The eternal answers from every mining thread: if you need crowdfunding to pay for your NRE or if you would prefer to have USD instead of BTC or if you would prefer to have a certain amount of money now rather than an uncertain amount later, etc.
The most obvious answer is this: you sell the money printing machine for more than the money it would have printed. In other words, anyone selling a mining rig believes that they will make more money from the sale than they would make from actually using the machine. If you buy the rig, you are making the opposite bet.
A good question to ponder. But I think a very strong answer is that as a company producing bitcoin hardware you want to reduce exposure to bitcoin. Selling the machines (monetizing their future use value) instead of using them yourself does that to some extent.
Before anyone knee-jerks the "you asked for anarchy" response, bear in mind that A: libertarians generally are OK with contract enforcement and B: the real world legal system is apparently already quite involved, and I doubt anyone's complaining.
(Libertarianism isn't anarchy. If it were, we wouldn't need a separate word.)
In English, synonyms are rarely equivalent. I can not come up with an example of two common-English words (i.e., not from a jargon set) that really are exactly the same, in all implications, off the top of my head. Some may exist, but in general if such a pair exists normal language processes will push the two apart in meaning anyhow.
libertarians generally are OK with contract enforcement
Although, the last hardcore libertarian I talked to suggested private contract enforcement, and I think I know where that leads- less civil suits, more broken kneecaps.
> "I think I know where that leads- less civil suits, more broken kneecaps."
Unlikely, breaking kneecaps is manual labor that scales poorly.
In a short period of time abstraction layers would likely be built up to insulate creditors from the hassle of breaking kneecaps themselves. Debtor Prisons would probably arise, and with the realization that debtor prisons are not the most efficient way to extract an owed debt, debtors would be given the opportunity to agree to structured repayment of debt. Confiscation of property and/or the threat of imprisonment (backed by threats of violence that would rarely actually need to be carried out) would be used to enforce these repayment agreements. Hmm, this sounds familiar.
It's basically just a very round-about way of disassembling the current government and creating a new identical system that goes by a different name.
I support the reduction of government to focus on this sort of thing, and that's why I call myself a libertarian and not an anarchist.
It concerns me that the Federal government is all our eggs in one basket, and people don't realize that doing dumb shit like blowing billions of dollars on programs that shouldn't even exist jeopardizes the whole basket... if our overbloated, overextended government collapses (and there is NO NATURAL LAW against this), it won't just take out the bloated overextended bits, the whole shebang goes down.
Sometimes people try to fling the "Oh, so, what about Police huh, you crazy libertarian?" at me, but at times I feel like I'm one of the only people actually taking the idea that government has certain core responsibilities seriously. Yes, we need police! Stop endangering them by stuffing every crazy-ass idea you come up with and decide call a "right" suddenly into the Federal government, without any apparent limit until it topples over!
We need to approach government more like engineering and less like a laundry list to the DC Fairy of everything we want in the world. One of the cores of any robust system is simplicity.
Yes, the libertarian position where the government continues to provide certain things, such as contract enforcement, seems reasonable to me.
Anarchism makes sense to me as well, so long as that particular flavor of anarchism recommends that certain useful roles of the government be replaced by novel constructs, not merely eliminated. An anarchist who advocates for the elimination of contract enforcement is being shortsighted, those functions are useful to creditors and, if dismantled, will be recreated.
Slandering libertarians by asserting that they are the later form of anarchist seems to be a popular internet passtime.
Anarchy as used in the lay press, and as used by the anarchist movement, are not the same thing.
The lay meaning is more akin to "chaos" or "disorder".
An-archy comes, literally, from "no ruler" or "no hierarchy". There are numerous definitions but it's best understood as an order arising out of interactions among equals.
That to my mind is its key disadvantage: there are no equals, and in the Libertarian context, there's a vast overt blindness (which I suspect is a covert strategy) toward the power which accrues from wealth.
Noted by Adam Smith himself: “Wealth, as Mr. Hobbes says, is power.” (Wealth of Nations)
Disclosure: I am neither an anarchist nor libertarian.
Where ever greed is involved, it must be administrated. Otherwise it would be as chaotic as sadly things are shaping up in the bitcoin world.
I will try to search for ARS article on butterfly, which went into depth about mining, actually it was my first time, I had completely known what is bitcoin mining. Now When I read 'butterfly' I was in a complete shock and awe.....
So what's the method of the scam? Take money from people to build the machines; run the machines to earn bitcoin; use that bitcoin to repay anyone who complains and hope the bitcoin is profitable?
Could people sue for the lost opportunity of bit oin they could have earned if they had the machines?
How poorly run do you have to be to not make money simply selling the hardware and harvesting bitcoins during the burn in period? It's no different than using the float in other ways. Do it in a way that customers are still happy and everyone wins.
As someone who downvoted you, and then saw the request for explanation, here's mine:
I downvoted you because rhetoric, however commonly held, isn't worth the discussion space, in my opinion.
Further, I disagree with the implication that all capitalist endeavors would just be highway robbers, if not for those pesky laws. Even those who suggest that Wal-Mart is definitively evil for paying minimum wage doesn't tend to hold the belief that all economic exchange is similarly evil, nor are all companies nefariously motivated.
Yes, successful business owners like to maximize value, but for every person trying to sneak in a hidden surcharge, or lobby Congress for favors, there's another person who runs the minimum amount of ads on his website because he doesn't want it to feel dirty, or who is contributing to open source, because he likes giving back.
I think this notion is specifically relevant to BFL.
The point is that in the absence of a Kohlberg "Conventional" and beyond sense of morality what we are left with is what companies (actors, individuals) can do, and what they can't do.
I don't think that companies are inherently bad, it's just that companies will do what they can to maximize profit.
It's as simple as that. As long as we let companies like BFL operate without punishment, they will test the limits of what they can do.
> I don't think that companies are inherently bad, it's just that companies will do what they can to maximize profit.
SOME companies will. What percentage, I honestly don't know, but I honestly suspect that it's a much smaller percentage than people tend to believe.
Aside from that, I'm not arguing with you _per se_, but you asked for an explanation, so I gave one. FWIW, I tend to downvote most pithy rhetoric that doesn't contribute to the conversation, even from pg himself.
I hate to think that _anyone_ thinks this is 'pithy' (or overly concise to be clear) rhetoric though. It's a simple observation, but I feel it's one that people seem to miss quite often when dissecting events of moral ambiguity concerning companies.
The point is this; we _have_ to get stronger at holding companies accountable for things we feel are suspect. That's all. Otherwise the playing field is more open to nonsense like BFL pulled.
There are several plausible answers, but it's still interesting to think about.
(Although in this case, the answer may be "they don't make machines that print money and they sell them anyway")