02.10.14
Wow, very rich, wonderful coin (continuing)
From the pipes:
Bitcoin’s value has dropped sharply after one of the largest trading exchanges said there was a flaw in the virtual currency’s underlying software.
MtGox said it had halted transfers to external Bitcoin addresses on Friday after detecting “unusual activity”.
It said an investigation had revealed it was possible for thieves to fool the transaction process so that double the correct amount of bitcoins would be sent.
Bitcoins fell from $700 (£427) to $540.
A spokesperson at the BitCoin Foundation said the problem was the exchange’s, not Bitcoin’s.
Today, Mt. Gox resumed processing BitCoin transactions.
Additionally: “The use of Bitcoin for alleged money laundering led to the arrests of two men in the US last week … Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle told Bloomberg in a statement that the ‘arrests may be the first state prosecutions involving the use of Bitcoins in money laundering operations.’ ”
The price of a BitCoin in Pasadena, today — $576 (Note trader has limited purchase to about a quarter of a Bitcoin.)
Thought exercise: How much have the Winklevosses lost in the last week on their BitCoin holdings?
Also simmering, Russia becoming hostile to BitCoin.
Patrick Byrne says the zombie apocalypse is coming, and there’s one thing that can save us: bitcoin.
He tells me this during a phone call from his car, a black Tesla Model S that’s winding its way through the mountains above Salt Lake City, on its way to Byrne’s home in the Utah ski country. Byrne is the CEO and chairman of Salt Lake’s Overstock.com …
He has long warned that our economy is hurtling toward another massive recession — what he calls the zombie apocalypse — and he believes bitcoin can shelter us from the fallout.
If the digital currency reaches its true potential, he tells me, it might even avert this apocalypse all-together. “Someday, either zombies walk the Earth or something close to that,??? says Byrne, the son of the man who built the GEICO insurance empire …
“It can make our country more robust,??? says Byrne, a disciple of the Austrian school of economics, which holds that our economy should rest on the judgments of individuals, not a central authority …
Conveniently, from E. J. Dionne, today — on the Austrian school of economics:
Those who follow [Austrian economists] Hayek and Mises would have us forget this history, or rewrite it beyond comprehension. They would also have us overlook that Hayek’s “own historical justification for apolitical market economics was entirely wrong,??? as the late Tony Judt put it in “Thinking the Twentieth Century,??? his extraordinary dialogue with his fellow historian Timothy Snyder, published in 2012, after Judt’s death.
Hayek believed, Tony Judt said, that “if you begin with welfare policies of any sort — directing individuals, taxing for social ends, engineering the outcomes of market relationships — you will end up with Hitler.???
But to the contrary, postwar initiatives along Keynesian lines are precisely what prevented both the resurgence of fascism …
“Years later, when I spend a few days with Byrne at Overstock headquarters and sit down for dinner at his home, a jewel of a log cabin just outside the ski resort of Park City, Utah …” writes Cade Metz for Wired.
Patrick Byrne, explaining what he believes in, poorly:
And when this Robespierre forces you to submit to him, he’s “forcing you to be free???, in Rousseau’s phrase. And that goes on through Hagel and [Marx] where the . . . you know it’s the …. And it’s [Lenin] where it’s the vanguard … party; Hitler, where it’s [das Volk] …. It’s the prerogative of . . . It’s the people . . . Real freedom is frowned on, and subordinating yourself to the work of the people …, [arbeit macht frei] as they said over in the concentration camp gates. And somewhere along the way, the intellectuals from the continent, I think, lost this sense of freedom, as this basic idea of people choosing their own ends in life. And it’s not . . . it’s . . . it’s a . . . it’s a . . . When I listen to people talk in politics, I go right back to this route. And it’s pretty easy to see that for most of them, they’ve just taken the wrong fork. They are, in one way or another, defining liberty and freedom as subordinating yourself to the ends that they . . . that someone else has chosen for you. And that . . . that’s valueless …
In fact Voltaire read a book by Rousseau where he . . . where when he read this stuff, he wrote Rousseau a letter where he said, “Dear Monsieur Rousseau, I’ve had the pleasure of reading your book against the human race.??? Well he had it exactly right. This philosophy . . . this continental philosophy from Rousseau, Kant, Hagel, Nietzsche, you know, Marx, [Lenin], of course – it’s anti-freedom. It’s . . . it’s [a] philosophy against the human race.
American plutocrat libertarians, a class unto themselves.
Make me a believer. I’ll try anything once. Escape from WhiteManistan, now accepting BitCoin.