Your insight is amazing.

Of course not.  Like me, I'm swimming in gov. money.  Because if I weren't, I would have to cough it up as taxes.  In a socialist culture, you can only be stolen, or be part of the thieves.  The only reasonable individual choice is to be part of the thieves.  But I regret that I have to be part of the thieves.  That's what pisses me off.  But I live very will on tax money.

This is universal behaviour.  Perfectly normal.


All I will be able to do with crypto, I already do it with fiat.  The only things I buy with crypto, are internet services of which I don't want people to put their noses in.  All the rest is too much hassle with crypto, and I do it with my credit card.


Yes.  Because you shouldn't use exchanges (apart from getting a starter's budget if you want to start buying before you want to start selling stuff).


Yes, because this reminds crypto users what "trustless" means.


Yes, because I don't want the public to adopt crypto at large, and fiatize it totally.

The public can do most if not all their financial affairs with fiat.  The niche applications of crypto are those that cannot be done with fiat, and hence are not 100% law abiding.

Well, the point is that, if you're suspected, the proof is on you that you are within the tolerated boundaries.  This is a legal nightmare, against every principle of law: you have to prove your innocence in these cases, and they don't have to bring reasonable proof of your guilt.  Everything dealing with taxes and financial laws is of this reversed proof principle (and so is strictly speaking, a "lawless law").

So, IF you are dealing with cash, and they can prove that you've been dealing with SOME cash, it is up to you to prove that you didn't surpass the $5000/year limit and that you didn't do anything "professionally" that way.  This is essentially impossible to prove, so you are at the mercy of the judge.   So *if they are after you for another reason* (like a political one), it is easy to convict you if ever they have one single instance of you handling cash against something.

You shouldn't confuse "tolerated" and "legal".  Tolerated has the problem that the burden of proof resides upon your shoulders, and that that proof can never be delivered.  So if you participate in a tolerated activity, you are at their mercy for anything.  If you *really* are a small guy and they have nothing against you (you haven't been politically incorrect, you aren't of a suspicious race they want to nail down (white, say), you have shown sufficient respect for the system in place), they will not annoy you.  If however, you piss them off in one way or another, they can use these honey pots to nail you on the cross and there's not much you can do about that.  And that's the goal of these things.

They don't like it, and they would like to outlaw it.  But it takes them too much effort to actually outlaw it.  So they discourage it by setting examples, and they use it to convict their political enemies.


I'm closer to your second vision, unfortunately.  There's even a law I heard about, that if you want to have UV sessions to get a fake sun tan, you have to register to a national registry, so that you cannot obtain more than an allowed dose of UV, and each time you take a session, the beauty institute is supposed to report it to the national register.  Now, I don't do UV, but if you see the level of totalitarianism for these details, it is outright scary.  The official reason is that too much UV gives you skin cancer, which is too expensive for social security.


But I agree with that.  Only, you can't say that it will be law abiding.  It will simply be tolerated to a certain extend, because it takes them too much resources to weed out, but at the same time it is a honey pot, and they will use it selectively to convict their political opponents and set them as an example.

Total power occurs when the law forbids everything, and most is tolerated.   Then the arbitrariness of judgement, which was done away with since King Hammurabi invented the law, is back, and full despotism has its way.  A fully Kafka-ian world.


It failed, but it was serving power in its arbitrariness.

People only revolt when an unreasonable law is applied.  When an unreasonable law is voted, but its transgression is tolerated, people don't revolt.  And you can use the law selectively to hit your political enemies.

Ah, Toknormal's aberrant monetary definitions again

There's a difference between two aspects of a monetary asset.  One is the BELIEF IN THE SYSTEM.  The belief in the system resides in the fact that you are willing to accept monetary assets against goods and services, because you believe that others share that belief, and that you will be able to obtain goods and services against these assets.
That belief needs (but it is not sufficient) a kind of belief in the respect of the rules of the system.  For a crypto currency, that belief in the respect of the rules is based upon the belief that the cryptography is sound, and the consensus mechanism is working correctly (that there is not a 51% attack going on for instance, and that such an attack is not imminent).

