Yes, crazy, but at least they smell the potential of the blockchain.

Now I almost miss talking about Side Chains.

i went through the entire story he/they wrote. it is a brilliant example of how bitcoin crawls into everyones head that is giving it a chance. those guys are very open about their learning experience and i think this is valuable information.

I feel as though I'm watching my own learning curve for bitcoin play out in ultra slow motion as I continue to read articles such as this.   John Mauldin has understood blockchain technology as a decentralized ledger for recording transactions (time-stamp server).  What he's missed is that half the benefit of using the blockchain as money is lost if these transactions represent claims on real assets (commodity-backed tokens) rather than the transfer of the asset itself (bitcoin).  

It's quite interesting.  He uses the word "information" in an unusual way, like he half-gets the money-as-memory concept:

"a way to make the new currency a truly stable medium of information that can be easily exchanged for goods and services"

yet then proposes to back this "information" with a basket of commodities.  Can he not see that "backing" reintroduces centralization and counter-party risk, clouding the pure form of information that bitcoin already is?  

I've always been a fan of Cypherdoc's quote "the blockchain may only be applicable to money," not that I think it's necessarily true, but that it reminds us of the huge gap in trust and complexity between using the blockchain as money and using it as some sort of generalized notary system.  The thing is, we've largely solved the former problem and that's a vastly more important problem than the latter.  

Bitcoin is the Blockchain's native unit--the two cannot be separated.  

Now it doesn't take long anymore. Everything is set for a new bigger rise in bitcoin price.

this is interesting.

to get a domino effect going to the downside in equities, we need bond defaults of some kind.  could energy be it?:

Energy companies, the fastest-growing segment of the high-yield bond market in recent years, account for nearly 18% of all outstanding high-yield bonds, up from 9% in 2009, according to J.P. Morgan.

http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/12/01/falling-oil-prices-could-lead-to-massive-junk-bond-defaults/

Very well stated, thanks.

What continues to be missed by Mauldin and others is that any sound money construct has to be contained wholly within itself with zero external dependencies. The problem with "backing" is the backing mechanism (whatever it is) becomes the weak point which must be trusted. For example, the FED originally was sold as a trusted entity that would back paper dollars with gold, however by 1932 the amount of FED paper liabilities was so far beyond physical actually held, that the FED was forced to default on it's obligations. Backing Bitcoin with gold is no different than backing paper dollars with gold, it doesn't work.

There is a reason we have the phrase "cold hard cash", it came from many generations learning to not trust "backing".

When Mauldin argues to back bitcoin with gold what he is really saying is "I want the world to use my version of sound money (atoms of gold) and not your version of sound money (Bitcoin ledger), but since physical gold is too difficult for your average person to use now I need your technology". However if Mauldin wants to recreate the gold standard, then the hurdle is to get the majority of the public to use physical gold (not paper products based on physical), this is a difficult hurdle.

The brilliance of Satoshi's Bitcoin is he designed the hurdle for your average person to directly use a sound money system to be very very low, lower than any sound money system we've ever had access too. That is proving to be a level of understanding real world economics that is beyond the vast majority of today's economists.

That seems to be the core disagreement, and I don't believe that SC's do break that aspect. Jumped back in after switching to silent observer for a while since I thought we were taking a break from SC for now. But if not then I'll try to reply on this tonight. Day job is killing me recently.

It's incredibly painful to watch these guys go through this process....in public, with massive audiences, and massive influence.

Someone should just turn this thread into a book and mail it to them all.