Bitcoin: The Digital Kill Switch

[acne]

Interesting, but no.

[1715419952]

1715419952

[AnonyMint]

You link to whiners that whine about workers disappearing in the US.
Well guess what! The Chinese have your work now! Cheap chinese labor is the real disruptive force. China as an economic power is a disruptive force (as has been predicted for decenia).
Funny how you didn't notice this but instead blame computers for it. Thu tukkin mu jub!

It is instructive that you missed the part about the manufacturing is leaving China back to USA where it is now highly automated.

I wish you wouldn't spam the thread with so many multiple instances of low comprehension.

Your new questions are valid, but not where you want to force me repeat arguments already made.

In fact, please provide figures that make it clear that the computer revolution (lets take the first intel cpu as a starting point, around 1970) reduced jobs and caused unemployment. Please make it so that it is clear that unemployment was caused by computers and not by other factors.
Maybe you can start by comparing unemployment rate with PC penetration, see what you get.

Are you denying that mass production destroyed cottage industry and caused massive unemployment during the first 1/3 of the 1900s?

No, but mass production created incredible amounts of opportunities for people.
The automobile was not produced by cottage industry.
Note how much the world advanced due to automobiles.

Still no figures? Thought so.

I already pointed out to you on the prior page of this thread, that it is the shift from old employment skills to new ones and statism delaying that adjustment by feeding people debt, that is the cause of the decades of unemployment, war and destruction.

Then the statism is destroyed (debt is erased) and the youth rebuild with their skills in the new technology. This will happen now until the reset in 2033.

Happens every 78 years. I am not going to explain it further. It is up to you to go do some research. I provided the pointers.

A supporting sliver of data is that very high youth unemployment (especially in Europe) because the boomers have the statism captured and award themselves government jobs and aid.

The youth will win after 2033, when the boomers will be put down into debt implosion.

Note I am not asserting that there is only one cycle, or one phenomenon. There surely exists a plurality of overlapping cycles and phenomena. And I am not asserting that the CLEARLY REPEATING THROUGHOUT HISTORY 78 year real estate boom+bust cycle (which I have associated with technological shift) is proven unequivocally-- almost everything in life is a theory backed by reasonable evidence, until disproven. Macro economics is particularly complex, because most likely is a multivariate solution space.

Note it is 52 years boom, followed by 26 years bust. In the USA, that was bust 1929 to 1955 (reset after WW2), then boom to 2007, now bust to 2033. (we have a 3-5 year bounce now due to global capital confidence cycle model where capital is rushing into the dollar as Europe and Japan near implosion first). The cycle repeats going back to 1700s at least. I didn't check it before that, but Martin Armstrong claims he has.

Here again is the link to the Case-Schiller housing price chart for past century, to illustrate this:

http://www.coolpage.com/commentary/economic/shelby/Housing%20Recovery%20Illusion.html

Note the dates don't exactly agree with the 1929 to 1955, because the USA was not in isolation. Europe had its cycle start earlier and capital was fleeing Europe into the USA after WW1 which caused the bounce before the crash again after 1929.

Also I am not sure if we can trust the price action in dollars in 1910 as comparative to the price action after the Fed was created in 1913. Before that the money was gold and after that the money was fiat. When gold is money, we must usually adjust prices for deflation and vice versa when fiat is money. So this can be another reason the housing crash appears to start in 1915 instead of 1929, when the economy truly crashed. We know the 1920s were booms times, and it was because gold was flooding into the USA.

Similarly we know the USA was bleeding jobs much earlier than 2007, and it was debt that was holding the economy up and prices may have peaked sooner if we used a non-liar inflation stats such as http://shadowstats.com

And this was due to global flows of capital and jobs to China for example.

Capital tries to flow where it can earn the highest short term return.

In any case, anyone who argues that we don't have massive low skills unemployment in the world today, due to the requirement for skills being raised by the computer, is in denial.

The unemployment is not just because of too much debt and failed policies, because today I could offer them a job if they knew how to program a computer. But they don't. The debt just enabled these people to stay longer in the jobs with no future. Without the debt, they would have been forced much sooner to reeducate.

Just read this about India's low education and labor laws, means most modern manufacturing there is done by robots not human labor:

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21577372-how-india-throwing-away-worlds-biggest-economic-opportunity-what-waste

The computer has enabled routing around these failed statist policies.

