Well that is not really an investment. It's a bank account.

The government usually guarantees such in return for regulating their business and posing demands for liquid capital.

Still even bank savings have been known to be lost if the economy got really bad. Since its rare your premium (interest rate) is low. My point stands.

Given the state of today's banks I don't think running to BTC/gold/other would be a bad move though.

You can't insure investments... that is why it is called "investing"/"venture capital"/"chancing it"/"believing in a company" and not "money in the bank"/"money under the bed"/"risk-free".

The risk involved in ANY investment is why you as an investor is paid anything - it's YOUR premium. So if YOU are getting a premium exactly covering the risk involved; how can an insurance provider ever hope to operate in the case of a default?

Such insurance firms have zero funds, they spend or drain any premiums they can get and fold at first trouble.


An "insured" or "risk free" investment translates into "RUN RUN RUN" to any experienced investor.

(not saying I'm experienced here, just common sense)

EDIT:
No I could not live on my BTC, but maybe one day in a not so distant future. Right now I hold BTC and invest directly in food/energy production.

Yes, just don't pay the tax, don't be a citizen and pay for each and every service from said government out of your own pocket.

As for US healthcare your cost is 16% of GDP (in rich country) and yet you don't live very long. That cost is largely insurance company profits.

My country's system is pretty bureaucratic, socialized and bad, however it STILL only costs 9.8% of GDP and life expectancy is slightly better than the US.

The facts simply don't back up privatized insurance. Maybe privatized hospitals can work, but not the coverage part.


Why do you people think the first government was created? For absolutely ZERO gains? Out of shear violence - then why didn't the private armies win?
If governments are universally bad then any long lasting society would have disposed of them - having superior efficiency and all winning over governments should be EASY right?

The world is the opposite the only free countries are countries like Somalia. Sometimes I think ultra libertarians just want to shirk any duty.

All these "second tree" solutions seem awfully complex and like a short term/bad solution.

When, not if, bitcoin reaches VISA volumes you will need like 3 meta trees or something.

Its the most ugly solution I have ever seen, I don't get why people here talk so much about it.


Super nodes are better or other solutions...

Progress report:
Okay so I have been reading the technical datasheet/manual on the basiccard website.

I have found the following:
- Communication standard should be T1 - faster, newer and less error prone than T0.
- 200-400 lines of basic code will be able to run on a 2kb basiccard (0.9-1EUR).
- Files/directories can be locked completely or assigned a pub key you must communicate by.
- The card may be locked into a RUN state in which it can no longer be read or re-programmed. This would be the product the users get,
   so that a corrupted/thief terminal does not wipe/re-program the card or steal your keys.

Additionally ZeitControl, the company behind the cards, is a member of the ISO 7816 committee since 1996? so they are quite big, proven and respected.

In light of this I am buying the SDK and going forward with these cards.

Hopefully the basiccard "enhanced basiccard ZC3.12" card with 2kb EEPROM will prove adequate as they are very cheap - I think the cheapest on the WORLD market.

Aliens/lizards could fry all our electronics and kill us all... otherwise BTC should be good and may even prevent NWO.

Btw I consider NWO as already happened. The level of control the bankers have over the US/EU is amazing.

Speculators = terrible
Investors = awesome

Sure that was a bad move, but it doesn't counter my argument - those first FED people may well have been more decent than the ones destined to come later.

Are you REALLY saying that the government that landed on the freaking MOON is exactly as bad as the shit-pile we see today?

Anyway this discussion is weird and off topic. If you don't even believe in governments then my idea is useless to you, just go troll somewhere else.

I am working on a bitcoin smartcard first at the moment. You are welcome to join that endeavor - you could earn money too.

You don't need skills if you have just a little passion, anyone can learn!

I think Bitcoin is the first to invent the "blockchain database" so I am guessing other than alt currency chains, no.

The world itself is based on violence, small creatures are eaten by larger ones, until the larger ones die and are themselves eaten.

