Ah, I understand, you do not see any difference between laws and regulations.
Some regulations exist explicitly in a law. Some regulations exist because they have been enabled by a law. Typically a law which recognises that standards change quicker than explicit legislation can keep up, and so empowers a statutory body to keep current standards up to date.
It's not an important distinction from the point of view of whether regulations should be there.
You are now saying that you support the right of government to invent and enforce arbitrary regulations relating to the notional rights of companies (such as create a regulatory body keep a register of trademarks and enforce them.) Yet you reject regulations that protect the safety of individuals.
think they are saying we should not have any laws.
On no, when you paint a libertarian into a corner, they'll always make an exception where they support governmental "interference" AKA laws. It's a running theme.
You are assuming that Bitcoin has no inherent benefits as a technology.
Not at all. There are elements of the bitcoin transaction model that are superior to existing ways of transferring money between banks in different countries. The legacy of bitcoin will be to improve the means by which conventional currencies are transacted between states. The implementation with a real currency will be superior to bitcoin itself, because it can be near instantaneous. Bitcoin can't be instantaneous because the truth of a transaction isn't made final until possibly competing block chains have had time to prove their arbitrary fitness and have been consolidated.
If you're going to make that argument, then please don't bring the real world into it, because in the real world, figuring out whom to trust and whom not to, is something everyone already does.
Were that true, Mt Gox wouldn't have been in business.
Dollars themselves used to built out of less-regulated gold.
There was nothing unregulated about it. In a free market the price of gold and silver would move relative to each other. And the price of the dollar versus other currencies such as the Spanish Dollar and the Pound Sterling. Yet in the early days each of these were set by US law to a fixed exchange rate.
The gold standard simply put confidence in currencies by guaranteeing that the government had something to back it's paper promissory notes. That doesn't mean the money was unregulated. Quite the contrary.
how many people suffered, and some died, because the government mandated airbags in every car before the technology was ready?
Safety technologies get better. But you have no evidence whatsoever that there were more people killed by 1990s airbags than were saved by them. It's ridiculous. The very notion shows how far your mind has to warp reality to make it fit your libertarian religion.
Can you give me an example of where an insufficiently regulated market resulted in less safety?
Can you give me an example of a libertarian state where the most dangerous stuff hasn't already been banned? You'd have to go somewhere like Somalia, where everything is dangerous, other than products that have the benefit of being brought in from other countries that do have safety regulations.
When you go back in history to a time when there was little consumer safety legislation, there was very little that was safe, Most things were consciously made more dangerous if doing so could make it cheaper to produce. e.g. http://www.victorianweb.org/sc...
Everything would be more dangerous were it not for safety regulation in every significant jurisdiction in the world.
Yes, it's a funny thing, libertarianism is focused towards the rights of an individual to do as they like, so long as they don't harm others. Anarchism is focussed against the state as a controlling force.
In reality most of those American right wingers that call themselves libertarians are in fact anarchists. Even though that's a label they would hate.
The gambler's fallacy: Everbody wins! It works like this. People who win make a big fuss about it. People who lose either keep quiet, or pretend they won and make a big fuss about it.
Reality: in the long term, almost every gambler loses. It's a zero sum game and it's biased towards the house or the bookie.
Maybe on this occasion, you took a punt on spending electricity and computer opportunity cost on bitcoins, and on March 13th 2014, you are up on the deal.
2 things may go wrong. One is that you'll keep on holding even after a fatal crash. and those gains are not realised.
Second is that you will during the course of your life also take other such punts on unproven investments, and lose more than you gained on bitcoin.
Millions are being taken out of the bitcoin game by fraudsters and thieves. It's a zero sum game, their gain will be matched by the losses of ordinary punters like you.
Trouble is that the only safe place to hold bitcoins is on your own media accessed by a computer which is unconnected to the internet. The number of bitcoin owners and users that do this is anyone's guess, but unlikely to be more than a tiny fraction.
In fact it's pretty hard to do anything in a secure way with bitcoin, unless you have an appreciation for how bitcoin works. And that's an extremely complex thing to understand - far beyond the grasp of most people.
