Quote "Counterfeiting is not a real crime. Putting ink on paper hurts no one."

If that were so then how come:

Quote "The real crime is issuing notes promising to redeem for gold, breaking the promise, and maintaining the value of your pictures by force."

The "issuing notes promising to redeem for gold, breaking the promise" *is* "counterfeiting".

The fact that it might be done by people who haven't realised the notes they are counterfeiting are themselves already counterfeit just shows that the first layer of counterfeiters fooled the second layer of counterfeiters. At that point the first layer fights back against the second layer hope to "maintain[snip] the value of [their] pictures by force", which as you point out they already were prepared to do even if the second layer of counterfeiters hadn'y jumped on the bandwagon at a degree of removal.

...

I often wonder about the wits of entities that spout as doctrine "we are strong therefore we are obviously going to rape you and you are too stupid to know it or too weak-willed to kill us in our sleep before we quit bragging that we are going to do it and just go ahead and do it."

Those are the strong? They have enough willpower to refrain from doing it until after the bragging? Is that more willpower than those who manage to refrain from killing them in their sleep?

Like hello, when should we stop your heart, or is this spouting essentially harmless?

-MarkM-

Re original post

Yeah, re-inventing finger and talk and ~username seems dubious given that those very functionalities were already rejected from the get-go by the gatesian masses.

We still have the code, so hmm what exactly were the problems with random spammers being able to "talk" at you or deduce your email from your webpage, again?

A lot of the stuff pointed to in original post and by what it points to etc seems to fail to say straight out from the get-go that history seemed to show that "faces" shouldn't be findable from email addresses and email addresses shouldn't be deduce-able from URLs. Oh I seem to recall too some history about email addresses not even appearing on pages that robots who ignore robots.txt might scrape.

I also see a whole lot of wanting to put random newfangled files in specific places then go auto-looking for them without so much as a tip of the hat to robots.txt.

Huh? What for are you digging around automatically on my site for random files other than robots.txt when my log shows you failed to first consult robots.txt to find out whether I wanted you to go looking for such a file and if so where I'd like you to please go look for it and where to please not look for it thank you.

Then some bitcoiners wonder why the paypal address I wave around cannot be spammed? Oh come to think it cannot be "talk"ed at either.

Is there any known way to teach yahoo chat about chatbots? A way to attempt it without going through a huge filling out of form (like, say, a this is a spambot button) would be nice, once you're on someone's CD of 10 million (or is it dvd of 10 billion now?) chat addresses you get a lot of bots constantly using exact same please add me and why spiel... Getting annoying to use yahoo mail via web. too bad they don't offer IMAP (yet?)

<rant>oops too late. oh well, </rant> then, my bad.

-MarkM- (archive.org / wayback machine / knotwork dot com squiggle guesswho)

Luckily for me the paperclip market already crashed. I wonder how many buggy-whips I should accept instead of how many paperclips?

Anyone got any genuine Henry Moore Paperclip Sculptures they wanna sell?

I have too many USD already. My 5 in mtgox my browser doesn't seem to want me to sell and those in PayPal I can spend some on renewing my domains but not sure I want to throw any more away on hosting I spent a lot that way already and have less now to show for it.

-MarkM- (Actually Henry Moore Pipecleaner Sculptures might also be of interest?)

Haven't you seen the movies?

Oh wait, you typed MiB not MIB, my bad.

If the MiB try it, we'll pray to the Spirits of the Holy Wood that the MIB will do something about it?

-MarkM-

Yes that sounds very very squeeky-clean, and less whatever you're taking I want some than "calculate your net gain of README files, Makefiles, sundry executables paperclips popped-off keyboard-keys, slightly wonky mice bitcoins sheets of newspaper and so on, all the tools of business you have more of now than last year and calculate what you could get on e-bay or mtgox or whatever for them".

When I am raking in taxable-tax-bracket income in Bitcoins I think I like the suggestion of only calculating what my bitcoin gains would be worth not what all the other sundry digital and non-digital tools gained might be auctionable for,

But meanwhile I will continue to figure that I am not sure yet how many paperclips to accept for a Freeciv Gold unit instead of $1000 usd or one Bitcoin.

