Isn't asking someone if you are in their ignore list a bit like this puzzle?

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/02/05/the-blue-eyed-islanders-puzzle/

...except everyone in your life who doesn't kill, rape or rob you, even when they could get away with it easily?

I get the feeling that this (rather common) counterargument -- aside from not really being an argument but rather an allegedly untested hypothesis according to their proponents -- stems from a very creationist / religious / Original Sin form of conceptualizing one's fellow man.

That is, the idea that without a government everyone turns into evil Motorcycling Mad Max in Mohawks, is really no different from the belief that roads will "instantly vanish" if "government disappears"

But then again, we've been telling religious people that for decades, and they still believe -- against all observable evidence -- that without the Bible, people will suddenly become evil.

Now, there's absolutely every reason to believe that a tiny minority of the populace will most definitely turn evil, because they already were evil and believe that committing evil doesn't matter, only getting caught does.  We call these people "psychopaths".  They're about like 5% of the people.  And it is a problem (for which theoretical and practical decentralized solutions exist).

Now, don't quote me on this, but even if we don't have a solution to the psychopath problem, I much prefer a system where a psychopath gets shot in the face while attempting to rape a little child, to a system where the same psychopath is worshipped by useful idiots and empowered to firebomb children, give syphilis to Negroes, or trigger nuclear bombs.  Democide, remember?


No, not really.  I don't think there are two opinions on each side here.  What is there, is an irrational belief about pervasive human malevolence rooted in Original Sin, being battled (and increasingly being proven wrong and conquered) by facts that demonstrate the ample majority of people are voluntaryists when left to their own devices, and only really resort to violence to defend themselves and their loved ones.

I mean, there's research proving this.  Even frigging soldiers won't fire into each other during war (a fact  that is described as a "serious problem" by the psychopaths who run these murderer gangs).  People, even strangers, even when they are children, help each other and have altruism.

I can show you videos of this shit.  The question really only is: will you believe your eyes, or will you reject it and believe what you were told about your Evil Cousin, Man?

I only changed 2 words.

It's like they wrote this as a perfect boilerplate, a fillable form that can be used to excuse practically any form of violence, transgression, suppression, aggression against any people who threatens their power.  This is the perfect example of generic doublespeak.

Wow.

Hey, bitthief!

Here's the door: http://www.freicoin.org/freicoin-s-superiority-to-bitcoin-t35.html

Don't let it hit your wallet on your way out!  :-)

Even better, they should ideally turn themselves off by remote control when a "government official" flips a switch.

Don't you see that, if we don't embed this capability in the protection shields, you won't be able to be made to voluntarily contribute your fair share?  Won't you think of the poor children!!?!?

I just thought of something.

Bitcoin is really only the first step in protecting oneself from theft.  We can already see how this is too disturbing for statists not to react, sabotage or otherwise defame.  "You need a state to have money" has been refuted by reality.

But there will come a day when someone invents a personal protection shield that prevents you from getting shot, stabbed, beaten or caged.  It's really just a matter of time.

And then, you'll be able to protect yourself, not only from common criminals, but from organized criminals, including those who allegedly exist only to "protect" you.  They won't be able to attack you to get your obedience and your money.  "You need a state for protection" will have been refuted by reality too.

Can you imagine that, for just a second?

I can already envision the headlines in the mainstream media: "Terrorists use unauthorized protection devices", "Only The Government should be allowed to own protection devices", "Evil people evade good taxes with evil protection devices".  And the consequential demonization of anyone who buys, makes or sells one of these...

...proving beyond all doubt that government was never about protecting people.  It was about farming them.  Except it won't matter anymore, because these organized criminals won't be able to do a thing about it.

That'll be the day when statists will literally lose their shit.

Yeah, he lives in a fantasy world where he thinks that we'll all bend over and take his theft in the ass.

I do have to love one thing about the whole ordeal in this thread (which I suspect will be ending very soon):

I love that he has to beg.

See, if this was fiat money we were talking about, and he proposed stealing from us via, say, stealing from deposit boxes (which has happened and still does happen today), and he, say, did business under the name "United States", we'd be fucked.  We'd just be robbed and there would be absolutely nothing we could do, just like they do in fact steal from people's deposit boxes today, and make you sue them to get your shit back.

