Doesn't it seem wasteful to rely on tedious and sometimes ambiguous real world laws with a lot of overhead instead of mathematical laws?
Is this some sort of religious revelation? Like there is One True Way which mathematics can find? Because that philosophy's as old as Plato - and even Plato applied it to management of the real world better than you (Republic's a cool read, really!). Then observational science came along and the attempt to mould the world to some branch of mathematics turned into the rational use of mathematics as a tool to help model the thoroughly complex and ambiguous real world.
tl;dr Your beliefs are centuries out of date.
When merchants started accepting bitcoins, verifiers (because miners is a misnomer) started to see that their generated coins were worth something.
If they're "verifiers" then I would like you please to send me all your bitcoins for checking. Or are you saying that this form of verification is unique in finance in that it requires no audit? You can smell a cult a mile off when they insist on such absurd euphemisms.
Some keep their machines under dry ice.
It's like giving portable fans to people who mine.. sorry, verify... gold.
A bitcoin laundry already exists.
Which is sufficient reason why no government will accept it, ever. For who are you hiding your transaction details from?
Bitcoin would provide these same services that payment services, credit cards or banks do but with much less cost to the merchant and customer.
Why is there less cost? Please try to at least justify one thing you say.
I have lofty dreams of a world where people can send money abroad without having to pay 20+% in many cases
Your lofty dreams are my reality. Which world do you live on?
Where people can raise funds through services like paypal but not have their accounts arbitrarily frozen.
No, the ISP will just deny you connectivity. Or your computer will be confiscated. Anyway, since you'd be an idiot to accept potentially laundered money, people will be wanting to see some sort of accountability attached to transactions. The accountability services will be denied to you if you're seen to misbehave.
Also, people who leave a lot of money in Paypal accounts are idiots. And idiots will do even worse with the plaintext bitcoin wallet on their C:\ drive.
Where citizens in developing nations who already oppose their government do not have to pay for wars of genocide out of their own pockets as was the case in ex-Yugoslavia where authoritarian control over the money supply helped finance a terrible war and bring about the worst hyper-inflation in Europe since WWII.
Woah there, sparky, unresolved issue alert. Meanwhile during any bitcoin-age civil war each side will just go around stealing computers for bitcoins.
Bitcoin in some form is going to be adopted
I shall pump the value of my stock! I shall! Believe in me and make me rich!
Our aspiration for bitcoin is to provide competition to the current system making everything cheaper for all.
"Competition makes stuff cheaper" being the most common justification of capitalism and the capitalist's primary fallacy in the eyes of those who oppose capitalism. And there was you going on about how diverse you are. Just another Ayn Rand internet libertarian.
It's about cutting the middleman,
In a few cases. Mostly you'll still want one to do the same authentication, storage, exchange, etc.
democratising money
I can vote money for myself?
and handing back power to people
You sound like Thatcher. Privatising services means handing them back
The responses are assertion after assertion without substantiation.
Overall, I believe the properties of this currency will significantly add to the wealth of all peoples, especially those less well off.
Why especially the less well off? Are they particularl known for having the sort of computing knowledge not to have a keylogger installed and their money stolen?
Ideologies should not be a point of contention, especially when we all see the immense prolific value of a more efficient means of commerce.
What is efficient about the way bitcoins are processed?
Although bitcoin is still underdeveloped, everything visible in the modern world can be adapted using bitcoins as a backbone.
What about government market regulation to prevent widespread pump-and-dump, plundering, etc.? Your argument is as complete as, "Everything in the world would be better if I were just promoted to benevolent dictator for life."
(clearing houses, security, fraud protection, interest bearing accounts...) continuing to be offered, but with far less overhead.
What overhead?
Gold is not a currency in my mind. It is a store of value.
In what sense is it not a currency? In what sense is currency not a store of value? Gold is not a yellow elephant; it is a blue dolphin.
Bitcoin is backed by the fact that is has unique properties as well:
Backed in what sense? And half the properties are wrong or meaningless:
Decentralized
How do I use bitcoin without a computer and a network? Who owns and regulates the hardware factories and the networks?
No bank holidays
Are you ill? I just gave 50p to someone last Sunday.
International
Unlike the Euro, I guess the bitcoin can be used (that's used, as in because everyone has electricity and a satellite dish and shit) in the middle of sub-Sarahan Africa, or something, yes?
No concept of borders
Aren't you asking for regulation?
Divisible
Who controls how divisible it is? Put another way, why can't I give you 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000001 of a bitcoin toward repayment of a debt?
True micro-transactions possible (new markets feasible)
As opposed to... fake ones?
New privacy model
That's certainly true. Everyone has to have the security knowledge of a bank.
Private identity yet transparent
Get your head out of the clouds a moment and examine what happens when you buy something over the Internet. How many ways can your identity be traced?
Secure
Stop it.
You do not have to trust merchant sites (Sony - Playstation) to protect your data
I don't anyway. If they are storing CC details in the clear and someone steals it, guess who isn't picking up the tab?
Fast Transactions
I think the computing power required in verifying a bitcoin transaction in an environment where the whole world uses bitcoins is going to just slightly exceed the current system.
No Charge backs
And here comes the libertarian caveat emptor bullshit we were all waiting for.
Oh, this is all too painful... maybe I'll read the rest if I can muster the energy.
Working below minimum wage is when you have to go out and get a job to survive and you're so desperate that you take something below what even the state considers reasonable for your survival. Choosing to spend time on free software projects voluntarily because they happen to interest you is not "working below minimum wage" - it's a hobby.
my writings on Wikipedia about building a better future for all
Wikipedia is the ultimate Objectivist dystopia. And Wales may be a slimy embezzler but at least he doesn't deny his admiration for Rand, so you can't plead ignorance.
You're acting like politicians who smear there enemies by pointing at anyone they dislike and shouting 'TERRORISTS!'
That's only bad when "terrorist" isn't well-defined or when the target doesn't fit the definition. But when a group of people act as self-righteous Ayn Rand-reading nerds then it's perfectly acceptable to call them self-righteous Ayn Rand-reading nerds.
