Is a Madmax outcome coming before 2020? Thus do we need anonymity?

[AnonyMint]

Exponentially falling prices due to productivity growth don't lead to hoarding.

Most people look to Bitcoin's current price activity as a counterargument. Bitcoin is not a good counterargument because this phenomenon is a different type of deflation; it's a short-run effect that occurs while bitcoin is being monetized. If people expect that Bitcoin will increase in value faster than they can get return on their capital, they will certainly hoard.

Again, the only reason this is happening is because bitcoin adoption is still in the initial phases and hasn't reached equilibrium. This is a sigmoid trend and will not continue forever.

Why don't falling prices encourage hoarding?
Because even if the gold/bitcoin quantities are not increasing faster than the growth rate of the economy, it will always be prudent to invest your money because the nominal interest rate will not be negative. The real interest rate will always be higher in absolute value than the deflation rate.

I am glad you raised this point for clarification. My prior logic was spread across several disjoint posts in the Peter Schiff thread in the Economics forum and the Mini-block chain thread debate with bitfreak!.

Perhaps you don't understand if you have not yet grasped fully the depth of my understanding of macro economic efficiency (or can point out a flaw in that understanding). Or if you take my declining price comment out-of-context of the prior stipulation of constant or declining M, then I would be incorrect. Or perhaps you understood already and wanted me to explain further for the benefit of us all.

With a constant or declining M, then at-risk (not dumb, mayonnaise debt spread) investment and productivity of supply Q can't increase due to hoarding as explained in the following paragraph.

Refer to my prior post today and the explanation of how dividends and interest rates aggregate to those who can capture the public backstop of taxation, because otherwise without insurance and a government enforcement of debts, then default risk will cause these dumb (because they can't intelligently choose stocks or business ventures) investors to fail over time, especially relative to those at-risk in stocks and business ventures with higher potential gains relative to the actual risk of failure of investment. See dividends and interest rate "investing" is really socialism because all the capital will end up with those who capture the government (i.e. the smaller banks failure and are eaten by the larger ones with complicit government), and remember insurance can't invest at-risk and thus does the same thing.

And don't tell me that limiting the supply of base money will limit debt. We have private bank gold certificate notes for fractional reserve banking in the 1800s as an example (and many others). Much better that the base money supply be expanded so the rich can't use the debt expansions and contractions as way to get ahead of the "smaller things grow faster" middle class. Much better we have an altcoin with perpetual debasement of 5% than (not as decentralized) colored coins Mastercoin and back on the same hamster wheel again.

Debt and loans based "invesment" is really about everyone doing the same dumb thing (for greater economies-of-scale for the rich such as Warren Buffet) without an expertise applied to the at-risk investment process of producing winners and losers. Guarantee success == guaranteed failure. Without investment risk, there is no intelligence incentivized.

So with constant or declining money supply M either you increase the demand for socialism and failure and also my math in prior post becomes (x + decline in M) instead of (x - an increase in M), so capital is hoarded over time by the rich who capture the government, or the economy is in failure (causing the price declines of conspicuous consumption assets due to collapsing demand, but not decline in price of produced goods of things people must have because that supply can collapse but the demand can't because they are daily necessities) and money is hoarded into small private stashes.

Read my prior post as to why increasing the money supply with a decentralized proof-of-work is the only solution I see. We suddenly have the technology to fix this hamster wheel that has been on our backs since the Mesopotamia.
 

Think about the dynamics of the equilibrium: if people were better off hoarding their cash than investing it, there would be no investment and the economy would not grow, and they wouldn't be better off hoarding because there wouldn't be deflation.

Agreed the vicious cycle of failure that the global economy has entered since at least 2007. We have stagflation, i.e. increases in prices of things produced, and deflation of investment, relative wages, and demand for assets for which demand was pulled forward by 30 years with 30 year mortgages. If we don't break out of it, we could end up in a Madmax Dark Age.

I don't see any reason why something as immaterial as the inflation/deflation rate should influence the real interest rate. In other words, why should inflation/deflation affect the relative amount of people producing things for consumption vs. investing in future production?

Do you refer to the monetary M rate or the price P rate?

At least M need to be increasing for the economy to be healthy as I explained above. P could decline even with M increasing as investment leads to increased productivity of produced goods. Even assets might decline in price P as increases in productivity can increase supply Q (of houses, commodities, etc). This would be healthy. Please note I stipulated the statement you quoted with the requirement that M was constant or declining, then I said declining P would not be stable in that case.

Remember smaller things grow faster (i.e. local actors are closer to the optimum local annealing gradients), so expanding M and Q are good for the middle class.

Tie this back into simulated annealing. Remember if cool ice too quickly, the local molecules don't have time to relax and find optimally distributed structures, thus we get cracks. Rapid global cooling is not available top-down. This analogy explains why smaller things grow faster.

Another angle:
In response to someone who claims that inflation is good for the economy because it encourages spending/investment,

That is not my reason for my claim as detailed in this and the prior post. Rather I am saying we have to continually dilute the large capitalists which want to use dumb fixed and guaranteed returns on usury with captured power vacuum of government to parasite and enslave "smaller things grow faster" investment.

