We will hear those arguments repeated over and over again, I was just thinking that maybe we should try to come up with the answers in a wiki-like format.
Or perhaps something like this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=89772 |
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It seems like that blog manually approves all comments. I wonder if anyone else other than Maria will be allowed to reply there.
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Exactly? No. If you get Stefan Molyneux here to make his argument or if you'd like to do it in his stead, I'm more than willing to debate.
I wonder if it would be productive. If I was Molyneux I wouldn't debate someone who started of with "I don't think UPB is worth reading." because "I started reading it, couldn't make much sense of it and gave up." followed by a statement that nobody is willing to do the intellectual work for you. |
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I never finished it. I started reading it, couldn't make much sense of it and gave up. Nobody else has been able to give me a good summary of the argument.
I also notice that nobody has attacked my argument head on so I'm guessing they can't? Isn't that exactly what you're doing? |
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I don't think UPB is worth reading. That's very interesting. What was the flaw that you discovered with his reasoning? |
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As for the argument from morality, all moral claims are opinions. They are preferences, nothing more. You can't say my opinion is wrong any more than I can say yours is wrong. That's because opinions aren't the kinds of things that can be right or wrong. http://www.freedomainradio.com/free/books/FDR_2_PDF_UPB.pdf |
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In the long run the use of a currency as a medium of exchange is the only thing that gives it value.
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It seems like that protocol is more of a better version of Tor and I2P rather than Freenet. Freenet solves a different problem.
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The biggest problem it solves is prior restraint. With Bitcoin it's not possible for any authority to arbitrarily forbid a transaction.
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Being virtually hairless would suggest that primates lived indoors before they lost their hair. If primates could sustain themselves indoors long enough such that they didn't need their hair to protect themselves from the elements, then the hair would lose its necessity. But, WTF? Why? It seems very implausible that a group of primates would travel to such cold environments, find and/or create shelter indoors, survive that way for so many generations and were able to sustain themselves for so long that generational intellect developed to the point where they could, for example, create fire and no longer need their hairy coats. And, if they didn't travel to such cold environments, then why would they lose their hair anyway? They'd be in warm enough environments where they didn't need to move indoors, didn't need to develop the intellect to make fire, etc. Hairlessness is an adaptation which allows us to cool down more efficiently. This allowed early humans to catch prey by running them to exhaustion. Humans, he said, have several adaptations that help us dump the enormous amounts of heat generated by running. These adaptations include our hairlessness, our ability to sweat, and the fact that we breathe through our mouths when we run, which not only allows us to take bigger breaths, but also helps dump heat.
“We can run in conditions that no other animal can run in,” Lieberman said.
While animals get rid of excess heat by panting, they can’t pant when they gallop, Lieberman said. That means that to run a prey animal into the ground, ancient humans didn’t have to run further than the animal could trot and didn’t have to run faster than the animal could gallop. All they had to do is to run faster, for longer periods of time, than the slowest speed at which the animal started to gallop.
All together, Lieberman said, these adaptations allowed us to relentlessly pursue game in the hottest part of the day when most animals rest. Lieberman said humans likely practiced persistence hunting, chasing a game animal during the heat of the day, making it run faster than it could maintain, tracking and flushing it if it tried to rest, and repeating the process until the animal literally overheated and collapsed.
Most animals would develop hyperthermia — heat stroke in humans — after about 10 to 15 kilometers, he said.
By the end of the process, Lieberman said, even humans with their crude early weapons could have overcome stronger and more dangerous prey. Adding credence to the theory, Lieberman said, is the fact that some aboriginal humans still practice persistence hunting today, and it remains an effective technique. It requires very minimal technology, has a high success rate, and yields a lot of meat.
Lieberman said he envisions an evolutionary scenario where humans began eating meat as scavengers. Over time, evolution favored scavenging humans who could run faster to the site of a kill and eventually allowed us to evolve into persistence hunters. Evolution likely continued to favor better runners until projectile weapons made running less important relatively recently in our history.
