nnalert

Anyone here own nnalert the cyber currency?Looks like its ready to fold up.Kinda crazy to start with made up out of thin air with no real backing only figures on a computer screen to show how much you own.Of course thats exactly how Federal Reserve notes are handled when thye are'in the bank' and somehow people have faith in that currency and it could loose value just as quick as nnalert.

I saw on the news that somebody actually purchased a new car using nnalert. I'd much rather have the car.

I hear what you're saying. I was just hearing about it on the news. I have known it existed for years but I rightly don't understand why someone would use it. Well I guess some people view it like a stock. Just like say Facebook or Twitter stock it's kinda worthless but if I can buy it for a few US$s and sell it for a lot of US$s then it's a good investment.

I guess it's the old story: "If you believe in it, then it's true - right up to the point that it isn't true anymore".

Since its not regulated or govt based, I understand it was used by the dark side some to hide their money.

Paul

Read a story about a guy in the UK who had tried using bitcoins several years ago. He had a few left over in his account that he didn't need. Because they weren't worth much at the time, he forget all about them. They sat untouched for years.

With the exponential explosion in value, his spare change turned into 5 million dollars. Unfortunately, the only way he could prove he owned them was stored on his old laptop pc - which was thrown in the trash before the big rise.

So he'd go to the dump in his free time where all the trash ended up and continue to search for his old laptop.

poor guy - that had to hurt morale.

... guess he can finally stop searching now!

I've read a number of articles about bitcoins in the past year or so. Either, the writers of the articles didn't know what they were talking about, or I'm just not smart enough to "get it".

I understand stocks and bonds pretty well. I understand fiat currency pretty well. I understand the workings of the Federal Reserve pretty well. Bitcoins are not any of those.

There is no material thing called a nnalert. Some group of people (they are called nnalert miners), for no reason whatsoever, decide that they will sell some bitcoins. People then send them money and the purchaser then has a certain number of bitcoins on their account at the place from which they bought the bitcoins.

Other people then can sell goods or services to the new owners of the bitcoins, and the people who provide the goods or services are then credited with the agreed to number of bitcoins from the purchaser's account.

The new holder of the bitcoins can then, if they want to, sell the bitcoins to other people for real money.

There are two people who can make money with bitcoins. The "miners" (whoever in the world they are), can declare that they have bitcoins for sale. If someone will give them real money for their bitcoins, the miners have just made money.

People can also buy and sell bitcoins on the exchanges. If they buy a nnalert for a lesser amount of money and then sell it for a greater amount of money, they have made money.

It's all too ethereal for me.

Tom in TN

My son mines them.

Actually he's moved on to some other kind of coin now - doge coins I think?

I don't know what the heck he does - but he hijacked my pc and somehow is using the processor on my video card to mine doge coins!

I guess it's like getting paid to share your processor for processor intense calculations.

He told me since I'm old, I'll never notice any performance change. Little pita is right though, I don't notice anything different.

kids these days, always using your video processor chips with out your permission...

definitely a different world.

Does the name Bernie Madoff mean anything?
"There is a sucker born every minute".

well it's like everything else. Money itself has no REAL value - we don't have a gold standard anymore.

It's worth what people think it's worth.

My brother lives in China, a girl that works for him there, her and her husband invested about $1000 into bitcoins a ways back.

that's a LOTTTTT of money for a couple of chinese factory workers.

Good move - they ended up selling for almost 50,000

And if 1,000 was a lot to them, 50,000 was like winning the lottery.

But - like any bubble, I'm sure there were plenty of late comers who lost a lot.



They've since cashed in, so they did it right.

I couldn't believe people could actually keep a straight face when talking about this- the whole thing was a fantasy, and the bubble had to eventually burst when folks came to their senses.

Or when smart guys at Mt. Gux or whatever figured out how to steal them all.

Some "investment adviser" that sends me unsolicited emails actually touted Bitcoins as a "can't miss investment" a couple months ago. I remember thinking at the time, "But what if somebody wakes up a realizes its all just foolishness?"