We're all very diverse in the Bitcoin community,
Why is it that every single oddball group uses the defence, "We're all very diverse"? You're as diverse as any group of people who think bitcoin is a good idea can be - and that's not very diverse.
but we recognise the potential of this currency how others recognise the potential of something like Esperanto or Linux.
Adoption of Esperanto was an interesting idea for cross-border communication which evolved into... everyone speaking English. Linux is and always was a pragmatic operating system project based on a Free software licence which has resulted in a very usable operating system. Bitcoin has... no redeeming feature whatever. It's not untraceable; it's not secure (unless you regard users' machines as less crackable than a bank's); it's not scaleable... so what is it, apart from a get-rich-quick scheme for its founders?
Your Ad Homineum attacks on our personalities are counter-productive for any kind of sensible debate about the merits of this system.
It is very important, in studying any human system, to examine the personalities of its leaders. It would be irrelevant ad hominem to dismiss you because you are, say, fat or Asian or whatever. But to consider bitcoin's political culture is entirely appropriate.
And besides, let's say someone else disturbs it for me.
Your argument seems to be something like, "If copyright infringement is OK then I'm not at fault for stealing your car as long as I get someone else to do it for me." What?
More often than not, the method of acquisition of an object decides whether the act of acquisition is moral/legal or not.
But not whether the idea/object/etc is illegal. If there is no harm done in the method of acquisition then it is absurd for the acquisition to be illegal too. Making a copy of a sequence of bits spoken by a friend harms no-one, except in the "every day you don't give me $5 you are harming me because then I'm $5 poorer each day" meaningless entitlement sense.
if he fires me, I obtain his banking details, and I cause the same event to happen, it suddenly becomes morally and legally bad. It's the same stream of data flowing down the tubes, a similar stream of electrons passing through the lattice of metal ions. I don't know how metal molecules encode my employer's consent. Do you?
What are you talking about? You're modifying part of a storage medium representing your employer's bank balance, depriving him of the enjoyment of the higher balance. You're editing part of a storage medium representing your bank balance, but the storage medium isn't under your authority to modify. This is nothing like copying using your media while maintaining the original.
What are you talking about? You've disturbed the arrangement of molecules of the car I was hoping to use. If you can make a copy of the car without disturbing mine, please feel free - I won't care.
Classical theft isn't theft because you're using something of mine. It's theft because you're denying me the ability to use it.
There is no meaningful difference between 111001101010 on my drive because I happened to come up with it using a PRNG and 111001101010 on my drive because i torrented Britney Fucking Spears.
I assume the only purpose of this article is to make RIAA look dumb by trying to suggest that there is such a thing as an illegal sequence of 0s and 1s, especially when it may be exactly the same in meaning as a legal sequence.
Wow, you seriously underestimate the effort needed to maintain a household before modern appliances and conveniences don't you.
Justify that statement. I want to know what it is I do that should be taking all day every day if I didn't have a modern appliance.
Your belief is typically chauvinist: to think that women were chained to the kitchen or the washroom until some clever men saved them with their cunning automated substitutes for women. But it was the dearth of men during war and a consequent change of attitude both by and toward women which brought them out of the house. Then employers saw that they could drive down wages with a labour market twice the size, and what was temporarily a choice became an obligation if you want enough money to run a household. Most women have now lost the opportunity for a full motherhood, and we have pride in motherhood substituted with a pride in "juggling work and family" - about as safe for society as "juggling piloting and small-bore rifling".
The average male age 20 can expect to live for an extra 15 years compared to the 1900, the average female for an extra 20 years.
It's convenient to choose "just over 100 years" because then you get to factor in all the deaths of WW1, the influenza pandemic, etc. For the US, compare the white male at 1920. He gets around 10 more years. All the pain of modern living just for 10 more years at the end of your life? No thanks! And not even 10 more years of living, because religious mores the laws on which they are based mean that in almost all developed countries we don't prolong life based on quality of life but based on the idea that life must be preserved.
(Also note what's happening recently, perhaps using more recent data.)
Air conditioning.
That's it? That's what you have to offer? Fucking air conditioning? One side of our family has an apartment on the top floor of a block in a certain Mediterranean city. It's no longer the permanent home, but that generation have (the fates seemed to decree) always had a top-floor apartment. And never with air conditioning. You know what you do when it's hot? You don't sit in direct sunlight, you take some clothes off and you open the window. Or you cool yourself with water. It's free and it takes advantage of the fact that you're an endotherm.
Many people consider this one of the most valuable parts of living. So congratulations on showing that your definition of a "good life" is not in sync with that of many people.
I asked a question. Well done on reading it as an assertion. Are you sure that the yearning for travel is not something engineered into us by alienating us from those living next door and by constantly pummeling tourism adverts at us? Is it actually human nature to want to move around the world? The question is far more subtle than, "Do people today say they want to travel?"
(If you don't believe that such programming occurs, consider asking a white man in apartheid South Africa, "Do you agree with the system of South African apartheid?" Ask the same question in England. If you're born into and develop in a society with a particular strong opinion, and you're taught that the opinion is to your advantage, you take on that opinion.)
I know quite a few people who now lead successful lives due to treatment but a century ago would have been locked up.
Have you ever heard of the LA county jail being called the "largest de facto mental hospital in the world"? Then people were identified as insane and locked up. Today we regard people as free to behave as they please, hold them responsible for their crimes, and then lock them up. If your friends now lead successful lives it is either because they had the benefit of loving intervention or they didn't experience
The issue of Mental Health Acts being the only official way of locking someone up indefinitely without being found guilty in a properly executed court trial... could have been tackled carefully over the last 30-40 years within a modern framework of human rights. It was instead used as an excuse to allow people with mental health difficulties to roam the streets until they commit a crime, then, as you say, lock them up in a regular jail.
If people were to regard locking-up as protection (of society in most cases; of yourself in a few) rather than punishment, justice would be far more just. "Not guilty by reason of insanity" is rather outmoded: it assumes that what matters is whether you are rationally responsible (using quasi-religious notions of responsibility) rather than whether you actually did something harmful. The insanity aspect is relevant only to (i) whether you can defend yourself properly; (ii) what your sentence should be.
