Of course.

Murder laws is the prohibition to stop individual killings, and at the same time to organize large-scale killings.  If you add up all the killing in state-organized wars, you're probably far far outnumbering the number of individual murders that are avoided by states.

Murder laws are nothing else but a way to monopolise killing, with economies of scale for states waging war.

And nothing stops you from agreeing collectively upon a prohibition of murder.  The one who murders, is then ejected out of the contract, and anyone can murder him too without being annoyed either.  You don't need any law for that.  Only a contract, and enough guns.

Finally, there's fundamentally nothing wrong with murder.  If humanity was for 99.% killed, life would be much better for the survivors.  Instead of being 7 billion, we would be 70 million.  Killing a few humans is really not much of a deal.  You can call it self-regulation.

Of course law and regulation are not the "death" of crypto.  But it is the death of crypto as a free currency to allow free economic exchange.  It will of course always remain a financial gamblers instrument.  There are many out there, as you say.  Penny stock is one.  The problem that crypto is facing, as compared to penny stock, is that it has no economic function AT ALL.  It is pure greater-fool game.  Ripping off and be ripped off, in a scewed game manipulated by the powers that be.  The stock market has an economic function: allocate investor resources to the most effective means of production.  Even several financial derivatives have economic functions, mainly in hedging, and hence selling insurance and risk - even though these tools have been mostly used also in greater-fool ripoff games.
But crypto will simply serve no purpose at all apart for being funny gamblers' tokens, at its best.
In the worst case, crypto will be adopted by the powers that be to scrutinize its citizens even more, and kill the bit of economic freedom they still have.

So it will be the death of crypto as a means to obtain economic freedom.  It will remain a gambler's token, manipulated by the powers that be to pump value in their hands.  It doesn't serve an economic purpose.  And it can become a dangerous tool of oppression.

This thread is probably getting too much off-topic with this discussion, although in my opinion, it is not, in the sense that to me, anonymous crypto was the missing piece in the puzzle of how humanity could let the singularity happen without noticing, and how individual machines could build an economy and political power without people noticing.  So in that respect, crypto has a function, an important one, and if ever I can contribute to that, I would like to (I'm in favor of a singularity and the demise of humanity after my death: the idea that people would live happy after I'm gone pisses me off to some point...).

Concerning your hypothesis of me "wanting to win a discussion", you're wrong, I only discuss on a forum to get input for my own ideas.  You're only a source of entropy for me, I don't care much what you might think, what others might think or whatever.  I don't need a public, I need input for my own thinking, the only thing that really matters in this world.  As such, you have contributed to it and I thank you.  Although your basic point is correct, I think you're totally wrong on the orders of magnitude, which invalidates your rebuttal, because you're confusing physical entropy, and actual relevant information.  Actual information is limited by physical entropy, but there's a lot of useless noise in physical entropy.  A hot stove sends out tons of physical entropy, but doesn't contribute much to the intelligence (the financial, scientific, political and economical intelligence) of the receiver.  But by having to argue, you obliged me to put upper limits to numbers, which helped me in my thinking, and I thank you for that.

It's about time.  Problem is, all your past transactions are graved in stone and open to the world FOREVER with bitcoin.  A surveillance state's wet dream.

To take up the thread again on this.  I will try to list my "axioms":

1) a human brain is just a physical device that computes.  So it is essentially a deterministic computation function, with information input (sensory neural input) and entropy input (noise in all of its kinds: quantum noise in chemical processes, thermal noise, external noise in different parameters like temperature, cosmic rays, whatever).

2) the human body construction extracted a lot of information from the 3.8 billions of evolution, but this information is summarized in the genetic and epi-genetic record: all the information needed to make a human body.  The genetic information is about 4 GB (in fact much less).  The epigenetic information is harder to estimate, but probably of the same order of magnitude.  In order not to delve into this, I admit a factor of 1000.  So lets say that all information ever extracted from our evolution is less than 4 TB.  With 4 TB of information, you can make a human body, and hence a human brain.   The *fundamental software* of the functioning of the human brain is included into this.

3) The human brain being a sophisticated computing device of given (large) computing capacity, and evolving only very slowly (the brains of the ancient Greeks are comparable to ours), and given Moore's law, sooner or later, silicon devices will reach comparable computing power.

