One-world reserve currency inevitable and will enslave all nations?

[iamback]

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Mar 18: Tor does not provide reliable anonymity!
From:    iamback
Date:    Wed, March 18, 2015 11:12 am
To:      "Armstrong Economics" <armstrongeconomics@gmail.com>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

As far as I know Tor never got compromised given the guy hosting the hidden service didn't do anything stupid, ... , if u run Tor with no javascript etc in a safe OS and dont reveal private information you are safe imo.

Tor is not reliably anonymous! If you are trusting Tor to protect your anonymity, the NSA has probably already de-anonymized you and is saving all the incriminating information for G20 tax hunts coming over the years.

Sadly even Tor's developers admit Tor has egregious problems and they are not sure exactly what happened in every case:

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-services-need-some-love
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/thoughts-and-concerns-about-operation-onymous

How did they locate the hidden services?

So we are left asking "How did they locate the hidden services?". We don't know.
...
Unfortunately, the authorities did not specify how they managed to locate the hidden services. Here are some plausible scenarios:

Bitcoin deanonymization

Ivan Pustogarov et al. have recently been conducting interesting research on Bitcoin anonymity.

Apparently, there are ways to link transactions and deanonymize Bitcoin clients even if they use Tor. Maybe the seized hidden services were running Bitcoin clients themselves and were victims of similar attacks.

Attacks on the Tor network

The number of takedowns and the fact that Tor relays were seized could also mean that the Tor network was attacked to reveal the location of those hidden services. We received some interesting information from an operator of a now-seized hidden service which may indicate this, as well. Over the past few years, researchers have discovered various attacks on the Tor network. We've implemented some defenses against these attacks, but these defenses do not solve all known issues and there may even be attacks unknown to us.

Another possible Tor attack vector could be the Guard Discovery attack. This attack doesn't reveal the identity of the hidden service, but allows an attacker to discover the guard node of a specific hidden service. The guard node is the only node in the whole network that knows the actual IP address of the hidden service. Hence, if the attacker then manages to compromise the guard node or somehow obtain access to it, she can launch a traffic confirmation attack to learn the identity of the hidden service. We've been discussing various solutions to the guard discovery attack for the past many months but it's not an easy problem to fix properly. Help and feedback on the proposed designs is appreciated.

*Similarly, there exists the attack where the hidden service selects the attacker's relay as its guard node. This may happen randomly or this could occur if the hidden service selects another relay as its guard and the attacker renders that node unusable, by a denial of service attack or similar. The hidden service will then be forced to select a new guard. Eventually, the hidden service will select the attacker.

Furthermore, denial of service attacks on relays or clients in the Tor network can often be leveraged into full de-anonymization attacks. These techniques go back many years, in research such as "From a Trickle to a Flood", "Denial of Service or Denial of Security?", "Why I'm not an Entropist", and even the more recent Bitcoin attacks above. In the Hidden Service protocol there are more vectors for DoS attacks, such as the set of HSDirs and the Introduction Points of a Hidden Service.

Advice to concerned hidden service operators

As you can see, we still don't know what happened, and it's hard to give concrete suggestions blindly.

Final words

The task of hiding the location of low-latency web services is a very hard problem and we still don't know how to do it correctly. It seems that there are various issues that none of the current anonymous publishing designs have really solved.

In a way, it's even surprising that hidden services have survived so far.

Essentially all anonymous networks suffer three fundamental design problems which make them very easy for the NSA to de-anonymize:

1) Sybil attacks (the Guard Discovery attack is aided by this). All the anonymous networks don't pay the relay nodes, so economically the NSA can be a vast majority of those nodes. In other words, I don't think a free network can be anonymous!

2) Denial of service attacks. Again I think the only robust solution to this is to make sending network packets not free.

3) Low latency relaying. Thus de-anonymization is possible with timing attacks. Thus we must design a high-latency anonymity network.

4) Tor adds exit nodes interfacing to HTTPS which make correlation attacks so much more trivial due to all the side-effects on web sites! (even if you are not using an exit node, this reduces the anonymity set overall)

[1713987061]

1713987061

[1713987061]

1713987061

[1713987061]

1713987061

[1713987061]

1713987061

[iamback]

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/18/state-of-emergency-in-frankfurt-ecb-protests/

State of Emergency in Frankfurt ECB Protests



This entire experiment with the Euro is literally going down in flame.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/18/ecb-grand-opening-with-tanks-no-journalists/

ECB Grand Opening with Tanks & No Journalists? Perhaps the strangest opening ever has marked the ECB in Frankfurt, Germany. The opening of the new, paid by the taxpayer office tower of the ECB, is accompanied by tanks and a military force to protect bankers. Whoever ventured on the road to the east of the city since Monday have to believe the Romans were invading and stood before the gates of the city. The ECB was strangely protected with barriers everywhere you looked, which was a reflection of their total lack of faith and disconnect with the people of Europe. Convoys of police vans, water cannons, tanks, heavy clearance equipment and wheeled APC all surrounded the area expecting a Russian invasion of something..For two days, traffic chaos has been at historical highs that may have exceeded the chaos Obama creates when he want to play golf. The ECB appears to have intentionally tried to intimidate the population to suppress protests given the degree of their unpopularity. They spend $1.4 billion for their new tower and protesters still appeared. This has been at odds with German culture for anyone who has been to Germany will notice that there has been a counter-reaction to the image of Hitler – they detest military and police shows. The city of Frankfurt has indeed displayed a longstanding objection to police shows so the strange aspect of this entire affair has been for the police to use this as an excuse to come out of the closet. They seem to have enjoyed the excuse to show force at last if not begging for protesters to bring it one so they can practice how to deal with their dream – training for a state of emergency. The Frankfurt police have indeed come out of the closet. Their scaremongering has led to a military display unseen in Germany with creating an exclusion zone, danger zone, water cannons, airplanes, helicopters and about 8000 troops. All of this to protect bankers. Just amazing. What the hell does this imply? Then, believe it or not, the ECB imposed an exclusion of the press. The ECB has decreed that their opening ceremony news agencies are permitted, but not newspaper journalists. Curious. The newspaper embargo raises the question of exactly what is behind this authoritarian show of force in the heart of Germany?

