I'm not being irrational.  Irrational would be to assume that regulation is the best option, without due consideration of other avenues.  Irrational would be to assume that seeking a middle ground compromise with a statist is going to result in an improvement in individual liberties, when it never has before.  You don't have to be a statist yourself in order to advocate for statist goals.  It's the default position in the modern world, perhaps throughout history.  It takes a lot of work to convince a single, rational and educated individual that libertarian social theories are even possible, much less the better method, as you are an example.  This is partly due to the fact that many of the libertarian social theories seem counter-intuitive at a casual overview, and partly due to the fact that the modern adult citizen has been educated within a government institution for at least tweleve years, and has a lot of cognative programming to overcome.

It is my experience that, given time to consider the arguments, and a real willingness to consider the arguments, almost everyone is a libertarian in most areas of their life.  They just don't know it.  Most have their little 'core issues' that they believe cannot be handled effectively without a government monopoly on force, despite eventually accepting that it their issue is not logically different than any other.  Your's seems to be the prevention of low-tech terroristic bombings.  I've seen others argue that only a government can regulate air traffic to prevent collisions, or that only governments can regulate drug or medical safety standards, or the electromagnetic spectrum as a commons, or scientific inquiry of various forms, usually outer space.  None of these almost-libs can ever quite get past the idea that these very pet issues of theirs are already regulated by organizations other than governments in many direct or indirect ways.  They are just set in their viewpoints on these particular issues. 

The solution to the free rider problem is that of homeowners' insurance.  No mortgage officer in their right mind is going to approve a home mortgage without homeowners' insurance, and no insurance company is going to approve a policy that doesn't require that fire protection is paid and current.  So if your mortgage is paid off, and you live between two homes on a suburban cul-de-sac, and you choose to drop your fire protection fee (and thus your homeowners' insurance policy, for even if you pay them, they will refuse to pay out if you have an event) and a fire starts in your house, your outta luck.  But your neighbors are protected from your negligence via their own homeowners' insurance policies and their fire protection fees.  The fire company could show up to protect the other homes from your blaze, and charge you anything on the spot to put your home out, or simply let it burn while dousing your neighbors.  Do this once, and the free rider problem disappears.

It's still a 'no' because your default position, and the default position of most every statist on Earth, is that if regulations (enforced by government agents) are possible, we will try that first.  If it works okay, we aren't going to "fix what ain't broken" in order to consider any other alternative; whether it would increase freedom or not, or whether it could increase effectiveness or not.  Do the Irish people have a right to regulate themselves?  Yes.  Does the Irish parliment have the right to regulate the Irish people on their behalf?  Not necessarily.  Do the Irish people have the right to regulate my business relationships with an Irish importer?  An unqualified no. 

How?  Do you think that you are going to get 51% of the miners to accept such an update, once the first hardware implementation is available and any significant minority of miners have already invested into same?


I'm not limiting hardware implimentations to GPU's and FPGA's; and the entire argo doesn't need to be implimented in order for the use of hardware to be cost effective.  If there is a way for it to be accelerated in hardware, someone is eventually going to figure out how to do it.  The more exotic the hardware that is required to do this, the more centralized that mining becomes.  GPU's are no longer uncommon hardware, even if there are still many consumer desktops still in service that don't have suitable ones.  You can't really buy a modern destkop that doesn't have a CUDA capable GPU, unless you shoot for the cheap.  If it's an iMac, you quite literally cannot buy a new desktop without a CUDA GPU.  And even though FPGA's are expensive and somewhat exotic hardware today, their general purpose usefulness pretty much garrantees that many consumer desktops are going to have intergrated FPGA's on the mainboard in another ten years.  However, if you succeed in making it uneconomical to mine with these forms of commodity hardware, only the truely exotic hardware will be able to do so, and you will become dependent upon the purchase of PCI cards with such exotic hardware in order to expect to compete cost effectively for mining once major operations start using these purpose made devices.