I am 100% in favor of highly expert capitalists who invest (their effort, expertise, and money) at-risk in the highest returning ventures, not in usury and government capture. I am not the Marxist, but those who believe in dividends, bonds, and insurance are.

[AnonyMint]

I would prefer to stop now posting, unless there is really some new argument isn't already dealt with in all of my archived posts.

I realize someone can quote from one of my posts then appear to have revealed an error, then it causes me to come back and reassimilate past posts with further explanation. But even though I enjoy it, I need to stop doing this because otherwise I will never get any real work done.

And my belief is we need for me to get real work done.

So hopefully this is goodbye and best wishes from AnonyMint.

Let's try to win. I don't believe we will get there with Bitcoin's major flaws such as funding from transaction fees (which I believe has numerous failure modes and attack vectors detailed the November and December archives of my posts) instead of maintaining the rate of expansion of the base money supply. And that isn't the only Bitcoin flaw I've detailed in my posts.

Again I don't claim to be omniscient. Vaporware doesn't prove a damn thing. The best is to compete and let the market prove the reality.

It will be most rewarding if some of you will be making the arguments for the expanding money supply for that competing altcoin. Can you help AnonyMint retire? He is getting old and he is a much better programmer than a writer.


Technological unemployment and the future employment for the unskilled:



Ben-d-you-over-anke's ZIRP's effect on your retirement:



Debt's effect on human morals, remember the bath houses of Rome:



Bread and circus of Rome near the end:



It would be funny, if ... I was still 5 years old:




Regulation increasing:



Scams increasing as debt has caused people to be frivolous and reject caution with money:

[elektibi75]

Yepp we are done for...

[AnonyMint]

One hopefully final transgression:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/01/07/creating-a-natural-hedge/

The people who were so gun-ho on gold and how it was money are now at it with Bitcoin. They have applied the same stories of hating the dollar and preach Bitcoin will have ATMs everywhere and displace the dollar becoming the new world currency. This is just the same gibberish. Just look at the tax-straddles of the 1970s where people discovered buying next year’s contract of gold and shorting the nearby this year allowed them to tax losses now and move profits forward. The IRS cam out with mark-to-market, fined the brokerage house for selling those deals, and then hit the people with interest and penalties retroactively. I knew people who lost everything at the end of the day back then.

NOTHING will be allowed to displace any government when it comes to taxes. They will always give people as much rope as they want to hang themselves. If they did it before, they will do it again. What we do has to be straight up – no schemes. There is no tax-free escape hatch these days.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/01/08/the-growth-of-the-internet-the-dawn-of-a-complete-new-era/

As government embrace electronic money they seek to make tax avoidance impossible. Even working under the table will become impossible if there is only electronic money. How will they sell drug? How will illegal gambling take place? There are many questions about how electronic money will change society, but one thing for sure – privacy will become a thing of the past.

Armstrong went to great lengths in upthread quotes to say we shouldn't believe in the power-elite boogeyman because it would make us afraid to stand up to government. Now he says we should be afraid to stand up to government overtaxing us. He forgets the dumping of Tea in US history apparently.

How can he be sure that we can't invent anonymity technology that is sufficient for many of us to feel confident enough in our anonymity weapon to stand up?

Why does standing up have to be global coordination in his proposed model of a global reserve SDR currency with floating national currencies?

Armstrong is not omniscient enough to know which form the reformation of government will take.

He should remember that and check his hubris at the door.

[Rassah]

Holy fuck! How many hours over how many days does AnonyMiint waste typing up all this stuff? And does he have a list of his own posts he thinks are important? I've never seen anyone quote themselves over and over to refute points or emphasize about how they are right about something, as much as he does. Hell, I'm sure he may be intelligent about some things, but I totally lost all respect for him when he started posting rather dumb mistakes about his ideas on how to attack bitcoin, and started attacking with ad hominems anyone who pointed out the rather blatant errors in his understanding of how bitcoin works. As for this political and economic diatribe, I used to read it, but at this point it's a waste of time, because he can't seem to figure out how to say something without taking up two pages to say it, and whenever you point out something that seems off or that you disagree with, he either attacks you as being an idiot, or replies with too many things to bother with. Seriously, it would take me a week to go through, digest, and refute his crap, but as soon as I did that, he'd come back with a moonth's worth of more bullshit, including moving goalposts, claims he didn't say what he did, etc. It's actually a fairly common tactic of creating such huge posts with so many points and issues that it becomes impossible to sit down, review, debate, and try to refute ("shotgun journalism?") Seriously, big fancy words that take up pages to not really say much of anything don't change a big-headed self-important loony idiot into a brilliant person (that only works for university professors...). Please don't fall for his brand of self-advertising bullshit.

So hopefully this is goodbye and best wishes from AnonyMint.

Yeah, hopefully, but somehow I seriously fucking doubt it.

P.S. I almost never attack or deride anyone (I may point out a dumb statement sometimes, though). I don't even have anyone on my ignore list. AnonyMint is a very special exception.

