Congressman Accepts BitCoin For His US Senate Run 165
SonicSpike writes "U.S. Representative Steve Stockman, a vocal opponent of Federal Reserve policy, told reporters that he wants to promote Bitcoin, whose most fervent evangelists tout as an alternative to fiat currency. To do so, he is now accepting Bitcoin for his Senate campaign against incumbent John Cornyn of Texas. The announcement was made last night at the launch event for the NYC Bitcoin Center, located just up the street from the New York Stock Exchange. Center founder Nick Spanos a real estate developer and Bitcoin enthusiast says the Center itself is still in something of a planning stage, existing more as a statement about Bitcoin itself, though he plans on hosting a hackathon later this month."
I like the idea (Score:5, Informative)
Speculation will never go down (Score:2, Insightful)
I like the idea of crypto currencies...
Why? Bitcoin has many of the worst aspects of a gold standard. It is useless for transactions that don't involve a computer to facilitate trade - i.e. cash transactions. Bitcoin has very high levels of exchange rate risk due to volatility, speculation and lack of liquidity. Few people really know what it is and even fewer accept it for payment. For most merchants it costs extra resources and adds risk to handle and exchange since they will have to convert it back to dollars anyway - the same problem wi
Re:Speculation will never go down (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure it has issues, even compared to cash but... cash can't be used for online purchases either. I don't think it is a problem if one currency isn't the perfect solution for all problems. Is it really a failure of one currency if it only fills in a niche? Do you really think the niche of providing online transactions to people who are distrustful of other currencies is a failing?
As a niche market, I think bitcoin works pretty well overall and fills in a real gap between cash and traditional bank mediated transactions.
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Is it really a failure of one currency if it only fills in a niche?
BTC does not fill any niche. What is it that BTC allows me to do that I cannot do through the bank, using any currency of my choice?
On the other hand, the bank offers me features that BTC does not have. I do not need to worry about the mechanics of inter-bank transfer. I do not need to carry a computer and a BTC wallet with me; a simple number on a plastic card will do. If I lose that number, I am insured against the loss. If a merchant
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Is it really a failure of one currency if it only fills in a niche?
BTC does not fill any niche. What is it that BTC allows me to do that I cannot do through the bank, using any currency of my choice?
Buy illegal stuff from certain websites, lose half your wealth in an instant when some random nation decides to ban them, waste metric shit-tonnes of electricity for little to no fiscal gain...
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As it always happens, the only sure winners from a gold rush are sellers of shovels. In this case, plenty of money was made by ASIC miner manufacturers, and by utilities. Everyone else has to fight for survival.
I considered buying a couple ASIC miners myself, until I did the research and discovered that they can only mine BTC. Then I brought up the calculators, and that's when I figured out that it was far too late to get into the BTC game.
So now, they're talking about ASIC devices that can mine Litecoins instead, but something tells me they'll be too late to that party as well.
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They can mine any crypto that uses SHA256, so, not only BTC.
Also, it still may be possible to earn profit from some devices, it all depends on price/GH/s, power/GH/s and delivery time.
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They can mine any crypto that uses SHA256, so, not only BTC.
Also, it still may be possible to earn profit from some devices, it all depends on price/GH/s, power/GH/s and delivery time.
Judging from this list of cryptocurrencies, [wikipedia.org] BTC is the only "active" cC that uses SHA256; the other two listed, Peercoin and Namecoin, are apparently 'proof-of-concept' only.
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www.coinwarz.com - you input your hashrate and it will calculate which crypto is currently the most profitable (of course, as with everything, you have to use caution).
I managed to earn ~1.8BTC by mining Unobtanium right after it was introduced for a few days. I probably would have mined 0.1BTC in that time. So, I mined UNO, then sold some when an exchange started accepting them, sold some more when the price rose and still have about 100 left (the price should rise again after the block reward halves).
Some
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Semi-anonymous donation.
Think of it now - this guy now has a way to basically fund his campaign without oversight. Sure, he can report all his BTC dealings on his public wallet, but he can always create another wallet for those "special interests" that want to bypass any election fundraising laws. And since BTC's blockchain only tells you which wallets were used, he can proba
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Explain the roadmap (Score:2)
Or at minimal it could potentially work really well.
