I think a balance between trading and normal life is necessary to ground you and avoid over-trading. Do not trade all the time. Take up a hobby so you save your capital money and don’t waste it by losing. It's all about patience.

It's the same situation as gold and gold mining.  The marginal cost of gold mining tends to stay near the price of gold.  Gold mining is a waste, but that waste is far less than the utility of having gold available as a medium of exchange.

I think the case will be the same for Bitcoin.  The utility of the exchanges made possible by Bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used.  Therefore, not having Bitcoin would be the net waste.

Each node's influence on the network is proportional to its CPU power.  The only way to show the network how much CPU power you have is to actually use it.

If there's something else each person has a finite amount of that we could count for one-person-one-vote, I can't think of it.  IP addresses... much easier to get lots of them than CPUs.

I suppose it might be possible to measure CPU power at certain times.  For instance, if the CPU power challenge was only run for an average of 1 minute every 10 minutes.  You could still prove your total power at given times without running it all the time.  I'm not sure how that could be implemented though.  There's no way for a node that wasn't present at the time to know that a past chain was actually generated in a duty cycle with 9 minute breaks, not back to back.

Proof-of-work has the nice property that it can be relayed through untrusted middlemen.  We don't have to worry about a chain of custody of communication.  It doesn't matter who tells you a longest chain, the proof-of-work speaks for itself.

Hi Mr. hal finney its so sad seeing you not alive here among us but i m happy to read that you passed your body to a alcor life to freeze your body so you can see the world using bitcoin i wanna say to you that now we are in the mid or almost not the mid we are in the beginning of that infact el Salvador its the first country to adopt bitcoin as a legal tender and central Africa republic its just the beginning.
but my goal of writing my reply is that when i was reading about you i was feeling that you are a true bitcoiner like you can sell the most expensive thing you have and exchange it in bitcoin. And besides that you was suffering from that disease and you till happy and thankful for life that's amazing.
again nice to meet you sir HALL FINNEY

Thanks Hueristic, and to everyone who found my visualization helpful (links to post and video, for those who missed it[/url]). I'm also VERY busy IRL right now, so I've had to switch to "lurker" mode. I'm trying to keep up with WO, and very quickly skimming through the posts.

On to your question, which is very interesting, and is one that also came into my mind while writing the visualization code and observing the results. You're right, the profit threshold is between 2 and 4 years. This is obvious, by comparing the plots for Case 4 and Case 5. Answering the question programmatically is not very trivial, so I found the answer graphically, by observing adjacent plots (one day apart), around the time point the spiral untangles. It turns out that the profit threshold is at 1096 days. This is around 156 weeks, or exactly 3 years. The funny (and interesting) thing is that this threshold is EXACTLY 3 years to the day (1096 / 365.25 = 3.0007)! The price point at that time is just under $20k (around $19,700).

Here's the relevant polar plot:

https://i.imgur.com/Cpy9noO.png

When I have some free time I'll try to think of other ways to visualize price data, so that we can get a better understanding of price dynamics. For the time being, I'm in "HoDL-&-wait" mode. The recent price drop (and even today's drop to nearly $27k) does not worry me. I'm convinced that it's just a matter of time for price to reach 6 digits and beyond. Just need to wait for a little while longer... We're all used to that. This is fine.

It's the same situation as gold and gold mining.  The marginal cost of gold mining tends to stay near the price of gold.  Gold mining is a waste, but that waste is far less than the utility of having gold available as a medium of exchange.

I think the case will be the same for Bitcoin.  The utility of the exchanges made possible by Bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used.  Therefore, not having Bitcoin would be the net waste.

Each node's influence on the network is proportional to its CPU power.  The only way to show the network how much CPU power you have is to actually use it.

If there's something else each person has a finite amount of that we could count for one-person-one-vote, I can't think of it.  IP addresses... much easier to get lots of them than CPUs.

I suppose it might be possible to measure CPU power at certain times.  For instance, if the CPU power challenge was only run for an average of 1 minute every 10 minutes.  You could still prove your total power at given times without running it all the time.  I'm not sure how that could be implemented though.  There's no way for a node that wasn't present at the time to know that a past chain was actually generated in a duty cycle with 9 minute breaks, not back to back.

Proof-of-work has the nice property that it can be relayed through untrusted middlemen.  We don't have to worry about a chain of custody of communication.  It doesn't matter who tells you a longest chain, the proof-of-work speaks for itself.

Some sample pseudocode using the new Accounts based commands in 0.3.18.

print "send to " + getaccountaddress(username) + " to fund your account"
print "balance: " + getbalance(username, 0)
print "available balance: " + getbalance(username, 6)

// if you make a sale, move the money from their account to your "" account
if (move(username, "", amount, 6, "purchased item"))
    SendTheGoods()

// withdrawal
sendfrom(username, bitcoinaddress, amount, 6, "withdrawal by user")

You can use listtransactions(username) to show them a list of their recent transactions.