[AnonyMint]

blahblab, I'll check back with you in 2020 when the horrific warnings have come to fruition, by then you will have experienced first-hand the purpose of fitness, resiliency, and Taleb's Antifragility in avoiding catastrophic failure which leads to great human suffering that could have been avoided if we eliminate the power vacuum of democracy. You still didn't grasp the very simple point (I mean really a 120 IQ should suffice) that with power vacuum, individuals maximize their individual wants by asking the government to give them everything they want in terms of social services and including insuring their 0% (or even negative) downpayment mortgages. Yes they maximize their short-term wants at the cost of catastrophic failure. But I don't want to explain this, because I don't want to feel compelled to refute another one of your clueless posts.

Rassah, check back with you after a few years when all my technical warnings about Bitcoin have come to fruition. There were no dumb mistakes written by me, only your inability to comprehend what is written. Don't bother dragging me into a detailed debate, it has all been argued ad nauseum already. See you 2020 my little feline idiot who stalks me and reads every one of my posts.


I guess you guys don't realize how silly you look displaying your dunning-kruger effect for me. Throughout my life when I didn't really try to communicate much what was inside my head, I always felt I wasn't that smart and was lacking information. But when people can't even grasp the simple concepts I write about, it makes me realize they are not simple for most people. So it causes me to realize that my low opinion of myself was not accurate.

[TiagoTiago]

I would find it really disappointing if we end up like that before we manage to create a self-improving AI that will take over the world...

[AnonyMint]

I would find it really disappointing if we end up like that before we manage to create a self-improving AI that will take over the world...

Creativity can't be expressed in an algorithm i.e. AI, because it spawns accretively from the fact that no two brains and environment path dependencies are identical.

Eric S. Raymond wrote recently about that path dependency. Apparently he hasn't formed the complete generative model of infinity yet though and apparently doesn't comprehend how this impacts his interpretation of a God, so this is one of several examples that causes me to believe I might have a higher abstract IQ than he does, although he clearly has a higher IQ in prose and other areas.

I made some comments about Biblical parables consistency with reality. If you read all my comments in that linked thread, you will clearly see that I don't think a God could be falsifiable. Nor do I think faith is rationale in the context of applying the scientific method. What I think Eric and many scientists miss is the point that the scientific method can NEVER BE COMPLETE (Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem says a signal can not be both band-limited and time-limited), i.e. no person can be omniscient, thus faith is a reality that we operate in by default and not admitting that is a delusion. This conclusion should not be misinterpreted as a violation of free will, and in fact if we could be omniscient then we would not have free will nor exist as past and present would collapse together as one. Eric and other scientists who think they are perfectly rational and devoid of faith are ignorant of this unsavory fact.

P.S. JustSaying is one of the 3 pseudonyms of mine that he banned from his blog.

I would be quite amused if someone could email Eric (mailto:esr@thyrsus.com) and get him to read this post. Presumably my emails to him go to /dev/null.

[TiagoTiago]

I would find it really disappointing if we end up like that before we manage to create a self-improving AI that will take over the world...

Creativity can't be expressed in an algorithm i.e. AI, because it spawns accretively from the fact that no two brains and environment path dependencies are identical.

Eric S. Raymond wrote recently about that path dependency. Apparently he hasn't formed the complete generative model of infinity yet though and apparently doesn't comprehend how this impacts his interpretation of a God, so this is one of several examples that causes me to believe I might have a higher abstract IQ than he does, although he clearly has a higher IQ in prose and other areas.

I made some comments about Biblical parables consistency with reality. If you read all my comments in that linked thread, you will clearly see that I don't think a God could be falsifiable. Nor do I think faith is rationale in the context of applying the scientific method. What I think Eric and many scientists miss is the point that the scientific method can NEVER BE COMPLETE (Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem says a signal can not be both band-limited and time-limited), i.e. no person can be omniscient, thus faith is a reality that we operate in by default and not admitting that is a delusion. This conclusion should not be misinterpreted as a violation of free will, and in fact if we could be omniscient then we would not have free will nor exist as past and present would collapse together as one. Eric and other scientists who think they are perfectly rational and devoid of faith are ignorant of this unsavory fact.

P.S. JustSaying is one of the 3 pseudonyms of mine that he banned from his blog.

I would be quite amused if someone could email Eric and get him to read this post. Presumably my emails to him go to /dev/null.

I'll try to read all those references some time later. This is my reply for now:

Creativity is simply the ability of arranging pre-existing elements in a new ways, and extrapolating the contents of any holes that may arise on the new arrangements based on what you already know (plus, possibly, a tad of randomness combined with some element of trial-and-error, either in "mental" simulations or testing hypotheses against reality or some close-enough stand-in for it).

We wouldn't need to replicate human creativity; and actually, i think what would have bigger odds of being successful would be non-human creativity. An algorithm that appears to be creative, but comes up with concepts humans wouldn't have. The very fact that humans wouldn't be able to foresee what it's next move will be, together with its self-improving, with pardon of the word, nature; means we wouldn't be able to stop it if it doesn't want to be stopped.

