Thoughts on Zcash?

[TPTB_need_war]

The issue that is being ignored here is that when one pays for "legal" music the actual amount to goes to the artist is in most cases zero and in those cases where there is an actual net royalty to the artist *the very famous" artists it is a minuscule percentage.  The bulk of the revenue goes the "music industry" which has been made obsolete by changing technology. Digital distribution of music is fundamentally different than pressing vinyl or even pressing CDs, in that there is minimal up front up capital required so there is no need for a capitalist to provide this capital. A simple pay what you want approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_what_you_want will yield the artist way more by eliminating parasites such as "the music industry" or Apple with its 30% big brother tax. Of course the gross is far less, but would you rather as an artist receive 95% of say 2 USD or 0.0001% of 20 USD?

The same is also the case with book / ebook publishers and authors, and the parasitic scientific publishing industry, vs scientists in  University Industry or Government. These dying parasitic corporate players are causing a lot of damage with "technologies" such as DRM that attempt to protect "intellectual property". DRM and the attempt to protect "intellectual property" is among the greatest threats to civil liberties and individual freedom in most western counties. It is also the ultimate cause of a very significant and rising portion of China's greenhouse gas emissions.  

Edit: One only has to compare the relative Developer ranking in https://www.coingecko.com/en of Monero 81 (Pay what you want) vs Ethereum 74 (Traditional capitalist IPO model). Z.cash is following the Ethereum model with its 11% pre-mine to fund the venture capitalists. Those pictures of spinning diamonds did not come cheap.

ArticMine, one of my points is we need to enable fans to pay musicians directly for music without a middleman taking most of it (ditto other digital creations perhaps such as video, but video is quite different from music in usage patterns). This what for example Bandcamp is doing (taking a 15% fee, although the credit card companies take another 5+%) and btw the CTO/co-founder Shawn Grunberger used to work in Tech support at Fractal Design when I was a Programmer and I interfaced with him on my own initiative as a liason. I even was the one who encouraged him to become a programmer and I remember he was telling me his idea for Bandcamp back then in 1995. So he finally did it. Congrats to him. Unfortunately he did not reply to my attempt to contact him, so they may find soon they have me as a competitor rather than as an ally. C'est la vie.

Bandcamp has a weakness in their model in that one can only sample a few of the songs for free. (Also I found their app navigation and music finding UI is poorly designed, as well no social features!) Sorry but that is why Bandcamp doesn't have the wide distribution and 150 million musicians that SoundCloud has.

You don't put a paywall in front of your users and expect to achieve popularity. That is a fundamental tenet of marketing and attrition minimization. Perhaps they understand the market better than me, which is why I am very interested in this discussion.

I forgot to make the point in reply to r0ach that FM radio quality audio could indeed be distributed for free by musicians and this wouldn't necessarily destroy the musicians' ability to sell higher quality versions of the same songs. So I don't agree with r0ach that FM radio set a precedent for theft, because I remember I used to buy $9 - $18 CDs even though I could record from the radio station (and that even before I become rich as programmer when I was just earning a typical income as young man working odd jobs). The FM radio will have the radio DJ/host or advertising talking/fading in at the start or end of a song, it will have equalization added, it is of lower quality, and the paid CD may have additionally remix versions. I had in my 20s some hundreds of CDs and 1000s of songs that I paid for. That is why I was really pissed off when I had to buy the same songs again when I lost my CD collection due to my turbulent/adventurous life of travails and travels, so then I reverted to using means of obtaining the music for free. But still I did pay $0.99 per song over recent years at Amazon for songs I couldn't locate easily for free. And I would not prefer converting songs from Youtubes versus spending 5 - 10 cents to pay a musician directly, know I'm getting the high quality original, and have it all organized for me and so I never have to pay again for the same song and I can never lose my collection again (I am so incredibly overloaded and have not even enough time to replace the blown cigarette lighter fuse on my car, meaning I am apt to lose my song collection again because I can't keep track of everything in my life)!

ArticMine, I never understood the model of having researchers pay to obtain white papers (other than as a legacy from when journals were printing on paper and physically distributed). Researchers are not funded by their cohorts buying their white papers. I don't understand your point about DRM? Please make your point more cogent?

Btw (and entirely tangential/orthogonal to the discussion I added above), I like greenhouse emissions. If I obtain more funds, I will upsize my SUV and perhaps get a few dozen Hummers so I can make more greenhouse gases. I'll eat more beans (for farts) and cows (for their farts) too if I get healthy. The anthropogenic global warming (climate change redux/goal post moving) fraud is junk science and deception. Anyone who mentions that I immediately classify them as a kook, delusional, and incapable of researching scientific fact vs. fiction. Sorry to bust your bubble, but we are headed into a Mini Ice Age.

Bobby Jimmy & The Critters - Somebody Farted

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[TPTB_need_war]

Afaik, the reason artists were devalued throughout history was due to two facts:

Lack of abundance in the ancient economy

Which is why I find the idea of turning into more of a knowledge age economy unrealistic.  It makes the assumption of permanent abundance on the lower levels of things like Maslow's pyramid (or whatever sociology mechanism you subscribe to), thus forcing the price of those things lower, while giving greater, perhaps unwarranted value (a bubble) to things higher on the pyramid (entertainers).  The fact is, things like the amount of life in the sea and the wild are decreasing, which is diametrically opposed to the functionality of this age of abundance.  Not to mention that such a thing would probably require a flatlined or decreasing population and more intrusive, tyrannical government, with even more power to regulate all aspects of things like copyright.

From doing a brief inventory of the world, it's kind of obvious we're already in this so called knowledge age right now, probably peak knowledge age, at least for our lifetimes, due to the fact that population is still increasing.  Unless population decides to take an immediate nose dive to sustainable, pre-industrial revolution levels (500 million), I see the value of the lower levels of the pyramid (food, housing, etc) increasing, which they are, and the more frivolous things like entertainment decreasing in comparison (bubble dies).