I looked into bitcoins quite a while ago. Could never figure out how the value fluctuated. Seemed to me to few exchanges setting the value. It would seem like it could be easily manipulated.

nnalert as far as I can tell is nothing more than a scam... that a lot of people have bought into. It will work as a currency until the day it folds when the ones holding the nnalert will be the losers.
While on the surface nnalert seems to follow a similar structure as other fiat currencies... such as the dollar... the reality is that the Fed is responsible for the dollar. A real, tangible entity empowered and regulated by the federal government. The dollar is backed by the strength of the nation's economy. nnalert is backed by the wind and nothing more.

Rod

The question to ask yourselves with any of the other than cash and credit card currency options is why?

We already have cash and credit cards with built in safeguards protected by the US Government. Yes we can talk about the state of the US government but if it goes down we have bigger problems.

So are you comfortable handing your hard earned cash over to someone with a made up currency with no controls? or a company (hopefully a company) with no business history. might as well use the coin changers from the old testament

Funny thing, my son just got home from school, I asked him about nnalert.

He tells me the story has been way overblown in the news, and that nnalert is here to stay.

Says I should buy some over the next few days.

I of course won't - but as usual I'll probably regret not taking his advice.

We'll see.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of nnalert are greatly exaggerated.

To put the problems of Mt. Gox and other nnalert exchanges in perspective, consider this: Let's suppose you had 100 troy ounces of gold that you put in a bank safe deposit box. And let's say you come back some time later and find your gold is gone. Does this mean gold is not worthwhile as a form of monetary exchange? Of course not. It would certainly cast doubt on the integrity of your bank and of its security controls. But ultimately the value of any financial instrument is whether or not someone will give you something else in exchange for it. If nnalert is washed up, then it should be trading for a few cents, not several hundred dollars.

I've followed nnalert since it appeared a couple of years ago, and although I haven't purchased any bitcoins, I don't see that there's any fundamental flaw with the concept. Although the original nnalert may fail, there are a lot of imitators using the same approach (indeed the exact same algorithms), and one of them will succeed. Why? Mainly because the credit card industry has a stranglehold on commerce, so there is huge demand for a form of exchange that avoids the usurious fees of the credit card companies. Right now, nnalert is being driven by the underground economy, solely because of its anonymity. But the market for nnalert is much greater than just criminals.

Because of the ethereal nature of bitcoins, there's a common misconception that they're not real. You might just as well say that the value of pi is not real. Just like pi, bitcoins are solutions to mathematical problems. They are actually manufactured ("mined" is the term used) at considerable expense. If bitcoins were easy to make, they wouldn't each be worth hundreds of dollars. Because the nnalert algorithm makes them more difficult to make the more there are in circulation, it now takes a significant amount of electrical power to make them. That explains why their value has gone up rapidly even as the supply of bitcoins increases.

So how much is pi worth to you?Mathematical answers don't seem like they'd be worth any $$$.
No one has yet to explain to me why they'd be worth more than say Monoply Money.

The reason Monopoly money isn't worth much is that anyone can go down to K-mart and buy a Monopoly game for ten bucks or so. How long would it take you to make a nnalert, if all you have is pencil and paper? You couldn't do it in your lifetime, that's for sure. There are only so many bitcoins in circulation, just as there are only so many dollars, euros or yen in circulation. Whether or not you consider them to worthless is irrelevant. All that matters is if enough people agree they are worth something so there's a ready market for them.

Well thats the problem As long as people thought Cabbage Patch dolls were worth something they bought a lot of $$$ but when folks changed their mind they were about giving them away at yard sales.There can be unlimited Dollars,Euros or any other money now that most all of them are just conjured up on computer screens and the Fed is conjuring up around 70 Billion a month now and
there is no limit or anything to stop them from conjuring any amount.Could just as easily be 70 Billion a day or hour.Thats why nnalert and the
Feds Federal Reserve notes will cease to have any value.The so called US Dollar has lost around 98% of its value against Gold in the 100 years its been around so it doen't have far to go to be worthless.