Wait a fucking second. If I donate something to a US non-profit with clear mission statement/statement of incorporation/whatever and the charity decides to just give away my donation to the first person to visit a web page, aren't they behaving fraudulently?
Of course a donor doesn't get to say exactly how his donation is used, but it surely must fall within the stated purpose for which donations are accepted? Or are US charities entirely caveat donor?
And because of that we can achieve what a man 100 years ago could only dream of.
A small proportion of us can achieve it. And much of what we can achieve does not reduce the suffering of man.
We work fewer hours than the average man 100 years back could imagine.
No, we don't. The organised labour movement which actually reduced working hours is older than you seem to think. Pay attention. Just before WW1, people were working around 50 hours per week, depending on area of employment. Now I don't know a soul today who works less than 40-45 hours a week. Add to that the fact that ongoing education is effectively compulsory to get and maintain any sort of steady job today, whereas back then it was a luxury for the privileged few, and you'll find that we're spending more hours per week toward the practice of wage slavery than one hundred years.
Women are no longer slaves of the household thanks to devices that shave hours off of household tasks.
Obvious sexist thinking. Women are no longer "slaves of the household" because war killed lots of men, not because they no longer had to wash the dishes. Compare improved worker conditions following the Black Death.
Our standard of health would make a person from the early 1900s weep in joy, especially if they have a toothache.
It's true that universal healthcare services have provided analgesics to more people. The progress of adult medicine is consistently overrated, though - life expectancy improvements have mostly been about reducing infant mortality.
We live in much greater comfort
Define "comfort".
and can travel around.
So what?
The mentally ill aren't locked in dark asylums
Well, not always. Today we have "care in the community", a euphemism for making them walk the streets until they commit some crime and can be locked up. I know it's difficult for people who have swallowed the fallacy of the rational human mind to believe it, but some people are a danger to themselves or others and need residential care, sometimes involuntarily.
and the poor can even get government funding (rather than the historical option of starving to death or begging a rich person for help).
Sometimes. Laws since the 1980s across the Western world have severely restricted support for the poor.
The average person can learn more than they could ever before
If they have the time, and are not distracted.
practical access to education is less restricted than ever before.
What is "access to education"? Do you mean availability of books? It's far harder to get a good university education in the UK than, say, 30 years ago, when university access was granted on merit rather than requiring loans etc.
No longer using any private healthcare here. NHS is fine, thanks. And if the Tories and their Thatcherite New Labour spawn manage to destroy the NHS, I'll move elsewhere. And if the interests served by destroying state healthcare systems manage to create a world without a decent national health service anywhere, the world will no longer be of interest to me and I shall welcome death from whatever condition befalls me.
Incidentally, last time I was an NHS in-patient it was awful not having private coverage. As a vegan my choice of food was restricted, while the private wing down the hall had a wonderfully choice-filled menu. Oh wait, no, the kind nurse just wandered into the private wing and took some food from there for me. But then there was the problem that the private patients had cleaner operating tables and an altogether better class of doctor. Oh wait, no, the same doctors were operating on everyone to the same standards.
BUPA can offer you reduced waiting times on some things and an altogether more hotel-like experience wherever you're staying the night. It may make you feel like you're getting better treatment because the part that really matters happens while you're under anaesthetic. Frankly, you'd be better off staying in the NHS ward and using the money you've saved on a hotel to rest up a couple of days before returning home.
A policy for a healthy 20 year old is less than $100/month. Firstly you have to be healthy to (i) be offered such a cheap plan; (ii) to be able to work to afford it. Then recall that you are quoting the base price of the plan, not the actual price of healthcare once deductibles/copays/all that bullshit actually comes to presenting you with the bill.
So, let's say you're healthy and you're intelligent and you manage to find a job. Then you get a horrible chronic condition. Then you have to be able to afford the increases in premiums because you keep claiming. Oh, and all those regular deductibles won't be going away either.
In short, you are both lucky and stupid. And you're loud about it. You're not helping America's stereotype.
Think of food, housing, clothes, everything you need to live. Don't you have to pay for those?
Not if you can't afford them, no. You'll get these things paid for you, either as specific items (e.g. UK's housing benefit) or according to your choosing out of an allowance (e.g. UK's jobseeker's allowance). You don't pay for healthcare out of an allowance like this because costs are not regular, steady, predictable and comparatively low.
(Of course, in the UK's case, you are entitled to NHS treatment without extra charges no matter what your means, though other countries equally successfully provide state healthcare while requiring the wealthier to make specific extra contributions.)
Welcome to the 20th century and the welfare state, America.
Assumption of privileged background. I stopped reading here and skipped to the last paragraph, as it's clear you don't live in the real world. My assumption was confirmed:
Everyone I know has health care they're happy with
In the real world, many people don't have a "parents policy" to be on and people can have serious health conditions from a young age which preclude most insurance options or eventually drive their premiums up to unaffordability.
(And I say this as someone who was born into a family with private healthcare in a country where most people don't have it. I was lucky and know it. You are lucky and don't know it.)
I'm sorry that it's so tough for you guys in the US. Here in the UK, Cameron (like Reagan's mini-me Thatcher and various oddly-admired gentlemen all the way back to half-American Churchill) is trying his best to turn us into the 51st state.
But it turns out that quite a lot of British people love the NHS. And, imperfect as all human endeavours will be, so do I. And I don't just love it in principle - I, like almost everyone in the UK, have experienced and benefitted from it.
(I also have experienced US healthcare. Oh dear. The US does a few things very right - why must it get some things so wrong?)
You're missing the point entirely. It's OK to use other people's services, but that's entirely different from relying on multinationals.
(1) In one case you're choosing to give someone else the task but you could still do it yourself, even if you don't do such a good job of it. In the event that the other guy becomes unavailable and/or your stuff develops a fault you could still fix it;
(2) Relying on businesses in the local community isn't the same as relying on a large corporation, particularly when it comes to bargaining and balance of power.
One hundred years ago you could plot a small sphere round where you are and stuff would carry on even if every man outside that sphere stopped working. Today your sphere is going to have to cover the world. The modern man is the very model of enabled impotence.
