Why Brand is a Dangerous Fool

A few days ago, a certain Russell Brand appeared on Newsnight. Much to the delight of the generally disillusioned left wing viewer, here was a charisma with a rant about revolution, everything being wrong, and why vote for anyone?

A worryingly large chunk of my left leaning twitter cloud seemed to latch on this call to not vote out of protest. Hence this short blog.

His argument here was that voting for the system gave it legitimacy it doesn't deserve, and what was needed was revolution, not a slightly different brand of politicians.

Like all persuasive arguments, it has some basis in truth. There is little difference between the UK's two major parties .. BUT ..

Let's look at the NHS. If you seriously believe a Labour government in power would be selling off the NHS on the quiet as the Tories are, then maybe you have a point. I however, despite being willing to admit there is little in major reform policies between the two parties, can't see it myself. So let's assume I'm right here and if Labour was in power right now, the NHS would not be being dismantled.

Let's also take ATOS. A scheme introduced by the right wing that has arguably caused multiple early deaths and suicides. This is important. It's not a minor policy quibble. It's something else I don't believe Labour would have implemented that has and is causing very real damage to people.

What Russell Brand has just called for, as an appeal to the disillusioned left was in effect "Forget it lefties, don't vote. Let the Tory's win". This annoys me, and this is why I call him a dangerous fool.

If as part of your left leaning thinking, you believe cash flow perhaps isn't as important as avoiding human suffering where possible, then even if the existing Labour party doesn't represent your ideal government, it's still the option to vote for. Basically, that you should have got off your ass and voted for *something* if you wanted to help avoid needless human suffering, premature deaths and suicides. Otherwise you are complicit.

If you really hate Labour? Sure. Set up your own party representation, give it a shot. While you're grumbling about lack of representation, your wish for an ill-defined revolution though .. you might want to actually turn up at a voting station every once in a while and stick two fingers up at the right wing in which ever way you wish to do so.

One step further. I've heard a few times the argument that you have to let the right wing win, so that things get really bad, and this mythical revolution can occur. This .. will only take a moment.

So what these people are saying is, the needless suffering and hastened deaths that occur in pursuit of a revolution are valid. Whereas the needless suffering and hastened deaths that occur due to an unchecked free market / right wing agenda are evil. I'll go a step further. I think the needless suffering and hastened deaths that occur because left thinking people decided to not vote out of apathy or some form of ill judged protest are just as disgusting as the other options.

Read that last paragraph back. Can you see what I see? Where's the evolution in thought to a more caring society? Nowhere. If that's your basis for revolution, I don't want to have anything to do with it. You're just as demented as the people you claim are demented.

Yup. Russell Brand is a dangerous fool indeed.

Something Smells

On the apparent launch of two ballistic missiles in the Mediterranean area.
3rd Sept 2013

Here's how it went on the information I saw go by, in the order it appeared:

Launches detected by Russia, identify two missile launches from mid to East Med area.
A bit of silence.
Reports of gas pipeline in Syria destroyed in explosion (story later vanishes).
First story appears that this is a US test, along with rumour that it was an accidental launch.
Pause
Israel report no record of any missile launches.
Pause
France reports no knowledge of missile launches.
Then almost together:
Sky News reports that it was a US test launch.
Russia speculates that they may be weather testing related launches.
Much longer pause...
Israel claims it was a joint exercise with the US to test missile defence systems.

I missed the point where the US claimed it had no knowledge of missile launches, I'm only seeing that come in now in retrospect, so don't know where that would be on the time line.

But hang on here...
Israel / US launches missiles in the Mediterranean area, apparently at Syria (from Russia's initial analysis of the flight paths) .. with absolutely no press / media preparations? Nothing at all? Hours passed between launch detection news and the final Israel / US story appearing. Result? I don't believe the official story on this one either.

Something here stinks.
As does virtually all the information concerning Syria at the moment.

Syria

It won't fit on twitter, and I don't like monologuing so much on there, so...

It's not about Assad.
The aim of any surgical strike (if it happens) on Syria, will be to destroy weapons that Israel believe to be threatening to themselves whether in the hands of Assad OR whoever might gain power following Assad's removal.

This explains in part the US & allies readiness to strike. They really don't intend to get dragged in to an Iraq war scenario here. It's just destroy the weapons then leave Syria to fight it out again.

But it raises some issues:

Firstly Israel must not only believe that it's strikes on Syria earlier this year were unsuccessful or limited in scope so a risk still remains. That or Russia has recently supplied Syria with more advanced weapons that Israel can't confidently deal with.

Next that it has reached a point where Israel doesn't believe it's safe for them to strike again to remove this threat as they have done in the past. Far safer for Israel to get America & chums to do it for them to avoid direct retaliation.

Next up? That Russia has knowingly provided more advanced weapon capabilities to Syria presumably in response to Saudi and US constantly funding the rebels for dubious reasons.

So if you stand back and take a look at it, it's once again super powers that be using another country as the playground of political gain with messy results.

This time however, there are some problems. The Syrian military has already said it would view an act of aggression by the US as an attack directed by Israel and would fire on Israel in retaliation. Bluff? Bit of a gamble? Israel / US counting on the fact they can neutralise the entire Syrian threat to Israel in one strike? Well ... If Syria does respond with a successful strike on Israel, all hell will break lose.

Now .. it's at this point I get a bit worried.

In the UK in recent days there's been a dramatic up turn in immigration control stopping and "taking away for interview" any ethnic minorities they can scoop up off the streets. Today it was Victoria station in London, and Oxford that I heard of. Want to minimise the risk of terrorism in response from within? Strike first and round up all you can?

Tenacious perhaps. But then there's the build up of military planes in Cyprus today. Easily the preferred point for US attack on Syria ... But ...

Look back up at the top there? We started this ramble on the assumption the original strike was simply to remove arms that Israel regards as a threat. Now all of a sudden, we're looking at contingency plans going in to place for a prolonged engagement and presumably a successful retaliation from Syria against Israel. If that does happen and it is being planned for as a side effect of the initial strike? Then the term "All hell will break lose" is very carefully chosen.

The Egypt Problem

Just for the sake of own sanity faced with the barrage of tweets on the subject.

Let's go back a few years, to a point where it was widely regarded that Morsi supported by the Muslim Brotherhood, was without a doubt the US backed preferred government in Egypt.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-struggles-to-install-proxy-brotherhood-in-egypt/31552

Now since then. On a wave of optimism that the Morsi solution would hold, one of America's big five buddies, the UK, has been busy selling arms to Egypt. All sanctioned and approved by American political interest in the region. (I don't have this kind of info for other countries, I'm sure the UK wasn't the only one).

http://www.caat.org.uk/resources/export-licences/licence?rating=Military&region=Egypt&n=0&date_from=2010-01-01

Most if not all of that weaponry and body armour goes to the police and armed forces in Egypt. In the eye's of America and it's arms dealing buddies, that was all totally fine because Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood had the power and therefore the arms.

So what happened yesterday? The Egyptian Army moved to clear out a large Muslim Bortherhood protest encampment. There were preceding reports that the MB camp was getting heavily armed in readiness for a fight. If you dig through the AP post on what happened today, you'll find buried in there:

"Authorities said the encampment had been heavily armed and footage aired on state TV showed security forces uncovering stashes of ammunition and hand guns after storming the site."

Now I can't tell you which side is exaggerating the truth in their own favour here. I'm sceptical of the largely pro-US media coverage we get in the West, and I'm finding it a little hard to believe the Army just decided to go on a killing spree one day for no particular reason. If they did? America has problems, because someone high up in Egypt has decided to declare war on the MB using the very arms that America and it's allies have been happily selling them. It's worth also noting here, that many in Egypt reportedly view the Muslim Brotherhood as "terrorists". So in the eyes of much of Egypt, not a lot of sympathy is felt. They were told they had to clear the encampment, they didn't so ...

All in all, it's a complete mess, once again with a root cause looking like Western interests meddling in foreign affairs for many years leading to a complete breakdown.

So that's why I'm holding back on comment on the situation unfolding in Egypt on Twitter. It's simply too complex an issue to fit in to 140 characters and there's little I can link to that demonstrates my point of view. I don't trust the media bias in the official news sources that I have access to. I don't trust the knee-jerk reactions of many twitter posters on the subject. I don't trust Obama's intentions either. Many of the Egyptian tweets I've seen are virtually the opposite of the slant of the AP or VICE news reports for example.

Calls to end financial support or military aid are short sighted. The military aid has already been supplied with intent to give Morsi the fire-power to retain control (Ooops). Cutting more general financial aid is likely to harm the citizens that everyone claims they are most concerned about.

The media machine and Western government official lines are a bit stretched here. Obama condemns the violence mainly because it's focused on his own pet project the MB. A sane person would condemn the violence simply on the grounds that violence doesn't solve anything. However, Obama and his supporting nations have been arming and funding Morsi and his supporters precisely to gain control through violence, and then to retain that position via violence if necessary. The word "hypocrite" springs to mind again.

Also worth noting here, that amongst some, the assumption that all protesters must be the good guys is a little jarring. It wasn't the MB protesting that caused the coup that wasn't a coup. That was most of the rest of Egypt against the MB / Morsi. But people seem to like thinking in little boxes without too much analysis, so somehow, the MB protesters are now the good guys because it was a protest. Sure there should always be a right to peaceful protest, but that doesn't mean the protester is always right. Sigh. Anyway. That's one example of the kind lazy thinking that got me to write this.

If you blindly cheer for the MB on this one, you're cheering for America's interests against the will of Egyptians that was shown by the largest turn out for sustained protest in human history just weeks ago. If you cheer for the Army, you're cheering for what does seem to be unjustifiable force from an outside perspective. Who knows? What if the MB was shooting at the Army and police from an encampment containing women and children? Who gave the orders for the Army to move in? As yet, I don't know. What we lack as usual is clear unbiased reporting.