[AnonyMint]

lol
a lot of fancy words
if the "cartel" wants to delay your tx ,   others will not and accept the tx    hardly a digital kill switch

Nonsense from someone who doesn't have a grasp of the technical issues.

Without the concensus block being respected, there is no guarantee against double-spends.

Dude I have thought about these issues deeply. My IQ is well into the near genius range. Please stop wasting my time.

Ok, explain the technical issue then.  I'm very interested, especially the concensus block.
I don't question your intellectual capabilities.  Your IQ can be up there, your ego clearly is.

The point of scolding the dolt, was to admonish him to ask a question instead of asserting his technical ignorance as fact. Go through the entire thread, I was very careful to be humble and not assert my ego, but mobodick is testing my patience with his spamming of the thread. Mobodick is encouraging the other dolts to come out of the woodwork and make idiotic proclamations with no technical justification nor correctness, because dolts tend to think other dolts are winning the debate, because none of them comprehend.

The technical explanation is that only the winning peer for each block can add transactions, and every peer must respect this, otherwise there is no consensus and thus there could be multiple versions of the record of spends. Multiple records of spends, means spenders can spend more than once. If the cartel has made mining unprofitable by driving difficulty to insane levels, then they will win all the blocks (or at least so often that your transactions are delayed for say days or weeks by those miners who offer resources at a loss as a charity to society).

That is so elemental that anyone who doesn't understand that, doesn't even understand the basic theory of the Bitcoin algorithm. Thus they shouldn't dare try to make any proclamation about it. Novices should ask questions instead.

I base my IQ measurements on tests such as the following one:

http://www.sigmasociety.com/sigma_teste/sigma_teste_eng.asp

For example, I rapidly solved question #22.

[AnonyMint]

I have perhaps revived my interest in my harddisk space Proof-of-Work, in marriage to a simplified Decrit's proposal:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=189239.msg2151850#msg2151850
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=189239.msg2140631#msg2140631

(read two consecutive posts of mine at each of above links)

The point is we don't eliminate every chance for the socialization (cartels/govt) of money (don't require Utopia). We improve Bitcoin in every facet instead, including marking cartelization more difficult (99% versus 51% attack).

[AnonyMint]

In addition to anonymizing the IP of the injection point using MUTE concepts in every peer that transmits transactions, there is an idea to anonymize the blockchain:

http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/04/zerocoin-making-bitcoin-anonymous.html

[mobodick]

Just read this about India's low education and labor laws, means most modern manufacturing there is done by robots not human labor:

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21577372-how-india-throwing-away-worlds-biggest-economic-opportunity-what-waste

The computer has enabled routing around these failed statist policies.

See, this is exactly why it is impossible to have a normal discussion with you.
You claim a fact, then link information that does not support that fact and then you point out "See, it's right there!".

Nowhere in the article are robots or computers mentioned and according to this article it is indias failure to educate their new workers to normal standards (skilled worker) so they at least can prosper in simple factory work.
They didn't so the conditions in those factories are bad.
But not a hint about robots or computers taking over.

Moreover, you do not present clear proof for your obsessions, you create your own personal 'proof' from fragments of media (mostly opinion blogs, it seems). Only your brain makes the connections and as i said before it is acting very selectively about what information it cosiders. It seems like you haven't trained your internet-bullshit detector well enough and have fallen into the informational schemes of internet weirdos. In my view this makes you miss the actual complexities and you obsess over (sometimes minor) influences of parts of the whole.

You see only statist control without seing the benefits it brought to society.
You see computers and robots as a threat without seing the benefits it brought to society.
You see mass production as a threat without seing the benefits to society.
You say that there is this 78 year cycle that ends in war without seing that war was conducted throughout the perceived 78 year cycle.

One thing you COMPLETELY miss is that disruptive technologies are a normal thing that happen every few years.
The actual technological cycles at the moment are severely compressed due to the exponential nature of scietific development. Technological development doesn't follow these 78 year cycles. It used to take centuries for anything significant to come through. Now you can read about scientific breakthroughs on a weekly basis.

