Either that or an escrow house/arbiter has to just come out and say "hey, this is who I really am" so there is recourse in the event of fraud.  I'm working on something along these lines, slowly and surely, where my real information will be posted as well as arbitration clauses involving judge.me (which are enforceable in court - hence they only have a <4% default rate).

For now, until a system of checks and balances can be put in place that supersedes traditional escrow, somebody is going to have to forgo the anonymous armor that bitcoin provides, and that someone is going to be the escrow house.

ak-47 is amazing for reliability.  If you want something that's going to be cheap to stock assloads of ammo for, get anything that fires a 5.56mm full jacket - you can get cases of 5,000 rounds for surprisingly cheap.

but this... this is my ultimate love...  this is the opposite end of the spectrum (and obviously for a bit closer range) i.e. NOT CHEAP.  In fact, you can buy a fairly nice car for less than one of these.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=WOoUVeyaY_8&feature=fvwp

Ignoring the fact that the planet has mortgaged somewhere between 50-100 years of its production from the future into the recent past 20-30 years does not mean that the world isn't far, far, far from anything you speak of....

Laws of economics are laws of human nature and therefore, eventually and inexorably, immutable.  Pretending it isn't so doesn't make it not so...

I am also extremely excited by p2p lending and venture cap.  Completely circumventing the existing financial structure is beautiful.  Let's keep at it.

the easiest transition to AnCap is for people to opt-out of the state system.  use private arbitration, do as absolutely much business as possible in the gray market for cash/barter/metals/bitocins, etc., withhold as much of your resources as possible from the state and just watch it shrivel up and die.

I think Pennsylvania is one of the greatest studies in peaceful transitions to AnCap.  Penn thought he was getting on the easy train by imposing his taxes and such, but the Quakers would have none of it.  They didn't forcibly resist, just laughed at his attempts to impose violence, and for all intensive purposes just ignored what he asked and went on with their lives.  It was the beginning of an era of great prosperity, and hardly a drop of blood was shed to get it there, and Penn (the current governor) ended up going completely bankrupt.  Beautiful.

The mathematics are already in on this thing.  Decades of the future have been mortgaged away, and there is absolutely no avoiding the collapse that always, without exception, ensues from it.  We libertarians and ancaps are lucky in a few ways that not many are - we understand morality and economics better than 99% of the population, and therefore we can see it coming and no why it's coming, and we have NOTHING to do with it, so we are one of the few parties that any blame could possibly be assigned to (we have been dead opposed to virtually everything that has led up to this moment, right from the get go).  We can position ourselves as what people will turn to during the coming years and decades, but it won't be easy.  We are eventually looking at a hyperinflation (or at least a "mini" one, as temporary reprieve for the greatest con-artists in mankind's history), and virtually all hyperinflations are followed by severe tyranny - THAT is what we have to try to avoid, otherwise humanity gets set back not a generation or two, but a century or two.

Statists and their damned crazy religious zealotry get all of the credit for what is to come.  All of it.  I will make sure they f**king know it in their bones.

Monsanto might retain some benefits by bribing the state (again, only possible when the state exists in the first place).

But their biggest fascist benefit is in patent law (which is immoral, in all cases, along with the entire concept of IP).  They can patent a planet, are waived from all consequences that their modified food might impose upon consumers, and if anyone DARES to take that and improve it or make it safer, they are sued into oblivion and/or locked into a cage.  It is the artificial monopoly that is the real killer, because the monopoly is where they shirk all accountability, and every natural mechanism of the market is beaten down to a pulp.

Sure, but only to an extent.  I can walk out of walmart without spending a dime.  Try "not spending" on sending other people's kids to school and paying those public teacher bureaucracies.  See how far that gets you and if you don't have men showing up at your house with guns taking your house from you because you "owe" them.

I don't see any walmart cops grabbing people off the sidewalks and dragging them into the store because they "owe" walmart for shelving and stocking all these products on behalf of the public.

roflmao.  I'm not sure where you got this from, but it is literally as dead wrong as it could possible be.

Hitler was immensely opposed to all decentralized forms of government, specifically stripping away the rights of all of the German states and co-opting those powers. 

page 566 of Mein Kampff "[T]he individual states of the American Union . . . could not have possessed any state sovereignty of their own. For it was not these states that formed the Union, on the contrary it was the Union which formed a great part of such so-called states."

Hitler (p. 567) mocked what he called "so-called sovereign states" in Germany because they stood in the way of a centralized Reich with their "impotence" and "fragmentation."

