Your (eternal) error is to think that monetary assets HAVE TO be backed by something.  They don't have to.  A monetary asset is a monetary asset when there's a collective belief in its acceptance against value.  How that belief came to be, how it is sustained, and whether it is "legit" doesn't really matter, the only thing that matters is that the belief exists in the mind of the person you want to give the asset to, in order to obtain goods/services.  That's all.  If I have doggie poop, but my neighbour is believing that others will accept doggie poop for goods and services, then I'm able to obtain goods and services from him against doggie poop I provide, and hence, doggie poop is, at that moment, a monetary asset.

The belief in its acceptance against value is the single, only, sole thing that defines a monetary asset.

Now, there are different methods to keep that belief going, to get it going and so on, but they are just tools, and there's no need for them to exist, if the belief can be maintained in any other way.

ONE way to get the belief going in a monetary asset, is that it is somehow redeemable against something that is recognized as valuable.  That can be another monetary asset of which the belief system is more firmly established, it can be some or other commodity of which the value is established because there's a users' market for it, or it can be an enforceable promise of delivering value by a debtor, in as much as one believes that the debtor can really be forced to deliver.  This is the idea of "backing" a monetary asset: to have it derive its value from something else that is valuable and which you can get "for sure" with the monetary asset.

But it is not necessary.

Of course, one thing that kills all belief, is if everybody can make arbitrary amounts of the monetary asset.  If the difficulty of creating one-self the monetary asset is lower than the difficulty of providing value to obtain the asset in a trade, of course this is not going to work. 

Indeed.  Like the freedom to question God's and the King's authority were considered bad.  Freedom not to be religious while the others have to prey and obey the rules of the high priest.

But also to have the freedom to exchange an apple for an orange, without having to give apples to the state and their parasites.

See, where I live, if I were to exchange fully legally an apple for an orange, things happen like this:

You have an orange, I have an apple.  We both have also 1 Euro, and we consider that the market price of an apple, and an orange, is 1 Euro.

I buy your orange, and I pay you one Euro.  On that one Euro, you have to pay 20% of VAT.  So you obtain 0.8 Euro in your business.  To get that 0.8 Euro out of your business, to buy my apple, you have to pay 23% of social security contributions, and 30% of income tax (if you are part of the upper middle class).  That means that you get in the end, 0.43 Euro.

Now, you buy my apple for 1 Euro.  I do the same.  So I end up holding 0.43 Euro.

On our exchange of 1 apple for 1 orange (worth exchanged: 1 Euro against 1 Euro), we paid together 1.14 Euro to the state.  Each time one exchanges an economic value of A, one has to provide the state with 1.14 times A.   Roads are not that expensive.  States are.  Because they are generators of "con jobs".

Being able to exchange an orange for an apple is what I call economic freedom.


And I told you you were wrong.  Because you could have said the same about telephone, television and other initial state-monopolies on economic goods, like roads, houses, space rockets, satellites and so on.

What value ?  The actual consumer-happiness value (the ultimate source of all value) by the existence of bitcoin is essentially nothing.  It is that economic creation of value that would not have existed if bitcoin didn't exist.  What is that value ?  What better cars are running because of bitcoin ?  What better food is being eaten because of bitcoin ?  What better education is sold because of bitcoin ?  What markets became more efficient and allocated their resources better than bitcoin ?  I mean, outside of the little crypto world itself ?  Yes, probably a few people are "creating value" by earning salaries when setting up coindesk.com and so on.
But apart from a self-serving little world, what value creation did bitcoin allow that fiat didn't ?
There is, at the moment, only one true application: dark markets.  There is true value creation in dark markets, especially of drugs.  People (consumers) really value drugs a lot.  The value creation for these consumers is huge.  But because of the legal barriers to that value creation, dark markets are risky to do with fiat.  So, yes, value creation happens on dark markets thanks to crypto in general, and bitcoin in particular.

There's another utility, which is related.  Privacy-related services on the internet.  VPN for instance.  This is value creation that is facilitated by the existence of crypto.  

However, on these two aspects, bitcoin is dangerous, because not private enough.  Only crypto with privacy-related features can, in the end, deliver on this.

But how much is this in terms of value creation, as compared to everything done with fiat ?  Crypto has enabled WAY WAY WAY less than 1/30000 of the world's value creation, because essentially all of the market cap of crypto (bitcoin included) is NOT by Fisher's formula for its demand as a use as a currency, but just by greater-fool speculation.  The *REAL* currency market cap of bitcoin is ridiculously small, probably less than 1% of its official market cap.  Remove all hope for "greater fools", let bitcoin's price crash to its level of demand as a currency (its only "value creation enabling" feature) and you end up with the true economic value of bitcoin, which is essentially insignificant.

