This pictures for sad children comic describes my feelings towards the venus project accurately, even if it is more aimed at "the singularity".

Essentially, the Venus Project appears to be religion for Atheists. The core tenet of the Venus Project is that at some point jesus will return a bitchin' AI will turn up and then everything will be awesome.

On top of this, the Zeitgeist films are riddled with so much bullshit it isn't even funny.

You should take his word for it. He is an "Internet Economist" after all.

The "honest" side of mining is that you are providing a service to the users of bitcoin - you are helping the currency to become more secure and more widely available, and getting paid (in bitcoins) for this. This doesn't account for much of mining's insane profitability though - that bit is because it is a huge bubble (if you are pessimistic) or because lots of people predict it will be the/a very important currency in the future (optimistic).

It being an illusion only bothers you because there is a you to bother

I have no idea who these people are (and even if I did - would it matter?)

Well, what's not the problem with nations?

They appear to be groupings of individuals with nothing substantial in common with each other, indeed of such a size that it is impossible to comprehend the number of people in the group (let alone form any meaningful link with them). These groupings don't seem to achieve much apart from warfare and the maintenance of power structures

Agreed.

The existence of the ego is only illusory in the same sense that cows and houses are illusory... and destroying that "illusion" is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, "I" think.


The biggest problem I see in the world today is the existence of nations.

If my calculations are correct, the odds are around (1/(1.0043516 × 10^59))^15000000 (which Wolfram tells me is 10^-(10^8.95))

In contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning are around 1/750000 - therefore* it is more likely that you will be hit by lightning 150,641,541 times.

*With a little napkin-maths license

The Achilles' heel of this plan is that you cannot trust the rented chunk of computer. The various @home projects don't really need to worry about this as people are already donating their hardware and electricity and have nothing to gain by "cheating" -  but once you're doing it for financial reward what's to stop you (the owner of the machine) hacking the client software to churn out false results, pretending you have lots of hardware chugging away at the problem?