although it makes sense to sell your bitcoin if you're using it as an investment). Don't pay your mortgage, lose your 20% equity in your h
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Poor people owe money. They owe more money if suddenly a dollar is worth more
Yes. But wages are 'sticky'. It's difficult to negotiate a raise during a time of inflation. So wage earners lose out in terms of real earning power. On the other hand, it's even more difficult to negotiate a wage cut during times of deflation. So, automatic raises in terms of actual wealth.
Guess which situation the investor class fears the most.
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Assuming all poor people keep their jobs. Of course, the sticky wage theory also says that people will lose their jobs to bring the total wages down. So some poor people are super screwed, and others are just equally screwed (cause most of their money is going to rent, long term contracts like leases and debt. All of those are also sticky.
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Deflation must therefore be the opposite: a wealth transfer from the rich to the poor. And that's why so many economists and politicians are fighting it.
Jesus christ where do these crypto-fetishists get their ideas from...Deflation gives existing holders of money, a greater share of societies wealth, while not having to do anything to earn it - the people who benefit the most from this transfer, are those who already hold a lot of money - i.e. the wealthy.
If the dollar or any other major national currency switched to accepting deflation, it is a transfer of wealth to those who are already wealthy, at the expense of those who have to go out and actually ea
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Let's investigate that strange claim. Which of the following statements is true?
"I will wait with buying food, because next year it is cheaper." "I will wait with paying my mortgage, because next year it is cheaper."
How about - I won't build a factory this year, or make other investments....it will be cheaper next year.
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Of course deflation is not bad for *you* if your money buys more stuff, but it's bad for people selling stuff. It also makes holding any debt -- like car loan, mortgage, or student loan -- extremely punitive. Both inflation and deflation damage the economy, but in different ways.
Anyhow, given the way many people treat cryptocurrencies it's not entirely inappropriate to refer to this as inflation. People are taking positions in things like BitCoin beyond what they need to facilitate anonymous transactio
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The thing you're missing is that the majority of the money we spend is on luxuries. Food? You could probably do with less than half the food budget if you had to. Mortgage? Owning a home is a luxury. It's almost always a poor financial decision (the 2010s being a notable, and scary, exception). Buying a car? Buying a new car is a terrible financial decision, even worse than owning a house. Buying used is better, but you can probably get away with a fraction of the cost if you have to.
A modern economy is
Cryptocurrency value is processing power (Score:1)
Corporations and other entities can crunch massive amounts of data that allow them to not build expensive infrastructure, and can use it as needed, rather than having dedicated servers. This is a real legitimate value, and earning the cryptocurrency is the reward for your computer doing a tiny fraction of the work. It's value goes up as more people use it. It is not some "con" as some people are claiming. Your computer and electricity are doing actual work in exchange for a valuable virtual currency.
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While it is possible to make a cryptocurrency with a useful proof of work*, most don't do this. Bitcoin wants a SHA256(SHA256(x)) result where a certain amount of LSBs are 0. Some other cryptocurrencies use other hash algorithms. In almost all cases this work has negligible value other than securing the coin.
*) The algorithms needs to calculate something that is computationally hard as this is what a mining farm will do, but it needs to be computationally cheap to verify whether the results is correct as th
\o/ (Score:1)
I foresee a serious impediment to US infrastructure due to a shortage of bridges ^_^
"Shiba dog dog" (Score:1)
Re:"Shiba dog dog" (Score:5, Funny)
Such grammar nazi. Much passion. Wow.
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And how do you feel about "ATM machine"?
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tuna
French: "you don't have"
Bulgarian: "ton"
Chichewa: "we have"
Czech: "tonne"
Greek: "ton"
Romanian: "thunder"
Sesotho: "we have"
Shona: "we have"
Swahili: "we have"
Tamil: "supporting"
Turkish: "Danube"
Urdu: "muddy"
Xhosa: "we have"
Zulu: "we have"
"Value" (Score:2)
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This indicates the danger of NOT paying attention to market cap. If you think buying Dodgy-coin at four cents per coin is a great deal (four cents is a lot less than $20,000!) you haven't properly evaluated the meaning of paying four cents for a 1 twenty-five billionth share of something some college students copied and pasted while high.
How does a public blockchain die? (Score:2)
Not what proceeds it or how the fools will move on to the next SuperDuperMoGoodererCoin, those things are probably not easily predictable as there is an infinite number of 'coins'.
But what are the death throes?
After a blockchain has reached a certain size, does the time per transaction go up significantly if the total number of nodes and or compute rate drops below some threshold of the whole?
Do most or all blockchains require a churn rate of compute time just to stay active?
When all the 'coins' in any part
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The total blockchain size has nothing to do with the speed. It requires ever-increasing storage on a computer, however.
Not all crypto-currencies use the same mining algorithms. Some don't even require much processing power and rely on other factors.
Not all crypto-currencies have hard limits. AFAIK Dogecoin doesn't have one, so the miners don't have any incentive to drop the coin and move to another one. The people who have been mining Dogecoin for years are now seeing their investment in time, hardware and
Spaghetti monster (Score:2)
This reminds me a bit of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Conjured up as a joke, and now people think they seriously believe in him. Here in the Netherlands there was even a lunatic who wanted to do his Ph.D. defense in Delft with a colander on his head: https://translate.google.com/t... [google.com]
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Google is showing a frame with nothing being translated.
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That is strange. For me it works fine, also from the link above.
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Here's the direct link: http://www.dvhn.nl/drenthe/Pas... [www.dvhn.nl]
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Thank you so much. Wow. Some crazy people out there alright.
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YW.
I don't know how the story ended unfortunately. I wonder if he ever got his Ph.D. I personally doubt very much if someone who acts like that deserves it.
Snake Oil South Seas Bubble .. (Score:2)
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AC already told you but I'll repeat just to be sure: don't be a moran!