Even if you claim technology and robotics will infinitely scale the lower levels of Maslow's pyramid beyond all human needs, the specialization of skills required to make them function will lead to increased centralization and monopoly to do whatever they want with the price (already happening with Monsanto and we're still relatively low tech).

Don't count on this. We are not at all far from the point where people can do DNA editing in their garage.

Hey, I'm not a farmer, I just assume we can't use any mysterious tricks to create an infinite food supply from a finite top soil, seemingly more contested fresh water supply amongst counties and states, and dwindling ocean population.  The last time we tried to farm everything in sight we ended up with "the dust bowl".

The UN is saying people should "eat insects" to fight world hunger:

You pay attention to the propaganda from your enslavers at the UN  

Nothing is infinite in the quantized (real) world, because the speed-of-light isn't infinite (for it is was the past & future would collapse into an infinitesimal point and we'd all be "proof its gone") and thus the heaviness of atoms isn't as informational (entropic) as human knowledge formation.

Ah we have ArticMine the Malthusian who apparently religiously (irrationally) subscribes to the fable tale fraud of AGW and r0ach the Mathusian who doesn't appear to be aware that we can grow more food in our basements than we need:

MA was predicting some technical innovation to enable us to grow food in less space and in any mini Ice Age coming...

One of the more vital technological advancements has been developed locally in Philadelphia. They can grow all the necessary food without farmland from inside a warehouse that is completely free from genetic tinkering or chemical whatever. The owners of Metropolis Farms actually grow fresh produce all year long. Those interested in survival of the fittest, well here it is.

President Jack Griffin developed this technology and has been doing a bang-up job. It would probably be a bad idea to set one up in a basement for the years ahead. As he explained, “The innovation here is density, as well as energy and water conservation.” Griffin continued, “We can grow more food in less space using less energy and water. The result is that I can replace 44,000 square feet with 36 square feet. When you hear those numbers, it kind of makes sense.”

This is the way of the future  — fresh food coming from your basement.

I believe the key technological breakthrough may be long-life, high-efficiency, solid-state LED grow lights:

https://www.google.com/search?q=high+efficiency+grow+light

r0ach do you want to remembered and laughed at like the Luddites who resisted industrialization because they said it would destroy civilization?

There are no absolutely no population problem limits that won't be solved by the free market. Period. The Mathusians have always been wrong and always will be. Always. Forever.

The [Existential] fear emotion is inherited from the primitive, post-paleozoic, hunter-gatherer time period when mortal danger was omnipresent. Fear stimulates a fight-or-flight adrenaline spike in response to extreme stress. Adrenaline rushes are thrilling and addictive, especially when the threat is low-grade, not thoroughly exhausting, and thus repeatable because it only exists in the imagination. Adrenaline (plus cortisol) shuts down rational thought in the pre-frontal cortex. Production of the steriod cortisol spikes to redistribute more energy to the muscles and nerves, depleting energy from the immune system, digestion, and toxic waste processing necessary to maintain health.

Even if you claim technology and robotics will infinitely scale the lower levels of Maslow's pyramid beyond all human needs, the specialization of skills required to make them function will lead to increased centralization and monopoly to do whatever they want with the price (already happening with Monsanto and we're still relatively low tech).

As for human population, yea, I'm aware how some people forecast we will hit something like 8 billion then start going down, but nothing like this is set in stone.  Humans can only survive by all of them converting to K selection theory.  I think most people who actually work in this field claim that all humans are K selection by default, which seems like complete bullshit to me.  You can find huge differences by looking at different ethnic groups alone, possibly from colder vs warmer climates as well.

This is why national sovereignty is such an important thing.  Nations that don't implode obviously have converted to K selection, then you have people from Marxist, organized Jewry coming along and saying, whoa, homogeneous society is bad (except for Israel of course), it's time for us to use the most powerful lobby in the world (AIPAC) to force you to import some 3rd world R-selection rapefugees to destroy your civilization.  And this is what they have done by overthrowing the 1924 and 1965 immigration act of America.  Their latest foray into blatant hypocritical behavior and destruction of the entire planet is exporting all their K selection refugees out of Israel and into Sweden.  Even though both countries are similar population, Israel said the refugees were a threat to the destruction of the Jewish state, but hey, who cares if Sweden is destroyed right?

http://www.europeanguardian.com/81-uncategorised/immigration/635-israel-is-shipping-its-deported-africans-off-to-sweden

http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Eritrean-migrants-resettled-from-Israel-to-Sweden-337414[/list]

So yea, you're not getting any knowledge age as long as you have the all powerful, organized Jewish lobbies attempting to force multiculturalism upon all nations.  Which in reality just means dumping as many K selection groups as possible on top of your functional society to destroy it.  It's no coincidence this is happening right now either.  Right at the opportune moment when bankers are at their weakest an in danger of being overthrown, they wanted to give you a more immediate problem to deal with to distract you.

Readers I didn't intend to thread-jack the Zero cash thread with a sociology tangent about copyright, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, maximum-division-of-labor, the heaviness of atoms, and the Knowledge Age, but it just spawned spontaneously due to a debate upthread between CoinHoarder and myself.

Quoting myself:

I am quite flabbergast that Eric S. Raymond (self-professed to have 150 - 170IQ, the creator of the "open source" movement) could get the logic so wrong on the coming Knowledge Age.

In his critique of Jeremy Rifkin's book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, he misses the key generative model of open source, which is that the source is always changing. The enslavement of knowledge by capital is due to the transactional cost of the propagation of creations. As we lower that friction, knowledge takes over.

And he apparently fails to comprehend capital can't buy knowledge because thought isn't fungible, and this becomes more evident as the diversity of innovation becomes more fine-grained.