Why? Paint a clear and defensible roadmap by which bitcoin becomes a currency that makes sense for a significant portion of the population. Explain how bitcoin provides any meaningful advantage over existing currencies. Explain how the volatility, liquidity and exchange rate risk problems will be resolved. I've got a masters degree in finance and am a certified accountant and I cannot see any scenario in which bitcoin is anything other than a silly idea. Perhaps you are smarter than I am.
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First, I will put my cards on the table with regard to BTC in that I am not a supporter, I personally think it will fade into obscurity in a f
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I can take a US twenty dollar bill, travel to Araypalpa, 3000 meters above sea level in the Peruvian Andes, and use that to buy something. If no one knows the current exchange rate they can use the single telephone in town to call Cusco and find out. When I can do that with bitcoin I'll consider it a real currency. Until then it's about as useful to me as Zimbabwean dollars.
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Do you really think the niche of providing online transactions to people who are distrustful of other currencies is a failing?
The only niche BTC fills right now is online transactions for illegal goods. You don't need to "trust" USD in order to buy a pizza on a credit card. Heck, if you expect hyper-inflation, a month's float on the credit card makes it an ideal currency.
The niche BTC can't fill is a stable store of value, mostly because that's not what currencies are for. Nor it particularly important that a currency suffers from inflation, as long as the rate is low enough to not be a hassle day-to-day (once you have to spe
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For me, BitCoin doesn't fill a void in my banking life. It's interesting and kinda fun to mess around with.
For people who don't have access to trustworthy financial institutions (or governments), I think it does fill a void. Their biggest hurdle would be getting BTC from their local currency (like China blocking BTC last month).
I think that it would be better if BTC traded in a narrower band, but I think that as it picks up in use, liquidity will help with that.
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For people who don't have access to trustworthy financial institutions (or governments), I think it does fill a void.
No it does not, at least not for many people. I've traveled a lot. What happens in countries like Vietnam where the financial/government institutions aren't entirely trusted is that they use alternative currencies and lots of cash. When I was in Vietnam a few years ago most of my purchases were in dollars instead of the local currency, the Dong.. (I kid you not - it really is called that) The merchants I dealt with strongly preferred dollars. Places where the government isn't trusted tend to have cash
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> For who? Drug dealers? Money launderers? Libertarians with a hate-boner for fiat currencies and the Fed?
Yes, exactly, are you claiming they don't exist? Because they, in fact do, and some of them have some resources; and there are others more than willing to trade from them.
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It's 2014. People carry computers around in their pockets these days, heck even my mother does. Even when you pay with cash, very likely that cash is placed immediately inside a computer controlled cash register. Of all the criticisms of Bitcoin I've seen over the years, this one has to be the strangest.
By the way, perhaps you aren't aware of how horrifically broken existing payment systems are. I've ta
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I like the idea of crypto currencies...
Why? Bitcoin has many of the worst aspects of a gold standard.
What worst aspects? It does everything gold does but can also be used online or moved around the world instantly for pennies (or even free right now if you are willing to wait).
It is useless for transactions that don't involve a computer to facilitate trade - i.e. cash transactions.
Everyone has a cell phone. I borrowed $2 from a guy at work for the vending machines and instantly texted him $2 in bitcoin using the Coinbase texting service.
Bitcoin has very high levels of exchange rate risk due to volatility, speculation and lack of liquidity.
This is true, if by risk you mean that you have a greater than 2/3 chance of your money being worth more.
Few people really know what it is and even fewer accept it for payment. For most merchants it costs extra resources and adds risk to handle and exchange since they will have to convert it back to dollars anyway - the same problem with them accepting foreign currencies which is why most don't. It's very expensive to use once you account for the full cost of the risk factors. Basically it scratches some ideological itches but as currencies go it doesn't have a lot to recommend it.
Actually, services like BitPay and Coinba
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Gold is not succeptible to a typo sending it into a black hole. Gold doesn't require multiple backups to avoid losing everything to a drive crash. Gold is exceedingly resistant to hacking. Gold transfers do not require you to wait for 2-10 verifications. And last but certainly not least gold has intrinsic value since it has uses other than currency.
