or simply put, democracy as we know it, doesnt work.
Bingo!
In the latter case, how much of a textbook should be allowed to be copied for a course should really not be the primary problem you should be working on.
Me working to solve that problem is like an ant working to prevent Sun-spots from occurring. Powerful, hugely financed, forces controlling mass media and access to political offices, the "law", police, military and related industrial complexes arrayed against the ever-more idiocratic populace....
In situations like these, unfortunately, the only way is to let the events unfold until the inevitable rivers of blood run... future generations can "work" to improve things when the revolution is under way, 50 or maybe, if things go bad enough, 500 years from now. We however are pretty much SOL, me thinks.
The problem with "databases" is exactly that they are.... databases. The thing would need to include all the advances in database technology of the last 4 decades to make it reasonably robust, like ACID, which would then make it a monster for the very simple, already well taken care of, task it would be supposed to fulfill. Then there all the complexities of interacting with a database. Compared to a much simpler and effective alternatives, the gains are so negligible as to make the idea preposterous.
The/proc pseudo-filesystem structure has a specific purpose of controlling a running kernel and therefore some sacrifices and compromises were made... at a huge expense of user readability, many/proc and/sys entries are downright human unreadable and there is only so much documentation that can be embedded in a file path! It is definitely not a general-purpose solution.
Your "liking" such ideas is a typical symptom of the "new, fashionable, shiny, cool, supremely convoluted and resource-hungry 'solution' looking for a simple, already long since solved, problem to 'solve' " disease which plagues much of the computer industry and causes endless grief everywhere.
those who jumped on the 'intellectual property/copyright' bandwagon
Who should be called what they truly are: modern day slavers. That is simply because an attempt to control the information one can access translates directly into an attempt at control what thoughts one can think. Which directly impacts what actions one can perform. Anyone who tries to restrict the mental capacity - and thus actions - of someone else in order to profit from it is a slaver. The difference between the old and the new is merely the methods, the old one involved chains and physical pain, the new one involves exorbitant costs. The end results are unfortunately the same in the long run - a class of masters lording over the ignorant peons who can never expect to raise their lot in life.
Actually, no. It is that bad. At the core of the mess are hugely mistaken assumptions about what the Registry was supposed to be and the typical over-confidence of Microsoft designers in 3rd party "utilities" to manage any and every mess they create.
I already mentioned things like backups (3rd party tools required), change tracking (3rd party tools required), corruption repair (3rd party tools required) and a host of other things that are trivial using built-in tools for the administrators on Unix-like systems and are quite non-trivial on Windows (and even more so when the AD gets involved in the mess).
The arrogant assumption that the end user will never interact with the registry directly (hence the absolute disregard for any sort of embedded documentation, documentation which is standard on Unix-like systems in configuration files) and which assumption has been proven incorrect so many times that it does not even bear counting, adds nothing positive to the equation.
In short, the Registry is a wrongly-conceived idea, poorly planned (based on mistaken assumptions), poorly implemented and arrogantly enforced as the only "cure all" "solution" to system configuration needs.
If any Linux vendor tried such a thing there would be a mass exodus of most of the users from that vendor. Unfortunately in corporate Windows monoculture there are no such options.
Not only that, but then there is the whole issue of simplicity of backups (the registry database is always opened and cannot be manipulated by standard filesystem operations), corruption, change tracking and so on and on and on, all of which is trivial with Unix-style user-readable, commented, configuration files. They even have a "central mechanism" too:/etc
Frankly, given all the drawbacks, I haven't seen any sane argument where gains exceed the losses in favour of a system like the Windows Registry even once.
Saying the windows registry is a "central mechanism for configuring OS directives", is like saying that dumping all your papers in the middle of your office floor is a centralized filing system.
That is not entirely accurate. To make the analogy more correct you would also have to remove any comments or instructions from these documents and only leave raw data, labelled with random cryptic terms. Remember, the Registry abhors comments or any sort of embedded documentation.
Oops. In my previous reply I said the IRA, I meant the IRS of course. But given what IRS has been up to recently it is a little surprise that I could easily confuse the two.
Here in the world world, economies based on capital loans (with fractional reserves) completely defeated the older model you seem to like - destroyed it everywhere the two models were in competition. (BTW, just to rub salt in the wound, America hasn't been a "fractional reserve" banking system for years, but a "zero reserve" system.. Only demand (checking) accounts have reserve requirements.)
You've gotta be kidding. Of course the "fractional reserve" system "defeated" the sane one because... wait for it... it is fraud! In the "real world" fraud will always defeat honest business, at least until the "marks" catch on. Otherwise there would be no fraudsters!
The "marks" realizing that something is rotten is what is happening now and which is why the "crisis" (i.e. the reckoning) is "worsening" even despite massive theft of public moneys used to prop up the con-artists.