[tabnloz]

UN Framework for sovereign debt defaults

https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/koos-jansen/un-preparing-for-global-sovereign-debt-restructuring/

[iamback]

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Mar 20: industrialism required Fascism (reputation & bartering still doesn't scale in the Knowledge Age)
From:    iamback
Date:    Thu, March 19, 2015 12:07 pm
To:      "Armstrong Economics" <armstrongeconomics@gmail.com>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------


First let me summarize my understanding of l3552's proposal, to make sure I haven't missed his point.

l3552 proposes to have a decentralized, non-anonymous ledger for barter trading labor-in-kind, e.g. an hour of baby sitting for an hour of baby sitting. I suppose he also proposes that users are free to exchange ledger credits across kinds, e.g. if a pair of users are willing to trade 2 hours of baby sitting for one vehicle oil change. He asserts that the incentive for using this system versus fungible money, is the reputation in the community for helping the economy grow and avoiding the fungible money which the banksters can manipulate through the aggregation of collective power that widespread fungibility enables and requires. In other words, widespread fungible money is a power vacuum and who ever can get their hands on the levers of its debasement and fractional reserve lending, can aggregate power over community and good.

In his latest post, l3552 alludes to my concept that the Industrial Age required fungible money because production required aggregation of large fixed capital investment for factories, wherein the engineering component of the investment was an insignificant economic factor. These banksters and industrialists became Fascists out of necessity (<--- click the links to understand more deeply --->), because fungible money inherently drives the risky, bankrupt paradigm of fractional reserve banking and socialism. When a capitalist makes an investment in a factory with a NAV lifespan of decades, he needs to be sure that risky paradigm won't destroy his investment. (btw, this is also a reason that sometimes capitalism gets associated with Fascism, but people need to remember that capital is not just stored money, it is any productive capacity, e.g. knowledge is capital, social skills is capital, etc.)

Whereas, the Knowledge Age is rising to bring production economics back to the individual and l3552 is proposing to eliminate the power vacuum by making the aggregation of representations of capital non-fungible (l3552 refers to fungible money as "commodization").

For example, in theory Knowledge Age workers are not most incentivized to store money, rather instead to store knowledge; thus they want to promote knowledge trading. For example, a programmer is most juiced about finding some new awesome code to integrate with his own, e.g. I started programming for Android and Scala because these are cutting edge moving technology and society forward faster. This is why I had proposed back in 2012 on my Copute.com computer language development website site (btw I need to renew this domain) that programmers could trade LOC (lines of code) as barter mechanism, but fungible within their desired target market.

There are some similarities between l3552's proposal and Catherine Austin Fitts' (solari.com) proposal for doing finance on a local community level.

The reason l3552's (and Fitts') proposal won't work is the analogous visualized criticism I made upthread wherein I explained that efficiency trumps inefficiency. Why would someone dig canals with spoons when they can work for an hour at minimum wage, purchase 4 gallons of gas, then do the equivalent of 2000 man-hours of hard labor with a combustion engine. Moreover how could someone who egregiously wastes his time be more productive and significant in the economy than someone who doesn't.

So the problem with barter systems is they are inefficient, and the one thing Knowledge Age workers detest, it is inefficiency. The entire reason the Knowledge Age trumps the Industrial Age is because efficiency wins in nature. When ideas can be produced closer to their source of inspiration (e.g. 3D printing), then granularly matched production to the granular (not one-size-fits-all mass production) market demand accelerates faster. You want a custom designed pre-fab house[1] or car[2] completed tomorrow? Okay 3D printing and we don't need to build a factory first.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/19/evolutionary-process-of-labor/

The key is to understand programming. If if you do not desire to sit in front of a computer screen all day, it will become a basic tool like knowing how to read and write.

Armstrong means that if you want to not do manual labor (e.g. manual bookkeeping account on the computer), then learn to program to automate it and be more efficient.

Reputation is important (e.g. you want to use my software code, because you know I am German and perfectionist), but it is orthogonal to the efficiency of trading value.

Also reputation in trading value can become very problematic. This the "coin taint" issue in non-anonymous Bitcoin (which is why gmaxell invent CoinJoin the precursor of Darkcoin, which btw I as AnonyMint was the first to point out could not scale because it can jammed), wherein certain coins won't be accepted or processed because of certain histories of trading. In short, the only way reputation scales is via political control, i.e. you want to drive the Knowledge Age back into the chains of Fascism that the industrialists couldn't escape!

If you want to build orthogonal reputation tracking systems, that is fine. But you can't tie the units of money to them, because otherwise there is no means to break free from "winner takes all" paradigm of politics.

