I don't know much about it, but I've heard that government bonds (printed by USA's government) are traded for dollars (printed by Federal Reserve), and that interest must be paid to Federal Reserve in a never-ending cycle of there always being more money owed than money exists.

If the dollar economy crashes to a value of 0 and that value goes into Bitcoins (and other cryptocurrencies designed to handle whatever problems Bitcoin may have scaling up), then what would happen to USA's national debt?

Would it be paid with the dollars as their value approaches 0 and then paid with other currency in small amounts proportional to the value of dollars?

Or do the government bonds stabilize what the Federal Reserve is allegedly owed based on aproximately the average value of other currencies instead of the value of dollars?

Either way, I want the dollar economy to crash to 0 and be replaced by cryptocurrencies in a smooth transition where the overall economy improves.

These 2 polls (same question about dollars and bitcoins) are to get forum members' opinions based on their own definition of ethics, not to debate whose ethics is best.

The results so far are, going by the median:
Dollars 16% unethical.
Bitcoins 3% unethical.

Smarter animals recognize themself in a mirror. Others see their reflection and act like its another animal. They hide their food, get ready for a fight, or run away for example.

Monkeys are smart enough to act based on where others are looking. They value 1 of 2 boxes higher if a person appears to value it, and more often choose to open that box first.

Compared to animals, being a conformist (copying what others do) is a sign of intelligence. If you drive onto a new road, before you see a speed limit sign, you tend to drive the same speed as everyone else. But conformism is just a little better than "trial and error" strategy.

In general, someone is smarter if they look deeper into someone watching someone watching someone... to some depth. Humans sometimes do experiments of watching a monkey choose 1 of 2 boxes based on the Monkey watching a Human watch the boxes. Through recordings and writing about such experiments, I am watching that Human watch the Monkey, and so on. If you think my writing here is interesting and continue to read it, you are watching me watch those things, so you are at a deep level of watching.

Its not just about how deep you watch the watchers. Its about what you learn from it. Why are the others watching eachother? Why are you watching them? If you watch just because I said smarter people do that, then you're acting at the level of conformism, just a little above "trial and error", but if you learn interesting things from watching the watchers, then that's a sign of intelligence.

This is about understanding how others' minds work and watching others understand the minds of those they watch. Instead of only understanding that Monkeys watch what others look at and act based on that, we should figure out how Monkey minds work, and we should figure out how Human minds work that makes them want to figure out how Monkey minds work. But we can't assume those Humans wanted to know how Monkey minds work. They may have been doing research because it pays the bills and only want to demonstrate what behavior Monkeys have.

The behavior of watching the watchers is what holds Human society together. We predict what others will do, assuming they make similar predictions, and so on. Money has value because of our prediction that others think money has value. We go to work because we predict others will continue going to work, because if they didn't then the employer would be unable to pay. We ignore laws that we don't agree with if we predict most other people also ignore those laws.

We avoid trying to change the world in big ways because we predict other people will not go along with it. But why do we predict those other people won't go along with it? It's the same reason we don't try to change the world. It only works if enough people try at the same time, but most of those people, at any one time, have given up, and that's a reason for others to give up before they start.

Lets think of a Human mind as many different ways of thinking all connected to eachother, like a definition of ethics, strategies, preferences, knowledge, way of organizing memory, content of memory, goals, way of understanding how others think and predicting them, intuition of how spiritual things feel and how to use them, what was recently thought about, and all other ways to divide a mind into parts. Everyone has many common mind parts but some parts are unique to each person. We interact with eachother mostly by making predictions about the common parts of others' minds. Our friends are people who have more mind parts in common with us or who have mind parts we want to understand through interaction with the friend. When we interact with others, we form mental models of their mind, and if we like how it works we use it as new parts of our own mind, often replacing our old ways of thinking or keeping both around to see which works best or use each at different times depending on what works best.

A "mind part" is an advanced kind of "meme", a way of thinking, or thinking about thinking, instead of only a thought or idea. I am expanding the definition of "meme" to include parts of minds, how intelligence works, people making predictions of what others will predict, and anything else that can change about how we think. An artificial intelligence (AI) or a Human mind is the combination of many memes that operate together in an intelligent way.

In the rest of this writing, its important to understand the expanded definition of "meme".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

Many proposals for improving the world have been ignored because the author did not understand how memes flow through society.

