Topic: Bitcoin: The Digital Kill Switch - page 10. (Read 55179 times)

LOL,.,
People in 3rd world countries do not usually have cell phones and when they do i don't think they have internet, never mind the money to pay for upkeeping the blockchain.
And what are they going to use their bitcoins for? Buying from silk road?
For these people bitcoin is the most useless thing in the world.
The idea that 3rd world people will become enslaved by bitcoin isrealy stupidly crazy. There is just not even the slightest posibility bitcoin will be meaningfull to these people.

If it would happen then it would be fascism, but it's just not very likely to go that way.
These people would first need to have food, housing and work before bitcoin would start taking on a meaning.


About the bilderbergs designing bitcoin/technology.
If you can't trust bitcoin then you can't trust any device in the world. Bitlderbergs would already own your ass.
If such groups could organize stuff on this level then society would already be completely controlled by them. Nothing you say or do will make a difference and you will be their slave all your life.

You call it statist but actually its called the information age.
We live in transformative times. Technology has opened far more doors than we can possibly look through at once. We need to find a new balance within these new posibilities.

I mean, ok, lets assume the bilderbergs know how much bitcoin i have in my account. Then what? They will just take it? And i wouldn't notice and post it on a blog or forum for everyone to know?
The point is that if they want to control bitcoin they need to control all the computers and networks already.
But if they already control the computers and networks then there is no point for them to control bitcoins. They would already be able to do arbitrary things with the exisiting substrate of technology.
In reality there are much more effective tools to unilaterally control society, if one wanted.

So i find it ammusing that you ignore the older possibilities for complete and total control in favour of new and unproven techologies of complete and total control.
You have to ask yourself, why would they want to control bitcoin if they already control everything that is needed to run bitcoin?

You also seem to have a lot of misconception about how bitcoin works.
First of all, they can have hidden nodes all they want but as soon as they start doing funky stuff the blockchain will fork and everyone will know they are manipulating transactions. At that moment everyone will have a choice to either work with the new chain or revert back to the old chain. I think most people will hear from their neighbours that its best to use the old chain and get out of that system asap.
I mean, if you hear that your bank is being robbed at random then you will want to take your money somewhere else.
So there is no realistical way to control the network like this.
But then you backpeddal and define control as the ability to see the transactions.
Well, have i got news for you!
You can already do that. This information is already widely available as there are sites that keep a record of the IP addresses that made the transactions. It is public information.
Sure, you can use things like Tor, but that is just a general layer of obfuscation. It has nothing to do with bitcoin and so controling the bitcoin network won't give you any extra information.
The only thing that having more than 50% of the network is good for is to forge transactions, but that is detectable and so unusable for the long run.

So again, there are no good reasons for any group to hijack bitcoin except to destroy it or make a quick buck (while destroying it).
Excerting real control will be difficult without a lot of extra facilitating control and if that is in place then the actual matter of bitcoin or another currency is immaterial.
What i'm saying is that there are much better places to furbish with mechanisms of control.

You tell me that i don't know about economics but then you go on to tell fables about biology/evolution..  

First of all, the most prolific life form on earth is the humble bacteria.
Small things grow fast because they are simple and their genes can adapt faster.
It's not about the opportunities, it is about being capable of adapting fast enough to be able to capitalize on the many opportunities nature provides.
That is why we get niches. Big complex organisms have a completely different set of opportunities than small simple ones and so they act according to different rules.

Anyway, if the bilderbergs need to control bitcoin to fight off millionairs then they have no real control at the moment. All this paranoia is nonsense if they can't already control most of the world.

And your techocratic underdog fantasy is also nothing more than a fantasy.
You claim that the recent crisis is because machines are more efficient than humans and and so humans become obsolete.
But the actual problem is human greed. It has nothing to do with workers but everything to do with a finacial system that thrives on profit and self-enrichment. So basically human nature.
The problems we have come from the fact that the financial world acted completely irresponsibly on the freedoms society allowed them. They were pushing credit without being properly secured against defaults.
If we can learn anything from this is that people cannot be left free with the kind of power one can ammass in society. People are assholes and start acting like it once they gain power.
Nothing will change this because we are all humans.
It's not the bilderbergs screwing us, it's our fellow citizens. We all grew up with the fantasy that the sky is the limit. It just turns out to be not true. There is no room for everyone to be at the top but that sure doesn't stop people from trying.

And still your arguments are twisted.
You say that these big groups are slow and irresponsive to changes.
But that is a GOOD thing as well and you never mentioned it.
Do you realy think they could get away with too much change? How many people would get fired? What kinds of consequences would it have on society if milions of people would be replaced by robots? How would you be able to maintain stability and peace?