Sorry guys I went down all these thought experiments years ago. That is why I get pissed off when people waste my time and don't go read what I already figured out years ago. Because I am in implementation mode now, and I only have a few months to get my work completed. You all might misperceive it as a lack of humanity on my part, but actually if I am not efficient then I am not helping mankind. And trust me, the world is depending on me right now. I don't care about those who are jealous. Go masturbate. I am busy.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3514

Those who can’t build, talk

...There are specific recurring kinds of errors in speculative writing about the Internet that we get exceedingly tired of seeing over and over again. One is blindness to problems of scale; another is handwaving about deployment costs; and a third is inability to notice when a proposed cooperative ‘solution’ is ruined by misalignment of incentives. There are others, but these will stand as representative for why we very seldom find any value in the writings of people who talk but don’t build.

P.S. lately I don't have an hour to put into writing each of my posts carefully as I did the above one. Sorry I am working 18 hours daily.


[1] http://www.3ders.org/articles/20150118-winsun-builds-world-first-3d-printed-villa-and-tallest-3d-printed-building-in-china.html

[2] https://localmotors.com/3d-printed-car/

[iamback]

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Mar 20: Asia is rapidly adopting automation (the West is falling back to "undeveloped")
From:    iamback
Date:    Thu, March 19, 2015 1:48 pm
To:      "Armstrong Economics" <armstrongeconomics@gmail.com>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------


...

In addition to the very low rate of government spending (and cost of regulation) as a percent of GDP in Asia as compared to the West, the other reason Asia will accelerate past the West is because Asia is young and the youth here don't even remember a world without mobile phones and internet! Thus Asia is ready to adopt the Knowledge Age quickly, because they are young and don't have a bankrupt government (too many constituent liabilities in the West) that will stand in the way like the NSA and Homeland Security are destroying high tech in the USA. In fact, I am predicting New Zealand to be the next Silicon valley, because of KimDotCom's initiative and political success and because in the new era of virtual collaboration then the best programmers (like myself) will choose to live and work in paradise (have you seen photos of New Zealand?)!

Just look at the cities in Asia and Dubai as compared to the cities in the West. The former have radical new high-tech architecture, and latter look like they are stuck in the 1960s.

Japan & Brazil:


USA:


Indeed it is true that many people will not be able to adapt to the requirements for full and most gainful work in the fledgling Knowledge Age, and this will be most egregious amongst the baby boomers in the West! A confluence of factors is hitting the demise of the West and it will simply fall into the abyss, there is no possible solution (other than immigrating Asia to the West and restructuring all the constituent liabilities).

A plumber and a painter may not be easily replaced but a taxi-driver will eventually be replaced.

...

It is true that the entire economy won't be automated by 2033. Oxford University's research projects 47% of existing jobs as of 2013 would be replaced with automation within 20 years.

But the salient point is that the sectors of the economy that are not automated will be 3 to 4 orders-of-magnitude less profitable and productive. Thus, those undeveloped areas (e.g. the currently "developed" western nations) will fall into the abyss with the one-world reserve currency of debt financing and socialism (I demonstrated in recent post these evils are symbiotic and sleep together).

So fuck your one-world, restructuring bullshit. It ain't the solution nor the real future. That top-down crap is for managing the slaves. The future will grass-roots break free from that.

Sure I will support your "Solutions" as a way to mitigate a Dark Age, but I doubt you will get traction. It will be the same as every other attempt you tried such as reforming taxation in the USA (when you debated Steve Forbes) and when you tried to advise them not to create the Euro without merging the national debts. You will pull your hair out in frustration with the MOR-ASS in the West. Instead I will move forward to the bottom-up future of the Knowledge Age!

I know which of these will be more effective and move faster.


http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/19/jumping-to-conclusions/

...

This is something to start the debates and END class warfare which is all about Marxist philosophy. This is all about thinking out the box. A fundamental principle that is just not even considered because the majority assume this is the way we operate is what needs to be challenged. So read before you assume and add to the debate. Trying to criticize something you have not even read is condemning us to the total collapse of the entire system for it will not survive another downturn as is.

[desertfox470]

I really don't think a one world currency will happen anytime soon.  Who would regulate it?  How would it be backed up?

[btcbug]

Anonymity is difficult with Bitcoin (but not impossible if you are expert). Bitcoin is an important bridge between the legal tender national currencies and the altcoins.

There are many technologies in play here, and there are more coming. Stay tuned.

Thanks for all the great thought!

I'd like to "stay tuned" and if you're speaking of your own solution, where should I watch for it? Here?

I'm looking for your ONE go-to place that I can follow. Too many threads on these forums!!

[iamback]

I can't respond to that because everything that I might be involved in is vaporware at the moment. And I don't even know how I would present it to this forum if at all, considering that I had long promised that I would never publicly endorse an altcoin.

Put it this way, if ever I work on something that is the solution, you will surely know about it. Otherwise it wasn't the solution!

If you mean you want to be first to speculate on it, or invest in something I would work on, I think there are people who follow me more closely and perhaps they will note your username here and private message you if they see something developing they think is important.

At this time, I am working on another (non-crypto-currency) software project and it won't be completed for at least another 3 weeks.

Also if I work on something, it will probably be (eventually) open sourced and it would not necessarily have my name on it (I haven't decided).

Also as I mentioned in the the multiple currencies thread I started the Altcoin discussion forum, I believe in making a system that is open to competition from new ideas.

