There is not a well-defined difference. 

If I can get hold of someones toothbrush then they clearly could not defend it therefore it was private property. If they try to get it back with assistance from anyone this just secures my claim, so if I am bigger, I win.

OTOH, if a have big steel doors with 32bit codes and a completely automated factory then I can have huge amounts of capital as my legitamate personal property. But if you keep trespassers out of your garden by paying locals with vegetables then you have a government defending your capital?

I'm going to guess that Stalin was totally down with a distinction like this because he could at whim determine which was which in any case that concerned him. Making up false distinctions and backing them with force is evil.


As a matter of fact the place I am living in is 100% both. It would be virtually impossible to defend the part lived in by the owner without defending the parts used for rental income. I'd like to know also how long the homeowner can be away before I can morally stop paying rent. He's actually been gone for 3 weeks and won't be back for another, does this somehow change our agreement?

As a general principle would you say that all the things a person legitimately owns have to be in the same physical location?

That definition is fine, I don't see how it precludes a group of investors from prepaying for Kiba's labor with $650 and letting him pay for his half with that from being called capitalism.

You can call it a bad deal if you want, and I don't necessarily think it's optimal that he put in no money upfront, but it's still capitalism.

He just shrtnd it a little ;-)

Good idea, someone could not read the whole thread and throw something in first.

Capitalism is free people making whatever agreement they want about capital and funding. If some people want to pay for his labor with half the profits from their capital, then so what?

I might be interested.

If you are going to need dollars then I think you need to make the offer as x% of profits for $y.

Of course you can accept payment in btc at whatever rate you expect to be able to get. Well, actually at a worse rate for exchange rate risk because you have to get $1225 at least.

Also, you are presumably going to be adding labor for a long time, but we will get a permanent share of unlimited profit? Perhaps it makes sense to cap investors return at 5-10 times initial investment? This helps us get your incentives right too, if you put a lot of god effort in then you can get to the point of keeping all your labor.

A rough timeline would be nice too. For example, if you only have $400 in a month are you going to keep trying or return investments?

And what about ongoing costs? What is the price of the plastic? Is electricity an issue?

Just some thoughts, I'm interested to hear what people think. It seems like an appropriately sized project to me.

I pledged, but didn't let him hold my money. Not because I had any suspicions, but what is the benefit? I know that I'm trustworthy, I'll just hold it myself. People do die, get brain damage, lose hard drives, etc. I'd actually trust two long time members each with a full copy of the wallet more than just one. Plus then we would know for sure and exactly when we were cheated, for whatever that's worth. Now we don't know if we should feel sorry for a dead guy or angry at a scammer.

I don't know if it will make you feel any better, but if you had been working on the real chain the last few months you would only have a few hundred because the difficulty of your personal chain was way lower than real difficulty.

Call it a transaction number and they'll insist that it be different each time.

Yeah you can't blame them though, they wouldn't want to put a reference to bitcoin on the site and have it come up during their fancy dinners with congressmen.

New registration is not open. It has been suggested that it be opened, but PayPal buying blocked. That seems like a good idea to me, haven't heard from dwdollar about it though.

I like it a lot.

A promise to pay what? By whom? Obviously it is not a promise by anyone to pay anything.

Someone might promise to give you something for a bitcoin, but that isn't what a bitcoin is.

If I build things and give some of them away that doesn't make it part socialism and part capitalism. I decide what to do with all of my property, giving it away is one of my uses for it. Maybe the word "capitalism" has to go, but for whatever reason it just means free market capitalism to me. It seems really obvious that a little bit of freedom doesn't make you free and a little bit of capitalism isn't capitalism. But if most people are using a word differently then I can change, as long as it's consistent.


There isn't some perfect platonic form of property and there will obviously be legitimate disputes. The question is how they will be resolved. If some group of people want to pick some list of arbitrary lengths of time for various items to lose their property-ness I think they'll do badly, but they can try it out and see. Long story short whatever people agree to is fine, if they don't agree they don't have to associate.

It is worse than that though. If you make something and they take it now they are breaking their rule of not possessing things. It is just straight contradictory.

If they answer that they'll just let you be, then it's really clear to me that people will chose to have some things and give some things, and that's capitalism*.

*not corporate fascistic government sponsored capitalism, but simply the having of capital that you created or traded for.

I don't think voluntary socialism is wrong or evil. It's only bad in the sense that it will really suck without a group of non-socialists to leach off of.

I can actually be a little more positive about socialism I guess. My family is completely socialistic. It works well because each of us likes the others about as much as we like ourselves. Also we are in very close open communication all the time, so we can allocate resources pretty well without prices.

So the next step toward large scale socialism is polygamy.

I would be much less baffled by anarcho-socialists if they simply said "In a society where force is not tolerated at all socialism will arise" then I would want to hear why they thought that, what the voluntary transition to it would be, etc. But when they say things like "Property is theft" it just makes no sense. Property is theft... so if I get some propery... you are going to take it?

That's clearly an insufficient argument since you could get rid of 100% of crime by killing everyone.

And how the &$#^ are they going to get rid of property without committing property crime? And if property crime is okay, then there goes that reason for getting rid of it.

In the future I imagine someone designing cool looking bitcoin GUIs and advertising "Now you can keep bitcoins on YOUR OWN computer!" and people will be like "Oh, how does that work..." lol.

Oh, and then people will move their coins off of the wallets and find out they were all fractional reserving it up.

"Anarcho-socialism" is ridiculous. What are you going to do if someone makes something and doesn't give it you? Uh, I guess we'll need a group of people to administer punishments....

Old offer (10/22): I buy Bitcoins with my Poker Stars at a rate of $.09/BTC, up to $500 for now. $5 minimum.