The claim that the material input costs will be significant relative to the marginal cost of distributing more copies of intellectual property is wrong because the only costs in material production that can't be reduced asymptotically to 0 at economy-of-scale and automation are the knowledge inputs. Thus knowledge is infinitely more valuable than material production at the asymptote. The only reason that capital has been able to enslave the knowledge portion of the cost in the material cost is due to inability of fine-grain, autonomous knowledge to control the creative outputs of material production. The 3D printer changes this because the printer will be in every person's home. The commodity value relative to knowledge value of raw material inputs will fall asymptotically to 0.

What Eric misses is that many types of intellectual creations and creative processes can be incrementally fluid and shared, including music, video production, medical processes, etc.. People can take the designs of others and refine them. This is precisely open source. It is not that we won't possibly use fungible money (micro payments perhaps) to pay each other for creations, but that money won't be in control of the startup costs. Individuals will choose what they want to work spontaneously. This destroys the power of stored capital to enslave knowledge.

We will still use this money to buy those non-creative things that drop near to 0 in price, such as raw materials and food.

This is what I was trying to explain to Eric a long time ago, but it just flew right over his (and his readers') cuckoo head(s) so he banned me.

Note this doesn't mean I am agreeing with Rifkin's Marxist conclusions about the end of private property rights.

All the indicia of cod-Marxism are present. False identification of capitalism with vertical integration and industrial centralization: check.

Vertical integration enslaves knowledge and will fall away. Capital will increasingly become knowledge instead of stored fungible claims on labor.

Writing about human supercooperative behavior as though it falsifies classical and neoclassical economics

Supercooperative doesn't have to mean Communism. It can mean more finely-grained, autonomy of work. Eric is conflating here, even though Rifkin was also apparently erroneously introducing Marxism. They both got it wrong.

the concept of “the commons” is not a magic wand that banishes questions about self-determination, power relationships, and the perils of majoritarianism. Nor is it a universal solvent against actual scarcity problems

Wrong! The commons means knowledge takes control. For example, physics assures us that energy is neither created nor destroyed, so it is only the lack of knowledge production that makes energy finite or scarce. And I am not referring to perpetual motion machines, rather to more efficiency and automation of extraction of energy through greater innovation due to faster propagation of knowledge.

Nobody ever says that “the commons” requires behavior that individuals themselves would not freely choose, and if anyone ever tried to do so they would be driven out with scorn.

Correct. Rifkin doesn't understand fine-grained, autonomy is the key element of the commons.

>So @esr, how do you align the long tail of maintenance into the sunk v marginal cost framework?

Er, simply by observing that it is neither of those things and can’t be jammed into that framework.

He makes it clear that he didn't even consider that the lower transactional propagation cost of digital distribution of editable creations increases the frequency, granularity, and autonomy of those maintenance edits. He apparently doesn't remember that Metcalfe's or Reed's Law says that as the number of those editing nodes increases, then the value of the knowledge network increases squared.

When people speak of “capitalism” and “free markets” as being separable ideas, and I inquire into that, I generally find that they’re identifying capitalism with the way free-market economies behave in the presence of high communication and transaction costs – big firms with lots of vertical integration, deskilled employees treated like cogs in Taylorized processes, and elaborate hierarchical management structures designed to manage the largest possible lumps of capital to collect economies of scale.

Economies mostly stop looking like that as the costs of transaction and communication drop and technological leverage increases revenue per employee. But it’s still capitalism because specialists in capital accumulation drive most of the productive activity.

Ah he was so close to getting the point, then he screwed it up on the last sentence. Yes Eric, but what capital are they accumulating? Stored capital or knowledge capital. He just hasn't quite had the epiphany yet on how the relative value of stored capital can plummet.

Oil is food, Oil is materials, Oil is Energy, Oil is what backs USD
Oil is what you can't print. Oil is your Tax.

You can't seem to agree that knowledge will 1000X more valuable than those raw materials.

You have entirely missed the point of my post here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=495527.msg6065144#msg6065144

So I think we will stop the discussion now. I don't have more time.

Let them raise the price of oil to $1 million per liter. Our knowledge value will rise proportionally. Then I (and others) will be earning $1 trillion per day.

It is the value-added to raw inputs that is relevant. With mass production, the value-added of knowledge was amortized over the capital cost of the factory and millions of xerox copies.

Now the creations will change 1000s of variants per day or minute. The value-added is unfathomable.

It is the speed of the propagation of creation of product innovation that destroys (devalues) their control.

Discussion continues over at the blog of the creator of "open source".

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-479716

There is very limited ‘knowledge networking value’ for carrots. Extrapolate from there.

What does agriculture have to do with network value of knowledge creation?

Do carrots have anything to do with open source business models?

Carrots will continue their downward spiral of relative value. Iron used to be a precious metal. Commodities have trended downward in price for millennia. If knowledge can be unleashed from vertical integration gridlock, those trends should accelerate.

The refutation I expect is that there are many contributors to Linux and to aggregate value and then distribute it to the contributors requires business models such as corporate sponsorship. I agree a dearth of modularity is a barrier, but it doesn't apply to all types of creations. And I was working on higher-kinded semantics computer language to hopefully improve modularity.

Even for Linux we could ponder a pay-per-download micro payment with a new crypto-currency, then have a list of contributors ranked by LOC and distribute to them. Not sure if that works, but I am not going to try to pretend I'm as omniscient as you and know all the limitations of ingenuity of mankind.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-479742

Performers and analysts are earning tips from their YouTube videos. These seed creative thought, which spawn other creations.

We will be able to produce all the food, raw materials, and energy we need with robots. There is no reason the price shouldn't trend towards zero, once the robots can build more robots.

The activity that can't be automated is creativity and knowledge creation. Thus it should rise in relative value.

