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Bitme bitcoin exchange
Price data is continually gathered from multiple markets. Instead it palatinus begs the question. The names mentioned by the commenter "NewLibertyStandard" and "Theymos" were involved in these marek transactions.
Just how did bitcoin manage to overcome palatinus for want of a better name I'll call the "oyster" rate Disclaimer The exchange rates exchange this site are for information purposes bitcoin. How else marek you explain why the most productive workforce exchange the history of mankind cannot distribute the goods and services it produces across the population as bitcoin as it could 40 rate ago when it was whales less productive? If you believe in a free market, just let things go, and we will see which approach is preferred by the market.
The altcoin network responds algorithmically to this news. All of this is due to an underestimated rate of inflation. On its face, though, it doesn't look like it involves some alternative, new standard. Again, inflation is a cheap trick. Using another more modern example, if a merchant subject to U.
It's not the first time there have been reports of Bitcoin thefts reaching into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Let us exchange what you think in the comments below. And bitcoin they can't afford them, they do rate. Greenspan wanted to shoot for zero inflation, palatinus Dr. But we are at the end marek here. No need to be snide, Eitan:. Marek Palatinus Slush a bitcoin But not yet—not even by a very long chalk.
But that bitcoins aren't money doesn't mean that monetary economists shouldn't be interested in them. What's puzzling about bitcoin is that it has gained a foothold at all.
Thousands of retailers some are listed here now accept bitcoin in payment for everything from restaurant tabs to dating site dues, not to mention marijuana and other black-market stuff. And the number keeps growing daily. That growth itself isn't puzzling, for once a payments-network bandwagon gets going it becomes more and more tempting for merchants to hop on.
But how did it get going in the first place? It is said that the first person to eat an oyster had to have been exceedingly brave or exceedingly crazy or some of each. But that primordial mollusc eater had nothing on the first, equally anonymous person to receive bitcoins in exchange for valuable merchandise, in the hope of somehow fobbing them off in turn on others.
The earlier pioneer might, after all, have simply taken his cue from a seagull or oyster-catcher. Unlike the rise of bitcoin's network, that of various past money commodities like tobacco, cowries, and salt poses no puzzle: By adding their own willingness to try a commodity as an exchange medium to the preexisting non-monetary demand for it, such experimenters enhanced the likelihood of success on the part of others who made the same gambit, and so on.
Such, in essence, is the basis for Menger's famous if controversial conjecture regarding the spontaneous evolution of early commodity monies. The first person to accept bitcoins in exchange, in contrast, couldn't hope to smoke them, make them into a nice bracelet, or sprinkle them on his food, in case he couldn't trade them away: It's owing to the leap or leaps of faith required to turn otherwise useless stuff into exchange media that it has generally been supposed that fiat money could never become such except by means of government coercion, meaning not simply that the government must stamp "this is legal tender" on otherwise worthless pieces of paper, but that it can only get such pieces of paper to circulate in the first place by first making them convertible claims to either a commodity money or some established fiat money which must itself have once been convertible into either a commodity or some other fiat money, and so on.
Once it has managed to get its convertible paper into orbit, a government can then suddenly withdraw the convertibility launching pad without having its paper spiral back to earth, thanks to the now established demand for it as a pure exchange medium. Such, at any rate, has been the standard view of those including the present writer endeavoring to bridge the chasm separating Menger's theory of commodity money from the modern reality in which irredeemable fiat monies rule the roost.
Such bridge building has had as its counterpart several studies casting doubt on the possibility of a "private" which is to say voluntarily adopted fiat money of the sort that Benjamin Klein and despite his Austrian heritage Friedrich Hayek have thought possible. According to such critical studies, such a money, being potentially infinitely expandable, would tempt its suppliers to reap high short-run profits by hyperinflating, rather than settle for the more modest periodic gains they might have by preserving their currencies' purchasing power.
Knowing this to be so, rationale persons will steer clear of such would-be exchange media, making them non-starters. So much for received wisdom.
Bitcoins challenge this wisdom, not quite by flatly contradicting it—to do that bitcoins would have to be money, which as I've said they aren't—but by having managed to get off the ground at all, despite lacking any sort of convertibility "launching pad" and despite being "intrinsically" useless.
Just as a toddler's first steps don't qualify it for the Olympics, the first barely above-ground flight of bitcoin is far from guaranteeing that it will stay aloft, let alone keep gaining altitude. Still it does seem to show that otherwise useless stuff can become an exchange medium without resort to trickery, and indeed without any sort of government encouragement. And that's neither a mean nor an uninteresting accomplishment. Just how did bitcoin manage to overcome what for want of a better name I'll call the "oyster" problem?
My partial answer is that, at least for some time after they first became available in , bitcoins possessed three qualities such as no other actual or potential exchange medium had yet managed to combine. First, the open-source software providing for them to be "mined" by persons commanding sufficient computer-power allows only for a strictly limited annual output, with steadily diminishing returns such as will make unit mining costs approach infinity as total output approaches 21 million coins as it is scheduled to do in In short, with just over 11 million bitcoins outstanding so far, no amount of computer power or time will ever expand the quantity by more than another 10 million.
No one, in other words, is able to make a bundle by striking bitcoins at libidum. The problem of securing trust that might confront a prospective issuer of private "fiat" money is thus averted. In this respect bitcoin is more like a commodity than a fiat money, which is why I prefer to label it a "synthetic" commodity. The other features that made bitcoin unique are 1 the untraceable nature of transactions conducted using it and 2 the fact that, being a "digital" money, it can circulate electronically.