Again, the "technical" belief is necessary, but not sufficient, for the monetary belief to hold.  If you don't believe that the crypto currencies' rules are correctly implemented (for instance, that there's a cheap trick to generate extra coins, or to reverse transactions), you can hardly believe the monetary value of it.  But it is not because a crypto currency is working correctly, that you believe that people will accept it against goods and services.

So the "monetary belief" is ONE aspect.

The different aspect is a single transaction.  One has already to assume the monetary belief, otherwise you won't bother getting involved into a transaction.
If you're on the receiving side, it is simple to believe in a transaction: you see that you obtained the funds.  Given your belief in the functioning of the system, that's enough to convince you.
If you're on the sending side, it is also simple to believe in the transaction: you see that you don't have the funds any more and you can verify that you did the transaction.

So both parties can convince themselves easily about the veracity of a transaction.  However, the receiver of funds has an incentive to *pretend* that he didn't get paid, because he's supposed to deliver goods and services for it.   This only matters if the sender needs some form of social pressure on the receiver; that is, if he did his payment before being sure that he obtained his goods and services ; or if the receiver of funds thinks he can manipulate social pressure on the sender to get more out of him (more money, or getting the goods back).

So the only potential liar in this case is the receiver of funds (who knows he's lying), and he's lying to a particular audience.

The sender can prove to this audience that the payment took place (and has to sacrifice anonymity for this transaction in that case).

With monero, the sender can prove it to ANYBODY he estimates needs to be informed about the receiver's lie.  If he sends the transaction key, the transaction ID and the receiver's address, ANYBODY can check that this transaction took place.

But it is up to the sender to give this information to the people he estimates, need to have this information (although these people can re-transmit this information further, which is an error in this system: it is not a zero-knowledge proof, it is full proof).

The revelation of this particular transaction has nothing to do with the monetary belief in the overall system.  The overall belief is partially built upon the belief of the correctness of the cryptographic system, and the absence of 51% attack, and partially on the inavoidable belief in the group-think of it having value.

One doesn't need to know how to reveal an individual transaction: one has cryptographic proof that they are all correctly linked together.

The revelation of a particular transaction is only needed to correct a lie of a receiver of funds to an audience for which you, as a sender, think it is important to correct this.

These are two different aspects.

There's a difference.  If you run a full node, it is very difficult to find out whether your full node processed *your own* transaction, or a transaction coming from a light client connected to you (of which maybe one is yours).  This is why you should run your own monero full node and why it is a bad idea to use light wallets in the first place.  The encrypted tunnels to a full node don't reveal what's inside, only that there was a connection. In order to even start untangling that, you'd need a global surveillance of all local connections too.  This can be done only for specific targets, and even then, it is difficult if several jurisdictions are at work.
So you only run this danger if you are already targeted, after which, it is just a matter of collecting proof.

But when you mix your coins on an FBI mixer, you are 1) signalling yourself and 2) making the mixing useless because they KNOW who brought what, and got out what on what address ; they don't need to pre-target victims, they come themselves, and they bring the proof of their own to their servers.  The first thing is a multi-billion dollar surveillance program with doubtful utility and results, the second is a less-than-one-million program that is a honeypot for people wanting to hide something.

Setting up several FBI mixers is much, much, much lower budget than global internet surveillance and is directly targeting the people they are after without the legal hassle of global surveillance.

A guy buys coins on coinbase, goes to a mixer at the FBI's site, thinks he's safe and buys drugs on a dark market.  The FBI agent looks at the analysis the next morning, sees the buying at a dark market wallet, sees that it comes from coinbase's wallets before mixing, asks a subpoena for coinbase, and knock, knock on the door if he happens to be in the US jurisdiction, or an e-mail to a collegue of a befriended jurisdiction to do the same.

You don't need global internet surveillance for that.  If I were an FBI agent, I'd ask for $1 million budget to set up a few hundred of mixers around the world, and ask for a promotion the next year when I brought down 10 dark markets.

What you fail to see is, all else equal, when you use a bitcoin mixer, you fully trust the owner of the mixer, and you reveal him what you want to hide.  BTW, DASH has exactly the same problem, with the master nodes which are nothing else but trusted mixers.  Only, DASH protects this somewhat more with the fact that you cannot "Sybil attack" the DASH masternode network, as you can "Sybil attack" the bitcoin mixer population like I proposed. 
The counter side to DASH is that most masternodes are in the hands of Evans, so in a certain way, you have to trust Evans for your mixing.  That's probably somewhat safer than trusting the FBI agent, but still.

