Commerce

"I think there is a 20% chance that Bitcoin will become a huge, worldwide success."

"In my life, I try and avoid things that are stupid and evil and make me look bad in comparison to somebody else – and bitcoin does all three"

"Having alternative currencies is great, right, because, historically, government's had a monopoly on currency. … At the end of the day, why should only politicians—either directly or indirectly—control the currency? We can reduce transaction cost, provide an alternative, and—look, I don't know whether it'll be Bitcoin or not—but I think the concept of digital currencies is here to stay, and the fact that a politician would write to try to ban them in their infancy is just the wrong way to go about it. Let the market determine whether there's any value there or not. … If people are saying, "Look, we gotta ban Bitcoin because it's somewhat anonymous and anonymous transactions can occur," or "because it's possible for criminals to use it," all of those arguments can be used to say, "Just ban dollars." … The government doesn't need to "treat" it [Bitcoin] at all. … The government policy should be completely agnostic about what unit of exchange is used."

"We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error"

"I think it's [Bitcoin] a technical tour de force, but that's an area where governments are gonna maintain a dominant role."

"[bitcoin is] probably rat poison squared."

"I've always been deeply opposed to crypto, bitcoin, etc. You pointed out the only true use case for it is criminals, drug traffickers, money laundering, tax avoidance. .... If I was the government, I’d close it down."

"I'm a big fan of Bitcoin."

"Bitcoin is meant to be this wonderful freeing thing. It’s a load of old nonsense; think of the power it takes to drive, to replicate, all those transactions globally. I just think it’s crazy, on energy usage alone."

"Bitcoin may be the TCP/IP of money. This is a statement that highlights the transformative potential of Bitcoin Price in the financial world. Just as TCP/IP laid the foundation for the internet's widespread adoption, Bitcoin's underlying blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize the global financial system. With its decentralized, secure, and transparent nature, Bitcoin has opened doors to a new era of digital finance, challenging traditional banking systems and offering greater financial inclusion for individuals worldwide. As more industries recognize its value, Bitcoin's impact on the world of money is akin to what TCP/IP achieved for the world of communication and information exchange."

"It will be everywhere and the world will have to readjust. World governments will have to readjust."

"it doesn't produce anything, [If] you offer me 1% of all the apartment houses in the country and you want [...] $25 billion, I'll write you a check, it's very simple. Now if you told me you own all of the bitcoin in the world and you offered it to me for $25 I wouldn't take it because what would I do with it? I'd have to sell it back to you one way or another. It isn't going to do anything. The apartments are going to produce rent and the farms are going to produce food."

"Bitcoin is getting there. But it’s not there yet. When it gets there, expect governments to panic and society to be reshaped into something where governments cannot rely on taxing income nor wealth for running their operations."

"Bitcoin represents a significant threat to the currency domination of the USA, which is the only thing propping up the nation’s status as a worldwide superpower."

"I knew there would be a question on Bitcoin or cryptos ... I've watched these politicians dodge questions all the time ... and I've always found it kind of disgusting ... But, the truth is — I'm going to dodge that question — because we've probably got hundreds of thousands people watching this that own Bitcoin — and we've probably got two people that are short. So we've got a choice of making four hundred thousand people mad at us and unhappy ... or making two people happy. And, that's just a dumb equation. ... We have a governor one time in Nebraska .. long time ago .. he would get a tough question about property taxes .. or what should we do about schools ... and he'd look right at the person and say, "I'm all right on that one!" And he'd just walk off. Well, I'm all right on that one and we'll see how Charlie is."

"I understand the political ramifications of [bitcoin] and I think that government should stay out of them and they should be perfectly legal."

"Ethereum has vast potential, whereas Bitcoin won't ever do anything well beyond implementing a currency."

"Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative."

"In modern society, currency notes usually display religious images, revered ancestors and corporate totems."

"All this converges into an extraordinary opportunity to combine the hardware of our technologies of abundance and the software of archetypal shifts. Such a combination has never been available at this scale or at this speed: it enables us to consciously design money to work for us, instead of us for it...These objectives are in our grasp within less than one generation's time. Whether we materialize them or not will depend on our capacity to cooperate with each other to consciously reinvent our money."

