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Surviving the Cashless Cataclysm
MrSeb writes "There's been a lot of noise about Sweden becoming a cashless economy, and the potential repercussions that it might cause, most notably the (apparent) annihilation of privacy. Really, though, I think this is a load of hot air. Physical money might be on the way out, but that doesn't mean the end of anonymous, untraceable cash — it'll just become digital. If Bitcoin has taught us anything, it's possible to create an irreversible, cryptographic currency — but so far it has failed because it doesn't have sovereign backing. What if the US or UK (or any other country for that matter) issued digital cash? We would suddenly have an anonymous currency that can be kept on credit chips (or smartphones) and traded, just like paper money. No longer would handling money require expensive cash registers, safes, and secure collections; your smartphone could be your point of sale. It won't be easy to get governments to pass digital cash into law, though, not with big banks and megacorps lobbying for centralized, electronic, traceable currency. Here's hoping Sweden makes the right choice when the referendum to retire physical money finally rolls around."
If it's secure, it's traceable, otherwise you can duplicate it.
What country in its right mind would back digital cash in this day and age? Certainly not the two examples given....
How do you hire a prostitute in Sweeden?... and you don't want that your wife knows about it.
1. Fiscal - not fully compatible with notion of anonymous cash
2. "Police State" - contradicts anonymous cash
3. safe on cost of paper money circulation - surely compatible
4. creating digital cash in order to fight SOME (maybe US) Govt. on pos 1 and 2 - very likely
Vassili Leonov
Banks already live in a world of digital money. All that trading in stocks and bonds and even currencies? No physical money changes hands in those transactions; it's just numbers in databases. If banks are against this, then I have to believe they haven't been presented with a very good system; clearly they aren't against the very idea.
of the great book by Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon. No self-respecting geek has not heard of it. :)
This fails the Jews in the Attic test. No thank you.
When I lived in he US, I rarely carried cash. I used a debit card for 90% of my purchases, including food purchases. I saw no point on carrying anything but a $20 on me for the random times a place I frequented didn't have a mag strip reader for my card.
Back in the 1990's, I was working on payment machines when the Mondex Trial started out in Swindon.
Essentially, this was just a smart card which you could load up with cash - if you lost your card, then you'd lost whatever cash was on it at the time.
At the time, I thought it was a useful idea, and it did take off to a certain extent for micropayments, particularly in newsagents, but as far as I recall, the trial fizzled out an died after a while. I do recall at one point the promoters were trying to hand out free Mondex cards loaded up with £5 but the general public just weren't ready for the concept 20 years ago.
Philosopher (n) - a wise person who is calm and rational; someone who lives a life of reason with equanimity
Credit cards weren't accepted in the beginning. Of course, it has teething problems, but give it time, and I'm sure it would be as accepted as PayPal is today.
Folks in countries with high value-add or sales taxes revert to the dawn of civilization practice of just trading goods and services, with no monetary transaction. That way, there is no transaction to tax. Whether it is legal or not, is another matter. But a good way to avoid traceable digital transactions.
Money washers will be able to provide plenty of other tips.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
For the criminals, the simplest alternative would be to use another convertible currency for your transactions.
Euros, US dollars, whatever; as long as all countries haven't joined in to the digital cash trend, evil doers can just ignore it
After that, what . . . barter?
There is always "another currency". The first economy to make this step will be severely hit on forex markets, so it is s risky movem, wanna trace? fine, letsuse the neighbour country currency.
The cashless society is a dream of the banks, that like to decide what happens in society by assessing risk in investments. They only like centrally distributed energy because that conforms with centrally extended credit (bear with me). In a society where people can own and do stuff outside the scope of the banking system (like a lot of farmers that do most things in cash) the market can not be controlled, and renewables can not be kept out. This is the main goal, because the wholesale shift to renewables would greatly reduce bank cashflow and eventually elimintate it.This is the primary reason. If all transactions would be using cash or a digital cash equivalent like bitcoin or tubecoin certificates, people would be free from controls and this would mean the death of banks and the carbon based economy.
my site is www.greencheck.nl
With the last tie to reality removed, here comes unlimited inflation.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
"If Bitcoin has taught us anything, it's possible to create an irreversible, cryptographic currency — but so far it has failed because it doesn't have sovereign backing."
What? Bitcoin has taught me if I have to ask "what the heck is that" I don't want to be paid in it. Money talks. Bitcoin... mumbles something about mining and Linden dollars and what not. As far as I know anyway. And I'm a dude who wants to get paid. Just not a dude who wants to understand bitcoins. "No, seriously, bitcoins count as money." Unless it's virtual goods and services for your virtual money. Take as many of my avatar dog sweaters as you want, pay me what you think they're worth. I'll make more.
The bank balance is already abstract enough for most people. A bank balance in an invented medium of exchange... dubious, even if it's not.
>"Really, though, I think this is a load of hot air. Physical money might be on the way out, but that doesn't mean the end of anonymous, untraceable cash"
I don't really agree with that statement. Most every form of electronic payment can be traced in a variety of ways. And something as elaborate as what was proposed in the posting can certainly have all kinds of security and privacy implications because it usually has to be funded in some manner and will still leave trails.
I don't want to have to perform a complex or electronic 3rd party transaction to give my neighbor $10 for picking me up something at the store, or $5 for a kid washing my car. That doesn't mean I don't like and use my credit card or pay some bills on-line. I just means I have a variety of methods that give me more flexibility.
The whole motivation of elimination of cash is not because it is good for citizens, it is because it is good for law enforcement or tax collection. Otherwise, there is no good reason to eliminate cash- just keep/add whatever OTHER electronic payment methods people might want. Choice is good.
At a time when government are trying to introduce censorship, block websites and pass internet three strike rule, don't expect them to make digital currency anonymous. Instead they will use excuse of fighting crime to require that it be traceable. And if you committ serious crime like file sharing, you'll be banned from trading. You'll be made outcast or your cash severely limited. Fascist dream come true. They can control whether you are allowed to trade or not. If you protest against government too much, no money for you.
Decades ago this might sounds like science fiction, but with the stupid law being pushed by U.S. entertainment lobby, this scenario is not too far off.
MrSeb is hopelessly out of touch with reality if he thinks any country will issue an anonymous digital payment system. Well maybe some tax-haven might, but not likely since they want access to the international banking system. Do you not read the news at all, let alone releases from the senate, treasury department or IRS??
... for it to be hacked and broken, given that the entire criminal resources of the world, together with any hostile governments, would be in a race to see who could crack it first? The people at the Cambridge Computer Lab are also quite good at that sort of thing, but I wouldn't put any money on academics winning this race.
Have you ever heard about "big banks and megacorps lobbying for centralized, electronic, traceable currency"?
There are effectively as many (or more - depending on your world view) "big banks and megacorps" who would prefer anonymous, untracable cash, believe me.
Keep to the point. And the point might just not be "big banks and megacorps".
Usually a few beers (Yes, I really am that good looking).
I don't give a crap about who tracks what already. Cash may be one of the last bastions of anonymity and privacy left to us! If I want to pay for cash for everything I can, then I should be able to do that! What I buy at the grocery store, or what movie I go see, or what restaurant I eat at, etc. is nobody's business but mine. Aren't things already bad enough in this world? I can't say it loud enough: DO NOT WANT!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
No country, big or small, is going to issue or back anonymous, untraceable digital currency. You might think they have. But it will be backdoored. Bet your boots.
The only untraceable cash the US is going to issue and distribute will be pallet loads of $100 bills. "Oops, it seems we've misplaced several billion dollars in 'small' bills. Oh well, chalk it up to a rounding error. At least it was only billions."
...Would render any effort completely useless from the get go. No, not systems security silly, that other kind where you are more secure by the government being able to track anything and everything you or anyone else does on a whim.
You have that a bit backwards. It's not the megacorps lobbying for traceable currency, it's the government forcing the banks to have traceable currency so that they can monitor and shut down terrorists, drug cartels, tax frauds, etc. Hint: the term "money laundering" means moving money through transactions not traceable by the government. Plenty of banks and megacorps have in the past and continue to provide essentially untraceable transactions.
You're going to need to provide some evidence for the claim that bitcoins have failed because of a lack of sovereign entity backing them. There's a whole slew of other reasons that probably contribute far more to the poor adoption rate of bitcoins.
Why would any government endorse an untraceable digital currency scheme, when the whole point of the scheme is to circumvent the government's regulatory and investigatory powers?
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Let's back up for a minute:
#1 reason for a country to go to an electronic purse is to eliminate the tremendous costs of managing currency. Think about the logistics required to keep money in an economy. It's not just "oh, ship $10 million USD to Las Vegas so peoples can gamble or whatever." It's an ENORMOUS HASSLE. Electronic purses are very tantalizing way to be far more efficient as a currency provider.
Banks and nations have mostly gone to a banking standard with a smart card providing a great degree of fraud protection for online transactions. "ONLINE" means anywhere a trusted network connection/payment terminal is set up. Done. Use a debit/credit card and any number of officious people can get that transaction information. Most of you guys and the girl reading this don't seem to mind this...
