What BitTorrent did to movies and music is ILLEGAL. Not as bad, but that example is like the "silk road" example we have to hear about over and over in the negative press.
Using the email/standard mail example is much more accurate although not as "sexy"
If BitTorrent is so illegal, why is the BitTorrent company still around? http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=BitTorrent_company - this is an argument like guns don't kill, people kill. If you're trying to explain what a gun does to someone who has never heard of one, do you avoid telling them they are useful for killing people simply because that's illegal? Or because you are afraid you'll be promoting murder? No, not if your purpose is to convey an understanding of what makes a gun valuable. Not all torrents are illegal either. Yeah, but the vast majority of torrents are illegal, and they certainly have a negative connotation in the mind of most anyone who doesn't actively use it. It's a correlation to be avoided. |
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Well, there's been 0.6511 (rounded) BTC in fees in the last 10 blocks. Extrapolate that out, and you have around 15 BTC/day in fees, or about $105.
Not going to do much, but it's something.
The problem would be, in getting everyone to switch over to a client that actually allows sending the fees to an outside address like that. You could cause some nasty forks and significant devaluation of Bitcoin if it doesn't go smoothly.
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Besides, there is a long term solution for the lost coins anyway. Eventually, hashing hardware will continue to increase until SHA256 alone is no longer secure. Long before this, another algo will be swapped into Bitcoin in it's place (or in addition to SHA256, the code in question is modular as well as there are already two 'modules' to use, both just happen to be SH256 at the moment). Eventually, everyone who still has funds are going to move those funds to addresses using the more secure algos, and the lost coins will be exposed for being the only addresses left on the blockchain using oly SHA256. That's when the 'salvage' process begins, and the treasure hunters of the electronic currency age will be doing everything that they can to be the first to force a SHA256 'collision' against those (now known) lost addresses.
I hadn't thought of that aspect... very true indeed! |
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So you prefer the current system because it includes the threat of jail time rather than the libertarian threat of  (honestly I don't know what comes after lawsuit for a professional con artist). The libertarian threat of nothing. People here are arguing all IP should be abolished, so counterfeiting would no longer exist or be a crime. It would become a perfectly legal profession. Yes, I prefer the system where counterfeiting is a crime. Counterfeiting should not be a crime (it is both non-violent and does not involve the physical property of others). However, if you promise -as in contract- to deliver a product originating from another manufacturer, and you deliver a "fake" or "copy", then you would be in breach of contract and could be "punished" (put in your flavor of restitution here). But it doesn't matter if you ruin one company's reputation by selling an inferior product under their brand name? Your theory of how the world should work just sounds more and more screwed up the more I listen to it. I can't imagine any modern world actually functioning with the sort of ruleset you propose. That said, I'm going to move on from this thread now. |
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So, we could say it hits its half life in 2033(ish) (last block above 0.50.... ish)
I suppose that's one way to look at it. Hopefully by then miners will be relying more on fees than the block reward for their profits. Block 6929998 will produce a reward of 0.00000001 btc, block 6929999 will produce none. Only about 6.2M blocks to go (at an average of ten minutes a block, that's over 117 years from now. I suppose there's a chance bitcoin won't even still be around by then....)
Wow, it gets too late and I can't even do basic math. With about 6.77M blocks to go, that's over 128 years from now... past 2140 A.D. And the blockchain will be 100GB by then, assuming the same level of transactions as we have today...! |
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There was another thread equal to this one that's almost 100 pages long that already covers what we're just getting started into. I'm sure we can all dispense with the formalities, read that, and move on.
If you're going to have private property rights then they will conflict with the logic of intellectual property. They are incompatible concepts. Any amount of argumentation about the justification of the benefits to society don't make the idea any more logical, consistent or relevant, and they certainly don't level the playing field any. In fact, they do the opposite.
