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You joined to protest on streets or spent at home with your computer?
Can you explain the purpose of going into the streets? The aim is to show that you have a lot people and you are committed. Committed to do what? If you cannot touch the leaders in a meaningful way, it is pointless. To starting an armed struggle against the authorities. In this case, blood is spilled. The street protests means that. Oh, I imagine the government must be really scared of trying to attack its population with the most modern weapons money can buy. An armed struggle will just destabilize the country, but will not have any effect on the government if they want (look at dictatorships), unless the military decides to stop supporting the government (which is why unmanned vehicles are getting so popular). We are going to a society in which the president can select all the demonstrators from a database (automatically based on camera data, of course), press one button and kill all of them. This might be done by sending missiles, but it could also be done by analysing the DNA, finding a biochemical agent which mysteriously kills a particular part of the population of just one specific individual (they can create flying machines the size of a musquito already that no doubt could also be equipped with some untraceable poison). You can do it slowly enough, and the people will never notice what hit them. You also don't have to completely kill them, you just have to weaken them. For an example of that look at the presidential candidate of some Eastern-Europe country that was poisoned. This might sound radical, but I am not the one who invented the every increasing more efficient weaponry on which the US (and other nations) spend about a trillion dollars a year. Everything in the previous paragraph is technically already possible, and 80% is probably already implemented or could be operational in a year after the system is desired. Systems of control like that simply have never existed before in history. In a country in which there exists an asymmetric power balance between large parts of the population and the government, you get tyranny. I am not suggesting that everyone should have access to their own nuclear bomb, but owning a gun or even a tank (if lots of people in the community vouch for you for example) should be perfectly reasonable and perhaps even mandatory. |
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You joined to protest on streets or spent at home with your computer?
Can you explain the purpose of going into the streets? The aim is to show that you have a lot people and you are committed. Committed to do what? If you cannot touch the leaders in a meaningful way, it is pointless. Let's take a look at Iran. A large part of the world does not agree with their actions of developing the exact same technology they already have. The CIA could demonstrate, but they can also just blow up a few nuclear scientists (which is likely what they have done). The credo "might is right" of the Nazi's is spot on. No might, no right. |
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Fine
Spanish Civil War.
I already said that there was a time in which demonstrations could have consequences for those in power. That time is over. Another example: look at the nuclear waste transports through Germany. It took 75 hours to travel a distance which should be more like 10 hours or so. The only thing which was displayed is that there are a lot of people that don't like nuclear waste, but the objective of the government was still achieved. |
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Err Huge protest in Greece in 2008. Huge protest now in UK over the student cuts. I think they know its a majority and also the France strikes were pretty popular. Your minority government cover up idea is not real.
The truck drivers in Greece got fucked over in the end. The people in France lost. Don't think it will go different in the UK. As far as I am concerned you are only supporting my point. |
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You joined to protest on streets or spent at home with your computer?
Can you explain the purpose of going into the streets? A minority will only go into the streets. Even if a majority would go into the streets (which has never happened before, AFAIK), the government will simply state that it was a minority. Before the government had good riot control weapons demonstrations had the option of escalating and actually overthrowing the government in the worst case. That simply is not the case anymore. People have no weapons and are literally without power. The same money they pay in taxes will get them killed if they oppose the government too much. |
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So, it was not the US government. There was just a stupid president who was fooled by some international bankers.
If only he was "fooled", i think "controlled" is a better word That's the age old malicious vs incompetent question. I am also fine with your choice of words. I don't have information to decide and I think neither do you. |
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The only reason that I don't go to greater lengths to correct your misunderstandings of economic history is that I grow weary of doing so on online forums without due compensation. Not just for yourself, as economics is a widely misunderstood subject even among those who consider themselves well educated. This is something that I've often viewed as strange, considering it's not really a complicated subject to understand from a scientific perspective; but too many try to view it from the macro side and then overcomplicate it.