(Of course many here on Slashdot understand, but we're a self selecting group of nerds, most of whom have probably been CS students, and the rest have mostly self-educated to a similar level. We are big outliers on the bell curve of understanding stuff like this)
Thanks so much for the very interesting chart. It's most interesting feature is the remission from banking crises during the time of the Bretton Woods system.
Turns out that the way to avoid banking crises is to have fixed exchange rates, and more regulation.
The recent banking crisis was caused by a long standing trend towards less regulation. And worse the stupidity of the belief that they could regulate themselves.
Treating it as if the developers knew about it and were conspiring against you, just because of how long it took to find the bug, is beyond idiocy.
I didn't do any such thing. I presented the possibility that the bug was placed there deliberately. As indeed it might. I never said it definitely was. Far from idiocy, in the absence of evidence one way or the other, this is the only rational view.
Again time to detect is meaningless. To say that Apple is superior for finding their bug sooner than gnutls found theirs is pointless. What matters is that the bugs were fixed, not how long it took to find them after the fact. No one wins by saying "I found a bug in X amount of time!".
You keep saying this, with no justification for your claim. And of course there is no possible justification. Everyone seeks to find and fix bugs as soon as possible, and longer times of being vulnerable are obviously worse than shorter (or no) times being vulnerable.
The senseless waste of human life should be everyone's concern. That dead body is someone's child, maybe someone's parent. And of course the people who are passengers on the car and die probably weren;t the ones who made the buying decision. They may even be children, who both lack the ability and the privilege of making such decisions for themselves.
That it's not a concern of yours only highlights how much of your morality has been sacrificed on the altar of your false libertarian god.
Why do we have safety standards on products rather than let everyone make their own decisions? Because every product is it's own specialism, and the ways in which they can be dangerous, and the relative risks of every form or danger are very specialised knowledge. It would not be feasible for ever consumer to be fully informed of the risks of every product.
Besides, as an extreme libertarian, you would be opposed to requiring vendors to disclose the manufacturing details of products, such that the consumer could make an informed decision even if they spent the significant amount of time necessary to evaluate such risks.
And other people believe in unicorns. There's no accounting for bizarre beliefs.
On the other side you have experience. And experience shows that there's never been a reputable report of a unicorn. And that insufficiently regulated market forces tend to result in less safety, not more.
Escrow is not the same thing as chargeback. Chargeback can protect you when your credit card or banking details are stolen and used by someone else. Escrow cannot, BECAUSE of the very optionality you mention, criminals will not use escrow services. And if they did, they'd probably only pay out to them, not you.
The thing about bank cards is you are paying for the charge back feature whether you need it or not.
Actually the merchant pays for it. At least where I come from credit card usage is free, provided you pay off the statement each month. Charges only come from interest after the first month, not for chargeback services.
Now you might say that that puts the price up, but you pay the same whether you buy on a CC or cash.
It's illegal to steal anything, virtual or otherwise.
So you're claiming that there is such a thing as software theft, as opposed to copyright infringement then?
You don't need a new law for anything tangible. But bitcoin isn't a tangible thing. It's a protocol. It needs a law or precedent before we can say whether there is such as thing as stealing "bitcoins".
OTOH, we've already seen lawsuits.
Lawsuits can be issued for anything, regardless of the law. A written law, or convictions under an existing one are the only things that could show that there's a crime of "stealing bitcoins".
Troll? Really? It might be a view you disagree with, but it's a perfectly valid view. Are Linux fans really so insecure in their beliefs that they need to mod down rather than debate?
Best of all, if you really want to, you can do all that stuff today with Bitcoin, through use of contracts, only sending money to agencies that can prove they've posted a bond (i.e. sent money to to someone you have decided that you trust, such as a government), etc. Whenever you need the extra security, you pay for it, just like everyone always does with dollars. The difference is that when you don't need those things, with Bitcoin you can opt out (or rather, it doesn't automatically opt you in).
A reiteration of a common but naive libertarian argument. Citizens shouldn't need to check the status of each company they do business with. That would be too much work for individual in the real world to ever do it. Rather citizens should know that whenever they do transactions in their own country with companies that are known to the government, that they are covered by a common set of protections. Then they only need to take the extra steps of checking that you mention on those rare occasions when they need to send money abroad.
You can build regulated structures out of unregulated primitives.
Experience says you can't. And Bitcoin certainly isn't regulated.
