Thank you As Bob Ross said:

I think I understand what he's trying to say: because the state was created with the intention to protect our rights, and because bitcoin is outside the reaches of the state, the state cannot protect our rights in bitcoin, ergo it shouldn't be used i.e. banned.

His folly is in the belief that only the state can, or perhaps only the state should, protect your rights; he has settled upon this belief and he is going to double down on his double downs no matter what perspectives you try to give him proving otherwise.  I dunno what else to say about it; he's a psychological vampire, his purpose is to rob you of your energy thinking about what he wants you to think about.  Anyone can protect their rights, it's not something you need an official badge for lol You protect your property rights like you protect anything else; someone reaches for your food, you pull it out of reach and say, "No, it's my food, you should ask if you want some."  It's just what people do.  Someone comes up to you and tries to take 100$ from you, you take any opportunity you can to stop it from happening.  Since we can certainly protect our bitcoin by protecting the keys to our wallets, his point crumbles apart very easily; no matter what the state was intended for, it's not an excuse to be lazy about defending your rights.  Yeah, some people are going to lose and lose big, but losing is a part of life, something this guy wouldn't understand seeing as he's become comfortable being a writer of opinions where the only opportunity of losing you can experience is in getting your own opinions wrong.

Not to mention, if bitcoin is outside the control of the state, it's outside the control of a ban, at least a political ban; therefore when he calls for a ban, what he really is trying to say is that he feels you should stop using bitcoin and he's willing to get violent to change your mind, same way the war on drugs works, they didn't actually ban drugs they just started filling up prisons and ruining lots of lives.  And he wants to make that horrifying experience a reality for bitcoin users.

Let that sink in.  All that comes to mind thinking of this is, what bitcoiner raped this poor guy's mother?  What caused such destructive resentment?  Imagine the invasive lengths the state would have to go through just to make sure you weren't using bitcoin, assuming they plan on being effective in a ban at all.  And imagine all the time and energy that could've gone into improving the world somehow, instead spoiled so some asshole on a soapbox can feel secure that nobody will have an advantage over his own poor spending habits; you can't compete when you're fighting courts and jail, you "bitcoin cranks"!.

Here's the image I draw in my head: he's financially insecure, he needs to feel like there's adult supervision in society which can right any wrong he makes, and that adult "fix everything with a flick of the wand" supervision stems from a strong state: people who are prone to risk, e.g. poor financial decision making such as impulse buying and entrusting money with shady people, like an undo button so their risks are minimized and they can risk to their hearts content with little fear of loss.  They're often referred to as socialists or fascists, depending on whether they're pussies or dicks, but the point is to eliminate risks in life so you don't have to avoid them.  Thing is, having that Daddy Undo government causes problems, considering a government which can undo anything is effectively totalitarian in strength waiting on abuse by a democratically elected dictator, and this drives sane people away from such a predicament, one such venue being bitcoin.  What appears a massive problem to one side, to the side of this writer it is a blessing, and those who reject the blessing of undo are the problem, the "anarchists".  Whatever, doesn't matter, he has his bias however he got it and he's going to fight for his bias till his heart stops beating or his head is removed from his body, may your biases be damned.

As a rule of thumb, if someone's going to open an argument with ad hominem (e.g. "Bitcoin cranks" instead of "bitcoiners", and implying they're angry like he's a tween on CoD,) you should not consider what they have to say; it's a telltale sign as to what their true purposes are.