“Endurance running is part of a suite of shifts that made Homo [the genus that includes modern people] human,” Lieberman said. |
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Like Crypto-Anarchism? Then use Sone instead of Facebook! |
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Hi,
I was reading about US health care system, and I want to be sure to understand it well. I have a few questions:
-Basically, you pay for health care. If you go see the doctor, you pay the bill, if you have an operation, you pay the bill like any other normal bill from any other service, correct?
-Since health care cost can be insane, you have insurance companies, who offer to pay the bill in exchange of a premium. I suppose they are like any other insurance companies(like home insurance, car insurance or life insurance). It seems they offer a good deal for big business, so it's really valuable to get a job with health care. Are all these insurances companies are for-profit organization? Is there is some sort of cooperative insurance or government insurance you can buy? Or the market is completely dominated by for-profit insurance companies?
-Who owns the hospitals? Are they owned by the government? Or are they private property of for-profit organization? Do you have any "community" hospital or hospital owned by a cooperative?
-Can you buy stock of health insurance companies? Is there an open market for that, or they are only privately-owned companies? Is is the same thing about hospital(in the case that they are for-profit organization)?
I think it could be a wonderful market for speculation, but I want to be sure to understand how it works.
Thanks!
The US has a fascist monstrosity of a health care system where bureaucrats make the real decisions but so-called private companies implement all of them. It only looks like a free market if you don't pay attention to the government controlling a significant majority of the spending and don't look at how they use tools like the tax code to push the system in the direction they want, to the determent of everyone except their cronies. Believe it or not the US once had affordable, high quality health care before the government decided to "help" but the people who remember that are dying out. |
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bit-pay offers payment processing for 501(c)(3) organizations without charge and, as they claim, "ZERO Bitcoin Liability". Maybe worth a shot for Tony to approach them directly suggesting and explaining this option. We could also have a trusted member of the community collect donations for Wikimedia Foundation to be payed out as soon as they officially list Bitcoin as donation option. I don't think it would change anything though, because in the end they are probably just afraid to be associated with Bitcoin for whatever reason  Wikimedia Foundation does not need payment processing. What they need is donation processing, which is slightly different. They need to be able to set up an account and, instead of getting a shopping cart plugin, just have a bitcoin address for which all received funds (minus fees) will be autoconverted to USD and deposited for them. Then they have no more excuse for not accepting bitcoin donations. |
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With the current fee structure, i think it will be a long time before Bitcoin, not to mention Bit-Pay, is widely accepted. It's simply too expensive to convert fiat to Bitcoin, not to mention too complicated and time-consuming for the average consumer. So, even if pawn shops accept B, it's not cost-effective for the consumer to pay in B instead of paper, credit cards, and other current devils we already know. Right now, there are so many expensive middlemen, such as BitInstant, Bit-pay, etcetera, that B is more costly to use than credit cards, not to mention cash. Calculate for yourself how ridiculously expensive it is just to get fiat in your pocket to an xchange via this CVS/Walmart/blahBlah method. You might win OR lose due to the large xchange rate fluctuations. Plus, unlike paper, it's not anonymous whatsoever... Due to these costs, i am done with using large xchanges to buy B, unless i absolutely have to. In the existing environment, we simply replace expensive middlemen like credit card companies, with new expensive middlemen, such as Bitinstant, ZipZap, BitPay, bitcoin xchanges, etc. The governments are allowing it, because the average consumer would have to be a fool to use B instead of fiat, and pay the Bitcoin middlemen. So, B isn't a threat to fiat now, or in the foreseeable future. IIIFFF and WHEN it ever becomes one, the governments will just make it so that the middlemen have to charge even higher fees to xchange fiat to B... Until i can get paid in B, i would only buy B privately, and you all know that's not easy, cheap or convenient either for most people. There isn't a private exchanger within 100's of kliks of me. Good luck with widespread adoption given the current xchange middlemen!  The developing world is the key. There are a lot of people who don't have access to modern banking and/or are getting gouged by remittance services. Once bitcoins start flowing into those countries all of a sudden they'll have the ability to purchase products and services from overseas they couldn't before and that's how exporters in the developed countries start getting paid in bitcoins. |
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I like to listen to stuff that meets the basic criteria of music. It must have a rhythm and changing tones, in other words: melody.
Not everything that is called music actually contains a melody. I've noticed certain types of dubstep to be a particularly notorious offenders.
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