BTC has its potential uses but as a currency will never be one of them if only because of the extreme slowness of verifiying a transfer compared to say a credi
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OTOH, Gold is difficult to divide and verify the amount. For example, if would be difficult to pay $1 worth of gold (that amounts to,what, 25mg?) both i actually cutting such a small amount from a larger block and weighing it to see if it's really $1 and not $0.9. Ohand the seller would then need to melt the received gold back into a larger block (because if he had lots of dust each particle weighing 25mg, then one sneeze would result in a huge loss).
OTOH, you can send 1uBTC as well as 1MBTC just as easily.
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Where do you think the phrase "not worth a Continental" came from?
Are you sure that doesn't refer to the inherent worthlessness of anything manufactured by Ford?
Re:I like the idea (Score:5, Insightful)
It needs to become less speculative and more stable to be a true alternative.
It cannot become more stable. The supplies of BTC are limited by design. As BTC is used more and more in the world trade, each BTC keeps increasing in price. This is on top of the built-in deflation in a market of fixed size. This is why it cannot be used as money. Nobody wants to part with something that becomes more expensive as you hold it. There is an awful amount of USD in circulation, and only 21 million BTC. If you replace all USD with BTC, each BTC would cost a million dollars, and you'd run out of divisibility of BTC, and the "small" payment fee would be unaffordable. Also, BTW, early adopters would own half of he planet's wealth.
The reason it can't become more stable (with a click of a button) is that not enough people use it. Deflationary and supply issues aside, there just isnt enough capitalization (with respect to other currencies) to prevent huge swings due to speculation. But contrary to the original assertion about "too much speculation", if enough _more_ people were speculating (raising the value and volume of daily trades), you would see it stabilize compared to the current roller coaster. Bitcoin is like a micro crude oil market; big speculators can drive it any way they want, and since the total capital (relative to USD) in bitcoin is so low, a single heavyweight speculator can run the show.
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The reason it can't become more stable (with a click of a button) is that not enough people use it. Deflationary and supply issues aside, there just isnt enough capitalization (with respect to other currencies) to prevent huge swings due to speculation.
This is a nice theory but was fairly thoroughly proven false during the 2008 financial crisis, it doesn't help how many investors you have when all of them stampede away from a rotten apple. Call it systemic failure, call it a house of cards, call it a domino effect but I don't see adding more speculators having much stabilizing effect because their market behavior is very, very similar.
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The problem with that line of though is there is a wealth of empirical data to back up the theory. I can’t think of a case where it leads to a death spiral, but there are many examples where deflation has skewed the economy to the hoarding of cash, a reduction in investment, which is followed by a recession. These range from the financial crash of the 1870s to Japan of today.
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There's a wealth of empirical data to back almost any economic theory. When you have the entire history of the world to draw from, you will find examples of "condition A is true, then B happens" for almost all values of A and B. On the other hand, every situation is unique, so you can't really isolate the causal relationship between A and B. And on the third tentacle, people have money riding on convincing oth
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Speculation in BTC is trivially small in absolute amounts compared to speculation in other currencies. The problem is the ratio of speculative trading to normal use - most BTC activity is speculation, not "paying for stuff". That's the balance that would need to shift to dampen the swings in BTC value.
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the divisibility of bitcoins is set on the current version of the protocol and can be increased any time with a update version. the protocol already had several updates, one of then a mandatory update to solve a large block fork issue [bitcointalk.org]
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The problem with inflation / deflation is not with the units of currency – That the value of coins becomes too large under deflation and that you need wheelbarrows to cart around cash under inflation. If that were the issue government currency would be more effective because they can redecimalized.
The problem with inflation /deflation is the change of value of a unit of currency. i.e., it does not matter if your 1 BitCoin changes to 1.0 BitCoins, it that what it can buy is different.
Re:I like the idea (Score:4, Interesting)
However, the ecosystem around BTC is way too unstable for that kind of planning.
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Upward movement of price may not get you stability. The stock market has been trending upwards for over a 100 years and it is still not stable. Heck, I would argue that gold is currently too unstable to serer as a currency – though I know people will disagree.
BitCoin will remand unstable until it is much larger (i.e. more transactions) and more interconnected (for example, somebody takes out a year mortgage on their house denominated in BitCoins) with the real economy.
