Finding and compromising 1 bank account is one thing (think Dwolla). Doing the same for 10, is a whole different story. Now imagine 10,000.

Ripple ≠ This

      Mt. Gox and friends are killing Bitcoin. While such centralized exchanges have been very good to people like me who have bots, they inherently concentrate the market into hubs that can be effectively targeted by Homeland Security and others. One of the great strengths of Bitcoin is that it evades interference from entities which draw their power from centralization. The United States government relies on this form of power to influence the world. Through internationally organized frameworks of law and finance, this institution has manipulated the course of history for almost the last century. Bitcoin has survived and flourished thus far because of its insusceptibility to centrally planned offensives. The US government cannot operate/manipulate in this framework because it's outside the scope of its dominion.
      We've seen what kinds of manipulation can already take place in these exchanges. When a few Tinklevoss-like characters with enough capital decide to participate in this economy, they hold the power to artificially influence the price of Bitcoin. This is entirely because of the way the Bitcoin exchange environment is organized. While the currency itself is decentralized, the means for acquiring it and trading it are consolidated into a few nodes.
     This is a fundamental flaw in the Bitcoin exchange system. There needs to be a way to transfer this exchanging power over to the people. This capacity is already built into Bitcoin itself with the wallet framework and the ability for individuals to effectively act as their own bank, but it is entirely confined to the transfer of Bitcoin, not Fiat. Because the majority of crypto procuring is in exchange for fiat, we inherently establish bottlenecks. We are still playing in their backyard, so they ultimately retain the power to kick us out and tell us to go home (or to jail).


     Because we rely on a small number of money transfer services which have at most a few bank accounts associated to them (Dwolla etc…), we provide targets for authorities to go after. With Bitcoin, the target is an internationally diffuse mesh of computers which maintain an abstract concept. This is what makes it impenetrable to governments and all those who want to maintain the status quo. Fiat money, being tied to banks and the physical realm, requires that someone actually interfaces between the banking system and the Bitcoin world. Up until the present moment, this has been a small handful of companies like Dwolla.
     We can't go forward applying individualistic capitalist ideals, like having a handful of companies act as an intermediary between fiat and Bitcoin, and expect them to work in a decentralized economy. This idea may be unnecessarily bold, and even stupid (this is why I'm posting here. I want to see what the community thinks), but it could be good food for better thoughts. So I hope everyone brought along their appetites…


     We apply the concepts which are fundamental to decentralized services like Bitcoin and Tor, and establish a web of bank accounts which are linked together in a cryptographically secure blockchain which will also orchestrate the movement of funds  from account to account. This would require ordinary people opening up checking accounts (these do not fall under Federal Reserve Board Regulation D, as far as I can tell), and subscribing to the network. This subscription would allow the network to process inter-bank transfers. There would have to be two distinct pools; the reserve pool, and the payout pool. The reserve pool would shuffle funds around and act as the digital bank vault, and the payout pool would be the transfers that are sent to individuals who want to cash out Bitcoins into their own private accounts.
     The people who have to initially open the checking accounts hold a huge responsibility, and at the same time, a huge risk. They could be assholes and withdraw money from the network node they opened (the network would have to immediately sense this and shuffle the money to other nodes). At the same time, they are the ones which will have to face the firing squad if and when it comes to that. This network would have to act similarly to the Tor network in that it would operate underground (in other words, it would be invisible due to cryptographic protocols). Instead of having 10 bank accounts which are bright red targets to authorities, we have a mesh of inconspicuous accounts with only a few thousand dollars in them. On their own they might be weak, but strung together into a network of millions of dollars worth of assets, they become part of a powerful engine for moving around Fiat. In addition, the ability to trade Bitcoin for Fiat becomes much more fluid.
      Authorities might compromise a node or two, but it's not as if we don't deal with this problem anyway. They might be able to kick a few of us out of their yard, but they'll have to spend an enormous amount of effort to tear down that tree-house. I want to make their job as difficult as humanly possible.