It's exploiting people's natural desire to help those in need; by fashioning themselves as victims, they can milk this desire via donations, attention, and so forth.  The more of a victim people believe you are--regardless of whether you are or not--the more you can milk.  So long as that is a profitable position to be in, these people will wear their weaknesses like strengths with their hands held out for help.  It's not necessarily a conscious thing they do, maybe they really believe they are suffering in some manner and just don't have very wide perceptions, not wide enough to realize that grouping with people who share your convictions doesn't actually help your convictions, but ultimately the problem is this money is not going to any good as the preservation of this so-called victim is in being a victim, not helped; the opposite effect occurs, "helping" them sends the signal to continue being a victim, that's what's getting you paid.  It is for this reason that, for example, the feminist ideology necessitates that it never solves the problem it sought to solve for this would follow the dismantling of the group: there's no need for feminism when all is well.  So to continue thriving, the problem can never be solved, in fact the group gains power when the problem gets worse, so it's always in the interest of feminists for things to be as bad as possible which gives them as much power as possible.  A world where women are at their absolute worst is a world where feminism reigns supreme, which becomes like a shadow goal for the organization, the unspoken intent that not even its members want to realize, paying attention only to the spoken intent.  Such ideologies have but one purpose: destruction.  They die when people lose that need to destroy; even resolution of the ideology involves destruction, the best case scenario for them is that they end ASAP.  Adopting such ideologies is like wearing a big neon sign saying "I am cancer, please save me," but the trick is to figure out how, to figure out what caused this cancer, and of course, to those who benefit from the cancer not being resolved, they do all they can to obscure the truth and ensure that doesn't happen.  So the cancerous entities just keep growing larger, feeding into the interests of those who control the ideology's thought flow, until people catch up to what's happening.

Like, why wouldn't you?  I have a friend who, out of curiosity rather than nefarious intent, set up social media accounts with the sole purpose to pose as a victim and to keep an amazon wish list handy in case someone wanted to "help out"; we'll see how it results later.  After seeing things like #GiveYourMoneyToWomen, you just gotta wonder how much of this is real and how much of this is staged.  All I know is, I don't want to share a community with them, and I'm glad they generally dislike Texas.

Can you show me an example of what you're looking for?

I blame the government

Thanks man, I really appreciate that

That one took me about 15 hours total, split up by 4 or 5 days.

He's pining for something that's already been screwing us over for a long time now, even assuming it functioned properly.  To have equal say from citizens is to insinuate that the vast majority of incompetents in any given society should have the same say in matters as the tiny minority of competents; given we're functioning on a 50% majority rules system, and given that each vote is equal to the next, you wind up with 100% of all decision making--including choices in representatives, or the choice to have representatives at all--stemming from the least-fit members of society, in other words the opposite of meritocracy: not rule by the best, but rule by the worst.  Given that the definition of democracy is "rule by the people", and given that the people have decided to give up their power to rule to others (i.e. politicians), it becomes very clear that the people are obv. not fit to rule--they admit it themselves through their actions.  Given that they're not fit to rule, anyone offering the people greater sway in political matters, after having given up their ability to govern, is basically just an attempt to rub the public's ego in the hopes of getting some of that given-up governing power, so is the role of every politician, Lessig included.

Considering over the last few decades the people have allowed themselves to be bribed to give up their votes to even less qualified individuals than they normally would've voted for (i.e. electing criminals), given a perfect system where everyone's vote truly mattered equally and there was no corruption whatsoever, they would still vote in whomever was willing to give them the best goodies.  Even Lessig is guilty of it:


Just what the doctor ordered: more taxes to throw at politicians.  But to the average voter with less than 2k$ in savings, it looks like a wonderfully empowering thing.

There is absolutely nothing he has proposed here that will solve any fundamental problem (if not worsen them), all he's doing is saying whatever he needs to say to get into power to enforce whatever "well-intentioned" vision he has in store.  Considering he'd do something like bribe the public to get into office, I really don't think he's fit to rule, but at the same time, nobody who will seek political power is ever fit to rule as all they can do to get into office is bribe you better than the other guy, it has absolutely zero to do with their ability to govern righteously.  If he really wants to change things for the better, he'll find a way outside of politics.  If he really is well-intentioned and he still seeks political power to fix things, he's a mirror of the average voters, and I don't want the average voters running this country any more than I want the average voters to perform open heart surgery on me--in both cases, I suffer.  One could argue this is the lesser evil of a corporate-funded politician, but in truth neither are preferable to posterity, nor is this form of government which enables both fascism (rule by corporations) and communism (democracy, a million laws later.)