For now, it simply looks like both sides are deeply in the wrong.

It's a horrible mess. The best I can do is hope that somehow out of the smoke, Egypt manages to emerge with a non US installed government and some form of peace. Some in Egypt are predicting civil war and an eventual geographic divide. I hope not. But I guess those in Egypt probably have a better insight in to what's going on than I or most the commentators I've seen in the West do.

Yet Another Game Review...

Sorry guys & gals.

I'm making a real effort not to spend my entire life bound up with the frustrations of injustice and petty run downs. So I still find the time to play games.

Most of the time, I'm even frustrated in that simple pursuit, but recently, I chanced some time with "Kerbal Space Program". And this one is something of a gem. Well a gem for anyone who ever dreamt of launching a rocket anyway.

It's a game in development, currently only with a sandbox style approach, and actually? That's moar than enough to have managed to give me some of the biggest laughs from a computer game for a long long time. It's self challenging. You don't need a plot. It's more ... well ... what can I do with this next?

The first challenge is simply building your own rocket and getting something, or some hapless Kerbal in to space. The Kerbal's and running humour in item descriptions work well. Your budding astronauts don't have a huge splay of skills and experience. They have bravery and stupidity. I'm not sure which serves them best as I accidentally curse them to a fiery death or life in a perpetual orbit I can't rescue them from, but the stupid grin or freaked out "ARGH!" on their faces has finally persuaded me to stop laughing snot bubbles out of my nose and send more unmanned test launches instead.

The first challenge is simply to build your own rocket and launch something or someone in to space. It's ... well ... it should be easy. Actually it's a nice little first lesson in rocket design, staging and structure. When you eventually manage it, it's either a lesson in ... ohhhh that's that the parachute's are for! Or ... Yeah ... it's relatively easy to launch something in to a meaningless orbit round the sun.

And that's where it starts to really shine beyond the absurd hilarity of the initial rocket designs going wrong in all kinds of unimaginable ways. No really. Watching your own "That's my best idea yet!" design destroy itself in new and original ways just doesn't seem to get old. The physics engine in this bit of code is just fantastic. So yes, sometimes things don't place where you want them, and sometimes it's best to just save it, reload it and .. ta-da! It works more like it did before! But overall, glitches aside (it's still in development), physics are the cruel jester as you try to wrestle with gravity again and again.

Anyway. Having escaped the upper atmosphere, putting something in to stable orbit around your own planet becomes the next challenge. This is where you begin to learn about apoapsis and periapsis happens. In other words .. yeah .. actually? How do you chuck something in to orbit and adjust the orbit?

Then it only expands beautifully. Kerbal's own moon "mun" is a nice target, as is the insanely difficult challenge of building your own orbiting space station. The challenges of sending your homebrew payload across gravity wells of other planets and moons begin to beckon.

It's just a fantastic bit of coding. Raw around the edges. Yes you can find fault with part placement. Yes sometimes that previously good design needs a retouch on the launch pad, but somehow even those glitches add to the Kerbal derp humour level as you try to figure out work arounds.

For anyone who ever dreamed of being an astronaut or launching a rocket. This is one fantastic, time absorbing, oh so simple, oh so fun and yet oh so incredibly complicated bit of fun.

Tips

Take it small steps. Each challenge you set yourself and learn from helps a lot when you reach for the next milestone. Figure out the basics of staging and launching, then simple orbit, then adjusting orbit. Add in how to get your derpy Kerbal home again, and before long you've spent hours laughing like a loon and got a pretty good grip on what you can cope with.

The orbital view will blow your mind to begin with. What the hell are all these little symbols when I add an adjustment waypoint?!?! Start simple. The basic tutorials are minimal but put you in the right direction. When you do understand the challenges of orbital flight, the little symbols all suddenly begin to make sense. When that happens you suddenly find the orbital view is incredibly clever for conveying what you want to do next.

Back on the orbital view. If you've messed up a target flight path and can't get a delete X on it, just grab the inner circle and drag it to one side. When it turns red, let go and it's gone. Now try again derp head! What is this? Rocket science?

And...

What can I say? It's just a fantastic bit of coding. Physics become the challenge. What you want to achieve next becomes the aim. Even with it's basic graphics, the satisfaction of your first stable Kerbal orbit is fantastic. Watch the sun rise in true NASA style, launched from your own designed rocket. Then stretch it to managing a near miss with the Mun, then your first stable orbit of a nearby body, and eventually, your first non Kerbal landing. Then ... you begin to wonder ... which planet is easiest to get to next? Can I get a Kerbal to land and plant a flag on the Mun and then get them home again?

The game expands itself. It's beautifully done. Right down to your own space debris kicking you in the ass from time to time.

Don't pirate this one. If you do? Then it taught you that these guys deserve the payout. Now go buy it and enjoy the updates.

I've not enjoyed a game this much since discovering Grand Theft Auto III back in 2002. So this is my once in a decade "Oh hell yes that's goood!" game!

``Never Whistle While You're Pissing''

Excerpts from ``Never Whistle While You're Pissing''

by Hagbard Celine

From the Illuminatus! Trilogy

Seventh Trip, or Netzach (the SNAFU Principle)

"The most thoroughly and relentlessly Damned, banned, excluded,
condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignore, suppressed, repressed,
robbed, brutalized and defamed of all Damned Things is the individual
human being. The social engineers, statistician, psychologist,
sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of
industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are
perpetually forcing this Damned Thing into carefully prepared
blueprints and perpetually irritated that the Damned Thing will not
fit into the slot assigned it. The theologians call it a sinner and
try to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish
it. the psychologist calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still,
the Damned Thing will not fit into their slots.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Appendix Teth: Hagbard's Booklet

" I once overheard two botanists arguing over a Damned Thing that had
blasphemously sprouted in a college yard. One claimed that the Damned Thing
was a tree and the other claimed that it was a shrub. They each had good
scholary arguments, and they were still debating when I left them. The
world is forever spawning Damned Things- things that are neither tree nor
shrub, fish nor fowl, black nor white- and the categorical thinker can only
regard the spiky and buzzing world of sensory fact as a profound insult to
his card-index system of classifications. Worst of all are the facts which
violate "common sense", that dreary bog of sullen prejudice and muddy
inertia. The whole history of science is the odyssey of a pixilated card-
indexer perpetually sailing between such Damned Things and desperately
juggling his classifications to fit them in, just as the history of
politics is the futile epic of a long series of attempts to line up the
Damned Things and cajole them to march in regiment.

Every ideology is a mental murder, a reduction of dynamic living processes
to static classifications, and every classification is a Damnation, just as
every inclusion is an exclusion. In a busy, buzzing universe where no two
snow flakes are identical, and no two trees are identical, and no two
people are identical- and, indeed, the smallest sub-atomic particle, we are
assured, is not even identical with itself from one microsecond to the
next- every card-index system is a delusion. "Or, to put it more
charitably," as Nietzsche says, "we are all better artists than we
realize." It is easy to see that label "Jew" was a Damnation in Nazi
Germany, but actually the label "Jew" is a Damnation anywhere, even where
anti-Semitism does not exist. "He is a Jew," "He is a doctor," and "He is a
poet" mean, to the card indexing centre of the cortex, that my experience
with him will be like my experience with other Jews, other doctors, and
other poets. Thus, individuality is ignored when identity is asserted. At a
party or any place where strangers meet, watch this mechanism in action.
Behind the friendly overtures there is wariness as each person fishes for
the label that will identify and Damn the other. Finally, it is revealed:
"Oh, he's an advertising copywriter," "Oh, he's an engine-lathe operator."
Both parties relax, for now they know how to behave, what roles to play in
the game. Ninety-nine percent of each has been Damned; the other is
reacting to the 1 percent that has been labeled by the card-index machine.

Certain Damnations are socially and intellectually necessary, of course. A
custard pie thrown in a comedian's face is Damned by the physicist who
analyzes it according to the Newtonian laws of motion. These equations tell
us we want to know about the impact of the pie on the face, but nothing
about the human meaning of pie-throwing. A cultural anthropologist,
analyzing the social function of the comedian as shaman, court jester, and
king's surrogate, explains the pie-throwing as a survival of the Feast of
Fools and the killing of the king's double. This Damns the subject in
another way. A psychoanalyst, finding an Oedipal castration ritual here,
has performed a third Damnation, and the Marxist, seeing an outlet for the
worker's repressed rage against the bosses, performs a fourth. Each
Damnation has its values and uses, but is nonetheless a Damnation unless
its partial and arbitrary nature is recognized. The poet, who compares the
pie in the comedian's face with Decline of the West or his own lost love,
commits a fifth Damnation, but in this case the game element and the
whimsicality of the symbolism are safely obvious. At least, one would hope
so; reading the New Critics occasionally raises doubts on this point.

Human society can be structured either according to the principle of
authority or according to the principle of liberty. Authority is a static
social configuration in which people act as superiors and inferiors: a
sado- masochistic relationship. Liberty is a dynamic social configuration
in which people act as equals: an erotic relationship. In every interaction
between people, either Authority or Liberty is the dominant factor.
Families, churches, lodges, clubs and corporations are either more
authoritarian than libertarian or more libertarian than authoritarian. It
becomes obvious as we proceed that the most pugnacious and intolerant form
of authority is the State, which even today dares to assume absolutism
which the church itself has long ago surrendered and to enforce obedience
with the Church's old and shameful Inquisition. Every form of
authoritarianism is, however, a small "State," even if it has a membership
of only two. Freud's remark to the effect that the delusion of many men is
religion can be generalized: The authoritarianism of one man is crime and
the authoritarianism of many is State. Benjamin Tucker wrote quite
accurately:
Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression,
invasion, government are interchangeable terms. The essence of
government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to
control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the
nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it be made by one man
upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one
man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by
all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.
Tucker's use of the word "invasion" is remarkably precise, considering that
he wrote more than fifty years before the basic discovery of ethology.
Every act of authority is, in fact, an invasion of the psychic and physical
territory of another.

