IANAL, but...


I think it would be amusing if the Bitcoin Foundation sent back a reply, stating simply

Done!

and just continued to do what it's doing. If that's the end of this amusement, some California bureaucrat will smile smugly, feeling a job has been well done. If we are lucky enough for this amusement to continue, then they will (I hope I hope I hope) keep sending more C&D letters, to which TBF can just keep replying, "Done!" until those bureaucrats actually spend some time to try to prove that TBF is actually doing any money transmitting. And fail.

Downside, though, is that they would be too embarrassed about wasting a few hundred thousand tax payer dollars, and will probably try to pin some BS on TBF, just so none of them get in trouble for wasting everyone's time.

I have found the opposite, that faith in god limits one to what they are willing to believe, think, and thus experience. I guess it all ready depends on the type of faith. I mean, being a fundamentalist muslim I'm sure severely limits your life, while being generally open about everything AND sharing it with an imaginary friend can feel really nice, I'm sure.

Regarding protein, why not just get it directly from roving mobs and bandits?

These are cultural issues, not political or economic ones. So there is no answer to the question of whether these crimes would be more or less prevalent in anarchy society v.s. statist society, dictatorship society v.s. democratic society, communist society v.s. capitalist society, etc.

Ok, I may have misunderstood, but then, could you please explain what the hell "determining decent through the female line" has to do with absolutely anything at all here?

I think you missed my point. Unless I misunderstood "matrilineal community" as still having specifically defined gender roles with the female being the dominant one as opposed to the male one we have now. I'm against the idea of gender roles.

Do you believe that time dialation when approaching the speed of light or a black hole, or that stars in other solar systems being made of gas, or even that Neptune is made of gas, is accepted on faith, because we have never had proof of these claims?

Circulating, without movement? I can imagine everything up to that point. I'm sell aware of the concept of the 4th dimension and beyond. But just as a 1st dimension line has to expand from a single point, and the 2nd dimension, and the third, the 4th expanded from a single point as well. And what does this vast interconnected chain, existing in the 4th dimension, have to do with pre-time?


As we know it, time is a function of matter/energy and velocity. The faster you go, or the more matter you condense into a spot, the slower the time moves. At a certain point, be it speed of light or extreme gravitational cingularity, time just stops moving completely, so nothing happens, at all. We use this understanding of relationship between time, matter, and velocity in our daily lives now.
We believe the same rules applied during the birth of our universe. Everything in our universe is expanding in a way that suggests that it all came from a single point. With the amount of gravity that would have existed when so much of the universe was together, time would have moved very slow. If you had a time machine, and tried to travel into the past to the beginning of the universe, you would never get there, because the farther back you go, the slower the time moves. It's like trying to travel down the line of a graph that approaches zero but never touches it, in a futile attempt to get to zero. At  a certain point, which was the very beginning of our universe, the time was almost stopped. At the point just before the creation of our universe, there was no such thing as "before." There was no time to measure before, during, and after, because nothing moved. There was no matter and velocity for time to exist in. So the idea that someone could "exist" in the "before," make decisions, and carry out actions, is a bit absurd, as all those things require a "before," a "during," and an "after." The most god could do is create the universe in the same infinitesimal fraction of a second as when the universe itself was created.


Imagine you have a six-sided dice. No, rather, imagine you have a 1 trillion sided dice. And you need to roll exactly 5 for Earth to have the precise rotation and distance. What are the chances you will get that on a first roll? Now imagine you had hundreds of trillions of rolls, as there are hundreds of trillions of stars and planets in the universe. What are your chances of hitting a 5 at least once, now? What was god doing, creating hundreds of trillions of stars and planets in our universe, most of which don't come close to being like our Earth? (Though some apparently are similar)

It's easier to claim that "it's not possible for humans to understand, period, so don't even try or question." I mean, if you wave your hand, you are moving matter, from one location, to another, over a period of time. Take time out of the equation, and there is no motion, no action, no nothing. For someone to do anything, the doing suggests that something is being done over a period of time. Maybe you can explain how something can be done without time? Even if it's not a logical explanation?

Crumbs, I don't see anywhere in that post of yours where Lex Mercatoria was suggested for anything other than "To protect your property." Did you forget to quote something?