The contraction of the money supply in that general time period is not what caused the Great Depression. The contraction of the money supply was the concurrent remedy to the malinvestment that was rampant in the decade that preceded the Great Depression, which was itself caused by excessive expansion of the monetary base by the Federal Reserve banking system from it's conception in 1913 to 1929, but mostly after 1924. Most of the human suffering during the Great Depression was the direct result of attempts by the US Government to intervene in the natural corrective process of deflation, rather than simply stay out of the way and let the nation take it's hard medicine and move on. The Great Depression was, largely, a political event as opposed to an economic or fiscal event; and the parallels to the current state of things is striking. For a wonderful counter example, look at the Panic of 1920, and the similarities and differences in how that was handled by the two administrations.
I think many are blinded by the vast amount of historical material. A close look at the underlying structure however, tells us all we need to know. The details of each boom-bust cycle cannot be fathomed without inside information, to which, we are not privy; however, the larger picture is as crisp and clear as the air of the antarctic. The FED, like many central banks around the globe, was instituted in order to lend legitimacy to what would otherwise be seen as a [snip] So, it was not the US government. There was just a stupid president who was fooled by some international bankers. |
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Greetings, I manage the http://earthsociety.org domain and main blog - it is a libertarian anarchist/anarcho-capitalist website on the whole. I'm also, and this is more the relevant part, the forum-master for the digital coin forum - linked from the above portal page. It was set-up with Paul Grignon's consent - Paul being the man behind "Money As Debt" ! & 2. I've spent a lot of time studying the monetary system and the history and I'm a bit of a coder too, but more of a hack than anything. I've a strong interest in the development of Bitcoin and I see it as potentially a very good alternative to Paul's Digital Coin concept. I believe Paul Grignon's system would use a centralized structure, however this does not by any means imply a monopoly. I believe the concept is that there would be many bourses (central trading markets) that would function independently. Perhaps Bitcoin, has leapfrogged Grignon's idea, however Bitcoin is very dependent on the internet is it not? While I'm not overly concerned that governments will be able to successfully shutter the internet, it is a valid concern as government's these days are mostly institutions that function as the middle-man between the corporations and the people, or put another way, they are the slavemaster's that serve the ruling class and keep the peasants in chains. Way oversimplified, but, governments are able to do this so successfully as they control a nations money (In actuality the money supply is usually controlled by an unelected ruling class) and through the ability and willingness to coerce people to use the government money. So, I'm concerned and I think it is reasonable that others are concerned, about the potential for the use of coercion to limit or destroy any monetary system that competes with the monopolist's money system. If a new system can be both distributed yet can also function in isolation, settling differences when they are able, then it would be much more resistant to attack. Can Bitcoin function in this manner? How many nodes are needed for it to work, and can it work on a local network? So, assuming that the above concerns are unwarranted, then I think Bitcoin may function in a manner most similar to Digital Coin's 'PC'. Digital Coin's 'CC' could then be created at a local level and function with Bitcoin as it would with 'PC'. Just my two bits  Hi, Good that you dropped by. You cannot have a disconnected network topology with Bitcoin; they would simply be different "virtual commodities". So, you could have the Foocoins, the Barcoins, the Abrahamcoins etc. and you would have exchanges which allow you to exchange between the various "virtual commodities", but it seems rather hard to keep track of so many "virtual commodities", so because of network effects it would be easier if there was just one. By the time such a system has more than a million users, there are bound to be some mesh radio networking guys in the case we lose the Internet. I think this risk is smaller than the crackdown of a market as you described it. The larger the network is, the harder it is for an attacker to take it over. I personally don't like that there is an arbitrary limited fixed precision in the Bitcoin sytem, but the author claimed that was not a problem. I think an ideal solution would have this credit coin idea too incorporated in it, but how exactly it is supposed to work? No idea. |
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The most important feature that the digital coins have is that you never have the "we won't do this project, because there is no money"-problem, which was what happened in 1929. There were workers, people wanting to eat, and factories, but no money.
That's not really what happened in 1929, or 1932. The banks stopped increasing the money supply, did a few tricks (called back margin loans) on the stock market to make it fall faster and probably shorted the entire economy. What's wrong with that? The end result was that normal people were not able to pay with labour for their living expenses. The only reason that I don't go to greater lengths to correct your misunderstandings of economic history is that I grow weary of doing so on online forums without due compensation. I actually don't see much difference between the way you describe it and I do. You label the government as intervening, but AFAIK it was the Federal Reserve which decided to act essentially against the interests of the population. By shorting against the national economy they could get even more money. They do this trick every few decades and are speeding up the process. You are free to reference books that claim the government intervened. |
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What are your thoughts on digital coin?