So of course we will need to adjust. We are in a constant state of change and have been for decenia. Every generation has a different world presented to them. And the changes are accelerating. This is completely unknown territory. Never before in history did humanity have it so well, for instance. Go back only a few hundred years and you are at the end of centuries of shit life for almost all people. Work hard for your lord untill you die and be glad that you got some food underway. Wife is pregnant from the land lord and your life expectany about 30 years. Normal life for a commoner in the past.
Things have gotten a lot better since we started with the technological revolutions and despite the challenges and (various) social disruptions we managed to make society better with every step.

For someone claiming to have near genius IQ you sure as hell fail to see important movements while obsessing on others.

[tellsomeee]

I believe it to be impossible to force in any protocol that can be imagined.

[ameliaih]

Okay I am are good. Thank you.

[FenixRD]

I have perhaps revived my interest in my harddisk space Proof-of-Work, in marriage to a simplified Decrit's proposal:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=189239.msg2151850#msg2151850
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=189239.msg2140631#msg2140631

(read two consecutive posts of mine at each of above links)

The point is we don't eliminate every chance for the socialization (cartels/govt) of money (don't require Utopia). We improve Bitcoin in every facet instead, including marking cartelization more difficult (99% versus 51% attack).

I'm liking this thread more and more, as we get away from the elephant of cartelization, which I believe less relevant, and move toward the things like allowing for drastically more peers (your HDD ideas) and best of all, better blockchain anonymity.

Green folks, read before talking in here... (probably still just watch for a long while): https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses ... If at least 95% of that isn't pretty crystal clear, read more.

AnonyMint, I still haven't quite decided your ratio of crazy to smart yet, but in any case, don't worry about Sigma tests and stuff. If it helps, I'm an ISPE Fellow... No need for people to prove things. Colorblind folks cannot have the color red PROVEN to them, no matter the credentials of the individual telling them. Anyhow, there is an awesome little IGNORE link in the forum avatar section of posters. Click it. I clicked it for mobodick a week ago, because he was shitting up the thread and making it unreadable -- feels good, man.

Carry on good sir...

[AnonyMint]

Green folks, read before talking in here... (probably still just watch for a long while): https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses ... If at least 95% of that isn't pretty crystal clear, read more.

AnonyMint, I still haven't quite decided your ratio of crazy to smart yet, but in any case, don't worry about Sigma tests and stuff. If it helps, I'm an ISPE Fellow... No need for people to prove things. Colorblind folks cannot have the color red PROVEN to them, no matter the credentials of the individual telling them. Anyhow, there is an awesome little IGNORE link in the forum avatar section of posters. Click it. I clicked it for mobodick a week ago, because he was shitting up the thread and making it unreadable -- feels good, man.

Carry on good sir...

Did the ignore.

Perhaps the end of the following linked comment qualifies to demonstrate the capacity to abstract a problem to grasp the generative essence:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=189239.msg2165884#msg2165884

Essentially we can't violate Coase's Theorem.

[FenixRD]

Green folks, read before talking in here... (probably still just watch for a long while): https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses ... If at least 95% of that isn't pretty crystal clear, read more.

AnonyMint, I still haven't quite decided your ratio of crazy to smart yet, but in any case, don't worry about Sigma tests and stuff. If it helps, I'm an ISPE Fellow... No need for people to prove things. Colorblind folks cannot have the color red PROVEN to them, no matter the credentials of the individual telling them. Anyhow, there is an awesome little IGNORE link in the forum avatar section of posters. Click it. I clicked it for mobodick a week ago, because he was shitting up the thread and making it unreadable -- feels good, man.

Carry on good sir...

Did the ignore.

Perhaps the end of the following linked comment qualifies to demonstrate the capacity to abstract a problem to grasp the generative essence:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=189239.msg2165884#msg2165884

Essentially we can't violate Coase's Theorem.

That is an interesting application. By the way, having considered it a bit further, I am moderately concerned with the "cartelization" attack. I am not sure how it might play out in the real world, and some of your descriptions rely on certain conspiracy theories, which make it harder for some in the thread to consider your perspective, but the technical flaw is real enough.

Detractors may do well to note that this is a variant on a known potential flaw:


(From https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses)

Cancer nodes

It's trivial for an attacker to fill the network with clients controlled by him. This might be helpful in the execution of other attacks.