Thankfully, I don't have a toddler, but I'm not surprised. When babies are babies, be they human, or wolf pups, or kittens, or bird chicks, they compete pretty hard for the limited resources of the food and stuffs provided by mama. Often the weaker babies don't survive due to bullying by stronger ones. Sad as that is, it does keep those who may have physical or psychological birth defects from propagating the species in the animal kingdom. Once they grow up, those babies start to recognize the value of individual members of their pack, and learn some of it's customs. In the same way that human babies go from "Mine!" to understanding that we have to work together to survive, whether that baby grows up in downtown London, a small village in Africa, or a native tribe in Australia. We are not social because it was something taught to us by our society or religious texts. There's a good reason social acceptance is one of the items on Maslow's list of fundamental needs.



As mentioned, physics sort of broke that idea when it showed that time needs matter, aka universe, to exist. How can a god be "before" there was a thing like time?

Why can't the universe be the eternal self-existing one, with there never being a time when the universe didn't exist? More importantly, since time is a function of matter, velocity, and space, time could not have existed without the universe. In other words, the father you go back to the point of the Big Bang, the slower the time moves, until it reaches zero, I.e. time did not exist. So, how could god exist before time? Any sort of action of his part would require change over a period of time, but if there was no time...?


Just biology and sociology. There are many examples of species that are social and tribal in nature, just like us, who take care of others within their pack who might have fallen on hard times. Wolf packs are very well known for this, bringing food and caring for expectant and new mothers, and even those of their pack who get injured. Darwinism isn't survival of the fittest, it's survival of whoever can propagate their species the best, whether that be as individuals (hawks, turtles), or as social packs (ants, bees, wolves, dolphins). Charity, or specifically caring for vulnerable members, provides greater safety and security of a pack, and it's easier to help the injured recover and come help you hunt and defend your territory than to breed a new replacement. Especially since you'll be preserving already established wisdom and knowledge.



Could it be that feely-cary types are simply more attracted to a philosophy that already fits their feely-cary nature? The question is, does Christianity make someone go from an uncaring a-hole to a caring person, or does it selectively attract caring people and rejects uncaring a-holes? If it's the latter, then those who are caring and charitable, but who couldn't be gullible enough to be convinced by Christianity's claims, will still be the same caring and charitable people. They just wouldn't be associated with Christianity. The other issue is that Christianity and other religions demand one to be charitable, so it's much more likely for Christians to constantly loudly proclaim about how charitable they are, to prove that they are good Christians and are following the rules. Secular charities don't have anything to prove to anyone, so they wouldn't be advertising about how charitable they are because of their atheism on city billboards.


Yeah, I disagree with that. Humans generally help each other out. You see that most prominently on smaller scale, around neighborhoods, especially after a severe snowstorm or flood. People come out to help out neighbors dig themselves out our clean up the mess, regardless of what their religion is. Besides, one of the biggest philanthropists in the world, who has given more to charity than anyone else, is an atheist, while one of the richest Christians in the world outside of the Vatican, has given practically nothing to charity. I'm peaking of Bill Gates and Pat Robertson.

Does Bitcoin have a system wherein the clients will simply reject to accept and retransmit a transaction if they have said transaction in their memory pool, even if that transaction hasn't been included in a blockchain yet?

So, are you saying that you're hoping that in the future, one type of sexism will be replaced by another, while the rest of us are working on making gender irrelevant in regards to pretty much everything?

I'm curious too.

Yes. But only if the centrally controlling computer is able to know what everyone thinks and wants, know all the resources that exist, can track every single resource through its entire production method, is able to motivate inventors and doers with more stuff, if that's what they want, without upsetting the neighbors who are getting less stuff, and is able to make everyone happy and like itself.

Personally, I can't make everyone like me. Maybe it's possible if I abduct people and drug them, and then make sure they all take drugs from then on to stay complacent and ignorant? Have you seen Equilibrium before?

Lex Mercatoria, or non-governmental trade law, did receede a bit this past one or two centuries, primarily because countries were very isolationist, with lots of conflict. Instead we had war, tariffs, trade restrictions, currency manipulation, etc. But it is very much alive still, and has been exploding in use this past decade. According to Wikipedia, there are entire organizations that are focusing on developing a body of international trade law, specifically for globalized trade and transnational companies that aren't based in any single country. A lot of it is based on arbitration, and is just a more nuanced version of the old Lex Mercatoria. Because of this, and Bitcoin, and other tech that is making trade easier and regulation harder, whenever someone says something like, "We are getting more socialist," or "You need government for trade/capitalism," I go all

People are naturally charitable. It's in our DNA, since we are a social species that tends to live in packs. Wolves are charitable to members of their pack as well. So, with non-profits, some people start them because they are charitable, and some people start them because they are charitable, and use Christianity as an excuse for why they feel that way.

Theism:
The belief that the universe was empty, then it wasn't, then splat you have a god who then goes on to create the entire Universe.