After rereading the article, I now understand that you were referring to this quote in the article : "The circulation number is not enough".
You are right, the fact that it's divisible render this point moot. I thought you were saying that dividing coins somehow decreased scarcity (Yes, I've seen many people argue that, believe it or not).
Original comment below :
I find it really mind boggling that some people don't understand that dividing a pizza into 100M pieces does not give you more pizza.
Ok, thanks for clarifying. Yeah subdivision doesn't affect scarcity. The arguments the article made were weak, but there are plenty of solid arguments to be made.
The number only matters as long as it can subdivided sufficiently to buy the smallest priced thing.
You're thinking of it as a fixed sized pie and thinking dividing it doesn't make a bigger pie. But it's not fixed, the whole pie can grow as bitcoin increases in value. It's up to one trillion dollars now.
There being a cap is relevant, because it makes your currency deflationary and therefore a poor medium for exchange and a very poor medium to base an economy around (as, among other things, it increases the real value of a debt over time and discourages investment). Small amount of deflation are dangerous - but if everybody used BTC for everything the deflation would be massive and the effects severe.
> The number only matters as long as it can subdivided sufficiently to buy the smallest priced thing.
Why would I even buy the smallest priced thing with deflationary bitcoin, when I could instead hoard it and wait for it to increase in value?
I think most people who have ever used bitcoin as a medium of exchange have kicked themselves when they realized how expensive that thing they bought was at current (very high) exchange rates.
> Why would I even buy the smallest priced thing with deflationary bitcoin, ..?
Given the inflationary dollar, you probably wouldn't, but otherwise, you'd need to transact at some point.
Perpetual debt against assets is a common trope in tax avoidance. People do use/abuse this. If enough people abused it inflationary money would fail.
Deflationary money isn't bad, but the common belief says it is. One example that changed my mind was business investment.
Why would you loan money to a business if the money itself might be worth more later? Well you probably wouldn't. Instead, you'd buy a share of the business itself.
We've all live in a system of inflationary money and were educated by a system that teaches it's use. We should acknowledge our bias here and keep an open mind.
> We've all live in a system of inflationary money and were educated by a system that teaches it's use. We should acknowledge our bias here and keep an open mind.
The problem with that is that deflationary money isn't exactly a new idea. It's been tried before, it's workable, but it has problems. However, it is an idea that favors people who already have lots of money over those who don't, which has fueled background level nostalgia (and nostalgic propaganda) for the idea.
Bitcoin had some genuine innovations, but that doesn't mean all the ideas that were baked into it were good ones.
But the increase in bitcoin's price does not come from the inflation relative to it. Even if bitcoin had been as inflationary as the dollar, its dollar value would've still increased by similar amounts.
The arguments surrounding deflation aren't necessarily wrong but it's hard to gauge the actual effects of it in practice at this stage where market forces are way more impactful.
Does it not? Is there a bounded limit to the amount bit-coin can be subdivided? If 0.0000000000001 of a bitcoin is valid for purchases etc. then doesn't the limited supply become meaningless?
Yes, technically you are not increasing the size but it feels like word play.
So the point is that if bitcoin transactions can occur without a lower bound limit (and I'm still waiting for an answer as I don't know) there is an infinite supply.
The dollar point feels more like word play. In retail there is a lower bound limit for dollars and this is 0.01 dollars. Not so with Bitcoin transactions.
If 0.00001 of bitcoin etc. Is viable tender then simply put the limited supply of bitcoin might be misleading.
So I said in retail the dollar is limited. I'm aware in finance etc. there isn't a lower limit of dollars.
Again (for the third time) are you aware if fractions of bitcoin can be sent from one account to another? Or does it have to be one whole bitcoin?
Again I don't know.
I'm just thinking theoretically you could convert bitcoin into bitcoin_plus and these coins represent 0.0001 of a bitcoin. And tada you have 100 million coins in circulation etc.
There is a purpose, but it's not HFT... It's orbital mechanics.
You can't have efficient coverage of the whole planet without launching all of your satellites at fairly high inclination (>45°). There will be more satellites per area near the poles and so that's why Starlink will be available at very high (and very low) latitude before it's available at the equator.
If you are late to work because your car won't start, say a bad starter or a dead fuel pump, would you really tell your boss that your car had a "catastrophic" failure?
We just expect a company that stores the highly personal information of hundreds of millions of people to have better security than that of a random blog site maintained by one guy in his basement.
Well, you are asking for perfect security. Everyone here is. That's what it means not to ever be breached. I think that's the uncomfortable truth we've obscured. We are asking for the impossible.
If you don't feel that way, I propose asking some of your pentester friends how they feel about the breach. Somewhere between unsurprised and shrug, probably.
It doesn't change a thing that this situation demands higher security. We're fighting against forces of nature. Except instead of extinguishing forest fires, we're asking for the equivalent of no forest fires, ever, and arguing vehemently that modern technology is so good that forest fires should not have been allowed to happen.
Here they left the door wide open. Google does not leave the door wide open. Google does not have perfect security. But we expect them to make the cost to an attacker high enough that it requires massive investment for a successful breach. Why should we expect less for a company that keeps 140+ million customer records?
