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To destroy bitcoin is easy, to maintain it is hard. If bitcoin ever really steps on anyones toes in a big way, it will have a real hard time; the main power right now is its small-timeness.
I think you got it all backwards. Fighting with Bitcoin is like fighting an invisible enemy in the dark. It will always be around you laughing at your every move. Please understand that Bitcoin is much bigger than a single crypto-currency. It's an idea, ideas are bullet proof. |
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If the Foundation is seeking registration as some form of non-profit, then it's likely that voting procedures are outlined by law and that they can't just make them up themselves (here, votes by the membership of non-profits must be overseen by officers of the Electoral Commission who check that members were financial, that the required quorum was met, and that the required formal procedures such as notice, proposers and seconders etc were followed).
I understand, but hopefully law doesn't prevent the voting to be accomplished in a provably-fair way while still being overseen by authority. Again the old system didn't have all the tools to make it happen properly, so looking back into the past for a solution is not the right approach in this case. Any organization with registered members who pay a membership fee with Bitcoin is a perfect setup for emergence of a provably-fair voting. It can be done in addition to the already existing formal procedure required by the law. In short, members cast a vote by sending a message signed with the private key from a Bitcoin address used to pay their membership fee. Then the whole registry of these messages is made public for everyone to check and scrutinize. It's even possible to do this in the current BF setup without changing the procedure of collecting fees. They can assign a Bitcoin address (with private key) to each member internally (without giving out the private key), then transfer all the fees they collected first to these addresses and then back to one single public BF address. This will make it possible to verify via blockchain that votes are coming from the addresses which paid the fee. Then when member presses the vote button BF simply signs the message with corresponding private key on his/her behalf and publishes the registry. Each member then knowing his Bitcoin address can verify that his vote is correct and everybody can verify that votes are coming from addresses that paid the fee (making them de-facto members). |
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With technological advancements you can do the same with less or you can do better (higher quality) with the same. So it doesn't necessarily mean growth.
Growth was only needed to pay the interest on the money we borrowed. With Bitcoin the economy will start converging to balance instead of growth and that's exactly what we need in the current situation.
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Read David Chalmers.
Thanks for the info! So according to wikipedia article David Chalmers is best known for his formulation of the notion of a "hard problem of consciousness", which could be stated "why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?". Chalmers is also famous for his commitment to the logical (though, importantly, not natural) possibility of "philosophical zombies" (mentioned in the video in OP). All in all, knowing what the "actual problem" with consciousness is and asking the "right questions" is a good start. Still many people today mistakenly attribute their consciousness to the chemical/electrical processes in their brains failing to accept the undeniable existence of their own self. Who knows maybe those philosophical zombies aren't philosophical at all  |
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Most answers are correct, there is no inherent purpose of life in general. However according to the videos above, what we humans set out to do on Earth is to show the rest of Creation that while still being part of Creation it's possible to create an illusion of disconnection to a degree that we're experiencing right now and then still find our way to reconnect with it. Not remembering who you really are after being born is part of that process. In short we are not a low level kinder-garden compared to other civilizations as it may seem - we are earning our master's degree. We are the most brave and courageous souls in Creation that agreed to reach out to outermost regions of existence and participate in this journey. We are the Explorer Race. PS: Also please note that science nowadays seems to converge on the new paradigm that consciousness is primary to everything else. What we previously thought of the objective material reality is in fact a product of our collective subconscious that we all share: ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=119344.0) |
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In my view the voting procedure must allow members to verify two things:
a) check that your own vote is correct
b) check that other votes come from legit members
(then those members can verify that their vote is correct on their own)
So I thought that the following approach might solve the problem:
Each vote needs to include a signed message from the Bitcoin address used to pay the membership fee to a fixed known BF address. Then the whole registry of these messages with their respective addresses can be made public so that each member can (a) check that his vote is correct and (b) that other votes originate from the addresses that paid the membership fee. This will prevent BF from creating phony members just to rig the voting.
