ah, bist du wohl aus der gegend. ich war einmal in dem laden beim hoffest, ziemlich gut ich glaube die preise im Onlineshop sind die gleichen wie im Laden (oder?), aber das Sortiment ist kleiner. Versand ist auch sehr fair, 5,90 für <10kg
schade dass sie den speck und schinken nicht verschicken.

ja, die qualität ist wie gesagt on the top. bei amazon gibt es eine kleinere auswahl der besh, da werden z.b. die maultaschen für 6,50 statt 4,85 verkauft (34% preisaufschlag). ich vermute mal, so eine gewinnspanne ist nicht unnormal, weshalb sich der direktbezug immer recht lohnt.

@themartin: sehr guter punkt, habe ich bisher nicht dran gedacht. muss man sich da aber sorgen machen, dass sie dann in einem atemzug mit silkroad genannt werden?

@seeder: manches finde ich auch zu teuer (alles wo viel wasser drin ist). anderes ist ein absolutes schnäppchen, z.b. der schweinebraten (ergibt 2 Portionen und ist eines der besten Produkte dort). ist das eine ernste idee mit den trockensachen? ich habe mal eine weile versucht von haltbaren sachen zu leben, als krisenexperiment quasi. meine erfahrung daraus ist, dass man möglichst fertige speisen in haltbarer form haben sollte (gläser/dosen), vorzugsweise seine lieblingsgerichte. alles andere ist in der krise viel zu unpraktikabel (evtl kein strom, evtl kein wasser, keine nerven speisen lange zuzubereiten weil man plündern gehen muss). chips sind auch gut und schokolade. es gibt einen vorschlag der bundesregierung wie man einen foodstorage bauen sollte, der ist auch sehr sehenswert und witzig (katastrophe).

Hallo zusammen,

ich würde gerne einen Onlineshop überreden bitcoin zu akzeptieren und zwar shop.besh.de
Das ist die Onlinepräsenz der bäuerlichen Erzeugergemeinschaft Schwäbisch Hall. Ich habe dort öfter mal bestellt, da das Fleisch (insbesondere Schwein) qualitativ innerhalb Deutschlands quasi unübertroffen ist
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schw%C3%A4bisch-H%C3%A4llisches_Landschwein
und durch den Direktbezug ziemlich günstig. Zweitens bin ich ein großer Fan von hochwertigen Konserven, da ich immer latent Angst vor einer Krise habe und im Fall keinen Müll essen will. Aktuell kündigen sie auf der Startseite zudem an, demnächst Frischfleisch zu liefern.
Wie ich das sehe ist die BESH ein sehr junges und progressives Unternehmen, denen ich auch zutraue, neue Wege einzuschlagen und Bitcoin zu akzeptieren. Ich würde ihnen ggf. demnächst eine E-Mail schreiben und auf das Werbepotential verweisen, dass Bitcoin im Moment hat, da sie im deutschen Markt ein Monopol hätten und in kürzester Zeit einige Tausend Leute erreichen würden.
Vielleicht können wir hier ein bisschen Meinungen sammeln, die ich wiederum der besh gegenüber erwähnen kann. Z.B. wieviele Deutsche gibt es hier im Forum, bzw. wieviele würden auf die besh aufmerksam werden wenn die Seite in das Wiki der akzeptierenden Webseiten reingeschrieben wird? Wen gibt es hier, der sagen würde er würde auf jeden Fall etwas bestellen wenn man es gegen Bitcoin tun könnte?

Ich fände es einen großen Schritt, wenn wir diese Seite gewinnen könnten und bin überzeugt davon, dass sie ebenfalls sehr davon profitieren würden. Ich würde aber auch auf die Kursschwankungen und etwaige Schwierigkeiten beim Umtauschen hinweisen.

maybe I got it now. in contrast to barter, money is slightly "overvalued" because it is more flexible than say a goat. WIth money I can buy anything, with a goat I can only buy products that are offered by a guy acceting goats. I agree. Lets consider the case where I sell one month of work for a certain wage and buy stuff with that money, spending everything. Would you agree, that in this case the "money-premium" is irrelevant? I think the problem you are talking about arises when people are hording money, right? So they need an incentive to spend it (e.g. freigeld).