But here, with Bitcoin, he has zero power.  So he has to beg, and he has to lie, and he has to manipulate, and he has to play stupid.  All these demeaning actions, right, that reveal him for what he really is.

I love that shit, because I know that, for all the hot air he might expel, it's inconsequential.  He can't steal my shit.    I quite enjoy when I get to see thieves on the other side of the fence, powerless to get at me.  I like to wave at them, and say "Haha!  Fuck you, you can't steal from me!".

Oh, bitfilch's switched to condescension and derision!  That means he's finally out of lies!  Yippeee!

Just today, I've read four threads about this, two here and two in Reddit.  All of them littered with the same irrational propositions.  It's like all of these idiots' brains malfunction, but malfunction in a very specific, pro-theft way.  What a coincidence!


I absolutely expect them to take to the streets once they figure out that the end of their gravy train is nigh.

Part of "taking it to the streets" is useful idiots doing the Lord's propaganda work of sabotaging that which (they perceive) is costing them the gravy.  This will most def include Bitcoin.

Think about it -- how much do these parasites get from other people's inheritances?  Bitcoin's gonna do away with that gravy train.  Isn't that precisely the point of making long-term Bitcoin savings stealable?

I said that much to him, first calmly then angrily.  He didn't ever listen or respond to that.

That's when I understood that he actually wants theft.  That's when it finally made sense for me that he was giving all these nonsensical "reasons" to implement his plan.

Exactly.  Guy here is telling you "why is it so hard for you to bend over so I can steal from you?"  Hahaha!  What a guy, eh?

Thieves use reason to manipulate others, but they don't accept reason themselves.  Sorta like a counterfeiter passing fake bills while being careful to get real ones, except in reverse.

--------------------------------------------------

In other news: I stopped being angry when I finally understood that what bitthief! wants is theft.  A couple of hours before it hadn't dawned on me, so I was (understandably) very pissed at him for not comprehending that what he proposes is theft.  I was like "how could you not fucking understand that stealing people's savings is stealing?".

But now that I figured out he doesn't want to understand, my anger's gone, completely replaced by the satisfaction of knowing that Bitcoin has protected me from people like him, who would seek to use subterfuge to steal from me.

Phew!

I don't want, and never wanted, to blame "governments".  They don't exist.  All there is, is people doing things.

I blame the belief in the virtue of a group who perpetrates organized aggression to parasitize everyone else.  People under the influence of this belief, whether members or victims of this group, are the ones who believe that governments exist.  Not me.

What you see in observable reality is nothing more than (a) a tiny minority of people telling you what to do and how much to pay so they will let you live unharmed (b) a gaggle of people who incorrectly believe that the first group are their saviors and protectors, and worship them as a result of this incorrect belief.

That is, to me, the essence of statism.  It is to recoil in horror when watching an aggressor murder another, then to watch the exact same scene with the aggressor in a blue costume, only to say "well, he had it coming".  It is to feel terrified about being robbed of half of what you have, but paying up every April 15th with an unease that is hard to explain away.  It is to talk shit about Halliburton while celebrating the paid murderers in green costumes.  It is to cry in awe as the President sheds tears for the death of 20 children, when he himself has ordered the firebombing of 2000.  It is that level of irrationallity.  That is statism.

The problem isn't "totalitarianism".  It never was, not in the slightest.  The problem really isn't "aggressive people using too much aggression".  The problem is the belief that a bunch of aggressive people are virtuous and protect you.  That very belief, that the aggressive people are authorized and righteous to use aggression, is precisely what enables the aggressive people to murder everyone else, with total impunity.

If you think for a second that you live in a human farm, where you're farmed for your labor, and suppressed if you become a problem for the farmers, then the distinction between "totalitarianism" and "democracy" becomes very easy to figure out: both are merely methods to organize the farm.

The belief that a human being is righteously authorized to murder, brutalize, or cage another human being, as punishment for peacefully resisting an order, is not a totalitarian belief -- it is a statist belief.  Democide is not caused by totalitarianism -- it is caused by statism.

#13.25.  Phew.