If it isn't logically consistent, somebody's going to get burned. It will always happen. History is riddled with people who can't seem to make the connection between the yours, mine and ours concept. You muddle that up, and society and your precious investments will all eventually go down the drain. The system has already been gamed. Special privileges given for special persons backed by a powerful political structure is always going to result in a mixed bag.
I just ask that everybody respect everybody else's person and property. Not real difficult to comprehend. Let's not turn it into rocket science.
Nice way of avoiding a response. I have no problem with respecting everyone else's person and property. - I do have a problem with someone else selling a product that is exactly the same as mine. - I do have a problem with someone else selling a product that looks exactly the same as mine, and under my brand name, but has reduced functionality, thus ruining my brand. - I do have a problem with pharmaceutical companies not being able to recover the costs of medical research through 14-year monopolies provided by patents, thus severely limiting the amount of medical research done in the first place. - I do have a problem with movies and music not having protection, as it will mean a lower quality and selection of movies and music will be available to watch. - I do have a problem with companies not wanting to innovate because their ideas would be stolen by competitors. I don't really care about your theoretical conflict of private property rights and intellectual property rights. They are incompatible, yes, but I am fine with the current compromise between the two. I don't really see how the rest of what you said is even relevant to this discussion without specific examples. |
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But your views of not having IP protection would directly result in a lack of innovation in the drug and pharmaceutical world. How else am I supposed to take that besides you supporting a lack of innovation in the medical world?
I don't think innovation would go away. People adjust their behavior and their tactics based on the prevailing market in which their environed. If everybody was free to emulate their neighbor, a lot more people would be trying things and spending a lot less time trying to set traps for the competition to fall into. There would likely be more tinkering, adjusting, inventing and incremental innovation as opposed to worrying about being sued because some yahoo half a continent away who happenstanced upon a concept before you and decided to get governments "blessing" to prevent and exclude all others from it's use now has you dead to rights. Now you're in violation with the law, and you may not even know it. The same IP laws can be used to "harm" others too. What if I invented a cancer cure pill and I were able to patent it (legal exclusion and proscription)? Let's also suppose that it's relatively easy to replicate. I just happened to figure it out and you didn't. So I decide instead of making a bazillion dollars once, I decide I enjoy watching people suffering and dying before their time. There's always a flipside to every coin. Why would people try to innovate if they can't make money off of it? Anyone with an invention would just keep it to themselves or a big company would just rip off their idea and put it on store shelves before they were even halfway to market with it. People would be much less likely to innovate if their ideas wouldn't be protected. In fact, I would expect to see a lot more fakes, ripoffs, and copycats than anything. They're easy to make, and easy to make money off of. We don't see a lot of them right now because law protects the rights of the company with the "real" product. Can you imagine how many iPhone-like phones would come out that looked and acted exactly like the normal iPhone, but had less functionality? Maybe lower battery life, or a slower processor? But the average consumer wouldn't notice, so the copy-caters would make money, while Apple gets a ruined reputation from mistakes made in the copycat products. Yeah, sounds lovely. Patent research is something that any inventor puts time into before going into production, or even heavily investing in creating a new product. It's not hard to do (the patent database is publicly available), and it ensures you don't run into such a situation where someone across the continent invented the same thing you already did. As far as I know, that sort of situation hasn't arisen (where medicine has not been created after research proved a success), so I don't know why you are using it as an example. |
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Because I don't want to go rifling through a bunch of random biased websites, can you concisely tell me why IP laws stifle innovation? |
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I'll volunteer to be custodian, if people trust me. I only hold two shares of the "company", but am definitely interested in seeing justice prevail here.
$150 is what, 22 BTC? Shouldn't be too difficult to come up with.
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I haven't seen any new Bitcoin articles pop up on news.google, so I'm guessing that if any reporters have taken an interest in it, they've at least put it on the back burner for now. Bigger fish to fry, and all of that.
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If you're ok with no new drugs being developed, well, I can't argue against that. Me, I rather like corporations spending billions of dollars on research so I can live healthier and longer.
