No sane person actually believes that there exists some massive supply of ultra-low-risk, ultra-high-interest loans. And no sane person with the wisdom to exploit such a pipeline to financial success (assuming it exists, which it doesn't) would also be so stupid as to borrow money at 100% APR. You can treat other people like idiots but I'm not falling for it.

6%/month is slightly more than 1.5%/week. As Gavin put it: It is impossible to get risk-free 1.5% weekly interest, I don't care how good you are at "playing the market" or "choosing who to lend to."

Nevertheless, you are gambling with money that you cannot afford to lose. You may wish to rethink how wise that is. One of the basic rules of operating a gambling establishment is that you *must* be sufficiently well-funded that a couple of jackpots don't ruin you.

Depending on how your customers bet, it's not unusual to have a well-run gambling establishment that has more losing days than winning days. For example, look at Satoshi Dice. You have to have the financing to let the law of averages catch up.

Why would you 100% agree with me but prefix it with "I don't follow you" and follow it with "What are you talking about"? You've just said exactly what I said. You are taking all the risk. You are keeping only a sliver of the profits. And you continue to borrow bitcoins at ultra-high-interest even though you are making enough money to pay those debts back. And that should, rationally, be your top priority. Any profitable business would make paying back ultra-high-interest loans its top priority.

Either you're making a lot of money yourself or you're not. If you are, there is no rational explanation for why you continue to acquire more ultra-high-interest debt. You would have paid it all off and never borrowed again. If you're not, there is no rational explanation for why you expend all this effort and take all this risk.

Well, and you also need to take all the risk yourself and still be willing to settle for only a sliver of the profit. And you have to stubbornly refuse to pay back your ultra-high-interest debt even though there's no possible reason you still need it.

That would be a good counterargument to anyone who argued that an AnCap society wouldn't have any violence. However, I don't think anyone is arguing that paradise on Earth is possible. The idea is to avoid making a system that rewards violence and theft. But of course, there will still be the occasional case where people either irrationally resort to violence or, despite our best efforts, find themselves in a situation where violence will benefit them. In those cases, there will definitely be violence.

Your hypotheticals are impossible. When honorable people run short of money to pay their investment obligations, they don't keep making 100% payments with exorbitant interest to whoever is lucky enough to ask first and then one day 100% stop making any payments at all without making any disclosure of what assets and obligations remain.

I agree.

True, but if someone comes to me looking to hire a hitman to kill their wife and I help them find a hitman to kill their wife, then I'm as responsible as the hitman for the death of their wife. This is true even if I hired them a reputable hitman and fully complied with all my obligations to the person who came to me.

The issue is not whether the PPT operators breached their agreement to their investors. The issue is whether the PPT operators knowingly hired Pirate to make their customers the recipients of fraudulent transfers. If so, they're share the guilt with Pirate for those transfers.

If you are a PPT operator and you knew that Pirate was likely operating a Ponzi scheme, then you paid Pirate to make your customers the recipient of fraudulent transfers, payments from sources you know were told that their money would go to legitimate investments and where you knew that the payments to you were in fact not legitimate investments at all.

You're assuming the set of people who encouraged others to invest and the set of people who lost money are somewhat more overlapping than they are likely to be. In fact, many of the encouragers are probably people who did profit or at least sought to profit from the scam. Holding them accountable is just as important as holding other scammers accountable. Anyone who recommended that people invest in an obvious Ponzi or made clearly nonsensical arguments (especially those who insinuated they had inside knowledge they didn't actually have) should be held accountable, just as Pirate should be.

A very good example are PPT operators who are on record as saying that they believed this was a Ponzi scheme, but nevertheless sought to personally profit by increasing the losses others would ultimately suffer. They knowingly paid Pirate to make their customers the recipients of fraudulent transfers.

Personally, I'm willing to give indirect scammers a pass on responsibility for this one. I don't think it was clear to them the responsibility they had for what was going on. So long as a lesson is learned here, I don't see any benefit to a witch hunt. (Plus, if there was a full reckoning, a lot of good people would be in that list. You all know who you are. If you knowingly profited from the Pirate Ponzi, even if you also suffered losses, this means you.) This a one time offer.

If multiple accounts access from different IPs, they also can't know whether it's the same individual or not. So detecting account accesses from the same IP seems kind of pointless.

I still think this is pretty boneheaded, but not as boneheaded as what they actually do. There are still many small ISPs whose clients *all* share a single public IP.

I think a few moments reflection will show that freezing a verified account because an unverified account connected from the same IP address is a massive security fail. In my fantasy world where you always do the right thing, you'll audit all your security practices once you realize that you let one this boneheaded slip through.

Actually, Tangible Cryptography sounds like more of a publicity stunt than a legitimate investment to me. You'll notice that it didn't last very long and is now fully funded. Unless TC wants to continue it as a publicity thing, they'll likely pay off all their investors very shortly, if they haven't already.