     There are obviously big flaws in this conception. How could we trust the openers of the accounts to not withdraw from them? Are there bank API's available for these accounts to be linked with for automated transfers? How would we organize the subscription service to this network? All of these wrinkles would need to be thoroughly ironed out for this to work, but if it were to be possible, I think this could be incredibly powerful. I'm interested to see what you guys think. Please let me know why you think this wouldn't work, apart from the points I've already raised.

touché

So I guess this turned into the Vietnam War thread. Funny how the internet works....

Don't really want to get involved here, but I'd just like to add that our homeland security was left worse off because of the intervention in Vietnam. (wanted to tie it to back to the original topic in some way, if only superficially)

I do respect the sacrifice of fallen soldiers, though. They gave their lives in the service of something greater than themselves, and that is truly admirable. That doesn't change the fact that the politics surrounding Vietnam were misleading, exploitative, and imperialistic in nature.

My ultimate point is that while we can point to the government making changes and say that these are substantive, with every action there is an UNequal and opposite reaction. If you think that the ruling class (the ones who the government works for) will simply sacrifice their power because of public opinion, then you need to read some more serious history books. Because we can't force black people to be our slaves anymore, we have to use Chinese and Indian children, who will attach plastic parts together until their lungs shrivel up from chemical fumes. If you go down the list of examples, for every 1 change in public policy there are an accompanying 100 different externalities which aren't mentioned, and which skew the structures of power in favor of those who have always had them and will continue to keep them as long as people subscribe to being governed. That's the whole point of making the changes in the first place. You need to placate the masses and make them think this is their government which they have influence over, otherwise participation in this system will suffer.

The rest of the world is also a part of the international central banking system. It's not just the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_for_International_Settlements

The politics we need isn't going to be within this system. None of those "changes" you refer to actually changed very much. As a previous post noted, "for every action there is a reaction". We don't have black people picking cotton anymore, but we have many new and pernicious forms of slavery (mortgages, Fiat currency, non-stop pre-emptive war, the healthcare mafia). Women can vote now, but can we honestly say that either women or men can cast ballots for anyone truly worth voting for in our ridiculous two party "democracy"? I don't think the rest of your examples really need fleshing out.

Couldn't the US government hypothetically run existing supercomputers to mine all the remaining Bitcoins and just destroy it that way? For the amount of money it takes to file all the legal paperwork and run the DHS for a week, they could contract an ASIC to be built which could mine the remaining Bitcoins in a very short period of time. Or am I wrong about this?

What would it take for them to go after BitInstant? (based out of New York City and UK)


Probably not very much....

It is strong like russian Ox! But in all seriousness, it's so much better than any other exchange. I don't know how, but it's basically impervious to DDoS

This is so great! I'm already on it. About to start emailing/messaging people to organize one near my hometown.

Not all fighting is obligated to be with a fist or a gun

     
      While the recent action by the DHS concerning Dwolla's Mt. Gox transactions will not be a serious blow to Bitcoin, a precedent is being carried forth which could lead to much more extreme measures. The fact that the DHS is concerned about Bitcoin should suggest how powerful our beloved crypto-currency is, and how real a threat it must pose to the ruling class.
      This is not a time for merely accepting government action as it is handed out. We can not let these shameless impingements on our basic rights be applied without resistance. Why do they expect us to sit behind our computer screens and merely act in reactionary clicks and types as our freedoms are legislated away from us? Because that's been the precedent that we have set.
      What are we going to do if and when it comes down to an internationally orchestrated assault on Bitcoin? What options do the people have against the power elite? I'm curious to hear what the community thinks.

First of all, thank you for your contributions to the Bitcoin community! We need more people investing the time and energy to produce services like yours.