A machine that thinks like a human is a big deal, but we got cheap humans that we don't have to pay for the manufacture. Now a machine that thinks different(ly) and better than humans, is something you can't get from nature (at the time of writing, highly advanced self-improving aliens are widely considered to be just hypothetical) ; the niche is waiting to be filled.


If something else doesn't stop humanity before, i see a non-humanoid self-improving intelligence as inevitable in the long term.


It doesn't need to be omniscient, it just need to have better guesses than the humans'.

[Phrenico]

I am glad you raised this point for clarification. My prior logic was spread across several disjoint posts in the Peter Schiff thread in the Economics forum and the Mini-block chain thread debate with bitfreak!.

Perhaps you don't understand if you have not yet grasped fully the depth of my understanding of macro economic efficiency (or can point out a flaw in that understanding). Or if you take my declining price comment out-of-context of the prior stipulation of constant or declining M, then I would be incorrect. Or perhaps you understood already and wanted me to explain further for the benefit of us all.

If I took it out of context, I didn't mean to. I see now that there are a lot of other assumptions built into it. I was imagining a completely free market and am not terribly interested in, or capable of, predicting how it would interact with these other macro effects:

With a constant or declining M, then at-risk (not dumb, mayonnaise debt spread) investment and productivity of supply Q can't increase due to hoarding as explained in the following paragraph.

Refer to my prior post today and the explanation of how dividends and interest rates aggregate to those who can capture the public backstop of taxation, because otherwise without insurance and a government enforcement of debts, then default risk will cause these dumb (because they can't intelligently choose stocks or business ventures) investors to fail over time, especially relative to those at-risk in stocks and business ventures with higher potential gains relative to the actual risk of failure of investment. See dividends and interest rate "investing" is really socialism because all the capital will end up with those who capture the government (i.e. the smaller banks failure and are eaten by the larger ones with complicit government), and remember insurance can't invest at-risk and thus does the same thing.

And don't tell me that limiting the supply of base money will limit debt. We have private bank gold certificate notes for fractional reserve banking in the 1800s as an example (and many others). Much better that the base money supply be expanded so the rich can't use the debt expansions and contractions as way to get ahead of the "smaller things grow faster" middle class. Much better we have an altcoin with perpetual debasement of 5% than (not as decentralized) colored coins Mastercoin and back on the same hamster wheel again.

Think about the dynamics of the equilibrium: if people were better off hoarding their cash than investing it, there would be no investment and the economy would not grow, and they wouldn't be better off hoarding because there wouldn't be deflation.

Agreed the vicious cycle of failure that the global economy has entered since at least 2007. We have stagflation, i.e. increases in prices of things produced, and deflation of investment, relative wages, and demand for assets for which demand was pulled forward by 30 years with 30 year mortgages. If we don't break out of it, we could end up in a Madmax Dark Age.

You might have misunderstood me here. My original comment describes a negative feedback that suggests an equilibrium that allows for stability in a 'deflationary' (M constant) environment.

I don't see any reason why something as immaterial as the inflation/deflation rate should influence the real interest rate. In other words, why should inflation/deflation affect the relative amount of people producing things for consumption vs. investing in future production?

Do you refer to the monetary M rate or the price P rate?

At least M need to be increasing for the economy to be healthy as I explained above. P could decline even with M increasing as investment leads to increased productivity of produced goods. Even assets might decline in price P as increases in productivity can increase supply Q (of houses, commodities, etc). This would be healthy. Please note I stipulated the statement you quoted with the requirement that M was constant or declining, then I said declining P would not be stable in that case.

I was talking about price inflation/deflation. Bitcoin isn't actually deflationary in the "shrinking money supply" sense (well, lost coins I guess..). I disagree with you if we are talking about a non-intervention market, but it doesn't seem like that's your context.

That is not my reason for my claim as detailed in this and the prior post. Rather I am saying we have to continually dilute the large capitalists which want to use dumb fixed and guaranteed returns on usury with captured power vacuum of government to parasite and enslave "smaller things grow faster" investment.

I am 100% in favor of highly expert capitalists who invest (their effort, expertise, and money) at-risk in the highest returning ventures, not in usury and government capture.

Ok now I see. I won't go edit what I just wrote to reflect this clarification. Seems to me that your preference for inflation is just expedience.

I would prefer to stop now posting, unless there is really some new argument isn't already dealt with in all of my archived posts.

I realize someone can quote from one of my posts then appear to have revealed an error, then it causes me to come back and reassimilate past posts with further explanation. But even though I enjoy it, I need to stop doing this because otherwise I will never get any real work done.

And my belief is we need for me to get real work done.

So hopefully this is goodbye and best wishes from AnonyMint.

I wasn't intentionally playing "gotcha". Perhaps this is another reason to record these essays in your blog. As others are saying, it's hard to understand and discuss when everything you've written is scattered in different threads. It'll also help people to understand the motivation behind your altcoin.

I'm very interested in alts that solve Bitcoin's ultimate tragedy of the transaction fee commons and worry that perpetual debasement is the only solution. Good luck.

[Rassah]

if we eliminate the power vacuum of democracy.

Considering that (at least according to you) I have been stalking your every post, I haven't seen you propose how to eliminate or counter it yet (yes, I'm aware of this power vacuum, too, and have my own ideas)

There were no dumb mistakes written by me, only your inability to comprehend what is written.

