They are not exactly related though. You are thinking that if someone has $1 of crude oil (a limited natural resource), then the only way for them to double their wealth is to get another $1 of crude oil; and that the total wealth in this example is now only limited to $2.
The fact is, you can refine that crude, and from the products sell black tar for $0.10, gasoline for $0.75, airplane fuel for $0.50, kerosene for $0.30, and plastic for $0.25. You can then collect and recycle that plastic for another $0.10 (prices are very rough estimates purely for example). You can then make even more money by forming that plastic and black tar into useful objects instead of just selling the raw materials for $0.10 and $0.25. So $2+ from just that single $1 resource, and that second $1 worth of oil is still free for someone else to take. Even more so, the people you sell those refined components can make even more wealth by trading it and using it to produce other things, like farming food, or transporting people. Then even more people can use that wealth to figure out and invent yet more services on top of those, thus growing what we can get out of that $1 exponentially. That's what wealth is, and how it was able to grow so much faster in the last century than the amount of mined resources.

Wealth doesn't come from natural resources. It comes from trade and from the mind: thinking, inventing, creating new ways to use resources or services. The most obvious example of this is in the Middle East, when you compare Israel and Dubai, two nations that have practically no resources to speak of, and make all their resources from their minds, to the rest of the countries in the area, which are dirt poor and torn by war.

Just looking for some ideas here:

HYPOTHETICALLY How would one go about starting a business that you know may be illegal, and will eventually run afoul of the SEC, without running into legal trouble? Start it using your reputation, build it up to be viable, then give it to an anonymous entity when you start to feel the heat? Start it in an anonymous way and get someone well known to vouch for you?

Doesn't relying solely on credit checks for real world reputation/profiles limits you to lending only to those who have credit scores? (I.e. very few countries)

Actually, while discussing this, I remembered that there is one more level to this. It's the classic battle between the parasites and the productive, which stems from the battle between the Marxists who think the pie is only so big, and capitalists who think the pie can expand.
The parasites believe that there is only so much wealth in the world (limited size "wealth pie"), and the wealthy have most of it, so the only way for others to have wealth is to take the piece of the pie from the wealthy. The productive have witnessed how their own wealth was created largely out of nothing, without taking anyone else's wealth by force, and thus believe that the amount of wealth in the world isn't really limited, and the "wealth pie" can just get bigger, expanding to give more pieces to those who work for it.

Man, Marx has really infected the collective human mind with one hell of a viral parasitic thought 

(P.S. I knew this before, especially since this concept was described in detail at my "evil, liberal brainwashing, public university, but I often forget about it, and mainly described the "pie" in detail to those who aren't familiar with the concept yet)

The only way he could profit from that resource is by selling it to other people, for their greater good. You can't profit from a resource by sitting on it.

The reason this derogatory statement buried me is because it seems to be quite often misapplied to Radians and AnCaps. I can see it applying to the casting off by yourself in a lifeboat scenario. Another couple of examples where FY,GM applies:

Illegal immigrant policies (fuck your lack of jobs in your country. I got mine, and you ain't taking it)
Regulations against shipping jobs overseas (same as above)
Tariffs (taxes) on imports like steel and sugar (fuck your resources, production, and need to trade for food, got mine here)
Minimum wage laws (There is only so much revenue from this company to spread around, so fuck you, employee whom the company can no longer afford, rest of us got our $7.25)
Continued support for farm subsidies (fuck your family farm, got my gov check to undermine your prices with)
Continued support for highway and road construction (fuck your struggling railways, got my trucking and roads)

These are things that both of the popular political spectrums are guilty of (Dems and Repubs). They are also all things that libertarians like Randians and AnCaps, are against. So I think a term that would fit libertarians best would be
"Got mine, go get yours"
I don't think I've met a libertarian who would actually prevent someone who doesn't have something from getting it, as long as they went for it in a fair way, through their own work. So I'm not sure the "fuck you" applies. Rand was certainly all for everyone getting everything they wanted, as long as they worked for it, and used their heads instead of relying on bailouts.

What does your lawyer say about making lender information publicly available on the borrowing request sites, or even letting the borrowers post that information themselves, and only have you confirm it?

^^ I don't disagree with this, but that doesn't really have much to do with currencies being government-backed. In fact, privately-run militias that control territories in Somalia and provide protection against other warring tribes or passing criminals/thieves work kind of the same way. They render their services for you whether you want them or not, and they will come after you if you don't pay them (same as mobs). Yet they don't claim any political power, and entirely privately run like a business, and are perfectly fine with you choosing not to use their services by moving elsewhere.

Looks like there are three options then:

1) Fuck you, got mine.
2) Love you, here's some.
3) Fuck you, gimme.

I doubt any of them are applied fairly though. Especially the first one.

But that's exactly my point. That threat of violence doesn't back it at all. It makes it so you need to acquire it at some point, which does give it some value, but it doesn't actually support that value any more than a 7-11 down the street only accepting USD for munchies supports that value. If the printers were turned on full force, and new USD in circulation was increased by 100% every day, no amount of "threats of violence" will keep the worth of USD from quickly going into the toilet.

