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Assume that the people and person are all randomly selected from the world population at large, ie. if you do nothing, X randomly selected people will die, and if you act one randomly selected person will die. There are no legal or social consequences to you personally.
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non-authoritarian stream of socialism.
Any form of socialism requires coercion for its implementation. Whether this coercion goes hand in hand with authoritarianism does not really matter. It is wrong regardless. Sigh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism |
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I believe that a sales tax, although difficult to enfore, reduces the trend of consumption and waste by pricing items higher. A property tax is not based on land, but rather the "property value", something difficult to define. I support this new tax system.
If a property tax encourages people to move, it should tax land area, not "property value".
Except the sales tax does not tax consumption and waste, it taxes value. So it creates no incentive whatsoever to switch to using your money to buy more non-wasteful goods and services, since you get taxed just the same no matter what. As for property taxes, I agree, they should be based on land, although an externality tax on buildings based on their volume or number of units to compensate for the increased road use such buildings create, noise pollution and increased effort needed by the police to defend the property due to the greater stealable wealth contained inside would make economic sense to add on top. It would also end the bureaucracy of requiring people to supplicate their local community to allow them to develop land on a case by case basis, since you can just pay the tax and you're done. |
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Now of course AnCap can "work" but will it be better than our democratic systems? Not unless human nature changes.
In 415 BC a democratically elected government attacked a neutral island that refused to join its military alliance and killed all of the men and enslaved all of the children. Even in the context of a war, such an action would be considerably less likely and less successful in modern times. If not human nature, what did change? |
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I think the problem with carbon taxes is that we're thinking of them in the wrong way. We're trained to believe that the choice is between increasing taxes and using the money to fund wasteful subsidies on technologies that will allow us to continue destroying the world's resources but in a more clean and shiny way on the one hand and outright denialism on the other. I think there's a middle ground that libertarians and environmentalists alike will find acceptable: add carbon taxes, but use them to replace other taxes. If the government earns $10 billion from the carbon tax, remove $10 billion from the income tax.
It's economically superior in every way - it helps protect the environment, does so in a neutral way that doesn't build in a preference for any one solution over another, and it reduces taxes that dampen the incentive to produce.
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Interesting site. I had no idea that they were trying something so interesting. Its not a fair trial of libertarianism as the Abhaz and Sth Ossetian areas are occupied and Putin is on record as saying he is "going to hang Saakashvili by the balls." But its interesting to see how it goes.
I would like to personally commend you for being so willing to admit that it's not a fair trial. In return, I'll admit that the USSR is not valid empirical evidence against any non-authoritarian stream of socialism. |
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How would this work fundamentally better, than, say, Bitcoinica publishing a nightly encrypted backup (a dump) that anybody can download (either via http or torrent), and also publishing a PGP signature to commit to its hash on a particular date?
This would be a whole lot simpler and less complicated and trivial for stakeholders to participate in the solution.
If there were a need to demonstrate that prior revisions aren't changing and that only thing happening is new records being added, the backups could simply be an archive file, where the backup of any night n contains identical copies of all the files that were present in the backup of night n-1, plus a new file representing that day's activity.
Intermediate solution: publish nightlies and store just their hashes in the blockchain. Seems like it solves the problems with both approaches to me. |
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One of the selling points of BTC is micro transactions,
Not sure where you got that from. Here's an example: May 9, 2011 - Gavin Andresen: For the record: bitcoin is not designed (and isn’t really appropriate for) micropayments.
Bitcoin transactions are broadcast across the peer-to-peer network, and received by all the nodes on the network. It isn’t designed to handle gazillions of tiny transactions; we estimate the network-wide cost of handling a typical transaction is about 0.1 US cents, so payments smaller than that DEFINITELY don’t make sense. If the cost of transaction processing is a significant fraction of the transaction value, then that’s bad, so bitcoin really only makes sense for transactions worth more than a few pennies (and most people define micropayments as sub-penny).
- http://gigaom.com/2011/05/09/can-flattr-plus-twitter-make-micropayments-a-reality/#comment-622793The term "micropayments" (or "microtransactions") can mean different things. In my experience, most people take it to mean payments in the $0.10-$2 range. For things that are even smaller, particularly automated protocol payments like one might use in a hypothetical incentivized mesh networking setup, I tend to use the term "nanotransactions". |
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That was written in January. Things like this are a good reason why I'm skeptical. |
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"So in Ireland they're determining whether or not to vote for the European Fiscal Treaty, because voting yes is going to bring stability, like the stability that monarchs and Qaddafi and Ben Ali and Mubarak brought." Good old Keiser report. |
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It depends if the other cryptocurrencies will offer any value of their own, other than just being different. Bitcoin clones will all fail, but an OpenTransactions-style centralized currency with a trusted provider could work (if it doesn't get shut down), and a cryptocurrency-based system which has other uses, like Namecoin, would have a good chance at succeeding.