I've already answered it three times.  The answer is a qualified no.  For many of the principled and practical reasons that have been presented to you, that apparently you have failed or willfully refused to consider.  For some it would be an unqualified no, but I'm not willing to undermine the 'good' in pursuit of the 'perfect'.  But I'm also openly stating that, by compromising my own priciples for a pragmatic victory, I'm still compromising my principles.

On the other hand, statists don't really have any principles to compromise as far as I can tell, so I'm not willing to meet in the middle either.  You're going to have to come a lot farther to my side with checks and balances against government abuse before I am willing to concede that the benefits to public safety outweigh the risks of future government "mission creep" or deliberate government corruption.

In some way, publicly funded fire stations do have a form of competition, even in urban areas.  The technology of automated fire suppression that just about every insurance company in America now requires of commercial or industrial new construction.  It makes their insurance premiums much lower to have these systems, and this is because fire companies are less necessary and over time are reduced across urban areas, for a modern fire company can 'cover' a larger area effectively and the fires that do occur are much reduced in magnitute on average.  Most commercially manufactured furniture are 'fire resistant' as compared to a couple of decades ago for similar reasons, because insurance companies demanded same.  Homeowners are still free to have a private furniture maker, such as an old Amish carpenter, to make their couch; but importers cannot import a couch that doesn't meet the UL standards for fire resistance.

And before you ask, UL is a private testing company, funded by the insurance companies themselves.  The building code just requires that manufactured (and imported) products be 'listed' by such a testing company, and the import regs make an end run around the code that much more difficult, so you could buy any random new couch and set a lit cigerette upon the cushion and it's significantly less likely (i.e. not impossible) for it to catch the whole couch (and thus the house) on fire than the fabrics that were available for couches just two decades ago.

Really?  You have over 800 forum posts and still don't understand how bitcoin's encentives work?

Then it would just be a deed restriction of the condo complex, and you are just back to where you are now with one fire suppression company that holds a monopoly on the condo block that you live in.  So you have lost nothing, and if the condo association ever gets sideways with that suppression company, they can vote to amend that clause to another company.

Fire suppression & trash collection are the easy one's for libertarians.  Public safety and road maintaince are the hard ones.  As for the issue about power companies holding monopolies, that's fixable also and some areas actually do have power company choices.  Same for cable tv providers.  It's possible, it's just not allowed in some locales.  After all, do you only have one choice in your Internet services, even if you choose to use a government monopoly such as the phone company to provide it?  I know that I have numerous choices for Internet services, it's just that the monopoly supported companies tend to have cheaper rates because the network was largely already paid for long before the broadband Internet boom.

And the same would happen in a libertarian society, despite the objections of an absolutist minority.  I'm not going to say that b2c or Fred are wrong, because they are not wrong from a principled perspective.  They are just not pragmatic.  A mostly libertarian society is still much more free than what exists, and is one major reason that the framers of the US Constitution advocated for that document despite it being a relative centralization of political power as compared to the Articles of Confederation.  Precisely because under the Articles the states bickered like EU member states are now bickering over the sovereign debt crisis over there.  They both seek a perfect libertarian society, wherein the state is actually small enough to drown in a bathtub should the need arise.  Much more realisticly is that the drive towards more individual freedom and personal responsibility begins to approach a condition of diminishing returns.  At which point, most practical libertarians are satisfied with the achievements and leave the perfectionists to battle with the "social democrats" in the political realm while the vast majority returns to simply ignoring politics and pursuing their own personal interests.  That really is the end goal.


You have cited this before, but corrolation still isn't causation, even in Ireland.  The subject is too complex to attribute to a single regulation, and without even checking, I'm pretty sure that the political issues that motivated much of the IRA were resolved around that same time, were they not?


No one has the power to stop you, which is not the same thing.  The framers recognized the need to incentivize creative works, and established both the 'authority' of Congress to establish a term limited copyright monopoly but also the Library of Congress (and thus the exceptions that libraries and schools enjoy) as well as explicitly rejecting the notion that copyright was a natural right.

I've had similar experiences with PayPal.  I'm inclined to believe his version of events.  Evidence simply doesn't pop up eight years later of guilt, Occum's Razor suggests that PayPal has decided that it doesn't like what this guy is doing, and wishes to distance themselves from his activities without it looking like another Wikileaks debaucle.  That certainly has cost PayPal much international business.

