I've seen a few posts by people saying that the name and language on your page remind them too much of some of the current flame wars. I personally don't care, but were you all aware? Why the name shill?
We picked the name Shill because it sounds a lot like shell, but is a bit of an in-joke because it is built on Racket, which is a descendant of Scheme. All three have slightly negative connotations: schemers, racketeers, shills.
There are also a lot of other non-HEMA historical european martial arts groups and less historical EuroMA. For instance you can find stick fighting most palces, Jogo Do Pau is Portuguese stick/staff fighting, Savate is French kickboxing usually with cane and maybe some sailor stuff, Zipota is similar, but from Basque Spain. Lots of herding cultures kept this stuff alive and whether it is MMA or something else they seem to be getting more attention.
That's just being difficult. The real world does work that way. Take poltical labels for example, liberal, conservative, et al have totally different meanings for different people. Contradictions do exist, just externalizing them in a formal system is lazy.
The question you should ask yourself is; "Is it right for you and your project?" It doesn't matter as far as your project if the community should be moving on as a whole or not. What matter's is if you, and/or your team, can effectively use the technology to reach your goals.
I thought a lot of that money was accounted for coming out of branches of Cypriot banks that remained open in the UK and Russia.
Not saying that bitcoin isn't where some or a lot of it ended up, but the black market was basically the first adopter of bitcoin, and black markets (and pornographers) are traditionally early adopters of any new technology.
Sort of the price we pay.
Doesn't mean it's a pump and dump. If it is where international criminal syndicates (who probably have more economic power than some nations) decide to bank long term in bitcoins it might actually be a stabilizing force.
That's assumes you are starting from no one having any to one person having them all. If someone had 1 billion in demand for bitcoins it would drive the price up, some would sell hoping to cash out, but others probably more would save seeing this big new interest as a sign of increasing value. You can't count out the sociology and the theater of it. Or other external forces like unstable/untrustworthy national currencies, or the value of relative anonymity.
Same things are true for any currency, this is partly why they work. We can trust because we have common interest in the solvency of any commonly used currency. A dollar is only worth what someone will give you for it.
"A dollar is only worth what someone will give you for it."
Dollars also have value because they can be used to pay taxes and settle other debts in the United States. It is not like people woke up one morning thinking that the US dollar was a great currency to use; it has actual utility.
There eventually wont be much point to mining when the cap is reached, then there will be a point to process blocks for their transaction fees. You are also right about the hardware issue, plus there are other more profitable ways to use a botnet. There is also just a general problem with the argument that it incentivises botnets, they are their own incentive, anything that needs bandwidth, cpu power, and stolen information will be much easier with a botnet.
Don't forget that bitcoin can be broken down into arbitrarily small fractions. It caps, but it can still grow by being traded in increasingly smaller values. Which I don't think we really have an economic model for.
And yeah, the author seems to miss a lot of the things in the bitcoin website. The whole thing presumes there are unforeseen consequences, that something will replace or complement it, and that it will be remarkably volatile for some time. It is first in breed and very well aware of that.
> I wouldn't want the web as a platform to be that good
What? Are you so ideologically caught up that you actually wish something wont get good? It is totally reasonable to to think something isn't the right approach or a waste of time, or to not like the workflow, etc. But to actually wish that something wont get good enough to be a general solution even if it can? How does that make any sense?
>But to actually wish that something wont get good enough to be a general solution even if it can? How does that make any sense?
It makes a lot of sense because things do not happen in isolation. A "good enough web platform" could bring a lot of OTHER outcomes too.
I wrote one in my comment already: all computers because Chromebooks, glorified clients.
That has other consequences: you loose control, you don't own your apps (the company does, and it can take them from you in an instant, like Google Reader), etc. Not to mention the privacy implication of ALL apps running in a web browser, getting their data remotely. Or the implications for companies and governments locking content, pushing you out, demanding a premium, etc.
I don't see that those consequences follow, at all. I see a natural evolution from where we are now to a world where people own their own servers in the cloud and run all the software on them.
Or, if you really don't want any data to go over the wire, just run all the web app servers locally.
There was a big swing from the idea that at&t would sell you a terminal that was connected to a central mainframe, to personal computers that were distributed, back to everything being centralized because the advantages of the web were compelling and centralizing things was the natural path. Things will swing back again to decentralization, but the difference this time is you will be able to access all of your data from anywhere at any time.