You completely disregard the fact that these bilderberg people get their power from the workers in the factories. That is why they are so central. They actually represent a large portion of society. It is much more an ecosystem than a strict hierarchy. All involved parties need each other to create this reasonably stable and prosperous world we live in.
If you go back less than 200 years then our society has changed tremendously.
Just think of what we have developed in the last century and a half and specifically the later half of the last century.
Trains, planes, automobiles, cinema, electricity, television, hygiene, water, housing, shops, food supplies, luxury goods, communication, electronics, transistors, integrated circuits, computers, computer networks, genetics, medicine, lifespan doubling, information technology, satelites, space travel, human rights, global trade agreements, voting rights for women, etc, etc, etc.

Humanity never had it this good on the average.
So of course it is in our own interest to not want to change it too radically.
These millionairs you speak of would need to provide food and job for them to be able to gain any momentum.
But even then a sappling has no chance of surviving withour properly adapting to the environment (the big old trees).
If the sappling grows too close to the old tree the shadow from the big tree will naturally prevent the sappling from growing. Balance is the key word here.
Sure you can make a factory that runs on only robots, but that also means that 200 people won't get money that they can spend on buying your product.
The first question you need to ask is if it is economically viable to have only facories that work with robots.
Programmers won't be needed in the future as computers will be able to program themselfs.
So in the future these people won't need anyone to make a factory run. But who will have money to buy their product?
It turns out that there is only so much that you can automate without losing buying power. And without buying power your economy will stagnate and everything will collapse. It is not a strategy that will allow you to survive.

I whish things worked as superficially as you want them to but in reality there are many many societal dependencies and the only way to look at it is from an emergent ecosystem pov. Then you can see that control is not as clear as it might seem on first glance. There are a lot of niches.
I think that instead of obsesing with these bilderbergs you should realy take a wider view and see that the bilderbergs have their own set of dependencies and that they are more like shapers than like controllers. They are not concerned with how much money you have in your bank account. They are worried about whether they will have enough schooled workers for their airplane factories so they need schools and engineers to be planned beforehand. They do not have absolute power but they are a big cohesive force keeping shit together.
It takes a lot of responsibilities and i can imagine it's not easy to structure society into a system that is this stable. Never before in history did humanity manage to organize itself into such a complex and productive entity.
At the moment it's not only about organizing the next cool thing. It is much more a question of keeping the current level of prosperity going because we never gotten this far in history of mankind.
To have this level of society we need to plan ahead. There is just no other way of having the cake and eating it.
On the societal scale you are confronted with completely different sets of problems.
The bilderbergs are in a sense the emergent manifestation of the solution to these problems.
They grew naturally out of the dynamics of our development and have a function in giving society shape.
That is why there are these meetings.
It allows for the tuning of resources. Industry can communicate their needs i terms of resources (workers, energy, etc) so that they can provide the jobs for people. Then the politics can act on this by providing the resources. And then the politics can state demands from the industry to provide a good to society. It's an interaction.

It turns out that to you need this interaction for society to profit.
Both parties are worse off when they try to control the whole too much.
The only way this is going to work is if a balance is found and both parties know it. Otherwise such a system is doomed to destabilize.
Just take a look at the glorious societal development of north korea and you can clearly see how far total control will take you. And the only way they can keep it together is by total information control. They can't have anyone talking about the wrong things. It's not something that is stable in the long run and getting this level of information control going in our modern world would be impossible.

So this won't happen in the western society without the world economy collapsig. And if that happens all bets are off. Everyone will have to struggle for food and society (including any power extracted from it) will collapse.


About the 666, i hope you realize it was originally written as a critiqe against the roman empire that was recording identity for the purpose of collecting taxes.
It is the inevitable consequence of organizing beyond the structure of a village and it has been around for millenia. There realy is nothing special about our current situation as every large civilization has to deal with these things.
In fact, taxes are much older than the romans and even the pharaos collected taxes in the form of grain (that was then stored) so that when that civilization was faced with bad crop years the pharao could still feed his people. This was so successfull that they could supply whole cities with a steady supply of food and water despite productio rate. This in turn reduced famine and unrest. If your crop failed this year you do not have to steal it from your neighbour who only had a partially failed crop. You will get some of your tax back. And it would never have happened if the pharaos didn't take a bit of everyones produce as tax.
If you want to describe people as sheep then this is it. People in general are too egocentric and short sighted to be able to organize themselfs beyond their direct surroundings. They need a kind of hyrarchy that gives them the security that they are not the only ones that pay into society and that secures the benefits they will get from the tax they pay. If this structure is missing then people get into micro wars (man against man, group against group) and society has no chance of flourishing. It would be a mess if you think about the kinds of physical harm one person can do with modern tools.

