I'm not blaming it on Bush, just saying it's no different from that supposedly completely other guy, whom many of the people blaming Obama have not blaimed for the exact same thing. If you say that Bush did a lot of bad stuff, and now Obama is doing a lot of the same bad stuff, I agree with you. If you were sitting ildly by and ignoring things that Bush did, but then suddenly started to complain about them when Obama got into office, then you'd just be a hypocrite, or at the least disingenuous.

It's not about picking, it's about forecasting and projecting based on current trends. The overall trend has been more individual empowerment through increasingly decentralized technology. I don't think things like file sharing, 3D printing, decentralized law, and decentralized finance can lead to a centralized power.


Radical anarchists may be advocating throwing it out and replacing it, but that's not necessary. It's much easier to simply withdraw, ignore, and change things in small steps by simply making it impossible for the system we have to continue to exist. Whether that means ignoring copyright laws with filesharing, gun control laws with 3D printing, drug laws with Silk Road, and finance and tax laws with bitcoin. Centralized power requires financial and popular support, and decentralization is undermining both the popular, and soon the financial.


Not so much. I understand that ZGM's claims can't work not because I am brainwashed into thinking that capitalism is right and socialism/government is wroong, but because it goes against basic human nature. On the other hand, Eric, and possibly the ZGMs, for some reason still want to give control over themselves to someone else, despite technological and cultural trends (guided by human nature) are taking us in a different direction.
However, if you were to claim that I am brainwashed about ZGM with a mental block of "Humans can't be convinced not to trade and freely give up the products of their labor for no compensation whatsoever" or "Resources are by definition limited, because we only have a limited amount of stuff, energy, and time," then yeah, feel free to say "pot kettle black."

Continually rising prices is part of the problem. Sure, you converted USD/EUR into bitcoins before preordering, and thus feel like you spent USD/EUR, but you could have just as well bought those bitcoins and held them until they started to ship, thus getting it cheaper anyway. The other part is the long development cycles and risk (I was under the impression that Trezor will come out in November, but now the preorder page says January 2014). BFL was a good lesson about long development cycles and risk, too. I think it would be better to support such projects through donations as opposed to preorders (better PR and easier to manage), or at the least reduce prices when things go haywire.

Has anyone gotten any response to anything sent to BTCJam in the last month? Is this project still going, or is basically all running automatically, but is otherwise abandoned?

Called to ask to check if it's possible to attend a hearing on Monday. The guy on the other end said, "Oh, you mean the Crypto-currency hearing? Yeah, I think it's open to the public."

Apparently they got that question about that hearing from quite a few people already, if he could just guess like that, so hopefully it won't be too crowded.

There is an interesting trend that I noticed in this video, whic applies to the Resource Based idea, too, and hints at a general "brainwashing" of all the groups mentioned, whereby they can't even consider an alternative due to being raised in a specific mindset (which is somewhat ironic, considering ZGM proponents claim that capitalists are brainwashed for the same reason). The different systems proposed by Eric and ZGM proponents are:

1) Primitive > Slave > Feudalism > Capitalism > Socialism > Communism (at least if we consider Soviet style)
2) Primitive > Slave > Feudalism > Capitalism > Individual Sovereignty > Everyone Votes (Democracy)
3) Primitive > Slave > Feudalism > Capitalism > Socialism > Communism > Centrally Planned Merit-based Government
4) Primitive > Slave > Feudalism > Capitalism > Socialism > Centrally Planned Resource Based

Note that every single one of these has one thing in common: Someone, or some entity, is in control deciding things for everyone else.

What struck me about Eric Li's speech was that he listed the stages off one by one, got to the bolded part with "individual sovereignty," and then suddenly took a sharp turn and veered off a cliff in the red part with "everyone voting in a democracy." The two are not the same thing, since the latter is essentially giving up your sovereignty, and decising whom you want to subjugate yourself to. I realized that Eric, and the Resource Based proponents here, all have the same mental block: they can't imagine anything beyond the idea that people will need to be controlled by someone, as if people always subjugating themselves to someone or something is the only way things can be, and thus they don't even think of or consider alternatives.
Eric should have said:

Primitive > Slave > Feudalism > Capitalism > Individual Sovereignty

and stopped right there, since that is where we are headed. As we are able to provide our own communications (post office replaced by e-mail), security (guns, home security systems, private security/investigators), travel (cheaper flight replacing highways, telepresence replacing need for travel), manufacturing (3d printing), law (arbitration and digital contracts), and now finance (bitcoin), the role of the single all-ruling body that is the government is slowly diminishing. We are literally approaching the state of Individual Sovereignty, where each individual is capable of weilding the powers of control and production for themselves that used to be reserved for entire countries. While at the same time, we still have people fighting over who should have control over whom, and in what configuration.
In the list of systems above, 1 through 3 all have individual sovereignty, brought on with the help of technology, as the final outcome. Though I think #4 may be impossible to achieve in the first place, the only outcome I can think of for 4 is war between humans trying to achieve individual sovereignty, and the machine that is programmed to think that it MUST continue to subjugate and control all people at any cost, in order to "save" them.

Didn't BFL teach everyone that preordering anything in bitcoin is just generally a very bad idea? At this point, you're paying an extra $700 just for the aluminum case.

Depends on what you mean by life. Did you mean capable of reproducing? Shouldn't be too hard. Or did you mean capable of cognition and simulating the brain? The link points to our progress with that.

There are no arguments against altcoins, because paying a 1% exchange fee for BTC to Altcoin exchange is exactly the same as paying the 0% fee for just using Bitcoin directly, and besides, government owns and controls everything, with the help of Amazon, so why even bother with bitcoins.

How so? To me using altcoins only adds more friction.

Personally, I made a ton of connections and new acquaintances at the Amsterdam one. So, for me it was a great networking event (especially for European contacts), and somewhat an informational event from the speakers, too. Though I was jet lagged through most of it 

The former is called Liberal Arts, and is an important part of the food service industry

In the book, they are not limited by geography. Just as you can be a Bitcoiner or Trekkie anywhere in the world, you could be a member of a phyle. It gives you community membership, status as being an accepted member of that community, and benefits provided exclusively to members. Since they are not geographic, they are also completely voluntary.

Perhaps we should ask Bush why he was playing golf while starting to wage the war in Iraq. Maybe they have similar reasons for going off to play.

If someone tells me they are native, or Asian, or African, or of some obscure European decent, I say, "that's nice" and continue not giving a shit, not immediately spend time trying to figure out what race they really are. Because, you know, race doesn't matter.

You didn't read the link, as it answers that question.

I'll be there!

Here's some bulls* http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/12/tech/human-brain-computer/index.html

(Basic rat level bulls* was accomplished a couple of years ago, apparently)

Yes. I am free to trade with whomever I want, to get whatever I want, and if I don't,t have the resources to trade, am (somewhat) free to accumulate said resources (albeit with some regulatory restrictions, which are still nowhere near as restrictive as yours will be).

I think that's the location of the European Central Bank