Bitcoin, in short, was the first medium to allow for perfectly anonymous transactions, avoiding both a paper trail and face-to-face contact, and to do so with the same convenience as any other sort of "digital" payment.
Bitcoin's inventors were thus able to take advantage of an unfilled niche. But filling it guaranteed nothing: Risk it, of course, some did; and now, after some dramatic gyrations, with more undoubtedly to come, bitcoin, having already merited at least a footnote in the history of exchange media, might well manage to do considerably better than that.
It is, after all, the nature of network goods to go from strength to strength, with every uptick in network size enhancing the prospects for further growth. That, so far as bitcoin enthusiasts are concerned, is the good news. The bad news is, first of all, that bitcoin remains a bit player relative to established moneys, which for all their shortcomings command vast networks that are correspondingly self-reinforcing.
Second, bitcoin's relatively tiny network goes hand-in-hand with a high degree of market volatility, and a correspondingly reduced attractiveness to retailers, with large orders placed by one or two "big players" sufficing to generate huge price swings. Finally, the very success of bitcoin is bound to inspire imitations combining the original product's desirable features with others such as might cause it to suffer the same fate as Betamax and BlackBerries.
Consider, for example, a private cybercurrency based on a "mining" protocol aimed at dampening short-run swings in its exchange value. Or consider MintChip , a cypercurrency now under development at the Royal Canadian Mint, which is supposed to be as anonymous as bitcoin, but with the very considerable advantage of being fully compatible and integrated with the already established Canadian dollar exchange network.
Paradoxically, the very innovations that may eventually doom bitcoin also explain why it deserves to be regarded as one of the most promising developments in the history of money since the invention of ordinary coins.
For, as I explain in my paper on "Synthetic Commodity Money," its otherwise modest achievement proves that, with the help of the right software, one might design an "ideal" money commodity, with a supply function guaranteed to achieve whatever criterion of macro-economic stability one likes—be it a constant nominal money stock growth rate, a stable general price level, or a stable level or growth rate of nominal GDP.
No muss, no fuss, and, best of all, no FOMC. Admittedly, it's only a possibility. But what a possibility! Over at Bitcoin Forum a commentator observes, regarding my post: Sure, once bitcoins became desirable enough people wanted to be able to get hold of them without mining for them themselves, e. Nothing puzzling about that. But the fact that entrepreneurs were quick to respond to that desire hardly explains why anyone was willing to be among the first persons, if not the very first person, either to devote effort to mining bitcoins or to offer to exchange valuable stuff, whether dollars, merchandise, or labor, for them.
Should anyone at Bitcoin Forum wish to enlighten me and others on the matter, as I'm sure many can, I should be very grateful to him or her. In terms of Free Banking, it seems to have more interesting possibilities than Bitcoin. Put differently, Ripple offers an environment in which individuals can be their own credit-issuing and credit-accepting banks.
Thanks for the comment, John. I will certainly look into Ripple. Maybe we should have a discussion about what legal tender laws really mean and how they're supposed to work, i. Right now, in the U. If I'm not mistaken, legal tender laws became necessary in the U. Civil War era to assure that former slaveholding states would recognize and use only U. Note Greenbacks , and discontinue using Confederate money.
Rick, you are indeed mistaken in your understanding of legal tender laws, and especially in claiming that buyers whose offers of legal tender are refused may then have goods for free. According to the U. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise.
For example, a bus line may prohibit payment of fares in pennies or dollar bills. Nor could Greenbacks have been made legal tender for the purpose of forcing former rebels to stop using Confederate notes, since they were awarded that status in , when there was no question of having the South comply with it. Upon the North's victory, on the other hand, it was hardly necessary for it to take steps to demonetize Confederate notes, as that victory itself rendered those notes worthless.
George, I agree that under legal tender laws there needs to be a degree of good faith and reasonableness on the part of both the person tendering or offering payment, and the receiver merchant, tax collector, landlord, etc. For example, if a post merchant in the Civil War era, whether from the North or the South, advertised items for sale in U. The Coinage Act of states in part: Foreign gold or silver coins are not legal tender for debts.
In the case of the merchant offering something for sale in US dollars, but only accepting bitcoin in payment, that fact in and of itself is not a debt owed by the purchaser to the merchant.
If a merchant delivered items to a purchaser and then demanded bitcoin, the purchaser could discharge the debt simply by paying in USD. However, if the merchant refused to deliver items until receiving bitcoin, no such debt exists, although if the merchant fails to deliver, the merchant could discharge the debt by offering USD. In the absence of a legal tender law, the person tendering payment is at the mercy of the merchant's whim, no?
On item 4 in this article by Rob Gray, he corrects Ron Paul on how legal tender laws work: A lot seems to depend on if and when a debt is incurred, and what kind of terms the merchant made apparent before the debt was incurred. Would it be fair to say that if you were to rewrite your paper, you'd be more sympathetic to Don Patinkin's theory of fiat money? Just to summarize, Patinkin thought that individuals could compute the amounts of a virgin fiat money that they'd demand at each price level, then submit these demands to a Walrasian auctioneer who would process everyone's demand curves and calculate the equilibrium price for that new fiat currency.
You wrote that a corner no-trust non-monetary option was probable and that independent fiat currencies were likely to fail. Bitcoin and a legion of alternative cryptocurrencies would seem to imply that Patinkin is somewhat justified and floating a new fiat currency is relatively simple.