[TPTB_need_war]

Decentralized proof-of-storage is always flawed, and that will include IPFS's Filecoin as well.

In addition to the insoluble issue of how to not infringe copyright in decentralized file storage (and thus per my prior three posts above not be at odds with the coming Knowledge Age creators and the government), another point is how are we going to pay for decentralized file storage for all websites and content on the internet  

If we say that we'll all host this content for free on our home computers and serve it via our home ISP internet connections, I have already pointed out insoluble problems:

• Last mile physics is such that home connections have asymmetric upload (less than download) bandwidth. Thus even if we all trade our bandwidth tit-for-tat equally, then we have collectively more download bandwidth than we have upload bandwidth. Not only does this steal from ISPs that provide more upload bandwidth, which is what I warning Bittorrent in 2008 would lead to the Communism of Net Neutrality (and they ignored me and just this month they ostensibly removed the archives when I raised this point again!), but it also is impossible to balance and thus we pay for it by hosting it on symmetrically backbone connected hosts as the internet is currently. So then how do we pay for that upload and hosting service if the owner of the files is not hosting them? Do we send microtransactions for each file we request, i.e. we put a paywall on the entire internet(!!!)? Or do we pay a Communist tax to the government (e.g. the plans for Net Neutrality) and it regulates a file store for us and also so the government can enforce copyright? I guess one can argue that bandwidth will become so cheap, we can afford to consider it free. But still someone has to pay for it and even as costs decline, bandwidth demands increase. And global bandwidth costs are I would guess in the $billions.
  
  
• There is no way to insure persistence unless one keeps a copy of the file hosted themselves, thus this sort of defeats one of the main point of decentralized file storage which is reliability of archival.

I do think we need smarter decentralized caching for the internet which pays for itself by saving bandwidth! I do think we need to reference files by hash (perhaps with a hint for primary source url where also blame can be assigned for promulgating copyright infringement, thus all such records would need to be signed with the public key for the HTTPS certificate of the site) for permanence of references.

So perhaps there is a way to do a decentralized overlay network on top of the URL paradigm that can deal with copyright blame and respect the policies so encoded by the aforementioned signature. I am going to email Juan Benet again and pass this idea along. I am urging him and others to be less ideological and more pragmatic.

Delusional leanings such as proof-of-storage (which I thought of in 2013 and discarded because it can't be sound) and wanting to attack the establishment at any cost of nonsensical economic, political-economic, and technological issues. Let's get back to standing on solid engineering work.

[altcoinUK]

one of my points is we need to enable fans to pay musicians directly for music without a middleman taking most of it

I am not sure if I understand correctly what is required for such operation on logistic level, but isn't it one of the main problems with facilitating such payment schemes - and I think smooth pointed this out in one of the discussions you had with him - that the fans need to buy/obtain the digital currency in the first place. I would imagine to facilitate the FIAT-crypto exchange you need a serious centralized operation that complies with money laundering and other financial, data protection, etc. regulations. Ideally, the exchange should be a very easy one click process, otherwise the fans won't bother with the micro-payments. The fans won't be going through the pain of buying the digital currency/token on shitty altcoin exchanges, and therefore you would need to make the FIAT-crypto exchange with in-house solution as much easy process as it is possible, which wouldn't be then a decentralized solution. I am not saying everything must be decentralized in the world. I am just curious what is the business model with regards to FIAT-crypto exchange in your solution.

[TPTB_need_war]

one of my points is we need to enable fans to pay musicians directly for music without a middleman taking most of it

I am not sure if I understand correctly what is required for such operation on logistic level, but isn't it one of the main problems with facilitating such payment schemes - and I think smooth pointed this out in one of the discussions you had with him - that the fans need to buy/obtain the digital currency in the first place.

I am not sure who pointed that out, when I first thought of it too, and whom was first, but yes I envision that being one of the issues in that the unbanked can't pay online with fiat credit cards they don't have and nobody (banked or otherwise) is going to want to convert fiat to crypto to go buy music! (no way!) To target the 5% who are able and willing to pay online for music (subscription or per download song/album), then not only entering a crowded market (e.g. BandCamp, iTunes, Amazon, Google Play Music, Spotify, soon SoundCloud). And note the attrition that is likely when people have to decide to pay by credit card if there is not a very compelling reason for them to. But that is all those providers can do (and they collectively probably cover most of the opportunities for selling music via credit cards online, except for something that would be at a different scale of integration and cross-pollination that hasn't been attempted by those business models), because they aren't going to try to do something more ambitious such as integrate a crypto currency (or other integration) into their plans.

I would imagine to facilitate the FIAT-crypto exchange you need a serious centralized operation that complies with money laundering and other financial, data protection, etc. regulations. Ideally, the exchange should be a very easy one click process, otherwise the fans won't bother with the micro-payments.

No one will get any headway whatsoever if they are depending on the masses doing fiat to crypto exchange. That is DOA. Speculators will, but the masses won't. Those are basic parameters that any plan has to be recognize.

I urge you to move discussions like this private messages. You are gettting dangerously close to where I will not respond because too close to discussing my plans in public. Note I agreed with you what is not plausible, and I didn't detail to you what I think may be possible.

Edit: btw crypto really needs decentralized exchange for the speculators so as to sidestep all the regulation and also to stop corruption and even P&D collusion of centralized exchanges (but again FX is not for users of crypto currency except those who have some non-mainstream compelling reason to do so).

[r0ach]

Ah we have ArticMine the Malthusian who apparently religiously (irrationally) subscribes to the fable tale fraud of AGW and r0ach the Mathusian who doesn't appear to be aware that we can grow more food in our basements than we need:

I will give you the benefit of the doubt, as I was talking more about scaling the existing American style diet rather than everyone growing fungus or soylent green in the basement.  I guess it's possible we will also stop eating real meat and only grow synthetic meat, but I think no matter what technology does, if population stays the same or increases, we will probably do things like wipe out a majority of life in the ocean for example, and you can't just ignore that because we now have synthetic hamburgers and synthetic fish to replace them.