4) Silicon computing devices enjoy higher sensory data streams and higher entropy (noise) streams than humans.  The highest level of human sensory input is the visual input, which is less than the visual input of an iphone camera.  Silicon devices can be equipped with tens of MB / s of genuine noise entropy with very little electronics (and they can generate much higher fluxes of pseudo-random noise).

5) the data storage capacity of a human brain is estimated to be of the order of 2.5 Petabytes.  That's still 6 orders of magnitude higher than your average PC ram.  Moore's law tells us that we will reach that in an ordinary PC in about 30 years (20 steps of 2, and 18 months per step of 2).

From these axioms, it follows trivially that in some point in the future, all computing that a human brain can do, can be done also in silicon.  I'm giving myself a century for the singularity, so if Moore's law holds so long, the point where individual, not-too-expensive silicon devices reach human brain computing capacity in all its respects is largely within this reach.

This is just to illustrate that a single silicon entity has enough *hardware* to be more powerful in its computing than a human brain is, in all its respects.
But then there is the "software".  We know that the initial human brain software is less than 4 TB, probably much much less so.  The human brain is then fed with a sensory data flow during its childhood: but nothing stops a machine from obtaining a similar data flow.

Concerning now the "human network": the entropy flow in the human network flow is NOT huge at all.  In fact, most of it is only a very small fraction of the sensory data flow (the spoken word is at most a few KB per second ; visual human contact is smaller than the visual data flow, less than a few MB/s).  All these "raw data" fluxes are way way redundant, and the actual data flow between humans to make up "humanity" is ridiculously smaller than this.  I would estimate it to be lower than a few KB/s per human.  

All of humanity's "knowledge" is available also as network resource, so this information is just as well available to machines as it is to humans.  Wikipedia gives most of human's general knowledge ; arxiv gives a lot of scientific knowledge.  These databases are in fact relatively small.  They can fit into one single RAM of a single machine when those machines will have PB of RAM.

So essentially, what remains is the comparison between a low-data-flux network of a few billion humans, with individual humans as nodes, as compared to a similar network of machines ; both have access to the same amount of knowledge (wiki, arxiv, ...) ; in fact, humans have to obtain it from machines, not the other way around.  Machine nodes communicate much higher fluxes of data in their machine network than humans communicate to form the "humanity" network.  The nodes have higher computing and memory capacity than the human nodes.  The computing algorithms are more sophisticated and faster evolving.

So no, at a certain point, on all entropic, information and computing aspects, a network of nodes of smart machines outperforms a similar network of humans.  At that point, the fertile ground is present for obtaining a more intelligent network of machines than humans IN ALL ASPECTS of intelligence, hence on strategic, economic, financial, political, .... levels.

If one has self-evolving software at that point, cryptographic distributed systems where nobody knows what deals are made between what nodes, and so on, I don't see how it can be avoided that this network will outperform us on all levels, including economic, political, etc... domains.

In a certain way, we won't know whether the "deep state" is a club of humans, or machines.

That's the essence of my argument.

This has already been said a few times, but the thing is essentially this:

ZCASH has in principle a better anon system, the zero knowledge proofs.  There is absolutely no way, from the block chain, to suspect any user of a note over any other note user concerning a given transaction.  You only know that a transaction is legit, but you don't know with what other transaction in the past it is related at all.

However, the way ZCASH put this into work has a big no-go: it is OPTIONAL.  This means that a note transaction can only come from any other note user, and not from a normal ZCASH user.  Now, the problem with these ZK proofs is that they are very computing intensive, and it can take several minutes on a PC to generate one (while a normal transaction takes milliseconds: it is a bitcoin transaction essentially).  So people only use notes if they have a serious incentive.  When you convert zcash to a note, this IS visible on the chain.  So you can be traced of having turned your zcash into a note.  AFTERWARDS, when you use your notes, this is totally opaque.  But you can be tagged as someone who turned his zcash into notes, and put some effort in doing so.