Good plan.

Whether or not an algo can be devised that is too large to fit in current hardware, it is likely to only be an impediment for a few years.  Bitcoin itself was CPU hardware for two years before a GPU client could be reasonablely developed.  No matter the complexity of the algo, there is no way to avoid the advantages of hardware excelleration for at least some portions of the algo.  Thus, there is no practical way to avoid the advantages that those who can bring a hardware excelleration solution to market will have over general purpose hardware.

Not only am I interested, I've an old thread that actully calls for exactly this.  Alternatively, a set of command line POSIX tools that can replicate functions of the bitcoind itself are desired.  For example, a CL tool that can create a transaction from a local wallet.dat and then pipe that transaction to a file, another that can pipe in that file and interact with the bitcoin p2p network, another that can pipe received blocks to a file, and another that can pipe those block files into a local bitcoind as if it was connected to a network node directly.  These are the minimum tools necessary to build a completely network isolated bitcoind, unreachable from the Internet by any other method than a USB-drive sneakernet.  This is one lower tech way of ensuring a secure bitcoin savings account that doesn't touch the Internet ever.

I've considered this more, and still think that a partially avoidable demurrage fee is ideal for your goals, even if that is more difficult to impliment.  Perhaps there should be a grace period for recently mined Freicoins, but not one dependent upon the velocity, such as a grace period after a transaction like I proposed some months ago.  Say that the freicoin blockchain can identify coins that are less than 6 months old, even after transactions mix and divide them.  I don't even know if this could be done, at the scale that the blockchain would have to track them.  But imagine that a miner gets a standard block reward plus demurrage reward.  The demurrage reward isn't graced, but the standard block reward (as the currency is increasing) gets to avoid demurrage.  Perhaps it would work like this...

The miner either provides two different addresses to keep the two rewards from mixing, or one with the intent of mixing those rewards.  Once mixed with other coins inside of an address, the grace period is 'dilluted'.  There are two ways that this could be done.  One, by reducing the time period of the grace by a ratio directly relative to the percentage of graced coins to old coins within the address.  Two by a similar ratio to the actual percentage of demurrage.  I don't know which method would be easier to impliment, but the results would be similar.  The graced coins would be preferred by savers, but not by those who simply desire to spend.  Thus there would be a method for savers to partially avoid demurrage fees against their savings, by either personally operating a mining cluster or by contract arrangements with miners.  There would likely be a small premium for graced coins on exchanges, and that premium (adjusted for the mixing of coins and their age) must (if I understand the logic correctly) represent the best market metric for "basic interest" that exists, thus informing all market players as to what that "basic interest" actuall is.  Once the transactions of graced coins occur, the mixing of graced and ungraced coins then becomes complicated.  If the addresses can, by default, be considered to send all ungraced coins first; it then becomes possible for address holders to keep graced coins "pure" and benefit from the market "base interest".  I can't imagine how the grace period discount could be implimented in software, but then I'm not either a programmer nor a math expert.

It was never a simple "no".  It's always a complex topic, and a common attack vector for others to 'box in' libertarian ideology.  The core principle is that, even though one can show that the risks are greater that any particular group of people could aquire a WMD, the current state of international meddling in other culture's affairs contributes to the growth of those same groupls.  Al Qadia wouldn't even exist if the US military didn't have bases in Saudia Arabia.  That is their founding cause, as they literally (and correctly) view the station of foreign military (ours, from their own perspectives) as an occcupation force.  Although it may be a "soft" occupation force, with the consent of the House of Saud, it maintains the US miltary's capacity to strike any target we wish within a few hundred miles of those bases.  All of that territory is inhabited by people that they identify with, and they don't identify with Americans.  It's a simple concept to understand, for if the role was ever reversed, Americans wouldn't suffer the foreign military to exist to start with, whether they had the welcome of Washington or not.  Which is one reason that UN blue helmets will never station on US soil (although pass through US protectorate bases overseas), even though a large minority percentage of UN forces are, in fact, American born.

