Nice little story

Well, I guess you're right.  Thanks for reminding me why I dislike Androïd.

I whish I knew more GUI programming, because to me everything could be easily done with a bit of shell scripting.   openssl would do all encryption/digest/signing you might need, just as in my bitcoin-bash-tools.  There is also a qrencode program for encoding a QR code, and zbar-tools for scanning.  Obexftp would handle bluetooth communications.  Everything else could be done withh the bitcoind command line client itself.  So all we need is a GUI scripting language that could organize all this.  So : is there a port of zenity on Androïd ??

lol

Funny thing is :  Isn't that possible, with modern technology, to give a proof of the presence of some asset in real time ?

I mean for instance with the storage of gold, isn't it possible to have some kind of a web cam, continuously filming the gold stock?  I know there should be a way to prove that the shooting is real (not recorded or something), but come on, there is certainly some technical way to prove that the shooting is actually the real stuff.

I'm pretty sure that, with a little bit of ingenuosity, one can find something similar for other kinds of assets, even non material ones.

I seriously doubt that.  Being homeless is certainly not fun.


PS:  Also, anyone who uses bitcoin owns *a lot* of keys in his wallet.

See what they do with gold.  An ETF manager receives a phone call from an auditor :

"
- Hi, I want to make an appointement for an audit.  I will come with my team tomorow morning.
- Ok, no problem.
"

Then the ETF manager calls his buddy and says that he ugently need to borrow one ton of gold for one day.  If it's too soon, the guy calls the auditor and says :

"
- Oh I'm sorry, we actually have some difficulties right now, can we schedule this for next week instead ?
- Well, yes I guess we can.  But that's the last time you delay this, ok ?
- sure.  I promess.
"

As long as an auditor doesn't have the keys of the companies he's supposed to audit, I'll consider he's useless.

You're kidding, right ?

A third party just moves the trust from one place to an other.  It doesn't solve anything.

PS.  I'm wrong.  It actually improves the situation a bit.  But it's far from perfect.  And it adds costs : you have to pay the auditor.  I'm not sure it always worth it.

Non Gimp n'est vraiment pas fait pour le vectoriel.  C'est plutôt Inkscape qu'il faut utiliser.

I like this one

I'm not sure you meant exactly that, though.

It's been edited on the first post of this thread, FreeMoney.

I've sucessfully downloaded the second chapter.

Well, maybe biddingpond will be to bitcoin what eBay was to PayPal.

I liked the first chapter and I want to buy the second.  But you should give each buyer a different bitcoin address, otherwise you can"t know for sure who actually paid.

Also, have you read my thread about selling information ?  You could set up a price for the whole book (say 100BTC for instance), and publish it to everyone once the amount has been raised.

Lol.  Mrs Ben Ali doesn't buy gold.  She just goes to the central bank of her country, and she demands immediate delivery of gold bullions.

Have you tried to installed the previous version ?  Have you tried to launch bitcoin with a brand new .bitcoin directory ?

I use debian GNU/linux.

I should indeed look into i2p, but somehow I can't find any clear straitforward howto for installation on debian.

Indeed, the decree doesn't have to come from a government.  It can come from people.

Few days ago I was talking with some left-anarchists on IRC (#ranarchism on freenode).

We were having the same old debate between right and left anarchists about capitalism and money.  Somehow, this debate wasn't as sterile as I thought, for it allowed me to clarify my mind about what money is.

Bitcoins are truly worthless, apart from their properties which makes it useful as a money.  I've always suspected the same about gold, but with gold it's not that clear, for gold does have some use in jewelry and industry.  So, I was a bit uncomfortable with the absolute "fiat" aspect of bitcoins.

Anyway, the interesting part began when one of the guys asked me the following question :

- Name one thing that you feel passionnate about, and that you couldn't do in a left-anarchist society.

I thought it was quite an interesting way to ask things, but after a few seconds, I just answered :

- Eating, for one.  I just don't see how I could earn my life in a communist world.

Then the guy described me his kind of ideal society,  how I would have to farm 30 minutes a day to get some food for instance.  Now, I don't know exactly what I feel passionnate about (or more precisely, this is my business), but I know I don't feel passionate about farming.  I also don't have any skills for that.  Workers have to be specialised in what they are doing.  I think specialisation has been a characteristic of human economics activities since neolithics, right ?

Anyway, at this point this was not the anwser I had in mind.  I felt it more in the lazy approach.  So I asked :

- What if, for some reason, I don't feel like farming and I'm willing to pay someone to do the job for me ?

Then the guy denied the very existence of money so I had to imagine I pay the guy with gold.  At least the guy can not deny the existence of this metal.  However, he couldn't imagine I could find someone who would accept some gold.  "Gold is worthless", he said.  And other sentences of the same kind.  I had to say : "maybe gold is worthless, but maybe my worker just doesn't hate farming as I do.  Maybe he's just bored, or maybe he even enjoy farming.  Also, perhaps he wants to offer his women a gold ring."

I think I was going on the wrong path here.  Now, here is my idea of how money arise from an anarchist society.


In order to have some food, you have to work.  If you don't, you don't get any food and the communauty rejects you.   Therefore, the communauty has to remember, somehow, who worked and who didn't work.  They could, for instance, write this in a book.   In front of each name, they write a boolean saying "did work for his food", "did not work for his food".  Even if this book exists only in people's head, it still exists.  But it's obviously more efficient if it's written down on paper.  This is the beginning of money :  a symbolic proof of work.

Now, a boolean data is not very good either.  One could expect people to eat more if they worked more.  So, it's more efficient to write a number in front of each name, instead of a boolean.  That's already something which is very difficult to do if people just have to use a "mental book".  Numeric data is tricky to memorize, not even mentionning that we're talking about a large number of numbers (for a large communauty of workers).  Denying the usefullness of a real physical book, is just as silly as denying the usefullness of writing against just speech.

If you have a book with quantified values representing amounts of work, or value, you just have everything that makes money what money is.  You can transfer value by exchanging values, providing the two people concerned agree to it.  You can do pretty much any thing you can do with money, but there is a drawback :  it's centralised.  Only one person can modify it at a time.  Usually it's the job (a specialised job) of a specific person called the book keeper.  The communauty has to trust him not to write down phony numbers, nor attribute himself some work he hasn't done.

So the next idea is decentralisation.  Every unit in the book could be represented by some token.  Whether it is a piece of paper, a precious stone, whatever.  It just have not to be faked easily.  It is just a way to decentralise and distribute the book's units.  It's nothing but an accounting tool.

That's it.  That's how I see money now.  A pure conventional decentralized accounting tool.

And as such, it doesn't have to have any value per se.  It just has to permit to represent a limited amount correctly.  It has to be divisible (as numbers are), limited in quantity (each number is supposed to represent a fraction of the wealth produced by the community, therefore the total amount has to be limited), and it should not be easily faked (otherwise anyone could claim any amount).

Your stuff seems too complicated for me.   Apart from a ssh access to a standard unix-like environnement, I'd be lost.