Every fact of science was once Damned. Every invention was considered
impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every
artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of
culture and "progress," everything on earth that is man-made and not given
to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man's refusal to bow
to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the
first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant,
and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, "Disobedience was man's
Original Virtue."

The human brain, which loves to read descriptions of itself as the
universe's most marvelous organ of perception, is an even more marvelous
organ of rejection. The naked facts of our economic game are easily
discoverable and undeniable once stated, but conservatives- who are usually
individuals who profit every day of their lives from these facts- manage to
remain oblivious to them or to see them through a very rose-tinted lens.
(Similarly, the revolutionary ignores the total testimony of history about
the natural course of revolution, through violence, to chaos, back to the
starting point.)

We must remember that thought is abstraction. In Einstein's metaphor, the
relationship between a physical fact and our mental reception of that fact
is not like the relationship between beef and beef-broth, a simpler
extraction and condensation; rather, as Einstein goes on, it is like the
relationship between our overcoat and the ticket given us when we check our
overcoat. In other words, human perception involves coding even more than
crude sensing. The mesh of language, or of mathematics, or of a school of
art, or of any system of human abstracting, gives to our mental constructs
the structure, not of the original fact, but of the symbol system into
which it is coded, just as a map-maker colors a nation purple not because
it is purple but because his code demands it. But every code excludes
certain things, blurs other things, and overemphasizes still other things.
Nijinski's celebrated leap through the window at the climax of 'Le Spectre
d'une Rose' is best coded in the ballet notation system used by
choreographers; verbal language falters badly in attempting to conveying;
painting or sculpture could capture totally the magic of one instant, but
one instant only, of it; the physicist's equation, Force = Mass X
Acceleration, highlights one aspect of it missed by all these other codes,
but loses everything else about it. Every perception is influenced, formed,
and structured by habitual coding habits- mental game habits- of the
perceiver.

All authority is a function of coding, of game rules. Men have arisen again
and again armed with pitchforks to fight armies with cannon; men have also
submitted docilely to the weakest and most tottery oppressors. It all
depends on the extent to which coding distorts perception and conditions
the physical (and mental) reflexes.

It seems at first glance that authority could not exist at all if all men
were cowards or if no men were cowards, but flourishes as it does because
most men are cowards and some men are thieves. Actually, the inner dynamics
of cowardice and submission on the one hand and of heroism and rebellion on
the other are seldom consciously realized either by the ruling class or the
servile class. Submission is identified not with cowardice but with virtue,
rebellion not with heroism but with evil. To the Roman slave-owners,
Spartacus was not a hero and the obedient slaves were not cowards;
Spartacus was a villain and the obedient slaves were virtuous. The obedient
slaves believed this also. The obedient always think of themselves as
virtuous rather than cowardly.

If authority implies submission, liberation implies equality; authority
exist when one man obeys another, and liberty exists when men do not obey
other men. Thus, to say that authority exists is to say that class and
caste exis, that submission and inequality exist. To say the liberty exists
is to that classlessness exists, to say that brotherhood and equality
exist. Authority, by dividing men into classes, creates dichotomy,
disruption, hostility, fear, disunion. Liberty, by placing men on an equal
footing, creates association, amalgamation, union, security. When the
relationships between men are based on authority and coercion, they are
driven apart; when based on liberty and non-aggression, they are drawn
together. The facts are self-evident and axiomatic. If authoritarianism did
not possess the in-built, preprogrammed double-bind structure of a Game
Without End, men would long ago have rejected it and embraced
libertarianism. The usual pacifist complaint about war, that young men are
led to death by old men who sit at home manning beaurocrats' desks and
taking no risks themselves, misses the point entirely. Demands that the old
should be drafted to fight their own wars, or that the leaders of the
warring nations should be sent to the front lines on the first day of
battle, etc., are aimed at an assumed "sense of justice" that simply does
not exist. To the typical submissive citizen of authoritarian society, it
is normal, obvious and "natural" that he should obey older and more
dominant males, even at the risk of his life, even against his own kindred,
and even in causes that are unjust or absurd.

"The Charge of the Light Brigade"- the story of a group of young males led
to their death in a palpably idiotic situation and only because they obeyed
a senseless order without stopping to think- has been, and remains, a
popular poem, because unthinking obedience by young males to older males is
the most highly prized of all conditioned reflexes within human, and
hominid, societies.

The mechanism by which authority and submission are implanted in the human
mind is coding of perception. That which fits into the code is accepted;
all else is Damned to being ignored, brushed aside, unnoticed, and- if
these fail- it is Damned to being forgotten. A worse form of Damnation is
reserved for those things which cannot be ignored. These are daubed with
the brain's projected prejudices until, encrusted beyond recognition, they
are capable of being fitted into the system, classified, card-indexed,
buried. This is what happens to every Damned Thing which is too prickly and
sticky to be excommunicated entirely. As Josiah Warren remarked, "It is
dangerous to understand new things too quickly." Almost always, we have not
understood them. We have murdered them and mummified their corpses.

A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more
precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of "monopoly in the means of
production." Since man extends his nervous system though channels of
communication like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who
controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of
society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every
individual's brain.

Thus in preliterate societies taboos on spoken word are more numerous and
more Draconic than at any more complex level of social organisation. With
the invention of written speech -- hieroglyphic, ideographic, or
alphabetical -- the taboos are shifted to this medium; there is less
concern with what people say and more concern with what people write. (Some
of the fist societies to achieve literacy, such as Egypt and the Mayan
culture of ancient Mexico, evidentially kept a knowledge of hieroglyphs a
religious secret which only the higher orders of the priestly and royal
families were allowed to share.) The same process repeats endlessly: Each
step forward in the technology of communication is more heavily tabooed
than the earlier steps. Thus, in America today (post-Lenny Bruce), one
seldom hears of convictions for spoken blasphemy or obscenity; prosecution
of books still continues, but higher courts increasingly interpret the laws
in a liberal fashion, and most writer feel fairly confident that they can
publish virtually anything; movies are growing almost as decentralised as
books, although the fight is still heated in this area; television, the
newest medium, remains encased in neolithic taboo. (When the TV pundits
committed le`se majeste after an address by the then Dominant Male, a
certain Richard Nixon, one of his lieutenants quickly informed them they
had over stepped, and the whole tribe -- except for the dissident minority
-- cheered for the reassertion of tradition.) When a more efficient medium
arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
You can order The Illuminatus! Trilogy over the Web from
The Robert Anton Wilson Bookstore

Cross platform eh?

Total change of track from usual ramblings. This time as a result of trying to develop a simple cross platform GUI application on a Windows machine. Here's what we learned!

I started with Mono as the platform of choice. It has a neat opensource development IDE for Windows called SharpDevelop. It uses Windows Forms for it's GUI design. That's Windows as in windows on the screen, not windows as in Microsoft, so it does indeed run Windows Forms apps fairly happily in Linux land.

First problem. Don't bother checking to see how your creation looks on a Windows machine using Mono instead of .Net. It'll look really terrible and have fun graphical glitches and bugs. You really do need a Linux box or a virtualbox with Linux on it to test your creation.

Now it gets fun.

To begin with I was disappointed with what could be done with Windows Forms, so I had a look around and found Monodevelop appears to have had some updates since I last tried it. So much so that it's now called Xamarin Studio instead. It uses GTK for it's GUI design which is a much richer toolkit than WinForms. It's also open source and in theory lets you target mobile phone apps as well. Sounds fantastic! Except .. just like my last attempt to use Monodevelop in Windows, it's still buggy as hell. Sometimes it will refuse to let you click and put your cursor back in the edit window. I gave up telling it I wanted a Mono target because if I did that, every so often it would break the Posix library. Uninstall library. Reinstall library. Recompile. Ok. Go back to code. Can't edit code. Quit. Restart. Posix library breaks again. Reinstall Posix library. Edit code. Run. Edit code. Run. Edit .. oh it crashed. Give up on Monodevelop. It might work fine as a Linux development platform, but that's not what the original plan was.

So I look around and decide Python with GTK might be the way to go. Uh. No. Back in the good old days of Python 2.6/2.7, it seemed relatively easy to get a whole Python system running on Windows including ERIC, Python's own IDE with GUI designer. Now you have two choices. Try and install 2.7 and hunt for the now obsolete dependencies for it, or go for 3.x and face the fact most people are still on 2.7. I'm not an idiot when it comes to computers, but I gave up after about the fifth time around of "ERIC should run now!" ... Oh no it doesn't. Complete uninstall. Clean registry. Carefully recheck all stated requirements, try again. Once again. It probably works fine on Linux.

Fine. Have another look around. Well. There's Eclipse with SWING / SWT or Netbeans! JAVA! Java will save the day! Surely! ... Er. Not exactly. For a fairly long time now, Sun java hasn't been supported on many Linux distributions. And who can blame them? It's a security nightmare of a product. But if you accept that most Linux users will be on OpenJDK, you have a problem. Most of the fancy Netbeans applications (ok, all of them). Will fail to run without Sun Java. Even the fairly simple Eclipse + Swing app I tried died with AWT errors when I tried to run it on Linux. So it's not cross platform. You can either jump through hoops to stuff all the SWT libraries in with your creation (manually, Eclipse won't do it for you), or reduce yourself to a GUI so basic, that actually, WinForms back on SharpDevelop looks at least as good if not nicer with a lot less hassle.

The other side to that problem is I can't actually justify telling people it's "Linux compatible", if that means they have to go through a long relatively complex process to get Sun Java (a big security risk) installed before they can run it. Once again. If I did my Java application development on a Linux box, it would almost certainly work on a Windows machine.

Then there's dependencies. If I want to get fancy and use GTK for a Mono application, I can ... but I have to bundle in a bunch of DLL's for distribution that Linux doesn't need. That or point people at GTK runtime bundles for Windows. Again. Not exactly out of the box cross platform.