Before this is teared apart... this approach implies the changes to the procedure of paying membership fees. It needs to come from a single Bitcoin address preferably never used for anything else.
Member would need to register that address with his profile and BF would need to use a single public address for collecting fees, while identifying its members payments by the originating address they registered.
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RE: voting:
Great ideas! I think I'll be pushing to start with a good old-fashioned "send you a letter with a PIN number to your mailing address" as the first step to preventing voter fraud. We'll have to have a much more extensive discussion of voting procedures before it is time to vote. I'll probably push to follow the lead of other successful organizations, and to do the Simplest Possible Thing That Will Work-- which might be hiring a disinterested high-reputation company who specializes in running elections for organizations.
Thanks for looking into this! I don't see how "sending a letter with a PIN" would help address point (b) in my quote above. Also it might not be the best way to look into the past or at other "successful" organizations or hiring a "trusted" third party (please please don't hire Diebold) for handling voting as the best solution might not have existed before advent of Bitcoin. As an example the online gambling industry is now moving for the first time towards 'provably-fair' gambling: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/08/31/bitzino-and-the-dawn-of-provably-fair-casino-gaming/I believe there is a great opportunity here for Bitcoin Foundation to become a first successful organization in setting a precedent for 'provably-fair' voting and showing the rest of the world how voting should have been done in the first place. Please don't underestimate the importance of it. I'm certain that Bitcoin won't only prove to be a base for future monetary systems but will become a potent tool for direct democracy where people vote for underlying principles of their society with their hash power and/or cryptographically signed messages. Thus 'provably-fair' voting is going to be a crucial part of that future. |
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Already in the beginning it asks the right questions making it worth sharing with everyone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d4ugppcRUEEnjoy! PS: I can recommend this video to anyone with scientific background especially in physics. Peter Russell is a physicist and his approach is to have a scientific argument when talking about consciousness rather than rely on stuff like perception and intuition to describe it. The breakthrough comes from understanding the nature of light. Also nice quote from the comments section of the video: "The I that is trying to find who you are is who you are. You are that Beingness. As you say, the eye (or I) cannot see itself. And that beingness does have an inherent existence. It depends upon nothing else. And is always present (even if you don't notice it most the time)" Peter Russell. |
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... I gave FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) a call....
<sarcasm> Is it just me or the name suggests that the Network's purpose is to Enforce Financial Crimes? Well considering that their paper dollar pyramid is the biggest financial crime ever attempted in the history of humanity it all adds up now in my head. </sarcasm> |
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I believe in the future no Land Tax will be necessary. It's funny but the solution might come from how Bitcoin ownership is protected. Do you pay taxes to a central authority to protect your claim on bitcoins? No! What you do is keep the secret key from a record in the distributed database protected by all the participants' computing power. I'm not trying to pretend that it solves the initial distribution problem for the entirety of land, but once the initial distribution is settled (it can even be derived from the current setup) maintaining the ownership to a piece of land shouldn't incur any costs. So in brief the solution is to create an open distributed database with pieces of land represented by coordinates of their boundaries (pieces mustn't overlap) and have unique addresses attached to them with private keys kept by the their respective land owners. The transfer of ownership would be as easy as signing and broadcasting the transaction [1]. LandCoin anyone? If there isn't any reasonable concept behind LandCoin mining then the land database in question should be protected by merge-mining it with monetary blockchain (whatever that ends up being). Now if your land is under attack, then you can hire a defense agency to which you can easily prove to be a land owner and everybody can easily verify that. So you only pay when you're under attack and unable to defend yourself by your own means. It's much different from just paying for the ability to be defended even if you don't need it. [1]: It would be even possible to sell part of the land in that way. For example if Alice has a private key from the address A which has piece of land defined by boundary L attached to it, then she can form a transaction which says that subset of L defined by L1 now belongs to address B (owned by Bob) while subset L2 (normally the remainder of L after subtracting L1) now belongs to address A1 owned by Alice. The network only needs to validate that pieces of land in transaction don't violate a simple rules for transaction to be accepted. |
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While I don't oppose Bitcoin Foundatoin in general, I think the crucial part of its survival will be the transparency of its voting procedure. Is it going to be a black box voting and no easy way for members to verify its integrity?