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And I have another thought. Inflation is the change of aggregate supply of money against the aggregated demand for money.
Frist, yes, the aggregated supply of currency can be estimated in advance. However, currency (M1) and money (M2) are not the same thing. The supply of money is something different. See this graph:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply [wikipedia.org]
Second, you also need to estimate the aggregated demand for money. Partly this means estimating GNP but it also means estimating how much money, a riskle
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Each bit coin can be divided down to 100,000,000 satoshis. the whole transfer process is based on 100,000,000 satoshis, so when you get one bitcoin you, the backend process it as 100 million satoshis.
Payment fee can also scale, and can even be put manually in the miner i believe, or its capable of doing so and hasnt been implemented yet (bitcoin protocol is full of shit you can do)
From your two very wrong remarks, i would presume that you have little knowledge of bitcoin, and unfortunately your spreading mi
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Nobody wants to part with something that becomes more expensive as you hold it
Which is why real estate and precious metals are never bought and sold.
each BTC would cost a million dollars
At least.
and you'd run out of divisibility of BTC
Correct, the clients would need to agree to a protocol revision (probably 64 bits) to make it a true worldwide currency
and the "small" payment fee would be unaffordable.
There's nothing fixing the price of a transactions, so market forces apply.
Also, BTW, early adopters would
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Given the choice between cypherpunks and central bankers - well, we gave the central bankers a chance and look what they've done. I'll take the loons who are always going on about freedom and privacy over the Jamie Diamonds any day.
Nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is - a real person, or an alias of a person, or a large group. It would be very reckless to give "them" keys to the kingdom without checking.
Besides, central bankers are not that personally rich. The list of richest people on the planet is r
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Those have nothing to do with each other, and the first doesn't even hold true. Bitcoin needs nothing except more "normal" ways to use it for the value to stabilize. If someone like Amazon started taking BTC, you'd see the exchange rate nailed down to a tolerable level of variability in short order.
Nobody wants to part with something that becomes more expensive as you hold it.
I hear that a lot from people who oppose deflation
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and you'd run out of divisibility of BTC, and the "small" payment fee would be unaffordable.
Divisibility can be changed - 1e-8 is good for now and the near future, but if it is needed, the protocol can be updated to divide into as many decimal places as you want.
The "small" transaction fee can be changed. Besides, you can send transactions without the fee, they will just take a bit longer to first confirmation. Though some sort of minimum fee will probably be imposed - 0.1% of the transaction value for example.
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Ah, the pyramid scheme delusion. Good luck with that, sucker.
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I bought in 2 weeks ago and I'm already up. I'm getting in line before the: big banks, the billionaires, wall street, and finally main street catches on. Once the madness starts I will be well positioned to get rich. And quick!
Do you like tulips? I have some real pretty ones. One BTC per bulb, get in while you can. Historically, prices have never been better!
By all means (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's make it so it's even harder to tell who's bribing their way into power in Washington.
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Campaign donations are subject to federal reporting regulations regardless of what currency they use.
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Which raises a question. So if someone anonymously dumps 1000 bitcoins on him, then what happens?
Re:By all means (Score:5, Informative)
Campaign donations are subject to federal reporting regulations regardless of what currency they use.
Which raises a question. So if someone anonymously dumps 1000 bitcoins on him, then what happens?
He has to not spend it, or run afoul of the FEC for not having his campaign funding papered up nicely. Now if they give it to a superpac, and that superpac goes and gets him elected with a billion dollar campaign, no one could care less.
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Plus the limit per candidate per election cycle is $5,200. So any donation over about 6 bitcoins would be rejected immediately.
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>> someone anonymously dumps 1000 bitcoins on him,
Same thing as what happens if someone leaves an envelope filled with 500 crisp $100 bills at the office.
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You're wrong. Campaign donations have to be documented as coming from a US citizen. Citizens United was about independent PAC organizations, not campaigns.
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Still wrong.
"The Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) prohibits any foreign national from contributing, donating or spending funds in connection with any federal, state, or local election in the United States, either directly or indirectly. It is also unlawful to help foreign nationals violate that ban or to solicit, receive or accept contributions or donations from them. Persons who knowingly and willfully engage in these activities may be subject to fines and/or imprisonment. "
http://www.fec.gov/pages/b
Re:By all means (Score:4, Funny)
Wait, you mean the people who write the laws leave themselves major loopholes? I never would have guessed that.