If I get to print money willy-nilly, I can also "out-compete" pretty much any other business out there. The mob has been looking to this very method for a while now, complete with engraved plates in duffel-bags and printing presses in disused basements, but they lack the political connections of bankers to do it in broad daylight.
The fact that you can even make your argument with a straight face, that we should let fraudsters run rampant because they can "out-compete" honest businessmen is exactly the sort of brain washing that show how deeply the con-artists and charlatans have managed to corrupt the public discourse.
That's pretty much the way the system works now. The threat of jail time for lying keeps people in line, except where sales tax exceeds 10% or so (which is why the VAT exists as a concept, people are less willing/able to cheat and you can push the rate to 15% or 20%). Remeber, you have to keep (mostly) accurate books in order to function in the first place, and keeping a second set of books just for the government to see is more costly than you might imagine - sometimes more costly than just paying the taxes demanded.
That's the "gentle" method in Europe. In the US the IRA tends to send twitchy-trigger-finger SWAT teams in APCs, complete with machine guns, at 4am to perform an "audit" (i.e. to confiscate all your papers and computers while you and your family lie face down on the floor with hands behind your backs tied up with plastic ties) as soon as they imagine that you've been holding out on them...
But then again, EU hasn't reached yet the advanced stage of Imperial Hubris the US has a long time ago now and so the desperation to finance the ever more wobbly and ever more money hungry empire hasn't reached the US levels yet. But its just a matter of time...
And when a court asks for your sequence of numbers?
Then you give them one of yours. You see, you can have an essentially infinite number of wallets. Each wallet is less than a second to generate.
Some BitCoin users in fact use a separate wallet for each transaction to avoid just such complications. BitCoin is not perfect, being the first implementation of the concept of a crypto-currency that gained wider attention, but it has strong pseudonymity features.
You can't build an economy on everyone taking in laundry. Governments run on income tax, sales tax/VAT, and property tax, and are very good at actually collecting such taxes regardless of currency. The tiny barter economy isn't very relevent to the tax base - what kind of business can you run "off the grid"? There are certainly foks who run a mostly-cash or cash-only businesses today, but only because they stay very small scale and word-of-mouth.
The whole point is that crypto-currencies change these rules. Barter is impractical, cash transactions are (made purposefully by the government) impractical and dangerous for larger amounts but crypto-currencies have no such limitations and as a major bonus they do not require a bank to be a parasitic middle-man or in fact a banking system at all.
So one can conduct major operations in crypto-currencies, even if only to exchange large amount of cash from one place to another.
Similarly, banks are around because they provide useful sercives - loaning money, givng a sofe plce for a small amount of saings, and to some extenct the convenience of a checking account. These are infrastructure-level services.
No, banks have long since lost their useful role. They are now parasitic entities whose main purpose is to exact rent from you on the very money you loan them. Most bank accounts have interest rates (if any) far below the cost of the "fees" that are levied on deposits, withdrawals and any other activity.
As to making loans, banks are part of the ever more fraudulent fiat currency scheme called "fractional reserve" where they are essentially licensed to print money without any equity to back it up. Which is one of the main underlying elements of the shit-storm they've gotten the whole Western world into.
Oh, and - as a bonus - they also act as part of the police-state apparatus and report all your activities to any government agency that asks, at a drop of a hat.
Crypto-currencies cut this parasitic middle man out. There is no need for a "checking account" or a "debit card" since these functions are integral to the crypto-currency system itself. Banks could still exist, of course, but only if they provide an actual service: saving accounts with actual meaningful interest and loans backed by the equity of the bank. No "wildly creative accounting" is possible with BitCoins in this area, unlike what is going on now at pretty much every bank.
Banks became parasites because the government, in the effort to ban large cash transactions as they could not be tracked by an all-encompassing surveillance apparatus that was being constructed in an attempt to ensure maximum income for itself, made them indispensable for an average peon as a conduit through which to filter their lives. And if you cannot get or do not want a bank account, you are then forced, again by the government actions, to use "payroll loan" places or other even worse parasites to conduct basic business of your life. The government succeeded in making cash no longer viable for most purposes other than very small things in life. Crypto-currencies reverse this by giving full control of people's money back to the people.
If you have any wealth (wealth: an asset that generates money) then the government will certainly know about it. You're not going to own property, own stock, or pay an employee without the IRS finding out eventually.
That's highly unlikely given how far down the rabbit hole the US is already. And the EU doesn't look any better, I am afraid. Nor does Canada or Australia.
China has of course its own uniquely shit-flavoured authoritarian nightmare of its own making to dance through that has yet to even begin to reveal all of its hellish potential.
I say we are pretty much SOL here for a long while. Maybe the next generation or the one after that will get to see the light on the other side of this thing.
In the meantime my personal plan that I am working on involves establishing a rather large distance to all the self-righteous, asshole "powers", be it political or financial, and getting some popcorn while I admire the fireworks from afar...