What you are attempting to discuss is OFFLINE transactions. This software is sometimes referred to as an electronic purse.
Bob wants to give Joe $10 for a cool Commodore 64 and there's no paper currency in the economy. So, Bob has his smart card and puts it into a dumb, untrusted reader. The reader device asks how much to transfer. Joe then sticks his card in and like magic $10 in value is added to Joe's card and Bob's is credited with no network connection. Can the transaction be fed back to some server? Depends on the electronic purse. Can you have a relatively anonymous system that works? Yes.
Lots worse privacy issues than this. It's just that it's not okay to talk about them. We got to protect ourselves from those Terrists and all.
Where's my mobile phone that is a pay terminal? USA is still in the stone ages making a killing with 'identity protection' schemes and magnetic stripes. Why? Banks make more money and it's pretty cheap.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
We would suddenly have an anonymous currency that can be kept on credit chips (or smartphones) and traded, just like paper money. No longer would handling money require expensive cash registers, safes, and secure collections; your smartphone could be your point of sale.
Anonymous currency stored on a perpetually networked device with a long list of known escalation exploits? What could possibly go wrong?
Bitcoin is not anonymous. Bitcoin transactions are necessarily public information.
You can't be anonymous (disconnected) while at the same time expect digital currency to remain globally consistant and secure. It's an oxymoron.
Even if it were possible it is unrealistic to assume a single government exists on the planet who would choose to implement such a system. Where is the value to the government in not being able to trace all transactions even if you ..wink wink nudge nudge don't know "who" owns what money at a point in time.
FTA:
When was the last time you used an ATM, anyway?
yesterday. i had to stand in line to use it too. bullshit fucking provocative speculation go fuck yourself til you die. let's pick apart another fallacy in TFA:
...this means that every move you make will be recorded in a huge database. Your bank will know where you get coffee in the morning, the route you take to work, and if there’s a vending machine at your office it might even know where you work. Likewise, your bank will know that you like to buy things on Amazon while you’re at work, that you enjoy watching X-rated movies when you’re on the road, and that you always leave it until the last moment to buy your wife a birthday present.... .... Well, get this, every credit card company, bank, and sizable corporation already tracks your transactions.
unless you pay with cash, then they don't. they even point this out right after telling you that all your usual cash transactions are somehow being tracked. fucking retards. die in a fire. "your bank will know that you like to buy things on Amazon.." -- they already do!! HOW THE FUCK DO YOU BUY ANYTHING ON AMAZON WITH CASH??? i wish i could choke this writer out and kick his astonished dog.
i also take offense to TFA's writer who puts out this little reality distortion field:
At this point it’s commonplace for self-respecting libertarians to leap up and decry the awful, privacy annihilation that I’ve just described. How could you live in a world where the Rockefellers can track your every move?! they cry.
the joke here is that libertarian = crazy, get-off-my-lawn tinfoil hat wearing cranks. a little straw man goes a long way. the writer wants you to feel like you're a crank if you believe your privacy is being threatened further than it already is, and he wants you to feel that it's ok simply because it already is being violated. what an asshole. fuck anyone who perpetuates this bullshit. by that logic it's ok to put arsenic in the drinking water, we already put fluoride in it! fuck you!
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
You can read my original post dated January 16th 2012.
Life is not for the lazy.
1. card creation center makes card .... pays cashier with what? there is no cash anymore.
2. retailer stocks card on shelves
3. user picks card of shelf
4. user pays cashier
5.
6. user pays cashier with electronic device, which is tracable
7. user takes 'cash card' and gives it to drug dealer
8. drug dealer passes it through 'laundering chain'
9. organized crime underground 'prepaid visa card' center collects cards and launders money
10. oops, its all tracable to the original retailer.
interesting read.
BitCoin didn't fail because of the lack of government backing. It failed because it's expansion curve was stupidly chosen, leading to an impossible amount of deflation required (thousands of %) for it become anything larger than a geeky toy. The necessary deflation led to hoarding, which in turn led to illiquidity, which in turn led to downright insane swings in value.
Maybe BitCoin 2.0 will learn those lessons. But I have my doubts.
What if the US or UK (or any other country for that matter) issued digital cash?
I think Greece is thanking you right now.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
First, the obvious: How do you pay someone who doesn't have the means to register your payment? Private to private money deals will become virtually impossible unless both parties have some kind of electronic device on them permanently. And it may be unbelievable to some, but there are still people who refuse to carry a smart phone around. How do I lend my buddy 10 bucks if he has no means to receive them?
Then, the criminal. Untraceable, yeah, sure, tell someone who believes you. Criminals will not use it. Instead, they will keep the cash in circulation. And why shouldn't they? The very first thing I will do as soon as it becomes a fact that this goes through is to go to the bank and withdraw as much money as I can in the lowest possible bills available. Trust me, this money will become more and more valuable as time goes by, as it is used for back alley deals and as it gets out of circulation because of busts and people returning it to their account. ANY currency that you can only spend but not collect becomes more valuable over time, as long as there are people who give it value. And that stuff WILL be valuable, and if not, I can always still hand it back to the bank and deposit it. The alternative being, of course, that some foreign currency suddenly becomes the street bill. For reference, see Cuba. You want something aside of the state-approved crap? You better have greenbacks with you.
And finally, how about people who do not get a bank account? It's not like it's possible for them to have a halfway decent life now, but then, it will become virtually impossible. Try to get a job in Europe without a bank account. Just try. No such luck. There is NO way you will be paid in cash. No company I know of will ever even consider doing it. Now on the other hand, try to open an account if you're homeless. Try it. I dare you. How the heck do you think these people will ever get back on their feet? Because then your excuse "if he really wanted, he could" doesn't work anymore. He CANNOT anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Bitcoin, last I checked, had not failed, and was still in use. Having used it in the past myself, I remember it being rather easy to get my money in and out. So... failed? So rising to $5/coin is failure? Or is it just because the $30 bubble burst?
Bitcoin is deeply flawed, but, as of one of just a handful of largish attempts at a non-soverign digital currency, I would say the lack of government backing is hardly a proven requirement, any more than a few early flight failures proved that flight was impossible.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I know that many credit card companies that give their affiliates all the spending habits of their users -- second hand from an affiliate. For example: If you've got Costco's name on your AMEX credit card, Costco knows where, when, on what, and how much money you're spending with their card. They use this information, mostly, to decide where to deploy stores, what to carry (i.e. if they see a large bump of people going to costco, then afterward going somewhere else to buy dogfood, they'll do something about their dogfood)
This isn't insidious or malicious -- it's just extremely valuable information for a business to have -- but it could definitely be used for insidious or malicious purposes by any asshole, and there are a lot of assholes in the world.
"it doesn't have sovereign backing"
It never will because it doesn't benefit nation states to use it nor will the "One World Bank" allow transfer of it, in addition there will be a stigma attached to things like Bitcoin or other black market funds, "Why you using that? You doing something illegal?"
When everyone used cash there was no telling what you were using it for, now every purchase will be documented, and saved for your lifetime.
In addition once we live in a cashless society you will see the rise of "micro charges" "Oh you want water with your meal? That's 0.5 credits" literally everything will start to have micro charges of pennies/credits (or equivalent) it will become so prevalent you will go to the bathroom and a paper towel will cost 2 cents, and soon 1 cent here 4 cents there it adds up.
Literally anything can and will have a micro charge device attached to it, go shopping for groceries and want a cart or bag? 0.25 credits.
You see since it's a card the charging can be automated, so even charging pennies for a common item like a grocery cart can be profitable.
A cashless society is the ultimate form of control and in the end gives governments and banks full control of the planet, you don't agree?
Fuck you your card is shut off.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I have lived in Sweden and have plenty of Swedish family members. The taxes are too high. You can't nearly find a plumber who'll accept anything but cash. I am dead serious here. I have an uncle in law who's house burned down due to Lightning, he called several builders to find one who would accept his insurance money which meant that the builder would have to pay full tax on the income. He heard the following when telling builders it was 100% insured, "Our official work load is already full for the next 2 years." This wasn't just one place or two but several. They could start work in a few months if a large portion was paid out in cash under the table. I know people will find new ways to cheat the system but I just don't think cash is going anywhere in Sweden it would be economic collapse.
You also took on a lot of risk.
Here's what happens all too often: Someone takes your card, buys a ton of stuff which then depletes your bank account. So, your card gets rejected and you call the bank. The banks says that you spent all your money in the account. You say that they are all fraudulent. Banks says that they will have to investigate before they can give you any of your money back - two weeks minimum.
Oh, and if you happen to run up any charges, fees, or penalties because there wasn't any money in your account - let's say because of direct withdrawal to pay for a mortgage - tough luck! You owe the fees and penalties.
I've seen it happen way too much.
Use a credit card. That way if someone steals it, you got a buffer between you and your money. AND many times - not always - they give some good exchange rates when traveling; YMMV.