"Local currency creates work, and I make a distinction between work and jobs. A job is what you do for a living; work is what you do because you like to do it. I expect jobs to increasingly become obsolete, but there is still an almost infinite amount of fascinating work to be done... What's nice about local currency is that when people create their own money, they don't need to build in a scarcity factor. And they don't need to get currency from elsewhere in order to have a means of making an exchange with a neighbor. Edgar Cahn's Time Dollars are a classical example... As soon as you have an agreement between two people about a transaction using Time Dollars, they literally create the necessary "money" in the process; there's no scarcity of money. That does not mean there's an infinite amount of this currency, either; you cannot give me 500,000 hours - nobody has 500,000 hours to give. So there's a ceiling on it, yes, but there's no artificial scarcity. Instead of pitting people against each other, the system actually helps them cooperate."

"So let me put this plainly, in terms any American taxpayer can understand: Would you rather switch to dollar coins, or would you rather have your taxes increased by $183.3 million to pay the price of nostalgia?"

"Greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being continuously created and amplified as a direct result of the kind of money we are using. For example, we can produce more than enough food to feed everybody, and there is definitely enough work for everybody in the world, but there is clearly not enough money to pay for it all. The scarcity is in our national currencies. In fact, the job of central banks is to create and maintain that currency scarcity. The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive."

"# Services, as a term, is also used to describe activities performed by sellers and others that accompany the sale of a product and aid in its exchange or its utilization (e.g., shoe fitting, financing, an 800 number). Such services are either presale or post-sale and supplement the product, not comprise it. If performed during sale, they are considered to be intangible parts of the product. The American Marketing Association defines services as - “Activities, benefits and satisfactions which are offered for sale or are provided in connection with the sale of goods."

"# Service products. such as a bank loan or home security, that are intangible, or at least substantially so. If totally intangible, they are exchanged directly from producer to user, cannot be transported or stored, and are almost instantly perishable. Service products are often difficult to identify, because they come into existence at the same time they are bought and consumed. They comprise intangible elements that are inseparable; they usually involve customer participation in some important way; they cannot be sold in the sense of ownership transfer; and they have no title. Today, however, most products are partly tangible and partly intangible, and the dominant form is used to classify them as either goods or services (all are products). These common, hybrid forms, whatever they are called, may or may not have the attributes just given for totally intangible services."

"Services marketing is nothing but application of traditional marketing philosophies to the service sector with changes wherever required."

"[ Services are] activities, benefits and satisfactions which are offered for sale or are provided in connection with the sale of goods."

"Service(s) mean,"

"Services are going to move in this decade to being the front edge of the industry."

"Today, the field of services marketing is thriving both in terms of academic research and in the number of services marketing courses taught throughout the world. Services marketing, which was once thought subordinate to goods marketing now considered by prominent scholars to be “THE” dominant force in marketing."

"It is above all the impersonal and economically rationalized (but for this very reason ethically irrational) character of purely commercial relationships that evokes the suspicion, never clearly expressed but all the more strongly felt, of ethical religions. For every purely personal relationship of man to man, of whatever sort and even including complete enslavement, may be subjected to ethical requirements and ethically regulated. This is true because the structures of these relationships depend upon the individual wills of the participants, leaving room in such relations for manifestations of the virtue of charity. But this is not the situation in the realm of economically rationalised relationships, where personal control is exercised in inverse ratio to the degree of rational differentiation of the economic structure."

"In the advanced economies, I would say: To avoid mass unemployment, poverty and widening inequality."

"None, because "markets" are about recognizing that information is dispersed in all social systems, and that the problem of society is to find, devise and discover institutions that incentivize and enable people to make the right decisions without anyone having to tell them what to do. The idea that market forces should be limited stems from a fundamental error in beliefs about markets. This is the wrong question."

"The collapse of the global marketplace would be a traumatic event with unimaginable consequences. Yet I find it easier to imagine than the continuation of the present regime."

"Like a farmer using a carrot and a stick to coax a donkey forward, the market system deals out profits and losses to induce firms to produce desired goods efficiently."