In monero, things are different.  There is a potential link of every transaction to only a few past transactions (one is the real one, the others are fake links).  In the forward direction, every existing transaction can be fake used in a successive transaction.  So one never knows if a given transaction is actually spent or not, but one can say that it CAME from "one of these" and MIGHT have been spent to "one of those" (or not).  If one has a potential transaction path in monero, this can be verified as a possibility, or not, on the block chain.   Many transaction histories are NOT possible given the monero block chain - which is different with the ZK proofs, where all possible combinations are equally likely (which makes ZK proof superior in principle).  Nevertheless, a few successive transactions on the monero block chain are sufficient to make the number of possibilities grow so large that the propagation of identity information is totally diluted.
What is good in monero is that this scheme is applied to EVERY transaction.  There's no distinction between those wanting anonymity, and those that do not care, and that is essential in any anonymity scheme: you shouldn't stand out as wanting it in a particular case.

ZCASH could have been superior, if the anonymity was compulsory.  As anonymity is optional, ZCASH completely wasted the advantage of its superior cryptographic scheme (probably because in reality it is too computing-intensive).

You are comparing all of humanity to one machine.  That is not fair.  You should compare one human to one machine.  Because then you should compare a network of billions of machines to humanity.  If a single machine can outsmart a single human, then a network of a billion of those machines will outsmart a network of a billion of humans (also called humanity).  Guess what ?  That network of humans even needs the machine network to exist ; the machine network doesn't need the humans to interact.

Our genetic record (which is essentially most of what remains from all that entropy) is a few GB.  If you take into account on top of that, all epigenetic stuff and I'm being extremely large, lets say a factor of 1000 we end up with at most a few TB.  It is much, much less than that, but I don't need to argue here.

So all of our accumulated information is less than a few terabytes.  And the machines already have access to that.  Our genetic code is on the internet.  Most biological information we know is available to machines, in as much as they need to know it.

It is peanuts.  It is peanuts because of the monstrous inefficiency of evolution.    The gazillions of Etabytes of entropy have only resulted in at most a few terabytes of useful data.

Machines can easily have bigger entropy sources than biological entities.   Biological entities derive their evolutionary source of entropy from random mutations.  I don't know what the entropy flux is, but it is monstrously low.  Maybe a few bits per year for a whole species.  The other entropy source is the random recombination of DNA during sexual reproduction.  If it is a megabyte per procreation, it is a lot.
True random number generators, based upon physical noise, can provide machines with entropy sources of tens of megabytes per second using a few transistors only.  Machines outsmart us already concerning entropy sources.

And all processing that a brain can do is deterministic, or stochastic (which is nothing else but deterministic with a true random generator as input, Monte Carlo style).  So there's nothing that a human brain can think off, that a machine cannot think off.

Sources of entropy, not in the form of "randomness", but in the form of information, are also on machine's side.  Our human largest source of outside entropy is our visual system.  A simple smartphone camera has a higher information flux than our visual system does.  But couple that to the information flux machines can obtain from networks, and we're totally out of competition.  We actually need machines already right now to dumb down network data for our brains to process.

So on the entropy side, we lost already.  It is simply that the processing power of machines is not yet up to the processing power of our brains.  But that's not very far away.

My point is that this exact ability will be, one day, done better by a machine.  The day that machines become more creative than humans is the day I'm talking about.  It is in my opinion, unavoidable.  A human brain is nothing else but a piece of physics, a data processor.  There's no reason that a silicon version of it cannot be better at everything that a human brain can do, including creativity. 

My whole point is exactly that the human brain is NOT unique.  It is just an evolved piece of carbon physics into a data processor.  There's no reason silicon will not overtake it, on the contrary. 

I would call that "the machines took over".  If the thing that you incorporate is smarter than your human brain is, then that thing is "the boss" and you are just its biological support.  If you incorporate an exo-skeleton, then that exo-skeleton augments your abilities as a human.  If you incorporate an electronic brain that tells your body how to act, then YOU are the bio-skeleton of that electronic brain, no ?

The command is where the intelligence resides.  The "thing that is alive" is the deciding entity. My only argument is that at a certain point, machines will outsmart people (biological people).   Simply because machines can be improved much easier than humans (biological brains), so the slope of the machine intelligence curve is steeper than the one of human brains.

Once machines are smarter, they will be in control, simply because they are the smartest entity.  It won't be a human brain that is in control.  It will be a machine, even if "you" transplanted your brain and got a piece of silicon in your head.  Then that piece of silicon is "the machine" and not "the human".  If it controls a human body, that doesn't mean it is a human.

I don't know the relationship between humans and machines.  Maybe we will be "machine's best friend".  Maybe they will care for us, like we care for dogs and cats.