I grabbed the "Digital Coin Technology" pdf file. It looks to me like it fails in the second paragraph: This
Digital
Coin
serial
number
can
be
up
to
512
numbers
long.
The
Digital
Coin
software
alone
can
find,
read
and
alter
this serial
number.
If the DigitalCoin software can read the serial number, then so can other software. It is simply not true that "The DigitalCoin software alone can ..." Either you have a central server running the DigitalCoin software and you have to trust that the people running that server won't double-spend DigitalCoins. Or... you have Bitcoin, where the "serial numbers" are the public keys of coin generation transactions. Let me put it differently: I think the _ideas_ with respect to associating to every product its own self-issued currency have some value. The double spending problem has to be addressed, yes, and that's why I would prefer that people that bring these systems into the world would first take the time to show why they would be secure in the first place. Today it is even possible to show these properties in a way that it is verifiable by software that this holds. Claims and proofs of the form: P=/NP -> description_of_payment_system -> NoDoubleSpendingPossible description_of_payment_system /\ NoForgeryPossible description_of_payment_system are possible to express in systems like this. |
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The most important feature that the digital coins have is that you never have the "we won't do this project, because there is no money"-problem, which was what happened in 1929. There were workers, people wanting to eat, and factories, but no money.
That's not really what happened in 1929, or 1932. The banks stopped increasing the money supply, did a few tricks (called back margin loans) on the stock market to make it fall faster and probably shorted the entire economy. What's wrong with that? The end result was that normal people were not able to pay with labour for their living expenses. |
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We do _not_ have a working self-replicating 3D printer yet. reprap.org is often marketed as one, but you still have to do lots of human labour to replicate one. When the day comes that you can replicate the original in a day without human effort, can use more materials than currently supported, have a lot less variance (this is manufacturing!), that will be the day where you can think about printing cars, etc.
Currently, we have hyped technology that can create plastic items (that cannot even contain all liquids without leaking). It's a great project, but to think it will be "done" in 5-10 years is a mistake. If anything, major advances could come from increases in processing power, but they have to be enormous (kind of like how GPUs have been growing in capability in a limited domain of computations), but I don't see it happening. I used to, but progress has been too slow over the past 5 years in this area.
For example we really should have been able to buy memristor based technology by now.
Was anybody here talking about reprap being finished in few years ? Reprap is probably decades from "completion" meaning when it will be possible to print something complex with it, without the need of any human intervention... I sensed a strong suggestion by some people before me that 3D printing technology is already a miracle technology. Your prediction is closer to what I would predict. FYI, in various videos they claim literallly "within 5 to 10 years you will all have your own RepRap and you can then just print another one for a friend by pressing a button". That's the marketing I am talking about. That time duration is a unfounded number. As a wise man said "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future". |
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We do _not_ have a working self-replicating 3D printer yet. reprap.org is often marketed as one, but you still have to do lots of human labour to replicate one. When the day comes that you can replicate the original in a day without human effort, can use more materials than currently supported, have a lot less variance (this is manufacturing!), that will be the day where you can think about printing cars, etc.
Currently, we have hyped technology that can create plastic items (that cannot even contain all liquids without leaking). It's a great project, but to think it will be "done" in 5-10 years is a mistake. If anything, major advances could come from increases in processing power, but they have to be enormous (kind of like how GPUs have been growing in capability in a limited domain of computations), but I don't see it happening. I used to, but progress has been too slow over the past 5 years in this area.
For example we really should have been able to buy memristor based technology by now.