Frankly, I do not know what the answers are. But what I do know is that all the present systems are corrupt beyond any hope of me having any faith in them whatsoever. If "civilization" means constant surveillance, police state thuggery, "elected" officials who do not even pretend to represent you anymore, interests so entrenched that dislodging then would take a bloody revolution - all funded by brutally enforced taxation regimes dependent on the ever-expanding surveillance and the powers of the police-state, then to me such a "civilization" has as little appeal as that of Ancient Rome and their "civilization" built upon slave markets. One can point out that Rome too built roads and aqueducts and so it was not all so bad...
Come to think of it so did all those thugs who called themselves "royalty" at one time or another. They too built, out of the tithe they collected, a "civilization"... of sorts.
So perhaps a massive shake-up is what we need. Odds are that horrible things will come out of it but then again maybe some other fresh idea to negate them. Status-quo however is rotten to the core and I cannot see it maintained much longer without its own set of horrible and bloody events in a desperate effort to prop it up.
Maybe it is those "hierarchical and territorial instincts" that have to bred out of "humanity" or maybe even just redirected... lest our history end with a whimper of self-extermination (as I don't think that as pathetic as humanity is it can actually manage a "bang").
So... an inflationary currency is not perfect, just better than a deflationary one.
That's like saying that tractor tires are better for any purpose because they are larger...
Using just one metric without considering all the others is just silly.
You can walk the line; it's happening here in the UK right now. Inflation's up at close to 5%, which would have been unthinkably high a few years ago, but isn't hyperinflation (money is still perfectly usable day-to-day). And guess what, it's working - I'm buying more and saving less than I would otherwise, which is exactly what the economy needs.
Sir, you've been so brainwashed that it makes me sad. And what, pray tell, will you do when you retire? Do you even plan that far? Will "the economy" come to your rescue then, you with no savings as thanks for all the "helping" you've been doing when younger? Or do you plan to fund your retirement by selling off all those plastic lawn chairs from China and 20 different models-of-the-week of obsolete iPods on Ebay? Or perhaps you've "invested" all your money in some gambling scheme under the flashy neon sign of "Wall Street"? You've got a sure-bet system to break them odds, no?
Thanks to such idiocy the average saving rate has declined so bad in the US and other "industrialized" countries that it is now negative. And there is an economic crisis in the US and EU. On the other hand, in China the saving rates are skyrocketing and their economy booms. So much for simplistic "fiat currencies help economies by discouraging savings" nonsense.
No I don't; of course there are plenty of other reasons to prefer one currency or another. But a deflationary currency is fundamentally bad for the economy it supports; all other things being equal, you're much better off with an inflationary one.
Err, no. That "all other things being equal" is impossible when contrasting fiat currencies and deflationary ones is the fundamental problem with your reasoning. Each type of currency indicates a different economic scheme, with different priorities and with entirely different mechanics with different winners and losers in the economic scheme of things. That is why statements like "deflationary currencies are fundamentally bad for economy" are utter nonsense: they would be "bad" for inflationary economies, at which point it would be like complaining that those tractor tires do not fit your Mini.
BitCoins are not anonymous, and (being digital) are easier to trace than physical currency
They are if appropriate precautions are taken. Transactions are between wallets identified by random sequences of numbers. Unless you yourself or the other end of transaction reveals its nature and amount, there is no way of associating the random string with your person.
And if that happens, you can bet EBay will report any BitCoin-denominated payents to the IRS just like they currently do with all the other payment denominations they broker (Canadian Tire Money!).
Sure and while it will get EBay's income taxed, it will not true with their customers unless they purchase vast amounts of stuff from Ebay or ship to their home addresses instead of Mailboxes Etc ones.
More importantly however if I buy a yacht with BitCoins from someone in Bahamas, the US government will have no idea that I had the money to do so. In fact one could run a whole business online with BitCoins and pay zero taxes of any kind. Remember you will not need any business papers, no registration, no incorporation because these are required mainly to open bank accounts. No bank account, no need for such documents, no income or sales tax. And while theoretically you would be a criminal "tax evader", if BitCoins become popular you would also be in the same boat as file sharers: impossible to stop.
That, and many other reasons, is why I was talking about a potential for seismic shifts of power. Destruction of banks which would no longer serve any useful purpose (which right now is enforcement of the non-cash nature of large transactions and reporting of income to the government) is but one of them.
How is that different from cash? If I give you a $20, no one will know it happened except for us.
Huge difference. Cash transactions have a practical ceiling mostly because governments worked real hard to put it there - removal of high denominations, limits on amounts of cash that can be held/transported etc. In fact possession of large amounts of cash is synonymous to a "crime" and the cops will look for a reason to lock you up.
Then there is security, ability to transfer over large distances etc.
Crypto-currencies have no such limitations.
Are you actually serious here? As though government won't figure out how to tax us in the absence of sales tax or income tax? Well, several states have no income tax (the US didn't even have an income tax until the early 20th century) or no sales tax, but those states still have revenue. How? High property taxes (you gotta live somewhere), personal property taxes (gotta drive something), fees for services (driver's license, business license, etc.), etc.