I don't know.  Most people around me are quite fearsome about downloading stuff.  When I tell them about VPN I buy with bitcoin and so on, they look at me like I'm an extraterrestrial.   Someone I know had been downloading movies, and got a repremand letter and he really got scared.  So yes, people do download, but with fear on their minds, and without daring to talk publicly about it, which limits severely its potential.  And, it IS illegal.  Of course you can do it.  If you're lucky, they won't single you out as an example, and it is not difficult to get lucky.  But that doesn't make it legal.  That's my whole point.

So yes, crypto has a role.  But in as much as it is useful over fiat, it will be essentially illegal, even if you can use it and most chances are you'll be lucky, because, as you say, they can't go after every millibitcoin guy.  But then it isn't "law abiding".  Downloading movies is not law abiding, even if only the dumbest and/or unluckiest get caught, and there's enough room to use it "under the radar".

The goal of the laws is of course that you can't opt out strictly legally.  You can, in practice, if you are "under the radar" and with sufficient novelty that they aren't chasing that.  I think, "thanks" to bitcoin's high flying, this period is closing for crypto.  It got on the radar.  Silly gamblers.

Hell, where I live, it is even prohibited by law to help anyone in one's real estate to do any work that could also be done by a professional, if you're not related to less than the 3rd degree (parents, children, brother, sister).  I cannot go and help a buddy paint his rooms.  If I do so, I'm considered doing illegal work if I don't give out a "fair bill" and pay taxes on it, and this I can't do if I don't have a business.  So it is simply strictly illegal to help someone, that is not your family, do things in his house.  This is a law that wants to push people to take on professionals, and not count on friends.
I can't paint, install a bathroom, install a kitchen, do electricity, break or make internal walls, ... anything that is fixed to the real estate if it is not my brother, sister, son, father, mother, daughter's house. 

I live in a European country, and as far as I know, it is forbidden to do any productive activity without the status of a business (you have to declare yourself, get a business number, and even pay taxes yearly if you did $0 affairs during the year), and all business-related affairs need to be regulated on a business-bank account (not even a private account).  You are not allowed to accept cash beyond $1000,- in a direct sale if it is domestic ; you are not allowed to do any sales abroad with cash: it has to use your business account.  I have a small consultancy business next to my regular dayjob, the lightest possible structure that exists, and these rules apply.

Of course, there tolerances: if you do something casually, if the total amount doesn't surpass $5000 a year, and your activity can by no means be considered "professional" these rules don't apply.  For instance, if you do a one-time sale of stuff in your basement, you're not handling more than $5000,- in total and you cannot be suspected to have done this in a professional way, it is tolerated even though strictly speaking, against the law.


I would be surprised.  For the moment, there's still a vacuum, and the laws haven't tightened in.  But when one sees how there's a crack down on cash (the limit of cash use in stores has been lowered more and more: it used to be $10 000, then $5000, then $3000, now it is $1000), I seriously doubt that there will remain any freedom, except the temporary freedom of novelty, when the law didn't catch up yet.  

There's too much at stake for them.  Who controls the money, controls the country.  


I know.  But they have another weapon: fear.  Fear is what keeps power in place (next to faith and social pressure).


I think there's a way to make it illegal in court *if one wants to* and laws will catch up.  The reason is not the use of crypto currencies per se (there's almost no jurisprudence for that yet), but there's the fact that someone has been investing value in a business that has most probably not been declared, and is expecting returns on it, and that this business activity is done professionally.    If that is the case, you'd be already in deep trouble with social security laws, because you're doing "work" that is not declared, and you don't pay social security contributions on it.  There's an effective business structure which has not been officially declared.  You are using real estate (a room) in which you practice business activities (you're thinking for your business, you're working) which has not been declared.    All monetary activity of that business is not happening on a business-bank-account which has been joined to your declaration, and you didn't obtain the only allowed payments NOT on that account through cash in a sales point, locally.  In my jurisdiction, you would already be in deep doodoo.  *if they found out* which they probably can't unless they want to SET AN EXAMPLE to instill fear and social pressure.