For example, an attacker might connect 100,000 IP addresses to the IRC bootstrap channel. You would then be very likely to connect only to attacker nodes. This state can be exploited in (at least) the following ways:

• The attacker can refuse to relay blocks and transactions from everyone, disconnecting you from the network.
• The attacker can relay only blocks that he creates, putting you on a separate network. You're then open to double-spending attacks.
• If you rely on transactions with 0 confirmations, the attacker can just filter out certain transactions to execute a double-spending attack.
• Low-latency encryption/anonymization of Bitcoin's transmissions (With Tor, JAP, etc.) can be defeated relatively easy with a timing attack if you're connected to several of the attacker's nodes and the
  attacker is watching your transmissions at your ISP.

Bitcoin makes these attacks more difficult by only making an outbound connection to one IP address per /16 (x.y.0.0). Incoming connections are unlimited and unregulated, but this is generally only a problem in the anonymity case, where you're probably already unable to accept incoming connections.

Looking for suspiciously low network hash-rates may help prevent the second one.

[BTCoder]

This thread has a scary sounding to it.

[BTCoder]

Right?

[daHavok]

I think that most of the retailers will think twice before widely using such an uncontrollable coin.

Btw: Your topic made me think about that movie with the kill-for-money button.. can't remember it's name.

[FenixRD]

This thread has a scary sounding to it.

Well, ignoring whether you'll buy the OP premise that Satoshi baked-in this flaw, which really doesn't matter, it's still only a problem to be solved. Right now Bitcoin is fine, and may be for quite a while. Meantime, people work on developing a potential successor (Litecoin is just that, Lite bitcoin, and actually pretty dumb beyond its goodness as a Silver to Bitcoin's Gold; almost everything is the same, with just different scales). In fact, this is the only alt-coin development thread I've been intrigued by.

Still not even sure that constant debasement is the right answer to this cartelized-cancer node question.

[FenixRD]

I think that most of the retailers will think twice before widely using such an uncontrollable coin.

Btw: Your topic made me think about that movie with the kill-for-money button.. can't remember it's name.

Bitcoin is still infinitely free-er than existing fiat (US dollars, etc.) OP is solving a problem that MAY happen and only present itself many years from now, if ever. Which still makes it very worthy of solving, unless it can be proven impossible.

[BTCoder]

Bitcoin: The Digital Kill Switch

by Shelby H. Moore III

March 29, 2013

Bitcoin is the first peer-to-peer (P2P) digital currency and payment system to gain significant interest. This month its marketcap surpassed $1 billion.

P2P currencies promise some differences from credit cards, such as increased privacy, no control by authorities, instant signup, lower fees for the merchant, and no chargebacks (buyer at the mercy of the merchant to issue refund if dispute).

Unlike a credit card which allows the merchant to see your details, making unauthorized charges to your P2P account is impossible, unless you allow someone to get your private key. Note credit cards are adding for example Verified By Visa to provide a similar degree of security.

The government control increased on March 13, when FinCEN ruled that transactions for goods and services paying with P2P currency are not regulated, yet exchange to other currencies is regulated and can't be anonymous. Since most users need to exchange from legal tender to and from P2P currencies, some of the purported privacy has already been lost. Also instant signup has been effectively eliminated for many, as now many new users must "practically give a DNA sample" to become verified by exchange providers— however this tsuris may not exist in all jurisdictions.

The anonymity of payments for goods and services is given by the fact that each sender and receiver of a payment is just a number without any other identifying information attached. New numbers can be generated by users at-will. However, the authorities regularly collect information from the internet about usage activity using various means of tracking such as man-in-the-middle routers, spyware, and requests for information from sites that collect information via cookies such as Google's ads and Facebook's Like that appear on many pages of the internet.

So what are the compelling advantages of P2P currencies, since most of the differences from credit cards are being diluted?

For merchants it is the elimination of the 2 - 5% fees charged by credit card companies, the elimination of the ability of the buyer to issue a chargeback, and accessing a new market of highly motivated buyers. In some cases however, the buyer will not like this "no chargeback" provision and prefer to use a credit card.

For the buyer or payer, there appear to be no remaining significant advantages. Even most merchants don't accept P2P currencies yet. The non-merchant has one significant reason to buy digital coins— the expectation of appreciation.

