Not just bitcoin. Gold and silver too. And yet people are still bashing goldbugs. All the more reason why education is necessary. There is also the problem where gold enthusiasts deride Bitcoin because it's not "backed by anything". It's not obvious to them that gold is not "backed by anything" either, because gold has been used as a currency for so long. This is an educational problem. Bitcoin doesn't have to be widely adopted to be efficient. I've said it several times and I repeat it. What does efficiency have to do with anything? I want to use Bitcoin as my primary unit of exchange. I want to pay for my food with BTC, pay rent in BTC, get paid in BTC. None of that is going to happen (outside of perhaps a small community) unless we are able to convince people that Bitcoin is worth more than fiat currency. Again, this is an educational problem. If you rely on the smartness of the majority of people, you are screwed. Not really. Think herd mentality. We just have to convince some significant minority of "regular joes" that Bitcoin is worthwhile. They will convince the rest. |
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Because they have never tried to know about it.
How hard is it to google "digital money", to follow a few links and to come up with a wikipedia page that mentions bitcoin, Ripple and stuffs like that?
How hard is it to wonder if there exist a decentralised currency?
To me, we don't have to spend energy to teach bitcoin to someone who has never even tried to do such a basic research. Why, that's a mighty high horse you've got there. Most people have been told all of their lives that state control over money is necessary and desirable. Bitcoin flies in the face of that idea. Bitcoin cannot become widely adopted merely waiting for people to find it and understand why it is good on their own. We need to get out there and educate people about the nature of money. Fuck, most people don't even realize that the reason prices have risen over the last 100 years is almost entirely due to monetary inflation by the Federal Reserve. |
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to combat the delay issue (which is a large usability flaw in my mind), have you thought about using a service like clearcoin? https://clearcoin.appspot.com/ Some big names in the bitcoin community are heading up that project, so even if it's not a total fit, you might get their attention to see what any other courses of action might be that could support the growth of this kind of technology. Clearcoin requires 6 confirmations before you can spend the money. Gavin is one of the main developers of Bitcoin, in addition to the founder of ClearWing software, and posts here frequently. |
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will you loose warranty or some one will hit you if you run your fan at 100%? Those squirrel cage fans are LOUD at full speed... |
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The only way out is to expicitly say "I do not consent to you looking at my phone without a warrant".
Am I missing something? ftfy  |
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This pisses me off soooooo much. ACLU learned that the police had acquired the cell phone scanning devices and in August 2008 filed an official request for records on the program, including logs of how the devices were used. The state police responded by saying they would provide the information only in return for a payment of $544,680. Law enforcement agents testified that requiring a search warrant before tracking criminals "will have a significant slowing effect on the processing of child exploitation leads." |
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What types of non-standard transactions are currently in use and/or in the thought experiment phase? I'll start a wiki page for non-standard transactions.
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When you talk about voluntary organs etc you're getting in to a real gray area too. If someone needs to sell it to feed their starving family are they really giving it away? Same with prostitution. You could argue that their economic situation is causing the loss of the organ / prostitution but I don't know. It would just be pretty damn hard to regulate those kind of things and know what is legit or not. If an individual is willing to trade an organ or sex for a good or service they need, in what way does preventing the trade benefit them? Also if Silkroad doesn't have it someone with less scruples (or just a different view whatever) will provide a place for it. Truth. |
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When I laugh about the government doing the research I'm more laughing at it from the "less government is good" perspective not that it might be the best answer.
The government can (and does) take a loss all the time where private companies wouldn't. If something affects 1 in 1000000 people the government could lose money researching it while the private pharms might ignore it. Obviously this is good and bad. If they handled the research then we might have better antibiotics but no viagra. So I guess you'd be guaranteed to get old and not enjoy it.
Should the government (or anybody) be in the business of taking money from everyone, by force if necessary, in order to spend it on research for a disease which only affects 1/1,000,000th of the population? In what way does that even make sense? Do you realize that by saying government should not only do this, but accept a loss in doing so, you are saying that your money should not only be forcefully taken from you and distributed to causes which net little gain? Government has no incentive to provide quality, cost effective service, since they can never go out of business. |
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Except in the case we're discussing where it doesn't lead to profit making opportunities. At least not for the ones doing the research. They just have costs.
