Amen brother.  You said it better than I ever could.

Now, steering this convo back on topic.

Myrkul, I fully agree with you.  The damage that people in power make would be indeed significantly limited if the people who get to be in power were fully randomized.  That alone would have the impact of diminishing the amount of good-for-nothing-but-lying sociopaths in power, since we wouldn't be doing a stupid ritual to select the best liars every X years.

I don't know what you mean by "your case".  As far as I remember, I came back to this thread and you were accusing certain people of "cynical name-calling" -- off-topic for this thread -- when they tell the truth.

Now, in case you somehow managed to post without reading what we're talking about here: what we're saying here is that democracy is lousy.  Having accepted that premise, some of us are proposing a better mechanism to select who will have maniacal powers, and some of us are saying that we'd better off not giving maniacal powers to anyone at all.

That is the topic of this thread.

If you want to stick to the topic, your contributions are welcome.  IF instead you just barged in to yell "CYNICAL NAMECALLERS DERP", then please use the door and remove yourself from here.

Thanks!  :-)

I identify as anarcho-capitalist / voluntaryist, and I can assure you none of this is true for me, especially the vigilantism part.  Ugh.

You know, it's hard to have a conversation about anything when the other person has already imputed me a number of false beliefs.  I can only imagine this is how it feels to be an atheist trying to talk with a religious person who is already convinced that the atheist has babies for breakfast.

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As for your observations on parenting and violence.  Allowing a child to run across the street is egregiously bad enough parenting as it is -- you are the parent, you are the one informed that cars can kill people, you are the responsible one, not the child.  On top of that parenting fail, brutalizing the child afterwards for your mistake is even worse parenting.  It only "works" insofar as terror "works".

Let's be fair: if you are doing any of this, you're not beating your child up to "teach" him anything.  You're beating him because you're angry at your failure and you have a sadistic streak in you: beating up your child feels good and it's easy to get away with it (your kid is too weak to bash your face in self-defense).  That's it, no high falutin' nonsense excuses about "discipline" needed.

As long as we have people thinking that beating children up qualifies as "education" or "discipline", we will have adults thinking that beating other adults up qualifies as "justice" or "law enforcement".

"Communication" aka "give me free money or else someone will put you in a cage".

Somebody answer the phone!

TIL: I never knew truth could be "slanderous".

I concede that maybe you won't be civil enough.  I, my loved ones, and pretty much everyone I interact with on a daily basis, will be, because we are civil already, and we are civil not because but despite threats.  We civil human beings outnumber people like, perhaps, you, probably 25 to 1.

My observation to you: if you fear death in such a world order without violent authorities, perhaps you would like to learn to be civil before it takes place?  Since not being civil will certainly cost you your life in ancap society, it pays off to learn civility.

This is actually a very good response. I concede.

Well said.  This very, very obvious point is often missed.

This is the nature of all legislation -- lawmakers pretend to pass laws to increase people's freedoms and well-being, but in reality the laws do the very opposite.

I feel like this is the most important and key aspect of the whole conversation.  If the goal of voting is to empower such gang of thugs (it is), then the conversation should be about removing the need for these thugs, rather than finding a new way to select new thugs for the gang.

This theft might or might not happen in the future, but at least Bitcoin will have prevented the biggest heist of all: inflation.  ;-)  In my book, that's progress.

You all who want the ISO to recognize XBC as a currency / ticker symbol are under the delusion that bringing facts to these people will persuade them.

They rejected it the first time, and their rejection was entirely irrational and their excuses had zero factual basis.

What makes you all think that this time will be any different?

What does it matter to you that you have to beg for strangers' approval?

What does it matter if some strangers say "yes, XBC is a thing"?

Well said.  Anyone who continues to insist in saying "Bitcoin baaaaaaaaad" can start a new thread, thanks.

'?
More to the point, does Bitcoin even need to replace government currencies?  Who cares, right?  Bitcoin is sound money, superior to government currencies, so it'll replace the currency used in the market, or most of it, or only a significant chunk of it.  This will be the first case of good money displacing bad money :-)

Thank you very much, guys.  I welcome your appreciation.

I'd already posted in the comment stream of the article.  I posted once more, and here's the text of my comment in case the Staazi doesn't publish it:

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Dmytri,

You're right when you say that people doing business as "the State" can certainly threaten everyone else into paying up, whether they transact in Bitcoin or seashells.  Nobody contested that.

With one condition: for them to threaten anyone, first they need to be aware of some activity that (in their mind) justifies their threats, and Bitcoin (plus prudent behavior on the part of the activity's participants) makes that pretty much impossible for them.  No one can punish what they can't find.

And that's just great!  That's exactly what we want.  That is why Bitcoin doesn't need to replace fiat currency.  Bitcoin can be used to hide people's economic activities from this mafia.  Make no mistake, this is a deliberate design decision in Bitcoin. This decision will eventually de-fund and weaken this mafia you speak of.

Of course, again, some of your conclusions about how Bitcoin can't replace fiat currency are true (even if the premises you use to arrive at them are completely wrong).  Public money may or may not continue to exist, but there will inevitably come a time when nobody will use it, because a better alternative -- Bitcoin -- has arrived.  It happened in the Roman Republic, it happened in Zimbabwe, and it will happen here too.

Isn't that just fantastic?

Agreed.

You know, it's hard to combat mythologies like these, because the inventors of these myths often aren't the ones doing the brunt of the effort of propagating them -- that would be the useful idiots like Dmytri who believe what they are told blindly.

Take ΅the origin of money is tribute" as an example.  This truth-bearing statement is very much obviously a lie (and also a myth because people like Dmitry believe in it without any valid evidence to support his belief).  At some point, when Dmitry was told this lie, he just believed this lie at face value and incorporated it into his belief system.  At no point in time did he bother to question or fact-check the lie against any number of facts already widely available.

The result of this pattern of ingestion of lies: when people like Dmitry talk about any subject, they explicitly (or, worse, implicitly) fill in lies as established premises in their arguments, therefore coloring and sabotaging every single possible thought they could experience about reality and share with others.  Furthermore, the very confidence with which they express their unsubstantiated and false premises as unquestionable truths acts as reinforcement.  Sort of how "which president is the 'good' one?" implicitly establishes the unsubstantiated premise that "having a president is good / mandatory / inevitable" without actually saying it.

The result of that link in the chain of lies: people who consume this kind of superstitious garbage read arguments like Dmitry's and bellyfeel "well, perhaps something in the argument might be questionable, but surely the initial premises must be correct", reinforcing the myths as time goes by.

This is convenient for the liars who make up these myths, because the useful idiots genuinely believe the lies and repeat them to one another, which makes them that much more convincing when they spread the lies, and that much more difficult to accuse them of corruption and venality.

All of this reminds me of how people remember they learned about their pet lies.  They remember the lies as truths that somehow must be true because everybody around them has heard of them and pretty much accepts them.  What they don't remember is that teachers (or other authority figures like priests) told them these lies when they were children, and threatened them with punishment if they refused to believe them.  Since their brains weren't fully developed, they can't remember the threats attached to the lies -- they only remember the lies as truths.  This is the tried-and-true process mechanism that all religions (including statism) have used to spread their poison, it's very effective, and it's still going on.

Our job is so much harder than theirs.  They get to use threats to "convince" children to believe in lies ("God/vernment loves you", "when God/vernment forces you to give them money that's charity", "when you don't obey or give money to God/vernment you are being a bad boy", "God/vernment is good when they smite people who refuse to pay and obey").  We're limited to using reason and evidence to try and extirpate these cancers rooted in adults carrying them decades ago.

Good ones.