The inability to comprehend, or more specifically the pointing out of what were dumb mistakes, weren't just by me. It was also by quite a few of the long-time bitcoin users, miners, and even a few developers. So, when you making proclamations alone in a crowd, and the crowd says "that doesn't make sense," yes, it could be because you are just "too smart" for us, but it is more likely that you are either wrong, or are just really awful at explaining things.

See you in a day or two, when you inevitably come to post here again.

P.S. I hope you're hurrying up on that altcoin of yours, because this thing http://ethereum.org is coming, and it will likely kick the ass of whatever you have planned.

[CoinCube]

Considering that (at least according to you) I have been stalking your every post, I haven't seen you propose how to eliminate or counter it yet (yes, I'm aware of this power vacuum, too, and have my own ideas)

Anonymint proposed counter is the creation of a truly anonymous cryptocurrency that cannot be taxed or tracked by governments. Over time people would flock to such a currency to avoid the ever increasing taxes that are going to occur over the next decade or two.

It's an ambitious agenda. I am interested to see what he comes up with

[Rassah]

Considering that (at least according to you) I have been stalking your every post, I haven't seen you propose how to eliminate or counter it yet (yes, I'm aware of this power vacuum, too, and have my own ideas)

Anonymint proposed counter is the creation of a truly anonymous cryptocurrency that cannot be taxed or tracked by governments. Over time people would flock to such a currency to avoid the ever increasing taxes that are going to occur over the next decade or two.

It's an ambitious agenda. I am interested to see what he comes up with

That's not enough. You can still tax property, can still intimidate businesses and buyers into paying fees or following specific rules, can still collect money at the threat of force, old style, where tax collectors would ride around and take some amount of money from townsfolk, regardless of whether they earned anything. I was hoping he had something more, because just that "anonymous currency" thing comes woefully short.
Did he come up with any counterbalances or counterincentives to power at all?

[AnonyMint]

Let me quote my post from the related Economic Devastation thread, then below that I will address a few comments sparingly as possible and may not be back to this thread again for a long time or never (because I need my time for more productive endeavors):

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg4700928#msg4700928

Great discussion which I can't address fully at this time. I quote something I wrote at another blog:

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/01/will-the-reforms-speed-growth-in-china/#comment-12371

Michael recognizes the point I made in my prior post up the page, wherein I said all the problems are due to top-down control which of course concentrates wealth due to the Iron Law of Political Economics.

Now we have confirmation in the recent China news.

I explained in my prior post (readers please click that link because it expounds in much greater detail on the coming chaos) that the only way the problem is resolved is chaos which results from elimination the top-down control. The unemployment occurs because the system is misallocated due to this top-down control.

The chaos restarts the system from the bottom-up wherein employment will grow again after the bottom in 2032 of this increasing global crisis.

The growth in employment will be hitech and is ongoing now. For example much of this medical transcription (dictation) BPO outsourcing will be replaced by highly integrated speech recognition software.

So the programmers get the jobs.

We programmers realize we are going to envied and hated and the governments will try to tax us to death.

So we are doing something about this too.

Goodbye to this system we have now. I am sitting in the driver's seat and you should brace for impact with chaos.

There is absolutely nothing the governments can do to stop this. It is technological and structural.

Long term is harder to predict. Will technological advancement eventually be able to overcome those human advantages above?
Sure but to do so you may have to build a robot that is self replicating, energy efficient, preprogrammed to function well in most terrestrial environments, multipurpose, and capable of dynamic learning.

I want to reiterate the critical point I made in my prior post:

It is crucial to note that without (granular, e.g. individual) risk of failure, there can't exist excellence (i.e. fitness). A uniform distribution allows no fitness, no change, no adaption, and is thus the antithesis of life.

Let me quote again from my blog article:

http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Knowledge_Anneals

The knowledge creation process is opaque to a single top-down perspective of the universe because to be omniscient would require that the transmission of change in the universe would propagate instantly to the top-down observer, i.e. the speed-of-light would need to be infinite. But an infinite speed-of-light would collapse past and future into an infinitesimal point in spacetime— omniscient is the antithesis of existential. In order for anything to exist in the universe, there must be friction-in-time so change must propagate through resistance to change— mass. The non-uniform mass distribution of the universe is mutually causal with oscillation, which is why the universe emerges from the frequency domain. Uniform distribution of mass would be no contrast and nothing would exist.

Thus there can never exist a perpetual top-down control or superiority.

Creativity is diversity. Period. Technology has nothing to do with it.

So unless robots are designed to fail often as humans do, they will never be producing creativity. And if they do fail often, they won't be ubiquitously superior. It follows that superiority can never be a ubiquitous quality, rather fitness is always granular to the level of diversity. To visualize how fitness applies to diverse needs of real life, imagine an infinite number of uniquely shaped objects and finding matching shapes that interlock. There is no superior shape, rather most shapes fail to interlock and only those which are well matched achieve fitness. You can imagine the failure of attempting to place a government regulator every where to make decisions for billions of unique events (situations) happening all over the world each minute. Rather the local actors (whether they be people or atoms, etc) need to make the decisions in real-time. This threat of failure in the free market of local actors is what drives fitness and resilience.