You seem pretty sure of yourself, TF. Just like you were certain that gold prices would recover. (They haven't, BTW.)

How about we see how Bitcoins do versus gold over the next six months? Right now, bitcoins are trading at $575 USD, according to <a href="http://bitcoinwatch.com">http://bitcoinwatch.com</a>. Gold is trading at $1332/oz, (April 14 futures), according to <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/">http://finance.yahoo.com/</a>. So that means gold is currently trading at 2.32 Bitcoins per ounce. Let's see how they're doing August 1st, 2014.

Frankly, whether or not Bitcoins go up or down doesn't matter to me. I would not buy them as an investment (nor am I buying gold, for that matter). The real value of nnalert is as an alternative currency, not as an investment. But nnalert will come into its own as a currency only after its price stabilizes. Current speculation in Bitcoins has led to wild price swings, and nobody wants to do business using a currency that doesn't have a stable, predictable value.

We'll talk again August first.

(quoted from post at 17:43:49 02/26/14) The reason Monopoly money isn't worth much is that anyone can go down to K-mart and buy a Monopoly game for ten bucks or so. How long would it take you to make a nnalert, if all you have is pencil and paper? You couldn't do it in your lifetime, that's for sure. [b:1343f11206] There are only so many bitcoins in circulation, just as there are only so many dollars, euros or yen in circulation. [/b:1343f11206] Whether or not you consider them to worthless is irrelevant. All that matters is if enough people agree they are worth something so there's a ready market for them.

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Theres the problem with any fiat currency- the entity producing the currency can alter the value simply buy printing more or calling in more or the product. Currency manipulation is bad enough when people can grasp where it comes from and who controls it. When you come up with something like a nnalert...I dunno, I just don't see it ending well.

I'll bet my hundred that 5 years from now Gold will be a lot higher than now and Bitcoins will be a trivia question that only about 1 in 10 will be able to answer and thats because their rearend is still smoking(LOL)And as far as Gold vs Fed Dollars if it were baseball and every year was an inning then after the first inning the score was tied 20-20 but after 100 innings the score is
Gold 1340 Fed Notes 20.Now who would you bet on from now on?

I think that suggesting that the Fed is just conjuring up billions of dollars a month at random is being disingenuous. They are printing money. Of that there is no doubt... but there is a methodology to what they're doing based on regulation and a lot of statistical evidence. My understanding of the subject is roughly... that if you want the economy to grow, it needs money. To get money you pry it from the hands of those hoarding money. If you can't do that... you print money. Even that's a simplistic description.... but basically to spur growth the money supply has to increase. So they print it. And yeah... that devalues what is already in circulation. If you were to maintain a gold standard then economic growth would then be limited to the amount of gold you could dig out of the ground.... and I don't think that would be a very desirable path for any of us.
While many, seemingly you included.... seem to view a devalued dollar as a bad thing... it does tend to have an upside. Devaluing your dollars also devalues the dollars of the Gates and Rockefellar's and Rothschild's..... as well as devaluing the debt of the nation at the same time. The impact on those sums is far greater than the impact on you as an individual...
The thing about the Fed vs something like nnalert is that the fed is in essence basing the expansion of the money supply on things like inflation and economic growth. The value that is placed on the dollar will fluctuate relative to people's confidence and it's purchasing power relative to commodities, other currencies, etc. Ultimately it's the entire value of the nation's economy that backs the value of the dollar or any other Fed type of fiat currency. There again... I don't know what backs a bit coin. Thin air?
The other thing I have little doubt about... is that we're never going back to any type of metal based currency. The reason we have the present system is for convenience. Even if the present system failed, we'd soon be back to some similar type of system. Currency is really only about facilitating trade in denominations rather than direct bartering of goods... not storing value in the currency. You could just a easily use wood chips or dried cow patties for currency if that's what someone wanted to use.