Bitcoin has no chargeback mechanism. Once your transaction is gone, it's gone, regardless of whether it was really you who did it. Unlike the conventional banking system.
Last I checked ripping someone's bitcoin wallet off is just as illegal as taking their physical on filled with fiat.
Oh really? And how exactly did you check that? Where's the law that mentions bitcoins? As an intangible string of binary information, we can't simply treat it as property unless the law says so. Where's the person that's been convicted for stealing bitcoins? For sure there's been people done for drug trafficking and money laundering, who've incidentally used bitcoin as part of the transaction. But where's the convictions for bitcoin theft? There's been millions of bitcoins stolen, so we should expect some prosecutions were it an established crime.
For sure there are safety and emission standards that will have put up prices. But not nearly so much as the non-legally mandated things we now expect. (Depending on where in the world you are) There's no requirement for electric windows, electric rear demister, power steering, power braking, ABS, traction control, hi-fi, rev counter etc.
And most people are very happy that the law required standards in safety and the environment. It's only libertarian extremists that wrongly think it's a bad thing.
Of course the problems with PayPal have been down to too little regulation, not too much. What do you get when you remove most of the regulation from PayPal? Mt Gox.
Consumer protection. The possibility that when you are ripped off by wallet-services, exchanges or hackers poking around your hard disk, there is a legal authority you can go to, who may be able to get you your money back and deal with the criminals.
There's certainly much the government and official banking system can learn from transactions in crypto-currencies. And actually the government backed implementation can be better. Bitcoin suffers from the problem that a transaction can take some to to become certain, as two or more block chains fight it out for fitness, before being reconciled. This only happens because of the goal of avoiding a single point of authority. A government backed system can always have a blessed block-chain. And can thus have transactions finalised almost instantly.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, I understand, you do not see any difference between laws and regulations.
Some regulations exist explicitly in a law. Some regulations exist because they have been enabled by a law. Typically a law which recognises that standards change quicker than explicit legislation can keep up, and so empowers a statutory body to keep current standards up to date.
It's not an important distinction from the point of view of whether regulations should be there.
You are now saying that you support the right of government to invent and enforce arbitrary regulations relating to the notional rights of companies (such as create a regulatory body keep a register of trademarks and enforce them.) Yet you reject regulations that protect the safety of individuals.
think they are saying we should not have any laws.
On no, when you paint a libertarian into a corner, they'll always make an exception where they support governmental "interference" AKA laws. It's a running theme.
You are assuming that Bitcoin has no inherent benefits as a technology.
Not at all. There are elements of the bitcoin transaction model that are superior to existing ways of transferring money between banks in different countries. The legacy of bitcoin will be to improve the means by which conventional currencies are transacted between states. The implementation with a real currency will be superior to bitcoin itself, because it can be near instantaneous. Bitcoin can't be instantaneous because the truth of a transaction isn't made final until possibly competing block chains have had time to prove their arbitrary fitness and have been consolidated.
If you're going to make that argument, then please don't bring the real world into it, because in the real world, figuring out whom to trust and whom not to, is something everyone already does.
Were that true, Mt Gox wouldn't have been in business.
Dollars themselves used to built out of less-regulated gold.
There was nothing unregulated about it. In a free market the price of gold and silver would move relative to each other. And the price of the dollar versus other currencies such as the Spanish Dollar and the Pound Sterling. Yet in the early days each of these were set by US law to a fixed exchange rate.
The gold standard simply put confidence in currencies by guaranteeing that the government had something to back it's paper promissory notes. That doesn't mean the money was unregulated. Quite the contrary.
how many people suffered, and some died, because the government mandated airbags in every car before the technology was ready?
Safety technologies get better. But you have no evidence whatsoever that there were more people killed by 1990s airbags than were saved by them. It's ridiculous. The very notion shows how far your mind has to warp reality to make it fit your libertarian religion.
Can you give me an example of where an insufficiently regulated market resulted in less safety?
Can you give me an example of a libertarian state where the most dangerous stuff hasn't already been banned? You'd have to go somewhere like Somalia, where everything is dangerous, other than products that have the benefit of being brought in from other countries that do have safety regulations.
When you go back in history to a time when there was little consumer safety legislation, there was very little that was safe, Most things were consciously made more dangerous if doing so could make it cheaper to produce. e.g.
http://www.victorianweb.org/sc...
