If it's a free market, then why am I somehow "not allowed" to blow others to smithereens when they're trying to brutally compete against me?

Isn't that basically the current system where countries (or economic regions) can independently inflate their national currencies without any transparency? Sure, debasement is visible after the fact, but the international trade -- which causes relative exchange rates to drift -- has already occurred. That could get messy with everyone trying to game the business cycles in a kind of Mexican stand-off*.


*edit: or is it a normal stand-off because of a "first mover" advantage?

I see your point, but it's a pretty big claim nonetheless. Some people believe in intrinsic value, so for them there is such a thing.

When I see gold, I see a metal that was costly to dig up and refine. I also have a rough idea of its monetary properties, not least of which: lots of other people think it has something called intrinsic value. Thus, on top of its niche uses in electronics and jewellery, it also becomes useful as money. I see "cost" and "intrinsic value" as interchangeable terms.

Probably not, but the NSA are probably masturbating to this conversation a bit like in that South Park "Toilet Safety Administration" episode

Gödel's theorems are a kind of critique of the language of mathematics:


Therefore, any mathematically described "theory of everything" is going to face the above problem with the underlying maths. Try explaining the "hard problem of consciousness", or belief, or the 'delusion' of free will, or qualia, or just the mere existence of any observer... using the empirically observed laws of entropy. Circular reasoning.

No, that's an empirical interpretation of what creativity appears like, in hindsight no less.


You're still not giving any material to suggest that objective value judgements on the creativity of different brains is even plausible.

^
Lots of great responses -- it's very encouraging!

I stand corrected

The name sounds suspect. Maybe it used to be some dodgy website promoting illegal activities, like euthanasia. Get it, "dev (death) to me" ?

Or, more likely, just genuine censorship because Facebook are retards.

I suggest reading some Roger Penrose and looking into Kurt Gödel, and also catch up on some of the atheism/god discussions in the politics forum while you're at it.


It can be argued that the universe, within which the 2nd law of thermodynamics applies, is just a subset within our whole existence. Reasonable arguments can be put forward that we can operate beyond the rules of our physical reality, and that's what gives rise to things like free will and creativity.

Re: Algorithms=/=Entropy

His reasoning for "a cause of creativity" is illogical and does not follow from his otherwise sensible intuition that an algorithm surely doesn't cause it.

For a start, the word creativity is self-explanatory: it refers to an act of creation. Nothing comes before creativity in order to somehow cause it, because then that would be the real creative source instead. He could argue that creativity is not real, just an illusion. However, that would just reaffirm what I said earlier: we act upon and alter our illusion of reality, and thus we operate outside of it.

His theorising further down is interesting, but still relies on the same causal premise.

For example, we could think of DNA like an extremely advanced, organic von Neumann universal constructor. A Turing-complete state machine that operates within the physical laws of its substrate: various chemical interactions and so on. It replicates, evolves, has error correction for self-repair. Then we skip a few steps and say that complex organisms evolved from this DNA and formed brains.

Then we make a big (MOAFU) assumption: brains and networks of brains seem creative and extremely complex, therefore it must be all that complexity and variation that causes creativity. No, it's a bit like that Russian joke where the world seems upside down. Stuff doesn't cause creativity. Creativity causes stuff. I would suggest that maybe it's an ongoing process of creativity that allows complexity to arise in the first place. It may seem ridiculous, but I would also speculate that creative choices might occur at all levels in nature, resulting in what appears, in hindsight, to be the second law of thermodynamics.

Ahh. I meant in the sense of diminishing returns. E.g.: one person with $1B vs one person with $1M. The first million can really kickstart someone's dream life, whether it's repayment of house or car debts, purchasing lots of items, funding a hobby and/or business, or travelling to exotic places. On average, each subsequent million has a drastically smaller effect on overall "quality of life" than the previous million.

Forgive me if I misunderstood your original complaint about the power law distribution. In a previous thread you basically alleged that a large stakeholder, Joe, would not be able to redeem his bitcoins without crashing the system. That's a closely related issue. If a large batch of bitcoins are dumped on the market because the owner wants to "cash out their wealth", each subsequent bitcoin they sell nets a smaller amount of goods.

If anything, it could be said that political power fills the gap left by the invisible wealth. One could argue that rational actors don't want to harm their own values, so they would only speculate and manipulate the masses in ways that seem beneficial. Whether that's always the case, I don't know.

Your fundamental premise is flawed.

a) You're equating coin distribution with wealth distribution, and not even bothering to define wealth in real terms.

b) You're looking at the numbers as a static system, not one with flows and velocities.