-MarkM- (Now accepting offers in CDN-Delivered paperclips!) (And Genuine Antique Hand-Carved Tally-Sticks!)

Also, business is different from personal.

If Mark Metson "earned" a month of hosting normally retailed for $5, that very likely needs to be declared as $5 income.

On the other hand if Mark Metson's Sole Proprietorship "Digitalis Data Services" aquired that same hosting and failed to make any money with it - or come to think of it, even if succeeding in making money with it - it is merely an expense, and thus a tax deduction if Digitalis or MarkM paid for it, not income at all!

Get yourself at least a Sole Proprietorship or (as Digitalis used to be) a partnership (that happened to have no partners just me), and if you actually do "take off" look into the lovely scam (as some Libertarians seem to consider it) known as a Limited Liability Company.

Or your planet/regions similar constructs/entities.

-MarkM- (These keystrokes are a business expense, but being a business Digitalis won't beg. ) (Yet hahahaha)

Hacker Nation needs *you* !

Makes sense the Galactic Hackers should have something a tad more advanced than these Earthlings have, lets see what can be done!

-MarkM-

Is it too much to hope that "ethical hackers" will come up with the gear to "mine" wallets before bitcoin loses all its value due to "black hat"s?

And what will the ratio of lost+empty wallets to unlost wallets be by then?

-MarkM-

Some things it doesn't seem reasonable to try to tax until they finally emerge from the virtual/game universes into some kind of legal tender.

If I do get $1000 usd for a Freeciv Gold I won't mind paying tax on it.

If all I get is a bitcoin and that can buy two units of freeciv gold at the next planet in the galactic milieu I can offer two units for $2000 and maybe make my gov't (Canadian govt) more tax than by trying to sell the bitcoin for my tax bracket percent of $1000 usd...

Volume is relevant though, because at some number of usd in a year I will attain a tax bracket so high that I will be paying the gov't instead of them paying me via GST rebates on top of whatever I earn.

-MarkM-

How much of it could they earn back by making blockbuster movies about how it vanished?

-MarkM-

Lost? Nay, they are merely inadvertently offered as bounty for quantum computer development!

-MarkM-

How much is your World of Warcraft gold worth?

If you play a nation in Freeciv, how much is it's gold worth?

Basically unless you actually manage to sell some any guess about it's value is purely speculative, and even if you do manage to sell some at one price there is no guarantee you could sell any more at all at that same price.

How much do babies sell for?

Is your baby taxable merely because in theory someone might consider it a marketable one?

How about your hours? How much are they worth?

When you don't happen to sell them?

When you choose not to put them on the market that hour or week or year or decade?

If you sold 40,000 euros your cost of machinery maybe it might be worth at least a tenth of that, depending on the speed of depreciation / rate of increase in competing tech of that machinery since you bought or built it.

So you could if you are optimistic at least claim you accepted what you imagined to be worth at least as much as the inventory you sold.

(Does computer machinery depreciate to half value every 18 months as new ones double in power each 18 months?)

There is a parallel buyer side problem too. How much is inventory worth that was bought with BitCoin?

How much is stuff worth that is given as a gift or in barter?

Some of those are solvable presumably.

Most likely, legal tender laws require that you offer to accept legal tender and the amount of legal tender they could have paid for it could be naively imagined at least by those who do choose the legal tender option to be the value.

So maybe help drive up BitCoin value by offering things at much much fewer bitcoins than you will take in legal tender?

-MarkM- (Not licensed to practice law in any known nation of Sol III)

STOP PRESS! Freeciv Gold now only $1000 u.s. per unit (or 1.00 bitcoin...)

I am thinking of doing "BotCoin", because I need to do at least one currency anyway for Galactic Milieu.

I would start from the existing BitCoin codebase though not a whole 'nother language.

One idea I have for it is to offer "Your own BotCoin-based currency!!!" that instead of forking the chain is DIRECTLY based on BotCoin, being implemented as cosmetics of the client (theme / skin type idea). Peg "your" currency to BotCoin simply by fixing (not floating!) the conversion rate directly in "your" currency's client.

I have to hack the code anyway to make the currency the Hacker nation in the Galactic Milieu should be using. So if this could also lead to national currencies for all the nations featured in Freeciv each being able to have their own national theme/skin that'd be great too.