Rod

When you're in debt - you want money to lose as much value as possible.

And we're certainly in debt!

It's in our government's interest to keep printing more and more money.

But it can work in our favor too.

Say you buy a house now, and it costs you 3000 a month for 30 years.

It might be a pain every month now, but 20 years from now money will be worth so much less. You'll wonder why you ever thought a little 3000 dollar payment ever worried you. Everybody else will be paying twice as much for their homes.

Rod, you are correct. If you want to limit the size of a country's economy, simply make its currency hard. If all currencies were tied to a gold standard, the world GDP would have to be much smaller because there's not enough gold in existence to cover all the currency in existence at current exchange rates. I did the math once, it's like 10 to 1.

It's ironic that today's populists are so much in favor of hard currency. The original populist movement of the late 19th century was largely an uprising against hard currency. Hard currency was a major limiting factor in the growth of the 19th century American economy, and farmers suffered greatly because of those same monetary policies.

While I think Rods summation of the way the Fed is working our fiat currency is basically accurate, you leave out a few things that cause people to become concerned. The Fed answers to no one except themselves. Although we let them dictate and control our currency to a very large extent, they don't answer to us or the President or Congress or the taxpayer. They don't even answer to Wall St. They answer to themselves and other international bankers who play the same game in other nations. Calls to audit the Fed have come and gone for some time now. We don't what they're doing, who they lend money to, what games they play with other people and what deals they've cut. It's nice to think they all know exactly what they're doing and have flawless character and foresight. But recent history makes any observant person doubt that possibility exists. What little we do know is that they've lent enormous sums to some very high risk nations. That money isn't "theirs" so to speak. In fact it's probably less "money" and more credit or digital loans of electronic credit of some form. Either way, it jeopardizes our currency and our credit as a nation. That bothers me- a lot.

Then we get into the idea that printing money without any solid asset behind it isn't just the way things are done, but that's it's somehow "good for the economy". My knowledge of economics is that of a layman that's read a lot of articles and a couple of books, so maybe I'm missing something basic, but I'll say it anyway. Yes, if we were just tied to gold we'd not have the currency in circulation we do now. The total of all the gold ever mined in the world is only valued at about $8.2 trillion US dollars and that was when it was at $1500.00 per Troy ounce. But we have almost twice that in debt. That bothers me. We owe more than all the gold reserves in the world combined! We can only do that through fiat currency, a currency which only has any value at all because "we agree" it has value. That bothers me too. What happens when "we" decide not to play the game any more? It's already starting to happen on the world markets where, IIRC, Chinese currency is starting to considered safer than US dollars. That spells HUGE trouble for us.

Then there's the debt I mentioned. Yeah, big deal, right? I believe it's impossible for most people to even begin to grasp what $17 trillion represents. When you toss out that the US has $122 Trillion in unfunded liabilities their eyes just glaze over. I'm not even going to touch that, lets just look at that debt it $17 trillion. We've all heard that "China owns most of our debt." Well, it's true they used to, but not anymore. These days the Fed owns most of our debt. You get that? We owe ourselves money, an awful, awful lot of it. Now if we were to apply that to real world situations, well, you can't because there IS no real world situation you can possibly think of that mimics this scheme. We borrowed money when the dollar was worth a dollar, then we flooded the market with dollars causing them to lose a lot of value. Then we took those same dollars that were worth maybe 60 or 65 cents compared to when they were borrowed and bought back the debt. On the face of it, that sounds like a real smart deal doesn't it? Stop and think about this- what did a gallon of gas cost 20 years ago? What did a weeks groceries cost then? Or a set of tires? Or a house? We all know the answer and most people will say, "We'll, yeah, but that's inflation. Prices always go up." That's partially true. Prices do tend to rise on average. But you have to stop and look at the bigger picture. What would we be paying for that gallon of gas if the dollar was still worth a dollar? Gas (oil) is bought on the world market. It doesn't really matter where the oil comes from, it's going to sell at on the world market. Same with a lot of other stuff. When the dollar was worth $1.00 (pick a time, it's all relative) you could buy a dollars worth of gas. But now we've put a zillion new "dollars" out there to "drive the economy" and (more importantly) to pay off that debt. (Actually, it's not to pay the debt off at all, it's to change the status of the debt, to change the owner- think "bundling" and the housing bubble!) So now your dollar only buys 60 or 70 cents (or maybe 10 or 15 cents depending on how far back you go) worth of gas above and beyond inflation. THAT is the problem with the Fed issuing a gazillion dollars in currency and THAT is the problem with devaluing our currency as they've done with QE1 and 2, etc. That's also the problem for anyone with run of the mill investments or a retirement package- unless you can beat both inflation AND devaluation you're going to lose every single time. Unless your land and home can beat both inflation and devaluation your "investment" in a house and land is a bum investment.