"And so today this state, for the sake of its own existence, is obliged to curtail the sovereign rights of the individual provinces more and more, not only out of general material considerations, but from ideal considerations as well" (p. 572). Thus, a rule "basic for us National Socialists is derived: A powerful national Reich . . ." (emphasis in original, p. 572).

"Certainly all the states in the world are moving toward a certain unification in their inner organization. And in this Germany will be no exception. Today it is an absurdity to speak of a ‘state sovereignty' of individual provinces . . ." (p. 572)

"the cry for the elimination of centralization is really nothing more than a party machination without any serious thought behind it" and reveals "the inner hypocrisy of these so-called federalistic circles. The federative state idea, like religion in part, is only an instrument for their often unclean party interests" (p. 573).

"Since for us the state as such is only a form, but the essential is its content, the nation, the people, it is clear that everything else must be subordinated to its sovereign interests. In particular we cannot grant to any individual state within the nation and the state representing it state sovereignty and sovereignty in point of political power" (p. 575).


Do you need any more than that, or did that do enough of a job of showing you that you need to seriously read your actual history and not come to an intellectual discussion armed with a nerf gun and a bag of overcooked pasta...

Hitler was dead opposed to individual state rights.  As was Stalin, as was Muzzonlini, as was Mao.  There are 100 million innocent bodies on those men.  The religion of statism is not one you should be proud to endorse, since it's got more murder, rape, torture, and destruction in the last 100 years than any and all other religions combined in the history of the human race.

Everybody did already bite.  I was referring to the still-playing-out theft of over $5 million worth of bitcoins by one Pirateat40. 

The effects are still yet to be seen.

Anarcho-Capitalism allows for most of the sub-categories to exist within itself, but they have to be on a voluntary level (i.e. you don't get to have your magic uniform going around and skewering people who don't do what you want them to do when you have no moral grounds for making them do it, other than some post-modernist drivel bullshit or some attempt at imposing an outside "morality").

In an an-cap society, it is perfectly acceptable for a bunch of people to try to get together and create a syndicalist neighborhood.  If they are all willing participants in the soon-to-fail experiment (sorry, you just can't rewrite human nature.), that's fine and well.  They get to bear the consequences, good or bad, or whatever way of organizing themselves they have decided upon.  Or let's say you have a sub-division or neighborhood that everyone who buys a house there must sign a behavioral contract, restricting them from doing gaudy things with their lawns or houses, and have to pitch in to pay for 24/7 security and lawcare services.  If I walked into that as a voluntary, non-coerced participant and I decide that it is worth it for me to sign a contracting guaranteeing X amount of my resources per month, then that's cool.

Anarcho-capitalism is about morality and ethics!  Free markets are only a cog in that essential machine - they are an extension of the recognition of inalienable human rights, simultaneously possessed by all human beings by nature of the fact that they are human being.  All of the details are not and can not be up to one group to decide "on behalf" of another, or what not.   The "morality" of those other societal structures and Utopic dreams is not moral if it is blanket applied to all human beings.  It always requires some to be slaves to others at gunpoint, without exception.  Anarcho-capitalism is the highest form of morality because all of its moral axioms can and must be applied equally to all human beings simultaneously.  Within that, you will likely have people doing a lot of really, really stupid shit, like believing that you can re-write human nature, etc.  But you have the right to think that stuff and hang out with and do business with other like-minded people.  An-cap just makes sure I have the right to give the crazies a really wide berth and do business with, be friends with, and associate with people who exist in the rational world...

I believe in unicorns, too!

My favorite thing is voting.  I love it.  That's because hen you write someone's name down on a piece of paper and enough millions of people check off the box beside the name on that piece of paper, that the person who was chosen has undergone what is formally known as the "rite of purification by ballot", and that all negative aspects of their human nature that might exist have been washed away by the will of the majority, and they will only use their armies of hundreds of thousands of men with guns and free reign to use them indiscriminately, without consequence, will be the greatest, bestest thing for all of us!

http://www.garynorth.com/public/images/7010a.gif

That's the key right there.  If the central bank conjoins with the government at the hip and swaps its fascist partner (stops caring about the banks), you might see something like this happen.

Until then, the Fed is pretty constrained - they essentially just swap assets around - promises to pay that are deemed more valuable for promises that are worth less.  Worthless mortgage securities for fresh AAA rated treasuries on deposit with full reserve capability.  But it all hinges on the ability of credit to continuously expand - the fractional reserve banking system cannot survive a contraction in total money + credit.  It dies.  Depositors begin to demand deposits to pay off debts, because debts become more expensive as monetary velocity decreases and total credit contracts (less promises to pay against the same physical goods and services).