Don't put words in my mouth. I never said I'm ok with no new drugs being developed. I just said it's your business what you do with your stuff (physical, not ethereal). Me knowing how you did it and then acting based on that knowledge, should not be punished. That's a violation of speech, a violation of property rights and a violation of my person (you may imprison me if we disagree, merely for disagreement sake). I'll respect your opinion if you respect mine. Me knowing something about you and yours and then doing something about it is not tantamount to theft and piracy. It isn't proportional punishment. But your views of not having IP protection would directly result in a lack of innovation in the drug and pharmaceutical world. How else am I supposed to take that besides you supporting a lack of innovation in the medical world? |
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How do you feel about corporations holding patents on genes everyone have? They didn't develop a new gene they just found one that already existed in nature but since their medicine targets that gene no one else can do research on it without licensing the rights to a naturally occurring protein. Intellectual property laws are tricky. How do you ensure people can profit from their ideas while making sure certain things belong to everyone? With the arts in seems that if the artists is good people will reward them. What we have now days is a system rigged to make a few big studio execs extremely wealthy while trying to short change the people that actually wrote, filmed, recorded, edited the product. With the internet the main barrier to entry is removed. You don't need a factory pumping out cassettes and CDs. You just need a website and a reputation for a good product and you can be successful without having to sign a contract with some faceless corporation hoping you get 2% of net. Some people are always going to want something for nothing. The problem is when you think of those people as lost sales. They weren't going to give you money no matter how cheap your product is. Focus on quality and what your fans want and you should be fine. You'll make money on tour and from selling merch. You know, actually working. The days of recording something once and expecting never have to lift a finger again are over. The internet is a great level playing field if you know how to use it.
Gene patents are really silly. The barrier to entry for music production being broken down is really true. You don't need more than a few hundred dollars worth of hardware and software to make an album that really sounds pretty good. Add a couple of grand, and you're almost at the same level as professional, and the big bucks are only spent on mixing it all down properly. But that said, what about people who just like to record music at home, then sell it on the internet. Do they just take donations? Or forget about making any money from music at all? FWIW, I'm one of those people. Terrified of playing any sort of music in front of people, but many people love listening to it, so I record it, and sell albums online. In your scenario, with no IP, I would have no way to make any money off of my music. There are a number of articles out there presenting powerful arguments as to how the concept of "intellectual property" actually stifles innovations. (I may dig some of my favorites up if anyone actually cares to view them, and time permitting.) The two biggest objections people first think of to eliminating IP are movies and drugs. But with drugs, most of the cost is actually artificially inflated via the government. And as far as movies, well, I don't know that I'd call most of what Hollywood puts out "innovative."
But beyond that is the principle, which is far more important than one or two industries. Is it right to punish people for copying something that the designer allowed them to see? If the answer is no, but we do it anyway because "society benefits," then I would just agree to disagree... many wrongs can be committed in the cause of benefiting society. (If the answer is supposedly "yes", regardless of the societal benefit/detriment, then I think there might be some trouble defending that view.)
My view: following the logical, consistently correct course of action always ultimately leads to mankind's betterment as a whole, even if in the short term we can't fully see it.
The concept of ideas as property is inconsistent with the concept of physical property which we have absolute rights to. And since I find the concept of arbitrary property rights, as determined by some authority, to be rather disturbing, I choose to accept that the concept of ideas as property is inherently flawed, and ultimately a detriment for mankind.
I enjoy the average Hollywood blockbuster, myself. I'm not sure why there's always so much hate piled on them. I enjoy them a heck of a lot better than most low-budget films with poor quality acting and cheesy special effects. I would surely miss the caliper of Hollywood movies and TV shows were IP protection to go to the wayside. I'd like to hear more about how most of the cost of drugs is because of the government. And even if the government is the cause of 90% of the cost of drugs, that 10% is still going to be billions of dollars that someone has to pay, or the research isn't going to get done. |
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If a 51% attack originated from deepbit with a DDOS on the other major pools, then miners would probably stop using any major pools to begin with. Lots of mini pools would crop up, as the importance of the issue would be fully realized. I can see continuing to use the currency afterward, provided there were no longer any pools that could be used in a similar attack.