First prove that large stakeholders who control, say, 5% of the money base, do indeed have 1000 times more usable 'mojo' compared to stakeholders with only 0.005%, and then we can talk.

If you've got some other currency that is more inflationary (value goes down instead of up), it makes sense to use that for spending so you're not holding too much of it.

I'm shocked at your deus ex machina.

In a far, distant future, bitcoins are not only expensive, but also very expensive to transact. Over time, as the system evolved, things got tricky in the mining sector. Miners who tried to offer cheaper rates kept having their blocks 'orphaned' until they learned to comply with the club rules: do not swamp the blockchain with cheap transactions. No matter how these heroic, rebel miners tried to get around the problem, it just wasn't working. Cheap transactions -- big blocks. Expensive transactions -- small blocks. The group consensus was: small blocks are less costly in the data centres.

Meanwhile, various helpful investors saw some opportunities to tidy Bitcoin up a bit. Bitcoin, the clunky "digital gold" that it was, was just too bulky for the fast rough-and-ready infrastructure people wanted. So a whole new banking sector arose from the ashes of the old one. This new sector was of course very convenient and useful: each layer provided an extremely valuable service, such as lending out Bitcoin-backed credit, all for a tiny fee that was passed onto the customers. In turn, these customers also provided some extremely valuable services: accounts, ATMs, chip cards, and pleasant branches with helpful staff. The best part was the cost: extremely affordable! Only a few percent per year.

Others saw opportunities in the 'mining' sector. Spaces were limited for the actual mining of course, but figuring out the optimum fees and block sizes was a formidable task requiring an army of accountants and programmers. You see, any slight miscalculation could have catastrophic consequences in the wider economy downstream. For example: increase block size too quickly, fees drop, and a small revolution erupts as mushrooming non-bank lenders start competing with the old guard and drive them out of business. Scary stuff! In such complex, chaotic systems, it often seems that the best thing to do is just: never change anything, and then it will remain stable.

Assuming he never ends up owing money to an assassin and he's 100% sure that his security hasn't been compromised. In the media articles the quotes made it seem like he was reckless and desperate, not cocky.


If he's serious about getting it working, he'll probably find a way. The problem I see is that he wants it to work. Even if he fails, there could easily be copycats once they see what's possible.

Early results seem much less controversial than I predicted.

Until now it was just theory. Now there's an actual site running. Thoughts?

There's just so many parasitic middlemen controlling the financial system and trying to sap free energy from the real economy. That's the problem with it. If you look at the traditional banks in terms of what they do, it's really at about the same level as telcos. Yet even telecommunication companies have been rolling out a whole lot of new infrastructure because of the Internet and mobile phones. What new things has the banking sector been coming up with? Apart from usury and asset grabs? Very little. Just incremental, cosmetic changes in customer service -- nothing ground-breaking.

Because most regular entrepreneurs aren't that interested in money. They are idea people, not greedy people.

I'm sure the timing was purely accidental

Updated OP:


This is how I see things potentially playing out. At first, nobody takes the threat seriously. Everyone who has followed Bitcoin has seen so many scams and would-be disasters that were supposed to destroy Bitcoin but failed, that we've become numb to it all.

Occasionally a few coins get deposited, and it's seen as black humour for the lulz. Who cares if it's probably a scam and the creators will disappear with the money? It's Bitcoin -- stuff like that happens all the time. It's a risk people take when trying to remain anonymous, and 2-party escrow is still in beta. Authorities probably could take down the website if they wanted to. IF.

Meanwhile, the funds slowly add up and eventually they reach a tipping point. Whether it's because of slow accumulation or rising exchange rate doesn't matter. Some big-name politician gets killed, and that's when the SHTF.

Suddenly, the news is 100 times worse than Silk Road ever was. Massive regulation ensues. Innocent Bitcoin enthusiasts, miners, early adopters, and developers get arrested. Masses of people who don't care about any alternative political systems like Laissez-faire, Anarchy, Anarcho-Capitalism, Libertarianism, Zeitgeist Movement, etc., they see this from the POV of "normal" people: murder caused by Bitcoin and therefore it must be stopped.

And who gains in all of this? Not some phantom government which is supposedly evil and coercive -- they're just taking bribes like all good Capitalists. It's the fucking dinosaur banking sector.

Fractional Reserve banking.
If all else fails, bad debts can be written off and deleted. But banks are greedy. As long as a bank can avoid doing that, it will. They want to have their cake (conjure up easy loans despite a lack of deposit funds) and eat it too (if a debt goes bad, keep the usury payments ticking along by repackaging the debt and selling it to someone else.

The FRB system has been gamed and Bitcoin is a much needed wake-up call.