"Yeah, we're really unhappy with how traceable electronic cash is. By all means, let's issue a government-backed anonymous currency to ensure people once again can transfer money without us watching. We'll get right on that."
What if the US or UK (or any other country for that matter) issued digital cash? We would suddenly have an anonymous currency that can be kept on credit chips (or smartphones) and traded, just like paper money.
The one and only question I have is what would be the motivation for the US or UK to create anonymous digital cash?
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
:-) We should think deeply about how to move past have artificial scarcity (including fiat currencies) at the heart of a 21st century abundance-oriented economy. We can do that in part by improving our gift economy (Linux, Wikipedia, Thingiverse, blogging), by improving our subsistence economy (home robotics, 3D printers, solar panels, maybe LENR), by improving our planning (like by using emails and twitters to organize the economy by creating and monitoring demand and feedback), and, if we do have a currency, by having a basic income to go with it, as well as LETS-like local currency systems. It would also help to rethink the nature of most "work" so it is more inherently fun and inherently meaningful:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
As a rule of thumb, if there are laws relating to something about "counterfeiting" or "unauthorized sharing", you are dealing with a system based around "artificial scarcity". We should be able to do better in the 21st century.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=star+trek+money
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
With correct legislation reasonable privacy can be preserved even with digital currency. Forbid banks from selling the data and require a warrant for the police to peep into it.
Give us a break about BitCoin and this non-sense that given the fact that it failed was to be blamed on not having sovereign backing. If it had no one would have used it as the only ones using it are criminals. Yes, criminals. Most are trying either to avoid paying taxes.
Back in the 60s, there was also a lot of noise about "we need a currency the government can't destroy by printing endless amounts", because we had recently officially left the gold standard (we had unofficially left it under FDR when he outlawed private ownership of gold). Being the 60s, one often-discussed proposal was the use of hemp-backed currency. A note might be backed by 20 pounds of hemp (and be printed on hemp paper, of course). But that was mostly hippies discussing this, and so it went nowhere.
From what little I've read, to the extent BitCoins are in use, it's as an underground currency, mostly to buy illegal drugs (I'm a bit skeptical, but it could be so). So perhaps we've come full circle to a new hemp-backed currency? I kind of hope so, just for the humor value.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Credit card numbers are stolen and sold all the time now. Wouldn't criminal organizations just put more focus on stealing physical objects or numbers that are not tied to them? I would assume that they have some success in using these stolen cards without getting caught or else it wouldn't be such a common target and hot commodity. So we'd trade a system where the average joe (plus criminals) can remain anonymous, for one where criminals will remain anonymous and the average Joe will be sent purchase history related ads.
Bitcoin failed? When did this happen?
While you may have glossed over this point for the purposes of the joke, I just wanted to point out that hemp actually isn't a drug. No THC in them leaves. You can smoke all you want, you're not going to get any higher than huffing on rose hips.
Bitcoin is not anonymous and is damn well traceable. In fact, all the transactions are public. The hard thing is to put a name behind an account, and so far the lack of a raidable authority has made this a bit more difficult to identify account owners but bitcoin has not been designed for privacy but for resilience and lack of a central point of failure.
What you can do anonymously is run a bitcoin node over Tor. How, and by the way, it has not failed. A speculation peak and a crash was exactly what was expeced for the seeding phase.
A cashless society would effectively destroy privacy of transactions.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Personally, I took the EFF, of all places, returning all BitCoin donations as a bad sign.
And the current pathetic theoretical net value of the entire BitCoin currency ($30M) isn't exactly encouraging either.
As I said in the other post, I send my kid to school with 60 cents or $2.75 for lunch. If she loses it along the way, drops it on the ground, it gets dirty, some other kid steals it, etc, I'm out a small amount. Now you're telling me I have to send her to school with a phone worth hundreds of dollars, not to mention some sort of plan (pre-paid or contract)? And the school has to pay to put in some sort of billing system? I know this could be set up via some "account" system where we would pay into the account and they would debit it. But the whole "paying for things" is a life lesson that's pretty valuable to learn and kids are very oriented towards seeing money change hands. They don't "get" the electronic transaction thing.
And how long is it going to take for someone to set up some sort of hack where your "just like cash" payment does the equivalent of a double-swipe on their phone when you pay them? The Craigslist scammers are going to be all over that action. No thanks, I'll pay cash for my second hand blender and know when I give somebody $10 the deal is done.
Remember the power outage in the North East (Michigan, Ohio, NY, PA, and other states)? Even when I'm conservative, my smartphone doesn't last THAT long . . . Of course, the cashiers at the local grocery store couldn't sell me anything anyway because they didn't have all the stupid barcodes memorized and couldn't use a calculator, much less pen and paper. So, i guess it doesn't really matter, we're pretty much screwed either way.
http://creditcardforum.com/blog/7-11-rallies-against-the-credit-card-industry/
7-11 does like them and a system like this may have lot's of fees some times on both sides.
I can't remember which Heinlein novel (maybe Time Enough for Love?) was set in a 'nearly' cashless society. Cash however, was still needed because, as was phrased, it was 'the oil needed for the wheels of commerce'. What Heinlein was implying was that the contribution of black and grey markets can't be ignored, and indeed without them, normal commerce wont work at all.
I said it in the first article today about "OMG, cash sucks!", and I'll say it again. EVERY TIME YOU USE PLASTIC, YOU ARE PAYING ABOUT 3% TO BANKS. When will these anti-cash nuts get this through their heads? You really want to give Bank of America and First Data and PNC 3% of our GDP?
Over my dead fucking body. I see how much plastic money costs, because I pay it out of my pocket every month. I use cash for everything I possibly can.
I don't respond to AC's.
OK, here are some things that should be made legal:
- Buying something while in a in a no-sales-tax jurisdiction, taking it home, and NOT paying "use tax".
- Buying alcohol at age 18 (I'm old enough that I actually did that legally. Now get off my lawn).
But I think the point he was trying to make is that things will BECOME illegal if it is feasible to track everything.
Let's say the store you go to does not take your system but they do take others?
What if the phones are down / your card system is not work for the store at this time?
What about on the train where they don't have vending machines at most stations, don't have the window open all day at most stations. So you have to buy in cash on the train and they still use the old hole punch system. The trains don't have room for a vending machine on them.
Also the stations are way to open for them to be gated like most subway systems and you pay based on far you go vs one fair on most subways.
buying on amazon isn't anonymous because it's mail order - you still have to provide name, address and phone for your amazon account and shipping ... but you CAN buy amazon gift cards with cash and then use them to pay for your amazon purchases.
there are numerous methods of buying the gift cards with cash, available at 10s of thousands of locations across the country.
http://www.amazon.com/2-page-Corp-GC/b?ie=UTF8&node=1292847011
don't need the power to go out just one card to go down. One day trying to gas did not work just to be told that others with the same card say it's not working and to try later.
right, sorry. you hit on my real point, that it's still trackable despite being ultimately paid for in cash. of course those gift cards probably come with some type of id number that identifies what region it was sold to and purchased from, making at least some aspects of your purchase transparent. and something can be inferred too, if you use a gift card purchased in the southwest united states, but entered from a computer with an IP from argentina. it's a good thing i'm behind 7 proxies =P
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
"Who is supposed to pay for the construction of such a space habitat?"
"Zeitgeist Star Trek"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6cN-1dLoPY
"Captain Picard promotes a Resource Based Economy"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui6g23ygov8
"Where will the materials come from?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O'Neill
"One application O'Neill proposed for mass drivers was to throw baseball-sized chunks of ore mined from the surface of the Moon into space.[50][51] Once in space, the ore could be used as raw material for building space colonies and solar power satellites. "
And from around 1927:
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/
"Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus."
"What about mission support?"
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/08/04/14/1349202/study-reports-on-debian-governance-social-organization
"Even on such a station, there will be a class system and scarcity, whether anyone likes it or not."
Yes, some people may always choose to be poor and enslaved...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect
Read James P. Hogan's novels like "Voyage From Yesteryear" for an alternative vision:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"Someone will have to fly the damn thing."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 :-)
"Likewise, unless the powers that be use fascist tactics to control reproduction, procreation will put a further strain on resources."
There is probably room for quadrillions of humans living in space habitats just around the local solar system, so we are nowhere near the carrying capacity of the solar system for human life and life we bring with us, even just considering current or near-future-term technologies. The biggest problem of industrialized societies is actually declining populations...
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-August/004174.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I live in Sweden, we're not becoming a cashless society. I don't know where this is coming from.
hemp-backed currency. A note might be backed by 20 pounds of hemp
Nice, hemp....of course.
BitCoins are in use, it's as an underground currency, mostly to buy illegal drugs
SSSHHHH! We were calling it 'hemp', remember?
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
yeah, credit card fees add up, but 7-11should be the last to complain about high prices
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
"The main thing is the solutions are there, the problem can be solved."
