Quote from: Barbijuana on April 11, 2013, 07:38 pmGreat read, Pine. I AM SO JACKED UP ON FREEDOM NOWPine posts will contain approximately 38.6% more Freedom in the future.Quote from: cantharidin on April 11, 2013, 08:03 pmI argue that there is a huge difference in discussing BTC vs ExxonMobil. Exxon's relationship to the dollar economy is easily studied and strong conclusions can be reached, because both Exxon and $ have long histories and real (more or less) relationships with tangible things (the weighing machine). There are for sure lots of variables and spurious events that cause noise in the system, but still... If I gave more of a shit, I'd go get an economics degree.Although I agree Exxon's fundamentals can be studied more since they have more historical information, all oil companies keep trade secrets and the quantities of oil that exist in the ground is usually a matter of the highest nation state secrecy. Although it's not a black market, there's plenty of information that the market can only make (very sophisticated, thousands of geologists, chemists, physicists at work on Wall Street) educated guesses at. There is a huge incentive to keep secrets in that industry due to the colossal sums of money involved. That is why oil companies frequently use dark pools of capital to achieve their financial objectives e.g. buying up small prospectors. They need anonymity too, probably more than we do. Just because you got a whole lot of data from the past does not imply this shall help your predictive powers. This may sound like pine is being deliberately obtuse, but I'm really not, that is what it is. It really is that hard to reach "strong conclusions" about the relationship between any two prices in the economy. You can have a great head for valuations, but prices are another matter.The big difference between SR with relation to BTC and Exxon with relation to USD is that SR is relatively speaking a much bigger component of economic value in the economy that trades BTC. But that is beside the point, which is that all currencies have similar properties, even if they are cryptographic and the supply isn't generated by fiat. Currencies can represent either economic activity or speculative activity. Whenever you hear of a market analyst on CNBC talking about how "conditions in the European Union contributed to a fall in the Euro" or anything of that character, they are full of shit. Even when they sound logical, they are full of it. Nobody can actually know the motivations of millions of actors in the economy, the system is too complex to be wound up into a coherent narrative that our brains can understand. Occasionally some people may get a ray of light, but that's as much as you can hope for. Anybody that can consistently interpret market moves has a bridge to sell you, no better than an astrologer.A bit OT: but the economics profession gets a lot of flak for either making predictions, or for not making them and being too general. The truth is that their answers are often accurate (outside of predictive power) and do indeed reflect some aspect of reality, but that nobody wants to hear the truth because it isn't useful to you in placing trades or setting government policies. They are cursed to be bearded bespectacled Cassandras. :DQuote from: cantharidin on April 11, 2013, 08:03 pmThe question about SR and BTC is much more interesting to me because while SR exists as a tangible marketplace with tangible value in inventory, trade, etc (let's not argue about who assigns value or in what units it's measured) that can be connected back to all of the history and value of the traditional economy. It can be weighed. It doesn't matter to SR whether one bitcoin is worth $10 or $1000 (other than the disruption that excessive volatility causes) - we buy bitcoins with dollars or Euros or whatever, and we buy stuff, and (should) think of the cost of what we bought in the $ we paid to get the coins. BTC is a middleman in the transaction. That is so. I think of it as being a place, Silkroadistan, where you visit on holiday and need the local currency btc in order to be there.Quote from: cantharidin on April 11, 2013, 08:03 pmBTC, on the other hand, is brand new and no one knows what the real value is or how to assign it. The place of BTC (and all cryptocurrency) in the world is being hashed out right in front of our faces, and I think it's really interesting. If SR is 100% of the bitcoin market, then it would be much easier to look at value of bitcoin, and, in fact, bitcoin would act like a traditional currency with some arbitrarily assigned exchange rate. If 100% of the BTC market is controlled by speculators, then the value of bitcoin is impossible to assign because there is no value other than as a gambling machine - the price could be pegged to tulips...I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. Well. By middle I mean 90% speculation 10% fundamentals, so that's a funny kind of middle, but there you go. I suppose if SR really was 100% of the economy they wouldn't be called bitcoins. They would be called silk road vouchers, like some kind of currency in a one company town. (but what a town!) :DQuote from: cantharidin on April 11, 2013, 08:03 pmMy original question really had to do with my thinking about what the effects of SR activity are on BTC as a whole, and especially the role that SR plays in the perception by the PTB of what BTC is and what their response will be. I agree 100% with you that this is a revolution, but I'm not as optimistic that there's a good end as people come to realize what's being done to them. Corporate Fascism has taken deep root and the People in Charge will be ruthless at ripping out anything that rises up to challenge the status quo. We're slaves already.That being said, I hope I'm wrong, and I'll do anything I can to support what's happening here. This is the best chance we have to undermine the system and proactively create something new. That is a much better vision than tearing down the system and letting anarchy reign...Hear hear! I note that for every act of creation there is an act of destruction. The invention of the automobile destroyed the horse and cart industry. So some element of seeming 'chaos' is natural, but still, I think the end result will be a better world once we have new (cryptographic!) institutions. By 2100 or even 2050 the concept of government fiat and central banks determining montary policy should be an anachronism.