It's better than the 1990s and it's HTML 1.0 and animated GIFs. It''s better than the 2000s as we get ever more sophisticated web apps and usability by devices other than PCs...
I recall first browsing the web while mobile around 1998, sitting in a McDonalds in London with a Psion Series 5. It was perfectly usable on a handheld device in the late '90s before the bloat of nascent Web 2.0 and reliance on Javascript made sites too heavy and complex. We're only now creeping back to where we once were in terms of usability on less powerful devices.
Also, cloudy web apps are a horrible idea, both technologically and in terms of all the freedom arguments RMS has already made about them. But if you don't already agree with this then you're hardly likely to change your mind right now.
Inflation may have been 5.5% last year, but wages rose by 16%.
Are you slow? Concentrate on inflation of essentials, which is what all those desperate people that capitalism has saved with slavery will be wanting to buy. Next consider whether the wage rises have been across the board, whether they've been engineered, etc.
In fact where wages are rising rapidly there is bound to be significant inflation of prices.
caramuru, if you're offended by the bare and harsh fact that half the people are simply not that bright (and that you can't base a society, say, on assuming that those people simply need to try harder), at least write a decent defence. In particular:
(i) I don't know about your country, but in mine "average" isn't synonymous with "mean". To know which measure of central tendency is being selected, you observe the context. In my case, by the fact that I've used a definition based on 50% being below, I must be referring to the median;
(ii) Anyway, most measures of intelligence seem to be symmetrically distributed. Which, of course, is sufficient for mean to equal median - it doesn't matter whether the distribution is normal.
Oh please. Even letters were always dependent on some organization to deliver them.
What sort of organisation is needed for you with your horse to provide a service taking a letter from A to B?
Ditto for the "open Internet".
The Internet was an end stage, but it was still much better when it was about distributed autonomous peers rather than a few private backbone providers and Facebooks.
And the majority of people never built their own radio set.
But many people could and many people did. And if you couldn't yourself, there'd be someone local to fix yours.
People didn't change, technology did.
The patented automatic ass-wiper was built and, even though it never really worked as well as the human hand, people forgot how to wipe their ass.
And that abused labour has seen their wages raise in the double digits per year.
If it wasn't for their manufacturing, they'd still live in an oppressive country, but living in even worse conditions.
"We treat the slaves better than the previous master, thus our slave trade is justified." Also, when you dismantle the security of the state - you may recall that China was once fairly socialist in the way it provided for its people - then of course people will end up in worse conditions and have to flee to exploitation in the city.
The British Library has just handed the copyright on a load of uncopyrighted work to Google, and Google in return gets exclusive commercial rights to the work. This is awful. And for only £6 million, by their estimate, they could have done it themselves - considering the broad range of interested parties, donations could easily raise that amount. Their effort would be far better, too, if the standards of Google's old archives are anything to go by.
This is just another example of the British "public private partnership", where one guy does an under-the-table deal with another guy to do something seemingly simple and relatively inexpensive in an unnecessarily convoluted and costly manner, ending up with a product/service far worse than it could otherwise have been.
The guilty party is the British people for allowing the government to engage in an ongoing sale of the country.
Fuck off, Google. It was OK when all you wanted to do is control the future - the future's not that interesting, if the last three decades can be extrapolated - but now you want to control the past.
The government is going broke because it is spending more than it takes in, period.
And I listed some reasons why.
Giving the incapable more comfortable lives won't fix that at all
Giving people more comfortable lives is pretty much the goal of society. How you define "people" in this sentence is up for debate: some have excluded blacks, or Jews, or homosexuals, or cripples, etc. You appear to exclude at least cripples. Try harder.
Oh, and of course it'll improve it - though more is needed to "fix it". You give people help when they're incapable and they maintain a certain standard of health which makes them less burdensome to everyone from family up to a national level. Many people can be productive despite chronic illnesses after a sustained period of rehabilitation. Their carers can often be productive outside their caring role providing they're given appropriate support. Many social welfare systems understand the need for the state to have a relationship with a family which supports dependents: it's the choice between an entirely destitute family and a responsible family which takes the burden off the state and which can, as a whole, continue contributing to society at large.
You are, of course, free to donate all of your money to that cause. You're just not free to donate mine.
You have money because the people around you let you have it. This is how all property works in reality: certain property rights are protected because people as a whole regard them as beneficial on balance. If you stop doing what society demands in exchange then society will turn against you and stop offering you protection, and you'll lose what you consider to be "your money". (If you want to see this illustrated, stop paying tax.)
It has ruined you. If you're posting on/. as an educated geek with a good job and a comfortable life then you are one of the few winners of the system. Most of the West is miserable with no voice loud enough to be heard.
The media in every regime give the impression that almost everyone is content with that regime, from the US through the USSR all the way to DPRK. Spend time providing help to or even stopping to have a conversation with the homeless, the chronically sick, the nonviolent prisoner. Then move on to the non-smart - it sounds mean, but half the population are intellectually below average and likely have extremely limited opportunity for it. You'll find that people are struggling and miserable. Not yet at the stage of mass consciousness and disloyalty, but that's yet to come.
I'd summarise our problem in three words: reliance on corporation. We suck at supporting ourselves for our own sake, whether that means individually or at a community / region / national level. Since the '50s local community has deteriorated, and since the '80s we've lost a sense of national community. We're now stuck in this utterly false mindset that the only way to get anything done is to throw money at some magnificent private company to do badly what we've lost the power to do ourselves. Need to talk to someone? Your voice and a knock on the door is no longer good enough. Nor a letter. Nor building your own radio set. Nor even an open access Internet. No, that all requires too much thinking. Now you're tempted to get a shiny ready-made throwaway toy built at a cost which could only be achieved by choosing abused labour in an oppressive country.
In short, we're lazy and we suck. We so far following the progress of every other civilisation (read the original, check out how well he'd predicted the next half-decade through analysis of other civilisations, and identify where the West is now) into destruction.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't it seem wasteful to rely on tedious and sometimes ambiguous real world laws with a lot of overhead instead of mathematical laws?