Although I trust current board and its secretary Jon Matonis with handling the voting (if he is the one handling that) we should always strive towards systems where no human needs to be trusted.
In my view the voting procedure must allow members to verify two things:
a) check that your own vote is correct
b) check that other votes come from legit members
(then those members can verify that their vote is correct on their own)
So I thought that the following approach might solve the problem:
Each vote needs to include a signed message from the Bitcoin address used to pay the membership fee to a fixed known BF address. Then the whole registry of these messages with their respective addresses can be made public so that each member can (a) check that his vote is correct and (b) that other votes originate from the addresses that paid the membership fee. This will prevent BF from creating phony members just to rig the voting.
PS: I haven't been following this thread closely, sorry if this was brought up earlier...
EDIT: Before this is teared apart... this approach implies the changes to the procedure of paying membership fees. It needs to come from a single Bitcoin address preferably never used for anything else.
Member would need to register that address with his profile and BF would need to use a single public address for collecting fees, while identifying its members payments by the originating address they registered.
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It all started here in this thread 1 year ago! Happy birthday Litecoin! |
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We are "paper-people" trading with "paper-money" governed by "paper-laws" in a "paper-world".
Bitcoin comes and lights the match!
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What is illegal? As people start distrusting govt-backed "money" they will figure out that govt-backed "laws" are no different. They are just arbitrary abstractions imposed on them against their will. Or do you suggest that governments these days have highest approval ratings in history? No, they don't.
The future of Bitcoin is that govt in its current form will be dimmed illegal!
You're dealing with Super Nova explosion here in slow-mo, there is nothing you can do about it other than observe its magnificence, and don't get too close or you'll get burned.
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acoindr is spot on.
His mission is not to convince anybody to follow his way, but simply to show people the way things will play out.
Bitcoin is much bigger than a single crypto-currency. It is a hyper-dimensional concept which intersects with our 3D reality in a variety of ways. Intersections may appear as separate objects in space and time, but they really are just parts of a bigger more complex idea.
Imagine how fingers on your 3D hand would intersect with 2D plane - a bunch of independent circles here and there.
Similar thing happens when our plane of existence gets Bitcoin treatment. Instead of arguing about which finger is "the finger" I would say that we would need all those fingers when doing such a delicate and complex job as liberating humanity from oppressive grip of fiat.
Now from the market dynamics point of view the timing of events is so interesting that it hints at an intelligent design rather than being a mere coincidence. While Bitcoin Foundation is filling the vacuum in its own niche, a new vacuum forms in the mining business. As Bitcoin shifts to a specialized ASIC hardware, the general purpose hardware (CPUs and GPUs) become available for the next contender. This vacuum will be filled with a second most valued crypto-currency with independent hash algo, which is Litecoin.
This cycle would likely to continue as Litecoin shifts to ASIC mining at some point in the future until the market somewhat saturates with different coins filling all the necessary vacuums. The point of this thread is not to influence this process, but to point out the direction where to watch to see it unfold.
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What I was getting at in my previous posts is that the real "you" exists outside of physical reality. It is very incoherent to assume that very uniform process of biological development would produce this singularity.