Yes, that is my key point. Solutions exist even if we may choose collectively not to pursue them. Thanks for the summary and insights into issues of power. A related item:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
Whether we decide to solve these problem is getting to be more a social issue than a technological one. A related essay I wrote: :-) These points come from the multiplication of the "social" points times the "technical" points.
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79?hl=en
"One can think of it this simplified way. Imagine abundance for all takes a society earning 100 "social-technical" points.
So, 50 * 2 = 100.
Or, 2 * 50 = 100.
or, 10 * 10 = 100."
One big problem is that every day it gets easier and easier for fewer and fewer people to wipe out all of humanity. For example, the genetic code was like a lock that prevented designer plagues (or attempts at them). Now that that code has been "broken", we are all at extreme risk of plagues created for whatever reasons. And it is not as easy to change your DNA as it is to change your ssh key.
As Bucky Fuller said decades ago, whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end...
I find this 1950s story called "The Skills of Xanadu" inspirational about the possible power of the internet for social change, but even then, the internet could be used for a crackdown too:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51#v=onepage&q&f=false
So, I don't know what will happen. I only can see from everything I've read on slashdot and elsewhere what could possibly happen in terms of solutions.
Likely we may get a range of outcomes in different places. India actually seems to me a place that may get it together best -- a culture of villages, a culture of sharing, a common knowledge of English, a youthful population, and so on...
http://p2pfoundation.net/Creative_Commons_-_Critiques#The_perverse_effects_of_CC_in_the_developing_world
"There is an overall culture of sharing knowledge here, even if this isn't called 'Creative Commons'. We had the launch of CCIndia in early 2007, but there seems to be little activity there... I think CC is a bit too conservative and too respectful of copyright issues. Copyright has not worked for us (in the developing world) for generations. Generally speaking, copyright in any form, including CC, doesn't fit in too well with Asian ideas of knowledge, since it enables those controlling knowledge and information over the rest, and we find it impossible to emerge winners in this game. It is a colonial law, not meant to serve the interest of the people of those parts of the globe that are not ahead in the information race! Why should we be as respectful to it, as, say, Lawrence Lessig is?"
Maybe we'll see more good things from Skikshantar?
http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/udaipur.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
If cash goes out of style we'll probably see a higher reliance on the barter system for friendly under the table and illegal transfers of money. I'm from one of those small communities where neighbours usually know each other and it's fairly common for people to share and trade items. Borrow a cup of sugar, fix a computer in exchange for a meal, repair a piece of jewelry for an engine part. That sort of thing is fairly common. Were cash to go away people would just do more of the barter/goods exchange.
That being said, I rarely use cash anymore. It's probably been months since I used cash for anything, so I'm not likely to miss it. Usually the only time I pull it out is for spur of the moment transit or tipping service people.
Hong Kong uses chip based anonymous debit aka "Octopus" card for the transit system as well as 7-11 and other small cash transaction.
The chip is (or was) made by Sony and it is very successful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_card
There was some major privacy issues with the company selling their customer database. One can tie the card to a savings account or "recharge" it with cash. It was quickly dealt with highly efficiently Hong Kong style within 2 weeks the CEO admitted guilt in the media. Pretty good reason to stay anonymous.
"but so far it has failed because it doesn't have sovereign backing". This is equivalent to saying that people are starving because they don't eat enough shit. What a load of crap...
That might be the darkside of bitcoin, but it's also being adopted by more and more high tech firms.
I've been watching as one by one our competitors start accepting bitcoin as well, we've been accepting it upon request for quite some time now.
Bitcoin hasn't failed, just because there was a bubble it hasn't disappeared anywhere, and adoption just keeps on increasing.
Also, independent chain sponsored by government would actually not work, for one reason being there would be too little hashing power making a 51% attack possible by foreign government, also it would fight against for the things bitcoin stands for.
It would make sense for sweden to back bitcoin however, by establishing their own mining farms which can be far smaller than what they would need for their own chain, and sponsoring development on convenient ways to work with it, and establishing exchange rate stability, trading bitcoin on a very small scale on government standards. They could put in just 1million euro to significantly bump the bitcoin value and then use that to stabilize fund to stabilize the price, along with reaping nice profit on the way.
That ain't going to happen anytime soon tho, bitcoin is still too small for country level adoption. Tho single country adopting it would quite dramatically change that (and explode bitcoin value)
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
It's a medium of exchange that is being used as payment for products and services. What's your criteria for failure?
And finally, how about people who do not get a bank account? It's not like it's possible for them to have a halfway decent life now, but then, it will become virtually impossible. Try to get a job in Europe without a bank account. Just try. No such luck. There is NO way you will be paid in cash. No company I know of will ever even consider doing it.
At least here in Norway there no such thing, through the post office you're always entitled to a bank of last resort. Ignoring that I've never been asked for my bank account number until after I've been employed, they may think I'm crazy but they'd still have to pay my salary - they will need my id number for tax reporting though. I would not get paid in cash but I would get a "payout referral" or something like that - I'm not sure how to translate it, it's not a cashier's check but more a wire-to-cash transfer you can collect at the bank. The money is reserved but the transaction is not done until the recipient collects at the bank. If the recipient doesn't collect in 3 months, it expires and the reservation is lifted and the money stays on the account. I used to work in the financial industry and occasionally customers would get payouts but have closed the bank account they were supposed to receive it on. We would then send out these things, most people would simply direct the money to the right account but they could also cash it without having any account at all. If they didn't collect we still had to keep them as client funds until someone asked for them.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
In my experience far more homeless people have cell phones than have bank accounts, but aside from that a device capable of doing the work needed would cost much less than 10 dollars to create and could be fashioned into a bracelet or suchlike. So if a government decided to go with digital currency; how much greater a cost would it incur from manufacturing such devices rather than minting coins and printing bills (forever fighting an expensive ongoing war against counterfeiters)?
Furthermore I can't help but notice that your definition of criminals seems largely people that deal in goods which your government prohibits while later knocking Cuba's government for prohibition against some things. Given that ciminals are in a minority I struggle to see how a currency solely used by them would increase in value, currency derives it's value from demand and if most people don't want it it will wither.
Speaking as a European with no bank account and a history of homelessness I agree with much of your last paragraph. However considering a move to digital currency it would depend on whether it was centralised or decentralised. More important is how easy it is to sign up for an account. Depending on how it's done it could well ease the plight of the bank accountless underclass.
Given the neo-liberal ideologues in positions of power in much of the west (if not the world) you would expect they'd open such a thing to the free market which would surely result in some enterprising business seeking to exploit the largely untapped bank accountless underclass so maybe that will happen. And you'll see people holding signs (virtual or real) saying, "will code for zynga dollars".
NOT paying "use tax"
Come to Missouri. We don't know what use tax is, and if you tell us what it is, we'll laugh in your face.
Credit cards weren't accepted in the beginning. Of course, it has teething problems, but give it time, and I'm sure it would be as accepted as PayPal is today.
Except credit cards were run by private companies with their own hides on the line. Government digital currency will be implemented by the lowest cost-plus bidder. It will be about as touted as the most excellent cost saving efficiency thing ever by politicians and be as reliable as the average digital voting machine.
EFF returned Bitcoin donations because of concern with legal issues. Bitcoin tries to take on the whole monetary structure, it wouldn't be like defending bittorrent, so they backed out. It's only a bad sign if you believed they could do it in the first place.
Although Bitcoin economy is not in a brilliant condition, total volume of transactions per day is about $1M. So I think it's very much alive. I wish there were a pure currency to compare it with, but there isn't.
I really don't get why /. is so bitter about Bitcoin, but if you look at the requirements, all this will come to is something like Bitcoin.
For long-range transactions, we don't want the approval of an intermediary. With cash we have this, but it doesn't work long-range. If you don't want a trusted intermediary, then what you need to invent is a decentralized currency. For a decentralized currency to work, it needs to be pure, i.e. not backed by anything. And voila, you have Bitcoin.
Since you don't need approval of a trusted authority, you don't have to reveal your identity to possess Bitcoins. But you would need to do at some point, in most cases even at the initial purchase. But on the other hand, it needs to be traceable to prevent the double-spending problem. So what do you do? You don't mix the coins of your different identities. So there, it's as anonymous as you need it to be.
Surviving the Cashless Cataclysm? You're kidding. I have been dating her for 15 years...
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
Interesting idea that discontinued money will become valuable. Doesnt hold water i am afraid. I witnessed USSR currency being discontinued and it turned into toilet paper overnight. I also witnessed another currency turn into paper because there was no economy to back it up, or they printed too much. Greens on the other hand replaced this unstable toilet paper currency, so ur second suggestion is legit :)
We should think deeply about how to move past have artificial scarcity (including fiat currencies)
Why should we get rid of money? Governments are a necessary thing in society, and governments need to collect taxes in order to function -- and money is basically the best way we know of for governments to collect those taxes.
laws relating to something about "counterfeiting" or "unauthorized sharing",
These are two very, very, very different problems. Someone who makes unauthorized copies of some creative work is violating a regulation on industry (which is very much out of date in the modern world). Someone who counterfeits money is basically committing fraud, pretending to have something they do not really have. Creatives works are valuable because of what they look like, what they sound like, the information they convey, etc., regardless of who produced the copy; money is valuable because a government issues it.