Is this some sort of religious revelation? Like there is One True Way which mathematics can find? Because that philosophy's as old as Plato - and even Plato applied it to management of the real world better than you (Republic's a cool read, really!). Then observational science came along and the attempt to mould the world to some branch of mathematics turned into the rational use of mathematics as a tool to help model the thoroughly complex and ambiguous real world.
tl;dr Your beliefs are centuries out of date.
When merchants started accepting bitcoins, verifiers (because miners is a misnomer) started to see that their generated coins were worth something.
If they're "verifiers" then I would like you please to send me all your bitcoins for checking. Or are you saying that this form of verification is unique in finance in that it requires no audit? You can smell a cult a mile off when they insist on such absurd euphemisms.
Some keep their machines under dry ice.
It's like giving portable fans to people who mine.. sorry, verify... gold.
A bitcoin laundry already exists.
Which is sufficient reason why no government will accept it, ever. For who are you hiding your transaction details from?
Bitcoin would provide these same services that payment services, credit cards or banks do but with much less cost to the merchant and customer.
Why is there less cost? Please try to at least justify one thing you say.
I have lofty dreams of a world where people can send money abroad without having to pay 20+% in many cases
Your lofty dreams are my reality. Which world do you live on?
Where people can raise funds through services like paypal but not have their accounts arbitrarily frozen.
No, the ISP will just deny you connectivity. Or your computer will be confiscated. Anyway, since you'd be an idiot to accept potentially laundered money, people will be wanting to see some sort of accountability attached to transactions. The accountability services will be denied to you if you're seen to misbehave.
Also, people who leave a lot of money in Paypal accounts are idiots. And idiots will do even worse with the plaintext bitcoin wallet on their C:\ drive.
Where citizens in developing nations who already oppose their government do not have to pay for wars of genocide out of their own pockets as was the case in ex-Yugoslavia where authoritarian control over the money supply helped finance a terrible war and bring about the worst hyper-inflation in Europe since WWII.
Woah there, sparky, unresolved issue alert. Meanwhile during any bitcoin-age civil war each side will just go around stealing computers for bitcoins.
Bitcoin in some form is going to be adopted
I shall pump the value of my stock! I shall! Believe in me and make me rich!
Our aspiration for bitcoin is to provide competition to the current system making everything cheaper for all.
"Competition makes stuff cheaper" being the most common justification of capitalism and the capitalist's primary fallacy in the eyes of those who oppose capitalism. And there was you going on about how diverse you are. Just another Ayn Rand internet libertarian.
It's about cutting the middleman,
In a few cases. Mostly you'll still want one to do the same authentication, storage, exchange, etc.
democratising money
I can vote money for myself?
and handing back power to people
You sound like Thatcher. Privatising services means handing them back
The responses are assertion after assertion without substantiation.
Overall, I believe the properties of this currency will significantly add to the wealth of all peoples, especially those less well off.
Why especially the less well off? Are they particularl known for having the sort of computing knowledge not to have a keylogger installed and their money stolen?
Ideologies should not be a point of contention, especially when we all see the immense prolific value of a more efficient means of commerce.
What is efficient about the way bitcoins are processed?
Although bitcoin is still underdeveloped, everything visible in the modern world can be adapted using bitcoins as a backbone.
What about government market regulation to prevent widespread pump-and-dump, plundering, etc.? Your argument is as complete as, "Everything in the world would be better if I were just promoted to benevolent dictator for life."
(clearing houses, security, fraud protection, interest bearing accounts...) continuing to be offered, but with far less overhead.
What overhead?
Gold is not a currency in my mind. It is a store of value.
In what sense is it not a currency? In what sense is currency not a store of value? Gold is not a yellow elephant; it is a blue dolphin.
Bitcoin is backed by the fact that is has unique properties as well:
Backed in what sense? And half the properties are wrong or meaningless:
Decentralized
How do I use bitcoin without a computer and a network? Who owns and regulates the hardware factories and the networks?
No bank holidays
Are you ill? I just gave 50p to someone last Sunday.
International
Unlike the Euro, I guess the bitcoin can be used (that's used, as in because everyone has electricity and a satellite dish and shit) in the middle of sub-Sarahan Africa, or something, yes?
No concept of borders
Aren't you asking for regulation?
Divisible
Who controls how divisible it is? Put another way, why can't I give you 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000001 of a bitcoin toward repayment of a debt?
True micro-transactions possible (new markets feasible)
As opposed to... fake ones?
New privacy model
That's certainly true. Everyone has to have the security knowledge of a bank.
Private identity yet transparent
Get your head out of the clouds a moment and examine what happens when you buy something over the Internet. How many ways can your identity be traced?
Secure
Stop it.
You do not have to trust merchant sites (Sony - Playstation) to protect your data
I don't anyway. If they are storing CC details in the clear and someone steals it, guess who isn't picking up the tab?
Fast Transactions
I think the computing power required in verifying a bitcoin transaction in an environment where the whole world uses bitcoins is going to just slightly exceed the current system.
No Charge backs
And here comes the libertarian caveat emptor bullshit we were all waiting for.
Oh, this is all too painful... maybe I'll read the rest if I can muster the energy.
Ergo theoretically we could run the entire economy on a single bitcoin :)
I see your propaganda and raise you a question: how many bitcoins do you hold, genjix?
working below minimum wage on free software
Working below minimum wage is when you have to go out and get a job to survive and you're so desperate that you take something below what even the state considers reasonable for your survival. Choosing to spend time on free software projects voluntarily because they happen to interest you is not "working below minimum wage" - it's a hobby.
my writings on Wikipedia about building a better future for all
Wikipedia is the ultimate Objectivist dystopia. And Wales may be a slimy embezzler but at least he doesn't deny his admiration for Rand, so you can't plead ignorance.
You're acting like politicians who smear there enemies by pointing at anyone they dislike and shouting 'TERRORISTS!'
That's only bad when "terrorist" isn't well-defined or when the target doesn't fit the definition. But when a group of people act as self-righteous Ayn Rand-reading nerds then it's perfectly acceptable to call them self-righteous Ayn Rand-reading nerds.
We're all very diverse in the Bitcoin community,
Why is it that every single oddball group uses the defence, "We're all very diverse"? You're as diverse as any group of people who think bitcoin is a good idea can be - and that's not very diverse.
but we recognise the potential of this currency how others recognise the potential of something like Esperanto or Linux.
