Yes; but examples of cultures/societies that were more anarchist than anything else have existed, some of which existed without major issues for longer then the United States has existed in total.  I'm not an anarchist either, and I do agree that the world isn't really ready for a total self-governing society just yet.  But the key word there is 'yet'.  The age of the Internet has brought us real examples of voluntary associations able to perform complex social functions that only governments and/or corporations had the organizational structures to perform effectively before.  Bitcoin is one beautiful example of this; as it performs the function of a central bank & minimalist regulatory structure entirely without compulsion, and largely without any third party human intervention at all.  I can't imagine how the other problems may be solved (collective defense & funding of same, being the primary issue, and the one that you highlighted) but that is not to say that they are not solvable.

Furthermore, your complaint is an issue with sustainablility, yet history displays the error of your thinking; as nation-states are not much more stable than the odd anarchist culture.  They also, historicly, have a habit of invading one another every few generations.  The execeptions to that rule also happen to be the most anarchist of nation-states to have existed, such as the union of Swiss Cantons prior to this past century.  Who also happen to have had, and somewhat still do have, a clanish & militant culture; which is why they were not themselves ever conquered fro without; as any attempt to do so resulted in a loose union of city-states to band together and actually act like a nation-state in the shadow of any external threat.  The Swiss cantons were so stable, that they existed as functionally independent city states for eight hundred years, while the nations that go by the names and borders of Britian or France suffered through wars of succesion, military coups, popular revolutions and religious civil wars; functionally re-inventing themselves every couple hundred years at best.

The nations-states we commonly refer to as "Western" are all between 150-250 years old (excluding the entire WWI & WWII debacle) and are thus all getting a bit long in the tooth.  Hell, Britian itself is overdue for another religious civil war; and the French have been inclined towards killing their own leadership for a couple of tense decades already.  A quick move towards an anarchist-like nation-state might be the best chance to avoid getting sucked into another world war, no matter it's long term risk factors.

Much has changed.

I'm sortof doing that, actually.  I'm in the process of buying about 5 hectares of mostly undeveloped forest land.  I live in a climate wherein trees grow readily without help, so according to the US government, the actual land is worthless; but it's still a viable investment under some conditions.  Most of the value, according to everyone else, is the house that sits on the land.  The house is barely livable, and I consider the ~3K trees to be the valuable part of the deal.  I figure that if I must, I can grow a garden and sell firewood, should the pols succeed in taking the remainder.


I trust her fine, and she is waking up, but that doesn't yet matter.

You and I know that, but it's really hard to convince a woman that Argentina is a case example comparable to the United States.

I think that you know that is easier said than done.  For most people, the tax consequences alone of early withdrawal results in most people delaying such a decision.  My wife would never let me do any such thing, until the day that I can show her that it's already happening to others, by which time it will probably be too late.  The only thing that I can realisticly do is take out a "loan" against it, for which I can only get half of the nominal value and I have to pay back.

And yet, it happens anyway.  Worse, in the US the bailouts were added to the deficit, to be paid by my grandchildren instead of current taxpayers.  That's such an awful precedent I can't see any path back to respectablility for the US.  The current deficit is impossible to repay already, and continues to grow.  Default and economic breakdown are inevitable.

Furthermore, so many things are illegal in the US today, the average middle class American commits 3 felonies per day without their own knowledge of the violations.  The IRS scandal right now is proof that the average government agent is not aware of the laws that govern his own job, and that the basic understanding that picking on a group that you don't agree with is a felony was absent from the IRS.  It's also absent from the ATF, I've seen that one personally; and government agents tend not to listen to those around them who have a deeper understanding of the law.

We'll never know.

So would my hat.

I seriously doubt that, but...


...this is true.  It's a talk forum.  It logs all access as a necessary part of it's primary function.  If this makes you want to find your tinfoil hat, hide in the closet and suck your thumb; perhaps you shouldn't be using this forum?  Or any forum, for that matter.


Heh.  Good luck with that one.


Yes, be safe.  Use a brain.  Good words to live by.  If this thread is deleted now, I'll eat my hat.

The cause of this OP is proof enough that is not so.

Much better.

What?  No it doesn't.  There need not be an operator at all.

Go back and read # 7 again.  Keep doing it until you grok it.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts

Is this the same guy who posted on his blog the same thing a month ago?  If not, this guy is going to be very disappointed that he was not the first to make this connection.

Mostly these are implicit contracts, managed by the electronic devices doing the interaction on behalf of users.  I'd wager that not one in 10K will really know or care how their cell phone can incrementally pay for petrol in bitcoins without a need for trusting either party.  When you drive up to a gas pump and call the attendant for a self service cash fill up, he has to trust that you will come in to pay afterwards, and not drive off.  If you walk in and pay cash up front, you have to trust that they will give you any change back.   But both of these things require that a human observer oversee the business's side of the transaction.  However, people do like the convenence of driving up to a pump and using a credit card at the pump.  So does the company.  With contracts, this is possible using bitcoins, entirely without a human observer making any such decisions to prevent drive offs.

Doesn't matter what I may or may not know.  It's an objective observation that a consensus algorithm is not an obvious "most promising" anything.  If you hadn't stated it as if it were fact, I wouldn't have objected, but that is not what you did.  Your opinion may or may not be shared, or supportable with objective or subjective arguments, or even considered common knowledge; but it is still an opinion.

I really have no opinion on whether or not ripple's new consensus algo is "the most promising alternative to Pow" or not.  I consider that a silly idea on it's face.  My personal opinion is that comparison is akin to the next most promising alternative to good health, life or freedom; the next most promising alternative is not usually acceptable.

First off, those are distinctly different professional disciplines; so just knowing what he needed to know from each of those disciplines without screwing it up was no small feat.

Furthermore, there is more to Bitcoin than you seem to be aware.  The way the security methods and economic incentives fit together is not simply complex, it's probably perfect.  There are subtle, secondary security features in the protocol that; while not making the 51% attack impossible, do contribute to making it generally unprofitable.  Most of these secondary interactions are not mentioned in the white paper, but were present from very early on, and were not simply added to the protocol later.  Just consider what can be done with blockchain enforcable contracts.


https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts

That's not at all obvious.



It certainly doesn't leave PoW obsolete, it doesn't even serve the same function.  Ripple is a p2p credit system.  It's not a monetary system at all, and it's recent attempts to develop it's own internal currency are going to hamper it's utility.  They are simply trying to be all things, and it's not going to turn out well.


Oh, consensus can certainly fail.  Deadlock for a necessary change is a failure.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-11/argentinas-modest-proposal-buy-bonds-or-go-jail

However, if this even halfway works in Argentina, the US will be next.  Only the US federal government knows exactly where those retirement accounts are.

Yeah, good luck with that.


The poker players just changed to bitcoin.

It's already too late.