No, economic freedom.  Like freedom of speech.

And yes, economic freedom is "really bad" to many people, like freedom of speech is really bad to many people (and even more so when religion holds its sway).

I think it is.  Of course, not immediately.  Raw processing speed is a *necessary* condition.  But it will become a sufficient condition because what is possible, will happen in this kind of thing.  Simply because it not happening is a meta-stable situation: if it happens once, that's enough, and will introduce the equivalent of a phase transition.  It is like undercooled water.  It has the potential to freeze, but it simply didn't... yet.  One perturbation that starts nucleating the freezing, and the water undergoes a phase transition.
There is no "stabilizing force" that takes any step towards machine intelligence "back again", on the contrary.  Once machine intelligence can improve itself, there's no stopping to the run-away effect.

"neurons" aren't, of course, "processors" in the machine paradigm, but are run-time objects (computer science objects).  In a run-time environment, objects are just as varied as biological neuron types.  The variety of "neurons" in a biological brain corresponds, if you want to, to the class structure of the running software in the object oriented paradigm.   

The "processor" is the underlying layer: the bio-chemistry of neurons, at least the part of the bio-chemistry that is essential for the data processing (the metabolism biochemistry is not necessary).

But again, the idea is most probably NOT that we implement a bio brain imitation in silicon. 


This is not a problem.  You cannot upscale the human brain to a 1 MW processor.  We would simply catch fire.   You can easily upscale a silicon machine to 1 MW.   And cheap energy is available for machines, much more so than it is available for human brains. 

That's what I try to make as a point: the human brain is a brilliant invention of evolution.  But it is what it is, and can only very slowly evolve.  In as much as it is radically altered artificially, it is btw also not a human any more, but a machine.  By definition, a human will be a thing with a current-human like brain.  It has huge capacity and so on, but only very slowly evolving. 
Technology under Moore's law evolves millions of times faster, and so the hypothesis of a singularity is simply that a faster-growing curve will, at some point in the future, cross an almost constant curve, and that this is inevitable.

The two exceptions are that the point may be further in the future than one thinks, or that the rising curve may flat out (end of Moore's law).  But if not, then their crossing is inevitable.


Again, you're confusing run-time objects and execution layer.  Neurons and their organisation and connection is "run time".  Like objects in a run time environment.  The execution layer is biochemistry of neurons for one, and silicon circuits ("processors", but maybe not von neumann architectures, but rather FPGA like structures, who knows) on the other.
And we don't have to implement brain like run time systems onto silicon, it may take totally different configurations: there's more than one path to intelligence.


You may very well have run time environments with thousands of classes of objects.

To make him see the most essential aspect of crypto, which is that it is essentially a zero sum game, and that the idea that one "can make money from it" implies that others must lose an equal amount of money ; and that if you're new to the game, most probably you're on the losing side.

This is entirely different with a question like "there are so many cryptography texts and books, I'm confused, I want to learn cryptography".   "learning cryptography" is not a zero-sum game.  When one person acquires more knowledge, it doesn't mean that another person has lost that knowledge.  So there, every beginner can be helped.   It makes sense to "want to lift your confusion to learn cryptography".   But "wanting to lift your confusion to make money with alt coins" is something different.  You need to be warned that there must be as many losers as there are winners, and that, if you're a beginner, most probably you will be losing.

Indeed, given that the crypto scene is a zero-sum game, for people to make money, others have to lose just as much money.  This is why the crypto scene is looking for what's called "adoption".  It means more people coming to crypto, that will lose some money, so that others can win more money.  Without new losers coming in every day, it wouldn't be possible to make systematically a lot of money in crypto.

So the OP is probably very much welcomed.  People like him are needed for adoption to succeed.

Hypocrisy is one of the ways to do crypto.  Coding is another one.  They are both legit ways of trying to rip off the other one, no ?

Indeed, and DASH has everything to be mega-pumpable.  Evan's a true genius, and he will get insanely rich (or go to prison).  He knows perfectly well how to mimick a distributed, private, crypto currency with high liquidity with a centralized, low-liquidity system entirely under his control.  The perfect greater-fool pump, and as you say, people don't care because they think (most probably correctly) that they will find even greater fools to dump on, in sync with the master of the game.  And they are probably right (in the beginning).
This is how empires are made.  The only problem is that when Evan's fortune is going to get too big, it will be on the radar of the SEC.