Democracy (politics) is the tool by which the weak make all weak, many slaves with few masters; meritocracy (market), the tool by which the strong make all strong, many masters with few slaves.  Unless Lessig starts talking about that, I feel he is irrelevant, just another faceless politician aiding in the suffocation of this nation's economy (i.e. its lifeblood.)  Whatever criterion he will be selected by to run this nation will be entirely void of considering his ability to actually lead, so it's a pointless exercise to consider him over any other politician as the results will wind up similarly, more slaves fewer masters.  Supposedly this is what we're trying to avoid so it is of supreme, even fatal irony that we keep voting ourselves into slavery, keep voting ourselves into tyranny.  Again, what more can you expect from a nation governed by the worst?--they either don't know what they're doing or, worse, purposefully do poorly for self-benefit.

Anyhow, if you think you can get some advertising space for bitcoin out of it, I say go for it; that's about the only boon I can see from this.

You're welcome 

Only a nation of people who are pure of soul would consider it.  Fiat is king because it allows for stealing from the wealth of its holders by the printers of the currency, who can then use a portion of the stolen wealth to buy off the issuer's population and quell their resistance to such actions i.e. keep the process of wealth-extraction afloat, increasing the printer's power indefinitely, even to the point of dictatorship and collapse, parasite killing host and self essentially (Third Reich being among the most obvious disasters.)  For an entire nation to accept a money invincible to infinite monetary expansion means that the society is not kind to bribes in return for their posterity and individual power.  It would be debilitating to empire as there's no way to transfer wealth from individual to empire stealthily, but for democratic entities I can see crypto functioning just fine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality


Emphasis mine

Basically, those with slave morality are realizing that democracy is a far more potent tool for enslavement (edicts, laws, etc., control in other words) of those with master morality (businessmen, the rich, right-wingers, libertarians, those who seek freedom from enslavement) than religion.  It's just a migration, they're not actually disappearing, only calling themselves a different name and pushing their agenda with a different spin; given Nietzsche is correct, they're adjusting their "re-sentiment" in accordance with modern master values, which is why such incredible, unusual focus has been placed on the gaming community for example, a popular venue for those with master morality; this comic was made to highlight the bizarre refocusing of values, giving a bit of insight to how "re-sentiment" works (literally resentment).

Nowadays they're called SJWs (feminism being among the most popular, complete with its own pinata of the masters being "the patriarchy"), Marxists (USSR or China being the closest examples to slave morality encompassing master morality), democrats, liberals, socialists, egalitarians, and of course "The Jews" as slander, essentially anyone who identifies with the left.  Don't be fooled by the rise of atheism, it's still the same stuff from before Christ just with different wording, the slave-moralists are just catching on that the old methods aren't as convincing and that these new methods are, at least for the time being.

Christianity worked out for a long while for slave-moralists--at some points in time completely overshadowing entire nations--but nowadays it just doesn't work out, master-moralists don't listen to the church much anymore, the church is powerless to help slave-moralist desires.  Islam is still a very prevalent method of control in the middle east, however I am not sure how long that will last but it seems to be very much functional like Christianity was in the past (albeit abhorred by competing slave-moralists in the west.)  You can tell the Catholic pope is trying really hard to appeal to slave morality but I'm not sure how effective it will be; he's certainly convinced a lot anyway, I have atheist friends who really like him regardless of the religion.  Ironically, the pope is the very type of person you'd figure the slave-moralists would abhor, but apparently the best way to succeed in this field is to pretend to give a shit about the whims of the masses (as any politician nowadays could attest to.)  The numbers will continue to change as the church becomes less popular with master-moralists.

