Bankers know how to create wealth. If they take over the country and change it to make it create wealth, that would be a good thing for everyone living there (except for those living off of other's work and wealth).
Yes. Bankers know how to create wealth. They take away money from hard working people and give it to the politicians. No, taxes take away money from hard working people. Bankers just take money from inefficient and wasteful parts of the market, and invest it where it can do some good. By the way, are you on this forum mainly for things like Freicoin instead of Bitcoin? Or for the Resource Based Economy / Venus Project stuff? Or are you just getting paid to continue the Russian propaganda? You seem to be rather socialist and anti capitalist in the things you espouse, and now even more so with your rather extreme support of Russia and their policies. I've ignored your crazy historical views on Ukraine and everything that flows out of those views for a while now He's the only talking sense. The rest of you guys are just reposting Russian propaganda. Even the links with Western-sounding names have Russian authors. , but I cannot ignore this one:
Bankers = good?
And here I thought that banks are private organizations which lobby the hell out of every politician in every country to reduce regulation and thereby take money from inefficient and wasteful parts of the market and put it into their own pockets...
Everyone lobbies everyone else. That's the nature of the game. I cannot ignore this one: Bankers = inherently bad? Therefore people managing and dealing with money are bad? And money itself is evil? You're welcome to share your Venus Project views with us, but please explain how the "moneyless world" alternative will actually work. Step by step, so that the instructions could be programmed into a giant computer like the one that will be running their world-saving crypto-communist paradise. Surely, you are against slavery? You want initiatives like the Venus Project to succeed, right. So tell us how it works. |
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What percentage of global GDP does this Eurasian Economic Union have? What percentage of global GDP does the European Union have? Perhaps that's why Moscow is "desperately clawing at the elusive Ukraine"? Please join Russia! Our leader is really nice and extremely popular, and we need some real countries to join us so that our union doesn't look too pathetic. By the way, we're sorry about all those comments we made earlier about you not being a real country. Please join us!   Oh look! I just did a little "union" with myself! |
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At the same time, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk cautioned President Yanukovich against «disproportionate use of force» against the Maidan. Today Donald Tusk, whose grandfather, Josef Tusk, served in Hitler’s Wehrmacht, demands that the Kiev junta deal with the «eastern rebels» harshly, «as with terrorists».
I would rather say : "Tusk was born in Gdańsk. Tusk's father, also named Donald Tusk (1930–1972), was a carpenter. Donald Tusk's mother, Ewa Tusk (1934–2009),[2] was a nurse. His uncle, Bronisław Tusk (1935–2000), was a sculptor from Gdańsk. His grandfather Józef Tusk (1907–1987) was a railway official who was imprisoned at the Neuengamme concentration camp; later, as a former citizen of the Free City of Danzig, he was compulsorily drafted by German Nazi authorities into the Wehrmacht[3] on 2 August 1944." Regardless, it's a low tactic to make insinuations about a prime minister having "Nazi genes", or even commenting at all about family history unless it's somehow relevant. Such bad journalism betrays the reader's trust. Also I would love to see the opinion of another polish official , like Jarosław Kaczyński who lost his brother in a mysterious accident a few years ago Smolensk , which was "obviously" not the fault of... anybody.
You mean the plane that got shot down, exploded, and hit a tree, while attempting to land in an artificial fog because the other Kaczyński ordered the pilot to hurry up so he wouldn't be late for the ceremony? Don't you see? It was at least 5 different special forces -- possibly including aliens! -- all acting independently to get rid of those xenophobic PiS-heads. |
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What I don't understand is, why are you morons so up in arms over a "democratically elected" president being deposed for trying to become a dictator
I'm sorry but the only "moron" is in your mirror, because only a moron would believe in something like that. Which facts do you disagree with? That Yanukovych was democratically elected? That he tried to gain dictatorial powers by illegally changing the constitution? 87 pages... hundreds of posts from you and just a couple of other people. Surely you have enough "free time" on your hands (which you're not being paid for  ) to answer the original question? Who told you this nonsense, CNN or FoxNews? I'm afraid that I haven't seen anything more stupid during the last two months.  Don't be naive, do you really believe that police is unable to disperse such demonstration? If he wanted to become a dictator, he would have got it. If you believe that special forces were unable to resolve this type of problem, then you have never seen this guys in action. Less than 15 minutes would be required to resolve these "protests" by force. He even wouldn't need to use an armed forces for that, just give the "Berkut" an order to use batons, and it's done... But unfortunately, Yanukovych has no balls to do what is needed to be done right from beginning, and he ordered them to do nothing. Any primitive caveman society can use a police force to brutally disperse crowds. As bad as Yanukovych might have been, your own comment shows that even under his leadership the Ukrainians had a more "advanced" attitude than your "just beat the nationalists with batons" Stalinism. I have a question for you: when your computer breaks, do you smash it with a hammer? Who knows, if you hit the right part at just the right angle, you could repair it in under 5 seconds! |
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2. You are turning it upside down. The whole thing started when it became clear that Ukraine would not be joining EU. Russia offered EU and Ukraine a three-way agreement that EU refused, after which Ukraine had to decide, whether to ditch its own economy, as most of Ukraine's export went to Russia and become a dumping ground for EU, or whether to keep the status quo. The latter option was taken, which didn't suite the West.