So taxes are not bad in and of themselfs. They are the fee for living in a stable society with so many usefull mechanisms.
What we do need are mechanisms of democracy.
We need a way to inject demands from the people into the whole so the structure of society keeps benefiting the people and does not become self serving.
And i think this is where it often goes wrong and statism can thrive.
But a thriving statist regiment does not equal a productive society.
Any government that is too statist will be outcompeted by states with more freedoms. Even war is not an option anymore because the states that are more free actually are the only ones capable of producing these toys of mass destrucion. It is just not economically viable to sustain a deeply statist construction. Even russia and china realized that.

On the other hand, states without any statism structures are bound to eat themselfs up as everyone will fight over food with their neighbors.

So the only way, from a government perspective, to have a stable state for the future is by not demanding too much tax and to use tax in an open and discussable way. That way you will have the people behind you and will be stronger as a state.
Complete statism is not something that can survive for long and so it is not in the benefit of any one party in our society to push it too far.

So i don't think you can take this statist thing as an absolute thing that is separate from society.
It is because of statism that we have such a successfull society in the first place.
Without it we would still be tribes fighting over the best berry field.
Statism is fully embedded in our society and it has its benefits.

The thing to worry about is keeping statism just for the purpose of statism.
But that's nothing new and humanity has been working on the problem for thousands of years.
The problem is that the optimum is a balance of freedom and structure so we are doomed forever to re-evaluate this balance.
You should not address statism itself. You should try to see how it should fit in society so we can achieve an optimum in a given situation.

The bigger threat is the government will not shut it down, but rather embrace, help it grow, and control it so they can turn off your ability to eat individually if they don't like you

I am almost ready to abandon any work on cryptocurrencies. They appear to not be a solution to anything:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2129228

Sorry to say. I am awaiting any refutation.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4944&cpage=1#comment-401419

I think we may have a fundamentally unresolvable problem in attempting to fix Bitcoin's 51% attack with any alternative scheme:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2128451

It has to do with peers being first instead of last, i.e. the inability to inject non-determinism in the selection of who processes the transactions.

The bigger threat is the government will not shut it down, but rather embrace, help it grow, and control it so they can turn off your ability to eat individually if they don't like you:

I guess you haven't transacted daily in any of the third world countries that contained roughly 5 billion of the world's population. Yet many of them now carry a smartphone and thus are ready for a Bitcoin.

It can be seen as another strategy to for example subvert bank secrecy laws in for example the Philippines, that protect depositors from state monitoring. They may not end up needing Bitcoin, but they can float it as a trial balloon to have multiple competing options to get their ability to spread statism and taxation (and thus socialization of debt unprofitability and slavery) to every human on the planet.  Eliminating physical cash is very important and they would like to achieve it before 2032 (as evident by their pronouncements for regional blocs such as North American Union and Asian Union), when this current round of statism debt implosion bottoms. Also include the Trilateral Commission.

This can be viewed as fascism (big business + government) maximizing "cooperation and organization", i.e. vested capture of statism and slavery.


Precisely what I speculate to be true based on bizarre coincidental features of Bitcoin. Although I can't know it for sure. And I don't need to. I can see the where trend over history is headed.

And even if there isn't a concerted cartel control, statism and technology are still trending this direction. We should make sure we use technology that doesn't hand over this power to the state, because for sure the statism will grab it.

Note we may be getting closer to eliminating the Bitcoin threat (pending further technical review and discussion at the following link):

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2124304


Is debatable whether someone might be able to make it appear that the peers are coming from diverse sources and thus not detected.

Regardless, I don't see there is any need for them to fork the blockchains, if they want to use this power to both refuse to include transactions from people who don't follow their edicts (thus the masses remain happy and continue using the system) and to track the IP address that every transaction originates from since they will control most (if not nearly all) of the mining peers. One of the edicts can be to not use Tor or obsure the source of the transaction. Controlling the mining in theory gives them more control, because laws might be subverted otherwise.

Just because a few hackers recognize that a system has been overtaken by the state, doesn't mean they can do anything about it, if by that time the masses use that system and will not switch.


That shows you don't understand economics. In nature, small things grow fast, and large things stagnate and decay. The reason is that because new opportunities are exponential in potential, but mature captured markets do not expand forever. Saplings grow fast to oak trees, but oak trees don't grow to the moon. What the $trillionaires have to fear is some disruptive new ideas that some millionaires turns into multiple instances of $billions, which also craters the control that provides their $trillions of value. Often disruptive innovations destroy old capital, e.g. the tractor destroyed the investments in animal pulled plows. The $trillionaires gain and hold their wealth in control over debt, insurance, and governance. If they lose that control, their wealth can implode as the freedom of man catapults into a new paradigm.