Those who have followed me know that I was suffering from a debilitating chronic illness and this impacted my ability to work which is pretty much why I produced nothing but forum posts (and unpublished code) in period from 2012 - 2014. My productivity hinges on my health. I recently started a RAW vegetable diet with no carbohydrates, drinking olive oil, and most of my protein from WHEY ISOLATE (to reduce L-arginine which otherwise promotes growth of viruses similar to one I have). I have seen some signs that I have been able to work up to 18 hours a day as I used to before getting ill. My insomnia may have abated. And my athletics has increased and my headaches have decreased. If this sustains as a cure, then I might be on to a new wave of high productivity. Past high hopes have usually been disappointing. It is too soon to know as I am only on this diet for a few days thus far; before that I was on a Guyabano diet and over the past year or so experimenting with numerous homeopathic treatments such as CoQ10, AHCC, EGCG, Co-enzymated B complex, etc..

[OROBTC]

...

iamback 

Perhaps O/T

Please DO let is know what you have been up to when you are done with your project.  Perhaps with a new thread (assuming what you are doing is important).  If I read you correctly, you might make your project open anyway once finished.

If what you are doing is important, the correct thing to do is to share your knowledge.  Whether vaporware or not, even making errors enhances learning.

[iamback]

Something can be shared without attaching my name to it. I as a reputational entity, am not important. The outcome of the work is. It shouldn't need my reputation to succeed. It should succeed on its own merits.

[iamback]

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Mar 20: Armstrong (& most humans) is a Marxist! (even he doesn't  realize it)
From:    iamback
Date:    Fri, March 20, 2015 8:30 am
To:      "Armstrong Economics" <armstrongeconomics@gmail.com>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------


Sheesh CoinCube, your Marxist tilt makes you so gullible. I expect greater rationality from you with your math background! Where did you attain the Maxist indoctrination? How can you rid yourself of that mental disease?

All reputation systems scale to "winner take all". Humans can manage this in small tribes within their Dunbar limit where they can see all the shit that everyone does to minute detail so the tribal leader is held accountable. But we don't live in isolated tribes any more. Thermodynamics applies in spades (c.f. Coasian barriers, closed vs. open systems, etc).

The Dunbar number (the hypothesized maximum number of people man can maintain stable social relationships with) is thought to be anywhere between 150-250. It seems reasonable that with the aid of modern technology and only for trade this could be extended by a factor of at least 2-5 before you start to hit serious issues with reputation and scaling.

Absolutely false!

The actual number (when applied to this context) is well below a 100, because people simply don't have enough time to both work, raise a family, and be on top of the myriad of ways that those with reputation secretly (i.e. opaquely through a side channel outside the transparent paradigm) aggregate power.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/17/the-majority-are-just-fools/

In 2000, Bill and Hillary Clinton owed millions of dollars in legal debt. Since then, they’ve earned over $130 million. Where did the money come from? Most people assume that the Clintons amassed their wealth through lucrative book deals and high-six figure fees for speaking gigs. Now, Peter Schweizer shows who is really behind those enormous payments.

I was asked to review the documents when Hillary amazingly made hundreds of thousands of dollars trading futures at the same precise time she was in meetings. Her lawyer had an account at the same firm and a trade would be put on but left open until the end of the day. It would be a spread long and short the same commodity. At the end of the day, the losing trade went to her lawyer and the win into her account. Today, that is called money laundering.

This is why society must crash and burn. It is just too damn corrupt and the majority are simply sheep who believe whatever they say.

To Armstrong, that is the reason that even direct democracy will never solve the dilemma of politics being a power vacuum where the winner takes all, e.g. the DEEP STATE which is now in control.

Proxies for investigation and reporting such as the media can be controlled with power, thus they are not a fulcrum which can be used to raise the Dunbar limit. Politics only works in small isolated groups. We humans are still trying to do what we did to organize ourselves as hunter-gatherers, but this evolutionary ingrained paradigm causes us to be Marxist and enslave ourselves. We wonder why we are enslaved when we trust politics above our Dunbar limit and then blame what is natural for the cause, e.g. blaming greed, filling of power vacuums (thermodynamics & entropy), and our ability to exist (i.e. non-uniform distributions of skills, talents, interest, wealth, personality, etc[1]).

I have risen above my hunter-gatherer brain, but it seems most people can't evolve! Including both CoinCube and Armstrong! They just don't get it!

Again for the 100th time (fuck I am tired of writing the damn same thing over and over and the gullible Marxists just can't get it and that is why we must crash and burn), I will quote about the Logic of Collective Action about how power MUST aggregate to those who are the most corrupt:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=984

Some Iron Laws of Political Economics

Mancur Olson, in his book The Logic Of Collective Action, highlighted the central problem of politics in a democracy. The benefits of political market-rigging can be concentrated to benefit particular special interest groups, while the costs (in higher taxes, slower economic growth, and many other second-order effects) are diffused through the entire population.

The result is a scramble in which individual interest groups perpetually seek to corner more and more rent from the system, while the incremental costs of this behavior rise slowly enough that it is difficult to sustain broad political opposition to the overall system of political privilege and rent-seeking.


When you add to Olson’s model the fact that the professional political class is itself a special interest group which collects concentrated benefits from encouraging rent-seeking behavior in others, it becomes clear why, as Olson pointed out, “good government” is a public good subject to exactly the same underproduction problems as other public goods. Furthermore, as democracies evolve, government activity that might produce “good government” tends to be crowded out by coalitions of rent-seekers and their tribunes.

This general model has consequences. Here are some of them:

There is no form of market failure, however egregious, which is not eventually made worse by the political interventions intended to fix it.

Political demand for income transfers, entitlements and subsidies always rises faster than the economy can generate increased wealth to supply them from.

Although some taxes genuinely begin by being levied for the benefit of the taxed, all taxes end up being levied for the benefit of the political class.