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What an absolute cluster eff. On the bright side, it's a testament to how far along bitcoin has come since last year that the price hasn't fallen off a cliff.
You aren't looking upside down enough... |
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Et puis je me dis que l'avantage avec une image disque, c'est qu'elle n'est synchronisée avec DropBox qu'une fois fermée... Je me trompe probablement, mais j'ai l'impression qu'un fichier wallet 'décodé' pendant qu'on l'utilise, est accessible au moins pendant qu'il ouvert non?
Je ne sais pas ce que MultiBit fait, mais le client Satoshi ne fait pas le décryptage en place; il charge le fichier en RAM et fait le décryptage là chaque fois qu'on dépense des bitcoins. |
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Bonjour à tous! Je suis Vitalik Buterin, l'auteur principal des articles sur http://www.bitcoinmagazine.net/ et notre journal physique, dont la première publication a commencé à arriver aux acheteurs partout dans le monde. À long terme, nous voulons être le site principal des nouvelles de Bitcoin et les autres monnaies cryptographiques en plusieurs langues, mais il faut commencer avec quelque chose petite. Donc maintenant je vous introduis nôtre site français, http://fr.bitcoinmagazine.net/ , avec 5 articles traduits. Je sais qu'ils ne sont pas très récents, et que la qualité peut être amélioré (on n'a pas beaucoup d'argent, et moi, pour qui le français n'est pas une langue maternelle et qui ne l'utilise pas souvent, je devais corriger et faire beaucoup de traduction moi-même) mais c'est un travail en cours, et avec votre aide peut-être ça deviendra une resource principale pour la communauté française dans la futur. Pour l'instant, je voudrais vous proposer le suivant: si tu es un lecteur de nôtre site en anglais, vote sur tres 10 articles préférés. Ceux qui sont les plus populaires, on va les traduire premièrement, et on va tenter de commencer à publier de contenu régulièrement en français. Merci beaucoup pour votre temps et votre aide, Vitalik Buterin |
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Still waiting in Denmark...
Still waiting in Canada  |
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I'm excited to read this.
I understand there's a great article on zhoutong (the 17 year old wonder boy genius programmer) and his creation.....Bitcoinica.
Yeah it was kind of outdated before it arrived lol. Yes. I, in my infinite wisdom, decided that Bitcoinica was the second greatest thing that the Bitcoin community has ever been graced with. In an earlier iteration of that article, I had also declared the GLBSE a total flop, and back in April last year I supported the thesis that what the Bitcoin economy needed most was for people to be able to buy food with it. Reality imparts wisdom pretty quickly. (As for the Bitcoinica article, there isn't a full piece on it this issue, but there will be something most likely in #2) |
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Hi, I'm Vitalik Buterin, currently the main writer for the magazine (and I'm sure you guys all know me from the website ). The writers made some assumptions about their audience in some of the pieces here and there, which makes some of the content fly over the heads of the newbies.
Thank you for this kind of criticism. I would be glad to hear what people's non-technical wives, grandparents, husbands, etc think about the content in the Bitcoin magazine - both the technical "how stuff works" (which is intended to be a series) and the more business-themed pieces. It's difficult for both me and everyone I work with to imagine reading our magazine without having been exposed to the various technical intricacies, historical events and cultural memes that our community is so steeped with, so we would benefit greatly from that kind of feedback. |
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The villain here is not the business, it is the government that gives the lobbyist a special privilege. The government should refuse all lobbyist, then the situation would never occur. I wouldn't sponsor this Buddhist coop you describe. Refusing to do something is not work. I am only interested to support creative work, not refusal to do whatever. But I would pay an Indian outsourcing company for computer services, even if its members are religious in whatever ways.
I think you misunderstood me. The coop can do whatever, it doesn't matter. It just refuses to deal with lobbyists as a business policy in the course of its actions. > The villain here is not the business It's not about who's the villain. It's about the fact that refusing to do business with such people is a pro-free market activity, much like teaching people not to go outside alone in a crime-ridden district in the middle of the night is an anti-crime activity even though it doesn't directly harm a single criminal. Wow, never thought I would be arguing over what was essentially a joke |
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Will lend to someone who does not deal with any religious, socialist, or altruistic organization.
Only will lend to atheists and pro free market capitalism. Please describe how you plan to use the loan. You will have to return at interest.
What if someone were to seek a loan to help grow their Buddhist worker-owned cooperative that voluntarily refuses to buy products created by businesses which lobby for protectionist regulation? That's pretty close to being socialist, capitalist, altruistic, pro-free market, religious and atheist at the same time. |
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Wow, thanks a lot! I sent a bit extra as a tip.
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