3 hours ago, deltaKshatriya said:

Incorrect. Printing money is one means of combatting inflation, amongst other policies.

Printing money increases the supply of money and thus decreases the value per coin, a decrease in the value of the coin is called inflation.

3 hours ago, deltaKshatriya said:

Another is setting the reserve requirements for banks.

Yup, private banks can't lend out(=print) money infinitely, else you get both inflation WITHOUT the (government-owned) central bank/federal reserve printing money and additionally problems like with Icesave not being able to pay debts.

3 hours ago, deltaKshatriya said:

They also set interest rates for lending out of the central reserve.

Yes, they set the price for the product they 're delivering, fyi, they're a fovernment-agency, they do everything with policy, this doesn't mean they're not trying to make more money, but, in your defense, their policy is generally set by others higher-up,
 and i suspect they've given a simple allow-up-to-x% inflation, instead of a make sure no inflation/cause deflation.

Inflation is a way that the government can sneakily steal to everyone... that is not through taxes which are open and clear. If you really think about it, it isn't a good thing. To steal, and on top ripping off everyone while hiding... just like when they hide behind debt to years to come. Spend, hide, spend. And probably not the good type of expending either, it's sneaky bad spending, on top of being sneaky and bad. And most aren't benefiting from it... just the elite controlling the flow of money to their own pockets. 

16 hours ago, deltaKshatriya said:

but are these advantages exclusive to the system of CC? IMO they can (and at least some ideas already are) be implemented into more traditional currencies

If you wont pay cash all the time, you will always have any of these disadvantages competed to CCs because all the money you get is tracked from its creation (printing), the national banks that have to make settlements to your house bank that will track who has taken how many from what source and when up to you. Payment transactions are mostly handled digital from your income to your outcome and if financial service is pissed off, they can denie your accounts for an undetermined time. Banks partially take money for just storing your money in there computer systems while they also take yours to make even more money with more or less gambling on the global market. Some banks also take money when you have too much money on your account instead of giving you the fees from there work with it.

I just ask if anyone thinks this is fair?

CCs are fair by implementation because the basic idea is that you do not need the man-in-the-middle model for digital payment anymore and anyone can be its own bank, managing anything on its own, sure for some drawbacks, for example the need of using a capable device for it, computing and energy power but I still think CCs are for now the leading digital payment system that offer most freedom and independence related to digital payment services.

I dont say that CCs are yet meant to be the replacement for any other system but may become in the future with some more research and approval out of the discussion as black market or hacker currency but for the "normal" people

2 hours ago, Shaarigan said:

CCs are fair by implementation because the basic idea is that you do not need the man-in-the-middle model for digital payment anymore

The man in the middle is the developer. Almost every time a new money system was introduced, the creators cheated the system and forged extra money.

A smart developer would just spend small amounts of money buying what ever he wants; the best part for the developer is that stealing money from a cryptocurrencies isn't illegal.

At the moment cryptocurrencies are very similar to the old trading guilds, that is a good thing; because those guilds became the banking system of today.

The problem is that what most people are saying is the good parts of cryptocurrencies are the parts that won't last; because in truth they are what is wrong with cryptocurrencies.

The freedom that comes with cryptocurrencies allow people to exploit it. A good banking system is crime free and convenient, cryptocurrencies is neither at the moment.

there is no way CC's can become properly mainstream without giving average joe the chance to convert to the currency at a fair fixed rate.

The more popular CC's become the more our traditional savings are eroded and wealth moves even more towards the haves an do-nothings in our society.

i think we are moving towards a post scarcity world where money will be less and less of an issue. As jobless rate rises due to automation there will need to be division of resources (minimum income etc) to prevent poverty.

6 hours ago, RivieraKid said:

there is no way CC's can become properly mainstream without giving average joe the chance to convert to the currency at a fair fixed rate.

But that's the issue brought up at the very beginning.  There are no longer any mainstream currencies that are backed by physical commodities.  All modern currencies, including cryptocurrencies, only have value because people say they have value.  They do not have a fair fixed rate.

There have been times in history where money had some form of intrinsic value. Gold and silver coins were worth their weight in gold and silver in addition to their value in trade. Other times paper money was backed by physical commodities including barley, wheat, corn, rice, tanned hides/pelts, directly usable metals like iron and copper and brass, and in some times and places, paper money has been backed by tobacco or cigarettes. 

Even so, there is no fair fixed rate except for what the market says it is.  If that means one beaver pelt equals twenty fish hooks, then that is the prevailing fair rate.  Tomorrow it may be twenty five fish hooks, or fifteen fish hooks.  Similarly if a beaver pelt is worth five pounds of sugar today, depending on the harvest of both beavers and sugar then tomorrow a pelt may be worth four pounds or three pounds or ten pounds of sugar.  The value is arbitrary and constantly variable.

In modern currency there are currency markets where the value and fair fixed rate is in constant flux, with traders making money or losing money based on nanoseconds of transaction times. It is a mix of the currency markets and commodities markets that help ensure the stability of modern currencies. When one gets slightly better than the other the market traders will quickly identify a tiny difference in an attempt to make profits. There are markets for soybeans, cotton, cocoa, sugar, wheat, corn, barley, and most other foodstuff. There are markets for various types of oil and gas and coal and for processed gasoline. There are markets for gold and silver and platinum and copper and iron and steel. When traders (or these days, the trading algorithms) find a slight imbalance they make trades for it: sell 100,000 units of some currency, buy 50,000 units of a commodity future.  Or sell 7,500,000 units of one commodity and trade it for 2,500,000 units of another commodity.