The real problem we should be working on is not how to get rid of national currencies. It is how to ensure that every gets to live a good life, a life where they are not trapped or enslaved. Money is how we determine how much a particular person should be allowed to get; it is a way to quantify what people can have, and a way to give people the freedom to choose what they want to possess. In terms of quantifying the problem, we should be working to ensure that everyone has at least enough money to not merely live, but to live a meaningful life, to have hobbies -- to go beyond simply subsisting, simply working to keep oneself alive long enough to work the next day.
Money is a way that governments can organize societies and enable people to have the freedom to direct their own lives. A loss of money is a loss of freedom. How money is divided among people determines the power structure of society; if some people have vastly more money than others, those people will rule, and if some people only have enough money to live one more day, they will be enslaved. The goal should be preventing people from reaching either of those extremes, preventing the formation of aristocracies or slave classes.
Money is not the enemy, it is a tool for managing a large group of people. The legal structure that surrounds money, its distribution and its use are how that tool is used, and determine whether money will free people and empower or if it is will trap people and enslave them. The far-right has worked hard in America to turn money into a tool for controlling people, trapping them in their position in society and enforcing a rigid social structure; that is what needs to be attacked.
Palm trees and 8
I don't agree with a cashless society. Especially with the way student loan laws are right now. I get a 15% garnishment, my tax return is taken, and my bank accounts are under constant treat of being routinely pilfered by the US government. I make $13.50/h but could only secure part time. At the end of the month I have about $980 when it's all said and done. If I store any cash in my account I get a nice letter from my loan holders. I recently decided that I had to do something about it. I started storing cash so I can go to a CDL-A school to get a CDL-A that will allow me to get a better job capable of paying off my school loans. My monthly loan amount is $1,648.26 and total is 50K with 36K in late charges and accrued interest while I was unemployed. I went to ITT Tech and learned the hard way that a good college doesn't need commercials. Oh, and school loans are not discharged in a bankruptcy. Not even a Class 7 in 99.97% of all cases.
Needless to say, this wouldn't be a possibility if the US where cashless. I'd be stuck in low tier jobs the rest of my life with my only debt increasing faster than I could pay it. It's a loan holders wet dream.
. Criminals will not use it.
Just pay my friend over there. Then you can have the stuff.
Criminals have been using third party pay as long as money has existed. No way you can trace it to him. Just some random guy.
Nobody *pays* Fat Tony. They just do him favors. See, when he goes somewhere his money is no good. Love the kids and the place, hope nothing bad happens to them. But he'll have one on the house.
Traceable currency has only one use: collecting marketing statistics. For every other use there are trivial loopholes and, as you very clearly mention, unintended consequences for the poor. But marketing doesn't really care about the poor. Your target demographic is people who can afford to pay. Even if it would ruin them.
Today people who use paypal, debit and credit cards should be aware that they trade free marketing data for convenience. Tomorrow it may not be a choice. To riff off Ghostbusters: "there is no search, there is only Google."
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
"Except credit cards were run by private companies with their own hides on the line" -> And their hands in the till.
"Government digital currency will be implemented by the lowest cost-plus bidder." -> More along the lines of whoever is willing to give the government the biggest cut. Kind of the like the current relationship they have with the Federal Reserve.
" It will be about as touted as the most excellent cost saving efficiency thing ever by politicians and be as reliable as the average digital voting machine." -> And if that isn't a reason to buy in, I don't know what is. ;-)
I am John Hurt.
Really a debit card at a good bank pretty much takes cash out of your life already. Currently I keep about $30. per month and everything is direct deposit and almost all of my bills and expenses can be paid with the debit card online. The greatest benefit arrives when we all go cashless. Most crime vanishes. A burglar can't get by as he can't sell his loot. Your life becomes transparent to law enforcement and you simply have no way to accept illegal deposits. The flip side is that the criminal mentality is compelled to commit crimes so they adapt to change. Expect more computer fraud as these criminals certainly intend to keep stealing one way or another.
The rather sensationalist headline aside, I think this writeup managed to get the concept totally backwards.
The point of government is to uphold the rights of the People with a system of laws and order. It's supposed to represent the People, and the People are supposed to select their representatives. Something doesn't magically become valid when the government adopts it any more than it magically becomes reprehensible just because a government condemns it (victimless drug crimes, I'm looking right at you here).
More and more of the People have accepted BitCoin. If digital currency becomes mainstream, then it's only the government that looks rather odd in refusing to adopt it themselves. Regardless, we don't need a government to smile on something in order for it to be legitimate. I live in the U.S. where, unique among all the countries in the world, sovereignty is supposed to dwell in the People rather than the government they made. And at this point, I still trust BitCoin encryption a heck of a lot more than I trust this government.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
If by "high tech firms" you mean "small businesses that sell IT-related products".
Sorry I'm not allowed. All my direct siblings and first cousin's are already married.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
That's "cloud service providers" for you corporate zombies.
You can print out the private key or a QR with it... then you can hand off the bitcoins at that address. The receiver sends the bitcoins to their own address using the private key to ensure the seller (who could have a copy of the key) can't take them back. You could even use a passphrase run through a hash function. Private keys are just numbers, it's just some numbers are more valuable than others. And each number's value can be passed to any other number.
Not by growth in daily transactions: http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=
But---you use the apostrophe to form the plural, so you're still in. Congrats.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The writer dismisses all too easy the fear of losing privacy, just because there are technical solutions, as if it was a matter of technical difficulties. The State will not allow this because it will lose power (over people's lives).
The whole idea is to make it traceable.
In Denmark, where most transaction are chip&pin, and more or less everybody has a bank account, it is illegal for shops to accept cash payments for anything above the value of about $3000.
This is to fight black money (non-taxed income), that many people gets from criminal activities, or from jobs they forgets to tell the tax service about.
This is part of the current ongoing crusade against the people cheating the system. People now report to the tax service more than before when they suspect people abusing the system. Like using a company car for private purposes (very expensive. People using a large SUV often ends up paying $100.000+ in tax and fines for the abuse).
private to private? you'd do a bank transfer. doesn't cost, easy to do on the spot if you have a smartphone..
not as easy as just giving cash of course and there's a record there so.. I'd recommend spamming your transfers to hide nefarious transfer.
don't know why it should be illegal for homeless to have banking accounts or phones.. though in sweden it's not much of a problem, if you're homeless in sweden you'll be very cold and probably got serious mental issues to begin with(so bad that they prevent you from going to social sec for them to arrange you a bunk).
if you want some examples of going cashless funnily enough some areas in africa are a good startup point. why? cellphone banking is easier if it takes two days of walking to get to the fucking bank.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
When Slashdot stopped reporting on it two or more times a day.
Nope, privacy is being annihilated even as we type and you can bet your bottom dollar (no pun intended) that the powers that be will not allow for anonymous transactions through the cloud. Sweden's little experiment is just to test public response. It's coming folks, like a tsunami. Kiss your privacy goodbye. Another interesting consideration will be the conspicuous absence of normal transactions by "persons of interest". You shall be recognized by the fact that you are not all over facebook blathering about how cute your dog is. So, use your debit card to buy Starbucks and blather liberally about how cute your dog is on facebook. Maybe, just maybe, the eye of Skynet will just pass you by...
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
In which state are pedantic asshats considered 'native'?
I bet Swedes wanting to make anonymous transactions will use their neighbor cash currency : euros, rubles, whatever ...
So there will still be a shadow economy despite Swedish idealism.
Bitcoin failed in what? Again in what? Protocol? Its been around for a while now and it is valued more than a dollar.
Addresses is easibly traceable? Yes, but how can you find out which address belongs to whom. Even if someone traces address to some person, its actually pretty easy to scatter around coins to new addresses and then to more new address and then to e.g. one "public" addresse and then back to some newly created addresses. A nightmare for "detective".
The only thing I find it "flawed" its getting to long to get confirmations for a shopper who wants to buy few beers and hot dogs to watch basketball game with friends "right now".
Just lulz. How the hell can you believe digital money can ever be secured? Ever been on the inter-webz??
I hate to break it to you, but Missouri does indeed collect "use tax" on out-of-state purchases. Or at least tries. Take a look at your MO-1040 instructions under "Consumers Use Tax". Now of course if I worked in Jefferson City, I'd flag anyone who itemized and paid any of that tax just because they must be doing something wrong to try to appear like that much of a Boy Scout, but the line is there.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Failed at what exactly? Neither you nor the article define exactly what it is that it has failed at.
Linux is only 1-2% of desktops after 20 years... is that a failure? Scale isn;t great but look how many linux users there were after 3 years ... https://linuxcounter.net/charts/_stats_number_users_40years.png?1332412189
Sure bitcoin is still niche, revolutionary change doesn't happen overnight. Price discovery takes a while and often overshoots. Same with equities, and even indexes. That's all speculation driven. Beneath that there is an economy of sorts - it's small, tiny but thats how things starts.