Most peoples' minds are made of memes that rarely change. For example, they may think it is only possible for the 2 most popular political parties to win any election for the next 20 years, therefore when they receive a meme about how much better the world would be if some other political party won and therefore more people would vote for that party, instead the meme receiver temporarily replaces the "who wins elections" meme with the new meme, checks it against the other memes currently active in their mind, and concludes that most others will not vote for the other political party because others expect the first 2 parties to win.

Most people only think ahead as far as replacing a few memes temporarily, checking the results against their currently active memes, and acting based on if that small change is a short-term improvement and does not contradict the other memes.

Its an example of a "greedy algorithm", one that only looks around for small possible changes and chooses the best of those, and repeats until it finds a "local maximum".

What is a "local maximum"? Don't stop reading yet. This meme may already be too far from your current set of active memes, but it will make sense soon. If you find yourself stuck on an island which has just enough food to keep you alive for the rest of your life, that would be a local maximum. If you think like most people, the analogy would be to stay on that island instead of risking drowning in the ocean to get to a higher value than the "local maximum" of the island. This is only an example to explain what "local maximum" is. Most people would build a boat and risk it, but most people get stuck at local maximums that are more complex than being stuck on an island.

We are stuck on the local maximums of 2 political parties and most people voting against the one they dislike the most. We are stuck at the local maximum of corporations and money and political power being how the world is organized. We are stuck at the local maximum of not trying to change the world because we predict most others will not go along with our plans even if they are better than how the world works now. Many people will disagree on which things we're stuck on and which we should keep, but most of us can agree we are stuck at many local maximums.

Smarter animals recognize themself in a mirror. Monkeys act based on where others are looking. Humans watch the watchers enough that society improves but gets stuck at local maximums. Smarter Humans watch the Human species getting stuck at local maximums and find ways to get unstuck and find higher value for everyone on average.

Many groups have started talking about how they want the world to work, changes so big that we know of no sequence of local maximums from here to there. For example, the Zeitgeist Movement ( http://thezeitgeistmovement.com ) advocates a more scientific way of distributing resources than letting corporations and political power control it. If you agree with their goals is not important. They are an example of a way the world could be that was not thought of through a sequence of local maximums. The way they chose their goals is unusual, but the way they work toward their goals is very similar to how everyone else thinks. They try to get more members who think like them, and when they have enough members they would redesign the world as they planned. They also build small demonstrations. Their plan may work, but a more efficient plan would be to find the cause of the local maximum way most people think, because that way of thinking is the reason most people do not try to change the world.

The problem is not that people don't think ahead. The problem is when they think ahead they are using today's memes. Predicting what memes will be popular years from now is not hard if you understand how memes flow through society.

To understand how memes flow through society, you first need to think about the fact that memes flow through society. Most people rarely think about that.

Next you make predictions about how other people will think about memes flowing through society.

You continue making predictions of others' predictions, watching the watchers, until you understand why paradigm-shifts happen. For example, what was the creator of Bitcoin (a decentralized open-source economy) thinking when he decided to build a complex software and try to convince people to use numbers on a screen as money? What made him think it would work? It was the fact that its total money supply expands from nothing to millions of bitcoins, and those who get in early tend to make more money on their investment, so at any one time buying bitcoins is a local maximum. The creator of Bitcoin understood that society moves toward local maximums, so he designed continuous sequence of local maximums that would suck value out of dollars and put it into bitcoins, and it worked.

Bitcoin is 1 of many paradigm-shifts happening today. Some of the smartest people have noticed that there are ways to change the world without spending any money and with a small team of people.

A mind is the combination of many memes. Most people have much difficulty temporarily replacing more than a few memes at a time. They fall back to their old patterns of thinking. They have difficulty thinking of different ways the world could work because they can only think of a few changes at a time. That is going to change quickly as people start thinking about the idea of memes (including the more advanced parts of how a mind works) and start making predictions based on other peoples' predictions of memes.

