Ahh so it's all about the government for you; the fact that the rich and powerful and the government are intertwined has no meaning for you then? Or do you just shrug it off as "lol they can protect themselves by buying politicians to do favorable things for them"? Is it not the underclassmen that support the rich? Otherwise why do recessions even happen? Money doesn't just disappear.

Is the business cycle just a necessary consequence of capitalism? Blame it on credit, sure, but isn't it the people who produced all of these things which credit can buy? Is society really advancing when we are all mortgaging our lives away to the powerful? Does this really help anyone? How quickly would the collapse of western society happen if the countries we take advantage of for cheap labor were to suddenly resist?



Are you so dense as to believe that it does not affect the whole world economy?


The Wall Street derivatives market is almost 400X the GDP of the US.


You are an idiot.

The system itself certainly has no need to be fair, and shouldn't be. However, the deck shouldn't be stacked either.

People produce. Production is rewarded. Most of that production is rewarded in the form of money. Money power is universally stolen from producers. Is the world economy not about production and consumption? Is there something I'm missing when people who manipulate numbers on wall street to make millions of dollars are doing something far more productive than someone building cars or serving food? Why is it that when these "money producers" (as opposed to "product/service producers") do their job extremely well, the economy falls into a massive recession? Why do governments seem to be constantly flabbergasted as to how this happens? And why do they think that the only solution is to "produce more money"?

Are you sure that it is really a grotesque simplification?


Oh how cute you're calling the fairness of the power of money and production communism.

It's amazing how few people can see the forest for the trees when they think they're in the position to be the ones to benefit from a favorable type of money.

It's strange how so few bitcoiners apparently do not yet they rage against the government and monetary machine, because it does SOMETHING they don't like, they're just not sure what. Surely inflation doesn't steal the wealth and productivity of the lower castes and squeeze it to the rich. Surely 70 year copyright laws after the death of the author is for the good of the people, not the corporations.


Oh how embarrassing to accept free food when starving.



kjj are you just going to run away again after another one of your hit and run LOLs

So you don't think the monetary system and the interests of government are in tune with the rich? They are actually designed for "the people"?

You do realize that the entire economy of the world is based around stealing from the poor and middle classes to give to the rich and powerful, right? When the US throws out billions of pounds of food annually yet there are millions of people who aren't sure where their next meal is coming from, there is a disconnect in the system.

A 112 bit ECC key length is only about as effective as 56-bits of security though, and DES (56-bit) was broken in 20ish hours via brute force over a decade ago. It lasted for 20 years though.

I don't think it was the block chain security to which I was referring, considering that that does not give you access to any money.

Breaking a bank's website security does not give you access to the vault.

No, because ECDSA and RSA are based on problems that are considered hard in today's mathematics. That does not preclude them from being easy in future mathematics. The underlying assumptions of discrete logarithms and integer factorizations are that they will remain hard, but there is no guarantee.

And then of course the whole quantum computing thing.

Uhh where have I ever expressed a disbelief in the business cycle? Where our opinions clash on the matter is that I quite strongly believe that a limited commodity currency is no solution to the business cycle.


When gold was left to regulate itself, FRB was its and anti-regulation's lovechild.


The so-called semantics led to your red herring and misrepresentations of my position. As I would be wise to be more careful about history, you would be wise to be less quick to judge.

They are both effects of a limited commodity currency.


You are right on pretty much all counts in regards to the arguments about the US. My view was occluded by later interpretations. I concede and appreciate the lesson.


No.


I did not. I said that gold was not chosen in particular. The person I had originally responded to made the claim that "the free market has chosen gold/PMs" which fails a simple logic test.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/particular "of or pertaining to a single or specific person, thing, group, class, occasion, etc., rather than to others or all;"

And I used evidence of prior fiat-like money and the massive economic expansion under those schemes to make a case that gold does not need to back free market currency and implied that it might hinder growth. I also used bitcoin as an example.


Again, I did not say that gold was not used as money.

