I also noticed the marxist phraseology, especially when he claimed that free trade was a mutual exploitation of the needs of each trader.  

But I didn't mind.  Being marxist is not a crime, and I do not completely object this idea of a mutual exploitation instead of a mutual cooperation.  If you exploit someone, you do it for your own good.  So if two people exploit one another, in the end they both do it for their own good.   It's more of a point of view than anything else.  It seems to me that Adam Smith was saying the same thing but differently when he talked about the invisible hand acting for the good everyone from the pursue of selfish individual interests.


Anyway, what I liked in his text was the description of how bitcoin works, and his thoughts about money and private property.  I especially liked his analysis of money, which he concludes as money being an expression of social conditions where
private property separates means and need.
 

Quand tu achètes un truc au supermarché, tu demandes toujours de voir le directeur pour lui demander quelles sont ses marges?

Si le banquier te prête de l'argent, c'est pas pour te rendre service.  Il ne fait pas ça pour tes beaux yeux.

Ce qui détermine le taux d'intérêt, c'est compliqué.  Il y a les frais, le recouvrement, le refinancement, que sais-je encore.  Une chose est sûre:  il n'y a pas que le risque de crédit, loin s'en faut.   Et bien sûr il y a les politiques des banques centrales parce que non, les banques ne peuvent pas créer de la monnaie arbitrairement non plus.  Elles ont des comptes à rendre aux banques centrales.  Et là la transparence est totale, du moins en théorie.

He wrote somewhere that the fixed amount could have some appeal for libertarians, something along this line.  The way he used the third person and the conditional to talk about them suggests he is not a libertarian, though he probably sympathizes with the ideology.

La notion de "besoin" est une notion très vague.  Moi si je suis sans emploi et que je dis que j'ai "besoin" d'avoir une voiture, est-ce que mon voisin doit travailler pour m'en acheter une?

N'importe qui peut devenir actionnaire.  Ok y'a un peu de paperasse et je comprends que ça peut en rebuter certains.  Mais c'est pas pire qu'aller remplir un formulaire pour toucher une quelconque aide sociale.


Le gens sont sensés être responsables de leurs actes.  Les banquiers, comme tout commerçant, font de la pub pour leurs services et cherchent à te convaincre de signer leurs contrats.  Mais ils ne te mettent jamais le couteau sous la gorge.

La dette totale n'est impossible à rembourser que si tout le monde cherche à rembourser sa dette en même temps, ce qui n'est absolument pas nécessaire.

Par ailleurs, dès lors qu'il existe du capital, il peut exister des créances sur ce capital.  Dans un système de liberté économique, c'est absolument impossible à empêcher.  Et pour diverses raisons, l'utilisation de ces créances comme monnaie fait sens.


Ça fait plus de trente ans que le budget est déficitaire.  Donc les services sociaux dont tu parles sont financés grâce à la dette, justement.

Nul doute que si tu ne payais plus d'intérêts, tu n'aurais plus de prêteurs, et là les services sociaux, tu ne pourrais plus du tout les financer.  Donc si tu veux des services publics, la dette c'est plutôt ton amie.

Un excellent texte critique de bitcoin (bitcoin fait l'objet de la deuxième partie) défendant les banques, la monnaie-crédit, le système des réserves fractionnaires et les banques centrales.

http://monoskop.org/log/?p=7347

Comme je l'écrivais plus haut, le système monétaire actuel est plus subtil qu'il n'y parait et il serait même plutôt intelligent s'il était appliqué honnêtement.

It may be a criticism of bitcoin, but you gotta admit it is a great text.

The description on how bitcoin works is one of the best I've ever read, for instance.

And the part about money, credit-based money, capital and central-banking is also very good.


In other words, he makes lots of good points.

I confess I don't get it.

Apparently, there is a species of squid that can fly:




Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-bird-plane-squid.html#jCp

Duh.  Of course that would drive the price up.  I don't think $2.5 bn are enough to corner the market.