So basically ... If you really want to write cross platform applications, you have to write them from inside a Linux environment. If you want to be a pain like me and insist on a Windows development platform, then Mono looks like the best bet. Mono isn't perfectly cross platform tolerant (you do have to add code to cope with some things Linux does differently), but it does work in the main if you don't do anything too fancy. Java should be a great idea, but since Sun is no longer welcome in Linux land, it's not any more. Python seems to me to be slowly dying. I don't think the jump to version 3+ went very well. Windows support for the 2.x versions vanished yet most people still seem to prefer to code for 2.7 on Linux. So even though most of the development time has gone in to 3.x, less people use it simply because more people still use 2.7. Oh and Python guys & gals? Having install instructions on the webpage that differ from the readme that came with the download that point to no longer available requirements is a bit of a killer on Windows.

End result? I'm back on SharpDevelop using WinForms. It's not perfect by a long shot, but it's stable, fast, and what it spits out can actually run on Linux and look pretty darn similar to how it did on Windows without a lot of additional messing around.

I also learned you can waste most of a week trying other possible "better" solutions to a problem when the one you started with was actually a pretty good bet.

Just thought I'd share! :-)

There are no words

Curious title.
Just another ramble on a topic I can't hope to fit in to tweets.

It's just that there is no alternative language or voice against the situation the western world finds itself in at the moment.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's been assumed that the good guys won. That's us right? The cold war ended and glorious American style capitalism won out over corrupt terrible communism.

Well that's the history we're told. Having learned more about how the media treats those the establishment don't like over the years, I begin to wonder quite how horrible East Berlin and the old USSR actually were. Probably quite bad. But ... dare I suggest .. just as bad as the "good guys" that won?

We have a growing perceived threat of terrorism. Increasingly domestic. That is people radicalised and ready to carry out atrocious acts without ever needing to travel to some far off easily blamed country. The only language I see in the main media against that is quibbling over just how draconian the surveillance laws need to be to catch these evil people before another bomb goes off.

I have another idea.

Why aren't we asking what makes a terrorist act against our own people seem logical to some? I don't know, maybe it's an illegal Iraq war, the injustice of Guantanamo Bay, blind support for Israel and it's persecution of Palestine, countless innocents killed by ongoing drone strikes ... you know .. stuff like that. Maybe it's us doing that kind of stuff that gives people the beginning of an idea that the only way forward is to blow something up.

Worse. Maybe it's the fact there is no voice in the mainstream saying "Hey! Maybe it's this stuff that's creating terrorism against us?!", that makes it even MORE likely for someone to feel horribly aggrieved against America and it's allies. If there was a political voice arguing against the hypocrisy then it would remove a huge part of the incentive for someone to go and make a bomb. Why would you? Wouldn't you join the party protesting the injustice, that has it's voice heard in mainstream media and shout even louder instead?

Yeah yeah. Go for it. Call me a terrorist sympathiser or something. I'm not in anyway justifying terrorist acts. I'm simply saying American acts ARE terrorist acts, or at least can very easily be interpreted as terrorist acts, and it seems highly likely that being a terrorist to others is going to result in some terrorism being done in return.

What do we do? Remove our own liberties and rights as a reaction. Maintain that we (the western world) are not terrorists, even though we commit acts of murder that we would call terrorism by others.

It's just plain dumb. It's a self perpetuating spiral down. I know "think outside the box" makes people spit in hate. But we are in a very small box.

The 'Science' of Economics

Deep sigh.
This follows on from my "Why Krugman is an Idiot" post horribly well.

You're safe. You don't have to read that one. In it I criticise the start point of Krugman's thought experiment as distorted to fit his conclusions. There you go. That was easy!

Well take a look at this then ...

Got that? A chunk of missing NZ data for whatever reason, that's royally messed up a currently widely respected and followed piece of economic research.

Tell that to the families and friends of the suicides in Greece.

Just one huge deep sigh at how we are being led increasingly by stupidity instead of ability.

My father was an educational researcher. It's a messy hard to explain field. Fundamentally though a lot of it rests on data, analysis and research of whichever area is under the microscope. What he did well, and seems to have rubbed off on me. Is respect for source data.

It's the same from instruments, through good old record decks right up to modern audio systems. The quality of source data is vital. If that's deformed, mangled, distorted in any way at all, then there is no way in hell you are going to make up for it no matter how good the analysis is that follows.

If done properly, the life of the educational researcher is a test of skills in that respect. The source data is often a mix of quantitative and qualitative data. The funding for time spent on gathering it is often as little as humanly possible. Each scrap of data is like a tiny nugget of gold. One inept field researcher can demolish vast swathes of valid input.


Where am I going with this? Just that the art of good research and solid conclusion based on it seems to be slowly fading away from the world. Outside the world of the purely scientific, it seems anything goes as long as it pays. Well actually. Even within the world of the scientific. Look at climate change deniers and who funds their papers.

Just another facepalm night in a world full of fail.

Boston

Not a good day.
I've paid some attention to twitter as the tragedy unfolds, but not much. Twitter on occasions like these becomes like a sleazy tabloid with no editor. The ultimate drive by a car crash and rubber neck scenario.

At times like these, I'd actually rather just wait and see what emerges as the services do the best they can. I'm not sure I want to see a competition for the most horrific photo and video footage.

Anyway. After pondering it for a while. My brain has wandered back to a post I made shortly after the Sandy Hook tragedy. The closing stretch of the Boston marathon this time was dedicated to support and memorial for the families of Sandy Hook.

My brain ponders the cruelty, and gravitates to my own suspicions. It seems to me to be some psycho making the point that the clamp down on gun ownership was wrong. By blowing people up instead. Effectively the NRA terrorising it's own public. Well not the NRA, but some gun loving psycho.

It's made slightly more plausible by a few extremes in the tweets I saw in defence of gun ownership after Sandy Hook. There really was a very militant angry reaction to any kind of gun control in America from some people out there. I wonder how crazy some of them are.

By now as well, I'd expect a terrorist group to have claimed such a media intensive attack as their work in the name of >whatever it might be<. But the Sandy Hook memorial section of the Boston marathon? That's a pretty strange target to not be connected at all.

I am of course jumping to conclusions as many others have tonight.
Not sure if I hope I'm wrong or not.
A bit sad that's what my mind leads me to suspect might be the cause.

---

24th April Update

Well. I was wrong. It seems religious fanaticism is more dangerous than people who threaten to kill anyone who tries to take their guns away. (Close call).

WTF Is Wrong With You People?

BITCOIN!
This time Bitcoin-24 down.
Previously MtGox.

People again moaning they have BTC tied up in there.

If you were mid transaction when it went down? Then fair enough, and I'm sorry for your horribly bad luck. If you parked all your money there? What are you? Some kind of idiot?

If you park your money on any website, in any currency, you take a risk! With Bitcoin you don't even need to! Install the client software. Use it. That's your transaction wallet. Install Armory just like I told you to weeks back. That's your easily restored even from a complete computer crash wallet.

Bitcoin is now getting bad press from idiot's parking money on a website when for 90% of the time there's no need to at all with bitcoin! You are your own bank with bitcoin! That's part of the whole appeal if you have the faintest clue what you're doing!

ARGH!

Why Krugman Is An Idiot

Recently an article Krugman wrote in 1998 has been quoted and used as a reason to slate bitcoin.

Luckily, we don't even have to debate bitcoin this time. Krugman doesn't even understand babysitting.

Here's the basics of his article. Don't worry. You don't have to understand economics in great detail to see exactly why Krugman is talking out of his arse. It's pretty simple.

It claims to capture the essence of hoarding being a problem in an economic sense by comparing it to a baby sitting club using 1 hour coupons.

In Krugman's model. One couple (let's call them the Krugman's) decide to undermine the basis of the coupons and increase the value of them by hoarding them.

First problem. To hoard the coupons, the Krugman's spend months baby sitting and gathering vouchers. They never accept an offer for baby sitting in return. In effect, they are being rather generous.

After a couple of months, the baby sitting group meets up and notices the vouchers are running low. There is discussion. Everyone agree's the Krugman's are a bit weird, but they did get some baby sitting done, so it's no real problem. They buy another book of coupon's and carry on exchanging coupon's, some even seek out the Krugman's knowing they will never be asked to babysit in return.

There is no devaluation or economic point you can make out of any of this whatsoever for one very simple reason:

A one hour baby sitting coupon is worth one hour of babysitting. Hoarding it doesn't change anything. It's an hour of baby sitting. All the other coupons don't become worth more or less. Even supplying more to the people that do baby sitting doesn't change the value. Every voucher is still worth one hour of baby sitting no matter what the Krugman's do.

Any other conclusion is a severe distortion of reality. Why do you need to contrive a completely unrealistic situation to prove a point? Hmm... What kind of lunatic baby sitting club would declare a problem with supply of vouchers is causing the value of every voucher to change? Or to simply dissolve the baby sitting circle as an answer?

The Krugman's however are left with a vast pile of vouchers, now to cash in!!! Except ... you can only spend one voucher, per hour, per babysitter. So it's going to take them rather a long time to do it. The Krugman's have in fact taken on additional risk. What if the baby sitting pool vanishes before they can spend all the vouchers? What if the children grow up and don't even need them? ... In short ... The Krugman's are trying to manipulate a bubble and may get burned for it because they don't understand it. Are you listening Paul? I so wish I could know you read this one day.

All Krugman's efforts to demonstrate a problem with hoarding in baby sitting voucher's illustrates is that here is an economic "guru" who doesn't understand simple value and exchange.

It's a stupid model, a stupid analogy, ill thought out and deeply flawed as an example of anything except Krugman's own stupidity.

We don't even have to go on to apply his conclusions to bitcoin, because if he can't even get the economics of a baby sitting circle right, what's the point?