If you were to remove income taxation, the US government would be insolvent immediately (as opposed to being insolvent a few years from now as things are going). Income tax accounts for a lion share of the federal budget.
Bitcoin does not, I repeat, does NOT make taxation impossible. It just means you'll pay different types of tax, but taxes you will pay.
Not any tax on BitCoin transactions. It is clear that the taxation I spoke of was income and sales or any other type that depends on currency tracking. Property tax and "jackbooted, armed to the teeth thugs come to your home, take 20% of everything they find and leave you beaten up" type will of course remain possible as it does not depend on any sort of currency.
Sure, I will stop as soon as people will stop logging out, down-modding the posts they don't like and then replying to them as ACs for the extra kick...
There is a reason why you can't moderate the discussion in which you participate and its a good one. ACs have a right to their opinion but I also have a right to ignore them.
Also, you argument, like all of those who dis deflationary currencies as somehow inferior and unworkable, is logically flawed.
You assume that an inflationary fiat currency is immune from hoarding, which is clearly not the case. It is merely that the threshold of the rate of hoarding at which the economy falters is higher. But in both cases, should hoarding occur at a rapid enough rate, (the "my money will be worth more tomorrow" also becomes true for fiat currencies, at least in the short term if the hoarding rate exceeds that of inflation) the only possible action that the authority controlling the currency can take is self-destruction, converting the currency to fiat in the case of deflationary one, or triggering hyper-inflation in the case of fiat one.
This is not just theory but historical fact.
Thus the discussion of which type of currency is "better" cannot be predicated solely upon theoretical liquidity, which is what you insist on. Other factors have to be taken into account, like for example who has the control of the currency and to what ends.
Crypto-currencies have also another aspect that is wholly unlike traditional currencies: they are devastating to existing power structures who are 100% dependent upon taxation. They herald a possible shift of power of the magnitude the likes of which human civilization hasn't seen for a very long time. Destroying the mechanisms of taxation would render vast armies, gigantic police apparatus, industrial complexes feeding off of them and banking cartels backed by the state impossible. A lot of very very powerful people today would lose their power.
And that is why crypto-currencies will be the next battle of the coming years. And they, unlike the silly file sharing one, will be bloody. Very bloody. As it was always the case when the ruling class' income and power was threatened.
(and ideally people wanting to invest buy shares in companies that are actually doing wealth creation, rather than gold).
Except, of course, that any relationship that has ever (if any there was, which I doubt) existed between value of stock and the "wealth creation" of the companies issuing them is loooong gone. "Stock market" is today just a glorified synonym for "a casino".
You might as well "invest" your money in bets on horse races or some "system" to beat roulette.
It is no mystery then that people choose to gamble at the table of "value of gold" in the casino. Its simpler and the liquidity is higher.
My entire point is that you need to just stop right there. Why would everyone start to accept bitcoin? It's complicated, and it offers zero advantage over federal reserve notes to 99.99% of people.
Zero advantage?
One huge advantage you are missing is that BitCoin transactions cannot be taxed, or at least cannot be proven by the authorities to have taken place for the purposes of taxation. All that talk about "control" of currencies, while having some merit, is far secondary to the primary issue: all the true global powers, financial and military both, are directly funded by taxation of some kind.
Making taxation impossible would signal a seismic shift of power the likes of human civilization hasn't seen for a very long time. It would be a monumental upheaval. That is why BitCoin and other crypto-currency ideas have governments, gigantic corporations (a lot of whom who depend on tax welfare/bailouts) and the military/police/industrial complex (who are 100% dependent on taxation) become very, very angry.
How would lawyers make a killing and how would all those thugs who became police-men get to do their Gestapo bit then?
I think you are missing the main reason behind this "evolution" that the US society and many other so-called Western Democracies are undergoing: total victory of the "law and law enforcement" classes (followed closely by the "financial services" class) over all the other social strata.
And this process is so far advanced that I do not see any hope of a reversal anytime soon. I think societal collapse is the more likely scenario as the power of parasitic classes already far exceed that of productive ones and since most of the societal rewards already goes to the parasites. Even in "new" capitalist (or de-facto capitalist) societies like Russia and China the #1 answer to the question of "what profession you would like to have if you had free choice" of most "practical" teenagers is "a well connected lawyer".
0) become a lawyer 1) hire someone to explain Peano axioms to you so you can rewrite them in patentese ...
Otherwise your patent trolling will prove too risky and expensive. Note that most, if not all, of the patent trolls are either outright run by lawyers, or have lawyers on the board.
