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To add, this is one of the reasons why the use of Bitcoins is so interesting to observe. When people start to understand what Bitcoins are and can do, it begs these sorts of questions.
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The thing is, it wouldn't really be a virtual 'country' (read: state) at all. It would just be a voluntary organisation, from which you are subscribed to, in order to access the services they offer.
What is more interesting, is the question it begs - what is a state, if not an organisation which provides services, which you can't un-subscribe to?
Additionally, it begs the question of why you need a perimeter to defend at all; when members of different organisations are distributed randomly amongst one another, all anyone really needs to defend, is their property (including your body). The very definition of the 'police' or the 'army' are arbitrary - you just need personal security services.
IMO, the reason it is difficult to define what you are suggesting, is because what we have now (states/countries) is a rather strange and artificial concept to begin with. We are all just individuals, trying to safely navigate through our lives.
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My focus has been mainly around finding the "perfect" voting system.
This has already been found many many decades ago and it's called by strictly consumers regulated markets (i.e. free markets) where voting is carried out 24/7/265.25. The only problem is there's this small gang of psychopathic people who benefit immensely by using violence to interfere with it. Remove them and all of our problems with governments will be solved. 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.Aren't you essentially advocating cooperatives? Specifically, organisations where everyone owns a share and votes on the direction of the organisation as a whole? While you may want to create some fancy software system to manage such a thing, it is by no means needed. There are many examples of successful cooperatives, who operate in similar ways, with voluntary membership. IMO, there are times when cooperatives are good and useful and times when they are not ideal. The best way to find out when each should be used, is to let individuals choose via the market place. |
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Can we please not degrade every thread on innovative social organization into people yelling at each other about violence and coercion? I understand the moral concerns, but I would really like to see interesting discussions on how we can implement a society that can overcome issues such as tragedy of the commons and public goods problems without creating a centralized hierarchy of power. There are lots of political systems that can exist even within a constraint of non-coercion; both a communist no-private-property system and an ultra-neoliberal regime of privatizing every last square centimeter of nature and human creation are technically compatible with the concept - this insight is what ideas like the Political Compass are ultimately all about. I personally find the idea of running elements of basic infrastructure on cryptographic protocols quite ingenious; it removes both private power and government power and leaves us with a simple set of rules that anybody can play by to participate in the network. There are many ways to form groups in society and if they are voluntary, then that's fine. Maybe cooperatives/mutuals (where members are owners and can vote etc) are better for some things (health, roads, schools perhaps), while directed organisation are better for others. It isn't really important which are used, but rather that they are voluntary. I've got a book waiting to be read by Elinor Ostrom. She won a Nobel price for her work about the tragedy of the commons and how it can (and is in many cases) be solved without central governance: http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/the-victory-of-the-commonsYou don't have to go far back in history to reach a time when many commons had to be shared and the state had little involvement in the process. It is only in the modern era that communications have lead to top down organisation even being remotely feasible - the option simply wasn't there for millennia and people found systems to deal with commons just fine. |
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My focus has been mainly around finding the "perfect" voting system.
This has already been found many many decades ago and it's called by strictly consumers regulated markets (i.e. free markets) where voting is carried out 24/7/265.25. The only problem is there's this small gang of psychopathic people who benefit immensely by using violence to interfere with it. Remove them and all of our problems with governments will be solved. Thanks for being the sane voice on this thread. 'The state' is just an organisation like any other, except that it gets to use violence with impunity. It's strange that people seem unable to see this and want to treat it like some sort of special flower - an organisation which is somehow unlike any other and should therefore get to coerce people as it sees fit. All people need to accept, is that they own themselves and the results of their actions (both good and bad). Everything else from theft, through fraud to murder, all fan out from these basic assertions. It doesn't matter how a 'special' organisation is run, whether it is via software or humans, allowing it to steal and murder with impunity, will lead to tyranny. No organisation or individual should be able to coerce with impunity, no matter how special some think they are - including the organisation called 'the state'. |
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Is that Traktion from Housepricecrash?
You're the reason that I found out about Bitcoin!