Who would fund the start ups? It wouldn't be anyone who expected to make money from the investment. Especially since big pharma is now pooled together and have all the infrastructure in place to copy your invention. In this hypothetical scenario, I posit that there will be a significant incentive for large pharmaceutical organizations to pool their resources for research. They do research, even lacking IP law, because they want new treatments to sell. They pool their resources because otherwise their large competitors would use their work without any compensation. This way, they all get access to the research and they all share its costs. Perhaps the ones furthest along take the lead and thus get some form of monopoly rights inside this pool. The agreements made by these entities do not bind, in any way, entities (I posit it will be the small to medium size ones) that are not part of the agreement. Another thing you overlook is the role of trade secrets. Any entity is free to try to keep any or all information secret. Corporate espionage is still a violation of property rights, and I feel you underestimate the time and effort required to reverse engineer a drug. Even if it's only a matter of months, that's still a huge advantage for the initial developing entity. Work is work, regardless if you use muscles or brain. If you have to compensate me for my physical work, you should for intellectual work too. The justification for compensation derives from consent, not work. If you dig a hole in my lawn, I owe you nothing and in fact you may owe me damages. If I hire you to dig a hole in my lawn, I owe you whatever amount I agreed to pay you. |
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So things we definitely won't see on Silk Road;
- contracts/bounties to commit true crime hits (including assassination contracts)
- property acquired through theft of any kind (including body parts, stolen bitcoins, etc)
- criminal activity involving victims (including child porn, slave trade, fraudulent schemes, etc)
Things we might see;
- legitimate trade in substances and content that may be otherwise illicit in some legal systems (pharmaceuticals, censored material, leaked explosive govt. documents)
- legitimate trade in radioactive isotopes (maybe there is a market for fringe clean-up around Fukushima)
- legitimate trade in weapons, explosives and other destructive technologies (bio-weapons, chemical weapons)
- trade in gene selection technology for designer offspring and other ethically-questionable, experimental bio-medical technologies, fringe cancer treatments, etc
.....
good summary or wide of the mark?
Well, it's speculation... the rules are all up to Silkroad, but here are my comments on your list... There could be a legitimate reason for wanting an individual killed. Perhaps they are a member of the police or other authority and are threatening you or your family. It's not always clear whether property is stolen or legitimate, and I think any system to discriminate between them should be voluntary. Silk Road is free to put in place such a system if they choose. I'm not convinced that possessing or viewing child porn is immoral, only creating it with actual children. |
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Why do research at all? Why be in a pool? There's no profit in research anymore, or not enough to justify it. Why should research be profitable? Research generally leads to profit making opportunities. That's why it's risky. And how have you increased competition by pushing large pharma together into a large pool? Start ups are no longer restricted by IP laws and can thus enter the market more easily, without having to worry about being sued into oblivion by the larger players for patents they may or may not have violated. More opportunity to means more players means more competition. I agree that IP law should be reformed. But in some way intellectual work needs to be protected. Your conclusion is that "intellectual work needs to be protected". What are your premises, and the steps that take you from those premises to the conclusion? |
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The point is that I don't want to do the research. I just want the end result, a working drug, and without IP I can have it. I can just pick it up at the pharmacy. It's hard to fail in reverse engineering. And why would I want to pool resources? I don't want to do research. That shit's expensive. And even if I do, just because I'm such a good guy, there will always be another VC who'll see the opportunity to make money from someone elses research.
I'm not saying you should have to do the research. In fact, I'm saying the opposite. The large entities will most likely find it in their interest to pool resources for research. If non-participation is beneficial to smaller entities, they will grow and participate in the research pool. If not, then we've replaced a coercive IP system with one of a voluntary nature and there is no difference in market function. In addition to that we've lowered the barriers to entry to the pharmaceutical market and increased competition. wouldn't there always be people that didn't want to participate in the research and just reap the rewards of the other groups work? Sure. Who cares? Small freeloader is successful and becomes large contributor. There will always be freeloaders. How can anyone advocate for the use of violence against them? |
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Luckily, you're a smart venture capitalist, and you knew in advance there is no IP law. To that end, you had a meeting with Generica and the other pharmaceutical firms that could match your output. In return for access to all your research, you received additional funding, and a voluntarily entered into contractual agreement for 1 year monopoly rights (in return for doing the brunt of the research). Everybody wins.
Why should a smart venture capitalist pay for something he can get for free? As an even smarter venture capitalist I wait, pick up a few chemists with the proper education, build my factory and can still undercut the lot of them. After all, they all have costs that I don't. Copying is easy. Reseach is hard. Sure, it's always a possibility, but imagine if all of the big players pooled their resources for research like this. Let's say that your startup is profitable because you successfully engaged in corporate espionage or reverse engineering. You're not always going to be successful, and now that you have lots of extra capital, the smarter move is to pool your resources with the rest. Perhaps if you don't join them, they will put pressure on you to do so, by refusing to cooperate with you as an outside profit seeking entity. |
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Here's a couple paragraphs I liked from Against Intellectual Property. “Intellectual property rights are rights in ideal objects,
which are distinguished from the material substrata in
which they are instantiated.” One reason for the undue stress placed on creation as the source of property rights may be the focus by some on labor as the means to homestead unowned resources. This is manifest in the argument that one homesteads unowned property with which one mixes one’s labor because one “owns” one’s labor. However, as Palmer correctly points out, “occupancy, not labor, is the act by which external things become property.” By focusing on first occupancy, rather than on labor, as the key to homesteading, there is no need to place creation as the fount of property rights, as Objectivists and others do. Instead, property rights must be recognized in first-comers (or their contractual transferees) in order to avoid the omnipresent problem of conflict over scarce resources. Creation itself is neither necessary nor sufficient to gain rights in unowned resources. Further, there is no need to maintain the strange view that one “owns” one’s labor in order to own things one first occupies. Labor is a type of action, and action is not ownable; rather, it is the way that some tangible things (e.g., bodies) act in the world.