The days of brute force strategy controlling the world are nearly over. Those who understand how memes flow through society are the new world leaders, not ruling through threats and force, but influencing through deep understanding of how society works and what technology they can build to change its path. The rich and politically powerful elite will see this as the biggest threat they've ever known, but despite their immediate ability to destroy us all, they are only pawns in a game now controlled by deeper levels of thinking. To change the world, I have no use for weapons or threats or money or political power. The pen is mightier than the sword, especially when it leads to technology that changes how people interact with eachother. There is nothing more powerful on this planet than an understanding of how people think. Everything the elite have, somebody knows how to obsolete it and may be waiting for certain other needed memes to start the process of changing the path of society to do that. Things are not what they appear to be anymore. Those who appear to have power often have very little, and those who build certain kinds of socially organizing technology may appear to have very little power but actually choose the path of the Human species by their choices of what features to include in their technology.

We have no reason to overthrow governments, because that would mean we are not already in control. It may appear we're not because most of us haven't yet realized this and used it. Those who lack power feel the need to make threats, but those with real power simply make things happen.

Lets use these new abilities to work toward a global decentralized democracy, toward improving the Human species and all life forms, solving the world's biggest problems, and building a new society where everyone understands enough about how others think to change the world.

This is a Meta Paradigm Shift, a change in the way paradigm-shifts work, and it will expand into meta of meta without limit. As more people start to understand this, the world will change exponentially faster. Ray Kurzweil and many others talk about a "technology singularity", where technology advances far enough to build more technology and accelerates exponentially. That's great, but how we advance society is a choice. We are singularity if we want to be, and we are in control of our future.

I didn't say people agreed on what is moral and what isn't. Whatever the most people agree is moral, what I said applies to that.

I only said it that way to compare it to the common idea that "The ends do not justify the means." It makes more sense to say it this way... The ends, means, and side-effects taken as a whole should have to be positive.

There are legitimate uses for almost everything, but as I see it the important question is: Does x benefit society overall compared to the lack of x (including the means of enforcing the lack of x)? (and the same question for all ways to organize and influence or control x) If not, then we shouldn't have x until that changes.

The ends do not justify the means; The ends plus the side-effects justify the means.

I agree that knowledge shouldn't be censored, even about how to build weapons of mass destruction. If lots of people know how to do it, then when somebody tries to do it, many people will understand what they're doing and try to stop them. Its needed for power to be balanced. Its also important to advance science and solve the world's problems. Knowledge is ok. Actions sometimes are not.

Ok, very hard to hack, or harder to hack than governments are to corrupt, which isn't setting the bar really high, but it would be an improvement. The right to unlimited arms was a good idea when that was written hundreds of years ago, but they weren't talking about things that can kill a whole planet or country or whatever size. Regardless of what those old documents say about rights, we should think about the world today and decide what is best based on that. The USA Constitution is great for legal battles, but I won't take my opinions from it unconditionally for the same reason I don't believe ancient religious books. I may read some things from a religious book and decide to believe it or not based on how it fits with other knowledge about the world, and I read documents about rights the same way. I have to think for myself, and based on the world today I don't think everyone should have the individual ability to create weapons of mass destruction, and neither should governments.

We can continue this conversation here: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=27427.0 in the thread titled "Should individuals have the right to build weapons of mass destruction?".

A conversation started at http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=23054.40 about "Forcing people when you don't have to is bad" vs "Forcing people is bad".

I agree that governments aren't the right organization to have nuclear power (if anyone should have it at all).

Are you saying that individuals, some of which want to kill millions of people for not believing in their religion, should have the right to have immediately globally deployable weapons of mass destruction? What if one of those people says they only want to build the nuclear weapons so they can bomb the place you live and everything within 1000 miles?

I prefer the world be organized in a decentralized way where majority agreement would be needed, maybe through some unhackable decentralized software or other unhackable technology, for such dangerous things.

I hear lots of conspiracy theories, and I don't know if they're true, but I expect some of them are true, and its important to look at things statistically and find which set of theories fits together consistently.

If this one is true, then the most important question we should ask is... Who benefits the most from funding both sides of a war? Maybe the banks, weapons businesses, or anyone who wants government to have an excuse to reduce freedom and increase government control.

myrkul, should anyone who wants to be allowed to build nuclear weapons and automated global deployment and targeting systems?

westkybitcoins, I don't like the idea of giving authorities any more power, but its a strategic move I'm proposing for the end goal of obsoleting all such authorities and central banks etc. I know its the "Mark of the Beast" evil painful type of thing to do, but Bitcoin (and variations of its open source code) needs to "get its foot in the door" of large scale business transactions, and I expect that will be a lot easier to do with the common identity system (which many open-source systems connect to) than with Bitcoin alone. I want Bitcoin as it is now to stay around and for people to keep using it, but I expect what I proposed to make Bitcoin more popular and less laws made against it in the future.