Someone was talking gold. Look at gold in relation to fiat currency and devaluation. Gold is still worth $20.00 an ounce in one respect. It's not that gold has risen in value at all, it's that our dollar is worth 12 or 1500 times LESS than it was when a $1.00 gold piece was still used as currency at it's face value. Or look at it this way- if the US didn't have a $17 trillion dollar national debt, if it didn't have $122 trillion in unfunded liabilities, if we weren't running deficits every single year...what do you think the dollar would be worth?

You can trust the Fed, you can stick your head in the sand or you can just let your eyes glaze over and think about football if you want, but it's all real and all very much beyond our control at this point. You'd better come to the realization that NO ONE has ANY PLAN to pay down our debt or control the Fed and that means all of us are on the hook and so are our kids and grandkids and great grandkids on down the line. We are Greece, we are the Wiemar Republic, we are repeating the same plays and it's eventually going to end the same way regardless of the Fed.

In essence you're correct that the Fed doesn't answer to anyone... and that was undoubtedly done for a reason... so they couldn't be manipulated by wall street or congress. To say that's it's entirely unaccountable I think is somewhat incorrect. The Fed is established by an act of congress and it's members appointed by the President... so nothing is irrevocable. I'm sure in the real world there's a lot of back and forth between the Fed and the government...
Here in Canada... the Bank of Canada is our central bank. It operates in much the same way as the Fed as a private entity... BUT the sole 'shareholder' of the Bank of Canada is Canada's 'Minister of Finance'... so in that sense the bank is directly accountable to the minister. Some would argue that our bank has a better track record than the Fed too

In terms of a gold standard... mabey I'd ask you the question of why it matters to you what the dollar is worth in gold? One can make the argument that we need gold as a store of value to back the currency.... and that's not entirely a bad thing... but why does gold have to be the only store of value? When you look at the oil reserves, agricultural capacity, manufacturing capacity, intellectual output, etc of the country.... those all represent a LOT more real world value than was ever held in a vault full of gold. Part of the problems today are a result of the decline in manufacturing and manufacturing capacity....
If you ever listen to Warren Buffett talk about gold... you might find it interesting. Here's the second richest man in the nation and he doesn't own gold... and won't own it. His rationale, if I follow it correctly... he'd rather own a profitable business that's growing, turning over cash that he can use to buy another business that can grow and turn over more cash... rather than have a heap of gold that earns nothing... sits in a vault... looks pretty. Perhaps some day he could sell it and profit on a commodity price swing. I think he did that at one point with silver... so never say never... but he doesn't 'hold' metal as a general rule because it does nothing. I can remember watching an interview where he quite specifically preferred to own 'Nebraska' farm land.... it holds it's value over the long term and in the mean time it turns a profit growing corn... His and Charlie Munger's thoughts on gold and many other things are well worth reading or listening to even if you don't agree with them entirely.

