It doesn't matter who is participating in the fraud, or who is taking risks, which banks don't as the past two years should have highlighted.

It's legalized fraud because it was fraud before 1913 when it was legalized.  A pretty straight forward logic, really.

You understand incorrectly.  Capitalism (the economic principle) says nothing at all about the actual ownership of the means of production (i.e. capital) as we understand it in the modern world, but the possession of that capital is central.  In the former Soviet Union, the truck drivers didn't own the trucks, but they did hold possession and were often known to make sidetrips to transport things off the books in exchange for cash (or mafia favors, black market items, etc).  That's capitalism because the important distinction is that who keeps the 'fruits of labor', not who owns the capital.  Capitalism, the political ideology, does say much about ownership, property rights and contract laws.

No one can say for certain that no one died due to Y2K, only that not a lot of people died.

He might, but it's still best not to make verifiying that too easy for the feds.  I want them to spend as much time spinning their wheels as possible.

Sounds like it.  An agorist is a 'revolutionary' libertarian who uses counter economics to undermine the government by starving it of it's sources of support, but largely without initiating violence.

Once you have thought it through, you sound like you might be an agorist.

Read books, not websites.  Start with Whatever Happened to Penny Candy by Rich Mayberry and followed by Economics in One Lesson.  Both should be available at the public library.

In the modern world, Capitalism is a political ideology that is separate from it's economic definition, but the US hasn't really honored the political ideology for at least 40 years.  It's just taken this long for the public to begin to realize that something is amiss.  Capitalism, as an economic principle, is a description of economic reality.  It is this definition that Marx understood, and desired to overcome.  When people are free to exchange without interference, there is capitalism, which existed even in the Soviet Union on it's darkest day.  When the society is intentionally set up to encourage this, it is Capitalism.

Even more ironic is the idea that a political spectrum based upon the physical make-up of any national political body could reasonably represent anti-statists anywhere.  Almost as ironic as hearing a political candidate refer to himself as an anarchist.

Mostly, but not quite.  Rallies also help to combat the first meme that I mentioned above by dispelling the belief that those who quietly oppose the ruling class are part of a impotently small minority. 

Just because there is a wikipedia entry, doesn't it make it so, necessarily.  That's a classic logical fallacy, I believe it's often called the "appeal to authority".

Not that your opposition offered much of a rational argument either.

Hmm, I really would like to see this question debated.   "Is economic (wage) slavery actually slavery?"

Young man, you seriously overestimate the power of an unpopular government.  The greatest tool of control available to any government is the meme that the government represents the will of the people, followed closely by the meme that the government's collective force exceeds that of those who would oppose it.  Vary rarely has either of those conditions actually been proven true once put to the test.

If you wish to succeed, delete the above post, and refrain from making such direct statements on openly accessable forums that otherwise archive your statements.

Really, someone needs to put up a simple machines forum as a hidden service in TOR, and then PM me the address.

Oh, thank you!  And your quite welcome.


Although there is nothing wrong with anything you said in this post, bear in mind that the act of securing 50% of the generation is no small task even for a cartel with nation-state resources, and maintaining that majority is vastly more difficult.  I won't say that it is impossible, but I would say that the odds that any single nation or private group acting in concert could maintain such an escalating 'generator war' against not only the existing and/or future bitcoin community, but also the generating capacities of nations or other private/political groups who have something to gain by opposing the desires of the cartel/nation attempting the takeover would be somewhere close to the odds of a verifiable bitcoin address collision within my lifespan.

Which is to say, slim to none.

It's just the Bitcoin Cyber Monday Fire Sale, happens every year.  Didn't you get the flyer?  It'll probably come in the mail on Tuesday, you know how the postal unions work.

The Federal Reserve did what central banks always do, which is manipulate the monetary base to favor a very small minority insider class.  That's not at all special to the Great Depression.  What was different was that Congress & the Executive Branch operated under the (particularly damaging) idea that the markets were something that were 'broken' and could be fixed by the right kind of adjustments.  Some even operated under the (false) assumption that those who managed the Federal Reserve were there to actually help.  There were tariffs imposed upon imports from China (sound familiar?) to protect domestic producers, and programs to destroy livestock in order to support prices.  In the end, however, the will of the market can only be delayed, not avoided outright; so the deflation (the direct result of the destruction of credit outstanding due to defaults, not the deliberate reduction of the monetary base by the Federal Reserve) continued; but the suffering of the public was exacerbated by the misguided attempts by members of the political class to fix a socio-economic problem with political solutions.  In the end, most historians credit WWII with pulling the US out of the depression, but that was just because the political class was largely too busy with the war effort to continue to screw with the economic system.  It is the uncertainty of political intervention that delays a recovery more than anything else, because if investors don't know what claptrap Congress might try to pull next, they tend not to risk their capital.  Political uncertainty adds much risk to the markets, which is part of the reason that most 3rd world nations have real difficulty attracting investments, even when their dictator is known to be particularly friendly to business interests.


I am free to do anything that I wish, including nothing.  It's not a concern of mine if you believe me or learn anything.  In fact, it's better if you don't believe me.  feel free to prove me wrong, if you can, and you will learn vastly more on your own than I could teach you on an online forum; whether you succeed or fail.

Indeed...

desertislandgame.com

That is not to say that global trade is always the way to go.  In a post peak oil world, the 1000 mile salad is unlikely to be able to continue to compete with the 20 mile alternative.  Yet, traders consider the costs of trading.

Simplicity, most likely.  I do like the elegance of this proof, but the problem that I see is that it is hard enough for the average new user to wrap their heads around how bitcoin works at it is without adding this function.

Also, I can see a potential problem with this in the midst of a network split, and those problems could introduce a new attack vector.  The continuous function would certainly help with the distruption of the network at the fourth year intervals, but that is a short term disruption for which we have no evidence that it would be more disruptive than an attack on the network.  The last thing that we need is increased false block rejections.  Perhaps such a gradual shift could be done with each difficulty adjustment point, rather than every single block.

I think that it's too vague an idea to judge the risks.  Details are neccessary.  Perhaps you could develop it into a system that adjusts for risks to the lender, but I don't think anyone else is going to help unless you can prove the validity of your idea yourself.

I'm sure that I don't really need to remind the members of this thread, but to anyone who doesn't already know...

Corrolation is not causation.

In all likelyhood, both these variables are responding to the same unknown.  That unknown is likely the number of people who are interested in bitcoins at any particular point alont the timeframe noted.  But that is just an educated guess, since there is no really proxy for the number of users in the network.

The only reason that I don't go to greater lengths to correct your misunderstandings of economic history is that I grow weary of doing so on online forums without due compensation.  Not just for yourself, as economics is a widely misunderstood subject even among those who consider themselves well educated.  This is something that I've often viewed as strange, considering it's not really a complicated subject to understand from a scientific perspective; but too many try to view it from the macro side and then overcomplicate it.

The contraction of the money supply in that general time period is not what caused the Great Depression.  The contraction of the money supply was the concurrent remedy to the malinvestment that was rampant in the decade that preceded the Great Depression, which was itself caused by excessive expansion of the monetary base by the Federal Reserve banking system from it's conception in 1913 to 1929, but mostly after 1924.  Most of the human suffering during the Great Depression was the direct result of attempts by the US Government to intervene in the natural corrective process of deflation, rather than simply stay out of the way and let the nation take it's hard medicine and move on.  The Great Depression was, largely, a political event as opposed to an economic or fiscal event; and the parallels to the current state of things is striking.  For a wonderful counter example, look at the Panic of 1920, and the similarities and differences in how that was handled by the two administrations.