Your posts today were quite strong.
Our recent back and forth if continued would likely have transitioned into a repeat of one already concluded.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=365141.msg4916516#msg4916516

1) We agree that an equilibrium location exists while disagreeing over its exact positioning.
2) We agree that we are no where near equilibrium now and moving in the wrong direction.
3) We are in complete agreement regarding the causes and nature of the problem as well as its seriousness.
4) We agree that the proposed solution of anonymous cryptocurrency is potentially viable but disagree regarding its downsides. This disagreement likely results from point #1 above.

Since you won't be able to reply I will leave it at that.
Good luck.

This assumes the Singaporeans learn nothing from the decline of the West. I suspect they will prove smarter than that.  


Agreed


Anonymity is a desperate and somewhat repulsive solution. Unfortunately I have no better or even viable alternatives to offer.        

This is a controversial topic but I would point you to the following two links that demonstrate that perhaps over the long term we can control nature via centralized justice at least to a degree.

Choice or Constraint? Mass Incarceration and Fertility Outcomes Among American Men
http://faculty.washington.edu/blsykes/Publications_files/fertility_incarceration_v8-1.pdf

Legalized abortion and crime effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect

I would agree that trade is even more fundamental. However, to function any social group needs a system of norms and rules and a method for punishing those that violate those norms. The larger the group the greater the need for such norms.  

You argue that laws and an honest police force make people complacent. This is true, however it does not necessarily follow that "more wolves are induced to hunt". Singapore for example has some of the strictest laws and harshest punishments in the world. Drug smugglers are executed and vandals receive caning and long jail terms. Not surprisingly Singapore has some of the lowest crime rates in the world.

http://www.tripadvisor.com/Travel-g294265-s206/Singapore:Singapore:Health.And.Safety.html

Are people in Singapore complacent about personal safety? Sure but they are complacent because they actually are safe. They know that the overall crime rate in Singapore is very low and if they are victimized the state will go to great lengths to severely punish the aggressor.

You claim that we cannot mete out punishment as a surety contract in vengeance and expect it to accomplish protection, however, this is only true if we are inefficient. If the retribution is swift and efficient it will deter or if deterrence is impossible extract retribution. Wolfs that cannot be deterred can be skinned.  

No system is perfect, Singapore is certainly not crime free. Educating people to take reasonable precautions regarding safety is of course very wise, but it is expensive and inefficient to prepare for all eventualities. I could perhaps secure my home with electric fences, hire an armed bodyguard for my family when I am not home, and have all of my online activities done for me by a security expert. However, that would be very costly. At some level it becomes impossible to prepare for all eventualities and we all must rely on retribution to deter aggressors.

Again just because some crimes are nearly impossible to solve does not mean they should be ignored or condoned. It is probably already possible to remotely and anonymously hijack and crash some models of modern cars.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/car-hacked-on-60-minutes/

Anonymous murder would still be murder. Anonymous extortion is no different.

The bedrock of the social contract is our ability to trust that society will try to protect the weak from the strong. It still works to some degree. I do not yet need to carry a concealed firearm every day, and I am able to go to work leaving my wife and small children protected only by a locked door and an easily broken window. However, this same social contract is also exploited horrendously via centralized theft built into the foundation of our monetary system.

I agree that insufficient IQ contributes to the problem but a total lack of education on the topic may be the largest issue. Most people are simply unaware of the problem.  
I remain unconvinced that the solution is to destroy our ability to enforce the social contract via global anonymity.  Returning us to the state of nature does not strike me as an efficient or optimal long term solution. I concede that it may be a relative improvement as a transitory state if centralized oppression grows strong enough.

In regards to this particular individual. If he was a first time offender the punishment seems excessive. However, if he is a repeat offender with a criminal history I see no problem with an 18 year sentence. Psychopathy has been shown to be largely genetic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Genetic
Putting this guy away for 18 years has the added advantage of removing his genes from the population.

The argument that in the future we may not be able to find and punish similar criminals is in no way exculpable.

Iceland looks at ending boom and bust with radical money plan

Cross posting from the reputation coin thread as it is relevant.

The fundamental source of the problem is our collective inability to personally track reputations as we form ever larger social groups. This forces us to turn to centralized systems of rules, regulations and reputations to cope. However, such order is innately unstable as any centralized system will be exploited to the maximal degree possible by the sociopaths in the population.

Sociopaths leverage inefficiencies in the social contract to skim rents from honest players. Using the power generated from these rents they further warp the system opening ever larger wounds for their parasitism. Intelligent non sociopaths quickly learn to emulate the sociopaths as this becomes the obvious and most efficient means to achieve material wealth. Eventually the system devolves to the point where a majority are behaving in this manner with foreseeable consequences.

Fractional reserve and debt collapses have occurred throughout history. However, this is possibly only the first manifestation of this human failure. Even if we excised sociopathy from finance and somehow enforced fiscal discipline and sound money my suspicion is that this problem would simply manifest later in history with a different face. There are many areas where decay is currently occurring including weakening of the marital bond, decline of individual responsibility, and ever increasing growth of indoctrination standardized education. Would any of these lead eventually to a collapse if allowed to fester long enough? We have not yet seen that historically but perhaps this is because finance and debt is most easily rotted and the collapse of debt forces a return to basics across the board.