They don't need to chase every millibitcoin versed.  They single out a few examples, after whom they go, they make a great legal show of it, they present them as tax evaders, people that take the jobs of honest people, accumulate all the accusations, and convict them to 10 years of prison.  They make sure that the mass media relay this, they make sufficient links with "terrorism financing" and "drugs", and that's it.   Most people will now refrain from using this.  They won't go 10 years to jail because they used crypto.  Banks will propose fiat ways to do what was so-called difficult with fiat before.  They will ask you 5% on top of it.  A new law will introduce a tax on it.  From that moment, it is strictly illegal to do the same without paying a similar tax.  

I know people in the tax administration.  70% of their investigations are inspired by anonymous letters giving away neighbours, competitors, business rivals, and even customers.  There's even a law in the making that if you give away a true tax offender (of course non-anonymously) you may get a percentage of the money they make after investigation.


As I outligned, most of those things are strictly speaking, already illegal.  

That's simply wrong. 

https://getmonero.org/knowledge-base/user-guides/prove-payment


What monero is still lacking, but I think it is in the making, is multisig, needed for escrow.

We agree.  But that's because this is not totally complying to all legal requirements.  This is a real use case.  I'm launching this argument in the face of the people wanting total legality of crypto.  THEN it can be done with fiat, or it is (somewhat) illegal.
I'm NOT talking (only) about buying guns and drugs on dark markets.  But exactly about your kind of economic relation, which would be dangerous and/or illegal if these guys have it their way.

As you say in the rest of your post, you use crypto to hide from the sticky fat fingers of state and law.  That's the true reason for crypto to exist.  When it becomes entirely "legal" it will not serve that purpose any more.

If you'd know me, you'd understand that that comment is, well, misguided.  But you don't know me, and you shouldn't.  Of course it is pretentious to claim to know a subject deeply, and there are people on this planet who know much more about it than I do, but they are not very numerous, I can say.  I'll easily concede that I'm not in the top 10, nor even in the top 100.  Beyond that, we'd have to discuss

I also know enough about it to know that it is not of enormous interest here, in what I'm saying.  It has some importance, but that importance is vastly over-estimated in your rebuttals.

But let me frame somewhat more what I try to demonstrate, because there may very well be a big misunderstanding on that.  

My theorem is the following:

"in as much as we can rely on Moore's law in the coming century, and in as much as there is no major backlash in technological, economical and political development, the day that machines will have a political, economical and scientific superiority over humans will fall within this century.  That day is the day that we are not the dominant species on earth any more, but they are".

My demonstration is that the premises lead to the existence of a network of nodes which surpasses the human network in all respects concerning political, economical, scientific intelligence: the nodes are individually more performing than individual humans, and the network is at least as performing as the human network.

The last bit is simple to demonstrate: as the human network is built ON TOP of a machine network for most of its information flow, then of course the machine network, as a network is at least as performing as the human network built on top of it.  This also goes for "public knowledge".  All public knowledge "on the internet" is of course also available to machines.

So it is not on the network side that humans will continue to outperform machines, as the human network is built on top of it: machines can very easily have a virtual network that is just as performant, and that has just as much access to public knowledge (political, financial, scientific, historical, social, ....) than humans have through that same network.

This is why the thing that matters is the comparison of individual nodes.  I take it that the human network will be of similar size than the machine network (a few billion nodes).  I take it that there will be (at least) as many machine nodes than there are human nodes.  So the only thing that makes the difference is the individual node intelligence.  When individual node intelligence surpasses individual human intelligence, my theorem is demonstrated.

So how can I demonstrate that node intelligence will, at a certain point, be capable of surpassing human intelligence ?  I don't know what FORM machine intelligence will take.  It most probably will NOT be an imitation of the human brain, because the human brain structure is not adapted to silicon, and what is performing with carbon chemistry may be extremely wasteful of resources with silicon.  But a WORST CASE would be when machines implement human-brain-like processing.  As I said, this will most probably not be what will happen, as in silicon, there are probably *much faster ways* to implement brain-like intelligence, but the worst case is when we imitate the human brain in silicon.