We are alive because we are diverse. Period.

Entropy is existence. The game needs ever increasing entropy else it ends. If the universe has a bound, we would eventually know everything and there could be no more failure, friction would be eliminated and past and present would collapse into each other and we would cease to exist.

Anonymint proposed counter is the creation of a truly anonymous cryptocurrency that cannot be taxed or tracked by governments. Over time people would flock to such a currency to avoid the ever increasing taxes that are going to occur over the next decade or two.

That's not enough. You can still tax property, can still intimidate businesses and buyers into paying fees or following specific rules, can still collect money at the threat of force, old style, where tax collectors would ride around and take some amount of money from townsfolk, regardless of whether they earned anything. I was hoping he had something more, because just that "anonymous currency" thing comes woefully short.
Did he come up with any counterbalances or counterincentives to power at all?

Remember my thesis (see above linked related thread) is the Industrial Age is dying. Yes they will tax the physical capital age into the dust bin of history right on time with its destruction and replacement by the coming Knowledge Age.

My hope (and I am nearly sure) they won't be able to tax the Knowledge Age. This will eventually lead perhaps to a chip embedded into everyone's body to break the anonymity. I realize what I proposing could potentially forestall the 666 but actually drive the requirement to put the RFID tracking in the body where it can even monitor the brain signals.

Thus I am technologically threatening the power vacuum at its source of funding, which I think it the only way it can be defeated. This is a radical paradigm shift.

Naturally people will avoid anonymity because it is a hassle and it runs counter to their ideals of a society. But as those who don't go anonymous are taxed to death (literally!), then we will have remaining those who adopted anonymity. Hopefully eventually the crisis bottoms and we can come back to saner society where the anonymity is accepted and built-in to every thing so it is no burden.

P.S. I hope you're hurrying up on that altcoin of yours, because this thing http://ethereum.org is coming, and it will likely kick the ass of whatever you have planned.

At least one of those guys was talking to me privately and I was shown some of the key publicly released points of that design (specifically the proof-of-work design and I think some other aspects) and I pointed out flaws. So I am not worried about it.

That is not my reason for my claim as detailed in this and the prior post. Rather I am saying we have to continually dilute the large capitalists which want to use dumb fixed and guaranteed returns on usury with captured power vacuum of government to parasite and enslave "smaller things grow faster" investment.

I am 100% in favor of highly expert capitalists who invest (their effort, expertise, and money) at-risk in the highest returning ventures, not in usury and government capture.

Seems to me that your preference for inflation is just expedience.

I'm very interested in alts that solve Bitcoin's ultimate tragedy of the transaction fee commons and worry that perpetual debasement is the only solution. Good luck.

Inflation is the only technical way I can see to secure the proof-of-work (and I've already argued in my archives that other types are insecure, e.g. proof-of-stake, proof-of-primes, etc) because I've argued transaction fees are tragedy of the commons (note Rassah and others have resisted this argument). I think I also made arguments against demurrage, see my archived discussions about Freicoin.

DECENTRALIZED monetary inflation, i.e. M and not necessarily price inflation P, is the only way I see to depreciate slowly the capital of the rich (who don't consume and thus concentrate wealth causing the economy to stagnate because we lose fitness with top-down control) and distribute it to the consumers. This also works against the usury slavery system we have now.

Note if it is not decentralized then it is going right back into the pockets of the rich who control the government. And note that increasing M does not necessarily increase prices P, because Q can increase especially if we eliminated the top-down control, so there is much more locally annealed fitness in the economy thus much more productivity growth! You see it is a systemic problem and solution. You can't just consider these variables in isolation from the systemic issues.

Please consider this in the context of my overall points about knowledge formation and fitness, otherwise you do not have a systemic understanding and your points would be irrelevant to a systemic solution in my opinion. C.f. everything I have written above and the linked related thread.

People predict, and then take preventative actions. That's why it's called a self-defeating prophecy. I'm sure I already mentioned this but you weren't paying attention.

No the historical evidence (and common sense analysis) is they stay on trend of increasing debt until the Minsky Moment and collapse of the top-down order into bottom-up chaos. Then Madmax survival mode ensues.

by then you will have experienced first-hand the purpose of fitness, resiliency, ...

You've got it all backwards. You cannot measure fitness, efficiency, resiliency, etc., without first defining a purpose.
It's fitness for purpose.

You are missing the point that fitness can't be measured globally. It is by definition a locally annealed phenomenon, i.e. there are a plurality of instances of fitness, not just one goal. Diversity!

There is no purpose to the universe, other than to maximize diversity so the game of life (entropy) never ends.

...While there may be some truth to claims that "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger"...

Try telling a starving Somali kid to stop laughing and be miserable instead because he can't "self-actualise".

Maximizing fitness will free up diverse opportunities for that kid. It is the top-down control that is keeping all the poor locked in, e.g. passports and visas. Everyone should be free to go and do where they want as they want.

individuals maximize their individual wants

This is where your lack of understanding of humans shows. You are belittling the diversity of the human condition by labelling it as 'wants'.