The equilibrium state of a regulatory agency is to have been captured by the entities it is supposed to regulate.

The probability that the actual effects of a political agency or program will bear any relationship to the intentions under which it was designed falls exponentially with the amount of time since it was founded.

The only important class distinction in any advanced democracy is between those who are net producers of tax revenues and those who are net consumers of them.

Corruption is not the exceptional condition of politics, it is the normal one.

Changing the leaders of central planning to engineers or traders won't change the fact that the power vacuum will force the most corrupt to rise to the top and "winner take all". Armstrong is wasting his fucking time. The only possible solution is as it has always been since 6000 B.C., which is private money for the Private waves in Armstrong's cyclical model of oscillation between resets of the political MORASS. Armstrong believes private money is impossible in the digital age. If he is correct, then the human race will go extinct. I know the technology of cryptography and anonymity. I know Armstrong is incorrect. We will have private money in the digital age. The collective morass will eventually have to put a chip inside our body in order to attempt to stop private money (but that is for a future time, not this cycle).

[1] I am not going to explain all over again why we can't exist without diversity and how for us to all be the same and omniscient would require the speed-of-light to be infinite which would collapse the present and past into an infinitesimal point in time, c.f. my blog posts which eludicated this is great detail:

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

http://unheresy.com/The%20Universe.html

So an enhanced barter system with the aid of technology could probably function reasonably well as long as the group size was limited to somewhere between 300-1000 people. Small trading groups could potentially exist within a larger community. Barter transactions would be incentivized by tax avoidance and the need to not compromize government benefits and inhibited by the natural inefficiencies that are unavoidable with barter.

Would it work? I have no idea. The poor are typically poor for reasons that go far beyond bad luck. However, their economic incentives going forward will increasingly favor barter transactions so it seems at least plausible that something like this would help them at least to some degree.

I am of the opinion that any system that encourages and allows trade to occur without debt and without fiat is a step in the right direction. Some attempted solutions may be more useful than others and some will fail outright but I believe it is a mistake to summarily dismiss and discourage those with interesting ideas.

Nobody wants a money that has a limited scope. Precisely what makes money useful is it raises the efficiency of trade. The poor don't want some unit which they can only get one or two things in exchange for. They want fungible money just like the rest of us do!

And non-anonymous ledger isn't going to help anyone escape taxation. The government will threaten to cut off their welfare benefits.

The idea is the insanely stupid idea, I can't even believe you fell for it! Cripes, I am very disappointed in you. You have absolutely no talent whatsoever as an entrepreneur. You are too far removed from reality.

That you can fall into this shit which has been tried over and over in history just goes to show how hopeless it is to reform a MOR-ASS. Humans are really blinded to their fate in the Petri dish. They will continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.

I find myself in the odd position of quoting Martin Armstrong back at you.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/13/solution/

The system can be reformed. We must eliminate the old guard who refuse to see the light because they are the very problem. This is part of the political reform process that will begin after 2016.

On this issue as on many others my friend we agree on the overall picture but not the details. Like Armstrong I also believe government can eventually be reformed. It will not come easy and it will not come soon (definitly not before a major collapse and probably not this generation) but I believe it can eventually be done.  

You can join Armstrong and both of you can be good Marxists who believe you can top-down manage the universe.

Sorry I am smarter than you guys.

P.S. I suspect Armstrong is starting to realize I am correct. I think he is too smart not to get this. I hope I am not disappointed by him.

[iamback]

Condensing this thread:

All my bets are on the fat dude (in yellow) as the center of the aggregate inertia and personality.

(Is that Leonardo DiCaprio?)


I suppose everyone has forgotten that I explained that option markets for pegged assets are essential to scaling[1] Bitcoin.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=882857.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=882857.msg9746393#msg9746393 (toknormal is perhaps one the astute guys on the forum)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=380441.msg10531520#msg10531520
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=985481.msg10740998#msg10740998


As for the future of Bitcoin, Bitcoin is the reserve currency of crypto-currency, but not the reserve currency for the central banking world. I explained as follows.

Heiamback talks about "grassroots technological anonymous crypto-currency", I wonder if by this he means Bitcoin or a totally anonymous currency without a public ledger like Monero.

Monero has a public ledger which attempts to provide anonymity via autonomous mixing with Cryptonote's one-time ring signatures. Monero does not have anonymity of the IP address sending the transaction to the public ledger, thus it doesn't have total anonymity. Fluffypony was proposing to add I2P (a.k.a. Darknet) integration, but I don't think any free onion routing "darknet" network can be resistant to Sybil attacks on anonymity. We've seen the Tor "darknet" fail spectacularly with its hidden services.

Anonymity is difficult with Bitcoin (but not impossible if you are expert). Bitcoin is an important bridge between the legal tender national currencies and the altcoins.

There are many technologies in play here, and there are more coming. Stay tuned.

Subject: Mar 18: Tor does not provide reliable anonymity!

As far as I know Tor never got compromised given the guy hosting the hidden service didn't do anything stupid, ... , if u run Tor with no javascript etc in a safe OS and dont reveal private information you are safe imo.

Tor is not reliably anonymous! If you are trusting Tor to protect your anonymity, the NSA has probably already de-anonymized you and is saving all the incriminating information for G20 tax hunts coming over the years.

Sadly even Tor's developers admit Tor has egregious problems and they are not sure exactly what happened in every case:

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-services-need-some-love
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/thoughts-and-concerns-about-operation-onymous

...