Valuation

The supporters of Bitcoin are projecting very high valuations ranging from $1000 to $1 billion per coin in the future, based on a limit of 21 million coins to ever be created, and a projection of percentage share of global transaction processing.

Notably 50% of Bitcoin's future money supply was issued to the founders and early adopters in first 4 years ended 2012, and by 2016, 75% of the 21 million coins will have been created. By 2020, 87.5%. By 2024, 93.75%. By 2028, 97%.

This accelerated phaseout in the creation of new coins is creating a mad "gold rush" to get in before it is too late. Even though at least 59% (but most likely 75 - 95% since that is only a lower bound that can be measured reliably) are holding long-term and not spending, the skyhigh valuations are based on the hope for adoption by merchants and then increased spending on goods and services in the future.

The 21 million Bitcoins are replacement goods with low barriers to entry and thus can be debased by market share. If competing P2P currencies issue many more coins, then the total finite demand for P2P coins has to be spread between the coins in all P2P currency competitors. However, this spread of market share is not uniform. Today, Bitcoins traded at $75 - $95 with 10.8 million coins issued and Litecoins traded at $0.58 - $0.68 with 2.5 million coins issued. Given real-time exchange between P2P currencies, there is nearly no barrier-to-entry, since merchants will want to accept as many no chargeback currencies as they can if value is rising or stable. Also Gresham's Law dictates that coins will higher issuance will drive coins with less issuance out-of-circulation towards a higher store-of-value. Valuations are also crucially based on market share of transaction processing to be captured in the future, which requires circulation of the currency. So it is quite naive to think that the 21 million coins of Bitcoins are immune to debasement by competitors, unless all competitors suck and have no desirable differences.

Much of the fervor is further amplified with a false sense of altruism under the delusion of being part of a momentus and historic creation of what supporters expect to be the first meritocratic money system— one which can't be debased by the power elite who control the strings on banks in the fiat fractional reserve systems society uses now.

Scaling

For Bitcoin to meet the expectation of investors in its digital coins, the transactions for goods and services has to scale up.

And here is where the hidden diabolical quality of Bitcoin (and Litecoin too) becomes too obvious when the technical details of the design are closely scruntinized by an expert programmer such as myself.

The processing of transactions in P2P currencies is provided by "mining" peers, who provide some Proof-of-Work to insure that double-spends can not exist in the single correct copy of the distributed database. These peers are computers connected to the internet and interacting in a protocol with the other "mining" peers.

To incentivize the "mining" peers to offer their hardware and electricity to this task, they are given the new digital coins created with each new block of transactions. Also they may be offered an optional transaction fee by some payers.

However, the rate of creation of new coins is halving every 4 years, and will eventually stop. Given the fervor the supporters have over non-debasement for meritocratic money system, the end of the creation of new coins is "non-negotiable".

If an attacker can muster 51% of the Proof-of-Work capacity of a P2P system, the attacker can take over the system. There are differences of opinion as to the degree of malicious behavior an attacker could do. However, one unarguable mathematical conclusion is that an attacker that had for example 60 to 90% of the Proof-of-Work capacity could process 60 to 90% of the transactions. If this attacker did not do any thing noticably malicious and did not charge a transaction fee, then virtually all customers would not find it necessary to offer a transaction fee, because over just 3 blocks of waiting time the 60 to 90% becomes 94 to 99.9% of all transactions.* If this was sustained for sufficient months or years when the production of new coins had ended (or declined significantly), then all the other miners would go bankrupt because their costs are not subsidized. Such attacker would then control virtually 100% of all transactions processed. Note this 60 - 90% could be built up over time, because offering free transactions to a percent of the market (when no new coins are being minted), drives some percent of the other miners bankrupt thus increasing the percent the attacker has— it is a snowball effect.

This was explained to some of the developers of Bitcoin who hang out at bitcoin.stackexchange.com, but they claimed it is only an opinion and not a fact. How can math be an opinion?

*First block, 60 to 90% + second block 60 x (100 - 60) to 90 x (100 - 90)% + third block 60 x (100 - 84) to 90 x (100 - 99).

Digital Kill Switch

There is an expectation that large retailers such as WalMart, Amazon, etc., will want to provide the "mining" peers at no transaction fee cost to the buyers, so as to gain a competitive advantage over other retailers.