I've had people get back to me and say "No you don't get it. In Krugman's model, they can't get any more coupons, that's the whole point of his argument". To which I say. No. You don't get it. It is trivial for the group to get another book and issue coupons for baby sitting. That is what would happen in reality. To say "Well in Krugman's model they simply can't". Is just dumb. If Krugman wants to prove his point, he needs a real world example of what he's trying to argue where it's not trivially easy and reasonable for the group to just get more coupons.

If he can't find a model that actually fits what he wants to say. Just Maybe what he is saying is flawed as well? To love Krugman's reasoning on this one, you have to also love the fact that his conclusion may be just as contrived and unrealistic as his basic original model.

Yes I am aware of how thought experiments work. When it comes to mathematics, you can be quite fanciful if your end aim is admittedly a theoretical exercise only. For example: We know two men row a boat so fast. I wonder how fast 500 men could row the same boat? It is impossible of course to fit 500 men in the boat, but for the purposes of testing out your theories on how fast the boat might go, it'll do. When it comes to economics, it's not a scientifically testable or correct outcome from a thought experiment, so your start point needs to be pretty darn valid if there's going to be any faith in the conclusions you come to.

In the boat example, you might start off by asking how good are the rowers? How long do they have to sustain that speed? You define reasonable assumptions and the basics for later calculation. If you want to skew the results, you find two very slow rowers, or two very fast rowers and don't pay any attention to that fact in your conclusions. It's called selecting the data to suit the assumption. That's exactly what Krugman is guilty of here.

The perfect world:
"Yes Mr Krugman, I can see you have started from an excellent simple model with which I can find no major flaws whatsoever. I shall consider your final conclusions when applied to economics as a whole with a degree of belief".

Where we are:
"Mr Krugman? Why can't the group just buy more vouchers?"
"Because I said they can't."
"Could you have chosen an example where limit of supply was more realistic?"
"I don't care. This way I get to prove a problem with hoarding."
"Why babysitters?"
"Limited supply of a small number of vouchers!"
"But that's not at all realistic is it Mr Krugman? Gold would be a better example of limited supply wouldn't it? Why not make your argument using gold as a start point?"
<silence ... mutters something about hoarding examples not working so well for gold>
"So why does your final conclusion work out the way it does?"
"Because I said it does and it matches the original model."
"M'kay. Is this sounding a little circular in the logic department?"
<silence>

So no it's not okay to say Krugman's theory is valid even if he got baby-sitting dynamics wrong. Krugman chose an example to illustrate a principle he believed in. His example is deeply flawed. How much do you trust his principle now? You can't extend a theory from bullshit.

People listen to moron's like Krugman because they have money. Don't. People with money can also be incredibly stupid, as I have just demonstrated in one very short blog post.

On this one. Maybe we get a glimpse of how the great economists controlling our nation's think. They don't very much. They know how to play the numbers given to them in the game they know how to play. They lack a fundamental knowledge of how it all works when the wheels start falling off and basic supply and demand is the economic factor. They live in a world where a "one" is a billion. They no longer have any clue how the part's work that made the "one" possible.

-----

Postscript Diversion

Hey if we can contrive whatever we like out of a situation to prove the point we want to make? Here's my version. Just for the lulz. I'll even stick to the original impossible to replace idea.


We take it that the Krugman's have a significant share of the the impossible to replace vouchers as described above. The circle meets, there is no easy solution. If the Krugman's are excluded from the club then the vouchers can never be earned back in to circulation. Nobody wants to see value adjustment of existing vouchers, nor is there a simple and agreeable way to do it. Dissolving the circle and starting with new vouchers is impossible. These are the only baby vouchers that will ever exist, and each is quite clearly marked "One Hour". The circle meeting breaks up with little in the way of solutions, vowing to meet again next week and review the situation. A few days later, under cover of night, a small faction of baby sitting gun owners storm the Krugman's demanding the return of the vouchers.

Nobody is hurt, but arrests are made. Three of the father's in the baby sitting circle are now facing charges in custody. First the wives of those three, then a larger support group form a passive 24 hour resistance group that camps outside the Krugman's. Hurling abuse at them and demanding the vouchers back whenever they are seen outside the house.

Infuriated that the voucher hoarding plan hasn't worked and harassed by the support camp. The Krugman's light a bonfire one night and burn the vouchers they do have in full sight of the baby sitting support camp.

The cries of loss from the camp are unbearable. All hope is lost.

The remaining vouchers can't sustain even a small baby sitting circle and the group disbands. No baby sitting is ever possible in the town again for the rest of eternity. The Krugman's eventually leave town and try to join baby sitting circles in the next place they put down roots, only to find that they are excluded. Denied the joys of equitable baby sitting, the Krugman's argue bitterly and eventually divorce at great personal cost.

Meanwhile, over a period of decades, the town the Krugman's removed virtually all baby sitting vouchers from produces less and less children, and attracts less and less families with children. It gradually becomes a ghost town, eventually only populated by the childless over the age of 40. Such is the economic wasteland left by the Krugman's hoarding and burning of irreplaceable baby sitting vouchers.

News of the tragedy spreads across America, and soon all baby sitting circles have set an absolute upper limit on the number of vouchers any one couple can hold. It becomes known as "The Krugman Limit". Thus the rest of America is spared the horrors of baby sitting voucher hoarding and the tragic loss to humanity that results.

Well hey. You did say the vouchers were totally impossible to replace right? I like my version better than Krugman's anyway. It has social resistance, drama, fires and divorce in it. What's not to like?

Oh good grief...

I've just seen this 'Ripple' + OpenCoin article go by.

Bangs head on desk.

A lot of people with more money than sense will probably jump in to it hoping it's the next bitcoin. If you figure out which bit they carefully are not mentioning though, you'll be thinking "But why?".

First lets buy in to Ripples. It's the same problem you have with bitcoin. Somehow you need an exchange, and you need some ripples, because ... they vanish every time you do a transaction. M'kay ... So ... I need my Dollars in there somehow, because it says I can do that, but not how. I'm presuming they have some clever idea how to get cash from an account in to the Ripples account. This worries me. Any bank backing for this by any chance?

Oh. And I need some Ripples. I can't just buy those on Ripple with my Dollars in there, because I need Ripples for a transaction. So I need to do that then ... O.o

Hey. I just realised. I'm entering all this information on a single website. Can I have my account stored locally? Well sort of. It's in browser javascript at the moment that does store all the information locally, but buried somewhere in your browser cache and plug in settings. That sounds super fun and not at all prone to go wrong whatsoever. Glad we cleared that up then. Good talk. The information must also get stored on all the servers that keep being mentioned. Apparently all kinds of people are eager to run validating nodes because (I kid you not), straight from Ripples own wiki:

"Who will run validating nodes?

Anyone, with a reputation, who wants to support the network will run a validating node."

Blinks. Uhm. Ok. Moving on!

Now I spend my Dollars on some Euro's. (This is the only good part about Ripples), through a distributed exchange. So if someone matches my offer, it gets filled. That's pretty clever stuff when you might only get part orders filled, and you're trusting that network transaction, because it doesn't seem to be being verified in anything like the same way as bitcoin. There's lag in bitcoin transaction for verification. Anyway ...

I've got my Euro's and lost a few Ripples. How do I get my Euro's out again?

You mean I need to find someone who will buy Euro's from a Ripples account and give me Euro's in my pocket? Wait what ...? Oh and it costs me some more Ripples to do it ... Nice.

Unless of course there's some bank stepping in behind this to say "Don't worry, we'll exchange Ripple Euro's for real Euro's at the exchange rate of x". I'm almost wondering if this is a part bank backed effort to kill bitcoin.

It's DOUBLE the bitcoin problem + tiny ripples vanishing?

The sad bit is, the same witless crew that just ran up a $260 bubble on Bitcoin will rush over to it, with no understanding of it. The anti-bitcoin foghorns will then declare Bitcoin 2 has arrived. And after a few months people will figure out that actually it's cheaper moving money in Bitcoin. What damage it'll do to bitcoin is any one's guess. Right now, laying low might be no bad move for BTC. It coped pretty well with a speculation bubble, but public opinion is determined to see it die. I'm not sure why. Frankenstein like "We don't understand it! Kill it!" going on.

Hello Granddad!

I'm having fun watching traders sneer at bitcoin today because of it's fall from grace. Personally I think it's done remarkably well. I was expecting it to drop to the $50 - $60 level before climbing back up. I felt quite proud of the little currency that could when it refused to go under $100. That should be a fair chunk of the early "easy" money and speculators out of it.
Got to admit. I did get a smile out of seeing the speculators moaning to high heaven about MtGox going slow. People these days seem to think Google is search and that's it. There are other major exchanges, during the panic they all seemed to be working fine to me. Hey guys? Try logging in to a different exchange next time?

At the moment it's trying to level out at $170 (that bit written about 8 hours after the dump). I'm still smiling. That's not bad at all! It takes us back 4 or 5 days of the crazy speculators bitcoin bubble. Back to something looking like a more realistic current value. (I still think it's a bit high actually!)

Anyway!

Today it's "this is a joke of a currency" on Twitter, as after a few hours a few began to admit it wasn't about to reset to zero.

History lesson time!

America introduced the dollar back in 1792 and pegged it to the value of silver originally. So that's not the same as bitcoin. If you want a better equivalent to trying to introduce bitcoin, then you need to look at the rise of the paper dollar. That's where the system makes a leap of faith to a non precious metal backed physical thing.

So what happened then? Well between 1777 to 1788 they had a go at it, but it got counterfeited so often that it vanished again as worthless. Cough. Yeah. That happened to dollars. It didn't happen to bitcoin. Ooops!

In 1878 they tried again, this time with a bit more thought about "I promise to pay the bearer on demand", thus tying it in theory back to precious metal.

Here we go ...