So the question becomes: why's it getting less popular with master-moralists?  I believe this is due to the great swathes of information available, particularly due to the Internet.  Master-moralists have a desire to accumulate factual knowledge which helps them visualize and fundamentally understand the world around them, to "see" what's going on in the world, allowing them to control it (different from slave-moralist control which involves manipulation of people, rather than the master-moralist's manipulation of objects e.g. business operations.)  For most of history, this was hard to pull off: there was no video, no photographs, no wireless signals or audio, all you had to rely on was books and hearsay, so developing an accurate and complete view of the world was very difficult and usually skewed to the point of stupidity (re: earth being center of solar system.)  Nowadays it's easy as pie, there's so much content to fill your brain with, and the best part is we all share the same Internet so we all have access to the same stuff, allowing the best (i.e. most relevant and accurate) knowledge to rise to the top, and the rest to fall to the bottom.  Essentially, the entirety of the developed world's master-moralist population is steadily coming to the same conclusions on things, and these conclusions are shared, refined, and becoming deadly accurate to the reality of things.

The more perspectives you have (i.e. having listened to the perspectives of others, esp. those with very developed perspective), the clearer you can "see", your big-picture vision; a part of this global common understanding process is the rejection of religious principles, as the Internet effectively makes it obsolete.  Used to be, you'd get your understanding of the world through religion, which would always be far more developed of an understanding than you'd come up individually or within your limited community, or however far a letter could reach, however many books you could get (harder to get the further back in history you go, allowing the likes of kings and emperors actual advantage in the world as they'd always have an infinitely greater perspective than anyone else.)  In other words, people's perspectives were harshly limited, making it impossible to formulate advanced thoughts (well, what we'd call our thoughts.)  As communication developed, so was our ability to formulate an idea of the world, giving us a mental "hill" the brain sits on which grows taller every time it learned something new and saw something as someone else saw it, giving a greater and greater vantage point over the world.

Then came the Internet, and people started to communicate, with words and images and videos and audio, more and more people participating all the time, sharing their knowledge and sharing their perspectives, broadening their views far greater than most anyone has ever had in the past, allowing the greatest amount of people with the greatest amount of perspectives to multiply their "visions" and come to similar conclusions.  It's a slow and messy operation, and there's a lot of work to do (and undo), but with this constant re-envisioning of the world, of expanding one's mind, inevitably the individual is compelled reevaluate their religious beliefs, which is bound to cause more apostates than having few feeling need to reevaluate resulting in stability in general belief (what one may call stagnation in belief development.)

We're becoming more and more clear and critical in our thought as our ability to form realistic understandings of the world improves, and it's causing very rapid and very structured changes in its participant's beliefs, which in turn effects even non-participants ("internet leaking into the real world".)  Religion is becoming unpopular because it's no longer an effective method of control; it's been unpopular for some time, the modern state has long been a replacement for it, there's just lag in between realizing you've abandoned your religion and actually abandoning your religion.  I think it's reasonable to expect the popularity of religion to continue to fall; the cat's out of the bag by now, the religious perspective once reigned king in common perspectives when acquiring a complex perspective was difficult, but now it's so easy to have your beliefs expanded and challenged by someone operating outside the boundaries of your perspective, it's that much harder to just stick with a single belief for long.

Gotta keep up with these fast and strange times, it's of extreme importance for a belief's survival to change when it's been challenged on something believed to be untrue.  Religion just ain't gonna do it, nor is it standing up to the tests of a super-perspective, really shining the light brightly on its flaws and strengths, as it shines the light on everything; only those beliefs which aren't afraid of the light will survive, i.e. only the most consistent and accurate and true.  And of course, their respective shadows, the slave-moralist's re-sentiment, which will prevail simply based on which is the more subversive hate group.   