Lets see what happends in a village of ten people with a fixed amount of money:

10 people
different goods, a,b c, fix production!!
using money they agreed upon, say shells
fixed amount of shells: 1000 shells
There is constant demand and supply of a,b and c giving prices p_a, p_b and p_c.
Now I claim the following: If 500 shells are destroyed (and no new shells can be found), all three prices will double. this implies that you have to pay double and that you earn double when selling a good.

Now consider there is one rich guy who achieved to own 590 shells, but he saves/hordes the money and only uses 90 for his daily business. There is one thing happening that is in my opionion not considered by Gesell: With hording of half the shells (forever) the prices and wages double as in the above example. The richdom of richguy is theoretically double but he does not use it so everyday life of the 10 people is unchanged. Actually the other 9 had a profit "P" because the prices decreased due to richguys savings. Now lets say richguy wants to use the money before he dies and buys more goods than usual. If he spends all his money, the prices will go up depending on how many "productionperiod" he needs to spend everything. In an extreme case, he buys almost all of the  goods but the few that are needed for the other 9 to survive. But independet of the strategy of spending (one period all money vs. 10 periods 10% of the money), he does not get the goods for the halfed price and is in sum always paying a Premium "B". To understand that, keep in mind, that the production is fixed! I claim "P" equals "B". So richguy gets his well-deserved amount of goods that costed 500 shells in the beginning and nothing more.

So I claim, that hording is irrelevant, moneypremium is irrelevant and Gesell is irrelevant We could of course discuss, what happens on a larger scale, when we also consider that inflation and deflation takes some time to take place. Nowadays this gives central banks, banks and companies an advantage because we life in an inflationary world. This discriminates the ones farthest from the tap, e.g. pensioners and workers. I think yours and Gesells problem disappears when this problem disappears, which is when we life in a world with a fix amount of money which implies, that this money deflationates with the rate of economic growth. If your wage is constant but money deflationates, you can buy x% more goods, x being the rate of growth. So everybody participates in the growth with the same rate. In the real world, you at first don't participate in growth and also your wage is devaluated by the inflationrate i, so if you (as an worker or pensioner) can claim your fair wage/pension after say a year, then you where "taxed" (1+x)(1+i). Nowadays this is something between 5 and 8 percent. Its of course lower, if wages are adjusted faster. So actually I would say the third solution is a fixed amount of money.

Combining the three statements, you say:

capital yield > interest > capital yield > 0
Which can't be.



I pretty much agree with the gross interest consisting of risk premium and profit. The aggregate profit I would call growth of economy. If there is nothing to grow (Japan by the way is a great example, as mentioned here before!), profits of all firms tend to zero (a few may last a bit longer and grow faster and quickly reach the equilibirum). So one could assume, the interest still consists of the risk premium. This is theoretically correct, but if there are no borrowers, there is also no risk premium. Also it becomes almost inifitely easy to pay back loans, since interest tends to zero. So both components of interest tend to zero. Imagine a market where nobody wants any money! There can neither be interest nor can there be use for the money-owners.
One could loosen the assumptions here and say "in reality, it never reaches zero", because of several reasons:
-there is always some rate of technological development
-there is always someone who needs money because he did miscalculation within his budget
-there is always someone who thinks he can make money from investment even if he can't

Nevertheless, the implications of my theory remain valid: Higher growth rates lead to higher wage gap, higher wealth gap and to a higher worth of money and education.
Japan actually is a really nice example because some "numbers" of japan appear at the top of some ranking, e.g. Japan in the 90's was the second most equal contry of the world (only highly redistributing denmark had a lower gini coefficient).
japan has the highest government debt in the world. this might have different reasons, but the reason the debt remains is, that due to low interest its somehow irrelevant.
japan has the worlds highest wealth per capita (200.000$). Fits in my theory. Wealth isnt s valueable within a low interest framework, so you need more to provide for the future AND that high wealth did not lead to higher gap in income as one could assume in a high interest environment.

I am lazy but somewhere you wrote something like "how can there be interest while a depression".
I am not sure if we ever had a worldwide recession at a time where we also surveyed data about interest and growth. In the latest recession there still was economic growth in the average world (I think around 4%). The only thing that makes my model somewhat unrealistic is, that large differences in interestrates are possible between countries. e.g. why doenst china suck up all the low interest money of japan and US and boost their growth a little? interestrates should then converge; again this is somewhat prohibited by customs and central bank policies. Maybe this is already happening on a larger scale as I think and it just takes its time.