Also, I want to make clear that I'm not suggesting any of the pool operators would be involved. I'm suggesting that control of their pool is taken from them in some fashion. Right, I understand. |
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IP is just another externality, and would be solved the same way libertarianism would solve any other externality: insurance. For a ridiculously simplified example, let's say a group of people have health insurance and also some disease. The insurance companies would rather not pay all these sick people, so they offer to buy insurance for all their customers on the open market. An entrepreneur pays to have the cure developed in secret, agrees to the offers in place by the various insurance companies, and then releases the cure for "free". The entrepreneur now makes massive profits, enough to pay off any loans for insurance trades and also the cost of development.
In effect, people are paying for their own cure, but a free market allows them to easily coordinate. You COULD try to be a free rider and hope everyone else buys insurance, but if no cure is developed you don't get any insurance payoff. This only works if transaction costs are low (Coase theorem), so IMHO libertarians should be working on projects to reduce them. The burden is on us to prove this is possible!
Ok, I can see that working. And this assumes that the disease is something that wasn't known at the time of signing up for insurance, right? What about the people who know they have the disease before signing up for insurance? Or diseases that are with people from birth? The insurers could just not accept them because it's a pre-existing condition, and the research would be slower or non-existent than it currently is in today's market. |
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True...
I don't see it as very likely, but probably more likely than someone procuring their own hardware to stage an attack.
Honestly, I don't see it as very likely either. But the fact that it's possible is troublesome. /tinfoilhaton Large governments intent on keeping their power have done stranger, more difficult things in the past. I guess it depends if you think Bitcoin is disruptive to the "powers that be" or not. Or if it "may" be disruptive in the future. I've certainly read enough forum posts suggesting it is. Absolutely. If a large government were to successfully disrupt Bitcoin via a 51% attack even just once, using their own hardware to do it, I can't imagine continuing to use it. Governments just have too many resources to continue attacks, so I wouldn't be able to trust any future transactions made in the system. If a 51% attack originated from deepbit with a DDOS on the other major pools, then miners would probably stop using any major pools to begin with. Lots of mini pools would crop up, as the importance of the issue would be fully realized. I can see continuing to use the currency afterward, provided there were no longer any pools that could be used in a similar attack. |
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Yes, of course I'm serious. I don't care if you make a profit or not. It isn't my business. It isn't my risk. It isn't my stuff. I'm not interested in getting involved in your bureaucracy. Leave me out of it. I'll do my stuff, you do yours. However, if I like what you do, I might compete with you in the market. I may very closely emulate what you do. That's what competition does: emulate, simulate, mimic, copy, and innovate etc. All of those things. It's my stuff, and I should be able to make it do and appear exactly how I want.
Your example is tainted. You don't have a free market, so I don't know if those numbers actually mean anything. For all I know it might cost $100 dollars to make drugs. Who cares? Again, stick to the principles. If your principle logically violates another principle, maybe you should be more introspective.
If you're ok with no new drugs being developed, well, I can't argue against that. Me, I rather like corporations spending billions of dollars on research so I can live healthier and longer. |
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I would definitely be gone from Bitcoin if there was a 51% attack. It would kill value (down to the pennies of BTC) because no one could trust that their transactions wouldn't be reversed. And once that happens, nearly all mining activities would cease (it would no longer be profitable, at all), making it incredibly easy to continue 51% attacks down the road. Bitcoin would be pointless if anyone with malicious intentions was ever able to acquire more than 51% of the hashing power put towards Bitcoin, because it would just snowball into non-existence.
And you think it is inevitable? Based on what? Who has > 10 TH/s of hashing power they could stage an attack with?