The video is BS, governments provide a service like anyone else, once they stop revolutions dispose them rather quickly. People don't accept taxes because of some paper, they accept it because they somewhere believe in their country and government.

A tax officer will not kill you even they imprison you.
A tax lets you have roads, internet, police, protecting soldiers and free food should you one day find yourself down on luck.

The problem is the US government has become corrupted and thus people are stopping to believe in them. My algorithm would avoid such corruption and hence likely this discussion about government vs. criminals.

US government = criminals = correct.
Government as a concept = criminals = false.

When people rape, murder og rob others someone needs to step in and exert violence over the bad guys. It can NOT be avoided. What funds that is TAXES however low a libertarian might like them.

I know your next argument "private security firm". Considering the vast overprice you are paying for private health insurance in the US I think that is a really shitty idea. Let alone what happens when such a firm finds out that beating up people brings more customers!

Roads by a million different companies so you can't drive to work without a 100 stickers in your window?

The US meltdown must have melted your brains too...



All that said my algorithm/program IS voluntary, you would know if you read a few posts in the thread first. However nothing is stopping a later algorithmic government from using some level of violence. Again: natural.

Progress report:
Okay learned some stuff.

Brands:
BasicCard SmartCards (SCs) - Brand by German Zeit Control company. Uses the Basic programming language (DOS like).
JavaCard/JCOP SmartCards - Produced by multiple producers (expensive).
ACS cards - Brand by Advanced Card Systems, runs AC-OS (hence ACOS name).

ACOS cards are developed using their software. ACS sells an SDK.

Basiccards seem more open, though buying an SDK from the company will likely speed your development time. At ~59 EUR I can do this easily. That includes hardware such as test cards/reader, books and manual.


I have tried basic about 10 years ago and I remember it as an easy and simple language. Further the implementation on those cards are done in hardware so it's more efficient than the java cards - hence the price difference.

Basiccards will cost 1.5-5$ I think, it depends a bit on how demanding the BTC app turns out to be.

I have found no "C/C++ cards" though there may well be more card companies.


When communicating with the cards via reader/writers various frameworks exist such as OpenCardSC and as I understand one included in the basiccard SDK mentioned above.


Most card companies can print your cards (including ZC) or you can buy your own card printer at a reasonable price. Some of those printers also have programming modules, though I don't know if they will work with the basic cards.

I consider it very likely that given a little time and quite little start-up capital (5-20K$) you could set up a very serious BTC card manufacturing plant and churn out your first thousand cards or so.
Given the demand we could totally supply the world with BTC cards.


So; I am strongly considering buying the ZC basiccards/SDK, does anyone have any reasons this is a bad choice?
(if the corp dies the same BTC card standard/app developed here can be deployed on a new card, so no worries there)

Does anyone want to join the project or help out anyhow? I estimate I would develop this maybe 5 times faster with a second guy on board - not including his contributions.
(two men dig more than one man in twice the timespan)

Just keep in mind that lots of BTC have been created since the 11 high 25-30$ which means that the total BTC capitalization is reaching for the current "roof".

Has BTC really had that much natural growth supporting what was once a crazy bubble?

... I suppose the halving is coming.

Did you see my swarm client proposal? What you just described is a key part of it - just mentioning since you're "staff"

In addition my swarm node would verify a few addresses, so that once you have a swarm of thousands of them, some are guaranteed to start propagating report-proofs in the case of fraud.

About the warming planets I will just leave this here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-other-planets-solar-system.htm

In short basically very very little is known about most planets and the warming seen on SOME (not even all or most mind you) is often caused by highly elliptical orbits having nothing to do with the sun.

Solar radiance doesn't fit anyway.


As for cosmic rays:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/cosmic-rays-and-global-warming.htm

They are opposite to what they SHOULD be to cause clouds and even ignoring THAT the correlation is very weak with graphs often not lining up at all.