Thus, even if regulation can be proven to prevent harm to real people, it can never be proven to be the overall safest path; for enforcements of such regulations and treaties necessarily involve national militaries violating the local soverignties of other nations.  There is no way to avoid this. 

This also doesn't even consider the concept that only a national government can actually enforce such a regulation upon the movements of WMD, but legitimate governments (and only governments) are responsible for the greatest loss of life across the past two centuries.  Over the past century, most of that loss of life was not the result of wars, but the direct result of legitimate governments being overtaken by murderous madmen who proceeded to destroy civilians within the society that created the government in question and/or nearby nations.  Why oon Earth, considering that kind of history, would any rational person wish to grant any government (particularly their own) an exclusive monopoly on the use of force?

I'm going to play the Devil's Advocate a bit here...



Central banking control of the monetary base, yes; deflationary spiral, no.  Assuming that an imaginary construct that is commonly described as a "deflationary spiral" actually exists, that it is a real and significant threat to a major economy, and that it's not simply the aggregate effect of many market players changing their financial stragedies to fit the new economic conditions (and therefore in their own best interests and that of the economy at large); there remains no evidence that Bitcoin, nor it's many derivitives, are immune from such a deflationary spiral.

More specificly, there is no evidence that demurrage would insulate Freicoin from this aggregate effect, either.

I have already brought this up, and he quite literally can make an educated guess as the best demurrage rate to set, and let it run.  If it's impossible to change, the currency will either succeed or fail entirely on it's own.



I tried to argue an internal ruleset that would allow the active saver to partially avoid the demurrage, which would have had similar effects as to what I believe you are arguing for.  However, he is unconvienced of the value of an avoidable demurrage fee.

I'm willing to check.

Well, you are entitled to feel that way, but it should prove exactly the opposite.  That a truly libertarian society doesn't actually function significantly different than how it already does in practice.  In fact, the Internet at large is about as close to a functioning anarchy as this world has yet seen; but is limited by agreed upon rules and physical limitations on distance.  One could call those limitations the 'natural laws' of the venue, for if we could never have such heated conversations as we have all seen in person; for it we did, they would inevitablely led to violence.  "Fighting words" are an established defense against the charge of assault, as long established by the SCOTUS; for the uttering of "fighting words" is considered the first strike.  At least as long as a jury would agree that the words used are actually offensive enough in context to have reasonablely enraged the average person.

And it's not like I didn't repeatedly warn him about his use of language.  I didn't lobby for his banishment because of his opinions, for there would be many others on this forum who would have to go with him.  I, as a lib, am accustomed to holding a minority opinion; even on a forum that is established by and policed by libertarian leaning administrators.  My ideology prohibits me from discriminating against those who disagree with me, civilly.  I, in fact, have been lobbying for some form of administrative action against AyeYo for weeks; for mods don't have the power to act alone in the censorship or banishment of forum members on this forum.   I have been doing so because of his aggressive and offensive language, not because of his ideologies.  If I held the opinions of those who disagree with me against them, I would be a sad, bitter and lonely old man.  My wife has never agreed with me, and in fact views my opinions in a similar light as yourself or AyeYo.  However, my wife might view my opinions with contempt; but she doesn't view me with contempt for the crime of holding them.

Furthermore, if you could see some of the mod section forums concerning banning of errant members; you would see that I had to lobby for quite some time about AyeYo, for the very reason that the administration is very libertarian at core and did not wish to take action against AyeYo because his outbursts were viewed as borderline and/or occasional; thus not systemic, and some didn't want to be too aggressive in enforcement of civil discourse.  A few openly expressed the desire to err on the side of under-enforcement, rather than censor a contributing member even if he has a history of outbursts.  All of this is very consistent with a libertarian sense of order and enforcement of same; but in the end, eventually a line is crossed that justifies enforcement even within a libertarian society.

I noticed how much more civil, and quiet, these political threads seem to have become since AyeYo has been absent.  A single troll can turn an otherwise civil discourse between peers into a caustic argument among many former friends.