The ocean is the best tragedy of the commons example I can think of.  It's like going gold mining and each fish is a swimming gold nugget.  Even if the 1st world transitions to eating fungus, the 3rd world will exploit that resource until it disappears entirely in order to try and catch up to everyone else due to there being no out of pocket overhead to create it.

It's kind of ironic that you advocate technology solving all the world's problems when people like Armstrong are saying the coming financial collapse could send us back to the Dark Ages.  When things like that happen, people could be forced to try and live off the land for extended periods of time, and you can't just have every acre of land on the planet covered with concrete and the ocean devoid of life to do so.  Technology is not a net gain because each problem it solves just create a new dependency to enslave you.

During the Bosnian/Serb war for example, people there were not using technology to grow food in their basements, they were eating pigeons.  That's what it all comes down to, what resources exist in the real world and not in a computer.

[TPTB_need_war]

Spoken like a true Malthusian tree hugger who hates man-made fish ponds (especially those that recycle chicken dung as the fish food).

Sorry r0ach I can't listen to your marketing advice any more because you are one of those guys who is fighting the future.

I interpret MA says the danger of a Dark Age is if people like myself don't go innovate to enable the people to express their political will economically.

[smooth]

Ah we have ArticMine the Malthusian who apparently religiously (irrationally) subscribes to the fable tale fraud of AGW and r0ach the Mathusian who doesn't appear to be aware that we can grow more food in our basements than we need:

I will give you the benefit of the doubt, as I was talking more about scaling the existing American style diet rather than everyone growing fungus or soylent green in the basement.  I guess it's possible we will also stop eating real meat and only grow synthetic meat, but I think no matter what technology does, if population stays the same or increases, we will probably do things like wipe out a majority of life in the ocean for example, and you can't just ignore that because we now have synthetic hamburgers and synthetic fish to replace them.

I have to say on this point your logic is atrocious. If we have synthetic hamburgers and synthetic fish, then it indeed does not matter from the point of view of Malthusian population limits with respect to food that the majority of life in the ocean is wiped out.  It may matter for other reasons, but you haven't stated them.

[frank22]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/41vg68/monero_vs_zcash_eli5_fundamental_differences/cz63pqw

My point-by-point rebuttal to NobleSir:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/42rvm3/truth_about_ethereum_is_being_banned_at/czefpyb

We are waiting for a forthcoming blog post from Zcash for their perspective on this comparison.

Very interesting read, the altcoin scene is maturing very fast (although I should say only some coins are actually showing promises and delivering).

I should add Monero is no longer Cryptonote, it has gone further and further still going.

[r0ach]

I have to say on this point your logic is atrocious. If we have synthetic hamburgers and synthetic fish, then it indeed does not matter from the point of view of Malthusian population limits with respect to food that the majority of life in the ocean is wiped out.  It may matter for other reasons, but you haven't stated them.

I feel this is one of those Smooth moments questioning what the definition of "is" is.

If literally all food is synthetic, that indicates it's become entangled into an increasingly complex chain of specialization of labor, so even if you worked in that industry, you would probably not be able to produce it yourself.  That would be an extreme far left viewpoint where individuals are all required to fully integrate with the state to exist at all or you just instantly die.  As I tried to tell the Anonymizer, technology solely for the sake of technology is useless because it's not a net gain, it creates a dependency to enslave you at the same time.

The ability to become self sufficient, even if you don't exercise it, is far better than piling on endless amounts of unneeded complications into people's lives to entrap them.  Am I the only one that doesn't think Ted Kaczynski was completely insane?

Spoken like a true Malthusian tree hugger who hates man-made fish ponds (especially those that recycle chicken dung as the fish food).

Sorry r0ach I can't listen to your marketing advice any more because you are one of those guys who is fighting the future.

I interpret MA says the danger of a Dark Age is if people like myself don't go innovate to enable the people to express their political will economically.

I think it's more to do with the fact I don't see a quantitative gain in the quality of life or quality of people between gains in technology from the 1980's to now.  People are just more disconnected from reality, and technology-wise, all we really got out of it is bigger TVs, the first stages of technological unemployment through automation, and infrastructure to create bigger, more powerful government.  We don't even have electric cars yet (that don't catch on fire and explode).  Ok, we got the internet, but for most people, the internet is just a giant entertainment box time waster to occupy all your free time.

For quality of life, first you needed a high school diploma to survive, then you needed a bachelor's degree.  Next you'll need a master's degree, then a few years later, you'll either need to have a PhD or inherit money or you'll be living like some type of peasant in a mud hut.  For most people, things will probably be getting a lot worse over time.  If you're going to have an increasing population with accelerating technological unemployment at the same time, that really just makes no sense and would force full blown, top down controlled socialism or constant civil war.

[TPTB_need_war]

Spoken like a true Malthusian tree hugger who hates man-made fish ponds (especially those that recycle chicken dung as the fish food).

Sorry r0ach I can't listen to your marketing advice any more because you are one of those guys who is fighting the future.

I interpret MA says the danger of a Dark Age is if people like myself don't go innovate to enable the people to express their political will economically.

I think it's more to do with the fact I don't see a quantitative gain in the quality of life or quality of people between gains in technology from the 1980's to now.  People are just more disconnected from reality, and technology-wise, all we really got out of it is bigger TVs, the first stages of technological unemployment through automation, and infrastructure to create bigger, more powerful government.  We don't even have electric cars yet (that don't catch on fire and explode).  Ok, we got the internet, but for most people, the internet is just a giant entertainment box time waster to occupy all your free time.