Buying power of one U.S. dollar compared to 1774 USD
 Year       Equivalent  buying power
1774      $1.00
1780      $0.59
1790      $0.89
1800      $0.64
1810      $0.66
1820      $0.69
1830      $0.88
1840      $0.94
1850      $1.03
1860      $0.97
1870      $0.62
1880      $0.79
1890      $0.89
1900      $0.96
1910      $0.85
1920      $0.39
1930      $0.47
1940      $0.56
1950      $0.33
1960      $0.26
1970      $0.20
1980      $0.10
1990      $0.06
2000      $0.05
2007      $0.04
2008      $0.04
2009      $0.04
2010      $0.035
2011      $0.034

As you can see, it's not been exactly rock solid stable even for a currency theoretically tied to gold. That early printing run seems to have put a dent in around 1780. I'm trying not to look at the bottom of that table. I would love to see the best data available for 1774 to say 1784. I'm willing to bet it didn't cruise in to existence with no jitters whatsoever, and that's for a currency where exchange would be very slow and difficult compared to bitcoin.

I don't think any currency has an easy time achieving acceptance. Guess all I'm saying is that the bitcoin haters are making comparisons with existing, established forms of exchange. Bitcoin is still very much in the initial uptake stage so volatility is going to be high to begin with.

What bugs me about the bitcoin haters is that they portray themselves as knowledgeable and trustworthy economic scholars. They then just dismiss a new economic phenomena happening right under their noses because they fail to understand it. I'm loving this as a unique chance to see raw finances in action. It's testing my abilities to predict support and resistance. It's not chopped to bits by HFT traders, manipulated by a central bank or played by whales. It's a lesson in raw non-manipulated supply and demand that we haven't seen for decades. Even if you think it's going to fail, it's still fascinating to watch and learn. It deserves that much recognition at least doesn't it?

Hey stupid traders on Twitter?! Bitcoin didn't die today. It is not tulips. You don't understand it.

I'm laughing at some of you guys. It's like watching granddad struggle to understand why on earth anyone would want a mobile phone.

Say hello to the financial guru's I call granddad. Please speak loudly and clearly and don't worry too much. Maybe granddad just doesn't need a mobile phone. So @zerohedge @chrisadamsmkts @ReformedBroker @MNYCx @MonetaAdvisors and many many more, we salute you granddads. And some of us laugh at you a bit as well.

"We're very skilled traders with a huge knowledge of complex sounding financial things and we make money on financial predictions ... except we can't understand bitcoin for what it is, or predict what it does".

The morning after the crash? Granddad has forgotten calling Bitcoin tulips for now. Granddad is now calling it a penny stock. Closer! Almost! Keep trying! Maybe admit you were wrong?

BTC Dynamics

I know! I know!

This one is about another misconception I see flying around, but also some of my own ponderings.

The idea is, that Bitcoin 2 will appear, render bitcoin obsolete, and the whole thing will just be a bunch of tulip bulbs.

What this viewpoint misses is that the BTC chart for the last few months has shot up like crazy, but if you look at the entire BTC history, you'll see a good two years of low level existence which had a bit of spike around June 2011, when adoption of the idea initially kicked off.

If you're an uninformed mainstream media commentator .. or any other kind, you also probably fail to realise the investment for many people, and some subtle economics of supply and demand in the processing power thrown at BTC.

Start with investment. A lot of people have sunk thousands of dollars / pounds in to "Mining Rigs". Even before the current crop of even faster ASIC custom chips are appearing, GPU mining became a thing. That's using a Graphics Card to compute the parts of the block instead of the ordinary main processor in your computer. What some people did, was build computers with as many of the best graphics cards they could in, and mine BTC for themselves with that. So what?

Here's your first economic curve to build in. By saying "best graphics card" it isn't always the fastest. The trade off is against electricity consumed. There's no point spending more on electricity than you mine in BTC. When BTC was in the $12 to $15 range, this was a huge issue. Many people will eventually have done the maths and turned off the miner to play games instead. The effect of the recent huge up for BTC, is that even scraping a hundredth of a percent from a block becomes worth the electricity again. So processing power and investment returns.

Investment? Yup. You might not believe it, but some folk are chucking in the region of tens of thousands of dollars in to systems now that can only mine bitcoins. You can't even run tetris on them. They do it very economically as well in terms of electricity consumption.

Why am I bothering to explain this? Because the investment in technology and time prior to this sudden surge is much larger than some people are considering. Any incompatible rival bitcoin system now will have to attract all that investment away from BTC for a very good reason.

Sure, that could still happen. All bets are off in BTC land. But there is a fair bit more to it than someone saying "Hey! Use this instead!" and everyone leaving.

The other reason for inertia in moving away from BTC, is that over the entire lifespan, it has already proven itself to be a reliable secure system. So far at least, any problems have been overcome and the system has proved itself as at least very robust. Ironically, the more computing power that gets thrown at it around the world, the more robust it becomes. Why change to a new system when this one is secure, works well, and more importantly, has personal investment in it?

Yet another reason for inertia is the simple "It has to be better" argument. There needs to be some compelling reason why an established system should be ditched. At the moment, LiteCoin is the main alternative to Bitcoin. If you dig in to LiteCoin, you find it's simply an adjustment to the parameters of bitcoin. It produces more coins, and they appear faster. But it trades off security. I've seen regular transactions in Bitcoin of around £15,000 or so. If I'm sat there, wondering how to transfer my £15,000, I'm going to go with Bitcoin. It doesn't really matter if it's a theoretical problem and in reality LiteCoin turns out to be as secure as bitcoin. It's certainly not more secure than bitcoin, so why trust it? LiteCoin is basically an attempt to make some cash out of the bitcoin idea for those who can't afford the processing power to mine bitcoin at the expense of a degree of security. I can't see it going far when the security of bitcoin is already constantly being questioned. But who knows? Maybe we end up with parallel crypto-currencies at the end of the day? Some say LiteCoin is the silver to BitCoin's gold. That looks like another flawed analogy to me. Bitcoin isn't gold.

So for MegaBitCoin to appear, it'll need to be substantially better somehow than bitcoin. That's going to take some doing. I'm not even sure how you'd approach a model of something to be better as a currency than bitcoin. I have a vague idea that it will be to do with transaction times, but (and it's a big but! (Sorry ladies!)), it can't sacrifice transaction time to security, and that level of care about transaction time involves having a huge volume of bitcoin transactions, far greater than where we are now.

Finally!!!! On that point!!! Honest!!! If MegaBTC appears, and it does have ultra fast verification of transaction on top of at least equally good security, and it does begin to attract users away from BTC, there's no reason to believe BTC would instantly die. A lot of people would be nervous of moving to an untested new system. It would seem more reasonable to expect a gradual wind down of BTC as people moved to MegaBTC, especially if BTC was still working perfectly well for the majority of users.

Then we come on to the nature of the curve :)

It's a wow of a spike isn't it? But unlike a forex chart, there's no obvious points to whack your Fibonacci scale on it. The moving averages are basically permanently in catch up and meaningless. In trader terms, there's no apparent support and resistance. Or is there?

You'll like this. This is brilliant. (Well to my twisted mind anyway).

Well actually, yes there is. There are plenty of BTC out there that were gained back when it was around $12 to $15. These people are not traders. To them at the moment, nirvana is unfolding. Remember, these guys don't have an accounts manager to answer to. They can decide to cash out with a big smile any time they want. Chances are, not many will while it's rocketing up as it is at the moment, but given a sudden peak and drop? A whole bunch of them will freak out and sell.

I'm predicting when that happens, BTC will drop by a fair whack. Not just the jitters in government clampdown whispers that caused the drop or whatever it is, but a wave of sells from the early adopters.

How far down it goes? Well reasonably we could say back down to $12. Except now we have people who have bought in to BTC from $50 up with big chunks of money (big in comparison to bitcoin), we have people with mining rigs invested in when BTC was just curving up from $30 and are feeling mighty smug. There is support on the way down, some of these guys will keep the faith, see a falling BTC and even buy back in to it assuming the basic integrity of the system remains intact.

I guess here is the chance that everybody really freaks out and BTC gets sold out to near enough $0 for it to vanish. There's no accounting for crowd mentality. That would be a shame and a waste if the basic mechanism was working fine. The world though has done stupider things before, and no doubt will again. But even with the $0.01 scenario, if the thing still works .. people are still going to use it. That in itself prevents a 0.01$ situation if even only a few million $ across the globe still want to use it. There is a bottom end in value for utility built in to bitcoin. I have no idea of it's value. But it's there as long as it reliably works.

It's going to be choppy! It's going to be fun! But when it does spike and drop? Watch for the BTC is DEAD! Foghorn's. If the integrity of BTC remains. They will still be wrong, and we should see a more reasonable curve back to actual value.

That's my theory anyway and I'm sticking to it.

Yeah. Again!

Maybe I should just call this the bitcoin blog.

Time to place myself firmly in the middle again. There are some on one side predicting bitcoin will die right back to $5 or even completely, on the other side are the hopeless optimists seeing it race to thousands of $ per BTC.

Me? I'm in the middle.

It is indeed on an entirely unsustainable ramp. That much I know. Well. I think I do. With every other commodity / share / currency that I know of. Yup. That's an unsustainable up-curve.  A whole bunch of logic in me tells me this. But this is something a bit odd, in certainly unusual times. If anything faith in traditional currency and freedom of exchange is on an increasing dive. That is going to mean yet more cash pumped in to BTC. So the question really is, what's the sustainable level? I have no freaking idea. It could be $50/BTC it might end up being $5000/BTC or .... god only knows! Somewhere in this range of freaky is a level it will eventually settle down to. It seems unlikely at this point that the value will be $0. It seems to have achieved escape momentum. It has, or is beginning to achieve that holy grail of currency, acceptance as a means of transfer and value for it.

It's set against a bizarre backdrop. The money printing presses of the world just keep going, and the stock markets and forex charts look super healthy. Everything has a David Lynch like saccharine sprinkling to hide any evil that may lie below. To me ... and well ... I could be wrong here. It looks like an increasingly dangerous disconnect. The viewpoints are incredibly polarized. The government statistics look increasingly, how can I put this? Imaginative. I'm not an expert in all fields, but I know a few have thrown hands up in horror at reality vs US commercial property occupancy and employment figures, and here in the UK we have some numbers that really don't add up on employment as well.