Everything would be more dangerous were it not for safety regulation in every significant jurisdiction in the world.
And without government regulation, what's to stop a company putting the UL quality mark on it's entirely untested and dangerous product?
Yes, it's a funny thing, libertarianism is focused towards the rights of an individual to do as they like, so long as they don't harm others. Anarchism is focussed against the state as a controlling force.
In reality most of those American right wingers that call themselves libertarians are in fact anarchists. Even though that's a label they would hate.
The gambler's fallacy: Everbody wins! It works like this. People who win make a big fuss about it. People who lose either keep quiet, or pretend they won and make a big fuss about it.
Reality: in the long term, almost every gambler loses. It's a zero sum game and it's biased towards the house or the bookie.
Maybe on this occasion, you took a punt on spending electricity and computer opportunity cost on bitcoins, and on March 13th 2014, you are up on the deal.
2 things may go wrong. One is that you'll keep on holding even after a fatal crash. and those gains are not realised.
Second is that you will during the course of your life also take other such punts on unproven investments, and lose more than you gained on bitcoin.
Millions are being taken out of the bitcoin game by fraudsters and thieves. It's a zero sum game, their gain will be matched by the losses of ordinary punters like you.
Trouble is that the only safe place to hold bitcoins is on your own media accessed by a computer which is unconnected to the internet. The number of bitcoin owners and users that do this is anyone's guess, but unlikely to be more than a tiny fraction.
In fact it's pretty hard to do anything in a secure way with bitcoin, unless you have an appreciation for how bitcoin works. And that's an extremely complex thing to understand - far beyond the grasp of most people.
(Of course many here on Slashdot understand, but we're a self selecting group of nerds, most of whom have probably been CS students, and the rest have mostly self-educated to a similar level. We are big outliers on the bell curve of understanding stuff like this)
Thanks so much for the very interesting chart. It's most interesting feature is the remission from banking crises during the time of the Bretton Woods system.
Turns out that the way to avoid banking crises is to have fixed exchange rates, and more regulation.
The recent banking crisis was caused by a long standing trend towards less regulation. And worse the stupidity of the belief that they could regulate themselves.
Treating it as if the developers knew about it and were conspiring against you, just because of how long it took to find the bug, is beyond idiocy.
I didn't do any such thing. I presented the possibility that the bug was placed there deliberately. As indeed it might. I never said it definitely was. Far from idiocy, in the absence of evidence one way or the other, this is the only rational view.
Again time to detect is meaningless. To say that Apple is superior for finding their bug sooner than gnutls found theirs is pointless. What matters is that the bugs were fixed, not how long it took to find them after the fact. No one wins by saying "I found a bug in X amount of time!".
You keep saying this, with no justification for your claim. And of course there is no possible justification. Everyone seeks to find and fix bugs as soon as possible, and longer times of being vulnerable are obviously worse than shorter (or no) times being vulnerable.
Experience shows that government-regulated structures have their own issues.
Sure. But not as bad as unregulated ones, such as pyramid schemes, protection rackets and bitcoin.
And when you have trouble with the regulating body, you can pick a better one. Oh, wait. No you can't.
Democracy tends to be a coarsely granulated thing. No you can't choose every single thing, but you do get a say on the full package.
But you're criticising based on not being able to chose from several somethings when bitcoin doesn't even provide one such something.
The senseless waste of human life should be everyone's concern. That dead body is someone's child, maybe someone's parent. And of course the people who are passengers on the car and die probably weren;t the ones who made the buying decision. They may even be children, who both lack the ability and the privilege of making such decisions for themselves.
That it's not a concern of yours only highlights how much of your morality has been sacrificed on the altar of your false libertarian god.
Why do we have safety standards on products rather than let everyone make their own decisions? Because every product is it's own specialism, and the ways in which they can be dangerous, and the relative risks of every form or danger are very specialised knowledge. It would not be feasible for ever consumer to be fully informed of the risks of every product.
Besides, as an extreme libertarian, you would be opposed to requiring vendors to disclose the manufacturing details of products, such that the consumer could make an informed decision even if they spent the significant amount of time necessary to evaluate such risks.
Your beliefs are indefensible.
And other people believe in unicorns. There's no accounting for bizarre beliefs.