It's not that bad. We just have to inform users to ignore the malicious chain. Figuring out which chain is malicious shouldn't be that difficult. You don't need 10 TH/s to perform a 51% attack. All you need is access to deepbit and ddos to slush and btcguild. True... I don't see it as very likely, but probably more likely than someone procuring their own hardware to stage an attack. |
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Easy, everyone who benefits directly pays the R&D costs up front, kind of like how artists were patronized historically, except instead of one king backing an artist, all of their fans would. If you don't feel like patronizing an artist then don't, but then maybe they stop making that music that you like... same for medicines etc. If there is nobody willing to fund the research, then it doesn't get done. If that makes society as a whole poorer, then there is an automatic incentive for society to improve.
Kind of like how there are various campaigns to bring in donations towards cancer research? Ok, I get it. But it won't bring in enough money to pay for the current level of research being done. Case in point - just look at some of the drugs with higher prices. Some pills that people take cost $100/dose, and they have to take them daily. It doesn't cost $100 to produce the pill, but that is simply the price to help recover the cost of the research that went along with it. Therefore, if the research hadn't already been done, and everyone who is currently taking the pill instead had the option to donate $100/day towards research, I doubt the research would ever get done. Is someone with some uncurable disease going to donate $3,000/month to an organization doing research for their problem, when there is no guarantee of a successful solution? I seriously doubt it. But, they'll probably be much more willing to pay for a for-sure solution that they can benefit from immediately. Sorry, but the potential for corporate profits is still the best way to motivate teams of people into spending hundreds of millions of dollars on drug research. Even people with life-threatening diseases will likely find better use of their money than sending it to a research agency that may or may not have a solution for them 10 years down the road. |
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Let me ask you this. If I spent a billion dollars engineering and developing artistic manure hills, should I force you to compensate me for my effort?
Force me? no of course not. Whats that got to do with anything? now you answer my question; who will be willing to invest billions of $'s on R&D to develop new medicine if anyone can just copy the formula after you've found some new miracle drug ? Why should I respond to a non-sequitur? You're not talking principle you're talking price. It's not the same. EDIT: Do you respect private property? Seriously? Do you have no clue of how businesses work? If I am big pharma, and I want to research a new cure for cancer, then I do some cost-benefit analysis. Something like this: Cost to research: $100M Probability of coming up with a drug that works: 10% Potential sale price per dose: $1000 Potential total sales: $1.5B Risk-inclusive profit (loss). $1.5B x (10%) - $100M = $50M Now, if anyone else can copy the formula once the research is completed, then big pharma has to sell their drug for less to remain competitive. Suddenly, the equation starts looking like this: Potential sale price per dose: $25 Potential total sales: $37.5M Risk-inclusive profit (loss). $37.5M x (10%) - $100M = ($96.25M) Suddenly, no one wants to do pharmaceutical research because it's going to lose them money, every time. So who does research for new drugs if there is no profit to be made? Taxpayers? Or do you have something else in mind? |
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if you want to have ownership of idea/music/copiable KEEP IT TO YOURSELF IN YOUR HEAD.
So, you think, for instance writers should all get a day job and write books for free as a gift to society? The same for patent laws; for sure they are widely abused now and something should be done about that, but the basic concept that you can protect what is potentially a life long investment in to some invention makes perfect sense to me. Who is going to spend billions developing new drugs if they cant be patented? The government? Exactly this. Without protection for people who create IP, there will be no "good" IP. Music can only be created so well on a volunteer basis. Movies produced on a shoestring budget (because no one pays for IP anymore) will look like movies produced on a shoestring budget. No pharmaceutical companies will spend money on drug research, because the moment their "formula" was released into the wild, anyone could make it, and they'd effectively lose however many hundreds of millions spent on researching the drugs. No companies will innovate with new products, because their competitors could simply steal the design and sell it for less. If your goal is to kill all innovation and creative works on the planet, except that which is created in someone's garage or as their hobby, then sure, go ahead and abolish protection of IP. |
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