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What does that have to do with bitcoin based campaign donations?
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he thinks bitcoins are more anonymous then dollars, its a common misunderstanding, infact bitcoin is completely traceable. Every transaction that has ever happened, has been recorded and can be audited. Unlike dollars....
However, bitcoins can be tumbled and they lose track of who owned what coins because all the coins are spread among a bunch of people.
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Traceable only as far as a .wallet file. Not necessarily traceable to an address, phone number, person like a check is.
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Is this the same Steve Stockman who has this gem [talkingpointsmemo.com]?
I didn't follow your link but if he accepts Bitcoin and he's a Ruby coder then maybe we finally have a chance at a tech-savvy congressman!
Isn't it nice? (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't it nice that Bitcoin can be used to buy both drugs and Senators?
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I say...I say...it was just a joke, Son. My main problem is with long-eared varmints like you.
(Sorry for the bad Yosemite Sam impression - just another joke, Son.)
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It's a much better Foghorn Leghorn though.
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Considering that what you wrote looks like something the bastard child of Yosemite Sam and Foghorn Leghorn would say, you should be sorry.
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Oooooo! I hate that rabbit! Smart boy, got a mind like a steel trap – full of mice.
In retrospect, it was a bit of a mashup.
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I'd be more impressed if I saw (Score:3)
US Representative refuses all donations to his campaign.
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So you only want billionaires to be able to run for office?
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And how is this markedly different from the current situation? How many non-millionaires are there in congress?
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Isn't the point to try and improve the situation?
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Isn't the point to try and improve the situation?
If we really wanted to improve the situation, we would set the system up so that there is no such thing as buying favors, er, I mean "campaign donations," and instead have all 'bona fide candidates,' i.e. people who get on enough state ballots, get X amount from the Federal Campaign Commission, not a penny less, not a penny more.
Or something to that effect.
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US Representative refuses all donations to his campaign.
That gives the candidate who is independently wealthy a decided advantage even in the least populated and most compact of districts.
The average congressman represents about 700,000 people.
When labor unions were strong, union workers on the street and canvassing door to door were an enormous resource for the Democratic candidate.
It's naive to assume that financial contributions are the only ones that matters. It's naive to assume that in an era of political action groups that direct financial contribution
Image and ideology (Score:2)
The announcement was made last night at the launch event for the NYC Bitcoin Center, located just up the street from the New York Stock Exchange.
So they are locating this alleged future facility near the NYSE because they hope that will create an illusion of financial credibility.
Center founder Nick Spanos a real estate developer and Bitcoin enthusiast says the Center itself is still in something of a planning stage, existing more as a statement about Bitcoin itself, though he plans on hosting a hackathon later this month."
Oh, so there is no actual center and this is just a bunch of ideological masturbation. Honestly I cannot think of a single reason other than ideology that a real estate developer would have any use for or interest in bitcoin.
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It's kind of inefficient to launder drug money using real estate. While the overhead is less than what CitiCorp or Bank of America would charge, it's really, really slow. The developer is probably just trying to expand his clients' options.
Federal Elections Commission Response? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is interesting in light of the recent story stating that the FEC Will Not Allow Bitcoin Campaign Contributions [slashdot.org]. Maybe the candidate doesn't read Slashdot. I look forward to hearing the FEC respond, and how much of a fuss this guy is ready to make.
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He actually is/was under investigation by the FEC [wikipedia.org] for some "large" donations made in response to a Native American casino bill that he introduced...
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This is interesting in light of the recent story stating that the FEC Will Not Allow Bitcoin Campaign Contributions [slashdot.org]. Maybe the candidate doesn't read Slashdot. I look forward to hearing the FEC respond, and how much of a fuss this guy is ready to make.
The publicity value of the stunt aside; my guess is ultimately he is "accepting Bitcoin" the same way the car dealer "accepted Bitcoin for a Tesla." In other words, convert Bitcoin to dollars via an exchange and give me the dollars. Saying that is accepting bit coins is a bit disingenuous; it's like saying "I paid for my house with Google stock" because you sold enough to pay for your house.