When the top-down control offers them debt and welfare, they take it instead of competing to locally anneal the economic system to the optimum fitness(es).

The people are correct to maximize their wants, but when the incentive system has been top-down distorted, then they are not maximizing fitness rather they are destroying fitness.

Until you understand this, you will never understand my writings. Just stop expecting me to reply, if you can't get this concept.

by asking the government to give them everything they want in terms of social services and including insuring their 0% (or even negative) downpayment mortgages. Yes they maximize their short-term wants at the cost of catastrophic failure.

See, you're attempting to label what people want.

No I am saying the top-down control prevents them from maximizing their wants in a competitive locally annealed (i.e. bottom-up) fitness.

[TiagoTiago]

The thing is, computers can make virtual mistakes with no consequences on reality; and then whichever approach works better in the simulation is what the robots will do for real. For some things, computers can already run simulations faster than real-time; it's only a matter of time before most of the relevant things can be simulated faster than a human brain can.

[AnonyMint]

The thing is, computers can make virtual mistakes with no consequences on reality; and then whichever approach works better in the simulation is what the robots will do for real. For some things, computers can already run simulations faster than real-time; it's only a matter of time before most of the relevant things can be simulated faster than a human brain can.

It appears to me that you are entirely missing my point? My point is a very high IQ one, so don't feel rejected.

For example, your statement assumes that there is a way to measure globally what is "better". My entire point is that there is no such metric, and that life is entropic meaning the possibilities (i.e. orthogonal probabilities and diversity) are always expanding, thus no one can know what is better for everyone now, future, or in retrospect. Any one can from their arm chair claim that the present would be better had the past been such and such different, but this is incorrect because we can't change just one thing as other things are impacted in unpredictable ways (this is one reason top-down governance is such a failure, even if there were no corruption). Life is more localized variables than can be communicated to a single a metric in real time. If in fact we could transmit all the variables to a omniscient metric in real-time, then the past and present would collapse into a single point in time and the universe would not exist. Such a God would be quite lonely.

Kuzweil's Technological Singularity is nonsense. It essentially claims computers can become an omniscient God. He claims humans would no longer be able to reason about the future, because computers would be altering it ways and speed we humans can not compute fast enough. But it is already the case that no one can reason with certainty about the future in detail, especially the further it moves away from our localized situation. And he forgets that humans can leverage the computers. He entirely doesn't understand what creativity and knowledge are, nor what our universe is. Refer to my blogs for enlightenment:

http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html
http://unheresy.com/The%20Universe.html

Even if you could simulate all the variables, then you would not have time to run a simulation and then go back and rerun it in real life to your omniscient advantage, because the simulation becomes a component of the real life thus impacting things in ways you can not predict. Don't forget Coase's Theorem and competition.

This is way over most of your heads. I think I will need to carefully write a book on this. And I don't have time right now.

[TiagoTiago]

The thing is, computers can make virtual mistakes with no consequences on reality; and then whichever approach works better in the simulation is what the robots will do for real. For some things, computers can already run simulations faster than real-time; it's only a matter of time before most of the relevant things can be simulated faster than a human brain can.

You are entirely missing my point. My point is a very high IQ one, so don't feel dejected.

For example, your statement assumes that there is a way to measure globally what is "better". My entire point is that there is no such metric, and that life is entropic meaning the possibilities (i.e. orthogonal probabilities and diversity) are always expanding, thus no one can know what is better for everyone now, future, or in retrospect. Any one can from their arm chair claim that the present would be better had the past been such and such different, but this is incorrect because we can't change just one thing as other things are impacted in unpredictable ways (this is one reason top-down governance is such a failure, even if there were no corruption). Life is more localized variables than can be communicated to a single a metric in real time. If in fact we could transmit all the variables to a omniscient metric in real-time, then the past and present would collapse into a single point in time and the universe would not exist. Such a God would be quite lonely.

Even if you could simulate all the variables, then you would not have time to run a simulation and then go back and rerun it in real life to your omniscient advantage, because the simulation becomes a component of the real life thus impacting things in ways you can not predict. Don't forget Coase's Theorem and competition.

This is way over most of your heads. I think I will need to carefully write a book on this. And I don't have time right now.

If things happen different from the simulation, you adapt the simulation to the new data. You don't need to model the whole universe though; some simplified models can be right often enough that for most practical purposes you don't need to model everything. My point is just that creativity isn't limited to humans, and machines can be better at it; machines can fail better than humans and harvest just the good consequences of failing. Current machines can already beat humans in chess; and we keep making them more and more powerful; if the trend continues for long enough, one day will have machines that will be able to anticipate our moves better than we can anticipate theirs on most things that matter. Humans are more predictable than we like to think we are.



I'm not talking about current economics, i'm talking about the technological singularity (which may be delayed significantly depending on a shitload of factors, including major changes in the economic scenario).

[AnonyMint]

You still don't realize you didn't get my point.

And I don't say that to be condescending. Some times there are high IQ concepts that can't be conveyed to the wider population in a forum post or even a concise blog article. They require chapters of images and explanatory text to paint the concept into the mind of others.