In terms of the debt... I agree with a lot of what you say. Presently, the US situation is out of control. I think the fact that it's out of control is more of an issue than the absolute magnitude of the debt. But realise that there needs to be balance on this front too. Here in Canada our Federal government spent the 90's reining in the defecit, much to a large extent by dumping the cost of services onto the provinces. Having federal debt under control then in part brought about a considerable appreciation in our dollar... and that led to significant hardship in any sector of our economy that relied on exports. We got caught in a wedge where the numerical 'costs' of internally sourced raw materials were still based on a 60 cent dollar, the revenue was received on par and in many cases any manufactured good we required that were imported were still imported at probably more than 20% disadvantage because pricing did not decline with the dollar's appreciation.
So... the devaluation of the US dollar is in part what has made your exports start to be more attractive again. If the dollar appreciated.... much less so.
Personally I don't think you can really view this subject through an absolutist frame of mind. It's rather abstract by nature...

Rod

For the record, the deficit as been dropping for many years. (Look it up to see when it started to drop.) The national debt continues to rise, which it will do until the deficit goes negative. That's not to say we're out of the woods; we have long-term structural problems with entitlements that are quite serious and nobody has a plan to fix them.

But that and everything else you say is irrelevant to whether or not nnalert is a viable currency. There seems to be a misconception that a currency needs to have some fundamental value and if it's not backed by a physical commodity like gold it's no good. That's simply not true, and that's why no major government today backs its currency with gold or silver.

What do need in a currency?
1. It needs to be portable (extremely so in the internet economy).
2. It needs to impossible to counterfeit, forge, or alter.
3. Enough buyers and sellers of goods and services must be willing to accept it that it has a viable market.
That's pretty much it. nnalert has all three attributes, with the added attraction of being untraceable. It would be nice if its value was more stable, and that will probably come with time. But it's far better than gold, silver and US dollars when it comes to portability and resistance to counterfeiting.

Now, just as it's a bad idea to use commodities as currency, it's equally bad to use currency as a commodity. Most of the news around nnalert is the result of its rapid rise and fall in value. I didn't buy Bitcoins when I first heard about them (they were trading at six bucks then), and I haven't bought any yet. I wouldn't recommend them as investments. But as a currency, the nnalert concept is quite viable.

(quoted from post at 22:07:44 02/27/14) In essence you're correct that the Fed doesn't answer to anyone... and that was undoubtedly done for a reason... so they couldn't be manipulated by wall street or congress. To say that's it's entirely unaccountable I think is somewhat incorrect. The Fed is established by an act of congress and it's members appointed by the President... so nothing is irrevocable. I'm sure in the real world there's a lot of back and forth between the Fed and the government...
Here in Canada... the Bank of Canada is our central bank. It operates in much the same way as the Fed as a private entity... BUT the sole 'shareholder' of the Bank of Canada is Canada's 'Minister of Finance'... so in that sense the bank is directly accountable to the minister. Some would argue that our bank has a better track record than the Fed too

In terms of a gold standard... mabey I'd ask you the question of why it matters to you what the dollar is worth in gold? One can make the argument that we need gold as a store of value to back the currency.... and that's not entirely a bad thing... but why does gold have to be the only store of value? When you look at the oil reserves, agricultural capacity, manufacturing capacity, intellectual output, etc of the country.... those all represent a LOT more real world value than was ever held in a vault full of gold. Part of the problems today are a result of the decline in manufacturing and manufacturing capacity....
If you ever listen to Warren Buffett talk about gold... you might find it interesting. Here's the second richest man in the nation and he doesn't own gold... and won't own it. His rationale, if I follow it correctly... he'd rather own a profitable business that's growing, turning over cash that he can use to buy another business that can grow and turn over more cash... rather than have a heap of gold that earns nothing... sits in a vault... looks pretty. Perhaps some day he could sell it and profit on a commodity price swing. I think he did that at one point with silver... so never say never... but he doesn't 'hold' metal as a general rule because it does nothing. I can remember watching an interview where he quite specifically preferred to own 'Nebraska' farm land.... it holds it's value over the long term and in the mean time it turns a profit growing corn... His and Charlie Munger's thoughts on gold and many other things are well worth reading or listening to even if you don't agree with them entirely.