But it would likely cover topics which would suggest differences in gender. This entire debate is absurd. The link between gender and behavior is beyond plausible. Something as simple as psychological effects of being physically smaller than another gender could affect behavior; there are hormonal differences, and we know that decision making is influenced by hormone response. If physical differences between men and women are so obvious, why can't people accept the possibility of sexually dimorphism in psychology? How can one claim to be rational or objective while denying such a possibility?
> why can't people accept the possibility of sexually dimorphism in psychology? How can one claim to be rational or objective while denying such a possibility?
I don't see people denying the possibility that biology plays a role. I see people saying it hasn't been determined to play a role in determining which sex is better or more likely to choose complex modern professions such as software engineering. Damore makes it sound as if this has already been demonstrated by science:
"I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership."
"This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading."
The latter is a conclusory statement. Meanwhile, he continues to claim that his essay is fully backed by research. He denies that anyone has made a proper rebuttal, despite many scientists directly refuting his claims, including one he cited.
But there is nothing to rebut for a scientist without an agenda. Look around you; the plan of egalitarianism transitioned from experiment to propaganda decades ago. We do have scientific evidence of predictable gender differences in ability, the issue is that people like you are SO DESPERATE to deny these cracks in equality theory that such research into gender or racial differences has become taboo. Which means the scientific establishment has been biased and subjective in handling this topic.
Want more proof of bias? The google letter writer was attacked for his writing style and choice of discussion venue, not the contents of the letter. His subject was taboo and so people are still adamant about not discussing it, because in their mindminds, the science is settled. Thats the propaganda talking.
We can give people equal treatment before the law, but we need to recognize that differences in hiring ratios for not have to be indicitave of race or gender bias. It is possible for the numbers to be an emergent effect of group differences.
> But there is nothing to rebut for a scientist without an agenda
Science is the right place to have this discussion, not politics. Scientists have theories, not agendas. True scientists are not ideologues.
> The google letter writer was attacked for his writing style and choice of discussion venue, not the contents of the letter
People have pointed to flaws within both his conclusions and his writing style. His defendants first claimed that media is mischaracterizing what he said; they said they do not understand why people are upset. Then, when someone starts citing his words, Damorians complain they're cherry picking, being nitpicky, or being a grammar nazi.
The way one writes a scientific argument is important. Peer reviewed research goes through many drafts before it's even presented to the public. Thereafter, it can still be the subject of much scrutiny. One cannot simultaneously claim that Damore's paper is both,
(1) Representative of a scientific consensus, and
(2) Undeserving of critique for his writing style simply because he didn't intend for it to be released
> people are still adamant about not discussing it
I find this comment ridiculous as we're discussing it right now, and this has been national news for weeks with hundreds of articles written on the subject, commentary from scientists, etc. If you mean "not discussing in in the right way", then I don't know what to tell you. You don't get to decide how someone else makes their arguments. "Why don't you see it my way?" is not a useful debate strategy.
> We can give people equal treatment before the law, but we need to recognize that differences in hiring ratios for not have to be indicitave of race or gender bias. It is possible for the numbers to be an emergent effect of group differences.
Many do recognize that racism or sexism don't always play a role. I don't work at Google, but, I don't see women assuming sexism every time a male coworker gives a bad review of a prospective female candidate. The question here is whether affirmative action is an appropriate strategy for reducing gender imbalances. I understand many conservatives feel it's not. But, when asked how to correct for various socialization factors (not all of which are sexist or racist -- they can just be habit), their solutions would seem to keep the status quo. One of Damore's suggestions is to "reduce empathy". I can't think anything more inhumane.
He may or may not be a misogynist, but looking at his wikipedia page, he certainly spends significant time in the culture wars gutter discussing topics like:
5.1 White privilege
5.2 Feminist postmodernists – the Oedipal pathology
5.3 Cultural appropriation
5.4 Neo-Marxist postmodernists and 'identity politics'
> Because, as far as we can tell [...] conciousness is dependent on our brains.
This is neither a logical/mathematical proof, nor an empirically established fact. So how do you know? Why are you making statements of faith in what seems to be the scientific worldview, when the actual scientific worldview is that we should never make statements of faith?
It's as established empirically as we can observe. Shut off oxygen to your brain for ten minutes or put a bullet through it and determine its responsiveness thereafter.
Amazon and people who have been hit by this seem to disagree with you:
"Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance, from the time an instance is launched until it is terminated or stopped. Each partial instance-hour consumed will be billed as a full hour."
"You are billed for an EC2 instance-hour for each hour or partial hour (rounded up) that your instance is in the “running” state. Instances that are in any other state (“stopped”, “pending”, etc.) are not billed."
Here's a company that got hit hard by that behavior :
"A little-discussed fact about AWS EC2 pricing is that users are billed for each server that runs for any partial hour it runs. That means if a user starts a server and then kills it within five minutes, he is still billed for the full hour. That seems acceptable, but if a user kills a server and replaces it with a new server of the exact same type and location, this move doubles the bill."
After rereading the article, I now understand that you were referring to this quote in the article : "The circulation number is not enough".
You are right, the fact that it's divisible render this point moot. I thought you were saying that dividing coins somehow decreased scarcity (Yes, I've seen many people argue that, believe it or not).
Original comment below :
I find it really mind boggling that some people don't understand that dividing a pizza into 100M pieces does not give you more pizza.