Not having to have multiple chains would be handy for game currencies, but for the game version I would probably have the currencies able to float their conversion rate since foreign exchange rates and forex trading would be important part of the game. Fixed conversion rates wouldn't be useful for that but not having to have multiple chains would be.

-MarkM-

The chain could be forked, if people wanted to keep running with the only 21,000,000 coins model.

But the client has been changed before, if enough people with enough guns decided to try to force it to be changed again then there isn't a lot stopping them. We could fork, sure. Theirs could be made legal tender and ours not, whatever.

But it is very much a share in an endeavour.

-MarkM-

To me BitCoin looks like it *is* a "share holding".

It looks like an IPO that is taking some years to take place, whose initial public offering is 21,000,000 shares.

The limit on the number to be issued seems somewhat arbitrary, I do not see why if the Fed took up BitCoins it would not be able to announce a change in that arbitrary value, so that miners will be able to keep going another number of years producing (say for example) another 21,000,000.

What is looks to be a share *of* is "whatever you end up being able to trade it for".

-MarkM-

This forum account was not created for anonymity, nor was the corresponding freenode IRC nick, "knotwork".

WHOIS knotwork.com and WHOIS knotwork.net are also not intended to be anonymity tools.

Until I develop a means for hosting to pay for itself neither of these domains are actually hosted. I registered them through, and keep them at, networksolutions mainly because it seemed to be the direct descendant of the original NIC and I figured if it actually is CIA NSA etc crony then at least maybe it inherits classic U.S. freedom of speech traditions as well as the military backing of the U.S. Marine Corp.

The PayPal address I use for making money purposes is at a subdomain of knotwork.com thus does not actually work for email, but PayPal, happily, does still allow it to work for PayPal transactions.

I might have some e-gold rotting (storage fees) in an e-gold account if it hasn't already rotted to nothing but PayPal balances might rot faster due to inflation so this thread came to my attention in the process of wondering whether I might be better off moving my seldom used PayPal balance(s) over to BitCoin. So figured I might as well at least start toward such a potential future by introducing myself.

-MarkM-

Once it comes down to some kind of war like that, the economics of different methods and approaches and tools of war presumably start to enter into the matter.

One advantage of a war of processing power over a war of intercontinental ballistic missiles, from leftist perspectives that consider peacenicks doves and such to be a form of leftness, might be an appearance of less direct medical-triage type "damage" amongst the "collateral damage" of such tools/methods.

One think I liked about using Freeciv was it's inclusion of "nations" that actually correspond to some of the "nations" currently existing on Earth. Splits in the "chain" could actually have use, as until each "nation" has a currency in the system splits might be as good a means as any of implementing a "new" currency, and contrariwise each time a split occurs if there are any "nations" that do not yet have a chain of their own they could adopt one of the branches of the split.

From some perspectives splitting chains could look much more appealing than actually sending soldiers off to die or even battlebots off to be forcibly dismantled or maybe even co-opted.

Basing proof of work on work more do-able by machines than by humans though seems a kind of capitalism-biassed approach ab initio, is it a deliberate attempt to ensure those who employ robots an advantage over those who employ humans?

-MarkM-

Maybe next time around we could try a different proof of work.

Could one for example hash a video showing the human operator at their console along with the stream of keystrokes and joystick and mouse etc movements, providing an audit trail demonstrating how hard it really was to generate the magickal bonusses to be associated with the supposedly awesome magickal sword their efforts might conceivably gain for them should they turn out to be the killer of the boss monster in the main-chain timeline of the truly once you kill that boss that boss is dead universe in which they and other awesome workers perform the work of eliminating bosses and their minions?

-MarkM- (From a Freeciv Galactic Milieu perspective, I'd guess the Hacker nation might be the people to ask such things of...)

/quote caveden
No... FRB doesn't create actual resources, it only creates new money. How is that going to allow investments to take place? Capital is not made of dollar bills. Smiley
/quote

Someone else already mentioned that when you offer to buy, even with debt, production of resources can maybe be started up to meet your offer.