"It's not theft if you didn't do some as-of-today unnecessary ritual that I want to impose on you".

See?  I told you guys.  Reasons matter not -- the thief will invent lifeboat scenarios and false reasons to pretend that his theft isn't theft.

I love Bitcoin because it allows me to protect myself from precisely these types of insidious thieves, who love to invent exceptions to the very simple rule "don't steal".

I don't think reintroducing lost (truly lost) coins is theft, but I'd wager that anyone who invented the math to do such a feat, can surely figure out a way to reverse the accident that caused them to be lost, giving them back to the person who lost them.  If at all possible, I think that would be the just solution.

Other than that, I'm quite fine with the donation in value that lost coins provide.

This is fundamentally great insight.  Bitcoin, unlike other digital technologies, shares elements both from "old world" thinking and from "new world" thinking.  it does so -- some would say unfortunately -- because it ultimately must.

A store of value is fundamentally useless if it can be replicated infinitely, like everything else in the "new world".  And all stores of value "guarded" by "old world" methods (giving the keys of the empire to a bunch of sociopaths) have failed or are in the process of failing, victims of sociopathic greed and sabotage.

So what is one to do faced this constraint imposed by reality?

One invents -- or discovers, some would say -- the math necessary to bring the "old world" restriction of scarcity into the "new world" of infinite replication.  One invents Bitcoin.

Now, the way of producing scarcity that makes Bitcoin Bitcoin has the disadvantage that lost coins are truly lost.  They can't be recovered.  We don't know of and we don't have an algorithmic mechanism to produce a Bitcoin that doesn't have this alleged "defect" yet shares all the good properties of Bitcoin (including decentralized operation, scarcity, and long-term resistance to theft).

Now, as you can see in this and other threads, the one and only proposal to address this "defect" consists of deliberately weakening the long-term resistance to theft property of Bitcoin.  Since this "defect" is not really an issue (lost coins just add value to the economy in general), and theft is an issue, Bitcoin chose to prohibit theft of long-term stored value.

This choice is no accident.  This is deliberate in Bitcoin's design.  Satoshi could have written demurrage of long-term savings in the code -- it is just a computer program, it's not very difficult to implement, and the Freicoin team doing that right now -- but he didn't.

Now why do you think that is?  Do you think it's because Satoshi is supremely dumb and couldn't figure out how to make that happen?  Or is it more likely that allowing people to steal "stale coins" is just a terrible idea?

Whoever wants to have a Bitcoin that deliberately chooses to allow people to filch from others' savings, will certainly have something Bitcoinish, but it won't be Bitcoin because it doesn't share Bitcoin's properties.  They can try, but the slogan "Filchcoin: a revolutionary digital store of value that allows people to steal your coins if you keep them for too long" somehow, I suspect, won't exactly make the greatest catchphrase.

Until someone invents the math that will allow for a Bitcoin that doesn't allow for theft of long-term savings and allows retrieval of lost coins, you're going to have to live with what we have.  If you're so worried about losing coins, do yourself a favor and lose some.  Be charitable with the rest of us.  And take up math.  Maybe you'll learn enough to invent the math necessary to recover lost coins without stealing people's savings.

Sigh.

The futility of this exchange is simple to summarize:

People who are okay with theft will never be persuaded by reasons why theft is a bad idea.  Reason factors not in their decision.  Otherwise they would have deduced, like most everyone else before them, that what they want is bad.

"Everybody knows that theft is bad".  It would be to the detriment of the thief's interests if his intentions were unmasked.  So a clever thief will pretend what they want is not theft; they'll give you all sorts of made-up lifeboat scenarios to rationalize the theft; they'll even promise that they will spend the loot in a noble cause.  (I believe we've seen pretty much all of the above in this thread.)

In sum: the clever thief will abuse reason (spin a story), not because he himself believes in reason, but because he knows that he can misuse reason to manipulate well-intentioned and reasonable people willing to give him the time of day.

But admit that what they want is theft?  No, of course not.  NE VAR.

The greatest evils ever perpetrated, all of them, without exception, were sold to victims as virtues and solutions.

Ooooo... you're far away.

If I can't see the what?  I think you accidentally a word there.

Yeah, I think I remember seeing this porn flick.