Maybe it's always been like this, and I'm late to appreciate it. That is possible. But gut feeling tells me (all praise the truthiness!), that maybe it has always been a little bit true, but now we're taking it to epic proportions.

Hell no. On a limb on this one. I've watched the EURUSD long enough, and the whole deal is ... bizarre. When the Greece crisis was originally hitting, things sort of made sense. Hits to the Euro gave you chunks in shorts. I mean. It went down. Things have changed. The market's still don't like it if the Troika look like they've lost the plot, but other than that, as long as Ben keeps printing, and Troika keeps just about getting away with it, there's no danger here folks! Up we go!

Once again, it's a people in glass houses scenario. Yes BTC looks crazy at the moment, but the rise is actually just due to demand, there's no mystery reason beyond that. People are just willing to pay that much for BTC at the moment. That doesn't make it invincible. But then look at the stock markets, they seem to be on an ever rising up curve based on money printing and bail-outs or bail-ins. That doesn't seem all that sustainable either when just about every underlying economic indicator tells you there's a hard hitting recession going on outside the stock markets. So who's the fool at the moment? The BTC buyer or the perma bull on the markets? Both maybe?

It's not just an increasing disconnect in finances I'm picking up. It's social as well. Thatcher's death highlighted it strongly today. I was alive back when Costello was singing and I prayed people would listen to Spitting Image. I remember being a teenager. Swearing with friends that we'd book a minibus together and go piss on Thatcher's grave. If you weren't in the UK around that time at an age to appreciate the hack and slash job Maggie did on the UK, you'll no doubt think that's cruel, stupid and evil. But million's of us did and do still think like that. We all noticed she supported apartheid, we hated her for it. Our skin crawled as she declared Pinochet a friend of Britain. We knew she was destroying unions and industry out of pure ideological malice against them. We saw all the jobs vanish and even now, lack of production and manufacturing sector in the UK that resulted. We even got to see her install Rupert Murdoch. Possibly the most corrupt and corrosive media barron the world has ever known. It was him that got her re-elected. The Sun knew it. They even bragged.


I'm not glad she died.

I wish she'd never existed.


If I can?
Yes.
I'll keep the promise to my friends.
If I have caused harm to anyone as much as Thatcher did to a nation. You're welcome to piss on mine.

Meanwhile ... Those that credit Thatcher with easy wealth and massive growth in the finance industry, who worship her vicious direct style of leadership "she got things done". Can't understand why there were street parties the night she died. Strangely, these people also seem to own virtually every single newspaper, radio and television station. I can't think of a single world leader except for known established dictators who's death has inspired celebration. I'm certain Maggie will be buried in a very secure location, probably with CCTV monitoring, so I and many like me, won't ever get the chance to stay true to our promises of years ago. What level of social disconnect are we managing to achieve here? It's beyond strange. It's a society living in some kind of psychosis.

Yet another other bitcoin post

I've been thinking around the possible pitfalls of Bitcoin looking for weaknesses. The process has been helped by some other thoughtful folk out there asking questions which do indeed make you go "Hmm". Here we go!

"Taxation will be impossible"

It does seem different for sure, but it's not impossible. Car tax, council tax are easy. They either got paid or they didn't. There's even a slight advantage that it's harder to cheat on the bitcoin system. I can't turn up at the DVLA with fake notes (knowingly or not) to buy my car tax and get away with it in bitcoin.

The two head scratchers are income tax and VAT. Income tax paid at source by the employer out of the employee's pay packet is simple enough to record per transaction. If there's an audit all the transactions can be looked up and you can see the timestamp for each. For self employed it gets a little more tricky.

It would be relatively easy to simply not declare income and therefore avoid tax. It sounds like the first major pitfall of bitcoin, but actually, it's the exact same problem you have with cash at the moment. No better. No worse. However. With the current system, undeclared work and income is only traceable by unidentified increases in bank balance with a careful check (if the cash ever reaches a bank balance that's being checked for fraud). At least with bitcoin, if you take a random sample of clients for a self employed person and ask them to show the payment transactions, you can double check they paid someone something. If the self-employed persons records show a few blanks in receipt and declaration, then you know you've got some tax avoidance going on. It's different, but not impossible. It becomes more a case for whistle-blowers to say "I don't think this guy is paying his taxes! Here's my transaction!" and it's incredibly easy and cheap for a government taxation department to just look up the transaction and see if it got declared by the self-employed person. The nasty then is ... some git pretending they paid you something just to get you in to trouble. Ah ha. Yes. Well. We have a problem here. It is possible to dodge some income tax for the self employed, but it's even worse news when it comes to someone trying to get you in to trouble. A possible external solution would be a government registered pay account address. The customer pays that address, the supplier gets the payment via a simple "got it, recorded it, passed it on" transaction. The supplier is expected to pay up tax for the sum of transactions through that address at year end. There's a bit of a black hole here bitcoin fans. Ok so it's the exact same problem you have at the moment in reverse. But it's still a problem. Any answers out there?

VAT is a bit more strange. At the moment it's charged to the customer then paid by the merchant. With bitcoin it becomes an audit trail of transactions from the lead supplier down. Say the manufacturer produces 10 things and sells them for X to a merchant for sale. As a producer, it's very important to record that you're not just giving the stuff away for free for your own records, so that side works. The merchant then needs to be able to provide transaction key evidence for the sale of each of the 10 units. So for a simple commodity based example, audit trails are still entirely possible and checkable. It's again not impossible. It does require a rethink of how correct taxation can be checked, because the "I can see how much you have in your wallet (bank)" part is removed. But as already noted. That's not a terrifically good way of detecting fraud at the moment anyway. Witness the rise of secret off shore accounts to see how well the current system is doing.

So ... different .. yes. In some cases trivially easy to still tax people. For income and sales tax, a little more tricky, or at least different, but not impossible.

The self employed black hole is a problem, as are malicious claims. But that's because we're looking at it from the perspective of the current taxation system and it's development. It would still be possible for a government to raise significant taxes, and to adjust those taxes. The method and place where taxation occurs though would in some cases have to shift to allow traceability and indemnity under bitcoin. Taxation at point of sale as in tax on fuel at the moment seems to take focus rather than backdated taxation. It's a problem to be solved, but not an impossible one, and if anything it appears to be the small fry self employed who have most ability to dodge taxes instead of the multi-national company. You may think that's no bad thing overall.

"You can't artificially deflate it in the case of a crisis"

True. Here we're beginning to enter uncharted ground. Bitcoin claims to answer this by it's divisibility. If it came to it, 0.0000000001 bitcoins could be the equivalent to a 4 bedroom house. That doesn't matter so much if it's trivially easy to use 0.000000000000001 bitcoins to buy a loaf of bread anyway. You don't need the wheelbarrows full of cash scenario with runaway inflation either. If it took 400,000,000 bitcoins to buy a house, then 1,000 bitcoin would still get you a loaf of bread. But this is something of a theoretical answer to the real problem. If you have a rapid fluctuation in either inflation or deflation direction, the real value of however many bitcoin you have in your account changes.

This probably is a weak point of bitcoin. (Found one!). Bitcoin is a new and previously unknown and untested model. It is easily subdivided without needing trillions of bits of paper to buy a loaf of bread. So that bit is nice to know. However, bitcoin is designed to have an absolute limit of 21,000,000 bitcoins. That's it. That's all there will ever be. In hard traditional economic theory, that sounds like complete stupidity. It's normal to expect a degree of inflation with all known currency systems. How will that work even with trivial subdivision for a currency? No one knows. It's also unknown how much inflation and deflation is due to government and central bank intervention. Economists have views on it. But there's no right answer. Fluctuations in supply and demand will inevitably happen. How much damage that would do to a persons bitcoin wallet is unknown. How much damage it would do to a society using bitcoin as it's currency is wild speculation. This truly is a brand new, never before known adventure in economics.

But .... Once again you're back to comparing with the current known fiat systems. In the cases of gradual inflation or deflation, bitcoin seems well able to allow controlled variation in bitcoin value to compensate with zero cost and minimal harm to bitcoin holders. In the case of massive sudden changes in fluctuation ... well ... your start point is, that's horrible news for any currency and society. How could a government compensate? Quantitative easing isn't an option. You can take the view that's a fantastic thing, and the reality of the economic situation will be brutally dealt with (some people will go bust for bad bets). We flirt with that at the moment, but at the moment, money printing seems to make things worse for everyone outside of bond holders and banks. Nobody defaults, because nobody in a position of money and power wants to allow that to happen. The knock on effects are simply too horrible in the current rehypothicated debt scenarios. Instead we have a system where people are basically cast out of the system to save the major investors. Right up to increasing suicide rates, axing health care and welfare and the resultant homelessness and premature deaths that will result. No really. It's that simple. The current system is killing some of it's own population to preserve the status quo.

Here? You'll have to form your own considered view. Some will see a lack of artificial intervention as the best thing that could possibly happen for a reliable currency to exist, even if that does punish failure by some. Other's will think that's a nightmare scenario that can't possibly be tolerated.

Ok lets look at this another way...

Hyperinflation - Not going to happen under bitcoin. The supply of the currency is not only limited, but it's exact curve of supply is known and predictable over time. In classical terms, that makes hyperinflation .. well lets say .. highly unlikely unless there's another world war.