Well, I don't really see why you would get a more thought-provoking discussion by using minor modifications to bitcoin as a discussion point.


B-money did not solve the consensus problem even though he had written about using a system like bitcoin's money creation system to create money, he did not link the two together. It's a big black hole of a problem in his design where Satoshi filled the void.


Well perhaps you'll be happy to know that Decrits, at least, solves block chain storage and checkpoint sync.


The share system is for securing the network. The money creation system is a separate entity. Both systems can easily provide for an early adoption benefit, though it would be nowhere near on the same order as bitcoin's. But there's no point in pretending that bitcoin's characteristics will ever work again--we've already got that currency.


Proof of work is provided by the currency you need to create via minting in order to buy a share. Do something detrimental to the network and you will either instantly or eventually lose your share depending on the transgression. Anyone who doesn't agree on these protocol transgressions will also lose their share in the eyes of the clients, the honest cloudnet, and the honest shareholders. There is no 51% attack against this system, there is really even no 99% attack. The worst anyone can do without losing their stake is delay some transactions, and I'm working on making sure this is penalized as well. It's a bit delicate though and these are some of the deepest intricacies that I am trying to make rock-solid even though their impact is small unless a very big portion of the shareholders are intent on causing disruption. But the disruption they are able to cause is far less damaging than a 51% attack on bitcoin.


The shareholder system does have a big caveat that shareholders will need to exist at the start of the system, but this I plan to resolve by having a community effort in designing and creating the software and awarding shares to people that have an interest in seeing the system succeed. This poses no adoption benefit over early adopters, just a bit of free money. I also plan on requiring that these free shares require at least 6 years of service before being able to be cashed out. Anyone else is free to create money (at the accelerated early adoption rate) and buy a share as well (at the reduced early adoption rate). The system could start out by using proof of work to reach consensus and wait until a minimum number of people have purchased shares before starting the shareholder system, but it will be a lot of extra code for something that isn't strictly necessary. I would never take real money from people for shares, I only used USD as an equivalent value par exemple.


Well hey maybe I can convince you that I'm pretty far along in the ideating process and that you should make these ideas part of your own.

And I think it could be made completely trustless, all you have to do is prevent the standard stake withdrawal for 30 days or however long you want to keep the blinded transactions available for use and make sure that the shareholder has the money covered until then. This does come with a big caveat though--"money laundering" as a defined part of the protocol. That may raise the ire of the powers that be. An interesting topic to discuss though.

Actually, I thought about it a bit more, and specifically under the Decrits system this would be possible because of the shareholder system.

Users blind their transactions and shareholders add them to a blind sig queue. Once there are enough in the queue (decided by the protocol, say 50 or so txes), a shareholder will sign all of them and have the coins deposited to his shareholder stake. Then the txes can be unblinded by their owners and sent along the network whenever they feel the need. You have the slight chance of getting boned if the shareholder removes his share, but he is only allowed to do this once per year, otherwise he has to pay a very big penalty. This does mean that the total of the blinded txes would have to be no more than a percentage of the shareholder's stake though, so if you want to unlink a lot of money it is going to take a lot of time. There may perhaps be a better way though. (perhaps being willing to put a bigger stake on the line to provide this service? for a fee, obv)

Well you're posting about bitcoin but it's in the alt currency section so I'll remark about how account ledgers in lieu of transaction ledgers, such as the idea employed by the Decrits proposal, may help with the unlinkability of transactions. At least as far as the sense of "coin taint" goes.

Because of this, I think it would be possible to create signature-blinded tokens that would remove all linkability (with the caveats that they will have to be in a fixed amount of money and you must wait some time for deniability), supported by the protocol. But I am totally not sure on this because blind signatures are really hard to understand.

Nowhere did I specifically refer to the US. The US had other things that functioned as money supply expansions such as the Bank of North America--funded on credit and issuing paper currency, silver, greenbacks, and fractional reserve notes from other countries.


Deflation itself wasn't a problem, just the panics every other year.