But we see from the prior section that the incentive is very great to create a cartel that has control over all transactions. Once you have that cartel, you can eliminate those outside the cartel by delaying their transactions or charging transaction fees only to your competitors (billing the competitor, not deducting from the payer in the system). So this is just the credit card fees we have now all over again, except then they will also have a public global record of all transactions in the world (total end of privacy).

Then the government could easily collude with these cartels to turn off the transactions of political dissidents, free speech advocates, gun rights advocates, Ron Paul supporters, and any other classification of terrorist. With control over the processing and the merchants who depend on it, they can easily force an upgrade to the protocol which requires a SSN or other government tax ID to be attached to each transaction.

This is not a stretch at all. The design of Bitcoin and Litecoin encourages it— I go so far as to say they were designed for it given there are alternative designs (I proposed one) that don't have this diabolical possibility.

Having numerous competing P2P currencies does not escape from this diabolical threat, if all of them have the same diabolical design. A non-diabolical design would either have debasement that never ends and/or a minimum transaction fee.

I doubt one can create a non-diabolical P2P currency at any time in future, because the first-mover advantage will apply inspite of low barriers to entry. Because if the users already have Bitcoin and Litecoin, they may not see any compelling reason to add another, in spite of the diabolical quality which does not affect them directly (as a member of the majorty and not a dissidant or other threatened class).

Not Gold

The P2P currency fervor was further stoked by the illusion that they are somewhat like gold. Gold is a private hedge against government malfeasance, it can be traded privately with no public record. P2P currency ownership and transactions are stored in one public database that is never erased forever!

Gold's money supply is always increasing forever (we can mine it in outer space if we run out on earth) and the rate of nominal increase every year is also increasing. Bitcoin and Litecoin are geometrically decreasing the rate of increase of the money supply and will terminate production of new coins at 21 and 84 million respectively. Some people think this makes them even better than gold and silver.

Many people have the illusion these days that inflation is bad and deflation is good. Sorry to bust their bubble, but both transfer wealth to the power elite. The power elite have more savings relative to their expenses, thus they can switch their savings between investments which increase during both inflation and deflation. Whereas, the middle-class are hurt by inflation since they must spend more their income, and they are hurt by deflation, because their wages decline.

If distributed to the middle-class, some minimal debasement is beneficial to offset the guaranteed (government backed stopped) usury interest income the wealthy earn during deflation. I am not a socialist and I love free markets, but the fact is that money is a social collective institution and this is the reality of the math. Either you redistribute algorithmically with debasement and mining of new coins, or you redistribute with taxes and politics. I would much prefer the former.

It is possible to make a P2P currency that more closely emulates gold's money supply. And has the advantage that no one controls its rate of debasement and thus can't manipulate it to create false business cycles.

This really was a good article.

[AnonyMint]

End of factories (and human-labor for them):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=q9t68cMAPgA

[mobodick]

End of factories (and human-labor for them):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=q9t68cMAPgA

Sorry to say, but i was a bit disappointed by this guy.
He royally underestimates the disruptive power of the technology he describes.
The 'razor and holder' model will be useless for 3D printers. It is already eating itself up as 3D printers are becoming more capable of replicating teir own parts. Even better, these desigs are open open source.
This guy just doesn't see the real potential of 3D printers and the way the world will be changed by them. He clearly does not get the concept that these devices are being designed for the specific purpose of replicating themselfs. Once that is done there will only be a thin layer of opportunity to make money from it and you will be competeing with the biggest open source community ever.

[Pzi4nk]

End of factories (and human-labor for them):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=q9t68cMAPgA

Sorry to say, but i was a bit disappointed by this guy.
He royally underestimates the disruptive power of the technology he describes.
The 'razor and holder' model will be useless for 3D printers. It is already eating itself up as 3D printers are becoming more capable of replicating teir own parts. Even better, these desigs are open open source.
This guy just doesn't see the real potential of 3D printers and the way the world will be changed by them. He clearly does not get the concept that these devices are being designed for the specific purpose of replicating themselfs. Once that is done there will only be a thin layer of opportunity to make money from it and you will be competeing with the biggest open source community ever.

The real money from the 3D printing revolution will be made selling the materials used in the printers.