Hungary in 1946 is your prime example for hyperinflation. The trigger was the aftermath of the second world war. Great! Let's see how bitcoin would cope with that situation! You can't. Bitcoin is a global currency. That hasn't happened before. The purchasing power of bitcoin will be averaged across all the countries and people that adopt it. Hyperinflation in Hungary in 1946 would have resulted in a very weird case scenario. The relative value of bitcoin would have remained stable(ish) so it's hard to know what the overall effect to a global currency after WWII would have been without looking at gold. If you look at gold over that period then it looks pretty darn stable. We'll have to assume bitcoin would be similar because I can't think of a better comparison. So the result in Hungary itself may have been the goods and services costing less and less in terms of bitcoins until they were in the millionths of a bitcoin to buy a house. Yes. I know that sounds backwards. Your brain wants to flip it back to what actually happened which was increasing quantities of currency to buy the exact same thing. What that means in reality though, is that compared to the currency, everything actually seemed to get a lot cheaper. It's the supply of money that went bonkers, not the underlying barter and exchange of value in society. Except ... it wouldn't pan out like that. If everyone is apparently finding everything very cheap, people spend. Curiously, Hungary after WWII looks like it might have had a very weird time of it under bitcoin, but without the crazy money printing being required, new bank notes, new coinage, the economy may have recovered even faster than it did.

The thing is in cases like this, the actual real value of goods and services to the people that supply and use them remains fairly constant. It's almost back to barter. I did you 12 hours work, so I expect to be able to buy this sort of thing tomorrow with the money I gained from the work. You could easily still do that under bitcoin. Or at least it appears that way. In fact in the case of 1946 Hungary, it would seem bitcoin might have levelled out the fluctuations naturally. Nobody can know for sure. This is speculation on historical fact with an unknown new element. Curiously, the subdivision factor doesn't help here at all. The relative stability of value in a global currency is the deciding factor.

Bitcoin may actually help even out cases of extreme hyper inflation across countries as well as the lamented gold standard was supposed to have done. Except without external influences fiddling with it.

Bitcoin may seem anti-capitalist, but at it's heart, it's brutally set to allow supply and demand to find it's own value within it's spectrum in a very hard line capitalist way.

There's more .... I think I need to do yet another post in a few days time ...

But I'll leave you with this!

The main catch I can find in bitcoin, is that the current investors and those that profit from the fiat system we have in place will try and kill it. That's one huge chunk of power levelled against it. At which point does bitcoin become it's own valid currency immune to that because the same set of people have money in bitcoin? Who knows? It's a new one. I doubt we are anywhere near there yet even with the current high value, it's not mainstream yet. It's a promising alternative with practical application problems to overcome in it's current state. Only the degree of adoption will change that in to problems solved and accepted.

The "other" bitcoin post

Wow.
I've been busy most the day, glancing through my twitter timeline when I've had the chance and just ... WOW! Some of the misinformation and assumptions about bitcoin flying around are really quite spectacular! So I'm here again!

What I notice most is that most the criticisms fired at bitcoin are not only misinformed, but if you fire the exact same criticism back at fiat money in terms of £, $ or Euro. They actually stick and do damage.

"You want security? Buy gold or silver! Not Bitcoin!"

Fair enough in principle. Except for a few things. The first is one my own (hugs) 12 year old son came up with when I told him about the gold idea. "But there's not enough gold in the world is there? I heard it would all fit under the Eiffel tower". Proud Dad moment. Yup. For one thing. IF gold was underpinning all the cash in the world, there simply isn't enough of it at it's current value. But gold doesn't underpin the value of the cash in your pocket. Re-hypothicated debt does.

Let's go a little further here. Say I did actually really go for it. I buy a small bar of real solid gold. I even have it bored and tested to ensure it's not gold wrapped round some other heavy metal like some bars in the bullion banks. (You can't cheat like that with bitcoin) This is it ... the real deal. I have a lump of gold.

I can't use it to pay for anything much. I could in theory shave bits off it and attempt to trade it at my local supermarket for my shopping. I doubt it would work. This is the exact same criticism levelled at bitcoin. "But what can I do with it?" .. well actually, you can do more with Bitcoin in the world than you can with a lump of gold.

Even further on from that, the scams that gold has been involved in are many. There has been an attempt to make a virtual currency before backed by gold. It failed. There are groups that claimed to sell us ordinary folk gold backed securities, only to find they never had any real gold linked to the accounts at all. That also failed.

Bitcoin doesn't have that. You either have real genuine bitcoin in your wallet, or you have zero bitcoin in your wallet. There is no fake bitcoin wrapped in gold. There is no broker lying to you about gold backing. You either have it, or you don't.

"It's just like tulips!"

If you didn't know, around 1620-1630 tulip bulbs were acceptable currency in the Netherlands, and achieved quite a huge rate of return. However the person making this statement is only illustrating one thing. They have absolutely no idea about how bitcoin works. Yes. It's possible for any medium of currency to suffer a loss of confidence. That's why bitcoin is so popular now. There's a lack of confidence in the Euro (and increasingly in the dollar as the money press keeps churning out billions of dollars to sustain America). But tulips are a relatively easy plant to grow with infinite supply. Bitcoin is not very easy to grow and has a limit built in. Bitcoin was designed to be a secure and highly adaptable currency by a guy that had a pretty good grasp of currency and an excellent knowledge of cryptography and security, tulip bulbs are tulip bulbs.

"It's a ponzi scheme!"

How exactly? Show me on the map of the globe who benefits from a distributed network of currency transaction validation. Nobody. There is no "Bitcoin Inc." running the show. There is no bank or person pretending to be a bank involved. Yes, early adopters may get lucky on the uptake, but that's what you'd call good sense if you bought in to an unknown tech stock that suddenly took off like bitcoin has. Apparently, if it's on standard exchanges and involves fiat currency, it's ok to make a killing on a lucky buy in. If you do it with bitcoin? Well that's just not on. Probably because most of the market trader minds have utterly ignored bitcoin and now see a currency exchange graph kicking them up the backside that they wish they had been in on.

"Who would invest in such a volatile asset? It's a joke!"

Well quite frankly. See above. While some market traders are happy with slow and steady takings, a pretty huge chunk of the market just LOVES volatility when it's in a field they understand. You can short it, long it, generally make a killing in a short time frame. I don't see many market traders complaining about that kind of volatility. Besides. It would be fair to say that at the moment, BTC is searching for it's own sustainable level. Sure it might ramp way above it's sustainable level on news such as Cyprus bank losses. But that's exactly what Forex traders love about trading EURUSD. It ramps, it drops, it levels to an average .. that's how you make money. An entirely stable currency pair is a zero profit currency pair.

"Who would put money in to some hackers scheme?"

Well I've seen the original creator of Bitcoin described as "a hacker". But these days that term tends to extend to anyone with geek skills above average. I'm not actually aware of any hacking at all claimed against or by him. (I could be wrong here, but I've not seen any big flashing "HACKER" signs around bitcoin). Oh and btw. Bitcoin was not invented by Anonymous. O.o

Bitcoin is in fact an extremely elegant solution to security in transaction via cryptography. So much so that it actually beats the pants off fiat money. Transactions are final. They cannot be faked. There is no such thing as a fake bitcoin credit card. There is no fake gold bar bitcoin. There are no fake bitcoins in existence. This is the whole point of bitcoin. It's INCREDIBLY secure.

Better yet. Your bitcoins are not subject to being devalued by a government or central bank policy of money printing. They are not held by a bank that the Troika can plunder to save the bank at your expense. They are not held in a bank that the likes of Fred Goodwin can utterly destroy at insane expense to the tax payer. They are owned on a self verifying, global, digital network.

Oh and if you have the skill and knowledge. Here it is.  The bitcoin source code. It's been around for a few years already, why don't you go ahead and see if you can spot the hacker code that's going to drain your account to zero? Nobody else has. Can you say there's anything like the same level of transparency about how your bank does business?

"It's not even backed up by anything real!"

Well I've got news for you. Neither is the £, $ or Euro. Currency is always based entirely on faith. Yes there are pledges on bank notes (that are utterly meaningless). Yes in theory the government and central bank will protect your monetary value, but in practise? Well actually no. Governments and central banks will happily devalue your currency. In Cyprus they'll even basically steal whatever currency you had in the bank to pay off debts. And even better, capital controls can be put in place that prevent you using your currency as you'd like to.

Confidence can be lost in your home currency, as is happening with the Euro. Countries can even indulge in exchange rate wars, deliberately reducing the overseas value of your cash to attempt to boost export demand at home.

No. Bitcoin isn't backed up by anything real except strong cryptography and trust in a system that can't be easily fiddled with and distorted by governments and banks. Trust is everything for currency. Bitcoin is strong on trust and validity. Far more so than traditional fiat currency.

This is one of the prime examples of accusing bitcoin of something only to find it's your traditional currency that has either the exact same problem or worse.

---

Once people begin to realise that bitcoin is a viable and incredibly secure system for storing and transferring wealth without bank intervention, it's only likely to take off even more than it has already.

With one provision. The established powers that be utterly loathe bitcoin. They can't control it. They can't rob it. They can't sieze your assets. That makes it attractive to users, and attractive to highly funded government black hat hackers. I strongly suspect Instawallet was taken out by government intervention today. I can't predict how nasty and low the attacks on it will stoop, or if they will dent confidence in bitcoin itself. I can predict though. That the basic security of bitcoin will carry on regardless.

And ... Like I said before "DO NOT PUT YOUR BITCOINS IN AN ONLINE WALLET". They are only as safe there as the website they are stored on. Store and backup your own wallet locally.

I'll take questions at @fluffkin on twitter if people want to know more, but please keep it to DM's. I don't really want my timeline flooded with it. Also, I'm no expert. I'm fairly well informed, and honest about my limits of knowledge. Apparently that puts me light years ahead of main stream media and paranoid market traders.

PS. You ain't seen nothing yet. Underlying the basic framework that is bitcoin you can see today are built in systems for safe escrow, where the third party never gets to hold your money. Micro-transaction payment channels for things such as payment for tiny data usage on roaming wifi network usage *as you drive by* that don't load the network unnecessarily. Bitcoin isn't just a wallet with highly secure systems in place (better than any bank in the UK currently offers). It's a system designed from the base to be a very good currency medium.