It's not so much based on it, it's *identical* to it. The reason people phrase it in terms of "non aggression" is because that sounds better. The NAP is incoherent without absolute private property rights.

Well that's the thing. For the NAP to work, you first need to know what is force and what is fraud, and you can't have that without a theory of property rights and a theory of government. To present the NAP as the core is deceptive because the NAP requires a foundation.

Right, it's all the fault of the people begging and pleading to get others to listen and not the fault of those who refuse to listen. What the community needs is a 100% consistent vocal "this is a scam" response to everything that has the hallmarks of a scam. When scams break, the community needs a 100% consistent vocal "you were told that was a scam" response. What looks bad to the average Joe is someone saying "prove this is a scam" when it's an *obvious* scam. A community that is 100% intolerant of scams would look nice.

While true, since there's no evidence of a link between marijuana smoking and any kind of cancer, the presence of the carcinogens is irrelevant. It may be equivalent to 3 or 4 cigarettes in terms of the volume of carcinogens, but carcinogens are not all the same, and it definitely does not have anywhere near the same level of carcinogenic effect on humans as 3 or 4 cigarettes does.

This is not even controversial. For example, see here http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/marijuana :

I agree. So I guess the best we can do is start where we are.

I would hope that rising prosperity would lead to enough voluntary charity that inequities from the starting position could be wiped out even faster. I think there's a general consensus that these are at least in part unjust.

I still believe the only realistic chance AnCap has is to form an alliance with other groups that advocate for smaller government and to move in that direction. We don't need to sell the roads day one, and I don't think we can. And I think we can't have any confidence that AnCap is right until we start shrinking the government and see what happens. Getting rid of the courts and police will be something people can only have the confidence to do if getting rid of other things works as AnCap advocates hope.

And seriously, what AnCap advocate wouldn't consider a minarchy a vast improvement over what we have?

I honestly, I think AnCap advocates and Libertarians should ditch the NAP argument. It's just a deceptive way of trying to convince people in absolute private property rights while pretending to be arguing against force or fraud. Taxation isn't force if the government is taking money that is legitimately its money because that's what the law say.

Whoa! I almost ran your program to test it. Fortunately, I caught that before I did. On my computer, "Pause" is the command to pause the cooling system on my home nuclear reactor.

There's no need for that. You are writing a console program and it writes to the console. And it's a habit you should break as soon as possible, because when you write programs used as pipelines or redirected to files, that will break things.

http://www.gidnetwork.com/b-61.html

I can't ignore it. I think it's not logical to advance arguments about absolute respect for property rights in a world where most property was acquired unjustly unless you make clear that it only applies to justly acquired property.

That's why I advocate a gradual transition. I don't think anyone has any idea how to do this, and I don't think the problem will actually arise during any foreseeable transition.

Fortunately, I don't think it matters all that much. The initial distribution of wealth in a fair system won't matter all that much in a few hundred years. But I honestly cannot reject out of hand those who argue for a massive redistribution of wealth as part of a transition to a just government.

It is a very, very thorny problem. And I think advocates of AnCap are doing precisely the opposite of what they should be doing by ignoring or dismissing the transition problem. It's the transition that's the key to a non-violent AnCap, if there's ever going to be one.

He's still making money, why would he stop? Pirate debt still has a non-zero value. He can continue to trade his debt for Bitcoins.

I don't either. I think it's most likely time to make more money. Much less likely, it's time to buy his own debt at a low price to perhaps try to make it all work out in the end (which I don't think will work).

He miscalculated how much time he had. He was in the process of doing that when things collapsed.

Please name one such thing if you can.

Do you see any claim of low or no risk? It sounds to me like you're fully exposed to the risk that ASICs will shoot the difficulty through the roof.

I can't find any moral grounds to accept a "flag day" on which everyone who lawfully possess property under the law prior to the flag day is deemed to have moral title to it under the just laws after the flag day. I don't believe that I have just moral title to my house because I acquired such title under the present laws.

For one thing, the laws of the United States of America presently make possible to private property owners only a fee simple interest in property. I'd have to acquire allodial title by magic. No private property owner in the United States today owns their property free and clear. And the folks I bought this property from never had such ownership and could never have transferred to me something they themselves did not have.

If you're going to make a society-wide gift of free and clear property ownership, I can't see how giving it to those who most prospered under the unjust system you are replacing is a sensible distribution plan.

It's a transition problem, of course. It's not a criticism of AnCap itself. My larger point is though is that we don't have to address these issues now. We can't predict what problems we will face as such a transition begins, so it's all just wild guesses. We need a consensus on the direction that we have to move, and then we'll see what goes right and what goes wrong and, with luck, we'll maintain a consensus to move in that direction.

There won't be a great moral victory because the moral claims aren't really right yet. They translate into absolute respect for property rights, and nobody yet has any property rights deserving of that respect because they've not been justly acquired.