Smart move (Score:2)
Since nobody wants to part with their bitcoin, he will be funding his campaign with fiat currency while reaping the benefits of being to the first to accept bitcoin. It's a win win
Understanding how the Fed works should be a prereq (Score:2)
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/07/bitcoin-clampdown-continues-as-federal-judge-says-its-a-currency/ [techcrunch.com]
Pretty soon the federal government is going to reach out and definitively regulate Bitcoin. That is one of the functions of a central government.
Section 8 of the Constitution enumerates the powers of Congress, among which;
"To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;"
Why would you vote into Congress someone who seems not to have read, or seems no
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I wished they had fixed the standard weights and measures.
Douchebags didn't act on Jefferson's proposal for a decimal system (before the metric system!).
Now I have to own TWO sets of wrenches.
Why would you vote into Congress someone who seems not to have read, or seems not to agree with, the founding documents?
Not bloody likely. The guy is obviously a nut job. Anyway if recent experience holds true he'll get nominated by the Teapublicans and rejected in the general election in a classic foot shot.
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Bank Specie (Score:3)
Bitcoin reminds me of the bank specie circulated in the 1800s. Banks would accept legal tender, i.e. gold and silver, as deposits ad then print up specie redeemable at only that bank to be redeemed. If someone accepted it it could be used as de facto currency. There was nothing preventing it from being rejected for payment or banks printing up much more specie than they had deposits for. It was responsible for several major crashes when there was a run on specie and it was discovered the banks could not cover all of the debts or would only redeem it at a fraction of its supposed value.
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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-30/bitcoin-alternative-currency-libertarian-vs-pragmatist [zerohedge.com]
Re:Colour me confused (Score:5, Insightful)
rather than Nature regulating it with a fixed amount of, say, gold, or any other naturally occurring element that has it's own value (gold is a super-conductor).
I know you meant "gold is a super good conductor" (gold has not been demonstrated to be a superconductor under any condition) but either way that raises one pointed problem; what happens to semiconductor manufacturing if the value as a currency (in other words the need to store value in it) gets too great? Are we supposed to just stop making CPUs (or make CPUs that are 5x or 10x more expensive) just because someone decided that gold was pretty enough to base an economy off of? Or do we just give up having fast CPUs and go back to (shudder) copper?? It is this very property (its central place as a commodity) that would give me the strong opinion that it should not be used as a currency at all.
Serious answers only, please.
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The only real currency on the planet is our time itself. You should always value that over anything else, no matter what. Coming after that is food and water. So if you spend your time growing food,
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It's this real-world use that defines things
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You are the first person I've seen that realizes even "precious" metals are fiat currencies as well. I was trying to explain this to a Randtard recently and he just couldn't grasp how his go-to argument against fiat currencies was fallacious.
Yes and no. "Fiat" currency is commonly used to describe a currency that is 100% made up (a piece of paper with some dead guys pic on it being worth a week's hard labor), as opposed to one that is only partly made up (a piece of shiny, relatively hefty metal worth one week's hard labor). Your argument is more in line with the definition of "currency" which is anything that has some stored (agreed/decreed) value beyond just the intrinsic one (intrinsic like your ability to make wedding rings out of it and
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First, copper is a better conductor than gold (~16 nOhms/m vs. ~24nOhms/m, lower is better). Gold is primarily used as plating because it doesn't corrode. But that doesn't really impact the value of your question.
When a core material like gold changes price, the impact to the consumer depends on the rate and absolute value of the price changes.
If the total impact to the product's price is small or sudden, then it is either passed on to the customer or absorbed by the manufacturer. There isn't a lot of go
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Or do we just give up having fast CPUs and go back to (shudder) copper?? It is this very property (its central place as a commodity) that would give me the strong opinion that it should not be used as a currency at all.
Yep. It's amusing to me when gold bugs claim that gold's usefulness as a conductive material gives it an "inherent value" that also makes it a good choice as a currency (or as a backing for currency).
If we were to switch back to gold and keep using it in various manufacturing, that's a drain on the limited supply of gold available for use as currency. That's bad.* As you pointed out, cost could increase to balance that out, and that's bad, too.