If/when it gets outlawed, then I think we can start talking about failure. Thought technically it never failed - if anything, outlawing it suggests it was threatening to be a success.
Invaders must die
Your allegations are unfounded.
A digital cash device can be a transmitter as well as a receiver. With a small baterry, a small calculator-like monochrome screen, a surface that can accept light to charge the battery, a small calculator-like keyboard, and a small transmitter/receiver, you can easily lend your digital money to your buddy by simply connecting the two cards over the air, selecting 'transfer', entering the amount and pressing Enter. Calculators with these capabilities exist for over 30 years now, and slapping a small transmitter/receiver and some cryptography circuits on them is trivial.
Regarding the criminals keeping the cash around, they would only be able to do business with other criminals. Counterfeting would then become a standard practice, and so the remaining cash will quickly lose ther value. Banks would not accept the counterfeit money, and regularly exchanging cash for digital credits would quickly raise suspicions. If they use a foreign currency, they would have to import it, but the exchanging at the banks would stil be a problem for them, because they would have to prove the foreign cash was legally made.
Finally, I do no see why the homeless could not get such a digital cash card. If they can count coins and paper money, they could certainly use a calculator.
private to private? you'd do a bank transfer. doesn't cost, easy to do on the spot if you have a smartphone.
Is the bank under a legal obligation (whether statutory or contractual) to keep those bank transfers free? No? Then your testicles are already in the steam press, my friend; they've just not started squeezing yet. I'd entirely believe a bank introducing a fee for all such transfers if they thought they could, and then perhaps waiving or reducing it for transfers between their accounts; encouraging people to get all their friends and family at the same bank would be seen as a great marketing measure!
Banks: there are no moral depths that they will not eagerly plumb if they think they can get away with it.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
I wonder how the Supremes would get around that one? 'Cause you know at least five of them would be upset.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
Notice how this currency will be the only "black market" money you can use to get anything, I think it would be safe to assume that it will be in high demand. And we're not even talking drugs here, any bribe, any "favor" anything you don't want in your books to show up would have to be done with it. If you have the chance to talk with someone from the former East Bloc, especially the former German Democratic Republic, go ask them about "blue tiles" and what they were needed for. Given that more and more things we want are being outlawed or regulated, the difference is just that there it was not available due to shortage and here it won't be available due to legal restrictions, but the effect is the same.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem is, there would be an economy backing that money. An illegal economy, but still an economy. Money derives its value from the fact that someone gives it that value and is willing to part with some goods in exchange for that toilet paper. The reason why the USSR money lost its value over night was that there was no economy to back it up and nobody willing to take it in exchange for his goods. I somehow doubt that this is necessarily the case, especially if it becomes the only possible tender for illegal goods.
Of course, as long as there is an alternative that is not only backed by an illegal but also by a legal economy, that alternative will trump this. Lacking any alternatives, I don't doubt that this scenario becomes very possible.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You mean, like, cell carriers that make the calls within their network free and charge you through the nose for "enemy" networks?
I guess you have a case there...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem with the first case is that you need some agent to do this. You cannot simply take a few bills from your wallet and hand it to your friend. You need a bank or some other entity to supervise that transfer. And as soon as this exists, fees are not far behind. There may not be any in the short run to hook you, but as soon as it becomes mainstream they'll charge you for every cent you transfer. Look around you and notice how it's been and give me one good reason to assume it won't be the same in the future.
And I don't fear counterfeiting to be a big issue with "underground money". Since there would certainly be some entities that have a keen interest in that money keeping its value, I guess the punishment for illegal printing will be a tad bit harsher than they are now while government enjoys this privilege.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Give us a break about BitCoin and this non-sense that given the fact that it failed was to be blamed on not having sovereign backing. If it had no one would have used it as the only ones using it are criminals. Yes, criminals. Most are trying either to avoid paying taxes.
To be fair it wasn't just criminals. It was people hoarding bitcoins thinking it was an investment opportunity, egged on by early adopters boosting the unsustainable inflation so they could exit with as much real money as possible. It was more like some kind of hivemind ponzi or pyramid scheme where early adopters were cashing out on the proceeds of the later investors. Throw a few big thefts, some major exchange hacks and security scares and the whole lot collapsed and really hasn't recovered. Even in the remote event of it recovering it would probably still get regulated out of existence.
The amount of actual genuine trade was minimal and I doubt it was helped by the exchange rate going up and down like a yoyo. It's not surprising it flopped really.
"What if the US or UK (or any other country for that matter) issued digital cash?"
UK - never gonna happen
US - double extra never gonna happen
Here in the UK we do have completely legal, local currencies (like the Brixton Pound - which happens to have a 'pay by text' electronic side to it). For all intents and purposes, the B£ is untraceable - the notes are still numbered, but the value of any transaction is likely to be small, and no one pays any attention to them (heck, I'm sure a lot of the retailers don't even put B£ transactions through the till). But this is all the B£ will ever be - small and local. If it ever gets big, it'll get taxed and tracked just like the regular sterling pound. FWIW, I'm told that Germany has a few regional currencies, although I'm not sure if they're "official" or off the books.
Electronic currency is already available in the form of Visa/Mastercard/Amex etc. Anonymous electronic currency hasn't been invented yet (excepting barter), and if it ever is, the government is very unlikely to endorse it (even though it'll be a handy way of slipping your local MP some money to do you a favour in Parliament). More likely is that it'll operate like Bitcoin does now - that is, unbacked, but viable for "convenient barter".
As for the US - the paranoid levels of control the government likes to exert there pretty much write-off any likelihood of any competing currencies ever getting government approval, even in the "blind eye" sense. If something like Bitcoin gets genuinely popular in the US, it'll become illegal, or else it'll become tracked and centralised just like the dollar. Don't get me wrong, other countries will do the same too - but the US will do it with guns blazing, wheras others won't.
This remind me so much of the "Credits" used in many 80s games or movies. You know what I mean: they swipe a card to pay with Credits, but you never see any credits, it's all computerized.
JigJag
"The hallmark of humanity is the ability to move beyond sensory inputs" - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHahahahahahahahahahahahaha.... Oh my God, it's co cute that you really believe that.
Now I only have to try to believe 3 other impossible things this morning...
Yeah, but we'll also tell you about paying annual personal property taxes and sales tax on used cars.
Here in the UK train guards have taken credit cards and regular debit cards (though unfortunately they don't take solo/electron) for years. Nowadays the ticket machines the gaurds carry do "chip and pin" but before that was introduced they did "swipe and sign" like anywhere else that took cards did. There is also talk of introducing an oyster like system for the whole UK rail network. Making trains work without cash is far from an insurmountable problem.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Seriously, I get the dismay over the loss of physical currency, and I'm not saying I'm for it, but just because a nation does away with cash doesn't mean there's no way to make anonymous purchases.
Precious metals are the most obvious since they've been used for trading forever, but anything can be bartered for. You need drugs, but your dealer needs a new set of rims, or groceries, or a tank of gas, or whatever.
It's silly for a government to think getting rid of cash is going to make everything more secure and traceable. Normal people rarely use cash for most legal transactions anyways (and are thus already traceable), and criminals (I use the word loosely) are just going to find another way to do business (which might be even harder to trace than cash) so they can maintain their anonymity. At least you can mark bills.
Brilliant! If we set aside the fact that a lot of the current money is already 100% digital and not physical... it's easier to generate digital cash than to mint or to print it. The FED would be able to inflate the amount of money even more than they do already. Say welcome to hyperinflation.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
All we can do it is survive... until it finishes
There are many illegal aliens here in this state. My girlfriend being one of them. She works for a company illegally. She doesn't have a bank account. The company she works for cuts her a check based off of an illegal social security number that she purchased. She takes that check to the issuing bank and exchanges it for cash.
Many of her friends and relatives do the same thing. No bank account needed, no home address needed. The only drawback to that is she did live with a bunch of her relatives and there is always loads of cash at their house.
the whole lot collapsed and really hasn't recovered
You have a very interesting definition of "collapsed", considering that the current market price and trading volume have both increased by a factor of five or more over the past year. Note that the price increased by this much despite the fact that the supply of bitcoins grew by over 40% during the same period. There was a brief speculative bubble which peaked around $30, followed by a sharp correction, but the overall trend remains overwhelmingly positive.
This growth isn't entirely due to speculation, either; the range of products and services you can buy directly with bitcoins is increasing steadily, and includes web hosting, virtual servers, electronics, food, clothing--even real estate. Have a look at the Trade page on the Bitcoin Wiki for a partial, but still extensive, list of participating merchants.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Why would you need a bank or some other entity to supervise the transfer? there is no supervision when you give bills or coins to your buddy, so there is also no need for supervision in the case of electronic transfer.
Counterfeiting will be a major issue for the underground economy. Printing money like crazy will devalue the currency, bringing huge inflation to the underground economy. Pretty soon, bills will only be good for blowing one's nose only.