For this, we need to have:
1) the hardware capacity
2) the software running on it

Moore's law demonstrates that in about 20-30 years, the equivalence of individual PC will reach/surpass the raw memory and processing power of human brains.  So in as much as we can run the right software on it, an individual PC will be able to do similar kinds of processing as your average human brain.  The estimates taken for that are most probably exaggerated.  Probably the processing power needed for our *intelligent political, financial, economical and scientific thinking* is much, much smaller than that.  But it can of course not surpass the total potential capacity of processing of our brain.  So in the worst of cases, individual nodes will have sufficient raw hardware capacity to do all the needed processing.

The question that remains is: the software.  You may have a gigantic supercomputer, if the software running on it serves to calculate prime numbers, that machine will never do any political or economical thinking.  The question is: is it *thinkable* to have software that will implement sufficient intelligent thinking, processing like the human brain is doing ?  It might be that the "software" the human brain is running, is immensely complex.  Is it ?

That was the essence of my previous posts: no, it isn't that terribly complex.  The human brain is a processing system of which the fundamental software cannot surpass the full genetic information needed to *build a brain*.  Most probably it is a very small part of that, because that genetic information must also tell how digestion works, how procreation works, and even in the construction of the brain, there are a lot of aspects that don't matter concerning the processing, but are just the metabolism of brain cells.  I (strongly over)estimated the total information contents of genetic and epi-genetic information (everything that is needed to build physically a human body) to be 4 TB.  But in reality, the part that corresponds to the computational aspects of the human brain must be a very very small part of it, simply because much of this genetic and epigenetic information is common with fish, mollusks and chimps.

So the specific instruction set needed to get to the computational structure of the human brain mustn't be such a big deal.

Now, the human brain is a self-modifying piece of software, which "learns" by obtaining sensory information.  You're entirely correct on that.  But to "make a brain" you only need to BOOTSTRAP its construction, in exactly the same way as the human brain is constructed from genetic and epi-genetic information in the womb of the mother.

One shouldn't confuse the "run-time" structure of the human brain (which can be very complex) with the code needed to implement that run-time.  For instance, the code needed to set up a computational neural network with 1 billion nodes and 10 layers can probably be written in a few pages.  That's all that is needed to implement such a huge neural network on a running machine.  THAT is the code I'm talking about, that must be smaller (much, much smaller) than 4 TB.  THAT is the code that implements the computational aspects of the "raw" human brain, with its "native" (literally) structure (the "pre-wired things").

Once you get that raw brain up and running on sufficiently powerful hardware, you can FEED it similar stimuli than a small baby receives from its sensory inputs, the most important one being the visual stimuli.  We're talking about fluxes less than a few MB/s, which can very easily be fed into the run-time object that is running and is the "raw brain", modifying itself like the brain is modifying itself when a baby is growing up.  Have this object running for 20 years with similar stimuli as a human brain, and you obtain a thinking adult brain-like run-time state.

If all of this succeeds, you will end up with a run-time equivalent of a human brain.

I only wanted to demonstrate that all these steps fall largely within reasonable boundaries, totally feasible in principle on the informational side, some even today, and all very easily if Moore's law applies, within a few decades, not even a century.

So the "worst case human brain simulation" is feasible.  As in silicon, most probably much more efficient and different ways will be found to implement intelligence, not simulating clumsily a human brain, there is no fundamental problem, nor on the software side, nor on the hardware side, to obtain nodes that have sufficiently intelligent individual behaviour to outsmart us on the political, social, scientific, economic and financial side.  

But what is more, biological nature cannot clone a brain state, while silicon can very easily clone a brain state.  The learning doesn't need to be done over for every brain.  You simply do it a few times, to have some diversity in the obtained mature brain states, and then clone those a billion-fold into other nodes.

There are no information/entropy fluxes that are problematic for silicon in this respect.  Once we have a few thousand alternative mature brain states, they can be cloned, distributed, mixed, .... to make a myriad of different mature brain states in, most probably, a matter of days, on billions of machines.