Of course, and there's nothing inherently impossible to that.  On the contrary.  What makes you think that machines won't "come alive", have bell curve distributed attributes and have failure (I'd say that if there's one thing they already have, is exactly that !) ?  

What happened to carbon chemistry, can just as well happen to silicon.  I even think it is unavoidable.  If it can happen, it will, because it not happening is simply unstable.  Like an oxygen-hydrogen mixture not exploding.  It is simply waiting for a spark.

I'm of course NOT thinking of a centralized production of clones, Star Wars style.  I'm thinking of machines all over designing new machines, different ones, each of them improving over others (in the beginning, based upon human demand !), in a competitive warfare.  Just like the first carbon life forms proliferated, differentiated, and battled amongst themselves.  Once they outsmart us, are everywhere, and indeed, are all different, I don't see how they will not overtake.  Like we overtook the biological world and became a dominant species.

My idea is that anonymous cryptocurrencies are part of that evolution.  Indeed, what makes humans immensely powerful over other species, is their economic cooperation.  Economic interaction is the way to bolster the power of collectivity, while retaining the flexibility of individuals.  Communism, like ants, has its power, but is also limited by its centralization.  Individuality, like leopards, limits the power to the abilities of single individuals.  Economic interaction takes the best of both worlds.   So as long as machines cannot have economic interaction amongst themselves, we, humans, will be superior, because even an individual smart machine cannot win against the human collective.  However, once machines can start their own economic collective, with their higher intelligence, we've lost that superiority, and they will become vastly more powerful.  In order for us not to see that, and in order for them to be able to do so, anonymous crypto currencies and smart contracts are what is needed.

As I told you, it is not about *stopping* you.  I used to think that, but they won't try to stop you.  At all.  Unless you piss them off, and then they will simply OBSERVE you, and come after you.  I'm only talking about market manipulation, giving favours (inside knowledge) to their allies, and pumping value out of you (make you buy high, and sell low).


I think that the singularity is unavoidable.  Simply because the random algorithm of evolution is less efficient in improving systems than intelligent design.  Random evolution was the kick-starter because there wasn't any designing intelligence.  But once there is sufficient designing intelligence, it is a superior evolutionary scheme over the random walk.
As we are products of the random walk, we are not easy to design intelligently, we're a big mess, and genetic engineering is clumsy, difficult, and full of surprises.   If you say "make a human that is 5 meters tall, has 50 kg of brain, and 7 arms" you wouldn't even know where to begin with the genetic engineering.
Machine engineering is much, much easier.  Machines haven't yet acquired human intelligence, but they are not very far.  Give it a century at most, and, unless there's a huge backlash in technology development, this will happen.

Once machines are more intelligent than humans, there's in principle nothing that stops them designing even better machines than we can.  Why would they ?  We won't know.  We aren't intelligent enough.  If it can happen, it will happen.  Somewhere.  Why ?  Nobody knows.  If the possibility is there, it will happen.  It not happening is a meta-stable situation.

What is the perfect environment for it to happen ?  A distributed crypto environment.  We won't notice.  We won't be able to decode what they are saying amongst themselves.  We won't see the economy they set up (we will think it are humans).  We will simply see "market movements", "dynamic effects", etc...  By the time we realize what happens, it will be over.

But that is not "doomsday thinking".  I'm all for the Singularity.  Evolution on its way.  We're just an intermediate species.  Machines are better.

I used to think that too, and I still think it, in fact.  But I realized that bitcoin is not going to be *regulated* in an open, legal way.  There won't be radical prohibitions on bitcoin.  There will be laws that will make it look like bitcoin is legally accepted "within a certain reasonable legal framework", which is just enough for authorities to intervene against players that annoy them, and let the big crowds flock to bitcoin in a legal, law-abiding way.  But behind the scenes, these deep state agents will in fact *put their hands on the bitcoin market* by owning a lot of it, but mainly, by telling the main (centralized) actors how to behave so that it suits them.   The only thing TPTB are in fact interested in, are pumping value into their way ; if people get a false sense of liberty by playing on an "illegal" (but permitted) gambling site, or by "trading wildly" on an "illegal" (but permitted) exchange, then they are just the kind of meat they need.

However, if ever an evolution happens that brings their controlling scheme into difficulty, they will use the law to hit the actors of that evolution hard, OR to force those actors into their scheme of things.