In terms of the debt... I agree with a lot of what you say. Presently, the US situation is out of control. I think the fact that it's out of control is more of an issue than the absolute magnitude of the debt. But realise that there needs to be balance on this front too. Here in Canada our Federal government spent the 90's reining in the defecit, much to a large extent by dumping the cost of services onto the provinces. Having federal debt under control then in part brought about a considerable appreciation in our dollar... and that led to significant hardship in any sector of our economy that relied on exports. We got caught in a wedge where the numerical 'costs' of internally sourced raw materials were still based on a 60 cent dollar, the revenue was received on par and in many cases any manufactured good we required that were imported were still imported at probably more than 20% disadvantage because pricing did not decline with the dollar's appreciation.
So... the devaluation of the US dollar is in part what has made your exports start to be more attractive again. If the dollar appreciated.... much less so.
Personally I don't think you can really view this subject through an absolutist frame of mind. It's rather abstract by nature...

Rod

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Rod, I'm not arguing for a Gold Standard, I'm saying any fiat currency is going to have limits. There are no limits on ours at present and that is a problem in my view. Buffets opinion kind of lines up with mine. I'm not a gold guy, it's worthless to me at my level. Beyond that I think he's just another very successful guy that has a lot better PR image than he deserves.

Some debt would be one thing, what we have hurts us. The Fed, answering to no one in essence, encourages this. It's not going to end well unless major changes are made.

(quoted from post at 04:03:05 02/28/14) For the record, the deficit as been dropping for many years. (Look it up to see when it started to drop.) The national debt continues to rise, which it will do until the deficit goes negative. That's not to say we're out of the woods; we have long-term structural problems with entitlements that are quite serious and nobody has a plan to fix them.

But that and everything else you say is irrelevant to whether or not nnalert is a viable currency. There seems to be a misconception that a currency needs to have some fundamental value and if it's not backed by a physical commodity like gold it's no good. That's simply not true, and that's why no major government today backs its currency with gold or silver.

What do need in a currency?
1. It needs to be portable (extremely so in the internet economy).
2. It needs to impossible to counterfeit, forge, or alter.
3. Enough buyers and sellers of goods and services must be willing to accept it that it has a viable market.
That's pretty much it. nnalert has all three attributes, with the added attraction of being untraceable. It would be nice if its value was more stable, and that will probably come with time. But it's far better than gold, silver and US dollars when it comes to portability and resistance to counterfeiting.

Now, just as it's a bad idea to use commodities as currency, it's equally bad to use currency as a commodity. Most of the news around nnalert is the result of its rapid rise and fall in value. I didn't buy Bitcoins when I first heard about them (they were trading at six bucks then), and I haven't bought any yet. I wouldn't recommend them as investments. But as a currency, the nnalert concept is quite viable.

Click to expand...

I know the deficit has been slowly dropping Mark. That's why I was referencing the National Debt more than the deficit which I think I only mentioned once. I have little faith that the deficit will be erased any time in the next 10-15 years, unless we start a whole new paradigm in gov't fiscal discipline. Not gonna happen. And even if we had a balanced budget, what of it? You can have a balanced budget at home and all it means is that every dollar coming in is going out. You don't get ahead of the game that way. Your worth doesn't rise until your debt load is under control with a light at the end of the tunnel.No one in Washington is even thinking about that.

Bitcoins or paper dollars, the only reason we think they have value is because we agree they have value. Same for gold actually, it's worthless for the most part to me. Shiny rocks hold no value for me either. The point is what happens when people stop agreeing that it's worth anything? Is that likely? In todays screwed up world I think it's more possible than ever.