Indeed it is - I'm glad to be of service!  |
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What are the odds that this overlay network could be used to permit two mobile devices to transact directly, in the absence of Internet access for one or both parties? For example, a direct ad-hoc wifi connection or an indirect connection via a 'piratebox' type device? Asuuming, of course, that the sending device doesn't need Internet access to produce a transaction from it's own, known address funds.
+1 Great thread + software! I would like to know if you could pass a signed transaction onto another party (say, from the payer to the payee) too. This would be very useful for areas with limited data connectivity, as it would only require the receiver to 'upload' the transaction. You could also have situations where both parties had no Internet access and such transactions could be treated like cheques, which could be cashed when the payee is next online. |
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It's good to see new companies using Bitcoin, but I can't help but think this idea is a bit daft.
Rather than burning through energy and CPU/GPU cycles to earn a few quid, would it not just be better to ask for Bitcoin micro payments each month?
EDIT: To add, gamers are likely to have non-optimised rigs, compared with the next generation mining kit too, making it pretty wasteful. It is still good to see companies embracing Bitcoins though.
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I'd like to try it on my HTC Desire, but I get an error on start up:
The app need android 2.3 or higher (currently set on google play to 2.2 which is wrong). Ah, thanks - that explains it! I suppose this would be a good excuse to install Cyanogenmod or upgrade to a Galaxy Nexus! Will 2.2 ever be supported or is it not capable enough? |
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I found 2 problems with the actual Android client:
- It shows a warning: it says that it is going to occupy some space. This is a warning of the usual "Bitcoin Wallet", but your version doesn't download the blockchain.
- I had a wallet with only 0.01 btc. I tried to sent them to another address. I said that it's better to add the 0.0005 fee, and "it ask me if I want to add the fee", but the answers are only "ok / cancel". I think that it should be better to have three answer, yes/no/cancel.
I'd like to try it on my HTC Desire, but I get an error on start up: 'Sorry! The application Blockchain (process piuk.blockchain) has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again' Any ideas? |
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Thanks Stephen - that was a brilliantly detailed reply.
I read all of the threads and I'm even more convinced that Bitcoin is going to succeed than I was before. It feels like the holes and being plugged and the Bitcoin ecosystem is maturing nicely and at a good speed. It's all rather impressive!
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I was pondering how transactions could be made in areas where mobile data connectivity is poor. Specifically, how shops could allow payments in such situations.
As a shop can quite easily get a land line based broadband connection, they should be able to interact with the bitcoin network. However, the shopper may not have Internet access for various reasons (and may not want to set up wifi/bluetooth etc). That got me wondering whether there was a way to perform a transaction with only the receiver being online.
If this has already been done or discussed, apologies for bringing it up again. I tried searching the forum and google, but couldn't find what I was looking for.
My idea was using temporary deterministic wallets for such transactions. You could create a number of wallets with a fixed denomination of bitcoins in them. You could then show the PR code to the cashier and they could scan the code to re-create the deterministic wallet. The cashier's till software could then transfer the money out to another account, to ensure that the shopper couldn't attempt to double spend.
If change was needed, the shop could still send money to the shoppers receiving PR code, even if the shopper couldn't confirm them. They could give you a receipt and the transaction details in case there was a problem. If the money failed to reach the account, the block chain could be examined with the details in the receipt. Obviously, the shop isn't going to want to get a bad reputation for not giving change.
Is the above possible and would it be easy to implement? Also, are there other alternatives which can be completed in similar circumstances?
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The big problem for me is that the minting rate doesn't adjust with the size of the Bitcoin economy (ie. the swarm size). I have a feeling that if this isn't changed, the project may run out of steam.
While it may annoy old users a bit that they can't create as many coins, new users are waiting weeks to mint any coins. It is unlikely that Bitcoins will become established if new users aren't given a decent shot at their own minting (especially when the user base should be growing rapidly). Users who discovered Bitcoins early will still have amassed more coins than new entrants, even without the difficulty changing.
The software is very impressive, but the minting rules really need to be looked at again. Self minting is such a good idea for distributing new coins, but IMO it needs some basic economic theory applying to it, rather than a relatively arbitrary setting.