We could easily introduce money in the story, there is just no need because there is only two goods at a time.


Exactly! In a developed economy where nets are invented, the return of producing nets must be higher than the return of money. This however means it has to be sufficently profitable compared to producing OTHER goods. So you can always break down the whole time preference thing to production and goods. Money is just the medium of exchange. Prices reflect barter rates, interest reflects growth.


Yes, thats the point. In my fishexample interest in fact goes to zero, because there are no other goods than fish and massages and no more options to grow.
If you imagine the - highly hypothetical - situation when there is no economic growth (on average) in the whole world, what is going to happen?
Let there be a few companies that still make profits while the rest of the economy stagnates. All companies which are not growing will pay back (or already have paid back) there debts because paying back means say 4% profit (avoidance of loss) compared to 0%. So there is almost noone borrowing money so interest will be very low.
The last few companies growing can now very quickly and cheaply get money at the market and max out their growth potential. De facto, the stock prices will go up almost infinitely to take the low interest into account, and the companies can easily issue stocks for high prices. After this short phase, the whole economy would on average stagnate. Of course there are wages, depriciation etc BUT there is no need for a money market. You still need money for trading and stuff but you dont need loans and savings at bank so there would be no interest. 
In this admittedly hypothetical situation, I can't see how "at least little interest" can remain. In reality we would, if at all, come close to zero, because there alway is some fluctuation (population growth and demographic changes, changes in education, nature and of course bernanke and the chinese.

On the other hand, if one accepts the hypothetical situation, he could also accept a few meaningful statements like:

- A certain amount of economic unequality is temporary (this somehow is a constant situation, but the inequality of industralisation was the reduction of poverty today and the inequality of the internet age is tomorrows reduction of poverty)
- This part of inequality is somehow "fair" and does not harm anyone (except the coachman who can easily switch to driving a car within some weeks)
- Every attempt to intervene at that part of inequality (regulations, intellectual property rights, minimum wages) prolongs the process that the current inequality wave(s) benefit to fight tomorrows poverty

I even want to try a really provocative statement:
Besides this cause of inequality, most inequality is caused by the state (or other mafia-like institutions like the mafia or warlords)

Hm. I dont think so. If he would get 750 this would mean, that he has the same purchase power after the growth of the economy and all benefit goes to the employer. In my example, everyone participates in the growth with the same percentage. Joe can buy 25% more goods. The employer earns the same money (5/4 goods * 4/5 price) and pays the same wages, so nominal company profit is the same but has 25% more worth.
A change in the wage implies, that the profit is suddenly differntly distributed between employer and employee. This seems a bit strange because usually we think in the context of inflation or stable prices and not a constant deflation rate. You could also take money out of the equation and just think in goods. First 100 goods are produced, only wage costs, 10% profit: 90 for the workers 10 for the employer, then 120 goods are produced, the 9:1 quota held constant its 108 for the workers, 12 for the employer. Anything else requires changes in the bargaining powers of the two parties.

thanks! I read some reviews and it partly sounds like what I need. Indeed I need academic texts.

Exactly. I think its helpful to assume a fix amount of money in the system. So when more goods have been produced, your money is worth more. imho the additional money value should equal the growth of production (velocity of money assumed constant and demand-price-curves for all goods have equal slopes; else, the additional purchase power depends on the composition of your consumer basket).
The bonus on purchase power can now be distributed to additional savings and spendings. So you could maintain your former consumption and save the left over money. or you could partly or fully consume the additional purchase power. However, lets say, 10% more produced goods in the long run somehow implies, that 10% more goods are being bought. As an aggregate, this leaves the savings/spendings quota unaffected.
Example: You earn 1000$, save 200, consume 8 goods for 100 each. Now production grows 25% -> money stays the same -> prices are p0*0.75
On average, Joe now buys 10 goods for 75 each = 750 and saves 250 (=200*(1+growth))

This assumes of course an average rate of stock-holding or at least this holds longterm.



I will try a story and formalize a little bit: ATTENTION!!! took me an hour to write

t0: The tribe, 10 people, produces 100 fish by fishing with a fishing rod, everybody catches and eats 10 fish, no inequality, interest is 0.

