
Bitcoin for the Befuddled – Our fancy new book and website - drcode
http://befuddled.org
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Jayschwa
The yellow "inserts" that pop open are neat but appear too often and become an
annoyance. I think you should keep it limited to the fortune teller, cover
color voting, and cointagion link. The rest of them seem like filler and add
no value, in my opinion.

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drcode
Jayschwa, you might be right, we'll work to adjust that.

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drcode
We'll hang out in this thread and answer any questions. (Also happy to answer
questions on my other books, "Land of Lisp" or "Realm of Racket")

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genericacct
Are you long BTC at this moment? Do you think that makes your opinion of it
unbiased?

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chriswilmer
Co-author writing here. Although we think Bitcoin has (probably) a bright
future, the book is really just about explaining how it works (the protocol
and the cryptography behind it).

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xhjien
Question to both authors - The Cicada 3301 group has been linked to BTC
(suggestions that Satoshi is a pseudonym for the group), their most recent
puzzle had a key code around The Book of Law by Crowley. Just coincidence that
your character is also named this, or by design?

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rplevy
Cicada 3301 is fascinating. Taken at face value (and that's a huge assumption
to make) it appears to be a self-styled "cypherpunk freemasonry" of sorts.
Care to cite or summarize the evidence and case for a satoshi/cicada link
(other than "hey wouldn't that be so awesome if...")?

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MarcusBrutus
Has anyone yet been able to articulate a defense for BTC against von Mise's
"regression theorem" for the origin of money? or show that von Mises was
wrong? "this time it's different" is not good enough.

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mike_esspe
Isn't emergence of bitcoin falsified regression theorem?

From "Human Action":

 _No good can be employed for the function of a medium of exchange which at
the very beginning of its use for this purpose did not have exchange value on
account of other employments. And all these statements implied in the
regression theorem are enounced apodictically as implied in the apriorism of
praxeology. It must happen this way. Nobody can ever succeed in construction a
hypothetical case in which things were to occur in a different way._

[https://mises.org/humanaction/chap17sec4.asp](https://mises.org/humanaction/chap17sec4.asp)

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fragsworth
It sounds like there's nothing wrong here -

Bitcoin is (since its beginning) exchanged for something else at market rate
(e.g. dollars), so that a more convenient transfer can be made later, and then
exchanged back into something else (e.g. dollars). At no point did it have "no
exchange value on account of other employments".

Right? It's the same way how physical money works. They were exchanged for
goods (e.g. horses), so that a more convenient transfer can be made later, and
then exchanged back into goods (e.g. horses).

It is more convenient than our existing currencies, and you should be able to
see our existing currencies as being similar to "goods" like horses.

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MarcusBrutus
I beg to differ. I did have "no exchange value on account of other
employments" at the time the very first BTC was mined, and I suspect quite a
few months after that. The same cannot be said of paper money as from the
moment of its inception and for many long years thereafter it was redeemable
in gold, thus satisfying the regression theorem. Even today a tenuous link is
still maintained as the gold reserves of every central bank factor, to a
limited extend, in the assessment of a currency's health.

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walden42
> The same cannot be said of paper money as from the moment of its inception
> and for many long years thereafter it was redeemable in gold

But since the dollars themselves had no inherent value, its value was derived
simply from the cumulative belief that they could be redeemable by gold. I
could even say that when the dollar was first created, the rest of the world
was wary of it since it was so new.

I don't see how bitcoin is much different, except for the fact that a large
organization (e.g. government) didn't state that it had value when it was
first created, which is actually one of the strong points of bitcoin (a
currency by the people for the people.)

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mpg33
Cointagion is the first site I seen that shows how simple it would to buy
digital goods with bitcoins. How could this work with physical goods? Would
you just have to "tie" a shipping address to a bitcoin transaction?

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drcode
Were still trying to wrap our heads around the issue of physical shipments in
regards to bitcoin purchases ourselves. There is a new "bitcoin payment
protocol" for authenticating merchants that is part of the solution and which
we discuss in the book... But more and more goods are becoming virtual every
day (just consider 3d printing for instance as a way to increase
virtualization of products) and this is where bitcoin shines.

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mpg33
I guess I am thinking about it from the perspective of some company like
Amazon adopting it. That would be absolutely massive for bitcoin. I think we
are still a long way from being able to "3d print" any product you need.

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chwahoo
With the mouse sidebar, I think you meant terminal velocity (not escape
velocity).

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drcode
Darn, you are right...

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brosco45
Tulips, except you don't even get the flower delivered this time round..

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maaku
Oh you are so clever.

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contextual
Seriously cool stuff. Are there other formats (PDF for example) for those who
want to buy this and read it on their smartphones later?

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drcode
Hi, we're releasing the full book and ebook in Jan-Feb. It will also be
available in PDF form and will include all the comics from the website.