Adoption of Esperanto was an interesting idea for cross-border communication which evolved into... everyone speaking English. Linux is and always was a pragmatic operating system project based on a Free software licence which has resulted in a very usable operating system. Bitcoin has... no redeeming feature whatever. It's not untraceable; it's not secure (unless you regard users' machines as less crackable than a bank's); it's not scaleable... so what is it, apart from a get-rich-quick scheme for its founders?
Your Ad Homineum attacks on our personalities are counter-productive for any kind of sensible debate about the merits of this system.
It is very important, in studying any human system, to examine the personalities of its leaders. It would be irrelevant ad hominem to dismiss you because you are, say, fat or Asian or whatever. But to consider bitcoin's political culture is entirely appropriate.
And besides, let's say someone else disturbs it for me.
Your argument seems to be something like, "If copyright infringement is OK then I'm not at fault for stealing your car as long as I get someone else to do it for me." What?
More often than not, the method of acquisition of an object decides whether the act of acquisition is moral/legal or not.
But not whether the idea/object/etc is illegal. If there is no harm done in the method of acquisition then it is absurd for the acquisition to be illegal too. Making a copy of a sequence of bits spoken by a friend harms no-one, except in the "every day you don't give me $5 you are harming me because then I'm $5 poorer each day" meaningless entitlement sense.
if he fires me, I obtain his banking details, and I cause the same event to happen, it suddenly becomes morally and legally bad. It's the same stream of data flowing down the tubes, a similar stream of electrons passing through the lattice of metal ions. I don't know how metal molecules encode my employer's consent. Do you?
What are you talking about? You're modifying part of a storage medium representing your employer's bank balance, depriving him of the enjoyment of the higher balance. You're editing part of a storage medium representing your bank balance, but the storage medium isn't under your authority to modify. This is nothing like copying using your media while maintaining the original.
What are you talking about? You've disturbed the arrangement of molecules of the car I was hoping to use. If you can make a copy of the car without disturbing mine, please feel free - I won't care.
Classical theft isn't theft because you're using something of mine. It's theft because you're denying me the ability to use it.
There is no meaningful difference between 111001101010 on my drive because I happened to come up with it using a PRNG and 111001101010 on my drive because i torrented Britney Fucking Spears.
I assume the only purpose of this article is to make RIAA look dumb by trying to suggest that there is such a thing as an illegal sequence of 0s and 1s, especially when it may be exactly the same in meaning as a legal sequence.
Couldn't agree more.
Wow, you seriously underestimate the effort needed to maintain a household before modern appliances and conveniences don't you.
Justify that statement. I want to know what it is I do that should be taking all day every day if I didn't have a modern appliance.
Your belief is typically chauvinist: to think that women were chained to the kitchen or the washroom until some clever men saved them with their cunning automated substitutes for women. But it was the dearth of men during war and a consequent change of attitude both by and toward women which brought them out of the house. Then employers saw that they could drive down wages with a labour market twice the size, and what was temporarily a choice became an obligation if you want enough money to run a household. Most women have now lost the opportunity for a full motherhood, and we have pride in motherhood substituted with a pride in "juggling work and family" - about as safe for society as "juggling piloting and small-bore rifling".
The average male age 20 can expect to live for an extra 15 years compared to the 1900, the average female for an extra 20 years.
It's convenient to choose "just over 100 years" because then you get to factor in all the deaths of WW1, the influenza pandemic, etc. For the US, compare the white male at 1920. He gets around 10 more years. All the pain of modern living just for 10 more years at the end of your life? No thanks! And not even 10 more years of living, because religious mores the laws on which they are based mean that in almost all developed countries we don't prolong life based on quality of life but based on the idea that life must be preserved.
(Also note what's happening recently, perhaps using more recent data.)
Air conditioning.
That's it? That's what you have to offer? Fucking air conditioning? One side of our family has an apartment on the top floor of a block in a certain Mediterranean city. It's no longer the permanent home, but that generation have (the fates seemed to decree) always had a top-floor apartment. And never with air conditioning. You know what you do when it's hot? You don't sit in direct sunlight, you take some clothes off and you open the window. Or you cool yourself with water. It's free and it takes advantage of the fact that you're an endotherm.
Many people consider this one of the most valuable parts of living. So congratulations on showing that your definition of a "good life" is not in sync with that of many people.
I asked a question. Well done on reading it as an assertion. Are you sure that the yearning for travel is not something engineered into us by alienating us from those living next door and by constantly pummeling tourism adverts at us? Is it actually human nature to want to move around the world? The question is far more subtle than, "Do people today say they want to travel?"
(If you don't believe that such programming occurs, consider asking a white man in apartheid South Africa, "Do you agree with the system of South African apartheid?" Ask the same question in England. If you're born into and develop in a society with a particular strong opinion, and you're taught that the opinion is to your advantage, you take on that opinion.)
I know quite a few people who now lead successful lives due to treatment but a century ago would have been locked up.
Have you ever heard of the LA county jail being called the "largest de facto mental hospital in the world"? Then people were identified as insane and locked up. Today we regard people as free to behave as they please, hold them responsible for their crimes, and then lock them up. If your friends now lead successful lives it is either because they had the benefit of loving intervention or they didn't experience
The issue of Mental Health Acts being the only official way of locking someone up indefinitely without being found guilty in a properly executed court trial... could have been tackled carefully over the last 30-40 years within a modern framework of human rights. It was instead used as an excuse to allow people with mental health difficulties to roam the streets until they commit a crime, then, as you say, lock them up in a regular jail.
If people were to regard locking-up as protection (of society in most cases; of yourself in a few) rather than punishment, justice would be far more just. "Not guilty by reason of insanity" is rather outmoded: it assumes that what matters is whether you are rationally responsible (using quasi-religious notions of responsibility) rather than whether you actually did something harmful. The insanity aspect is relevant only to (i) whether you can defend yourself properly; (ii) what your sentence should be.
Wait a fucking second. If I donate something to a US non-profit with clear mission statement/statement of incorporation/whatever and the charity decides to just give away my donation to the first person to visit a web page, aren't they behaving fraudulently?