All I can say concisely is try rereading my prior post, as it refutes your reply. Each of the points of your reply were already refuted in the prior post of mine. I guess I would need to expound, but for those who are smart enough, I don't need to expound. I have already stated.

For example, "right often enough" totally ignores the point I made about no one can know what is right, except for themself and even then they really don't know what is right for themself either. They simply made a subjective choice with tradeoffs and impacts. Refer upthread (or the linked related thread) to where I mentioned that infinite shapes tested for interlocking fitness wouldn't be superior to each other, just different.

Life doesn't have a "correct" or "right" result, except to become more diverse.

If there was an objective metric for "correct" or "right", then the present and past would collapse into a single point in time and you would not exist (you would be disconnected from the universe of chance). Even if that was only locally for you (your local coherence). And it has global coherence, then the present and past for the universe would collapse into a single point in time and the entire universe wouldn't exist (because there would not be any change that isn't already known, i.e. no chance, no probabilities, and ZERO ENTROPY).

I believe if I spent some more time on this, I could develop this concept further with mathematical derivation. Which might aid understanding and agreement.

P.S. I edited and augmented my prior post.

[TiagoTiago]

You still don't realize you didn't get my point.

And I don't say that to be condescending. Some times there are high IQ concepts that can't be conveyed to the wider population in a forum post or even a concise blog article. They require chapters of images and explanatory text to paint the concept into the mind of others.

All I can say concisely is try rereading my prior post, as it refutes your reply. Each of the points of your reply were already refuted in the prior post of mine. I guess I would need to expound, but for those who are smart enough, I don't need to expound. I have already stated.

For example, "right often enough" totally ignores the point I made about no one can know what is right, except for themself and even then they really don't know what is right for themself either. They simply made a choice with tradeoffs and impacts. Refer upthread (or the linked related thread) to where I mentioned that infinite shapes tested for interlocking fitness wouldn't be superior to each other, just different.

Life doesn't have a "correct" or "right" result, except to become more diverse.

If there was a metric for "correct" or "right", then the present and past would collapse into a single point in time and you would not exist (you would be disconnected from the universe of chance). Even if that was only locally for you (your local coherence). And it has global coherence, then the present and past for the universe would collapse into a single point in time and the entire universe wouldn't exist (because there would not be any change that isn't already known, i.e. no chance, no probabilities, and ZERO ENTROPY).

There isn't an universal "best outcome", but there are outcomes that are the best of all predicted possibilities for a single individual or group. Machines can be made to calculate the inputs required for such a best outcome, and those that calculate the moves for the best outcome for themselves, and perform those moves, in the long term will be the ones that survive all others; so those are gonna be Humanity's competitors, if there is still any humans left by that point.

Evolution doesn't care about perfection, anything that is good enough keeps going (as long as it remains good enough). Even in the absence of any external evolutionary pressure, the pressure for self-reproduction emerges by the simple fact that patterns that don't perpetuate themselves cease to be.


In other words, machines don't need to be perfect, they just need to be better than humans for there to be reason for concern.

They might not be the last new form of life the planet will see; but the odds are big that they'll be the last one humans will (if post-singularity AIs are ever created, of course).



I think you're underestimating what it means to think better than humans. Perhaps, ironically, because you believe you do. Lemme put it another way, even if that was the case, the difference is you can't improve your mind as efficiently as a post-singularity AI would be able to; if one was created right now, you would be left behind by at least a few orders of magnitude in the blink of an eye.

[AnonyMint]

You continue to miss the point, there is no measurement for "best" even for an individual or a group. It is always a subjective judgment. Is an abortion today best or not? Should you take that birth control pill or not? What facets did we tradeoff to maximize some function of longevity, happiness, health, measurement of educational attainment, etc?

Evolution is only "correct" in retrospect, i.e. that race evolved. How it is evolved is chaotic, and other potential outcomes would have been just as correct in other ways, i.e. if the dinosaurs prevailed and primates never came into existence as a result or some other result. There were zillions of little incremental individual choices made and there is no overall metric of fitness. Besides is dynamic and coinductive function (i.e. irreversible).

You may decide you prefer an outcome and so attaining that goal is your definition of best. But that is precisely subjective individual or groupwise choice. It is not an objective metric. I already explained to you that an objective measurement would eliminate chance (because there is only one possible best choice), which means you would not exist (in the universe of chance and thus past and present would collapse into a single infinitesimal point because everything can be known a priori and thus diversity is reduced to one outcome).

The machine can't be better at something (i.e. diversity) that has no objective measurement! It can help the human optimize a choice the human made. Or the machine could make its own random choices. You fundamentally don't understand that the universe is made of entropy, i.e. orthogonal probabilities. I've explained to you why it can only be that way, else nothing exists. But I don't demand you are able to comprehend or agree. So I will stop here. I do believe if you could understand, you would agree. I think it is lack of understanding of why we can't exist if there is no subjectively. Chance and diversity require each other. It is a very interesting conceptual discovery. I would expect some other scientists or philosophers had this discovery, but I am not aware of who they are.