You are making a major mistake here.   You are perfectly right that it is essentially impossible to reproduce exactly a VERY PARTICULAR brain state: the brain state of Mary on Monday morning.  That will depend on details and is prone to chaotic divergence you talked about.  But we don't need Mary's brain state on Monday morning.  These details don't matter.  If Mary didn't look at a particular movie when she was 7 years old, she would be a different person  last Monday.  But we don't care.  The different Mary will do too.  It will also be an intelligent brain that can think politically, economically, financially and scientifically.  In a totally different way than the Mary version that saw the movie. But that doesn't matter.  The Mary that saw the movie, and the Mary that didn't see the movie, are both human brains that outsmart chimps.  In the same way, the exact brain state our silicon arrives at doesn't matter, if it can outsmart systematically most humans.  This is why chaos theory and so on don't matter in this.

It is sufficient that the possibility exists, and sooner or later, it will be realized.  As its realization will be irreversible, once is enough.  You are totally right that the KIND of society that will evolve is not predictable because prone to chaotically impossible to trace effects, but that's not what I'm talking about.  This kind of discussion is like me saying that a big meteorite is going to hit the earth and this is going to eradicate a lot of species, and you are telling me that I can't know that because I cannot predict the details of every aspect of the collision: where will what piece of rock fly ?  I don't need to do these (indeed impossible) predictions to know that the impact of the meteorite will kill off a lot of species.  I would need to do this impossible thing if I'd have to predict what new species would arise afterwards.  But just predicting the broad lines of the extinction doesn't need to delve into the details.


This is totally wrong.  What I'm saying is that, indeed, sending the equation tells you how to calculate Pi.  If there is enough raw computing power, you will be able to calculate the 100 billionth digit, while I sent you under one KB of information.  So *it will be possible to calculate Pi's 100th billionth digit* with just 1 KB of crucial information.  You don't need the more than 100 GB of run-state information to do so.  Thank you for giving an example that illustrates what I'm saying.  That it would be difficult or impossible to predict the EXACT STATE of a network of nodes trying to calculate that digit doesn't change the fact that in the end, that digit can be calculated.  That's the point.  We don't care about the exact state of a particular realisation of that computation.  We only want to show that it is possible, and not even very difficult to do so.

You could say that that those 100 billion digits don't contain much entropy: it contains much less than 1 KB of entropy.  It is all the difference between pseudo-random and truly random number generation, and is of utmost importance in cryptography.


No, not really.  I'm actually much more of a half solipsist, inspired by many-minds of quantum theory. (if all worlds exist of which I observe only one, then I'm the creator of that world, if you see where I'm coming from.  Of course, when I die, that world doesn't disappear, but it loses its specificity: it is one amongst all possible ones.   The Landscape style of thing).

What is nice about the singularity argument, is that you can stop worrying about the world.

The idea is not to "hold" on any crypto currency, is it.  The idea is to obtain it against goods and services you sell, and spend it to obtain goods and services.  Like you do with fiat.
If you are holding it, you're gambling on finding a greater fool.  Which may very well work out, btw.

The problem I'm having is, that if you don't mind a transaction being public, why do you need bitcoin at all, and why can't you do it with fiat ?

Yes, and this "sound money doctrine" is silly, because it makes an assumption: namely that the full market cap of currency is a monopoly.  Once you allow for competing currencies, the sound money doctrine loses its ground.

Mixing on an FBI server

We now have a SELECT club of such cartels, gangs and terrorist organisations.  They are called states, and their dependencies.  Having unregulated crypto opens the game they can play up to everybody. 


That's what states do all the time.  They call it taxes.


These are amateurs.  States are the professional throat cutters, scammers, terrorists and mobs.  They have stolen more from people than any gang, they have killed more people than any mob, they have lied, cheated and scammed more than a thousand Madoffs.


I know millions of people that have been assassinated by states.  They call it wars.

This is what I'm repeating all the time: if you want to be entirely law-abiding, law-protected and government-respected, fiat is much much better.  The only thing that crypto has for it, is that it is trustless and decentralized.  But if a centralized authority making the laws and enforcing the laws is admitted, it is MUCH MUCH cheaper, simpler, easier... to do away with that trustlessness distributed and have that authority, that is in any case dictating the laws, be the central authority for the monetary asset too.  That's exactly what a central bank is.

These people are nuts.  They are graving in stone for eternity what they have been doing.  Give it 5 years, and they are all in deep dodo, when law enforcement will start looking seriously into this.

It is much much worse than that.  It is not only a transparent wallet where you can see the current state, you can also see all past expenses, to whom, and all past receivings, from whom.  In other words, it is your transparent bank account.