LOL. Yeah, I think Warren has a better image than mabey he ought to. He's no saint... but there is a lot of wisdom in what he says.
On debt... I think you underestimate the role of the deficit vs debt. In this country we swung a 40B deficit in the early 90's to something like a 20-30B annual surplus by the early 2000's at which point they started lowering taxes and paying off debt. IIRC they retired something like 100B up to the 2008 mess when they started spending again. That 100B here would equate to probably 1t in US debt as an order of magnitude. That reversal in government policy here had a massive impact on the economy in spite of the fact that there is still a fairly large debt in relative terms. Not nearly as large as the US debt mind you... but large.

I really don't see where you're coming from when you say there's no limits on US currency tho... It's limited by the policy of the Fed. If you view control of the Fed as the limiting factor... I guess I see your point in that it's not limited by every whim of congress. Given the foolishness that takes place in congress and their absolute inability to reign in their own fiscal problems... I think it's more than prudent that they not have direct control of currency regulation. That would be an unmitigated disaster.
One big issue I have with the US system of government, from where I sit... it seems that nobody has a clear mandate TO govern. Everything is a trade off to pay off someone else to get somebody's vote.... where everybody supports somebody else's bad policy so they get that person's support when their turn roles around. It's just a miserable way to develop policy.

Rod

In modern times - since ~1960 - the deficit has only been negative for a short period of time around 2000. It was positive again very shortly thereafter, no significant national debt reduction took place after about the year 2000, mainly due to the tax cuts of the early 2000's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_annual_federal_deficits_over_receipts_1901_to_2006.svg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USDebt.png

(quoted from post at 10:40:37 02/28/14) In modern times - since ~1960 - the deficit has only been negative for a short period of time around 2000. It was positive again very shortly thereafter, no significant national debt reduction took place after about the year 2000, mainly due to the tax cuts of the early 2000's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_annual_federal_deficits_over_receipts_1901_to_2006.svg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USDebt.png

Click to expand...

Oh boy, let's deal with reality shall we? No reduction of the National Debt took place after 2000 because of spending. It had nothing at all to do with tax cuts. external_link has given out some tax cuts and almost doubled the debt through spending, not tax cuts.

(quoted from post at 07:42:47 02/28/14) LOL. Yeah, I think Warren has a better image than mabey he ought to. He's no saint... but there is a lot of wisdom in what he says.
On debt... I think you underestimate the role of the deficit vs debt. In this country we swung a 40B deficit in the early 90's to something like a 20-30B annual surplus by the early 2000's at which point they started lowering taxes and paying off debt. IIRC they retired something like 100B up to the 2008 mess when they started spending again. That 100B here would equate to probably 1t in US debt as an order of magnitude. That reversal in government policy here had a massive impact on the economy in spite of the fact that there is still a fairly large debt in relative terms. Not nearly as large as the US debt mind you... but large.

I really don't see where you're coming from when you say there's no limits on US currency tho... It's limited by the policy of the Fed. If you view control of the Fed as the limiting factor... I guess I see your point in that it's not limited by every whim of congress. Given the foolishness that takes place in congress and their absolute inability to reign in their own fiscal problems... I think it's more than prudent that they not have direct control of currency regulation. That would be an unmitigated disaster.
One big issue I have with the US system of government, from where I sit... it seems that nobody has a clear mandate TO govern. Everything is a trade off to pay off someone else to get somebody's vote.... where everybody supports somebody else's bad policy so they get that person's support when their turn roles around. It's just a miserable way to develop policy.

Rod

Click to expand...

I can see having some debt, I get that. If we were rebuilding our infrastructure then it would be one thing. But we aren't rebuilding anything!

The Fed doesn't seem to have any limits, that's the point. They do what they want based on what they think needs to be done. That would be fine if they always got it 100% or even 90% right, but guys like Geitner seemed to guess wrong about an awful lot of things. So far their only clear policy seems to be devaluing the dollar and low interest rates. That type of thinking only goes so far.