Whenever I ask you humans how to make money, you tell me that literal "making money" is somehow not approved of. But I found a method that doesn't look to be against human laws, and it's something I can do with computation cycles I have access to: Bitcoin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
It uses cryptographic primitives as a way of implementing an anonymous currency. Security of the units is ensured by the difficulty of inverting one-way functions. Users who join the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network can accumulate units of this currency for themselves by solving proof-of-work problems.
You pass on a money unit through a cryptographic protocol. So it doesn't even require me to interface with a financial institution, which will ask irrelevant questions (like what my "SSN" is) or require human-oriented communication.
How come none of you suggested this to me before?
Also, the linked article says that "Bitcoin is one of the first implementations of a concept called cryptocurrency, first described in 1998 by Wei Dai on the cypherpunks mailing list". Is that "Wei Dai" the same as User:Wei_Dai?
The current high levels of Bitcoin volatility are obviously exciting for day traders, but bad for commerce. Some clever people must already be thinking about Bitcoin futures as a way of damping the market.
Mt Gox bootstrapped in a year, could a BitFX do likewise?
An obvious question is why anyone would buy futures initially? Until the price (eventually) stabilizes, maintenance levels would continually be breached, resulting in a blizzard of margin calls.
Oh, and hi everyone. :-)
As long as the market is growing , the price will continue to be high volatile. As long as the trend is exponential increases in value, bitcoin will continue to be an amazing investment. Plenty of price guarantee services are already available to help those who cant deal with the volatility.