All I'm getting from this thread is that there's a lot of people in the world who, by their own admission, should not be in charge of a great deal of wealth as they'd have no idea what to do with it (or even how they'd have it in the first place, somehow ignoring the whole process of getting the wealth just to "sit in a meadow and meditate" at the end like there's nothing left to do in the world, like there's no problems left to be solved.)

Your wealth represents your stake in life, how much influence you hold over the direction of the world; having very little wealth means having very little influence, and vice versa with a lot of wealth (assuming we're not strictly referring to material wealth alone of course, there is wealth in everything from character to skill to relationships.)  You know all those hours you spend fulfilling the desires of others?  That's what wealth can do for you: those who know how to allocate their wealth intelligently can build their wealth to great numbers (i.e. operate successful businesses), whereas those who can't expend their wealth to any good wind up going broke (wealth gets released to people who are better at allocating it, or perhaps just as bad, inevitably winding up in the hands of the better allocator).  Those who know how to allocate their wealth reasonably also happen to be very good at producing action (usually desirable but sometimes not in the case of political spenders esp.), it's how they get so rich to begin with (pursuing goals and dreams rather than sitting in meadows and meditating).  In other words, those who seek great wealth also seek great action, which means the wealthiest are, consequently, the most active in the world, spurring action far greater than they could ever produce alone.

Having so much stake in the direction the world moves (combined with a drive to produce action, mind you), considering competitors who would want you financially crushed or even dead, protecting your stake from poor investment or straight-up theft (see: modern government), there's nothing boring about it: it is true freedom.  Being the person who does nothing but bring someone else's dreams to life, that is the boring existence.  Those who think wealth is boring are completely delusional, and probably themselves lacking in any substantial wealth for if they can't see anything to do with a great deal of wealth, they surely cannot see what to do with even a little.

TL;DR thread is secretly a poll to see who will succeed in life and who will complain about the successors and perhaps subsequently demand repentance for the injustice of inequality


They say if you put this conversation close to your ear, you can actually hear the cognitive dissonance...

And the dominoes keep falling...


Because governments know all about healthy functioning economies, considering they subject themselves to it every day

Yes, as Possum577 just pointed out, there is a culture of over consumption which enables this to occur.  If there wasn't, it wouldn't be a profit-driving strategy because everyone would say "Sorry, I really don't want this much food, I'm going to shop elsewhere which provides more reasonable portions."  Which would then force businesses to change to accommodate this, lest they be out-competed.

Again, as a consequence of the prevalent over-consumption culture.  If there's any merit to what you've said here, the logic reasonably follows that businesses would bloat portions to four, five, why not ten times, the necessary amount of food, to get an even greater return in profit at the expense of what the consumer actually needs.  Why not make every individual consume 10k calories in a single meal?  Fuck it, they don't have any control over their decisions whatsoever, right?  Squeeze every last penny out of them, that's the "capitalist" way!

But of course that's facetious because people do have control and they do decide how big their meals will be by consenting to the decisions of businesses, selecting them over businesses with alternate portion sizes, or over just making their own meals to their choosing.  Your assertions really just boil down to taking the people who cause themselves problems and telling them it's not their fault, providing a scapegoat "the businesses" and "capitalism" as the proposed core of the issue.  This is no good for the people who continue to kill themselves through overconsumption because it makes them wait on someone to come save them from whatever scapegoat you've provided, which is of course the far easier thing to do, where instead they should begin realizing they're at fault for their actions and should hone up to them i.e. be responsible, the far more difficult and, of course, less popular route.

Even with all that said, the individual could easily save their meal for later, nothing forces them to consume the entire meal in one sitting.  You're tilting at windmills, classic mistake.

Total time logged in: 60 days, 20 minutes

Don't be silly, the gun free zones work perfectly fine like 99.9% of the time.  They just weren't doing it right this time.  Next time it'll be better.

I endorse this movement.

Depends; a sketch would be around 0.17 BTC, a full painting around 0.7

Ever hear of this thing called "the market"?  Apparently it's pretty popular with literally everything else in existence.