I am skeptical your system will work beyond a small local scale. The driving force here is fundamental human limitation. On a large scale I do not see why your system would not be destroyed by the same forces driving our current decline.

I really like this visualization. It captures the essence of the matter better than any other I have heard.


I can see this as being useful for small groups and local communities as a way to reinforce community bonds and build wealth. Technology can probably enhance the number of people you can realistically keep track of to a few hundred. However, I am much less confident this can scale up like you are envisioning. Once you grow beyond a size where you can keep track of the individuals involved you become reliant on a large centralized reputation system and that is inherently prone to abuse in several ways.

Potential Problems:

1) Individuals who game the system acting honestly with multiple small local trades then comitting fraud on rare large trades with distant individuals.
2) Use of a centralized ejection mechanism (being kicked from the group) as a tool for unfair wealth extraction/terror of low power individuals.
3) As the system grows it will become vunerable to the same difficulties our current system faces. (Outlined below in the Iron Law of Political Economics Quote).
4) Who pays for development upkeep and maintence of the system.

For anyone considering a blue water sailing trip. I recommend this book.
Covers everything you need to know A-Z

http://www.amazon.com/Voyagers-Handbook-Essential-Guide-Cruising/dp/0071437657/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1426996447&sr=8-1&keywords=blue+water+cruising

If someone had asked me to estimate the probability I would listen to a talk from a Bon Buddhist master today I would have told them 0%.

That said sometimes your day suprises you. I greatly enjoyed the first of these Discovering Your Creative Potential. Thanks for sharing.

There is actually some medical evidence to support this. I have not read the studies myself so I cannot comment on how good they are but there is some data to suggest that negative ionization in the air as associated with improved mood.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23320516


The nor'wester is apparently the opposite phenonomina high positive ions in the air due to rare, very warm, very dry wind?

There is nothing to apologize for at least not to me. I see wisdom in that poem and only wanted to share it.
None of us can change the distant past. The best we clay footed humans can do is try to muddle along as best we can take the lessons we learn along the way and try to apply them going forward.

Below is a piece of knowledge that someone very smart taught me.


Some new ideas will take us down dead ends. Others will enhance and perhaps even replace our current paradigm. I believe your work is unique and takes us to a higher level of understanding. Honest challengers will in the end only strengthen that understanding. One of those challengers may bring to the table another unique contribution that takes us even higher. Most or perhaps all will be dead ends yet still foster discussion furthering overall awareness.

This thread has progressed from debating the existance of the problem to debating potential solutions to the problem. I would call that progress.

When we are angry at mankind
Or rave at some depravity of mind
When we would curse behaviour of a kind
To argue, rather than to view benign
It is with our own self we battle wage
When choosing not to understand, nor to engage
With that from which we isolate our self
With anger sent, to where, perhaps is needed help
Lest fearful, reason may just find the time
With tenderness, to enter in our mind.
And so it is perhaps from loss of our own face
We are so quick to shout of their disgrace
But we should not lose sight of our own sins
Though, in different colours dressed, appear they in
For is not all, of nature in this life?
The good, the bad, together, love, and strife
As nature, this is how such things will be
So it is not how loud we shout, but what we see
And seeing do, to help, to liberate
To free with tolerance, not shut the gate
That is
How it should be

-- Egal Bohen

l3552 as I said before I think your idea is interesting and certainly deserves a hearing. I have no objections to you starting a thread on it and moving further discussion there. To the degree it matters you have the CoinCube thumbs up.

Edit: For further discussion https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=998993.0

The Dunbar number (the hypothesized maximum number of people man can maintain stable social relationships with) is thought to be anywhere between 150-250. It seems reasonable that with the aid of modern technology and only for trade this could be extended by a factor of at least 2-5 before you start to hit serious issues with reputation and scaling. So an enhanced barter system with the aid of technology could probably function reasonably well as long as the group size was limited to somewhere between 300-1000 people. Small trading groups could potentially exist within a larger community. Barter transactions would be incentivized by tax avoidance and the need to not compromize government benefits and inhibited by the natural inefficiencies that are unavoidable with barter.

Would it work? I have no idea. The poor are typically poor for reasons that go far beyond bad luck. However, their economic incentives going forward will increasingly favor barter transactions so it seems at least plausible that something like this would help them at least to some degree.

I am of the opinion that any system that encourages and allows trade to occur without debt and without fiat is a step in the right direction. Some attempted solutions may be more useful than others and some will fail outright but I believe it is a mistake to summarily dismiss and discourage those with interesting ideas.