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Let me ask you the exact same question, but with a slight difference. You have a computer. It has a bunch of programs you installed, a bunch of files you created or downloaded, and all the settings are set up to be the way you want them to be. That is *your* computer, among the entire universe of *not your* computers. Let's look at the moment in time 2 hours before you booted your computer for the very first time. At this point the Universe has only been producing *not-your* computers and the Earth is populated completely by *not-your* computers. Now what is it in the physical/biological process that warrants that in 2 hours *your* computer will be booted and running for the first time? Why doesn't the Universe just continue producing *not-your* computers as it always has done. Can you imagine the computer you call yours will be born in 2 hours and it will be just another *not-your* computer with its own software and personalized settings? ^^^ That is how I read your question. And the answer is, it actually is the body, and my experiences through, it that make me *me*. Nothing more. Moreover, the *you* and *not you* property isn't all that drastic or binary. My arm is me. If it gets severed, it is no longer me. For disabled people, their wheelchairs and prosthetics are very much a part of *them*. If I have a cancerous growth, it's *me* but not really, because I don't want it to be me, and it's genetic code isn't exactly me. The only *you* that matters is the physical brain, just as the only *your computer* that matters is the physical location of 0s and 1s that store your files and settings and make your computer yours. The stuff you're talking about is secondary. You can only call something *yours* (your computer, your arm, your body, your brain) when you have *you* in the first place. You argue that a particular experience is what makes you *you*, but the truth is *you* is the one who receives the experience, who lives through it. The real *you* is a thing in itself, all the stuff that you are trying to attach to it is just that - an attachment. This includes your body, your memory, your experience, even your complete personality. Just sit quietly and try to imagine a different past for yourself, imagine you made some important decision in the past in a different way. Your experience of life and your memory of it to this point would be different, but you would still be *you* and you know that. It's empiric, it's part of observable Universe and any theory, simple or otherwise, would need to cope with that at some point. I've given away all the keys now, it's up to a curious and persisting mind to play with them and see which one opens the door. |
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What I was getting at in my previous posts is that the real "you" exists outside of physical reality. It is very incoherent to assume that very uniform process of biological development would produce this singularity.
I'll take one more shot at it from a bit different angle:
Let's look at the moment in time 2 hours before your birth.
At this point the Universe has only been producing *not-yous* and the Earth is populated completely by *not-yous*. Now what is it in the physical/biological process that warrants that in 2 hours *you* will be produced for the first time? Why doesn't the Universe just continue producing *not-yous* as it always has done. Can you imagine the body you call yours will be born in 2 hours and it will be just another *not-you* with its own consciousness and life path.
So it's not the body that makes you *you*, it's something completely different and it doesn't need to survive the death because it existed before you were born. Does this makes sense?
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Um, wtf???
I prefer the much simpler explanation of our brains being a network of electrical impulses, designed to help us survive and reproduce, but having more information stored than we can possibly process and make sense of, rather than this extra-body existence and reincarnation.
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Haha, in your simple explanation, if consciousness is just a product of electrical impulses in your brain, then answer me this simple question - what makes a particular consciousness *your* consciousness? ... There was no "appearance." It was a very slow development from nothing, through a very mentally undeveloped state as a toddler, to more and more developed state through childhood and adulthood, as my brain recorded various experiences and formed neural pathways that help me relate new information to my present day experiences. My particular life experiences, which were a direct PHYSICAL influences on the network structure of my brain's neural network, is what make my particular consciousness *my* particular consciousness. And "we" as in human species. We are no different from very complex network-based computers. And once our technology allows computers to think the way we do, and store our consciousness on machines, you guys will be going around causing all sorts of violence against intelligent machines and people who upload themselves to such machines, because you will think they don't have "souls" or "consciousness" any more, and thus won't consider destroying them as murder. No, I'm not talking about the experience that you go through in your life as you develop. I'm talking about binary singularity, that is real *you*. I'll explain... All the biological forms on this planet have this binary property - it's either *you* or *not-you*. Do you agree? Among all the life forms you call only one particular body *you* and all other bodies are *not-you*. Now, that's a drastic difference! It would be very illogical to suggest that this drastic difference, this binary singularity, comes from seemingly uniform and slow biological development process, which allows bodies to develop from the same chemical elements with some minor differences here and there. See where I'm going...? EDIT: So, in other words, what is it in the chemical makeup that makes only one body (out of the billions similar ones) your body? |
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