Or is it the love of money that’s the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a bitcent, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money–and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another–their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich–will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt–and of his life, as he deserves.

Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard–the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money–the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law–men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims–then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion–when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing–when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors–when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you–when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers deny bitcoin and only allow a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Bitcoin has an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account overdrawn.'

When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world?' You are.

You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it’s crumbling around you, while you’re damning its life-blood–money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men’s history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you repeat with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves–slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody’s mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers–as industrialists.

To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money–and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being–the self-made man–the American industrialist.

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose–because it contains all the others–the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity–to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.

Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters’ continents. Now the looters’ credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide– as, I think, he will.

Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men.

Blood, whips and guns–or bitcoins. Take your choice–there is no other–and your time is running out.

--slight changes made to "Francisco's Money Speech" from Atlas Shrugged.

So you think that money is the root of all evil?

Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the virtual shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce.

Is this what you consider evil?

When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those bitcoins in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those bitcoins, are a token of honor–your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money,

Is this what you consider evil?

Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions–and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

Or do you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made–before it can be looted or mooched–made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.

To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss–the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery–that you must offer them values, not wounds–that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade–with reason, not force, as their final arbiter–it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability–and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money.

Is this what you consider evil?

But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality–the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money.

Is this the reason why you call it evil?

Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth–the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it.

Is this the reason why you call it evil?

Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a satoshi’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity?

Is this the root of your hatred of money?

Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit.

Is this the root of your hatred of money?

Does anyone know how companies handle direct deposit for employees? What software they use and how it is processed?

The ultimate bump to Bitcoin would be if people start direct depositing their paychecks into their BTC wallets. This, in conjunction with some sort of BTC bill-pay would be great.

I am curious about if charge-backs are possible with company direct deposits, or what they would have to go through to make that happen.

We are certainly not at the point where companies would be willing to pay in BTC, but we could allow for the transition in the mean time.

I think the Federal Reserve should be the central authority for the blockchain.

Perhaps your DNA sequence could be used.

Add an extra digit to distinguish between twins/triplets/etc (1 for first born,2 for second...)

Dollar cost averaging.


Spend the same amount of dollars over the full length of time in increments.

Perhaps, $100 per day for 40 days.

This is like the telephone game.

Once you get that Bitcoin back it will be nothing like the one you sent out.

Which point? I was addressing his opinion that profiteering is immoral.

And I pointed out that others believe it is moral, and the reasoning behind it.

The fact that fees are high for some Bitcoin services after such a short period is understandable.

After the invention of the telephone, AT&T had a monopoly on telephone technology for 20 years and could charge whatever fee they wanted. At the end of that 20 year monopoly, prices dropped dramatically and choices skyrocketed as competition moved in.

A company that creates a new service should expect to do well for a while (at least a few months!), otherwise...why create the service?

lol...by "pushing the government over the cliff" they mean that they would get out of the way of those who are currently destroying it, like allowing a child to touch the hot stove instead of interfering. Some would say that it is best for the child to learn his lesson and get burned, others would rather the child not get burned and point out the danger instead. It gets tiring telling the child over and over that it will really hurt if he touches it.

I hate all banks. Not the institutions themselves, or the people who work there. Just the buildings themselves. The actual bank.

My hatred has found difficulty since online banks have come into play. I have not actually seen the servers which house these online banks, but I do believe that I would hate that server just as much.

I destroyed all piggy banks I saw as a child.

Ayn Rand had force initiated against her. She was forced to pay into medicare and social security. Once force has been initiated against you, you have the moral right to both defend yourself and punish, or be justly compensated by, the aggressor.

And if you read Atlas Shrugged, the fall of the country to be re-built by those who actually produce was a major point.

There are many in the libertarian community that believe that pushing the government over the cliff sooner is the better strategy as opposed to the long slow crash. Letting the socialist movement take its course leads to the same thing each time, it is up to us to prepare for that fall so that we may come out on top afterwards.

I, for one, do not support sitting back as liberals and socialists steal from the productive and distribute it among themselves. I am all for getting as much of that stolen loot into the hands of libertarians who will then go on to use that money to fight the very theft that is occurring. To sit idly by and allow the looters to prosper and grow at the expense of the productive is akin to the extermination of productivity.