I find myself in the odd position of quoting Martin Armstrong back at you.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/13/solution/


On this issue as on many others my friend we agree on the overall picture but not the details. Like Armstrong I also believe government can eventually be reformed. It will not come easy and it will not come soon (definitly not before a major collapse and probably not this generation) but I believe it can eventually be done.  

iamback you make a case for why the system presented by l3552 will have difficulties scaling. However, we need to ask ourselves does it need to scale to accomplish its intended goals. My thinking is that it may not. The intended target of such a labor credit system is not the Knowledge age workers such as yourself but those who have been left behind. Knowledge workers as you rightly point out will minimize their use of such a local system as it is more efficient for them to participate in larger and lucrative worldwide networks.

However a labor credit system (essentially a technologically enhanced barter) is potentially beneficial for the poor, the lower middle class, and those who have been induced to malinvest in their training due to our current labor market distortions. Many of these individuals simply do not have the skills needed to participate in a budding knowledge age as they have become entraped by false market signals produced by debt.

Often low income individuals currently receive fixed government subsidies. To supplement these they often they work under the table for cash because formal employment means losing benefits. As we transition to centralized electronic fiat and cash is phased out these individuals will increasingly be forced out of the labor market entirely becoming ever more enmeshed in a web of government dependence. The poor will increasingly be unable to work formally or informally.

The resulting free time creates an economic nitch for the discussed barter system. Furthermore, such a system is educational and would help people become aware of their situation and the root cause of their suffering. Individuals who have malinvested their lives due to debt bubbles are likely to never recover economically, however, they may be able to insure their children do not suffer the same fate.

A rapid and smooth transition to a knowledge age requires us to try and find solutions for these people. If you simply say that they are "obsolete" and must go the way of the bacteria in the Petri dish you are essentially throwing the game because such a scenario guarantees a dark age, massive violence, and social unrest that will set us all back a very long time. The decades long hatred of the English and violence in Ireland following the potato famine is a good example of where this line of hard logic takes us.

Social capital is hard to quantify but there is little doubt that it important and that it is declining. In pretty much every modern country all the forms of in-person social intercourse are in decline. These are real declines in interactions that educate, and enrich our lives and are not adequately substituted by online exchange or knowledge age activities. I suspect even knowledge age workers, would be willing to participate a little in a vibrant labor credit/barter economy despite its relative inefficiency if it helped to enmesh them in a vibrant and fulfilling local web of personal interactions.  

Overall as I said upthread I view the proposal of l3552 as synergistic rather then competitive with your efforts.

PS. It is clear from your most recent messages that time is a commodity you do not have in abundance right now. I will take no offence if you lack the time to reply to my points above.

l3552 I like your idea. It is an alternative and ultimately synergistic approach. We live in an era where the rule of the violence monopolist aka government is growing increasingly tyrannical. The fundamental challenge is how to trade  without using the approved paper while also avoiding the increasingly dangerous whip.

iamback has proposed anonymous distributed cryptocurrency as a method for allowing individuals to connect and trade
across communities. The whip is avoided via cryptography and anonymity. It is certain that such a solution will eventually be declared illegal. It will be demonized and attacked technically while approved paper equivalents (centralized electronic currency) will be held up as alternatives. Its long term survival will depend on how well it weathers these attacks.

You are proposing small non-anonymous local systems that use reputation to allow individuals to connect and trade within a community. This will also likely be declared illegal. They will survive not by being hidden but by being small, hard to quantify, and unpopular to quash. Variant systems can exist in different local communities and one system could even be shut down entirely if enough external pressure was applied only to pop right back up (without much loss) as soon as the pressure abated.

Ultimately I see these as compatible and even synergistic approaches. I agree with your critiques of anonymity. However, for trade across distant communities without using "approved paper" it is probably impossible to avoid. Within local communities, however, I agree it can and probably should be avoided. I will need to give it some more thought but on initial inspection I believe your idea when applied on a small local level has significant merit.

l3552 I have been recently been trying to solve a thought challenge. How does one tie together a large extended family spread out over a significant area when all individual actors are busy and geographically isolated. The natural trend of such a group even with blood ties is to maintain loose connection and for that connection to fray with time.

My first thought and the simplest solution is an annual gathering where ties are strengthened and renewed. However, with geographic separation this imposes substantial cost on all and for some the costs will be too high to participate.

My second thought was a system of labor credits exchanged over a website. These could be used for things like babysitting as family is usually preferred and perhaps even the exchange of skills and teaching either in person or  remotely via an online class model.

The goal of course is not to provide a service that cannot be replicated from strangers, but to develop something that adds value while simultaneously strengthening family bonds.
 
What interests me about your proposal is that your are essentially trying to solve the same problem on a much more ambitious scale worldwide rather then a single large family group.

However, I would note that you are perhaps wrong in at least one area. You claim that such a system cannot be considered illegal. However, should such such a system gain traction it seems certain that the "violence monopolist" would quickly reach out to crush it via tax law.

http://www.irs.gov/uac/Four-Things-to-Know-About-Bartering-1

The most thought provoking post I have seen in some time thank you l3552.

I am curious however just how money can keep its "names"? Are you envisioning a completely non anonymous distributed ledger?

If so in a world where the collective can and will use force against the individual I do not see how can keeping the "names" can be synonymous with non taxable or non seizable.