One guy is very clever and claims he can build a fishingnet to catch 40 fish but needs one fishingperiod time to knot it, so he proposes: Everybode give me one fish, so we all have 9 and after that I can catch 40 fish every period. The others agree, but they want some profit from sparing their fish: two additional fish in t1. everybody hungers with his 9 fish, the net is built. Interest is 100%.

t1: The tribe, 10 people, produce 90+40=130 fish with 9 fishing rods and 1 fishing net. "cleverguy" catches 40 but has to give 9*2=18 Fishes and is left over with 22, the rest has 12 fishes each. There was 30% growth, there is some interest and now there is inequality.

t2: cleverguy has 40 fish for himself (debt paid), he can eat 20 of his 40 fishes and give 20 to another tribemember "workerguy" to allow him to stop fishing and build another net. He will happily agree because of the 10 bonus fish. Now there is more inequality because workerguy earns double. Also there is some interest.

t3: Production is 120 fish (economy shrunk for the investment), cleverguy hat 40 fish and a net to sell, since he can only use one net at once. 8 Members have 10 fish each, workerguy has 20 fishes and might buy cleverguys net or build his own net (by the way this assumes, fish is still eatable after one period of time). Lets say workerguy buys the net for a bit more than 10 fish. Cleverguy now has a bit more than 50 fish and pays two workers to knot a net. More inequality, some interest.

t4: Production is around 140 fish, workerguy now also has 40 fish and cleverguy hast 2 nets. now cleverguy and workerguy compete for workers. btw there is more fish than the tribe can eat, so cleverguy and workerguy can pay some tribemembers to massage their feet.

t5: There are several nets, prices for nets fall, no need to produce 400 fish

t6: there are 4 fishers with nets, everybody eats 16 fish and gets fat and healthy, the other 6 dont need to fish but serve the tribes needs (foot massages). notice: at the end of this process, everybody will have the same purchase power for fish and massages, because its pretty easy to enter the fishingindustry with another net in case fish gets to expensive for the benefit of the fishers. So "wages" of fishers and massagers converge!! -> Equality is back.

Now to sum that up. In the beginning there was no inequality. At the time, where the new technology arrived, inequality started to rise, it started to fall again when the growth rate maxed and at the point of maximum exploitation of the new technology equality came back. (This assumes however that there are no other goods like weapons and mercenaries to buy for cleverguy...)

Now back to your statement:


I think it is not "at the same time" but FIRST it increases demand for money. AFTER the highest growth-rate within that "kontrdiev-cycle" is passed, the newly available ressources/money (supply) outweigh the demand (=your "offer" if I got it right). At the end of the cycle there is even a lot of supply, so interest falls (in my extreme case above it falls to zero) and wages converge.

Ok, sounds a bit artificial but consider this on a larger scale with 100 or 1000 people, where it is a lot easier that due to some entrepreneur, a "money/fish-market" emerges.
In reality there are of course other factors like regulation, central bank/inflation and there always is some rate of innovation unequal to zero so it is hard to see a clean reverse u-shape curve my theory describes. But: The other factors do not interfer with my causal relationship but all the effects sum up. So other factors held constant, it should be possible to make this empirical relation visible.

I would argue, that the abundant mid-level manager would penetrate the more thriving unskilled-market, so that the wages in the two sectors can at a max converge. For germany for example I can tell how the labor market changed after the so called "Bildungsexpansion" lit: education-expansion. The government put a lot of effort to get the masses to get higher educational degrees, resulting in 50% people with higher school certificate (Abitur) and tenfold the number of university students. One result is, that people with medium education replaced the unskilled workforce which now has a much higher risk of being unemployed. A lot of people with a masters degree dont do any academic job. This is also somehow dissatisfying, because everybody feels a bit unchallanged. But this gets too far into politics (equal opportunities) and away from theoretical considerations I think.

exactly. What my theorey would predict is, that every time, a great invention is made, there is a phase of higher inequality until the full potential is reached. After that, you have enough programmers, special engineers etc. I would name this a Kondratiev wave of inequality. 