The essence of crypto is "trustelessness", which means that from the moment someone tries to rip off another one, it is legit.  What is not legit in crypto is to collude over what would be a good thing to do for everybody.  When you stop trying to rip off the other one, you do something non-legit in crypto.  It is the only thing that is non-legit.  The whole basis of crypto is that everyone tries to rip off everyone else, with all possible schemes of code, coin emission, coin offerings, and what not.  If you do not try to rip off the other one, you're putting yourself out of the crypto scene, and you do non-legit things.

The art of doing crypto is the other one trying to rip you off, and you not letting him do so.

First of all, I don't think dash is a scam, simply because it is crypto, and in crypto, by definition, there is no scam, as "trying to scam the other one" is the essence of the game (also called "trustlessness").

The "lie" if you want to, about DASH, is that it is a decentralized system, while it is most probably a totally centralized entity, because of the instamine and the masternode scheme.  I'm pretty sure the dev team has near half of the stash.  This implies that they have the full power of voting over the dash code, and hence the protocol.  There's not much "decentralization" in DASH.  That doesn't mean that people cannot obtain it, trade it, and so on.  Fiat is also perfectly centralized, and works: people can obtain it, use it, trade it. 

As such, it doesn't really qualify as a "decentralized crypto".  But, but: this is actually its real value, its real power.  By mimicking as a decentralized crypto currency, but by having, behind the scenes, the full power and flexibility of a centralized system, this makes a hell of a powerful system.  Most all of the hassle, difficulties and so on of crypto come from the axiom of decentralisation.  The need for consensus, and the immutability, which makes unwanted features (like full blocks) also immutable properties.  In a centralized system such as a central bank fiat system, there is no such problem: the board gets together, considers the problem, decides on a solution, and that's imposed upon everyone.  No shit.  Aristocrats inform the king, the king decides, and the people obey.  Simple.  Efficient.  Has been working for millennia.  Sun Tsu.   And the nice thing is that the aristocrats and the king get insanely rich.

THAT is the real power of DASH, and that is why I think it will reach the moon: it is fiat, mimicking as crypto.   Is this a scam ?  No.  Because in crypto, nothing is a scam.  

They are the ONLY potentially sensible crypto coins.  But we went over this several times.   Any non-anon coin is fiat with a lot of hassle.  Fiat is then better.

So I have the opposite view: only anon coins are legit.  If it isn't anon, you better use fiat, it is in all respects a better system. 

These people are important.  If nobody were buying high and selling low, the general advice of selling high and buying low wouldn't find a market.

Maybe, but I rather think that DASH is now dumped onto newbies, to reload the funds that have pumped it earlier.  The low liquidity of the market makes that you don't need huge amounts of money to pump it, but you do need some money.  So at a certain point, you need to fill the accounts again.  This, you do by dumping when the newbies, suffering from FOMO, come in.  When the batteries are reloaded, you can go for the next pumping season (or for cocaine and prostitutes, depends....)
This doesn't work with a liquid coin of course, but DASH isn't liquid at all, and lends itself perfectly to this practice.

I don't think that coding details matter if what is traded for real, are poloniex IOU.

I agree with the idea that the only fair price is the market price, under the assumption of perfect fluidity, liquidity and competition.  Such a market is perfectly random too, that is, all the information that is to be had, is already included in the price, and hence, any form of speculation on a price increase or price decrease is a totally random guess - unless one possesses information that is not yet included in the price.  This is Malkiel's efficient market hypothesis.

However, a market can also be random, without assigning optimal resources, but just "totally noisy".

An efficient market is totally random.  However, I guess a totally random market is not necessarily efficient.  True.

If I remember well the code wasn't even open source, no ?

This.  He even leaves Vitalik in the rear mirror on that aspect.  Simply a genius.
That said, I think the biggest genuine advantage of DASH is exactly the fact that it is a centralized token system, with all the efficiency advantages that come with it.  There won't be year-long debates about block size, on Segwit or whatever.  Next week, the Emperor decides (eh, I mean, the community votes), and that's it.  Vitalik must be green with envy !  But this results in extremely efficient payment systems.  DASH is Evan's Mastercard company, mimicking as a crypto.
And this might exactly be something the adoption market is waiting for, not caring about seigniorage, true privacy, distributed consensus and all that, but just a fast, efficient payment system of which there's a guy that solves problems as they come, and get insanely rich in doing so (a bit like Bill Gates back in the old days, with computers).