Essentially all anonymous networks suffer three fundamental design problems which make them very easy for the NSA to de-anonymize:

1) Sybil attacks...
2) Denial of service attacks...
3) Low latency relaying...
4) Tor adds exit nodes interfacing to HTTPS which make correlation attacks...

tabnloz, very good. You've almost got it entirely.

Cash is going away. They are phasing it out such as by lowering the ATM withdrawal amounts, confiscating cash at borders, and civil forfeiture laws in the USA where they take your cash for any suspicion of illegal activity and they don't need to prove it (your cash is guilty until proven innocent, because it doesn't have human rights!).

The elite appear to be using Bitcoin to force the banking systems to go electronic in order to compete. Realize the elite can't rule by top-down edicts, because they would become the target of organized resistance. The elite rule by clever deceptions. I believe Bitcoin was created with an elite team of cryptographers from the NSA with funding from the DEEP STATE, i.e. the $2.3 trillion that Donald Rumsfeld admitted on the eve of 9/11 was missing from the Pentagon budget (cumulatively over the decades).

I believe that elite team intentionally (secretly subverting the DEEP STATE that contracted them) or inadvertently launched a market for a real anonymous currency and internet. I believe we can invent crypto-currency that can protect us and work as cash did and with extra beneficial features. Thus I believe Bitcoin will not be the only popular altcoin. But the proof of this will be in the pudding so to speak. Someone has to actually invent something worthwhile.

Changing the leaders of central planning to engineers or traders won't change the fact that the power vacuum will force the most corrupt to rise to the top and "winner take all". Armstrong is wasting his fucking time [with politics and central planning]. The only possible solution is as it has always been since 6000 B.C., which is private money for the Private waves in Armstrong's cyclical model of oscillation between resets of the political MORASS. Armstrong believes private money is impossible in the digital age. If he is correct, then the human race will go extinct. I know the technology of cryptography and anonymity. I know Armstrong is incorrect. We will have private money in the digital age. The collective morass will eventually have to put a chip inside our body in order to attempt to stop private money (but that is for a future time, not this cycle).

Armstrong apparently doesn't understand or believe that anonymous crypto-currency is plausible.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/14/real-estate-15yr-v-30yr-mortgage-new-electronic-currency-coming/

Paper currency will be eliminated and we are headed into purely electronic money. This will be the BITCOIN without the BITCOIN. That is a basic model, which is why they have not shut it down allowing it to survive purely to monitor its performance. Of course those who have used BITCOIN will wake up with a shock when the IRS will hit them for taxes, penalties, and interest on past transactions. They think they have an alternative. That is just silly. The Feds have demanded all data from Ebay and PayPal so that if you sell junk from your garbage on line, they get their piece of the transaction. So you really think they will let Bitcoin escape? They are hunting money EVERYWHERE!

Anonymous crypto-currency and anonymous internet communication is plausible. Bitcoin and Tor are not sufficient.

We have the technology to do it. It is just a matter of implementation.

Btw, I know how to make a crypto-currency WITHOUT A LEDGER! Completely decentralized! (from a transactions point-of-view) Even if they shut down the internet, they can't entirely stop this currency from functioning. I am not revealing my secret just yet. Soon.

I already said that Bitcoin is controlled by 1 - 4 mining pools, so it is not controlled by "We The People".

Can you give me an example of a currency that is indeed decentralized if you think bitcoin or any crypto isn't? I also don't get how bitcoin can be controlled by those with political power. Seems pretty free from that at the momemt.

Bitcoin is not decentralized. Don't make me repeat this FACT again:

So for the currently bitcoin network with 8000 nodes, it can't tolerant collude by 4 top pools(actually, many ppls suspect that GHASH put its computing power in the shadow to hide the fact it controlls over 50% of the total computing power), the fault tolerant is 0.05%.

In addition to the pools being centralized, Bitcoin relies on centralized checkpoints controlled by the core developers.

Also I had already provided the following link to you twice, don't make provide it again:

True decentralization will only come from multiple competing currencies

The nations of the world will agree to a one-world RESERVE currency (not a political union!) because they resent the free ride the USA has gotten by being in control of the world's reserve currency.

But please realize this is all just a ruse for the global banksters to have even more control and do even greater corruption in the future by cleverly hiding their central banking manipulation in "international policy objectives" just as the Fed is hiding their funding of the banksters in "domestic policy objectives".

The only way the powers-that-be will allow Bitcoin to become the one-world reserve currency is if they control it. As I said, Bitcoin is controlled by 1 - 4 mining peers (i.e. they have greater than 50% of Bitcoin's network hash rate), thus the powers-that-be will be able to easily control Bitcoin when they are ready to take over control.

Perhaps you don't understand that you could have 20 mining pools all secretly owned by the same entity. In proof-of-work, the variance of earnings is inversely related to the percentage of the network hash rate the mining pool has, thus users will always favor mining pools that have double digit percentage of the Bitcoin network hash rate.

Bitcoin will never be decentralized. I already quoted upthread my other thread that explains how to get true decentralization by having multiple competing currencies each pegged with an options market to the domaindominant unit-of-account. This will be the future of crypto-currency. But this will not be a dominant unit-of-account. The dominant unit-of-account will always be what is regulated, because fractional reserve banking (i.e. debt-based booms and busts) is demanded by the public that loves debt financiing and it is inherently a bankrupt financial system paradigm.

I think bitcoin could rise up as sort of a natural default one world currency for sure. I hope it actually happens as a truly borderless universal currency would be amazing in my opinion.