As others have said BTC would have to waste a lot of energy to rival our current financial system.

I think you mean "man made"? Anyway "made made" global warming/change is in fact quite real, see that's why the US is losing a huge amount of its corn to the heat wave, why Greenland is being flooded by all the melting ice in its record summer and why we had negative freak temperatures in the middle of damn summer here.

Usable energy is in fact also limited due to the second law of thermodynamics - though that limit is quite high given the size of the universe. Over use of energy is usually a good indicator that something is wrong.


Luckily BTC does not depend on energy for its security and neither will its energy use necessarily rise with the difficulty.

If energy is scarce then there will be fewer miners and the difficulty will be adjusted DOWN. This will however still be safe since any attacker would ALSO be faced with higher mining/energy costs.

What I programmed in my bachelor (and what the idea in this thread is based on) allows the implementation of most organization core structures.

In other words if you want to do weighted voting of some kind you could set this software up as you wanted it and then LOCK it. After locking it would maintain the rules you originally specified and even you yourself would be unable to change those rules.


The political system (ie not related to the software idea) I have in mind uses voting only as a safe guard in case of really bad leaders, but otherwise focuses on controlling the organizations inside the government and the selection process of new leaders.

This is because people seem unable to choose good leaders in elections due to their stupidity and propaganda, but even given propaganda seem decent at kicking out leaders that mess up.

We could do that with BTC too.

Give people a couple of BTC or so for free and have them sign up with their services. Then by contract they would have to provide said services in exchange of BTC.

The exchange would take ~10% of payments to cover risks (no service provided), if no losses occur this is simply given as new loans.

Services would be made to cost less than the average paycheck to bring back the capital through the exchange.

People would still sign up because A they get free credit and B they may not have a job so the "average paycheck" means little to them.


Not a bad way to create activity in your community if no one is working and no one has cash. Even if all you do is shine up your houses that could create real jobs/sales down the road.

While I agree going BTC only would be a strong statement and doable by down-sizing somewhat they DID just release the "Syrian files" right?

So it's not like they are wasting people's donations exactly. Wikileaks is alive and well as an organization.

I read up on it; in the case of the Weimar republic (the pictures) they were actually forced by other countries due to their loss in the First World War.

They basically treated Germany like we do third world countries today, starving, exploiting and ridiculing them. As today the English/US media covered this up.

There were several revolutions before Hitler came about - the world was basically begging for things to go wrong and Hitler just per chance was one of many that succeeded.

No wonder they never told us THAT in history class. Doesn't excuse the Nazis of course, but damn there's some blame to share there!


Anyway on topic it is said that depressions can be deepened by a deflationary currency as well, could this be true?

I don't believe it too much myself - we have a depression now and the currencies are inflating quite a lot. Are the examples given simply depressions caused by something natural and unrelated to what ever currency is used?

Lets say we have BTC world economy in the future and there is a huge depression, will this make BTC fall out of favor?

A lot of "economy" is basically exploiting of the Earths resources, given that can depressions actually be a good thing now and then?

Lets say there is a market wide bad idea - like today with bailouts of idiot banks - for the market to correct itself all of that has to collapse. This means a depression sooner or later which will last until the NEW elite/businessmen catch up.

Will printing money really help in such a situation? That is what we are doing today, but it will only lead to a greater collapse or hyperinflation.
Now IF the government printed money and massively invested it correctly in the NEW paradigm THAT might actually work. However as you have a market wide bad conception of reality prior to a depression it is unlikely those in power would know what the next paradigm IS.

If my theory is correct it is more optimal to have a short smallish depression with BTC than to exacerbate the problem with "monetary policy" (of any kind) getting in the way. This way you at least avoid the constant risk of hyperinflation.

Any eventual BTC government should instead provide housing, food and basic necessities for its citizens (those who paid voluntary tax). This way people are kept alive while the market re-orients itself and it is a cheap policy compared to many others.