Those commodity futures and currency markets help stabilize the rates of currency.  That form of market has already been happening in crypto currencies.

1 hour ago, frob said:

There have been times in history where money had some form of intrinsic value. Gold and silver coins were worth their weight in gold and silver in addition to their value in trade. Other times paper money was backed by physical commodities including barley, wheat, corn, rice, tanned hides/pelts, directly usable metals like iron and copper and brass, and in some times and places, paper money has been backed by tobacco or cigarettes. 

The relationship between commodities and currency is never terribly stable over time, though.

The Spaniards accidentally devalued their gold based economy by importing too much of it from the Americas. Salt was once incredibly valuable, but more modern methods to extract it from salt water (and more modern food preservation methods) made it basically valueless. De Beers has had to spend an entire century heavily marketing diamonds as a status symbol to keep their value from crashing...

In the modern day, at least in the West, our economy doesn't really operate on scarcity anymore. Which makes any currency<->commodity links speculative at best.

Exactly the point.  Currencies have no "fair fixed rate", and hasn't been for ages.  The value is whatever people say it is.

If some people are willing to pay $18,000 for a bitcoin, then that is the fair value at that time.  If those people stop and the highest bidding is $9,000 for a bitcoin, then that becomes their new fair value.  The fluctuations can be tempered by trading on major markets, but even then the values are in constant flux.

On 16/02/2018 at 5:31 PM, frob said:

But that's the issue brought up at the very beginning.  There are no longer any mainstream currencies that are backed by physical commodities.  All modern currencies, including cryptocurrencies, only have value because people say they have value.  They do not have a fair fixed rate.

There have been times in history where money had some form of intrinsic value. Gold and silver coins were worth their weight in gold and silver in addition to their value in trade. Other times paper money was backed by physical commodities including barley, wheat, corn, rice, tanned hides/pelts, directly usable metals like iron and copper and brass, and in some times and places, paper money has been backed by tobacco or cigarettes. 

 

Even so, there is no fair fixed rate except for what the market says it is.  If that means one beaver pelt equals twenty fish hooks, then that is the prevailing fair rate.  Tomorrow it may be twenty five fish hooks, or fifteen fish hooks.  Similarly if a beaver pelt is worth five pounds of sugar today, depending on the harvest of both beavers and sugar then tomorrow a pelt may be worth four pounds or three pounds or ten pounds of sugar.  The value is arbitrary and constantly variable.

 

In modern currency there are currency markets where the value and fair fixed rate is in constant flux, with traders making money or losing money based on nanoseconds of transaction times. It is a mix of the currency markets and commodities markets that help ensure the stability of modern currencies. When one gets slightly better than the other the market traders will quickly identify a tiny difference in an attempt to make profits. There are markets for soybeans, cotton, cocoa, sugar, wheat, corn, barley, and most other foodstuff. There are markets for various types of oil and gas and coal and for processed gasoline. There are markets for gold and silver and platinum and copper and iron and steel. When traders (or these days, the trading algorithms) find a slight imbalance they make trades for it: sell 100,000 units of some currency, buy 50,000 units of a commodity future.  Or sell 7,500,000 units of one commodity and trade it for 2,500,000 units of another commodity.

Those commodity futures and currency markets help stabilize the rates of currency.  That form of market has already been happening in crypto currencies.

TL:DR except the first part.

it is not about underlying value or any of that stuff you mentioned. If the euro has been introduced in the same way that any CC has been introduced it would have been pandemonium. Wealth would have been scattered around like houses on a monopoly board. CC's are the wild west, its dumb to think they can contribute to making society fair / balanced.

Explain why the minority of computer geek should become super wealthy while hardworking trademen from east to west should have their local currency eroded because of electricity wasting elitist unregulated ponzi scheme. The least technical in society will be left with nothing. There will be riots and rightly so. For decades people will not complain about bankers, they will complain about computer programmers. If the end game is not mass adoption then I honestly don't see the point of even discussing it, it will popular as long as it is volatile.

There arn't any scantily clad ladies trying to convince me on youtube to invest in the Swiss Frank or Dollars. That says it all.

Blockchain clearly has potential but that potential has been hijacked by greedy arseholes.

27 minutes ago, RivieraKid said:

Explain why the minority of computer geek should become super wealthy while hardworking trademen from east to west should have their local currency eroded because of electricity wasting elitist unregulated ponzi scheme.

How's that any different than the normal gold rushes in the startup/venture capital scene in tech? Producing widespread net benefit isn't something Silicon Valley is exactly known for...

33 minutes ago, RivieraKid said:

There arn't any scantily clad ladies trying to convince me on youtube to invest in the Swiss Frank or Dollars. That says it all.

This furore over currency speculation is hardly unique to cryptocurrencies. It happens with national currencies all the time. A certain segment of the population is always looking for "get rich quick" opportunities.

38 minutes ago, RivieraKid said:

For decades people will... complain about computer programmers

Spent any time on the West Coast? That's already a thing. Hard to go a day without hearing about the "tech bros" driving up housing prices.