All I am advocating is free market currency. Every single one of the downfalls of the aforementioned currencies falls on to the fact of monopoly control.


What does a limitation on the states have to do with the federal government?

Article I, Section 8: Enumeration of Powers

"To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;"

There ain't no gold and silver clause there. Of course the exact meaning was and is up to the judicial system. But the founding fathers were well aware of the concept of paper money.


The tally sticks weren't defaulted on, it was the contract that was defaulted on by the king (he could have just as easily defaulted on gold). But the only real losers were the goldsmiths. Well, and the country at large for single-handedly ruining the image of what was probably the best system of currency in history. I should concede that it was debased though, but really only because it put gold in circulation as a replacement.


As I mentioned, you posed a red herring to the discussion. And you did so via your unwillingness to understand my argument (you admitted so yourself) because you would rather attack what you think threatens the foundation for your misguided logic in what could make a sound currency. Even though I have Hayek on my side. You did not highlight any error.


I argued the inefficiency of gold by arguing that the free market had not particularly chosen gold (or other PMs) as its currency of choice until the advent of fiduciary media. This, I believe (I am speculating), was due to a lack of availability more so than any other reason.


Agreed.

That link is far from an enlightening answer to my question. Crossfire RPG has no link, maybe freeciv is viable, Battle for Wesnoth links to a few threads on a messageboard started by you with a half dozen replies. I don't care enough to dig through all of the information that again seems written by you, looking for evidence that people are actually making use out of all this.

Not trying to sound like a jerk, but does anybody besides you actually follow this stuff? Is there actually some virtual economy going on here?

But the amusing part is that the romans started by saying "this coin is worth 10x its weight in gold" or whatever, and that actually worked for a very long time. It was when they tried to fix it after initially making its value that things didn't work out.


I disagree. The evolution of money has served, in general, to make trade easier. This is not a burden on the economy in any sense. The problem has always been the manipulation thereof.


Lovely phrase that I was unfamiliar with. I will definitely keep it around.


Whatever, we can go back and forth on this issue nitpicking details here and there. I have the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the industrial revolution (coincidence that it happened just as FRB took off, I'm sure) as my evidence. Yes, all three failed due to greed and monopolies (NB: referring to gold-backed paper for the third), but they also all succeeded for a very long time.


Another falsehood? If you want to agree to blur the lines between big finance and government, I'm all for it. But it is not a falsehood. Regardless if most central banks are privately or publicly owned, there is no need to create money as debt. This is just a historic policy of patting the wealthy on the back for generous donations to government officials, to the detriment of society as a whole. The US constitution (to which I assume you are referring) does not prohibit the government from issuing debt instruments--it gives them the power to coin money. This power is rightly interpreted to mean that the US government can create any money it so desires. "Coining" was just a phrase of the time and did not specifically refer to metal coins. Lincoln did not violate the constitution by creating greenbacks. You are "provably" wrong.


Bro, you can't take one part of it and ignore the rest. One person took his personal need for conquest ahead of the society and caused the default after the system had worked amicably for hundreds of years. He only defaulted because parliament limited his powers, that's why he turned to selling debt for gold at a discount in the first place. It's always about greed and power.

When you have a set of free market, unbacked currencies, such a thing can't have wide reaching effects because people will simply stop using it in favor of another. Some balance of power may shift to the issuer ephemerally, but in the long run it will be for naught. They will always be better off competing rationally with other currencies.


Then it is just as relevant as my examples of roman and british fiat as well as currency people actually used rather than nations. A free market currency isn't nearly as useful if only a certain class or caste can use it.


Again, see above. A letter of credit is useless as a form of money whereas deposit notes are not. Why do you not understand this distinction? Just because gold has been used does not mean it was an efficient medium of exchange. I never claimed that gold wasn't used. But it was not efficient until FRB and deposit notes, and ergo the expansion of the money supply to meet demand.


Well it looks like you have beaten yourself, so I'll leave you to it.