As for tradeable items I never said there wasn't a token market but that's all it is. It is obviously totally unviable to trade unless prices in BTC are pegged to another currency, more or less demonstrating bitcoin is worthless in its own right.
Don't take plastic.
You could always just buy gold or silver and pay someone off with that. In the old days the cashless system was called barter. Still works today.
I don't know what a "use tax" is either, but you guys have to pay property tax on cars (my dad lives in Poplar Bluff). I'd call that a "use tax".
Free Martian Whores!
First, the obvious: How do you pay someone who doesn't have the means to register your payment?
That's the entire point of creating a cashless system: It forces all the stubborn/Luddite types to purchase tracking devices cell phones digital payment functionality. If it's not glaringly obvious by now that the future has plans for tracking everything everyone does to create data on how better to keep track of us and sell products to us and manage us in general (insurance, psychological/sociological conditioning, information control, etc.), then I don't know when it will be obvious. This is a long term, massive systemic trend that is accelerating.
Property tax helps pay for schools, libraries, parks, etc. Use tax is "we're upset that you bought something out of state, so we're going to try to charge sales tax on it anyway".
Anyway, I don't object to the money. I object to the idea of levying sales tax against a buyer. Sales tax is levied against merchants, because it's easier to enforce that way. Moreover, it should only be levied against in-state merchants, because a state shouldn't have any jurisdiction over an out-of-state merchant.
Oh great so another speculative bubble is forming out of those too deluded to leave the first time around.
Obviously not everyone thinks the current price is indicative of a speculative bubble. It could just as easily represent an actual increase in demand; only time will tell. You're welcome to short some bitcoins on the exchanges if you really think we're in a bubble, though. Change has been very gradual over the last several month—ever since the last big correction, really—with none of the runaway exponential price inflation which marked the previous bubble.
I don't see how claiming the market price suffering hyper expansion, collapse and then another expansion merely demonstrates that the "currency" is little more than a ponzi.
Well, I don't either, but obviously you meant the opposite.
The term "ponzi" gets thrown around a lot, but the essence of a Ponzi scheme is the promise of high returns, and there is no such promise (nor even any central figure to make such a promise) with regard to bitcoins. An "economic bubble" is not the same as a Ponzi scheme; to quote Wikipedia, "as with the Ponzi scheme, the price exceeds the intrinsic value of the item, but unlike the Ponzi scheme, there is no person misrepresenting the intrinsic value" (link). Of course, there is no such thing as "intrinsic value"—all valuation is subjective—but the meaning is clear enough. Bitcoin is not a Ponzi scheme.
As for tradeable items I never said there wasn't a token market but that's all it is.
Of course it's a "token" market; the system is still young. Did you expect it to replace the established national currencies overnight? Everything has to start somewhere. It's may be a small market now, but it's growing.
It is obviously totally unviable to trade unless prices in BTC are pegged to another currency, more or less demonstrating bitcoin is worthless in its own right.
I'll grant that the prices are more volatile than we'd like. Part of that is due to relatively low volumes (compared to other currencies), part is due to the lack of a significant futures market, part is simply due to the newness of the system and the resulting uncertainty over its long-term prospects. It's not "totally unviable" to list fixed prices in BTC, and some merchants do exactly that. However, for merchants used to setting prices in USD, it's not hard to see why they would prefer to treat BTC as a "foreign currency" and perform the conversion on-the-fly at checkout. The fact that they accept BTC anyway suggests that short-term volatility isn't enough to make bitcoins "worthless".
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Blue tiles were however not a remnant of the previous currency, but a response to a collapse of the state sanctioned currency. Anything not produced by the centrally planned economy therefore became difficult to obtain. Of course when confidence in a currency is lost people look to other things as a store of wealth and thus are inclined to conduct trades using such. So the said currency was used primarily for items such as coffee and other everyday goods not produced by the state.
Your argument is simply one against a collapse of a currency, not against digital currency per se. With the built in assumption that a move to purely digital currency will create a collapse. If you can see such problems then others can also, and see solutions also. A simple solution I can see to your concerns is to not overburden the currency in red tape and prevent people from using it for doing what people want to do with money. Less restrictive laws on drugs, prostitution and a legal framework for bribery (or lobbying as we now call it) would seem to be in order. Selling such liberal ideas to dyed in the wool conservatives may well be an uphill struggle, but by no means an impossible dream in my view.
It's easy to forget law is an artificial construct and that the natural state is for all things to be legal.
poor prayers at the church will have card readers supplied by government ? ... People want to help him... - what do they use ? They will ask to have him terminal card reader ? What do they do ? Do they give him their credit card as the gift, saying - please return it me after you will purchase some food and dressing ? ...
Let's say somebody has been robbed on the street
That is total scam. It is possible only if their people would be already reached status of angels in between a god.
But this is not true. I have been there some years ago. It's the same community. I've been there at the time when there was some kind of beer day celebration
They was literally pissing at the center of the town in the river - straight into the center of their king town at the eyes of police mans and kids. That's alright if all country becomes just one beer party. But..... - how it correlates to the angels in between a god ?
It's total nonsense. I think it's just some kind of adds marketing.
"Why should we get rid of money?"
Mainly because it is increasing obsolete as a vague way to understand demand. Things like emails and twitters are a more nuanced way to express complex demands.
But, it is true, with a "basic income", money is not as bad a thing. For example, see Marshall Brain's Manna: ...
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
""It works like this. Let's say that you own a large piece of land. Say something the size of your state of California. This land contains natural resources. There is the sand on the beaches, from which you can make glass and silicon chips. There are iron, gold and aluminum ores in the soil, which you can mine, refine and form into any shape. There are oil and coal deposits under the ground. There is carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen in the air and in the water. If you were to own California, all of these resources are 'free.' That is, since you own them, you don't have to pay anyone for them and they are there for the taking."
"If you have a source of energy and if you also own smart robots, the robots can turn these resources into anything you want for free. Robots can grow free food for you in the soil. Robots can manufacture things like steel, glass, fiberglass insulation and so on to create free buildings. Robots can weave fabric from cotton or synthetics and make free clothing. In the case of this catalog you are holding, nanoscale robots chain together glucose molecules to form laminar carbohydrates. As long as you have smart robots, along with energy and free resources, everything is free."
"Everything is free AND everyone is equal." Linda said. "That's exactly how you phrased it, and you were right. You, Jacob, get equal access to the free resources, and so does everyone else. That's done through a system of credits. You get a thousand credits every week and you can spend them in any way you like. So does everyone else. This catalog is designed to give you a taste of what you can buy with your credits. This is a small subset of the full catalog you will use once you arrive. You simply ask for something, the robots deliver it, and your account gets debited."
"Let me show you." said Cynthia. She opened her catalog to a page, and pointed to one of the pictures. It was clothing. "This is what I am wearing." she said. "See - it is 6 credits. In a typical week I only spend about 70 or so credits on clothes. That's why I like to wear something new every day."
"The robots did manufacture Cynthia's outfit for free. They took recycled resources, added energy and robotic labor and created what she is wearing. It cost nothing to make it. She paid credits simply to keep track of how many resources she is using." "
More and more the link between a right to consume and a need to get humans to do labor is breaking. People could see that beginning even in 1964:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird peopleâ(TM)s rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures --unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal i
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The hyper-niche and stagnant acceptance of the currency seems like failure to me. If it were successful, you'd think Amazon or some other major outfit would have picked them up by now, but that has not occurred, and will not occur, due to how illiquid BitCoins are.
I have absolutely no problem with the idea of BitCoins (I have my doubts about its scalability though.) I think something like BitCoins could fill a useful niche... I don't see the lack of a trusted intermediary, no govt. backing, etc. as major issues.
But BitCoins themselves? The designers betrayed a complete and total lack of understanding of the most basic economic precepts when designing that beyond-awful BitCoin expansion curve. It guaranteed that the currency would go absolutely nowhere... it started off way too quickly (letting those in on the "ground floor" obtain too much of the supply), and then it will level off at some point until it stops growing entirely.
Why on earth would anybody EVER design a currency that would stop growing? If a currency does not expand with the size of the economy using it, it deflates. Massively. Leading to illiquidity, non-functioning credit markets, and wildly fluctuating value. (BTW, the ability to tweak the money supply in response to current economic conditions in order to maintain currency stability is why every single modern economy uses fiat currency. Some central banks are better at it than others, but this nonetheless is precisely why nobody uses the gold standard any more.)
A better curve would have been to start slow to give time for it to be picked up, ramp up as adoption was expected to increase, and then level off at a rate approx. that of annual world GDP growth.
What they did instead was to flood the market at the beginning, and then slow down as adoption increased, and designed it to eventually stop entirely. This was, to be blunt, stupid, and it doomed BitCoins to irrelevancy. (Economically irrelevant anyway... maybe the technical ideas will be picked up by some other team with better economic understanding.)
Ever heard of A currency item becoming invalidated? - Its called the 1c and 2c coin in Australia.