While "switching homes" is a bit off, this would be like "taking a short 150 mile detour to work" because a toll-road owner of the only geographically feasible bridge in the area decided that you have to undergo anal probes each time you cross their bridge, for an extra fee! Which of course happens to be the only convenient way to get to your work, other "alternatives" shortening your day by 6 hours. So you are being advised by all sorts of market-freediot fundamentalists to put yourself at the tender mercies of some supposed, theoretical "market forces" that are, somehow, theoretically, magically, supposed to kick in and overcome all practicality, geography and laws of physics, not to mention corruption.
Or something.
The sane solution of course would be not to allow any exclusive toll-road idiocy but to, if involvement of private companies is applicable, have all the roads (conduits in case of ISPs etc) or other geographically-restricted access ways to be owned by the city and only lease parallel portions of them to as many various service providers as possible to ensure maximum competition. It would be the equivalent of the bridge having 5 lanes and each of them being serviced by a different company. Drivers could then choose whose lane is the best maintained and has the best toll. Homeowners could likewise choose which ISP, or maybe even which combination of ISPs, should light up the municipality-owned fiber to their home.
The result of such a simple scheme would be actual competition (well, in case of ISPs - 5 lanes of a bridge is not enough to prevent collusion). But in case of ISPs it would be actual market forces at work. Monopoly-busting low barriers to entry for new companies (at least for the last mile issue, peering would have to be addressed too).
But this of course requires sane governance, which if the way things are going in the so-called "Western Democracies" keep up, will soon be more rare then hen's teeth.
Slashdot Mirror
Bingo!
Me working to solve that problem is like an ant working to prevent Sun-spots from occurring. Powerful, hugely financed, forces controlling mass media and access to political offices, the "law", police, military and related industrial complexes arrayed against the ever-more idiocratic populace ....
In situations like these, unfortunately, the only way is to let the events unfold until the inevitable rivers of blood run... future generations can "work" to improve things when the revolution is under way, 50 or maybe, if things go bad enough, 500 years from now. We however are pretty much SOL, me thinks.
The problem with "databases" is exactly that they are .... databases. The thing would need to include all the advances in database technology of the last 4 decades to make it reasonably robust, like ACID, which would then make it a monster for the very simple, already well taken care of, task it would be supposed to fulfill. Then there all the complexities of interacting with a database. Compared to a much simpler and effective alternatives, the gains are so negligible as to make the idea preposterous.
The /proc pseudo-filesystem structure has a specific purpose of controlling a running kernel and therefore some sacrifices and compromises were made ... at a huge expense of user readability, many /proc and /sys entries are downright human unreadable and there is only so much documentation that can be embedded in a file path! It is definitely not a general-purpose solution.
Your "liking" such ideas is a typical symptom of the "new, fashionable, shiny, cool, supremely convoluted and resource-hungry 'solution' looking for a simple, already long since solved, problem to 'solve' " disease which plagues much of the computer industry and causes endless grief everywhere.
Who should be called what they truly are: modern day slavers. That is simply because an attempt to control the information one can access translates directly into an attempt at control what thoughts one can think. Which directly impacts what actions one can perform. Anyone who tries to restrict the mental capacity - and thus actions - of someone else in order to profit from it is a slaver. The difference between the old and the new is merely the methods, the old one involved chains and physical pain, the new one involves exorbitant costs. The end results are unfortunately the same in the long run - a class of masters lording over the ignorant peons who can never expect to raise their lot in life.
Actually, no. It is that bad. At the core of the mess are hugely mistaken assumptions about what the Registry was supposed to be and the typical over-confidence of Microsoft designers in 3rd party "utilities" to manage any and every mess they create.
I already mentioned things like backups (3rd party tools required), change tracking (3rd party tools required), corruption repair (3rd party tools required) and a host of other things that are trivial using built-in tools for the administrators on Unix-like systems and are quite non-trivial on Windows (and even more so when the AD gets involved in the mess).
The arrogant assumption that the end user will never interact with the registry directly (hence the absolute disregard for any sort of embedded documentation, documentation which is standard on Unix-like systems in configuration files) and which assumption has been proven incorrect so many times that it does not even bear counting, adds nothing positive to the equation.
In short, the Registry is a wrongly-conceived idea, poorly planned (based on mistaken assumptions), poorly implemented and arrogantly enforced as the only "cure all" "solution" to system configuration needs.
If any Linux vendor tried such a thing there would be a mass exodus of most of the users from that vendor. Unfortunately in corporate Windows monoculture there are no such options.
Not only that, but then there is the whole issue of simplicity of backups (the registry database is always opened and cannot be manipulated by standard filesystem operations), corruption, change tracking and so on and on and on, all of which is trivial with Unix-style user-readable, commented, configuration files. They even have a "central mechanism" too: /etc
Frankly, given all the drawbacks, I haven't seen any sane argument where gains exceed the losses in favour of a system like the Windows Registry even once.
That is not entirely accurate. To make the analogy more correct you would also have to remove any comments or instructions from these documents and only leave raw data, labelled with random cryptic terms. Remember, the Registry abhors comments or any sort of embedded documentation.