No, you've got it upside down and what you're saying doesn't make economic sense. Firstly, the Ukraine is far too poor to be a dumping ground for EU products. They can't afford to buy anything, except for maybe a few agricultural products like pork after Russia imposed sanctions on Poland. The Ukraine is not a gateway to Russia either, they would never make much money by selling EU products to Russia. Businesses are always trying to pressure their governments to impose tariffs or somehow reduce the amount of competition from neighbouring countries. That's normal. The difference with Russia is that Putin seems more interested in being popular rather than economically sensible, so he keeps Russia insulated from unwanted competition. "Ditch its own economy" -- that's a ridiculous claim, completely twisting around Russia's threats to punish the Ukraine with sanctions if they didn't make the right "choice". And I suppose women ask to be raped if they don't want sex? Apart from that, the smart thing for any economy is to go where there is the most potential. Slightly better integration with Russia would just be a minor optimisation, compared to the potential of completely new industries from the west. If you look at examples of other, former USSR puppet states such as Poland and East Germany, what would actually happen is that the west would 'dump' new jobs and infrastructure into the Ukraine. In return, the richer western countries would get cheap labour for a few years until it got too expensive. |
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I understand that you guys are trying to provide balance to a mostly 'Western' corner of the Internet, but -- just like many conspiracy theories -- your one doesn't make sense. Please explain why a newly elected president would want to destabilise his own country? Creating friction between nationalist groups, as has been occurring in the Ukraine, does not seem like a tactic that any government would want to use on itself, unless it's suicidal. It makes far more sense that some kind of organised opposition has been giving the orders. But who? And when did it all start? Rather than blaming the Americans for some elaborate scheme (yes, I know it's satisfying), we should use Occam's Razor and cut away the crap to find the simplest answer. When it became clear that Ukraine would not be joining the Eurasian Economic Union, it was an embarrassing and costly defeat for Putin. So when you mix emotional pride and financial pressure, you find that Moscow is behind the unrest. |
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It's so strange.... when people have to show their Ukrainian passport/ID/whatever in order to vote, for some strange reason the most passionate nationalists fail to show up. |
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Doesn't matter that half the people didn't voted at all.
What happened to all those Banderos and other Nazi/nationalist extremists that the Russians were so deeply concerned about? Willy Wonka intimidated them into staying at home? I have a better theory that makes more sense: a small minority of Russian nationalists and Russian football hooligans were making most of the trouble, putting on a nice show for the Russian media about "those crazy Ukrainians". |
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Censored thread. An on-line army of Putin's brown nosers filling up all the Ukraine threads so fast, they're probably paid to do it. I'm not even going to bother.
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Believe me,same situation happened 2000 here in Serbia and from that day we live worse then we lived before 2000. Well I was I kid then but that's what everyone here in Serbia talking about. All politicians in Serbia are paid from America and EU to destroy Serbia, they've given our part of territory Kosovo,they sold everything they can and also wages are much worse than 14 years ago. Believe me, this is all manipulation by America and EU they've paid 90% there to shoot on police and destroy the whole country, and believe me that you will regret if your opposition win "the battle". Orthodox brothers, you have our support, kill all that terrorists and turn to Russia. Without European union!!