The velocity of money has dropped by over 80% since the year 2000.  For every $1.00 of GDP added last quarter, it took over $2.00 in new debt.  Government spending is accounted for in total GDP, even though it is an economic distortion and malinvestment with several costs: a) the cost of removing scarce resources from the economy in the first place, b) the cost of what might have been done with those resources (cure for disease, new paradigm shifting technology, etc), and c) the cost to finally re-allocate them when the malinvestment can no longer be sustained (the bubble bursts).

This is the real estate bubble but fifty times the size.  Total M2 moneys supply for the world's reserve currency sits at about 10 trillion.  Currency and credit derivatives are over 700 trillion.  All it would take is a mere 10% in counterparty claims or defaults and the entire monetary system of the planet blows up.   

As such, I do and have always recommended having a good store of your savings in precious metals.  Precious metals are not "investments" - an investment is something that you expect to generate you a yield.  Precious metals are cash savings in another form.  Treating them this way is the only smart way to hold them.

Gold was changed back in June by the FDIC for US banks, and the EU has very recently adopted the same policy.

But there's a cause and effect here.  It's because there is no good collateral left - every dollar has already been leveraged to the hilt, every promise to pay has been levered up multiple times to create new promises to pay backed by existing ones.  Meanwhile all the "good" collateral keeps getting downgrade so that it is no longer "good" anymore.

Plus you have the new collateralization agreements (Basel III) starting to kick in for international banks, which require higher reserves (far too little, too late, and this within the context that non-market banking always eventually fails).  And the banking systems in countries whose sovereign debts are downgraded to dirt cannot access good capital in the first place, because nobody wants to do business with someone that holds a worthless underlying asset as the foundation for their entire operating model (see greek, spanish, italian banks, who are literally bleeding money and have been for many months).

Long run it's great for gold, great for silver, great for anything liquid and not instantly and infinitely replicate-able (owned free and clear).  Short run, since gold collateralization is so new on that level, it will be great for actual cash notes, since all debts are currently denominated in cash, and there are roughly 50x as many promises-to-pay cash notes floating around out there as there are actual cash notes.  The world is overleveraged on a scale that will probably not be seen again for centuries.  Cash is king, and gold will be emperor (and hopefully bitcoin, the "perfect money", along with it, as it solves the problem of a corruptible central depository by overcoming that historically insurmountable element of human nature, which will never, ever change).

lol have you looked at the Fed's balance sheet recently?  They are exposed to the tune of over 2/3 of their entire "asset" base in debt instruments with maturities 10 years or greater (including almost 1 trillion of long term mortgage securities, many of which are worth less than 50 cents on the dollar).

You are correct.  It is false and rigged - the Fed IS the long bond market right now, but the law of diminishing returns has and is going to keep knocking them over the head, and eventually if they start booking losses it will be a massively humiliating thing for the backstop of the country's "money" to be bleeding monetary losses of its own.  I will be laughing hysterically at them at this point, and I encourage all to join in.  This is why there is actually huge internal division among the Fed chiefs right now, if you read through their releases.  Many of them know this.  It's only a matter of time.

To the point of hyperinflation, it's not going to happen in the US.  The fed and treasury have hog-tied themselves.  They cannot instantly pay back long bonds - they must pay back as scheduled.  To pay back early means to default, and the market rejects any more debt issuance and very quickly the dollar itself.  Hyperinflation generally only lasts a couple of years, sometimes less.  It is impossible to hyperinflate and have the economy still using the same currency 30 years later, when a huge amount of debt needs to be paid off, including social security (20+ years out).  And as soon as an attempt were made to "pay off" an existing long-bond with very-debased money, the market would drop like a stone and people would just stop using dollars because that would be a de facto default.

If you look at monetary history, it is inevitable that all fiat currencies die.  This happened to the Nubians, the Romans, the British, all previous attempts in the US, and a good 15+ other instances in the 20th century alone (with cases occurring several thousand years ago, because human nature does not change, no matter how we would like to think it "evolves").  Hoever, there is a key difference between eras of true hyperinflation, and eras of high inflation of 20-50%.  The instances of hyperinflation were all instances where the political class, the State, had full control over the issue of money and credit.  Wiemer, Zimbabwe, Confederate Dollars, etc, were all instances where the government actually had control of the WHOLE money apparatus.  This is because it is the nature of the state to promise/mortgage itself out dozens of times more than it could ever afford to, and to "save face" with debasement.  The political class makes the farmers and anyone holding tangible assets win out, wipes out the banking system and eventually destroys the currency.