In fact, we already have plenty of historical evidence of such. Russian Rubles were backed by their own tax organizations and threats of violence (and Russia had 70 years of practicing extreme violence), but that didn't help with the backing any when the Ruble went through hyperinflation in the 90' and had to be scrapped. Ditto for any other currency inflated into oblivion. The best the people who have the power to threaten violence could do is watch in despair, along with every other merchant, and wait for some other currency to come along. The only thing that backs it is our collective trust in it (and "our" includes those who can threaten violence, who also have to trust that they can use what they collect to pay those who dole out violence on their behalf).

Sorry to derail my own thread a bit, but... wait, what?   The government has regulations that prevent mortgage lenders from changing loan terms? Or did whoever wrote that sentence meant to write, "People who were against the law that forced private banks to make changes to the loans of borrowers who were in danger of defaulting, at the expense of all other borrowers?"

I was thinking about quantum entangled communication where it was first mentioned, but didn't really say anything.
The issue with that method is that you need to physically deliver the second "copy" of the entangled material to the communication destination, and you will use it up whenever you use it to communicate.
Basically, two entangled particles stay entangled until you read the information off them. Soon as you do, the entanglement breaks, and they're useless. So, communication of this type would be instantaneous, but would require a constant replenishment of communication "fuel" to be ferried from one planet to another. Not a cheap proposition.

I've heard the term, "fuck you, got mine," a few times, pretty much exclusively used in a derogatory way. From what I understand, it is supposed to describe an individual who is of the opinion that as long as they have attained the item they strove to acquire, they don't care if someone else, who may really need the item as well, does not have it. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

So, my question is, what is the opposite of "Fuck you, got mine?" Is it something like, "I didn't do shit, give me yours?" I'm trying to understand the meaning behind the derogatory connotation. Is it really just the disagreement between the "I worked my ass off for it, I deserve it" class, and the "We're all in this together and we should all share equally" class?

Watching. Your original post made me rethink on how I should be pursuing my idea, regarding keeping it secret. Guess I'll have to post about it.
I'd like to think that the last 6 months have cleared out the incompetence from the community, too, but, alas, we have such things as newbies. They're everywhere, always arriving just in time to do something stupid and ruin everyone's day.

+1 on bitcoincard.

If the scenario is that our internet is still accessible locally, but blocked out from the rest of the world/country (great firewall of china example), we'll still be able to trade Bitcoin here, as long as ONE node somewhere in the system has a connection to the outside (we just may not be able to mine due to delays in block chain propagation). If worse comes to worse, and AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and whoever else all go dark, at least in larger, more closely grouped together cities people may be able to switch their WiFi's to open Ad-Hoc mode, and set up a wireless mesh of sorts. It won't be easy, and will require both people with technical know-how knocking on doors, and WiFi owners consenting to it (likely out of desperation).

I do really really really REALLY look forward to when wireless mesh networks can be easily set up and be practical.

It does make the sticks be worth something, but it doesn't actually prop them up with any specific value. The king could "spend" 20 sticks in the whole economy, and each will be worth a fortune, or he can "spend" 2 trillion sticks, and you'll see them threwn about the streets like garbage. Plus, in our situation, the IRS is the government that collects the sticks, but the people who actually print the money, the Federal Reserve, is not actually government. Meaning the Fed, by controling supply, is the one actually maintaining and giving the USD some value. The IRS is just an entity that accepts payment in USD only, just like any other US shop (though it does *demand* the payment, because we owe it to them for the services they give us)

Look at the bigger picture here. We live under this government, the government renders services for us, and then charges us with a bill. If we do not pay the bill, it comes after us. If you live in an apartment or a resort, the business renders services for you, and charges you with a bill. If you do not pay the bill, they can come after you. True, we have a government to protect us from the business coming after us with guns or throwing us in private prison, but the overall set-up is practically the same. Even down to the point where if you don't want to do business with the resort, you can choose not to. Don't want to do business with the IRS? Don't live on their "property." (Personally, my family has refused to "do business" with the Soviet Union) From a "giving the USD value" point, they really do seem to work the same: provide a service, serve you with a bill, collect whatever currency they can themselves use. And I guess just like any other business, they wouldn't care what $1USD was worth, or how much of it you needed to pay for a basket of goods, as long as the value was stable, and had SOME value.

Check again. While yes, it must be taken settle any debts, a merchant is not obligated to take it for goods and services. And even the debt thing varies by jurisdiction.


It doesn't need to be fiat. Employees can be paid in foreign currency, or by other means. The only thing that the IRS cares about, is that you pay them taxes on the US-dollar-equivalent of the value of what you've earned. A foreign company can hire someone here for minimum wage and pay them in Yen or Euros if they wanted to. It's just too much of a headache. Also, I think minimum wage actually depresses the dollar value. A hamburger used to cost $1 worth of labor, now it's worth $3. The minimum wage employee has more money to spend, but now so does the manager who sold the burger, the farmer who sold the ingredients, the store clerk who sold the employee groceries, and so on. It ripples through the system, and although everyone now has more dollars, the actual value owned by each person remains the same.


In America you have to pay capital gains on everything that's not in your tax-deferred retirement funds. Stocks and bitcoin, if they grow in value, must be partially sold off to cover taxes. You can avoid not paying taxes on bitcoin earnings if you don't tell anyone about them, but it's not legal

Which protocol are you asking about, Ripple or Bitcoin? (It is in Bitcoin protocol, somewhat - miners/pools)