Its perfectly related I think:

All entrepreneurs and businessmen decide, how much capital they need and what price they are willig to pay (maximum their expected returns of investment). When there is a lot of growth in the economy - probably due to a new sector emerging - there is a lot of demand for money in the market. The price (interest) is given by supply and demand. Imagine Google offering 20% interest if you give them your money, this would convince a lot of people to supply their beloved money for some time. So some really profitable entrepreneur is always given money if he can "outbid your timepreference".
Here you can also derive the growth-interest-relation. If there are 9 companies having returns of 5% and one company having a return of 4%, the latter might be outbidden by the others when interest rate climbs towards 5%. As 5% ist reached, there is an equilibrium in the moneymarket and the 9 companies won't borrow more money, unless supply increases (and interest frate drops) or their expected return rises beyond 5%. So growth determines the interest rates (as long as central banks leave their noses out) into an equilibrium where there are only companies beyond that interest rate. One could disagree and point out to the moneysupply as the second determinant, but I somehow assume the supply curve to be fix and supply is determined by demand, because I dont have an idea yet, how supply would be varied exogenously in a theoretical freemarket framework. (Maybe this assumes a natural savings rate curve) This might be a problem if inventions and growth opportunities also affect saving behavior. but this argument might be circular.

thanks for your thoughts.

I assume a strong longterm relationship between growth and interest, since at a certain rate "r" of interest, only firms with higher growth expactation than "r" would borrow money to expand. Furthermore I assume, with more and more investments, the return of investments lessens. So despite other factors affecting interest, growth is the one, which determines an equilibrium around which the interest rates should theoretically fluctuate (fluctuation is probably mostly because of bernanke and his colleagues).

The next step I take is to assume, that human capital investment like other investments must follow the same trace along the growth path. Aquiring human capital must be profitable, else one would do 3 years of work instead of a bachelor degree and leave some of the money in stocks and bonds or something. In fact there are studies which claim the return of human capital investment to be around 6-7.5% per year of schooling. This is pretty much the average interest rates of the past decades plus some compensation for the years where no income could be obtained.


I will try to break down the invention thing to the micro level:

- some new invention is made (steam engine, railroad, car, electronics, pc, internet)
- from now on, the economy might grow by exploiting the new invention
- there are some entrepreneurs (e.g. a railroad company, ibm, volkswagen, google) who are able to generate tremendous profits (far more than rate "r")
- those will pay above average wages to people willing to enter this sector and if neccessary adopt new skills
- on the other hand some workers of the "old sector" might even get unemployed (the only potentially negative part)
- other sectors will also grow (but at a lower rate) and pay higher wages because the new high-paid workforce of ibm, volkswagen, google has more purchasing power

You wrote: "When unqualified workers have access to new machinery they produce more and can bargain for better wages."

This is exactly how I think inequality of wages arises. Workers of IBM, Google etc. can bargain for way higher wages. But I guess you are right if some invention can easily be exploited by untrained or former low-income workforce (railroad might be an example or three-field (crop) rotation) and not only by trained people (like in electronics or it). Actually, measured with the Gini-coefficient, inequality almost always drops when some random wages rise! not sure if the gini is a proper measurement then

But to come back to the original question for a moment: The relationship between growth and interest seems so trivial, that it must be mentioned by some austrian economist. Any idea in which book to look that up? Reason is I need some sources of quotes from where to start with my ideas. Furthermore it would be neat to have some austrian texts about human capital.

Hi all,

one night I came up with the following idea: Interest is strongly determined by economic growth. So Interest is bound to returns of capital investments but also returns of human capital investments. If there was no growth and no interest, the wage spread between trained and untrained workers would partly vanish, since education costs (credit costs) are (near) zero and returns of human capital tend to be zero. So growth actually is causal for part of wage inequality (in a not harmful way).

Of course I like to debate about this topic if you highly disagree but primarily I would like to ask this (uniquely well read in austrian economics) community, whether and where a similar line of thought can be found in the vast literature of austrian economics because I don't want to claim this my own briliant idea, if it is know for hundred years

any hint appreciated!

In my opinion this is a great idea!