But I am reminded of a post I saw elsewhere in these forums claiming that the fact that some sequences of bits have in the past been sold, and some might likely in the future be sold, can be construed as a tax obligation on the part of people coming into possession of sequences of bits. Specifically, a miner making a block during the 50 botcoin block regime might be liable for tax on whatever some other bitcoins had around that time in history contrived to get exchanged into dollars for, or maybe even the mere existence of an offer at or around that time might suffice to create a tax obligation.

So when a banker's magickal flourish of his magickal pen conjures yet more megabucks into existence, if someone, including that banker, chose to offer some of those magickal megabucks in return for some resource, presto that resource can be purported to be worth those megabucks, whoever has that resource however desperately their survival might depend on it and however totally lacking in money they might be possibly due to previous magickal flourishes of such magickal pens, that "unfortunate" holder of the resource suddenly is liable for the tax on those megabucks their crumb of bread uh I mean desired resource has magickally been fiat-ed to be "worth" as a lever for coercing its holder, and .... this seems to be particularly cruel .... if the banker then decides instead to purchase his cousin's room-mate's cousin's crumb instead, the poor sucker stuck with the crumb that wasn't actually bought owes taxes on the totally "didn't actually happen" imaginary "value" of that crumb!

Given such weirdness, if the terrabucks say let there be investment, how many people having to die to enable it would even matter? Aren't they merely collateral damage compared to the grand schemes of the terrabuck-pen-wielders?

(Back when controversy over Lindens and WoW gold and large value ebay auctioned magick swords one could conjure up 32767 of as easily as one could conjure up 257 of was quite heated some politicians actually seemed to figure if I had MAXLONGINT such swords their value for tax purposes presumably should be MAXLONGINT times whatever one somehow sold on e-bay for! Imagine my tax liability then! How long an int's max of such "goods" would have to go up for auction to demonstrate to such thinking that it might not quite have it's estimate of the value of unsold and potentially unselleable goods quite right?)

-MarkM- (s/botcoin/bitcoin/ left unexecuted as the typo seems nicely fortuitous.)

Hi! First post.

I came across BitCoin somewhat serendipitously in the course of working on (IRC, eggdrop, TCL) trading bots for Galactic Milieu ( http://sourceforge.net/p/galacticmilieu/home/ ).

I was mostly looking for things like Open Transaction, since I wanted client (player's agent) bots to sit around trading "arbitrary" things in galaxies where one planet's local currency might be of little interest on another planet, especially in a galaxy far far away, but where actual tangible things, or even useful information such as how to build ships that can travel faster than light typically does, might well have value far away if ever it somehow managed to get there.

Part of the "game" with these bots is supposed to be the whole "problem" of why anyone anywhere would think your possibly puny planet's local currency has any value whatsoever, let alone bother buying any of it using anything actually useful to them such as ton-light-months of transportation or quantities of fuel usable to generate ton-light-months of transportation or ice cream cones or face paint (or even blue mud specially formulated for rubbing on your belly).

I have been wondering about a specific tactic or strategy that, when reading this thread, I find myself thinking could in theory maybe "explain" some of the things this thread mentions.

Basically as long as transaction fees are low or zero, and accounts buying and selling can be anonymous, couldn't people interested in creating and maintaining a perception that their national currency (hello, BitCoiner nation! Why aren't you featured in Freeciv as a nation yet? Is the Galactic Ruleset going to have to start adding in nations itself due to some problem of getting a BitCoiner nation accepting into mainline/default Freeciv? But I digress...) has value buy it and sell it back and forth between accounts of their own at ever higher values, only ever actually releasing some to outsiders at higher price than they buy it back from outsiders?

I kind of envisioned some nations deliberately buying and selling their own currency among their own sock-puppets constantly deliberately to create high volumes at high prices precisely for the purpose of convincing speculators that there is money to be made with that currency...

It seems to me it could be interesting to somehow estimate (or would that be guestimate) how many of the dollars seemingly being spent to seemingly buy BitCoins is actually coming from real people who really had no bitcoins previously compared to how much is coming from people buying their own BitCoins from themselves.

Might it seem useful to at least some miners to buy from themselves some of the early bitcoins they created by mining, precisely for the purpose of creating an appearance of the saleablilty of BitCoins, but refraining from buying other people's BitCoins since they are not actually trying to spend dollars they are trying to keep the dollars themselves whilst making it look like people are parting with dollars?

-MarkM-