Oops. In my previous reply I said the IRA, I meant the IRS of course. But given what IRS has been up to recently it is a little surprise that I could easily confuse the two.
You've gotta be kidding. Of course the "fractional reserve" system "defeated" the sane one because ... wait for it ... it is fraud! In the "real world" fraud will always defeat honest business, at least until the "marks" catch on. Otherwise there would be no fraudsters!
The "marks" realizing that something is rotten is what is happening now and which is why the "crisis" (i.e. the reckoning) is "worsening" even despite massive theft of public moneys used to prop up the con-artists.
If I get to print money willy-nilly, I can also "out-compete" pretty much any other business out there. The mob has been looking to this very method for a while now, complete with engraved plates in duffel-bags and printing presses in disused basements, but they lack the political connections of bankers to do it in broad daylight.
The fact that you can even make your argument with a straight face, that we should let fraudsters run rampant because they can "out-compete" honest businessmen is exactly the sort of brain washing that show how deeply the con-artists and charlatans have managed to corrupt the public discourse.
That's the "gentle" method in Europe. In the US the IRA tends to send twitchy-trigger-finger SWAT teams in APCs, complete with machine guns, at 4am to perform an "audit" (i.e. to confiscate all your papers and computers while you and your family lie face down on the floor with hands behind your backs tied up with plastic ties) as soon as they imagine that you've been holding out on them...
But then again, EU hasn't reached yet the advanced stage of Imperial Hubris the US has a long time ago now and so the desperation to finance the ever more wobbly and ever more money hungry empire hasn't reached the US levels yet. But its just a matter of time...
Then you give them one of yours. You see, you can have an essentially infinite number of wallets. Each wallet is less than a second to generate.
Some BitCoin users in fact use a separate wallet for each transaction to avoid just such complications. BitCoin is not perfect, being the first implementation of the concept of a crypto-currency that gained wider attention, but it has strong pseudonymity features.
The whole point is that crypto-currencies change these rules. Barter is impractical, cash transactions are (made purposefully by the government) impractical and dangerous for larger amounts but crypto-currencies have no such limitations and as a major bonus they do not require a bank to be a parasitic middle-man or in fact a banking system at all.
So one can conduct major operations in crypto-currencies, even if only to exchange large amount of cash from one place to another.
No, banks have long since lost their useful role. They are now parasitic entities whose main purpose is to exact rent from you on the very money you loan them. Most bank accounts have interest rates (if any) far below the cost of the "fees" that are levied on deposits, withdrawals and any other activity.
As to making loans, banks are part of the ever more fraudulent fiat currency scheme called "fractional reserve" where they are essentially licensed to print money without any equity to back it up. Which is one of the main underlying elements of the shit-storm they've gotten the whole Western world into.
Oh, and - as a bonus - they also act as part of the police-state apparatus and report all your activities to any government agency that asks, at a drop of a hat.
Crypto-currencies cut this parasitic middle man out. There is no need for a "checking account" or a "debit card" since these functions are integral to the crypto-currency system itself. Banks could still exist, of course, but only if they provide an actual service: saving accounts with actual meaningful interest and loans backed by the equity of the bank. No "wildly creative accounting" is possible with BitCoins in this area, unlike what is going on now at pretty much every bank.
Banks became parasites because the government, in the effort to ban large cash transactions as they could not be tracked by an all-encompassing surveillance apparatus that was being constructed in an attempt to ensure maximum income for itself, made them indispensable for an average peon as a conduit through which to filter their lives. And if you cannot get or do not want a bank account, you are then forced, again by the government actions, to use "payroll loan" places or other even worse parasites to conduct basic business of your life. The government succeeded in making cash no longer viable for most purposes other than very small things in life. Crypto-currencies reverse this by giving full control of people's money back to the people.
That's highly unlikely given how far down the rabbit hole the US is already. And the EU doesn't look any better, I am afraid. Nor does Canada or Australia.
China has of course its own uniquely shit-flavoured authoritarian nightmare of its own making to dance through that has yet to even begin to reveal all of its hellish potential.
I say we are pretty much SOL here for a long while. Maybe the next generation or the one after that will get to see the light on the other side of this thing.
In the meantime my personal plan that I am working on involves establishing a rather large distance to all the self-righteous, asshole "powers", be it political or financial, and getting some popcorn while I admire the fireworks from afar ...
Frankly, I do not know what the answers are. But what I do know is that all the present systems are corrupt beyond any hope of me having any faith in them whatsoever. If "civilization" means constant surveillance, police state thuggery, "elected" officials who do not even pretend to represent you anymore, interests so entrenched that dislodging then would take a bloody revolution - all funded by brutally enforced taxation regimes dependent on the ever-expanding surveillance and the powers of the police-state, then to me such a "civilization" has as little appeal as that of Ancient Rome and their "civilization" built upon slave markets. One can point out that Rome too built roads and aqueducts and so it was not all so bad ...