I bet you guys don't even know that Putin was a KGB murderer. |
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Come to Kiev and see what people are fighting! In another you do not understand.
i understand that you are fighting against repressive sociopath assholes. my argument was not that you aren't. my argument was that there is no point in seeking to replace them with new rulers. power corrupts and so what ever new person you give power to will also become corrupted. if you want freedom than replacing existing rulers with new rulers will never have that effect. if you want freedom than you have to reject rulership in general, not rulership from one particular group of rulers. The system in Ukraine is basically Feudalism. Have you wondered how they survive on those extremely low wages that wouldn't even pay for food? The free market! Or, a giant cash economy where everyone avoids paying tax so that their oppressors don't get too much. Everyone pays everyone else with bribes. Since the Ukrainian government appears to have a military aiming guns at its own people, that means 2 things: 1) it's extremely undemocratic. 2) their government is acting like a private corporation with a private army. Libertarian paradise! libertarians propose a system of competing firms providing these services. as near as i can tell the citizens of Ukraine are not free to opt out of paying for the "protection" services provided by their government in favor of purchasing the services of a competing protection agency instead. So tax-avoidance and arming the opposition doesn't count as competition against "Janukovich Enterprises"? |
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blahblahblah wrote:
Mining is a (maybe) necessary evil so that trust can be built on immature networks where no naturally trustworthy leaders have emerged yet. Bitcoin allows proof-of-stake to be added. Whereas perpetual POW crappyness is implausible. I strongly disagree. Mining is not a necessary evil, because it helps process the transactions, which costs energy, which in turn provides energy. Bitcoin miners are simply fish in a pond. I'll throw some numbers out to illustrate what I mean. As a rule of thumb, mining cost tends to asymptotically "catch up" with price, kinda. So let's say 1 BTC costs $800 to make. A block with 25 BTC = $20k of cost. Now, putting ideologies and general awesomeness aside for a moment, in a different system those 25 bitcoins might have been printed for free. OK, call it "$5" because even typing some numbers into a database must cost something. The other $19.995k is basically global warming, burnt coal for electricity, and landfills stuffed with dead ASICs. As some would it, "economic devastation" and a cancerous dead weight. And how many transactions are packed into each block? A few hundred? Sweet! Only $50 of socialised habitat destruction (per transaction, that is) to pay for the "provable inflation rate". At least it's not as bad as that extortionate minimum fee. *sigh* But surely I've misunderstood something? What about the awesomeness of decentralised proof-of-work, making it all transparent and honest? Well, the cost is so extreme that I'm questioning whether it's worth it. AnonyMint did not want to have that discussion. He would rather repeatedly shout out his conclusions and his pre-existing, US-centric rationale about centralisation and evil governments. However, when questioned about the heart of the issue, he kept deleting my posts. Another reason for my questioning is the high volatility. It's clear that a "transparent, honest, provable rate of increase in the money supply" does not produce nice smooth exchange rate graphs in practice. "Trust in the maths" is all over the place: 1 BTC = $800 of trust-in-the-maths one week, 1 BTC = $600 of trust-in-the-maths the next week. Obviously something doesn't quite add up, there. There must be some other factor/s affecting exchange rates. How about liquidity, flow, chaotic changes in holdings? Scale of adoption might have an effect, and it could be argued that exchange rates will become more stable as the market saturates. 4~5 years might not be long enough to see a long-term trend on log charts. (More on that, later.) To be fair on Bitcoin, it does seem extremely well thought-out and elegant in its simplicity: Block rewards are reduced over time, and tendencies to centralise and form natural monopolies (think: mining pools) are not cock-blocked by ideology. Innovation and evolution: from CPU mining, to GPUs, FPGAs and custom ASICs was free and unhindered all the way. However, some people would prefer a design that is deliberately crippled (read: micromanaged and prematurely optimised) to block these natural processes. AnonyMint himself argued extensively about entropic force and power law distribution -- so why the blind spot? |
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As expected, my comment was deleted from the other thread. Not even a quote or passing mention this time Only Satoshi's Proof-of-Work can solve the entropy security issue. Period. I have thought about this deeply.