I have no problems with Bitcoin's economic model (remember: money is not like other commodities) nor the decreasing rate of minting, but it would have been cool if done in less of a 'lottery' fashion and distributed equally among the users. It would be great if my laptop could generate even 0.1 BTC a day, for example. In terms of coin value: A growing Bitcoin economy (number of user making transactions), with no monetary inflation == A static Bitcoin economy (number of user making transactions), with monetary deflation. Minting is a great way of distributing the coins as the user base grows, but it could be done less arbitrarily. I don't mind the lottery system, but the number of coins in a mined block or the difficulty could be more flexible to demand. Anyway, I don't want to debate this at length on this thread, as it will take it OT (and we have several threads about this already!); I just wanted to point out my agreement with the OP about this. |
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The big problem for me is that the minting rate doesn't adjust with the size of the Bitcoin economy (ie. the swarm size). I have a feeling that if this isn't changed, the project may run out of steam.
While it may annoy old users a bit that they can't create as many coins, new users are waiting weeks to mint any coins. It is unlikely that Bitcoins will become established if new users aren't given a decent shot at their own minting (especially when the user base should be growing rapidly). Users who discovered Bitcoins early will still have amassed more coins than new entrants, even without the difficulty changing.
The software is very impressive, but the minting rules really need to be looked at again. Self minting is such a good idea for distributing new coins, but IMO it needs some basic economic theory applying to it, rather than a relatively arbitrary setting.
We should be encouraging wealth creation so that people can spend their bitcoins on, not focusing on minting coins. Why not switch off minting altogether then, with that logic? |
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The big problem for me is that the minting rate doesn't adjust with the size of the Bitcoin economy (ie. the swarm size). I have a feeling that if this isn't changed, the project may run out of steam.
While it may annoy old users a bit that they can't create as many coins, new users are waiting weeks to mint any coins. It is unlikely that Bitcoins will become established if new users aren't given a decent shot at their own minting (especially when the user base should be growing rapidly). Users who discovered Bitcoins early will still have amassed more coins than new entrants, even without the difficulty changing.
The software is very impressive, but the minting rules really need to be looked at again. Self minting is such a good idea for distributing new coins, but IMO it needs some basic economic theory applying to it, rather than a relatively arbitrary setting.
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Give people something today that will be more valuable tomorrow and they'll hoard it.
Give people something today that will be less valuable tomorrow and they'll trade it.
Good summary. It's why an ideal currency is one which suffers from neither inflation or deflation. What's wrong with hoarding and trading if that's the efficient thing to do given the underlying economic reality as in the original post? Nothing, but it may not be the most effective money then, but instead an asset (in the shape of a virtual commodity). BTW, I think the OT fails to recognise that the size of the Bitcoin economy will grow many fold in the future. I am concerned that this will cause monetary deflation, when judged per capita.
Yeah, I'm talking about the mature Bitcoin market. On the way there we will have both monetary inflation and monetary deflation per capita. That is maybe not optimal but I can't think of a better way to do it. Anyway, it should work, and the end result is good. Bitcoin has a brilliant solution to this - distributed minting - but I do think it could be tweaked to better suit the growing Bitcoin economy. It just seems a bit arbitrary (but a reasonable guess) at the moment. If you consider that the Bitcoin economy may never truly stop growing (if the acceptance keeps growing, along with the global population ultimately), I'm not sure why it needs a terminal size. IMO, it would be great if the quantity flexed with the user base. If you don't believe me, consider how hyperinflation works
I'm pretty sure that's not how hyperinflation works. Do you know of any instance of hyperinflation that has not involved the central bank printing huge and rapidly increasing amounts of money? It starts with the printing of a load of money, but that's not the trigger. They could print only 20% more cash and still end up with repudiation - who wants a guaranteed 20% loss of wealth? It's the loss of confidence in the currencies ability to remain a stable money which causes the cascading failure. |
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I was very surprised and pleased to see an article at LewRockwell.com about bitcoins. Did anyone from here wrote it or at least knew about it? http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/luongo7.1.1.htmlAlso, I think this could count as reference for the wikipedia article. I wrote it. I hope you enjoyed it. Let's see if it results in some new interest. Ta, That's a great read - thanks! |
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