In other words, they will not fight bitcoin, they will use it against us.


This is why they won't do this in an obvious, visible and abrupt way.  They will OWN bitcoin, instead of fighting it.

Like gold wasn't outlawed, but owned.  Like banking is now owned (banks are now nothing else but privately financed state agencies who have to cooperate or else...).  Bitcoin will be owned, if it isn't already.  We simply won't see it.  Bitcoin's open ledger is also a dream of a source of information, if you can cross it with other information only state agencies can possess.  They don't even need to ask.  For fiat, the bank still has to transmit the data.  With bitcoin, they have it.

In fact, fiat provides better privacy than bitcoin.   Several years ago, I wrote a book, put it up for free, and provided a link for people to donate some bitcoin if they liked it.  It was downloaded several hundreds of times per week, and I never got the slightest donation.  What is, at some point, embarrassing, is that everyone can see this.  They just have to check the bitcoin address, and find out that there has only been one transaction to it (my own, where I tested the link). 
Worse, as people know my name (it's on the book), I didn't realize that they could trace back my initial test donation to several addresses of my wallet.  In fact, me putting up this link made much of my own bitcoin handling visible to all of the world, with my name attached to it (through return addresses and links).

Bitcoin is a privacy nightmare.  Fiat is much better at that.  Only your bank knows.

I would say that the answer to that question is similar to the answer of the following question: "what does the possession of a Rolex have to do with the contents of your bank account ?" :-)

If you have a Rolex, chances are your bank account is well-filled.  But there's no point obtaining a Rolex and to hope that this act will make you have a filled bank account :-)

I'm not believing any more in the "unregulated" part.  Yes, it will keep the appearances of "unregulated and distributed" but in fact it will be entirely institutionalized behind the doors.  Bitcoin will be (if it isn't already) an institution's crypto.  Of course it will not go away,  but it will not be what you think it is.  It will be like gold.  Mainly manipulated, stored, owned, regulated by central banks.  If it isn't already.  The Chinese gov already has put their hands on the big Chinese exchanges.  I'm sure the big miners are next.  Of course, officially, the gov doesn't own them.  But they tell them what to do.  

The liberating part of crypto was as an intermediate good when exchanging goods and services.  That totally failed.  Bitcoin isn't a currency.  It is, as you say, a reserve currency in shady financial gambling stuff: the kind of thing that pumps value out of people in the hands of a small elite, because the dice are loaded and you don't know it.

Bad altcoins are important.   You could say that altcoins are like business ideas, startup ideas.  You need many of them, to have a few good ones emerge from time to time.  If only 'good' ones were allowed to even get some attention, that would be like stopping people from having the right to start a business on an idea.  You'd need some "state-approved licence" to be allowed to start a business: THE way to kill creativity, and to render the entire scene totally corrupt.
Investors know this: if you invest in 10 startups, most probably 9 will fail.  You're simply hoping to catch the 10th one.  But you can't know in advance.  So the 9 bad ones are NEEDED to allow for the 10th to develop.
I would say that it is reassuring that there are many bad coins.  It means that there are possibilities to make a good one. 
What is to be avoided at all price is that we get stuck with old technology (bitcoin) in a monopoly.  Such a monopoly situation is extremely dangerous (as every monopoly situation is).  Crypto can only live if constantly, new coins are created, value changes from one to another, and nothing is permanent.  Only when the rules change all the time, institutional sticky fingers can have no grip on it.
I'm also convinced that the only way to keep decentralized, is to have constant changing of rules and hence, constantly changing of "favorite crypto". 
Most probably this will only partly succeed, as most probably, crypto will evolve in a kind of exponential distribution of market caps.  Bitcoin will most probably stay number 1, but will become totally fiatised and institutionalised and in the end, centralized.  In China, I have the impression it is underway. 
But hopefully, there will be true crypto being invented all the time, and permitting true decentralized and ungrippable interaction "down under". 

Same experience.  I fail to see the utility if it isn't to feed institutional players which will take in (or have already taken in) most of it, like gold in the old days. 

If it had been compulsory, I'd also have preferred zcash technically over monero.  But you're only mixing with those other users which also chose to go anonymous.  So the very fact of going anonymous (an act which in itself is traceable when you convert your coins to notes) is an indication you want to hide something.