Come to think of it so did all those thugs who called themselves "royalty" at one time or another. They too built, out of the tithe they collected, a "civilization" ... of sorts.
So perhaps a massive shake-up is what we need. Odds are that horrible things will come out of it but then again maybe some other fresh idea to negate them. Status-quo however is rotten to the core and I cannot see it maintained much longer without its own set of horrible and bloody events in a desperate effort to prop it up.
Maybe it is those "hierarchical and territorial instincts" that have to bred out of "humanity" or maybe even just redirected ... lest our history end with a whimper of self-extermination (as I don't think that as pathetic as humanity is it can actually manage a "bang").
That's like saying that tractor tires are better for any purpose because they are larger...
Using just one metric without considering all the others is just silly.
Sir, you've been so brainwashed that it makes me sad. And what, pray tell, will you do when you retire? Do you even plan that far? Will "the economy" come to your rescue then, you with no savings as thanks for all the "helping" you've been doing when younger? Or do you plan to fund your retirement by selling off all those plastic lawn chairs from China and 20 different models-of-the-week of obsolete iPods on Ebay? Or perhaps you've "invested" all your money in some gambling scheme under the flashy neon sign of "Wall Street"? You've got a sure-bet system to break them odds, no?
Thanks to such idiocy the average saving rate has declined so bad in the US and other "industrialized" countries that it is now negative. And there is an economic crisis in the US and EU. On the other hand, in China the saving rates are skyrocketing and their economy booms. So much for simplistic "fiat currencies help economies by discouraging savings" nonsense.
Err, no. That "all other things being equal" is impossible when contrasting fiat currencies and deflationary ones is the fundamental problem with your reasoning. Each type of currency indicates a different economic scheme, with different priorities and with entirely different mechanics with different winners and losers in the economic scheme of things. That is why statements like "deflationary currencies are fundamentally bad for economy" are utter nonsense: they would be "bad" for inflationary economies, at which point it would be like complaining that those tractor tires do not fit your Mini.
They are if appropriate precautions are taken. Transactions are between wallets identified by random sequences of numbers. Unless you yourself or the other end of transaction reveals its nature and amount, there is no way of associating the random string with your person.
Sure and while it will get EBay's income taxed, it will not true with their customers unless they purchase vast amounts of stuff from Ebay or ship to their home addresses instead of Mailboxes Etc ones.
More importantly however if I buy a yacht with BitCoins from someone in Bahamas, the US government will have no idea that I had the money to do so. In fact one could run a whole business online with BitCoins and pay zero taxes of any kind. Remember you will not need any business papers, no registration, no incorporation because these are required mainly to open bank accounts. No bank account, no need for such documents, no income or sales tax. And while theoretically you would be a criminal "tax evader", if BitCoins become popular you would also be in the same boat as file sharers: impossible to stop.
That, and many other reasons, is why I was talking about a potential for seismic shifts of power. Destruction of banks which would no longer serve any useful purpose (which right now is enforcement of the non-cash nature of large transactions and reporting of income to the government) is but one of them.
Huge difference. Cash transactions have a practical ceiling mostly because governments worked real hard to put it there - removal of high denominations, limits on amounts of cash that can be held/transported etc. In fact possession of large amounts of cash is synonymous to a "crime" and the cops will look for a reason to lock you up.
Then there is security, ability to transfer over large distances etc.
Crypto-currencies have no such limitations.
If you were to remove income taxation, the US government would be insolvent immediately (as opposed to being insolvent a few years from now as things are going). Income tax accounts for a lion share of the federal budget.
Not any tax on BitCoin transactions. It is clear that the taxation I spoke of was income and sales or any other type that depends on currency tracking. Property tax and "jackbooted, armed to the teeth thugs come to your home, take 20% of everything they find and leave you beaten up" type will of course remain possible as it does not depend on any sort of currency.
Sure, I will stop as soon as people will stop logging out, down-modding the posts they don't like and then replying to them as ACs for the extra kick...
There is a reason why you can't moderate the discussion in which you participate and its a good one. ACs have a right to their opinion but I also have a right to ignore them.
Also, you argument, like all of those who dis deflationary currencies as somehow inferior and unworkable, is logically flawed.
You assume that an inflationary fiat currency is immune from hoarding, which is clearly not the case. It is merely that the threshold of the rate of hoarding at which the economy falters is higher. But in both cases, should hoarding occur at a rapid enough rate, (the "my money will be worth more tomorrow" also becomes true for fiat currencies, at least in the short term if the hoarding rate exceeds that of inflation) the only possible action that the authority controlling the currency can take is self-destruction, converting the currency to fiat in the case of deflationary one, or triggering hyper-inflation in the case of fiat one.
This is not just theory but historical fact.
Thus the discussion of which type of currency is "better" cannot be predicated solely upon theoretical liquidity, which is what you insist on. Other factors have to be taken into account, like for example who has the control of the currency and to what ends.