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Another money system is described on http://digitalcoin.info (this is what the Money as Debt 2 movie refers to). As with bitcoins, I see no formal specification of how it is supposed to work, but it seems to me to be a better system than bitcoins if you look at the kind of properties one would want to get out of a money system and those that are actually obtained. Bitcoins are similar to the permanent digital coins type, but have the downside (or upside depending on your role) of having a purely speculative value. The credit coin has no counterpart in the Bitcoin system and as such doesn't perform all functions one would like to get from a money system. The author of bitcoins has a technical background, but less of an experience in money history (correct me if I am wrong). The designer of the digitalcoin probably has a less technical background, but a firm understanding of money and its history. The most important feature that the digital coins have is that you never have the "we won't do this project, because there is no money"-problem, which was what happened in 1929. There were workers, people wanting to eat, and factories, but no money. Initially, it does seem rather complicated to make these kinds of credit coins contract (see the movie), but if one were to label ever product with a number (which already happens for a lot of products (e.g. a soda)), then it wouldn't really be a problem. What are your thoughts on digital coin? P.S. Is the guy from OpenTransactions also on this forum? It seems he has the broadest technical view as he has implemented a very wide range of systems and documented these on his website. |
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No no. It seems true to me. I first saw this film quite a while ago - long before I discovered bitcoin. That's why I was curious if this is in alignment with the world view of people here, or not. Does anyone disagree with anything presented there?
Only one issue I have trouble understanding / believing: Toward the end he describes a theoretical new money system (bitcoin??) with a limited finite number of units. He says that, within such as system, if lenders were allowed to lend money and charge interest on loans... eventually the lenders would end up with all the money. I have trouble believing that. The money holds no real value except when it is spent. It seems like the rich "lenders" would spend their money, sooner or later.
And even if they didn't - at least in the case of bitcoin - however small the number of bitcoins in circulation, they can always be subdivided into smaller and smaller units (i. e. 0.0000000001 BTN )
Look at our system: the banks get more interest than they can spend. The result is that the banks "own" the planet. I put the own in quotes because it's not 100%, but it's more than is good for the people. A bank can loan out some money at 6% to 50 people. If they make sure that the people do not default or when they default that they get even more money, the banks can make money in an extremely easy manner, and that's exactly what they do. The result of this concept of borrowing money is that more money is in circulation which devalues other peoples money. For the system to not result in the bank owning the planet, the banks need to spend an awful lot of money (which they don't). Before 1609 (IIRC, source: some video (I don't know whether it is true)), there was a law which _prohibited_ lending against interest. That is, the very thing which makes banks trillions used to be illegal. The USA system is crazy because some of the banks part of the FED know beforehand when they stop handing out loans. This has a huge effect on the stockmarket, so they can use that to make even more money. In relation to this I have a question regaring history: why was Switzerland neutral during WWII? Why didn't Hitler simply say "You know what? You have a very weak army, I will just seize all your assets. "? |
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I was thinking about this overnight, Wikileaks has in-house cryptology and security experts; they could do an audit on the Bitcoin security and we could donate bitcon to pay for it… scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.
I don’t know about the feasibility, but on the surface it sounds like it would be beneficial to both wikileaks and bitcoin.
There is nothing to be audited as far as an academic cryptographer would be concerned. For that to happen, the specification of Bitcoin would have to be of better quality. That needs to happen first and only when that is done, there is a chance someone will want to take a serious look. Only the author or a volunteer could publish a specification of sufficient quality. It's not acceptable as a Master thesis subject on a respectable university, because there is no research involved, it's just "work". The "coolness" factor is of no interest there. |
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I don't know exactly how it works in the EU, but for the USA it seems to be consistent with other sources and my view of reality. Why do you put it in quotes? It seems to suggest you think it is bullshit.
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The highest number of confirmations I have seen for some of my transactions is around 900. In a screenshot I have seen someone with over 6000. I thought a confirmation simply meant that one node has seen my transaction in the longest blockchain it has seen. 6000 nodes would mean that bitcoin is getting extremely popular or that some people have hundreds of nodes running.
Is my characterization a confirmation correct? What's the highest number you have seen?
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Try deleting your blkindex.dat and blk*.dat files.
I mv'ed the file under database and afterwards everything also seemed to be fine (as in the wallet still exists). What is the actual consequence of me moving that file? Or what is stored in that file? I can move it back if needed, of course. It is 9.6MB. |
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I get the following scary message in my log:
************************
EXCEPTION: 22DbRunRecoveryException
DbEnv::open: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
bitcoin in AppInit()
I already tried db4.7_dump <the only file existing in the .bitconf/database directory, but I got a format error there.
Solution?
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