Quark doesn't look like anything special to me. It's just Bitcoin with a different hashing and distribution function. What would be interesting is if someone created an proof-of-work coin like Quark that completely stopped inflating after 6 months. I'm curious what transaction costs would be when miners only get transaction fees.

I don't personally do this, but "optimal lazy portfolio rebalancing" (as described here: http://optimalrebalancing.tk) may work well with a Bitcoin/alt-coin "investment portfolio." It's a portfolio rebalancing strategy where you only rebalance your portfolio when you purchase or sell assets. So, if you get paid every week, and want to add money to your portfolio every week, you purchase assets in a way that tends to balance out your portfolio.

When someone makes a "commitment" to convert 6 months into the future, is that an "option" to convert (that can be canceled), or strong commitment? If they can't be canceled, 6 months seems like a very long time to have your money tied up in a cryptocurrency system. Though, I guess that could be somewhat alleviated by trading the "commitment?"

If I understand it correctly this is what he's claiming:
The value of Hopbits and Hopdollars should theoretically be very close to the value of Bitcoins and USD. Hopbits and Hopdollars actual values would be determined by external exchanges. The system attempts to alter the value of Hopbits and Hopdollars by increasing or decreasing the amount of "Hops" backing Hopbits and Hopdollars. These increases and decreases in backing are driven by PoS miners who vote up/down depending on the market price of Hopdollars and Hopbits on external exchanges. I.e. PoS miners would scrape exchange sites or use exchange APIs to determine their votes, and it's in the best interest of PoS miners to vote in a way that would make the prices on the exchanges to tend toward the value of Bitcoins and USD.

Is the author still advocating this idea? There's not much rationale for the design decision presented in the document. Without rationale and analysis, the equations defining the dynamics of the system look arbitrary to me.

I really don't think China and other countries will abandon the dollar anytime soon. If they wanted USD inflation, they could just sell all the U.S. treasury securities they hold. The entire reason they buy all these securities is to slow CNY deflation relative to USD. Countries with high trade surpluses with the U.S. would have the most to lose on USD inflation.

I'm begging the question here, but I don't see any imminent extinction dangers except those caused by humans.

I just bought Crusader Kings 2 the other day. I believe the genre this game belongs to is called "grand strategy." Most complex strategy game I've ever played. Crusader Kings 2 itself is kind of like a mix between strategy and RPG, where you have to shape your dynasty. There's also a Game of Thrones mod for it set in Westeros that looks pretty good, but I haven't played it yet.

All commodity and forex trading is considered a zero-sum game. Trading Bitcoin creates no wealth, only shifts it. Bitcoin is not a "real investment." IMO, investments are using your wealth to create more wealth. E.g. investing in companies that create things. That said, commodity speculators are needed to find the value of commodities. The bad speculators cause volatility, but are eventually weeded out (they're the ones that take higher losses in the game).

Well, "better" is subjective, but with proof-of-stake, coin ownership is used to achieve consensus instead of hashing power. A 51% attack would require the attacker to have 51% of the coins, instead of 51% of hashing power in proof-of-work. I'm not sure which is harder.

PPCoin augments "proof of work" with "proof of stake" to secure the network which is much more efficient. So, all things being equal, transaction fees with PPCoin should be lower than Bitcoin. And I believe transaction confirmation times are half that as Bitcoin?

Freicoin has a 5%/year demurrage rate that goes to miners forever. So, this may encourage a more secure network, and lower transaction fees. The demurrage could also help increase monetary velocity.

I believe the only thing different with Litecoin is the hashing algorithm and faster confirmation times?

In the grand scheme of things, this doesn't seem like much to me. At $110/BTC, $12 million dollars worth of BTC are mined per month.

To me, it looks like the panics are caused by someone with craploads of Bitcoins. It looks like someone starts making a series of big sells, which causes other people to panic sell. Then, when downward momentum has died down, they quickly buy back. All this happens so quickly, I think it's actually someone's bot.

The Bitcoin exchange market is confusing the hell out of me.

Who makes up the majority of people behind so much of the volume lately (say, since February)?
1) Low income individuals, college students, and young people living with their parents?
2) Medium income individuals, professionals, and high-demand skilled laborers?
3) High income individuals, business owners, and trust fund babies?
4) Paul Krugman?

Why have people been buying lately?
1) Trying to obtain a profit by short-term and medium-term trading?
2) Thinking of Bitcoin as a long-term investment (like gold), will sit on it for years, and rarely check the exchange price?
3) Buying small amounts (relative to income) to see what all the fuss is about, and maybe donate or gamble some?
4) To immediately spend on goods and services that some may frown upon (drugs, etc)?

A few days ago, I added my Dwolla account as a withdraw method. Ever since then, in the "available withdraw methods" dropdown, it says "dwolla (validating)," and won't let me withdraw yet. How long does this typically take?

My Mt. Gox account has already been verified for weeks now. I'm not sure what they have to "validate."

The Global Minotaur: America, The True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy- by Yanis Varoufakis.

Just read it recently. Good light reading. I've never read any investing books though. I'm mostly interested in macro-economics.

Ripple can be used like a semi-decentralized exchange as well.

Count me in for one of the first people to review an ASIC. Just to be clear, it would be the AR10 for $2649.00, right?

Interesting. Did you train the classifier? How did you get the labels (positive/negative)? Are you using k-grams, bag of words, or something else as features?

Actually, it's the other way around.

The way I understand it, Ripple is just a centralized/decentralized hybrid exchange. People still have to valuate their currencies, and put up ask and bid prices for it to work. And there will still be costs involved (from the spread in exchange rates, fees from the gateways, and risks involved in trusting IOUs, the owners of Ripple, the merchant you are paying, and the government jurisdictions all these groups operate in). I suspect that holding IOUs for a long amount of time would be very risky (the issuers may go out of business or be shutdown).