For quality of life, first you needed a high school diploma to survive, then you needed a bachelor's degree.  Next you'll need a master's degree, then a few years later, you'll either need to have a PhD or inherit money or you'll be living like some type of peasant in a mud hut.  For most people, things will probably be getting a lot worse over time.  If you're going to have an increasing population with accelerating technological unemployment at the same time, that really just makes no sense and would force full blown, top down controlled socialism or constant civil war.

And yet you argue against providing employment for indie musicians by paying for their music 

The internet opened the eyes to the people in Philippines and leaped forward from being ignorant about everything to being some of the most savvy social networking users and they fought to the right to go work abroad and the country has changed so much since 1991 when I first arrived.

I can put all my music on the same device I use to do mobile communications & calls. When i first arrived in Philippines in 1991, you had to send a mailed letter to your other party and wait days/weeks for the response. Now I can send an SMS in 1 second.

Etc...

And just ask the Amish about whether it is still possible to live the simple life if that is what you want.

[CoinCube]

The ability to become self sufficient, even if you don't exercise it, is far better than piling on endless amounts of unneeded complications into people's lives to entrap them.  Am I the only one that doesn't think Ted Kaczynski was completely insane?

...

I don't see a quantitative gain in the quality of life or quality of people between gains in technology from the 1980's to now.  People are just more disconnected from reality, and technology-wise, all we really got out of it is bigger TVs, the first stages of technological unemployment through automation, and infrastructure to create bigger, more powerful government.  

r0ach I can see why you would come to this conclusion. I but would argue that you can't see the forest for the trees.

I don't want to clutter the post up with walls of text so I will direct you to the three arguments I would make in response to your comment above.

1) Evolution necessitates mutual dependence
2) Complete freedom and self sufficiency is an illusion
3) Group selection, inclusive fitness and reciprocity limit neoplastic change

And just ask the Amish about whether it is still possible to live the simple life if that is what you want.

Don't knock the Amish. They are far wiser then many give them credit for. They recognized the toxic aspects of the modern narrative early on and partially walled themselves off from it while still interacting with and benefiting from it.

http://amishamerica.com/how-self-sufficient-are-the-amish/

That is not the only solution and not the one I would choose but it is very much not unreasonable. There are other groups that have found perhaps better solutions to both protect themselves while also interacting more fully with the modern world. In a few weeks I am going to write up a post in the Politics and Society forum titled "The failure of atheism" where I will explore this in more depth. I don't want to derail this thread so I will leave further talk along these lines to a different topic.

 

[smooth]

I have to say on this point your logic is atrocious. If we have synthetic hamburgers and synthetic fish, then it indeed does not matter from the point of view of Malthusian population limits with respect to food that the majority of life in the ocean is wiped out.  It may matter for other reasons, but you haven't stated them.

I feel this is one of those Smooth moments questioning what the definition of "is" is.

If literally all food is synthetic, that indicates it's become entangled into an increasingly complex chain of specialization of labor, so even if you worked in that industry, you would probably not be able to produce it yourself.  That would be an extreme far left viewpoint where individuals are all required to fully integrate with the state to exist at all or you just instantly die.  As I tried to tell the Anonymizer, technology solely for the sake of technology is useless because it's not a net gain, it creates a dependency to enslave you at the same time.

The ability to become self sufficient, even if you don't exercise it, is far better than piling on endless amounts of unneeded complications into people's lives to entrap them.  Am I the only one that doesn't think Ted Kaczynski was completely insane?

Maybe you believe that the ability to become self-sufficient is by definition a desirable outcome, but does not mean that lack of self sufficiency means that Malthusian limits will be reached. The counterexample is exactly what has happened for the last century or so.

Also, in general terms, specialization increases productivity across the spectrum. Even the least productive have cell phones (etc.)  today, which means they are far more productive in absolute rather than relative terms than the least productive in times past. Possibly more than the most productive. You do not understand how gains from trade work.

[ArticMine]

...
Ah we have ArticMine the Malthusian who apparently religiously (irrationally) subscribes to the fable tale fraud of AGW and r0ach the Mathusian who doesn't appear to be aware that we can grow more food in our basements than we need:
...

This misses the crux of the problem. Why would we grow food in our basements if we do not need to? The biggest problem with hunger today is not lack of food production but massive food waste and poor food distribution. The choice here is not between depleted oceans and starving people, the real choice is between depleted oceans and not wasting food.  

Your comments about me being a Malthusian relates to me pointing out the massive waste of perfectly good electronics, most of which are produced in China, in order to satisfy the DRM wants of organizations such as the MPAA. The link between attempts at intellectual property protection and ewaste, become clear when one finds out that one has to buy a whole set of new electronics just to support the new DRM for 4K Video, just as people had to replace their electronics just to support the previous DRM for HD video. Buy the way the new 4K video DRM has already been cracked, http://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/hackers-pirate-netflixs-4k-streams-for-the-first-time/ so now we throw out our electronics and buy yet again a new set? If we stop this needless waste we can have both the pristine forest and the SUVs, with both sides of the "tree hugger" debate in harmony.

Another example: Of course distributed storage is incompatible with preventing copyright infringement. It really does not matter if the distributed storage consists of a crypto currency based or solution or people storing the information on 5.25in floppy diskettes and sharing the diskettes with each other via sneakernet! Don't copy that floppy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI The only way to prevent all copyright infringement is to create an Orwellian super state where every bit of information is closely controlled by big brother and every digital device behaves like the Telescreens in 1984.  By the way current devices such as Apple's IOS devices and Microsoft's ARM (Windows RT/Mobile) devices meet all the surveillance and control specifications of the Telescreens in 1984. They are also somewhat effective at "protecting intellectual property".

The fundamental reality here is that protection of intellectual property is at a very basic level incompatible with both:
1) A free and democratic society where people enjoy personal freedoms and civil liberties
2) A clean and sustainable environment.