Of course a donor doesn't get to say exactly how his donation is used, but it surely must fall within the stated purpose for which donations are accepted? Or are US charities entirely caveat donor?
And because of that we can achieve what a man 100 years ago could only dream of.
A small proportion of us can achieve it. And much of what we can achieve does not reduce the suffering of man.
We work fewer hours than the average man 100 years back could imagine.
No, we don't. The organised labour movement which actually reduced working hours is older than you seem to think. Pay attention. Just before WW1, people were working around 50 hours per week, depending on area of employment. Now I don't know a soul today who works less than 40-45 hours a week. Add to that the fact that ongoing education is effectively compulsory to get and maintain any sort of steady job today, whereas back then it was a luxury for the privileged few, and you'll find that we're spending more hours per week toward the practice of wage slavery than one hundred years.
Women are no longer slaves of the household thanks to devices that shave hours off of household tasks.
Obvious sexist thinking. Women are no longer "slaves of the household" because war killed lots of men, not because they no longer had to wash the dishes. Compare improved worker conditions following the Black Death.
Our standard of health would make a person from the early 1900s weep in joy, especially if they have a toothache.
It's true that universal healthcare services have provided analgesics to more people. The progress of adult medicine is consistently overrated, though - life expectancy improvements have mostly been about reducing infant mortality.
We live in much greater comfort
Define "comfort".
and can travel around.
So what?
The mentally ill aren't locked in dark asylums
Well, not always. Today we have "care in the community", a euphemism for making them walk the streets until they commit some crime and can be locked up. I know it's difficult for people who have swallowed the fallacy of the rational human mind to believe it, but some people are a danger to themselves or others and need residential care, sometimes involuntarily.
But thanks to privatisation of certain residential care facilities, we witness precisely the abuse of a hundred years ago.
and the poor can even get government funding (rather than the historical option of starving to death or begging a rich person for help).
Sometimes. Laws since the 1980s across the Western world have severely restricted support for the poor.
The average person can learn more than they could ever before
If they have the time, and are not distracted.
practical access to education is less restricted than ever before.
What is "access to education"? Do you mean availability of books? It's far harder to get a good university education in the UK than, say, 30 years ago, when university access was granted on merit rather than requiring loans etc.
No longer using any private healthcare here. NHS is fine, thanks. And if the Tories and their Thatcherite New Labour spawn manage to destroy the NHS, I'll move elsewhere. And if the interests served by destroying state healthcare systems manage to create a world without a decent national health service anywhere, the world will no longer be of interest to me and I shall welcome death from whatever condition befalls me.
Incidentally, last time I was an NHS in-patient it was awful not having private coverage. As a vegan my choice of food was restricted, while the private wing down the hall had a wonderfully choice-filled menu. Oh wait, no, the kind nurse just wandered into the private wing and took some food from there for me. But then there was the problem that the private patients had cleaner operating tables and an altogether better class of doctor. Oh wait, no, the same doctors were operating on everyone to the same standards.
BUPA can offer you reduced waiting times on some things and an altogether more hotel-like experience wherever you're staying the night. It may make you feel like you're getting better treatment because the part that really matters happens while you're under anaesthetic. Frankly, you'd be better off staying in the NHS ward and using the money you've saved on a hotel to rest up a couple of days before returning home.
A policy for a healthy 20 year old is less than $100/month. Firstly you have to be healthy to (i) be offered such a cheap plan; (ii) to be able to work to afford it. Then recall that you are quoting the base price of the plan, not the actual price of healthcare once deductibles/copays/all that bullshit actually comes to presenting you with the bill.
So, let's say you're healthy and you're intelligent and you manage to find a job. Then you get a horrible chronic condition. Then you have to be able to afford the increases in premiums because you keep claiming. Oh, and all those regular deductibles won't be going away either.
In short, you are both lucky and stupid. And you're loud about it. You're not helping America's stereotype.
Think of food, housing, clothes, everything you need to live. Don't you have to pay for those?
Not if you can't afford them, no. You'll get these things paid for you, either as specific items (e.g. UK's housing benefit) or according to your choosing out of an allowance (e.g. UK's jobseeker's allowance). You don't pay for healthcare out of an allowance like this because costs are not regular, steady, predictable and comparatively low.
(Of course, in the UK's case, you are entitled to NHS treatment without extra charges no matter what your means, though other countries equally successfully provide state healthcare while requiring the wealthier to make specific extra contributions.)
Welcome to the 20th century and the welfare state, America.
When you're young, be on your parents policy
Assumption of privileged background. I stopped reading here and skipped to the last paragraph, as it's clear you don't live in the real world. My assumption was confirmed:
Everyone I know has health care they're happy with
In the real world, many people don't have a "parents policy" to be on and people can have serious health conditions from a young age which preclude most insurance options or eventually drive their premiums up to unaffordability.
(And I say this as someone who was born into a family with private healthcare in a country where most people don't have it. I was lucky and know it. You are lucky and don't know it.)
So what you're saying is that he'll have to commit a more serious crime?
I'm sorry that it's so tough for you guys in the US. Here in the UK, Cameron (like Reagan's mini-me Thatcher and various oddly-admired gentlemen all the way back to half-American Churchill) is trying his best to turn us into the 51st state.
But it turns out that quite a lot of British people love the NHS. And, imperfect as all human endeavours will be, so do I. And I don't just love it in principle - I, like almost everyone in the UK, have experienced and benefitted from it.
(I also have experienced US healthcare. Oh dear. The US does a few things very right - why must it get some things so wrong?)
You're missing the point entirely. It's OK to use other people's services, but that's entirely different from relying on multinationals.
(1) In one case you're choosing to give someone else the task but you could still do it yourself, even if you don't do such a good job of it. In the event that the other guy becomes unavailable and/or your stuff develops a fault you could still fix it;
(2) Relying on businesses in the local community isn't the same as relying on a large corporation, particularly when it comes to bargaining and balance of power.
One hundred years ago you could plot a small sphere round where you are and stuff would carry on even if every man outside that sphere stopped working. Today your sphere is going to have to cover the world. The modern man is the very model of enabled impotence.
