One option is to remove the need for pools by making mining rewards more even. Make a two-tier mining reward system: if you make a block that hashes to less than T₂ it's a normal block and it gets, for example, a 10 BTC subsidy, while if you make a block that hashes to less than an easier target T₁ but more than T₂ you can push the block as a special type of transaction to be included in another block and get a subsidy of 30 * T₂/T₁ BTC. The remaining 10 BTC gets democratically distributed as described. Obviously the block hashing algorithm would have to be modified to something like a hash of a hash since you can't have T₂/T₁ blocks full of transactions in every block, but if this or something else makes mining viable without pools it would make the coordination problem of finding a sufficiently large subgroup for capturing the democracy rather difficult.

Another option is to use approval voting. If the top legitimate candidates have >50% approval then a mining pool would need to have majority hashpower to overtake them.

Companies can only entice and society can only persuade - government is the only thing that can actually _force_. If you find their appeals lacking you have the freedom to reject them. That's the change.

What about encrypting messages with public keys using ECIES (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Encryption_Scheme)?

I would imagine anyone can take it. It's just that homeless people just happen to be the ones that have the most free time and gain the most marginal value from money. And there is no such thing as a "normal worker"; each job has its own required set of skills and its own supply/demand curve so you can't really say one kind of work is more exploitative than another.

Interestingly enough, this is actually false - gold coins were originally used by kings as a way of forcing their citizens to support local armies by making it the only legal tender for taxation. Genuine decentralized societies tended to use proto-Ripple-style credit systems. Read David Grabeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years.

$200k can give you a pretty nice retirement for life in Thailand, India or the like.

Firstbits, as implied in the name, returns the first address in the blockchain that matches the shortened version. The second address would have a firstbits one character longer.

~35% of people say all of the statements should be legal, ~35% just don't like the last one.

Is a 50-year correlation really enough to prove a statement as general and profound as "the more laws ban killing, the more killing takes place"? Let's look at a different graph:



And:



from http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.1/monkkonen.html

There are plenty of ways to explain that blip in the 1960-1990s - the war on drugs was a very large factor, some blame elements of the civil rights movement for the increase and some praise legalization of abortion for the decrease.

I would personally argue that the long-term decrease in violence in general is largely attributable to the increase in societal complexity and the reduction of importance of material goods - there's really not much valuable that you can actually steal these days. 2000 years ago, if you conquered a country or attacked a ship as a pirate you could take all the wealth and even capture much of the value of the people through slavery. Nowadays, all the wealth is more and more in personalized (ie. non-commodity) goods, human capital and social relationships, which can't be easily stolen. There's just no point to violence any more.

Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell. It's exactly what you want.

"special interests manipulate the people into voting for ever-lower taxes and higher government spending"

Democracy in the USA isn't just overruled by money, it's also the voters themselves that are overruled by money. This was the core argument against democracy way back in the 19th century: that the average person is not informed enough to know how to vote, so it would just give more power to the demagogues.

Me? I'd be fine with whatever model of government as long as there was freer immigration and genuine choices for individuals to pick what country suits them best so we can get some competition going to see what model works best (including policies like moving more services to states and municipalities to promote this). It might seem like it disagrees with my general libertarian ethic, but I think that if you talk to an anarcho-capitalist in the right way I'm sure even they would be fine with the idea of private cities and the like if the free market decides that vertically integrating health, education, insurance and the like is the most efficient option (I'd prefer not trusting that much to a single entity, but I wouldn't deny others the right to do the same - it's sort of like an iPhone vs Android debate).

Anything existing or coming up for Toronto?

I think this is an interesting question. Why does health care at places like these: http://www.bumrungrad.com/thailandhospital cost so little, and why can't they just import themselves to the US and get huge profits until the costs make their way down to their level?

I answered depends - it depends on whether or not the threat was a credible threat. "ill kill u lolol" on an Internet forum != a 100-kg man walking up to you in the streets at night and demanding your money or your life.

So even if someone walks up to you with a gun clearly in his pocket (assume that such gun carrying is normal and acceptable where you live) and says "give me $200 or I'll shoot you" it's not OK to attack him first? I'm all for free speech, but once you start taking things this far and outlawing preemptive strikes I really think we're entering into "evil will always defeat good because good is dumb" territory.

Exactly. It's intended to be a generic "oppress the involuntary minority" scenario.

Couldn't you argue that the second last statement is rewarding the killer with a higher social position with respect to you, which, if the killer values it (which he clearly does if he's willing to commit murder for it), is just as much a form of payment as money is?

I meant banned by the state (or treated as a type of aggression).