Impossible. Bitcoin is not decentralized and no crypto-currency can be entirely decentralized. A single, borderless universal currency would NOT be amazing in a good way, rather it would be slavery because it will always be controlled by those who have the most (political) power.

There will never exist such as a thing as a single crypto-currency that is decentralized. It can't exist. Bitcoin is not decentralized. True decentralization will only come from multiple competing currencies, thus of course these can never be the reserve currency.

coinits, calm down you are preaching to the choir. You perhaps don't realize I wrote the syndicated essay Bitcoin : The Digital Kill Switch. I am the one who has been writing that Bitcoin is owned by TPTB.

In spite of the arguable fact that Bitcoin is controlled by the global elite, my guarantee that it won't be the "winner take all" global currency remains certain.

First of all, simpleton readers don't seem to understand the distinction between a reserve currency and a circulating currency. Crypto-currencies are the latter. Dollar and Euro cash are examples of the latter. US Treasury and Euro-denominated bonds are the former (Tier 1 reserve assets in the BIS Basel model). IMF SDRs are the former.

The global elite are planning for a national (or regional) currencies floating against a global reserve currency. And they are planning for circulating currencies which are all digital. Bitcoin is one gambit in that mix.

Seems many readers are confusing Bitcoin with this thread. Bitcoin can never become a reserve currency, because the $200+ trillion of global wealth is not going to be placed in a speculative investment. (Stop with your fantasies about scaling over time, you don't have a clue about reality)

Large capitalists are conservative. They want safety of capital firstmost, then a steady average ROI.

There will never exist such as a thing as a single crypto-currency that is decentralized. It can't exist. Bitcoin is not decentralized. True decentralization will only come from multiple competing currencies, thus of course these can never be the reserve currency.

My thesis is that the Knowledge Age (we are leaving the Industrial Age) reduces the demand for stored monetary capital and increases the demand for stored knowledge capital. The Industrial Age (which is moving towards 0 or negative profit margins in China) required large amounts of fixed capital investment, thus a high demand for stored monetary capital. The factory worker and factory engineer are economically insignificant compared to the NAV capital costs of the factory infrastructure.

Whereas the high profit margins are moving towards the knowledge production sector (software programming, marketing, etc). The Industrial Age is dying economically and along with it will die the demand for stored money. The larger the capital, the less effectively one will be able to invest it with a positve ROI.

Thus we don't need crypto-currency to be a reserve currency. Let the oligarchs (and the socialist sheeople/masses) have their reserve currency and enslaved nation-state governments. That is all part of the process of that paradigm dying.

The Knowledge Age will rise with competing crypto-currencies.

Bitcoin will not "winner take all". I guarantee you that.

I never suggested that the reason a crypto-currency would become widely adopted is due to cap on the money supply. In fact, I have often argued that an improved replacement for Bitcoin must have perpetual debasement. Arguably the cap on the number of Bitcoins can be subverted in the future, because Bitcoin is controlled by about 1 - 4 mining pools, thus in essence Bitcoin is controlled by the governments which can regulate those large mining pools. The advantage of crypto-currency is not a fixed money supply. And Bitcoin is the least likely of the crypto-currencies to become widely adopted because it isn't even decentralized and doesn't even have anonymity. A better crypto-currency than Bitcoin will rise soon.

Note Armstrong's analogy about 21 million coins for 300 million Americans shows that he ignorant about crypto-currency. BTC are divisible down to 1 Satoshi (0.00000001 BTC) thus there isare enough fragments of BTC to supply every human on earth. Armstrong is correct that fixed money supply is deflationary and will never be accepted by the public-at-large, but he fails to articulate the reason why. The better explanation of why the public-at-large will not accept a deflationary currency is because it is incompatible with a fractional reserve banking system and thus incompatible with debt. And people love debt. Where there is no usury, there is no economy and nothing moves (as was evident in the Dark Age). The Middle East was similarly stuck going no where (still riding camels and living in tents in the desert) with their anti-usury stance, but the free money from oil and Armstrong teaching them how to hide usury in leasing gold, broke them free from that anti-usury abyss.

Armstrong seems to think that as long as the national government doesn't borrow, then my point about a reserve currency being an enslavement paradigm doesn't apply:

...

As I said, the public will always demand a fractional reserve banking system. Whether it is sanctioned by a central bank (e.g. the USA after 1913) or ad hoc by private banks (e.g. the USA in the 1800s) doesn't change the fact that the public love debt. Citizenry especially love when the debts are accrued by the collective (e.g. nation, state, province, city, school district, company retirement plan, etc) because they are under the illusion that they get all the benefits without the individual default risk. The citizenry are under the illusion that the default can't be taken directly from the individual. People are too stupid to realize they end up paying it in taxes or economic collapse.

...

I entirely agree with Armstrong. There is no way the debt market will agree to be denominated in some decentralized crypto-currency with no regulation. Because debt operates by leverage and fractional reserves, and thus the people prefer to be lied to and told that defaults will never happen and so the ultimate default is delayed by grouping everyone together in a collective with a central bank. This is more desirable to the public than individual failures haphazardly and more frequently.

Thus a one world reserve currency is coming, and it will not be a crypto-currency. Rather it will be something controlled politically by the powers that be. Everyone who participates in the mainstream debt and bond markets will be operating in that reserve currency dominated system (even if there is a 2-tier system with some nations retaining their own national currencies that float against the reserve unit-of-account).