I could probably offer a place to sleep and warm lunch in switzerland, but generally buying basic food, using bus/train here is always very expensive, so there may be better places to go for you. I would strongly recommend ptshamrocks offer to stay in munich. Munich is a great place and it is possible to live really cheap. Although I dont know, where to pay with bitcoin yet.
For travelling from one bigger city to another I would recommend to use portals like www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de (Literally: travel-with-oppotunity) Maybe someone can name some non-european equivalents.
There you can (early) setup a request, that you are looking for someone driving from A to B with his car and add a note, that you only pay in bitcoin. I think it is possible to find someone because within a period of a few days, there are a few dozens of "travel-with-opportunities" between big cities, mostly young males, so maybe there is some bitcoiner as well. Usually this is much cheaper than train or something else, for example 5h trip Munich-Bern 25 Euro. Of course you could also hitchhike.

I will follow the thread a little, maybe I have some more ideas when you can tell more about your plans (e.g. which cities you want to stay in)

cheers

wohne auch in bern (zugezogen)

die mitte von bern, zürich, basel ist logistisch gesehen vielleicht olten.

vielleicht kann man ja hier in bern kollektiv einen laden, beiz, kiosk, restaurant überzeugen bitcoin zu akzeptieren.
kenne aber bislang keine location, der ich das zutrauen würde.

what if the mtgox owner steals the money himself and claims it to be stolen by some unknown hackers? we could not distinguish, which of the two stories did happen, could we?

just to add some of my thoughts:

1. bitcoin is supposed to be a currency, one would not have bigger amounts of cash, neither at home NOR in a bank. one would invest it in something real.
2. I admit its charming to hold bitcoins to gamble. Nevertheless I claim it to be an efficient market. If it was very likely bitcoin will be worth 1000$, it alreay would be near there

3. nevertheless, I though about the following: separate in savings account and payment account and keep the savings account offline (encrypt->usb->delete unencrypted). when putting the savings-wallet.dat online, use a live system which is guaranteed not to be compromised.

4. there WILL be banks or some other payment providers, because there will be demand for it due to low-tech users
5. such a provider would need to be liable (real name, within some proper jurisdiction) and have features as the author of the thread suggested.

6. furthermore i think it is neccesary, bitcoins can be insured (which such an provider could do with the fees he gets), because if not, trust in bitcoin might vanish. this is somehow similar to credit cards, where you are insured in case of theft. nobody would (hopefully) use it, if this were not the case.
7. in the end, this is a bad day for bitcoin, because there only will be a small percentage of users, able to 100% secure their money, so this for sure is not the last case of theft and the bitcoin image is going to suffer...

would it be possible to detect such an attack and "vote the attacker out of the network"?

just random thoughts... like upgrading to a client that limits haspower within a certain region or ip-range...

i also keep most of my btc secured in an encrypted wallet.dat. still i would like to put a few somewhere for easy spending.

nevertheless, there are a lot of people who might switch from paypal to bitcoin, not with their entire wealth but with some digital pocket money. thats why "there will be web applications", there simply is demand. my point is more about WHEN there is a useable and "trustable" service, because the first jump from techs to no-techs seems to happen right now. so having a solid web application may speed things up, instead of risking the image of an unusable-payment-something given by the media.
just can't wait to see bitcoin break through

for a service to be "trustable" their should at least be the name of a real person. instawallet made a good start i think. its also nice, to give out a few bitcent to people just to try out.
as far as i understand instawallet, it is secured by the hash of the hind part of the url. like if i use 20 signs, it is as secured as some sign-up/login-system with a 8 sign username and 12 sign passphrase. please correct me

you're my man

i thought about such scenarios for a long time.i also made an experiment to life 4 weeks just with durable goods and developed sound strategies for food storages (most common knowledge about foodstorage is crap). if someone is interested, i will post some ideas...

my thoughts about an alternative barter currencies yield the following:

- ammunition for common guns
- antibiotics

both rise in value in times of severe crisis, are divisible and don't weigh much.

- gold
- cigarettes
- alcohol

might work well in a financial crisis, but loose value if there is severe political disorder, lootery and violence.

i totally agree with the guns also! you should also diversify with a home made flamethrower

and thanks for the hint with the bike, totally ignored that so far! my plan for the extreme crisis is to move to peers at the countryside, where order might be maintained, since all neighbours are armed and everyone has potatoes and gasoline in his basement.

regarding the food storage i recommend to early do your homework. its too late when you drove into the supermarket with your pickup and you have no sophisticated list