Who knows?  Maybe he plans on buying bitcoins  


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-google-chairman-bn.html#jCp

Edit:  remember that Schmidt has been aware of bitcoin for almost a year now (at least):

Schmidt also revealed that Google wanted to create a rival to Internet peer to peer currency Bitcoin. The company planned to call it "Google Bucks." Though Schmidt said peer to peer currencies like Bitcoin are "a great idea," Google Bucks never got off the ground because these currencies are illegal in many countries.

Agreed.  Also, Law is not supposed to be some external force we should obey blindly. It's supposed to emanate from the will of people.  If people want something to be legal, then it should become legal.

Bienvenue.   Ne sois pas surpris si le logiciel met plus d'une journée pour télécharger et vérifier la base.   C'est en cours d'optimisation mais actuellement c'est très long.   Heureusement ça n'est à faire qu'une fois.

Pourquoi faire?  Quel intérêt de créer une pool avec uniquement des français?

Sorry,  I can't.

It is not a vote because the result of a vote is supposed to induce a decision that will concern all participants.   It might sound trivial to remind this, but when Obama was elected, people who voted for Mitt Romney did not gather in a part of the USA to make a separate state.

Also, a vote is basically a question that is asked to you, and your answer is taken into account with the answers of others.  When you download a software, or when you just use it, you don't have to tell anybody.   People might care about you using it, and your choice might in the end support the developers in some way, but there is no accurate accounting of the number of users and it does not directly affect the decisions of developers.   Really, it has very little to do with what a vote actually is.   It might look like it, but it's more of a metaphor than anything else.
 

I thought it might be a fun exercise:

(Phys.org)—Geneticist Theo Sanderson has written a simple text editor that allows a writer to use only words from a list of the 1000 ("ten hundred" since "thousand" isn't on the list) most commonly used words in the English language, to describe things. He calls it the Up-Goer Five Text Editor, in honor of a comic created by xkcd, to describe a Saturn V rocket, using only the most common 1000 words in the English language. Sanderson has made the editor available online for free, which intrigued bloggers, Chris Rowan and Anne Jefferson to the extent that they've set up a Tumblr blogger page called "Ten Hundred Words of Science," where they display the results of a challenge they've issued to scientists to describe what they do for a living using Sanderson's text editor. The results are thought provoking, interesting and quite often humorous.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-up-goer-text-editor-restricts-writers.html#jCp




Edit.  I tried it in order to describe what a hash (or maybe a checksum) is:

« Say you have a note that you want to send to a friend.  For some reason, you can not be sure the note will be exactly as it was when it was sent.   You would like to find a way to make sure it is.

Here is how to do it:  you put your note in your computer.   Your computer do some stuff with the note and give you a short word back.  It's not a simple word but it is short enough so you can tell it to your friend and be sure he will get it exactly as it is.

Then your friend does this:  he puts the note that he got from you inside his own computer.  And his computer also gives them a word.  If this word is the same that the one you told him, then your friend knows he got the same note than you. »

Hoping for a society where people are smart, educated and have independent minds sure is a noble and fine social goal, but it has nothing to do with democracy.   You're just using this word to describe something that is not related.


See, that's why we disagree.  You now asks "What good is that if...", when I was arguing with your initial question "How can it be a democracy...".  I wasn't trying to discuss whether democracy is a good or a bad thing, I was talking about whether or not people not having independent minds changes anything to the nature of a democratic process.

The logic is very simple.  You wrote:

« How can it be a democracy if peoples minds aren't independent and free. »

The two points of my argument are straightforward:

1.  their vote is not the problem.  It's A problem if the vote induces poor decisions, but it is not THE problem of deciding whether the process was democratic, which was the problem suggested by your question ("How can it be a democracy").

2.  You don't know what's in peoples mind.   You talk about people minds being independent and free but that's an external judgement and you can't know for sure.  And no, if someone enters a supermarket, it's not necessarily because he's hungry.  He can have many other motives (like he works for someone and does his shopping).   Anyway fortunately, you don't have to analyse the motives of a vote to consider it valid.