But my point is orthogonal to that reality. Debt is basically useless in the coming shift from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age. Most of all the productive value produced in the future will be from knowledge work. This is not labor. It is not fungible like labor is. Thus it can't be financed. If Armstrong would read my essays, he would understand that there is radical paradigm shift underway which will make the debt based economy wither.

Thus those in the debt based economy with their stored money capital will be in the one world currency enslavement system.

The knowledge age workers do not need any monetary capital. We can generate earnings that are 100s or 1000s times our housing and other expenses. We don't get a rats ass about storing money. We want to save up and store more knowledge.

In our economy, we will be using a fully anonymous and decentralized crypto-currency (that is perpetually debased so it forces rapid dissemination into more knowledge production). We won't pay any taxes, except for the portion of our income that we choose to declare to justify our lifestyle to the tax authorities. The vast majority of our economy will go untaxable.

And our economy will be growing very fast while the debt based economy will be shrinking or growing very slowly.

We can peg our currency to the one world reserve currency using an options market, at some carrying cost (determined by relative volatility). We will choose to use our crypto-currency because our freedom and innovation requires we not be dictated to by a central authority, whether it be taxes, the tsuris of kafkaesque KYC and AML which interfere for example with micropayments, FCC regulation of the internet, etc..

Thus in the end, our currency wins and decentralization wins; and central banks and debt die. The one world reserve currency will be an ephemeral failing paradigm. It will be where all the unproductive people hangout and leech off the collective and default on the lenders. It will go into pernicious and terminal decline into an abyss or Dark Age. While our economy will rise up and take over.

Our problem is not what is money, it is government and its endless historical evolution toward corruption.

Incorrect! Our problem is the human nature that people love debt, because they like to consume before they earn. Wealth is power law distributed. That is a fact. Thus the middle and lower classes envy collective debt as a way to redistribute from the wealthy back to the lazy. They don't understand that this honey is what attracts the flies of government corruption.

Direct democracy will never be a solution, because human nature doesn't change.

The Knowledge Age is a technological paradigm shift which renders the collective powerless to tax (most of the economic activity which won't be tangible thus can't be tracked once we have good anonymity technology implemented).

[coinits]

I do not know who you are and I say this with all due respect. You need to take a break and chillax for a bit. You are going to stroke out. Go get a good meal with your woman or go on a sailboat ride or go fishing. Enjoy your life.

Peace out dude!

[bitboy11]

A One-world reserve currency is inevitable.
The question is which country will issue it and will it be distributed in a fair and transparent manner or are we going to see more poli-tricks and manipulation at play?
If so, it will surely enslave all nations at the mercy of the elitists yet again.

[TPTB_need_war]

http://blog.mpettis.com/2015/04/will-the-aiib-one-day-matter/#comment-123421

Wow Michael. Very detailed and insightful! I agree. The AIIB will flop. The world is going to be looking for a cooperative solution by 2033, wherein all nations agree to cooperate in managing a one-world reserve currency unit to climb out from catastrophic contagion coming (actually underway with Austria deciding to default, repeating the genesis of WW1 dominoes Minsky Moment). The dollar will have to crash and burn first, but the dollar will be rising until late in 2017.

[maku]

A One-world reserve currency is inevitable.
The question is which country will issue it and will it be distributed in a fair and transparent manner or are we going to see more poli-tricks and manipulation at play?
If so, it will surely enslave all nations at the mercy of the elitists yet again.

I don't imagine it as inevitable as people may think. After all for global currency there need to be first mutual agreement of all nations. And that is not gonna happen, people are just to diverse and have different opinion on this. They would rather fight to promote their own currency as global and 'the one' instead of just accepting someone's else project.

[TPTB_need_war]

I don't imagine it as inevitable as people may think. After all for global currency there need to be first mutual agreement of all nations. And that is not gonna happen, people are just to diverse and have different opinion on this. They would rather fight to promote their own currency as global and 'the one' instead of just accepting someone's else project.

As I wrote in prior post, China is trying with the AIIB. And the USA is fighting.

After coming global war and economic Madmax debt implosion, then the nations will beg for the compromise and cooperation.

The powers-that-be have planned this out well. They need massive suffering to get the world to agree. And they are poised to deliver this massive suffering. ETA 2018.

2016 will get the ball rolling with Europe and Japan going over the cliff. USA will follow end of 2017.

[maku]

I don't imagine it as inevitable as people may think. After all for global currency there need to be first mutual agreement of all nations. And that is not gonna happen, people are just to diverse and have different opinion on this. They would rather fight to promote their own currency as global and 'the one' instead of just accepting someone's else project.

As I wrote in prior post, China is trying with the AIIB. And the USA is fighting.

After coming global war and economic Madmax debt implosion, then the nations will beg for the compromise and cooperation.

The powers-that-be have planned this out well. They need massive suffering to get the world to agree. And they are poised to deliver this massive suffering. ETA 2018.

2016 will get the ball rolling with Europe and Japan going over the cliff. USA will follow end of 2017.

This scenario is not so unreal. In fact something like that could easily happen in the future, and then the only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation. But I am afraid that global situation need to be critically bad and real dire for countries to cooperate in the economic field. Money are one of the main area of contention between everyone from the dawn of time.

[TPTB_need_war]

I guarantee you it will be that bad before 2024, probably circa 2019.

It is going to be very very horrific the coming collapse. See the Economic Devastation thread in this Economics forum. Also the Madmax thread in the Politics & Society forum.

We will soon know. I expect by 2017 or latest 2018, you all will be scared shit and starting to wake up to the reality.

[coinits]

Never going to happen. At least not for the next 200 years. My deep research has led to that conclusion.