In instances of high inflation, it is always when a central bank or banking system is in control of the issue of what is always the largest portion of any currency in existence - promises to pay it:  Debt.  Central banks allow for high inflation to benefit the banking system at the expense of savers.  Hyperinflation doesn't occur when the government must use the banks as a proxy for its promises, only when the government itself attempts to fund them and controls the entire mechanism for doing so.  We don't have to worry about Weimer here, because the banks are beholden to the fed and the fed to the banks, with the state as a third-party benefactor (having its bonds as underlying collateral for all other credit).  We just have to worry about 20-50% annual inflation for a few years, which is still gutwrenching for an economy and easily enough to destroy a generation's worth of productive advancement, if not more. 

This all hangs on the caveat that the Fed's box of magic tricks could actually spur credit expansion with all those new, shiny reserves just sitting there waiting to explode out into the system and blow up the credit markets.

Considering that the velocity of money in USD terms has collapsed from over 25 to 5 in the past decade, I'm just not seeing it.  Ergo, cash is a safe bet for a little while, because even if the economy goes to absolute crap and credit starts to expand, everything we currently do in the brick and mortar world is currently denominated and settled in legal tender, and people calling in debts will create tremendous demand for physical cash notes, for a little while.  After that, it's look out below....

Isn't the bitinstant thing going to actually be a net neutral at best?  As far as I can see it's just going to create more demand for BTC holders to use them, which means it will actually increase the sell-side of the equation as BTC are converted back to national currencies.

What we need is more actual goods and services brought into the bitcoin fold - this is what makes a currency increase in value over the long term;  the faster growth of the underlying product base than the supply of money.  I think it's great, this whole debit card thing, don't get me wrong. That being said, the bitcoin economy itself needs more of an actual economy of goods and services.

Like I said, most of my position is using LEAPS (long term options, essentially).  they expire worthless if they aren't in the money by the expiration date.  I'm betting on a good hop up in the VIX even if treasuries manage to eke out another rally, which should keep the time premiums on the LEAPS up high enough that it's a very low-risk play.  And even if things are looking a little iffy, you can usually roll things over another year out (when available) for not too much price difference, sometimes you're only looking at a 10-15% rollover cost which gives to another 12 months.

I don't trade on fundamentals, but they do certainly bust open the dam when it's time for the trade to roll your way.  Investing is the long, long play.  Trading is on psychology, where the laws of economics can be stretched and ignored for a while.  We had a beautiful internal divergence on a host of indicators on that latest high in long bonds, a mature pricing pattern (early adopters, early majority, majority rush, late majority, final batch of greater fools), etc.  It was a great time to short it on a contra play.

I have a core short position, but I a mostly leveraged to the max via LEAPS (the premiums are pretty reasonable short-side right now, just because the VIX is so low and the market's got this huge still-baked-in expectation of continued upside.

As far as the rigging of the game goes - you can only violate the laws of economics for so long.  The Fed has been openly purchasing treasuries since 2008 and they already ARE the long-bond market.  Twist was just the last twist of the sword in attempting to push down long-term yields.  The Fed currently holds well over 2/3 of it's entire balance sheet in long term debt (LT Treasuries and Mortgage Debt).  If these markets begin to turn, they will start having to book serious losses, which will be pretty damned embarrassing for the all-powerful ivory tower gods of money. 

You couple that with what are sure to be serious, serious shenanigans in terms of the budget, plus the fact that SS continues to pay out more than it takes in (and its balance sheet is also made up almost entirely of treasury bonds), and you've got a highly probably chance that the everyone-and-their-mother who have piled on the Treasury bubble will get wiped out.

It's a 30 year bull market.  Not many bull markets can hold out for 30 years, and this one is a doozey.  Higher participation than stocks by the average household, and by a long shot.  Check out equity outflows compared to treasury inflows over the past 10 years, and you'll basically see another dot-com/NasdAPPL in the works.  There's not much possible upside even left on Treasuries, but the way down is a long, long way.

As for the rest of the discussion on here, I think it's going to be imperative to the future of bitcoin for more and more products and services to be offered and denominated in bitcoins.  As the underlying economy grows, so will the support infrastructure (bitcoin debit cards, etc.), and so will its value.  I'm working on a little something that will make it a lot easier to bring legitimate goods and services to the market and not worry (in the meantime) about your entire profit margin getting eaten up by specs over on the Gox.  That's project #1, which will hopefully generate enough revenue that I can focus entirely on my bigger goals over the next 6-12 months.

Maybe that's what he's waiting to see...

Is this poll just a clever way of flushing out the actual douchebags?

Allow me to correct and edit to show "average", then.  As far as road travel goes, I would be surprised if most horse and wagon combos were going faster than 10mph...