On the other side you have experience. And experience shows that there's never been a reputable report of a unicorn. And that insufficiently regulated market forces tend to result in less safety, not more.
Escrow is not the same thing as chargeback. Chargeback can protect you when your credit card or banking details are stolen and used by someone else. Escrow cannot, BECAUSE of the very optionality you mention, criminals will not use escrow services. And if they did, they'd probably only pay out to them, not you.
The thing about bank cards is you are paying for the charge back feature whether you need it or not.
Actually the merchant pays for it. At least where I come from credit card usage is free, provided you pay off the statement each month. Charges only come from interest after the first month, not for chargeback services.
Now you might say that that puts the price up, but you pay the same whether you buy on a CC or cash.
It's illegal to steal anything, virtual or otherwise.
So you're claiming that there is such a thing as software theft, as opposed to copyright infringement then?
You don't need a new law for anything tangible. But bitcoin isn't a tangible thing. It's a protocol. It needs a law or precedent before we can say whether there is such as thing as stealing "bitcoins".
OTOH, we've already seen lawsuits.
Lawsuits can be issued for anything, regardless of the law. A written law, or convictions under an existing one are the only things that could show that there's a crime of "stealing bitcoins".
Troll? Really? It might be a view you disagree with, but it's a perfectly valid view. Are Linux fans really so insecure in their beliefs that they need to mod down rather than debate?
Best of all, if you really want to, you can do all that stuff today with Bitcoin, through use of contracts, only sending money to agencies that can prove they've posted a bond (i.e. sent money to to someone you have decided that you trust, such as a government), etc. Whenever you need the extra security, you pay for it, just like everyone always does with dollars. The difference is that when you don't need those things, with Bitcoin you can opt out (or rather, it doesn't automatically opt you in).
A reiteration of a common but naive libertarian argument. Citizens shouldn't need to check the status of each company they do business with. That would be too much work for individual in the real world to ever do it. Rather citizens should know that whenever they do transactions in their own country with companies that are known to the government, that they are covered by a common set of protections. Then they only need to take the extra steps of checking that you mention on those rare occasions when they need to send money abroad.
You can build regulated structures out of unregulated primitives.
Experience says you can't. And Bitcoin certainly isn't regulated.
Bitcoin has no chargeback mechanism. Once your transaction is gone, it's gone, regardless of whether it was really you who did it. Unlike the conventional banking system.
Last I checked ripping someone's bitcoin wallet off is just as illegal as taking their physical on filled with fiat.
Oh really? And how exactly did you check that? Where's the law that mentions bitcoins? As an intangible string of binary information, we can't simply treat it as property unless the law says so.
Where's the person that's been convicted for stealing bitcoins? For sure there's been people done for drug trafficking and money laundering, who've incidentally used bitcoin as part of the transaction. But where's the convictions for bitcoin theft? There's been millions of bitcoins stolen, so we should expect some prosecutions were it an established crime.
For sure there are safety and emission standards that will have put up prices. But not nearly so much as the non-legally mandated things we now expect. (Depending on where in the world you are) There's no requirement for electric windows, electric rear demister, power steering, power braking, ABS, traction control, hi-fi, rev counter etc.
And most people are very happy that the law required standards in safety and the environment. It's only libertarian extremists that wrongly think it's a bad thing.
Are they? In the UK they have no more influence than any other retailer. And by American standards, that's almost none.
Don't worry, there's no chance of that. My standards are too high.
Of course the problems with PayPal have been down to too little regulation, not too much. What do you get when you remove most of the regulation from PayPal? Mt Gox.
Consumer protection. The possibility that when you are ripped off by wallet-services, exchanges or hackers poking around your hard disk, there is a legal authority you can go to, who may be able to get you your money back and deal with the criminals.
There's certainly much the government and official banking system can learn from transactions in crypto-currencies. And actually the government backed implementation can be better. Bitcoin suffers from the problem that a transaction can take some to to become certain, as two or more block chains fight it out for fitness, before being reconciled. This only happens because of the goal of avoiding a single point of authority. A government backed system can always have a blessed block-chain. And can thus have transactions finalised almost instantly.
Well the following may well have been the NSAs work, and they got away with it for 9 years.
http://arstechnica.com/securit...