Oh, I thought u were an open-minded person. Sorry for disturbing u. It is a fundamental mathematical insight. Someday I need to write a whitepaper on this. (Any mathematician readers who have some time to do this now?) I am open-minded to that which isn't already evidently mathematically irrefutable. Essentially proof-of-stake requires you to move to trust and reputation and call that "security". But that is not the type of security I want, because it ends up as "winner takes all". It is just democracy and fiat again. I want decentralized security which does not have the power vacuum. Only Satoshi's Proof-of-Work has that. While proof-of-work obviously tickles the braincells in various ways, AnonyMint's posts strongly suggest that technical design is merely secondary to some agenda he's obsessing about. In spite of all his showy keyboard bashing, he sure refuses to engage in meaningful discussions. |
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Seeing that the manipulator, AnonyMint has a somewhat tyrannical habit of starting threads that look promising at the start, but are ruthlessly censored to shut out dissenting views, I've decided to repost here. Feel free to post (or repost) replies as you see fit. Self moderated threads are for pansies. (Doug) Casey Research's Alex Daley penned a myopic rebuttal to internet pioneer, now venture capitalist Marc Andreessen's myopic fanboy regurgitation of the often repeated incorrect theories about Bitcoin's key innovation and future. These two and most of the Bitcoin community are far from understanding what is really going on. Thus expect the majority to vote "No" here, to reaffirm their myopia, else they should refute me in debate me here (they won't be able to).  Daley essentially incorrectly argues that money can't exist without top-down corporate and government control ( although he admits it could in a "wild west" mad max world which is precisely where we are headed after 2016), yet correctly argues that Bitcoin has insurmountable ( also) flaws for consumer payment without top-down take over while he failed to enumerate many of the reasons Bitcoin is vulnerable to top-down take over. Copying the myopia of most of the Bitcoin community, Andreessen fails to understand the reasons Bitcoin is doomed to a future of top-down control and thus can't compete with the top-down global money solutions being patented recently by the major banks. Your prejudice against all things centralised or structured "top down" (aka: weasel words for social structures that you emotionally dislike), fits right in with the 'myopic' Libertarian euphoria surrounding Bitcoin... in 2011 - 2012. In defence of the Libertarians here, most seem to have quite moderate views in advocating "small" governments and seeing their ideology as a "guiding principle" rather than a hard set of rules. Bitcoin is doomed to a future of top-down control and thus can't compete with the top-down global money solutions That's BS. Central control implies a cohesive group of vested interests -- much more dangerous to legacy financial systems than a disorganised collective of FOSS enthusiasts. One could even argue that as a distributed/decentralised platform, Bitcoin was a) too new/experimental/immature to compete with anything, b) allowed to naturally mature and become more hierarchical in precisely your favourite way: chaotic simulated annealing. It's too bad that you don't like the results-to-date of that unregulated self-structuring. Bitcoin Take Over Threats- Coming $Trillion(s) bubble burst will demand world government intervention & cooperation [1] (Bernie Madoff is so much smaller)
- Selfish mining attack confirmed by skeptics
- Those who were anonymous lose it ex post facto, when tax & law enforcement attack the numerous non-anonymous [2]
- 51% attack because mining is concentrated in a few pools
- 51% attack because mining is ASICs concentrated and ASICs foundries could be purchased with unlimited fiat. Note also ASICs can't be re-purposed as PCs can, i.e. each ASIC only works for a specific coin design.
- 51% attack because mining is not funded with perpetual debasement (new coins) to remain proportional to market value, instead transaction fees can not scale to market cap because even debit cards & ACH charge a flat-fee not a percentage of transaction value. Thus the world's rich (denominated in coin) grow more wealthy relative to the income of the miners.
- Non-zero transaction fees allows cartel take over via Transactions Withholding Attack
- Pools can be attacked with Share Withholding Attack fixable with oblivious shares
- Blockchain requires increasingly powerful full clients as scale to billions of transaction, thus more centralization and vulnerability to 51% attack.