If we were to stop using gold in manufacturing, product quality
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I hope we move back to the gold standard and someday soon the asteroid mining companies start flooding the markets with more gold than has been mined in the entirety of human existence. Or a bunch of special new uses for gold are discovered and drive the demand up 10x what it is today. This illusion that gold has an inherently fixed value is just ludicrous.
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I hope we move back to the gold standard and someday soon the asteroid mining companies start flooding the markets with more gold than has been mined in the entirety of human existence. Or a bunch of special new uses for gold are discovered and drive the demand up 10x what it is today. This illusion that gold has an inherently fixed value is just ludicrous.
No gold advocate suggests it is a fixed value, only that it is a fixed _supply_ which is good (the argument goes) because it stabilizes the value and prevents inflation by meddling governments.
Now, whether or not single-digit inflation (that happens with prudent monetary policy) is a good thing is an exercise left up to the reader.
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My point is that making the entire monetary system susceptible to a single black swan [wikipedia.org] is much more dangerous than the gold standard people seem to believe. And I disagree with the statement that gold standard advocates don't think gold has a nearly fixed value, in fact you do as well when you say "a fixed _supply_ which is good (the argument goes) because it stabilizes the value". It's true that you largely, baring unforeseen and unforeseeable events, insulate the monetary supply from meddling governments
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The properties of gold make it valuable for several different purposes. One of those purposes is its value as a conductor in electronic components. It's rarity, malleability, and resistance to corrosion make it valuable as a medium of exchange. The fact that one of these purposes is use as a "money" isn't any different than another type of purpose.
Supply and demand for gold for for these purposes (e.g., dentistry, jewelry, money, electronics) dictate the price of gold. The supply is relatively stable, infl
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Exactly. A Fiat currency is a currency that has no intrinsic value itself. Bitcoin has no other use than as currency, so it's just about as "FIAT" as you can get. At least with US dollars, if they become worthless you can still burn them for heat. Granted, Bitcoin does solve a lot of the problems people who dislike fiat currencies are concerned about. Namely government manipulation, inflation, the wholesale printing of money, etc... So perhaps Bitcoin is a type of Fiat currency that avoids many but not all
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Bitcoin is an _alternative_ to fiat currencies? Citation needed, mostly because I can't believe anyone would be that delusional.
Apparently he likes the thought of not knowing how many TV ads and rally signs his campaign can afford 12 hours from now...
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We are talking about Steve Stockman. Even most of the Republican crazes think he is out in lala land.
Re:Colour me confused (Score:5, Informative)
His main argument seems to be that John Cornyn (R-TX) is too liberal, so he's challenging him in the primary.
Also, the U.S. Constitution is too liberal for Stockman, so he wants to amend it in like five different ways. Oddly, given his claim to be some kind of individual-liberty crusader, the ways he wants to amend the Constitution are mostly in the direction of removing individual rights, in favor of giving the government the power to enforce his own particular ideas of collective morality and cultural norms. For example, the Constitution currently guarantees that all native-born Americans are U.S. citizens. Automatically, by right: no federal-government bureaucrat had to confirm my right to be an American, after I was born in Indiana. Stockman doesn't like this. What if some of these Americans aren't enough like him? Shouldn't they have to take a test devised by federal bureaucrats showing their cultural conformity before they're allowed citizenship? Stockman says yes!
Oh, and that First Amendment is a big problem for him. Protects too much liberal nonsense in his opinion. I mean freedom is one thing, but isn't there such a thing as too much freedom? When people do things that offend Steve Stockman, like burn the American flag, well that's just a step too far. Better amend the Constitution again to remove those rights.
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This is the guy who ran a Dodge meme against Cornryn on his Twitter feed last week.
This is the guy who wanted to remove th
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Was Stockman really a pro-choice Republican in the past? He certainly isn't now.
His campaign website [stockman2014.com] includes this section:
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By your definition, the *dollar* isn't fiat currency.
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Citation needed, mostly because I can't believe anyone would be that delusional.
I find it quite easy to believe. There are people out there [wikipedia.org] who think they can evade responsibility for debts by signing their name on contracts with an irregular capitlization [rationalwiki.org] and can escape taxes simply by claiming to be a non-resident alien on their tax forms. These are the far right-wing lunatic fringe [blogspot.com] of the people who see something sinister in the Fed manipulating the money supply.