I am against "an RFID chip we can all have conveniently embedded into the skin of our right hands or foreheads". I am against the forced use of the identity system I proposed. Forcing people when you don't have to is bad.


The common identity system with many open-source economies using it? Or the idea you proposed about the forced (I assume you mean forced since that's how the chip implants idea is normally talked about) chip implants? For my idea, I want to stir up debates and people trying to change the world, which some may say is "trouble", but its a good thing.

Blackhawke, I found this on Wikipedia, which I consider to be more credible on average than most news sources, because it tends toward a median of peoples' ideas.


They couldn't shut down the war prison because theres not enough funds? It didn't say Congress wanted it to stay open. It said funds were in control, funds which were instead paid in interest on national debt loans to Federal Reserve, interest on money which cost the Federal Reserve approximately zero to create.

There are many times when banks control things indirectly that way, but I agree that governments do some evil things too.

Its a huge tangled system and most of them don't want to fix it. Almost everyone on Earth is looking to get ahead in the corrupt system with no expectation of the system ever improving. As I've started in this thread, I'm going to try something most people never consider as a way to solve the world's problems... I'm going to talk to people, on all sides of the issues, and figure out what is really going on. Nobody else appears to care, as long as they get paid. This strategy most people are using makes no sense to me, the one where they think fighting for small changes in the world makes any significant difference long-term. I don't even care about the Patriot Acts anymore. I want a complete redesign of the entire system, so I'm going to the Zeitgeist Movement's forum. I'm going to try to integrate their ideas for how to organize the world with technologies like Bitcoin and artificial intelligence etc. I don't have time to fight political battles. I only have time to deal with people who can agree on what they want without fighting about it. So far they appear to think Bitcoin is just another way for numbers to control us (like dollars), but Bitcoin could be modified as a voting system or for other secure distributed purposes.


Vaxum, yes please implement my common identity verifying system idea, for an open-source competition where the best economies win, and/or those Bitcoin technical modifications I described, and/or the idea of including text with the money and/or such equations between the texts, wherever you want. Please tell me about your progress on that, if it works out, and call me ( phone at http://HumanAI.net ) if I could help.

I'm not abandoning the plans I made in this thread, but I think I can work toward that more efficiently through the Zeitgeist Movement, and then let the effects of it spread to the world through that.

That's the first thing authorities (anyone who has extreme power and chooses to use it conflicting with what others want) would do, which leads to the wars I described, and they would be forced to change their minds by the many countries who have an interest in them not being dictator through the central bank system. This may not happen until more countries notice the change happening in the global economy, but they will eventually learn of it. Since authorities would change their mind after making it illegal, on average authorities don't really want it to be illegal. This is about slavery to money, so don't think it will be ignored when there is a way to end slavery. Its less about technology and more about many countries being the slaves of a few others, and about individual slaves and bank masters. Free the slaves or fight the biggest war in all of history.

Authorities will want to work with us on this because if they don't then anonymous Bitcoin will continue to expand until a global conflict starts based on it, then laws will constrict freedom, wars will start as a result of such legal action, the central banks will accelerate such conflicts, and World War 3 starts. Is that enough reason to avoid that possible future?

I'm still trying to figure out how to explain these global events based on the facts. It will take some time, but the summary is in the first post of this thread. People either don't understand it, don't believe it, or don't want to admit its true. Change the world or die. Its that simple.

Lets leave the levels of accountability to whichever organization would agree to do this and are trusted by many people. Once they accept the job, government will tell them what to do, and if not, government acknowledges that its legal. Leave the accountability stuff to the authorities/businesses/banks/etc. We handle the open-source.

Its more than a certificate authority if you need freezability of accounts, like banks did to Wikileaks. I disagree with them freezing Wikileaks account and most freezing in general, but governments will demand the ability, and we can offer that by having the certificate authority be the only holder for the identity private-key and they do all the digital-signing using it, then send the signature back to the modified Bitcoin.

If account freezability is not included, a simple certificate authority will work, and a person can hold their own identity private-key.