Crypto-currencies have also another aspect that is wholly unlike traditional currencies: they are devastating to existing power structures who are 100% dependent upon taxation. They herald a possible shift of power of the magnitude the likes of which human civilization hasn't seen for a very long time. Destroying the mechanisms of taxation would render vast armies, gigantic police apparatus, industrial complexes feeding off of them and banking cartels backed by the state impossible. A lot of very very powerful people today would lose their power.
And that is why crypto-currencies will be the next battle of the coming years. And they, unlike the silly file sharing one, will be bloody. Very bloody. As it was always the case when the ruling class' income and power was threatened.
Except, of course, that any relationship that has ever (if any there was, which I doubt) existed between value of stock and the "wealth creation" of the companies issuing them is loooong gone. "Stock market" is today just a glorified synonym for "a casino".
You might as well "invest" your money in bets on horse races or some "system" to beat roulette.
It is no mystery then that people choose to gamble at the table of "value of gold" in the casino. Its simpler and the liquidity is higher.
Zero advantage?
One huge advantage you are missing is that BitCoin transactions cannot be taxed, or at least cannot be proven by the authorities to have taken place for the purposes of taxation. All that talk about "control" of currencies, while having some merit, is far secondary to the primary issue: all the true global powers, financial and military both, are directly funded by taxation of some kind.
Making taxation impossible would signal a seismic shift of power the likes of human civilization hasn't seen for a very long time. It would be a monumental upheaval. That is why BitCoin and other crypto-currency ideas have governments, gigantic corporations (a lot of whom who depend on tax welfare/bailouts) and the military/police/industrial complex (who are 100% dependent on taxation) become very, very angry.
How would lawyers make a killing and how would all those thugs who became police-men get to do their Gestapo bit then?
I think you are missing the main reason behind this "evolution" that the US society and many other so-called Western Democracies are undergoing: total victory of the "law and law enforcement" classes (followed closely by the "financial services" class) over all the other social strata.
And this process is so far advanced that I do not see any hope of a reversal anytime soon. I think societal collapse is the more likely scenario as the power of parasitic classes already far exceed that of productive ones and since most of the societal rewards already goes to the parasites. Even in "new" capitalist (or de-facto capitalist) societies like Russia and China the #1 answer to the question of "what profession you would like to have if you had free choice" of most "practical" teenagers is "a well connected lawyer".
That wasn't what I would term an actual reply. More like a placeholder for one.
But yes, while I try to stick to my policy, I am only human. We all have our moments of weakness now and again.
Login and I will reply. ACs do not get that privilege.
Let me adjust this to the sad reality for you:
Otherwise your patent trolling will prove too risky and expensive. Note that most, if not all, of the patent trolls are either outright run by lawyers, or have lawyers on the board.
While "switching homes" is a bit off, this would be like "taking a short 150 mile detour to work" because a toll-road owner of the only geographically feasible bridge in the area decided that you have to undergo anal probes each time you cross their bridge, for an extra fee! Which of course happens to be the only convenient way to get to your work, other "alternatives" shortening your day by 6 hours. So you are being advised by all sorts of market-freediot fundamentalists to put yourself at the tender mercies of some supposed, theoretical "market forces" that are, somehow, theoretically, magically, supposed to kick in and overcome all practicality, geography and laws of physics, not to mention corruption.
Or something.
The sane solution of course would be not to allow any exclusive toll-road idiocy but to, if involvement of private companies is applicable, have all the roads (conduits in case of ISPs etc) or other geographically-restricted access ways to be owned by the city and only lease parallel portions of them to as many various service providers as possible to ensure maximum competition. It would be the equivalent of the bridge having 5 lanes and each of them being serviced by a different company. Drivers could then choose whose lane is the best maintained and has the best toll. Homeowners could likewise choose which ISP, or maybe even which combination of ISPs, should light up the municipality-owned fiber to their home.
The result of such a simple scheme would be actual competition (well, in case of ISPs - 5 lanes of a bridge is not enough to prevent collusion). But in case of ISPs it would be actual market forces at work. Monopoly-busting low barriers to entry for new companies (at least for the last mile issue, peering would have to be addressed too).
But this of course requires sane governance, which if the way things are going in the so-called "Western Democracies" keep up, will soon be more rare then hen's teeth.
You've probably confused Google Chat, which has peer-to-peer voice component with Google Voice. Apples and Oranges.
When you go to Google Voice page from anywhere outside of the US after login, you get a "We do not do business in your country" page.
Now there is a bug in Google Chat that lets you get to Google Voice via Gmail mailbox, but I have no idea how long that will work.
For the millionth time: Google Voice is only available in the US and no expansion moves have been noticed for years now. Not even to Canada.
Skype is on the other hand a true global company. You can use it in pretty much any country to make phone calls to any other country.
There is no comparison. As far as I and most of global population are concerned, Google Voice does not exist since we can't use it.