- Superior altcoin
Your fears seem pathological, and you seem to misunderstand several things about the nature of money (but that's OK, so do most people). Re: the $150T bubble collapsing? Not gonna happen unless levels of mutual distrust in society reach a crisis point. Look up the causes of hyperinflation. There doesn't even need to be an increase in the money supply -- hyperinflation is fundamentally a runaway collapse in the amount of trust the average person has in the underlying system. Look around! Bitcoin had its own mini bout of hyperinflation just the other day -- yet the inflation policy has never changed. You've opined about the hockey stick shape of US reserve printing. There are many ways in which it could be interpreted, e.g.: -2008 was the start of currency war in which the US tried to steal from the EU with overpriced dollars. Since exchange rates are laggy, there's a first-mover advantage for currency debasement and the US broke the stalemate by printing. US interests would have been able to transfer $billions in hard assets from the EU, if not for EU counter moves to eliminate that advantage. Now it's back to stalemate mode with both sides sitting on extra reserves that they can't really move. -Structural problems where the Fed have some print policy, but a parasitic hierarchy of banks is doing funny things with the money instead of lending it, because no Glass Steagal. -You're right about a coordinated conspiracy and the Satanic elites have some suicidal plan. -Or... anarchy rules, everything is a pathological mess, and no-one's in charge. Ideological belief in the superiority of Capitalism could do that -- government bureaucrats simply shrug their shoulders because the free market already pays them to do what they do.All the 51% stuff and other attacks? It's all priced in. Centralisation boogie-man = big yawn. As mentioned above, it naturally results from your favourite simulated annealing process. Bitcoin Killer AltcoinThe Bitcoin killer will thus have at least the following features. - provably cpu-only mining with botnet resistance (current proof-of-stake can't redistribute new coins to masses & I posit it isn't secure)
Mining is a temporary bootstrapping thing. As a feature of money, the 'costliness' of the tokens has near zero utility. Calling that cost "intrinsic value" is just a distraction for people who haven't quite wrapped their heads around more advanced ideas that cash is a symbolic pointer to a web of trust.  Mining is a (maybe) necessary evil so that trust can be built on immature networks where no naturally trustworthy leaders have emerged yet. Bitcoin allows proof-of-stake to be added. Whereas perpetual POW crappyness is implausible. small, reasonable perpetual debasement agreed. built-in anonymity (to minimize non-anonymous users) meh. zero transaction fees (with economic transaction spam resistance) So you want to reinvent hashcash? How? Perhaps a small fee to prevent ddos? Maybe all the miners get together and vote to determine fee levels?... You haven't thought this through, have you? faster 1-confirmation block chain, e.g. 1 minute instead of Bitcoin's 10 min delay, if the orphan rate can be contained 2nd gen cryptos like Ethereum could make that issue completely irrelevant. E.g.: Ethereum would allow you to set up any centralised cash or share system inside a contract, and the "decentralised cloud server mining" nonsense is outsourced and non-intrusive. Your server just runs seamlessly until it runs out of funds. |
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As far as I'm concerned, gods have to prove their existence to me if they want me to believe in them, not the other way round, this looks a lot like fake or very dodgy science to me to make it seem that religious people are correct.
Doesn't that defy the point of a God though? Once a God proves its existence then belief goes out the window. If you saw god, you would only believe more. Do you believe it's possible to hallucinate something which isn't real? Imagine a shiny blue coloured cube, roughly the size of a baseball or grapefruit. Now imagine that the pointy corners have been dipped in red paint. Now ask yourself: why did that cube appear in front of your eyes -- the same place where you're only supposed to see 'real' things? This shows that we must already be using our imagination to "see the real world". |
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Speculate on this imponderable, and give reasons for your answer below! . . . . . . Disclaimer: this thread might contain light-hearted sexism that's not actually intended to offend anyone. |
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Related poll in Politics: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=340646.0IMO, there's a potential threat that a government agency might make a misguided attempt to "save people from themselves" via some kind of draconian regulation thrown in the general direction of the entire Bitcoin community. The seriousness of such a threat seems to be inversely proportional to the level of awareness in the community. |
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Look, there's a limit to the crap is ok to post in a bitcoin forum, just because somehow that so called "assassination market" operates in bitcoins.
Nuclear weapons are built with fiat. Should people start littering financial forums with WMD discussions?
I think it's important for Bitcoin users to have this conversation. As a new technology that enables lots of new things, Bitcoin and its users are under the spotlight. It's not like gun crime, where the inventors can't be blamed posthumously because they didn't foresee all of the problems with their inventions. Bitcoin development is still in progress, it's a group experiment, and maybe it can be steered in some way to improve the balance of good versus bad? Even if it seems obvious to us that nothing practical can done to prevent some new crimes because any "cure" would be worse than the disease, we don't know that without discussing it. Every time we find out about some new downside, we should ask ourselves: is it still worth the trouble? The online discussion itself is also important evidence for outsiders that proves that we're nice, caring humans who care about life and stuff, not just about money or getting rich. |
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Also Gödel's incompleteness theorems which state that no theory of computation can be both complete and consistent, as there will always exist another truth which can't be proven by the existing theory. Yes, and I'm trying to explain that this applies to your theory as well. Yet you seem to think that your particular theory is all encompassing -- internally consistent and complete. I can tell you off-hand that a theory that basically says the universe is "a multi-dimensional holographic 'doughnut' made of vibrating tines and lots of standing waves", still doesn't explain any of these things: illusions consciousness/ego/self qualia and of course creativity. Oh wait, those last 3 are all just illusions. Explain illusions then. I have already alluded to the explanation of all those phenomena. I guess I will need to write a treatise to expound for those who can't/won't extrapolate from the generative essence I have presented. You'll burn yourself out. Why not do something useful? |
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