Simply put, if you hold onto the currency for long enough - the government will just invalidate it reducing it to effectively something you can use to keep the fire going, because a bank will no longer accept it from you.
If a government decides to go to a cashless society, you will not be able to stop them. They'll just tell the banks to scrap the cash in circulation and any losses will be handed out via 'digitally created' money.
This doesnt mean that your old-money wont be accepted by someone, it just means that it will only be accepted if they wish to do something with it, otherwise there is no benefit.
If you want to go to a cashless system, Move your ass to Sweden. In the US we deal in cash. I like my privacy, weather or not I have something to hide is my business and cash is how I do business.
"The great unsolved problem is: people need to work for their keep (in some fashion) to feel spiritually fulfilled. In a post-basic-need-scarcity world, how does that happen? Because we've seen, over and over again, that society basically disintegrates if people don't feel like they've worked for the things they have."
Humans naturally come up with their own things to do. It is actually social institutions like compulsory schooling that beats that out of them. See John Taylor Gatto's writings, for example: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm ..."
"When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates
Just trying to be a good parent to young children can pretty much take as much time as people can put into it.
Look at how people used to live for some other ideas:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
If what you said was true, then why do not all the rich people in the world disintegrate (given most have inherited a good share of their wealth and power)? Why would they give money to their children? Why does Bill Gates still do things when he has so much material wealth? Why did Richard Stallman keep doing stuff after he got a MacArthur Genius award and could have just sat on his backside?
What does it mean to work for something? Is it really a big problem that people generally get their air for free?
I'm not saying there is not truth to your point, because it is true that people need meaning in their lives. I'm just suggesting the issue of gaining meaning solely by overcoming material scarcity does not generalize as broadly as you suggest. See also, for some middle ground:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
Those are reasons why we may choose not to automate stuff even when we can...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
So my smart phone stops being merely a piece of hardware that someone would like to lift out of my pocket to sell down at the pub, and starts being the keys to my bank account(s)? OK, maybe smart phone security can be beefed up, but I'm sure that might present additional challenges.
Athy, athier, athiest.
Those who collect it are those who give it value.
Athy, athier, athiest.
1) You're wrong because drugs ARE presently on their way to full legalization in the U.S. Already a majority of the population supports marijuana legalization.
2) Really? Share some examples? Are you blind? OPEN YOUR FUCKING EYES.
I see why you posted this as A.C.. You are so high from that blunt you just blazed down that you even forgot what thread you were replying to, let alone your login details.
I disagree, actually. If he's making enough for it to be taxable, then there's no distinction between him and a 19 year old doing the same amount of work.
I agree. Neither one should be taxed.
What about a 12 year old who runs a highly profitable online store?
He will go much further in life without the heavy hand of Uncle Sam reaching in his pocket every time he turns around.
Yes, I've read all that, of course. It doesn't really go to my point. It's not that some people can't find something to work for on their own, it's that most people can't.
The very rich who weren't born so often work 80 hour weeks to get where they are (if you include travel time): they got where they are because of their passion for what they create. Successful artists are often the same way. You can't overcome the frustrations otherwise. The rich who were born so? Paris Hilton. We've seen centuries of how antisocial and damaging that group can be.
But the simple truth is: only a small percentage of people will ever be successful at "creative" endevors, using that in it's broadest sense to include scientists, industrialists, artists, game designers, programmers, and so on. That's a mathematical certainty: your creative vision, whatever your field, must be several sigmas better than average to capture the attention of a lot of other people.
So what does everyone else do? Sure, each creative person may bring along a few helpers to do the basic logistical work of creation, but the more automaiton we have the fewer such people are needed. Most people will need to be given some artificial challange. And the success of MMOs shows that artificial challanges fill the void, at least for a time, but I'm not sure where that leads us.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
California.
Can Bob hack his smart card to give the same $10 to Suzy for other good and valuable consideration? Yes.
This is much harder than you imagine. Is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? No. Also, keep in mind, these are the real deal smart cards with full crypto capabilities not some dumb mass transit chip.
"It doesn't really go to my point. It's not that some people can't find something to work for on their own, it's that most people can't."
Maybe then you might like this refutation better? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
"In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors. The fundamental attribution error is most visible when people explain the behavior of others. It does not explain interpretations of one's own behavior -- where situational factors are often taken into consideration. This discrepancy is called the actor-observer bias. As a simple example, if Alice saw Bob trip over a rock and fall, Alice might consider Bob to be clumsy or careless (dispositional). If Alice tripped over the same rock herself, she would be more likely to blame the placement of the rock (situational)."
So, according to the fundamental attribution error, it is only natural to feel that you (and rich folk) work hard because you are virtuous. Other people whose will has been broken by the schooling system or by boring jobs don't work because they are lazy and uncreative as an innate personality defect.
Again, being a good parent can take about as much time as anyone can put into it, especially in today's problematical society that is very anti-child, anti-health, and anti-community. Ask a few people who are actively raising young children if they need more make-work activities added to their day? :-)
"Most people will need to be given some artificial challange. And the success of MMOs shows that artificial challanges fill the void, at least for a time, but I'm not sure where that leads us."
I'd certainly agree that some people are good at making worlds others want to spend time exploring. It's a good question how we should feel about this. What aspects of that come from creating pleasure traps unhealthily full of supernormal stimuli irresistible to abnormally distressed people?
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
Still, see for more support that mindless schooling and mindless work reduce people in their potentials to set their own directions:
"Human Resources 3/9"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-4Hv9pDicA
I feel that most people don't need to be "given" challenges when they are healthy and raised in a healthy community; I feel they will in that case be able to find or invent their own meaningful activities. (I'm not saying the USA approaches that though in many places...) It would be a good question how to prove that to your skeptical satisfaction (which is not an unreasonable demand).
To my mind, the fact that we generally only see fairly good people as very successful doesn't really tell us what we can conclude about the rest of humanity's aspirations and proclivities in a different setting that is less "winner takes all". Generally, the biggest material success is also not the very best in a field, who may languish as mavericks, but people of some substantial talent who were lucky enough to have substantial financial backing and good social networks and who were willing to make the right compromises for material success. Bill Gates is an example of that -- someone of substantial talent (but not the very best say compared to Dan Ingalls), born to wealth, and in the right place at the righ
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"There were also less than 0.1% of the current population of the area, and they had little use for wood beyond using it as a basic structural material and occasional fuel for heat."
Exactly. The amount of resources was very abundant relative to the need, and so people did not have to work very hard to get wood. Now apply that idea to cheap energy from LENR, and cheap 3D printing, and cheap nanotech material recycling, and cheap service robotics, and so on.
The human imagination is indeed the "ultimate resource" as economist Julian Simon said:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
With about seven billion people on the planet, many connected to the internet, we have more collective imagination than ever. So as a species, we are in that sense wealthier than ever...
"Again: China is developing a middle class. As China exits the cheap-labor market, many more countries are willing and able to pick up the slack"
China was the biggest single cheap labor pool around. Most of the remaining places for cheap labor have very little infrastructure. So, how long is that trend going to last?
Also, at some point, it does not matter how cheap the labor is if the quality standards can not be met for some reason. Related article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-it-in-america/8844/?single_page=true
"Tony explains that Maddie has a job [in the USA] for two reasons. First, when it comes to making fuel injectors, the company saves money and minimizes product damage by having both the precision and non-precision work done in the same place. Even if Mexican or Chinese workers could do Maddie's job more cheaply, shipping fragile, half-finished parts to another country for processing would make no sense. Second, Maddie is cheaper than a machine. It would be easy to buy a robotic arm that could take injector bodies and caps from a tray and place them precisely in a laser welder. Yet Standard would have to invest about $100,000 on the arm and a conveyance machine to bring parts to the welder and send them on to the next station. As is common in factories, Standard invests only in machinery that will earn back its cost within two years. For Tony, it's simple: Maddie makes less in two years than the machine would cost, so her job is safe -- for now. If the robotic machines become a little cheaper, or if demand for fuel injectors goes up and Standard starts running three shifts, then investing in those robots might make sense. "
So, even in the USA, many jobs could be completely automated if we wanted to. Ask yourself, it is really better that this single parent is away from her young children to save a $100,000 capital investment by someone? Would not the USA be a better place if the robot was doing that work and this person could spend more time with her children, friends, and neighbors? How many jobs are like that, or worse are just counter-productive like Bob Black wrote about in 1985 and others in the 1960s?
The cost of advanced robotics is also dropping very rapidly. Even toys are more and more pressed into service in real productive applications:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/03/13/1426252/lego-mindstorms-used-to-make-artificial-bones
"There is no vast conspiracy to defeat your idealistic vision..."
Did I say there was? Although it is true there are forces against it... As well as forces for it.
"... there are only the economic realities of efficiency and cost. The automation you envision will only happen when it becomes effective and inexpensive and not a moment before."
Well, total economic realities involve all externalities which should include things like pollution costs, health costs, social benefits costs for displaced
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
bartering never fails...quid pro quo!