You think I'm trying to be a pussy? The long-term goal of my plan has always been complete decentralization of society, obsoleting governments, central banks, and ending of all centralization, all without any violence or crimes or deception. After that, as I've been planning for years in a process I named "artificial parapsychology" (search for it), all people using the system will strengthen the existing "global telepathy network" (which has existed for all of Human history), giving everyone the ability to read/write minds, telekinesis, and over time we learn more advanced mental abilities. If you read on the first page, I said in some ways we're all gods, and I meant that. But we have to do this in steps, and the next step is decentralize the economy, and possibly in parallel get the Zeitgeist people to try out a centralized prototype of the stock-market-like (a little like that) bitcoin-like program described in the first post of this thread. "Olive branch"? Yes, for the purpose of efficiency and to maximize the utility-function (maximum of people get what they want). Peace is extremely more efficient than war. Also, myself and many other metaphysical life forms (also known as spirits, but that incorrectly implies they're dead) have invested huge amounts of resources into helping the Human species, and we will protect our investment if necessary (on a large scale statistically, since we can't be everywhere at once), which means every person on this planet, so don't screw with the banks or anyone else, while we figure out how to do this global change in the most democratic way possible, keeping everyone in the loop. Things simply work differently in the metaphysical. We're not claiming to own anyone or that they owe us anything. This is independent of the common identity system I propose in this thread, something that would be built on top of it, and in other technology, so nobody is forced to use these metaphysical things. They could, for example, use only modified Bitcoin with identity system and a debit card.

Any person could use any Bitcoin-like address that they have the private-key for (which they have if their modified Bitcoin generated it). They can have as many Bitcoin-like addresses as they want, to organize their money into many accounts, but all would be used with 1 identity key pair.

Anything you add to the Bitcoin-like network (transactions, maybe timestamp merkle trees) would have a pair of public-keys: 1 for identity and 1 of the Bitcoin-like addresses you generate (1 of your many accounts). Everything you do would be publicly viewable to anyone who knows who owns your identity public-key (you do), but it could be set up so only a bank or government gets to know who owns which identity public-key so it would be anonymous to everyone except the authorities who watch transactions and identities, like banks work now except using our infrastructure and much simpler.

It sounds almost as bad as the central bank system, but the purpose is to get authorities to accept this system and for it to lead to more innovations in open-source economy design and to obsolete the central bank system. Work with them, then obsolete them, and we'll do it while publicly saying and saying to their face that's the plan.

You would sign up at an identity service provider (lets call it IdentSP, not ISP) with a name and password like any other website. They would keep a private-key that means your identity and tell others your name that you proved to them. They would give you the public-key matching that private-key which they keep secret. They would also give you the public-key of their certificate-authority and a digital-signature (signed by the private-key of the certificate-authority) of the identity public key. A certificate-authority is simply this system I'm describing, where keys are signed by other keys. Other than that, you would generate anonymous Bitcoin-like addresses the same way Bitcoin does today. Using a lot of bandwidth, it would have to send all new blocks (including transactions, anything that gets digitally-signed) to the identity service provider, they sign it with your identity private-key, then send it back to your Bitcoin which continues using it as normal Bitcoin does today.

That's the technical way to say it. In practice, you would sign up for an account with an identity service provider, prove your identity to them, and give Bitcoin a file they give you. Then it works the same as normal Bitcoin, while storing your identity public-key and related data in the network.

I have to take these things as unreliable indirect observations because I saw them on centrally controlled news, which has less credibility than my word. I wouldn't know where to look to determine if its true or not, since any internet news could be faked and they duplicate eachothers stories. Maybe you could help?

What I do know for sure is a conflict between decentralization and centralized banks is escalating, and Wikileaks and Anonymous as I described are probable results, while they could easily be on either side. Because my mind works partially as a bayesian statistics calculator, uncertainty does not interfere with my ability to figure things out on a global scale, and any statistical information at all helps some on average.


It would be done by putting in a second key pair parallel to the single key pair Bitcoin has now, and a third key pair to verify the origin of the second key pair, the second and third private keys held by the identity provider service, maybe a bank or government or OpenID or run your own grid of decentralized identity servers if you want. That way the open-source software can not be modified to use such a network anonymously, but it could start a new network anonymously. Businesses will accept it much faster if all money on such network can ONLY be used with identity proven. Details here: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=23054.0