The problem with the natural rights defense of IP, then, lies in the argument that because an author-inventor “creates” some “thing,” he is “thus” entitled to own it. The argument begs the question by assuming that the ideal object is ownable in the first place; once this is granted, it seems natural that the “creator” of this piece of property is the natural and proper owner of it. However, ideal objects are not ownable.
Under the libertarian approach, when there is a scarce (ownable) resource, we identify its owner by determining who its first occupier is. In the case of “created” goods (i.e., sculptures, farms, etc.), it can sometimes be assumed that the creator is also the first occupier by virtue of the gathering of raw materials and the very act of creation (imposing a pattern on the matter, fashioning it into an artifact, and the like). But it is not creation per se that gives rise to ownership, as pointed out above. For similar reasons, the Lockean idea of “mixing labor” with a scarce resource is relevant only because it indicates that the user has possessed the property (for property must be possessed in order to be labored upon). It is not because the labor must be rewarded, nor because we “own” labor and “therefore” its fruits. In other words, creation and labor-mixing indicate when one has occupied—and, thus, homesteaded—unowned scarce resources. |
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Except that JSON-RPC is utterly unusable to implement any kind of real client.
Can you be more specific? Sounds like vague handwaving. Genjix mentioned some things, but they don't seem to be showstoppers... Yeah well I haven't been too happy at the response. I was told: "let us know what needs to be done to make a client wrapper possible. everything should be possible through the RPC".
- Need initialisation flag. Submit patch. Patch ignored. Workaround hack (that doesn't even work for all cases) proposed instead. Bitcoin issue
- Not able to import bitcoin RPC values into Python. Propose I write my own JSON RPC lib because Python's implementation is wrong. Python issue
- Propose consistent naming scheme for JSON-RPC Api. WONTFIX. Better to leave the inconsistent usage of getblaa or doaction because it's not a problem now. not an issue
I mean wtf. Come on.
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Fill the blanks and shout it. You will see. For instance, I think Atlas brag caused the exchange price to drop! I think reason x caused effect y on the Bitcoin exchange. It is a meme dating back to kiba and S3052 as far as I am aware.  Are you saying that movements in the Bitcoin exchange rate cannot sometimes be attributed to news events? My interpretation of the meme is "any speculation on the cause of the exchange fluctuation is speculation". |
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I'm going to see if the guys at the Global Village Construction set would be interested in accepting Bitcoins, either as a payment method or for donations. Semi OT: This video is quite impressive. |
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About implementation - I thought that implementing URI handlers is not a job for browser extensions, but the application itself registers the protocol in users operating system. So it's only a matter of implementing the protocol registration mechanism in Bitcoin client and we're done.
Registering is not even half the problem. Once it registers with the OS, it must actually handle such links as well. |
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So, in your world, void o IP-law explain this to me:
I have an idea on how to cure Parkinsons disease. I convince a few of my friends who happen to be very rich to invest in my company, naturally they expect some return from this investment. I then build a lab, hire the right people, and eventually succeed in finding the cure. I then test it to make sure it's safe and get it approved for the market. All in all it's been quite cheap to find this cure and only 900 million dollars have been spent so far. I then spend another 100 million to build a factory that can manufacture the drug.
Then we start selling the drug.
Generica company buys a few pills, reverse engineer them, builds a similar factory for 100 million, and goes to market with the same product, at 1/10th the price, 6 months later. In that time I've managed to make a 100 million dollar profit then I must slash my prices to sell anything at all, my investors won't get their money back for a very long time, if ever.
How can I convince my investors to invest in my new idea to cure Alzheimers? Why should they not wait and invest in Generica company instead. Luckily, you're a smart venture capitalist, and you knew in advance there is no IP law. To that end, you had a meeting with Generica and the other pharmaceutical firms that could match your output. In return for access to all your research, you received additional funding, and a voluntarily entered into contractual agreement for 1 year monopoly rights (in return for doing the brunt of the research). Everybody wins. |
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