Well sort of, if I produce chickens and all of the sudden there are way more chickens then I have relatively less bartering power. Now this is not truly inflation, as you stated, but to me as an individual it acts the same.

Of course this happens in a fiat currency economy as well, all I'm pointing out is that bartering doesn't remove everything that "looks like" inflation.

It's not a matter of looks, if you've got genuine inflation, then any asset you can hold is more desirable than the currency. In the bartering example, that's really not true, and even if the chicken market does get flooded, there is a baseline utility involved.

Which was never true with the USD, and pretty much any other form of coinage or currency that's been devised, it's at best a placeholder. And that most certainly does count the period of time when we were on the gold standard. Gold itself has virtually no value intrinsic to it and few actual uses have been found for it compared with say silver.

you sure about this? I thought it was useful in high quality cables and the like?

It has industrial use, but only a very small amount of the gold that gets mined every year ends up being used for such. Most of it ends up as jewelery and in Rapper's teeth.

Whereas in an average year nearly all silver that's mined gets used up in one way or another.

A large part of why is that gold isn't a very reactive metal so there's not really a whole lot you can do with it. It is used in some arthritis treatments and in various conductors, but there again, the cost tends to limit the use. And unless you have to have the corrosion resistance there's typically a cheaper choice anyways.

The primary thing that's driving the cost of gold right now is the belief people have that it has an intrinsic value in away that other types of assets don't. Which is just complete bullshit.

As hedwards said:

Gold is a terrible conductor in comparison to silver, it does have a higher melting point, though, so is used in the subset of applications where this matters (e.g. the space shuttle, or so I hear).

This is what the textbook says. It is not, however, what happens. But thanks for talking down to me.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/fed-now-pumping-200-billion-month <-- it's a blurb about investment, but the truly interesting thing in that is the graph and what it means. Even with "centralized management", the age of value-backed currencies has long passed. The US Dollar is a very good example, so is the Euro. Think about what they are backed by in reality, not just in theory.

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/who_wanted_botcoin_as_an_alternative_payment_method

US Government about to shut down Bitcoin?!
Too many criminals buying illegal drugs with it for their tastes....BANHAMMER'D!

No.
Please do not ever accept Bitcoin.

While I find this bitcoin thing a bit weird, something similar where the processing power is actually offered for sale would be interesting.

Can someone explain to me this whole mining thing? One of my rigs can probably handle it, but I have no idea what it even is. How do I make bitcoins off of it? Is it like that SETI thing?

In order for a transaction to be approved the history of that transaction must be processed (the key signing and passing, well, better said the whole crypto process) to ensure that for that particular coin the new owner is indeed marked as the new owner and the old one is marked on the history of that coin, as well as this info being published to the hub/list (I'm missing the term).

Mining resolves those equations that handle the crypto process. In short, what you're doing when you're mining is verify the validity of transactions and coins, and this in turn grants you coins.

A better explanation can be found here.

Sounds like an elaborate scam to me, given that in order for this to work those calculations have to be made, so there's no actual work being done as such this is basically just a pyramid scheme where the few people who enter early get something for basically nothing.

Bingo ;)

Some people tend to forget all the previous attempts to create this sort of currency. Hint: they failed, and not because of the lack or inefficient crypto system.

On the main faq i read it said you could generate 50 coins an hour if you had 6 or 7 computers doing it. I had 12 going for about 12 hours and didnt generate a single coin :(

You must've read wrong.

"As more and more people started mining, the difficulty of finding new blocks has greatly increased to the point where the average time for a CPU to find a single block can be many years." [Bitcoin FAQ]

The big winners in Bitcoin are for-profit electric utilities and anybody who manages to trade a bitcoin for something of value. The losers are, well, anybody who trades anything of value for a bitcoin and anybody who subsidizes his electric company by running this compute-bound crap 24/7.