      From a variety of conversations with different people I've gathered that, as you mention, there's a lot of serious interest in the idea of crowdfunding through Bitcoin but there's a lack of actual participation once the frameworks are established. Part of the reason for this, I think, is simply due to the youth and obscurity of this emergent economy. It could be that your design, in 2 or 3 years and another 200 million people with Bitcoins, could be very successful. At the moment, it doesn't seem like there's enough stability in the structures which provide the earnings to average individuals, for them to spend their Bitcoins on projects which could potentially go nowhere. Speculators on the exchanges, making dividends on worthless alt-coins, know that they can at least sell off their alt-coin holdings and get some sort of return even if they just watched the price (and effectively the value of their holdings) plummet. Crowdfunding on the other hand, is a much riskier investment. Not only are you counting on a hypothetical product which doesn't even exist yet, it could potentially never exist at all. In the fiat market, Kickstarter enjoys the comfort of having a majority of investments being small donations from wage earning individuals. Although there are big investors who throw around thousands of dollars to projects they find worthwhile, the vast majority of donations are under $50.
      When I say that BitcoinStarter's main problem is the instability of the asset distribution frameworks of the Bitcoin economy, this is what I'm talking about. Most people with Bitcoins don't get them on a regular basis from a job that they work at, and with its rapidly expanding value, many people see it more as an investment for themselves rather than a legitimate currency which they'd be comfortable letting go of. If I just put 1000 dollars into Bitcoin as an investment, then I can't really afford to let go of any because my ultimate and primary purpose in getting involved with this currency is individualistic advancement (specifically financial). I just invested 1000 dollars into myself, why would I then take that investment and invest in others?
      However, this current weakness in the crypto-economy could turn out to be it's greatest strength. Instead of assuming that the models of individualistic fiat capitalism can be transplanted into a decentralized economy, we need to appreciate that this new economy will have to depend on collaboration in addition to just competition. On your site there are many different project categories. Are they competing between categories or is the competition solely encased within categories? Clearly it's within categories. The "seed factory project" isn't competing against "photographing chernobyl". Imagine if you took one of them, say Publishing, and made a bitcoinstarter offshoot based solely around publishing. Now imagine that instead of fostering an environment based solely on competition between individuals who wan't to publish things, you created a forum for these similarly inspired people to talk to each other and share their ideas. Imagine if all the people who wanted to start online news services could talk to all the others who had similar aspirations. Chances are these people would develop their own ideas even further with this sort of collaboration. Not only that, but this community of experts now have the opportunity to find like-minded people to further collaborate with. You would establish a "guild" of sorts. Through discussions and collaborations, groups could produce guild sponsored upstarts that would be presented to the public for funding. The main difference here is that you are concentrating people who would otherwise depend on salary jobs in the other economy, to support and foster the establishment of similar institutions in this other economy. Imagine a Gaming guild, where developers and gamers come to talk about their ideas. Gamers who have no coding ability could collaborate with developers who have lesser creative abilities and the end result is better games for everyone. These relationships are supportive collaborations, but because we are putting projects up for crowd financing, we are not losing the powerful capacity of the free market to drive innovation and progress. In a Gaming guild (for lack of a better term), you will establish an atmosphere where people will actually want to invest, because they themselves are invested in these projects. You will no longer have dissociated individuals trying to compete against disparate projects in an environment where none of these people care about anything else that is being promoted on the site. In order to create institutions that people can earn a living Bitcoin wage from (so then maybe they can invest in upstarts they have nothing to do with), you need to foster the organization of these institutions by these very same experts and enthusiasts. We could call this a form of bootstrapping.

It's only too soon as long as nobody is doing anything about it. Without action and initiative, we stay in place. It's because of Satoshis and others that progress is made.

Same topic, more postings....



https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=204703.0

It's also not really a question of first or last, but rather how high the quality of the services are. This can mean the ease of use, presentability, integration with other web services, etc...


It's not so much the definition of the markets which will determine their subsequent success, but the creation of solid structures over which these can grow. Once we have created an environment of market specialized kickstarters, only then will their staying power and influence be a function of the features and ease of use. Up until now the focus has been in the opposite order. Instead of focusing on market specialization first, these sites have only tried to differentiate themselves in terms of their user interfaces and other superficial qualities. First we must differentiate markets, and only then can we build strong web services.

I'm probably not the one to ask this. I suppose markets that do the best for themselves regardless of kickstarters would have the most attention with them. Honestly, I think all markets would gain tremendously from this sort of framework. It's just a matter of some web developers taking the initiative to create them.