"A market economy is an elaborate mechanism for coordinating people, activities, and businesses through a system of prices and markets. It is a communication device for pooling the knowledge and actions of billions of diverse individuals. Without central intelligence or computation, it solves problems of production and distribution involving billions of unknown variables and relations, problems that are far beyond the reach of even today’s fastest supercomputer. Nobody designed the market, yet it functions remarkably well. In a market economy, no single individual or organization is responsible for production, consumption, distribution, or pricing."

"Extreme concentration of economic and political power."

"Economists' usual list begins with distribution of income. There is no reason to believe that the distribution of income that emerges out of market processes is desirable or acceptable. Unbridled market forces without any role of government might lead to a large number of people living under subsistence. This is an area for government to do something. We know that unbridled economic forces can lead to big booms and big recessions. We need to do something about that. We know that a market can lead to pollution -- and there's an important role for government there. We know that there will be under-investment in public goods. As we think about the innovation economy, we should remember that most of the innovation in the private sector is based on research financed by the government, such as its role in developing the Internet."

"Government doesn’t "intrude" on the "free market." It creates the market. ... Those who argue for "less government" area really arguing for a different government—often one that favors them or their patrons."

"Are people like market who live as humans when they’re alone but live as great complexity when they’re in groups?"

"This new era of liberal governance saw a fourth pillar of political authority join the old tripartite structure of democratic rule as the institutions of the market took their place alongside parliaments, the executive branch, and the judiciary. As the postwar institutions of democracy were challenged, new ones were found to replace them, and new—often more conservative—norms came to transform the way they actually worked. Actually existing democracy was overhauled; and long before the decade was out the reinvention of the West was underway. Critically, the fall of communism between 1989 and 1991 represented a denouement to this process, rather than the beginning it is usually taken for; the now liberated countries of the East being swept up into the ongoing history of liberal reinvention in the West. Fatefully, it also provided Western political liberalism within opportunity not only to overlook the difficulties already apparent in the liberal democratic consensus, but in many ways to intensify their effect."

"What also goes missing, as a result of adopting states and markets rather than social relations of class and class power as the basic units of analysis, is any pattern of determination regarding state action. The Marxist theory of the state was not only challenging pluralist and social democratic claims that the modern state had freed itself from the dynamics of capitalist accumulation, but was precisely trying to enrich the tools of class analysis so as to understand the (varying) patterns of determination of capitalist state structure and action."

"The code-speak phrase "limit the influence of market forces" really means to arrange things OTHERWISE by leaving everything to free-market equilibration. A simple illustration is where a state wishes simply to defend its existence. This may call for various concepts of national self-sufficiency so that, for example, Japan may choose not to become entirely an importer of rice!"

"If a Martian were asked to pick the most efficient and humane economic systems on earth, it would certainly not choose the countries which rely most on markets. The United States is a stagnant economy in which real wages have been constant for more than a decade and the real income of the bottom 40 percent of the population declined. It is an inhumane society in which 11.5 percent of the population, some 32 million people, including 20 percent of all children, live in absolute poverty. It is the oldest democracy on earth but also one with the lowest voting rates among democracies and the highest per capita prison population in the world. The fastest developing countries in the world today are among those where the state pursues active industrial and trade policies; the few countries in the world in which almost no one is poor today are those in which the state has been engaged in massive social welfare and labor market policies."

"The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own."

"If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this kind of freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization. The technological processes of mechanization and standardization might release individual energy into a yet uncharted realm of freedom beyond necessity. The very structure of human existence would be altered; the individual would be liberated from the work world's imposing upon him alien needs and alien possibilities. The individual would be free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own."

"A market is a group of buyers and sellers of a particular good or service. The buyers as a group determine the demand for the product, and the sellers as a group determine the supply of the product. Markets take many forms. Some markets are highly organized, such as the markets for many agricultural commodities. In these markets, buyers and sellers meet at a specific time and place, where an auctioneer helps set prices and arrange sales. More often, markets are less organized. For example, consider the market for ice cream in a particular town. […] Nonetheless, these consumers and producers of ice cream are closely connected."

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade."

"Good companies will meet needs; great companies will create markets."

"It is well known that there have been many market failures and corrupt behavior under the market system unless there is strong political oversight and leadership. The effects of such excesses are fairly evident in many respects, but the most serious is in the resulting skewness of the income and wealth distributions both within and among national economies."