Bitcoin provides one small piece in fighting the thieves. Those who use FRNs are getting wealth stolen every day, most people do not even realize it. A few services that are transparently showing you the fees that you are charged is nothing compared to what the Federal Reserve does. And you have the choice of using those services or not.

Again, how often did Karl Marx purchase a product at a free market rate? Did he pay more for a sandwich because the owner's child needed money for the hospital? Did he distribute the money he earned equally to those who needed it the most? Did he live every day of his life strictly confined to the principles of his communist manifesto? Or was he a hypocrite? Or is it not hypocritical to work toward an ideal while still dealing with the imperfect world you are fighting against?

And Karl Marx most likely bought a sandwich and earned money by producing a good or service. Was he a hypocrite?

Or did he pay more for goods if the person's need was greater?

How do you limit a single ID to a single person?

You can call it a cooperative if you like. I could see it working for things such as retailers making a bulk purchase from a wholesaler so that they get a lower price with a combined rate.

I have belonged to an electric cooperative as opposed to a private or public company. I also currently get my water through a private cooperative. Each customer is also a voting member, we elect a commission each year who then decides who will be the director in charge of day to day operations. Most local services could be provided that way.

Yes, the free market and individuals making individual choices is ideal. But most libertarians understand the concept of trying to organize individualists is like herding cats. Collectivists are able to form groups and combine efforts, but they tend to fail as the planning is centralized and  stifles individuality.

What I look at is taking all of those individuals who all have the same goal but do not have the power to combine their efforts toward the same goal.

When it comes to a group of people spending their money in a combined effort, this should be easily done voluntarily. Like the example of a group of people putting their money together to buy a park. Something that would otherwise be reserved for someone with a lot of money.

Ideally, there would be a group of people with a similar goal that would pledge a certain amount of money. Many ideas would be put forth toward achieving that goal. Members of the group would vote with their money toward the achievement of that goal. If not enough money is voted toward the goal then it fails and other proposals are put forth. If only 80% of the group votes with their money toward the goal but 80% is sufficient, then it goes forward. A new group is formed of those 80% stakeholders and the other 20% has the choice of contributing and having further say or moving on. The proposals put forth could include the organizational rules such as this software would provide, a leader to oversee the spending, a voting method for how to deal with future decisions, dues if necessary and whatever else may be desired. The key being that everyone agrees to how things are set up and nobody is forced to do anything. All while providing a way to combine efforts.

I can code, not very well versed in the nuances of C# but started out with C/C++ with some .NET and now mainly work in Java.

My focus has been mainly around finding the "perfect" voting system. For me the perfect voting system means that only those people who want something, pay for it and get it.  This gets a bit tricky with things like defense or something that gets paid for and benefits those who do not pay for it, but with moving money around it can be done. At the very least, a voting system that everyone agrees on upfront would be good as well.

I was actually coming on here to get some coding advice to get started on something very similar.

My plan, however, was to start small. Instead of looking at how a government would work, look to something like a club.

Members pay dues, they vote on things and money flows to one thing or another. This is all done voluntarily and no force is used.

If such a thing can be done at the small level, it can eventually be ramped up to a small local "government". Imagine a community that already has some government services but would like to better manage their resources. The community can take donations and start improving their community through the use of this organizational software. They may raise enough money to hire a private fire company that serves the members of their club/community. Same with detectives, police, schooling, etc. It does not necessarily need to replace the current government but it may reach the point where enough people in the community are covered by the voluntary government that they vote in the majority to end the services that they are already receiving.

I like your implementation of using a blockchain to hold the treasury. My idea was to have everyone hold their dues/fees in a single wallet and vote by moving their funding to the treasury, if the vote does not pass, the funds are returned. Each organization would be able to determine the voting structure and the dues and what happens if dues are not paid.

Would love to see your write up, my approach was going to require a centralized location for holding the funds which would require a lot of trust.

Is there a way to have P2P e-mail?

Basically pay people in BTC to run servers on their computers holding encrypted e-mails with portals which allow people to connect to their e-mail.

The e-mail can include a one line ad on the bottom of the e-mail which advertisers pay BTC to have.

Thoughts?

I cannot wait until this becomes live and I can pay for gas with my Bitcoin card.

I know nothing about the credit card system but will gladly contribute my java programming skills, at the very least to help with bug testing.

Just remember, any contract with a minor is null and void.