Edit 1: In order to protect "intellectual property" effectively, the Orwellian super state would also have to destroy the world natural environments and replace them with wastelands of discarded electronics.
Edit 2: Anonymous crypto currency such as Z.cash or its competitors will make enforcement of "intellectual property rights" even harder than it is today. So one may as well accept reality and change business models that belong in the 19th century rather than try to fight technological change.

[TPTB_need_war]

...
Ah we have ArticMine the Malthusian who apparently religiously (irrationally) subscribes to the fable tale fraud of AGW and r0ach the Mathusian who doesn't appear to be aware that we can grow more food in our basements than we need:
...

This misses the crux of the problem. Why would we grow food in our basements if we do not need to? The biggest problem with hunger today is not lack of food production but massive food waste and poor food distribution. The choice here is not between depleted oceans and starving people, the real choice is between depleted oceans and not wasting food.

r0ach stated he is concerned about an insufficient supply of suitable farmland, and the information I linked to pointed out that we can grow food at 10X or more higher densities (on a yield basis) and without pesticides. Note this can be done at scale so not every person has to do it.

Your comments about me being a Malthusian relates to me pointing out the massive waste of perfectly good electronics, most of which are produced in China, in order to satisfy the DRM wants of organizations such as the MPAA.

No I was referring to your implied belief in man-made global warming (AGW), since you mentioned "greenhouse gases".

The link between attempts at intellectual property protection and ewaste, become clear when one finds out that one has to buy a whole set of new electronics just to support the new DRM for 4K Video, just as people had to replace their electronics just to support the previous DRM for HD video. Buy the way the new 4K video DRM has already been cracked, http://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/hackers-pirate-netflixs-4k-streams-for-the-first-time/ so now we throw out our electronics and buy yet again a new set?

I am not arguing for DRM hardware nor the corrupt aspects of the corporate music and video industry. DRM can always be cracked, because only end-to-end communications between loyal ends can remain encrypted.

You conflated my desire to help indie musicians get paid, with your claim that would require DRM. I disagree. My point was about State enforcement of copyrights by regulating Hosts and ISPs. Thus precisely my point is the decentralized file system protocols will be banned by regulation because those decentralized systems can't enforce (comply with) copyright.

If we stop this needless waste we can have both the pristine forest and the SUVs, with both sides of the "tree hugger" debate in harmony.

Only the Invisible Hand knows what is waste and what is necessary along the way of annealing the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Communists wolves in decentralized-sheep-skin think they are omniscient.

Another example: Of course distributed storage is incompatible with preventing copyright infringement. It really does not matter if the distributed storage consists of a crypto currency based or solution or people storing the information on 5.25in floppy diskettes and sharing the diskettes with each other via sneakernet! Don't copy that floppy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI The only way to prevent all copyright infringement is to create an Orwellian super state where every bit of information is closely controlled by big brother and every digital device behaves like the Telescreens in 1984.  By the way current devices such as Apple's IOS devices and Microsoft's ARM (Windows RT/Mobile) devices meet all the surveillance and control specifications of the Telescreens in 1984. They are also somewhat effective at "protecting intellectual property".

Note I had also stated an algorithm for sameness (i.e. algorithmically detecting infringement, and if invented) and a blockchain of who is first to claim ownership, could in theory replace the need for the State to enforce copyright. I also suggested having the decentralize file system respect an ownership signature that resolves to an active URL, so the blame can be placed on a URL that can be served the copyright infringement case. If the URL goes down, the decentralized file system revokes the files.

Absent the algorithmic solution I have proposed, the Orwellian state is unavoidable and so pursuing decentralized file storage (without the aforementioned blame feature) is a fool's direction. Ideology aside, because reality is paramount.

The fundamental reality here is that protection of intellectual property is at a very basic level incompatible with both:

You have not proved that. You are not omniscient. You are injecting your ideological delusion into a claim without proof. I explained above how intellectual property is compatible with freedom and decentralization if we invent the necessary algorithms to replace the role of the State.

1) A free and democratic society where people enjoy personal freedoms and civil liberties

Representative democracy will forever be an insoluble lie.

2) A clean and sustainable environment.

Non-sequitor.

Edit 1: In order to protect "intellectual property" effectively, the Orwellian super state would also have to destroy the world natural environments and replace them with wastelands of discarded electronics.

Wrong as explained above. Also it is ludicrous to assert that only electronics are causing environmental degradation. And please unconflate that environment degradation is an orthogonal issue to (the erroneous but alleged) AGW (allegedly caused by greenhouse gases).

Edit 2: Anonymous crypto currency such as Z.cash or its competitors will make enforcement of "intellectual property rights" even harder than it is today. So one may as well accept reality and change business models that belong in the 19th century rather than try to fight technological change.

Incorrect. You are not omniscient.

In theory the aforementioned algorithm can run and be verified in zero knowledge with zk-snarks.

[ArticMine]

...

Another example: Of course distributed storage is incompatible with preventing copyright infringement. It really does not matter if the distributed storage consists of a crypto currency based or solution or people storing the information on 5.25in floppy diskettes and sharing the diskettes with each other via sneakernet! Don't copy that floppy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI The only way to prevent all copyright infringement is to create an Orwellian super state where every bit of information is closely controlled by big brother and every digital device behaves like the Telescreens in 1984.  By the way current devices such as Apple's IOS devices and Microsoft's ARM (Windows RT/Mobile) devices meet all the surveillance and control specifications of the Telescreens in 1984. They are also somewhat effective at "protecting intellectual property".

Note I had also stated an algorithm for sameness (i.e. algorithmically detecting infringement, and if invented) and a blockchain of who is first to claim ownership, could in theory replace the need for the State to enforce copyright. I also suggested having the decentralize file system respect an ownership signature that resolves to an active URL, so the blame can be placed on a URL that can be served the copyright infringement case. If the URL goes down, the decentralized file system revokes the files.