It's better than the 1990s and it's HTML 1.0 and animated GIFs. It''s better than the 2000s as we get ever more sophisticated web apps and usability by devices other than PCs...
I recall first browsing the web while mobile around 1998, sitting in a McDonalds in London with a Psion Series 5. It was perfectly usable on a handheld device in the late '90s before the bloat of nascent Web 2.0 and reliance on Javascript made sites too heavy and complex. We're only now creeping back to where we once were in terms of usability on less powerful devices.
Also, cloudy web apps are a horrible idea, both technologically and in terms of all the freedom arguments RMS has already made about them. But if you don't already agree with this then you're hardly likely to change your mind right now.
Inflation may have been 5.5% last year, but wages rose by 16%.
Are you slow? Concentrate on inflation of essentials, which is what all those desperate people that capitalism has saved with slavery will be wanting to buy. Next consider whether the wage rises have been across the board, whether they've been engineered, etc.
In fact where wages are rising rapidly there is bound to be significant inflation of prices.
You're the one touting the rise.
(+1, Judiciary)
caramuru, if you're offended by the bare and harsh fact that half the people are simply not that bright (and that you can't base a society, say, on assuming that those people simply need to try harder), at least write a decent defence. In particular:
(i) I don't know about your country, but in mine "average" isn't synonymous with "mean". To know which measure of central tendency is being selected, you observe the context. In my case, by the fact that I've used a definition based on 50% being below, I must be referring to the median;
(ii) Anyway, most measures of intelligence seem to be symmetrically distributed. Which, of course, is sufficient for mean to equal median - it doesn't matter whether the distribution is normal.
Thank you come again.
Oh please. Even letters were always dependent on some organization to deliver them.
What sort of organisation is needed for you with your horse to provide a service taking a letter from A to B?
Ditto for the "open Internet".
The Internet was an end stage, but it was still much better when it was about distributed autonomous peers rather than a few private backbone providers and Facebooks.
And the majority of people never built their own radio set.
But many people could and many people did. And if you couldn't yourself, there'd be someone local to fix yours.
People didn't change, technology did.
The patented automatic ass-wiper was built and, even though it never really worked as well as the human hand, people forgot how to wipe their ass.
And that abused labour has seen their wages raise in the double digits per year.
Stop regurgitating soundbites from Slashdot and pay attention to what is happening in China.
If it wasn't for their manufacturing, they'd still live in an oppressive country, but living in even worse conditions.
"We treat the slaves better than the previous master, thus our slave trade is justified." Also, when you dismantle the security of the state - you may recall that China was once fairly socialist in the way it provided for its people - then of course people will end up in worse conditions and have to flee to exploitation in the city.
The British Library has just handed the copyright on a load of uncopyrighted work to Google, and Google in return gets exclusive commercial rights to the work. This is awful. And for only £6 million, by their estimate, they could have done it themselves - considering the broad range of interested parties, donations could easily raise that amount. Their effort would be far better, too, if the standards of Google's old archives are anything to go by.
This is just another example of the British "public private partnership", where one guy does an under-the-table deal with another guy to do something seemingly simple and relatively inexpensive in an unnecessarily convoluted and costly manner, ending up with a product/service far worse than it could otherwise have been.
The guilty party is the British people for allowing the government to engage in an ongoing sale of the country.
Fuck off, Google. It was OK when all you wanted to do is control the future - the future's not that interesting, if the last three decades can be extrapolated - but now you want to control the past.
The government is going broke because it is spending more than it takes in, period.
And I listed some reasons why.
Giving the incapable more comfortable lives won't fix that at all
Giving people more comfortable lives is pretty much the goal of society. How you define "people" in this sentence is up for debate: some have excluded blacks, or Jews, or homosexuals, or cripples, etc. You appear to exclude at least cripples. Try harder.
Oh, and of course it'll improve it - though more is needed to "fix it". You give people help when they're incapable and they maintain a certain standard of health which makes them less burdensome to everyone from family up to a national level. Many people can be productive despite chronic illnesses after a sustained period of rehabilitation. Their carers can often be productive outside their caring role providing they're given appropriate support. Many social welfare systems understand the need for the state to have a relationship with a family which supports dependents: it's the choice between an entirely destitute family and a responsible family which takes the burden off the state and which can, as a whole, continue contributing to society at large.
You are, of course, free to donate all of your money to that cause. You're just not free to donate mine.
You have money because the people around you let you have it. This is how all property works in reality: certain property rights are protected because people as a whole regard them as beneficial on balance. If you stop doing what society demands in exchange then society will turn against you and stop offering you protection, and you'll lose what you consider to be "your money". (If you want to see this illustrated, stop paying tax.)
It has ruined you. If you're posting on /. as an educated geek with a good job and a comfortable life then you are one of the few winners of the system. Most of the West is miserable with no voice loud enough to be heard.
The media in every regime give the impression that almost everyone is content with that regime, from the US through the USSR all the way to DPRK. Spend time providing help to or even stopping to have a conversation with the homeless, the chronically sick, the nonviolent prisoner. Then move on to the non-smart - it sounds mean, but half the population are intellectually below average and likely have extremely limited opportunity for it. You'll find that people are struggling and miserable. Not yet at the stage of mass consciousness and disloyalty, but that's yet to come.
I'd summarise our problem in three words: reliance on corporation. We suck at supporting ourselves for our own sake, whether that means individually or at a community / region / national level. Since the '50s local community has deteriorated, and since the '80s we've lost a sense of national community. We're now stuck in this utterly false mindset that the only way to get anything done is to throw money at some magnificent private company to do badly what we've lost the power to do ourselves. Need to talk to someone? Your voice and a knock on the door is no longer good enough. Nor a letter. Nor building your own radio set. Nor even an open access Internet. No, that all requires too much thinking. Now you're tempted to get a shiny ready-made throwaway toy built at a cost which could only be achieved by choosing abused labour in an oppressive country.
In short, we're lazy and we suck. We so far following the progress of every other civilisation (read the original, check out how well he'd predicted the next half-decade through analysis of other civilisations, and identify where the West is now) into destruction.