Absent the algorithmic solution I have proposed, the Orwellian state is unavoidable and so pursuing decentralized file storage (without the aforementioned blame feature) is a fool's direction. Ideology aside, because reality is paramount.

The fundamental reality here is that protection of intellectual property is at a very basic level incompatible with both:

You have not proved that. You are not omniscient. You are injecting your ideological delusion into a claim without proof. I explained above how intellectual property is compatible with freedom and decentralization if we invent the necessary algorithms to replace the role of the State.

1) A free and democratic society where people enjoy personal freedoms and civil liberties

Representative democracy will forever be an insoluble lie.

2) A clean and sustainable environment.

Non-sequitor.

Edit 1: In order to protect "intellectual property" effectively, the Orwellian super state would also have to destroy the world natural environments and replace them with wastelands of discarded electronics.

Wrong as explained above. Also it is ludicrous to assert that only electronics are causing environmental degradation. And please unconflate that environment degradation is an orthogonal issue to (the erroneous but alleged) AGW (allegedly caused by greenhouse gases).

Edit 2: Anonymous crypto currency such as Z.cash or its competitors will make enforcement of "intellectual property rights" even harder than it is today. So one may as well accept reality and change business models that belong in the 19th century rather than try to fight technological change.

Incorrect. You are not omniscient.

In theory the aforementioned algorithm can run and be verified in zero knowledge with zk-snarks.

Your algorithm for sameness (DRM by blockchain) will not work because for starters one simply modifies the copyrighted work ever so slightly so as to not trigger the algorithm; however in order to sell the algorithm you did have to concede my point that intellectual property rights enforcement inevitably leads to an Orwellian super state and environmental degradation.

Edit: The fact that this algorithm does not work does not mean that there may not be a market for this technology starting of course with the MPAA.

[TPTB_need_war]

Your algorithm for sameness (DRM by blockchain) will not work because for starters one simply modifies the copyrighted work ever so slightly so as to not trigger the algorithm; however in order to sell the algorithm you did have to concede my point that intellectual property rights enforcement inevitably leads to an Orwellian super state and environmental degradation.

Edit: The fact that this algorithm does not work does not mean that there may not be a market for this technology starting of course with the MPAA.

I envisioned a smarter algorithm that can detect likeness the way a human can.

No I have to concede that such an ambitious algorithm (if it worked) could render copyright infringement administration much more efficient (as you admit in your edit).

[r0ach]

r0ach stated he is concerned about an insufficient supply of suitable farmland, and the information I linked to pointed out that we can grow food at 10X or more higher densities (on a yield basis) and without pesticides. Note this can be done at scale so not every person has to do it.

It was actually a more complex idea than that.  As long as there's abundant sea life and natural wild life (which in the context of humans are basically...resources), then you have the ability to "opt-out" of whatever system tyrannical humans establish.  Smooth seems to imply that all of civilization needs to be vertically integrated for maximum efficiency, and it doesn't matter if all the oceans are empty, food is entirely synthetic in a complex chain of labor custody, and every inch of land is covered with concrete.  In that instance, there is no opting out of anything, and you are in fact a permanent slave.

Outcomes like this are more likely to occur the higher both population and/or technology increases, and claiming anyone who identifies this fact is a "Malthusian" is ridiculous.  You will eventually not be able to opt out of anything, which is why people like Ted Kaczynski are not actually crazy.  He did not want to be locked into forced collectivism, so while his actions to try and prevent that might have been dumb or ineffective, the problem he identified is actually real.

[TPTB_need_war]

r0ach stated he is concerned about an insufficient supply of suitable farmland, and the information I linked to pointed out that we can grow food at 10X or more higher densities (on a yield basis) and without pesticides. Note this can be done at scale so not every person has to do it.

It was actually a more complex idea than that.  As long as there's abundant sea life and natural wild life (which in the context of humans are basically...resources), then you have the ability to "opt-out" of whatever system tyrannical humans establish.  Smooth seems to imply that all of civilization needs to be vertically integrated for maximum efficiency, and it doesn't matter if all the oceans are empty, food is entirely synthetic in a complex chain of labor custody, and every inch of land is covered with concrete.  In that instance, there is no opting out of anything, and you are in fact a permanent slave.

Outcomes like this are more likely to occur the higher both population and/or technology increases, and claiming anyone who identifies this fact is a "Malthusian" is ridiculous.  You will eventually not be able to opt out of anything, which is why people like Ted Kaczynski are not actually crazy.

Then go back to era before antibiotics and deal with the Blubonic Plague and other nasties.

The free resources life wasn't that good. Lifespan was very short. There was no electricity, etc.

Why are you on a technology forum? I think you want the Cave Man Hasn't Discovered Fire discussion and doesn't have a suitable weapon to fend off lions.

I don't know why you think the land with be concreted. The current trend is to further concentration of the population in the cities and abandon the rural areas. This should become more so when intensive agriculture can replace farmlands and as slower internet speeds of rural areas renders them uneconomic to habitat. There will be no shortage of land for those who want to go back to the simple life (and be very poor and have nothing to or able to trade to the mainstream economy which will be very interactive requiring fast internet).

[r0ach]

Why are you on a technology forum? I think you want the Cave Man Hasn't Discovered Fire discussion and doesn't have a suitable weapon to fend off lions.

Bitcoin is a supposed solution to a monopolization problem (no, I don't mean the math context, I mean actual human usage).  Even if Bitcoin worked flawlessly, what I just talked about above is the real monopolization gorilla in the room that dwarfs it.  Like I said, even with a perfectly functioning Bitcoin that scales to infinity, it would be worthless if you're unable to opt out of a monolithic, socialist civilization at all.