It also not necessarily fear, rather that they want to expand their wealth, and most of the wealth they don't have already is in the upper-middle class.


Indeed. The reason we have a global crisis coming now is because of billions of people who can't program a computer, yet the future is all about eliminating human non-programmer workers with programmed automation. Driverless cars, humanless customer support agents, humanless factories, integrated POS and accounting without humans, etc..

There is an infinite amount of programming to be done. Programmers (and related hitech innovators) will be employed. The rest will depend on the state to steal for them.

The cartel will manage the wars and megadeath necessary to cull those who can't adjust. The statism delays adjustment by increasing debt, thus making sure more people don't initiate education and adjustment.


Tracking every transaction and tying to a human identity, so the state can extract taxes to pay for all those who don't want to work-- which is eventually nearly everybody, so this is basically a eugenics trajectory. Luckily we have technology to save us during every one of the 78 year technology disruption cycles.

And i still don't see your point. Almost all transactions are already digital. If you think that the bilderbergs own some state then they already have enough power to control just about anything in that state. If they wanted they could have controlled bitocoin already. Or maybe bitcoin is their idea and satoshi works for them, right? 

Anyway, if they somehow indeed control bitcoin then any control they excert would be noticed by everyone. It would be documented in the forked blockchains. It would be clear to everyone that bitcoin is not free anymore and that it is time to move on to the next best alternative. So even if they control the network they cannot use it without being exposed.

If you have $trillions then millionaires are the least of your worry.
The bilderbergs control a lot of the companies that feed a lot of people.
Try dealing with angry workers, that will teach you about power.

Not sure what to make of the 666.

Unfortunately, statism always ends up in economic implosion and often megadeath, because it is gamed by everyone to maximize state debt. Unprofitably means war at the end game.


Well exactly. That is the weakness. The state (or cartel) can take over Bitcoin.


The masses would happily continuing using it. It would in theory work fine for all of them who are compliant with the state (or cartel) edicts.


Statism doesn't care about resource cost. Debt is paid for by the dumb masses, not the cartel owners of the state.

My opening article speculates that a supranational $trillionaire cartel (which owns the state already, Bilderberg meetings do actually happen), would love to have a functioning digital currency. Why would they destroy it, when they've been trying to find a way to eliminate cash (and physical bullion) so they can track everything (so they can destroy competition from millionaires).

Can you say 666?

First of all about your last sentence. I think the most beautifull and worth living for things are not profitable. So by itself i think it is a non argument against governments. Socializing unprofitability can have great benefits to society. On the other hand, profit doesn't give shit about society. If a banker could sell his mother for more profit he would. In fact, most of our current problems stem from the fact that there are people who put profit before the human race and get away with it.


Anyway, if the state can take a large enough stake in minig so it becomes inviable for private miners then they can completely control the network by 51% attack. So there is no reason to even speculate about private miner profitability. It would just become state controled.
But that still requires some government to actually do it and when they do the system is broken so fundamentaly that there would be no reason for people to use bitcoins at all.

So the only outcome of such a takeover would be that the system would become unusable.
But that would be a very strange thing to do because states have the power to break a sytem like bitcoin with much fewer resources. They could simply create a law that would force ISPs to frustrate the use and people will run away.

So i don't think that the government would attempt such a thing.
If they wanted bitcoin gone they can use any number of techniques to break it beyond usability.

I have disputed that as a viable model upthread. I don't want to repeat that debate (please), readers can read the entire thread if they want the full discussion on that.

Separately even before minting terminates, it is not clear that difficulty will not become ridiculous. The state has more resources to fund supercomputers due to the fact that the masses want to hand over power to the state. The state (or a banking cartel which has captured the state as is the case now) could in theory use the statism to drive hardware costs so high (lookup who were the top pre-IPO investors for example in Google and Facebook where the world's server farms are), that no one is profitable at mining. Statism will be going into hyperdrive with the global economic collapse. Perhaps it is not coincidental that minting is designed to stop 2030ish, which is exactly when the 78 year repeating model for economic implosion expects the statism to peak.

Remember statism socializes unprofitability.

transaction fees

Ah, ok I see. Please excuse my ignorance.

But the point stands, whats in it for the miner once all the coins have been mined?

I think you make a mistake.
Difficulty will not become ridiculous. Difficulty follows from hashrate.
If less people mine then difficulty adjusts downwards making it more profitble for the ones still mining.

Very interesting thread.

I seems clear to me that Bitcoin as it currently is seems to have a fundamental flaw. When all, or even nearly all, coins are mined, difficulty has risen to a ridiculous point and the power of electricity is constantly rising what incentive do miners have to keep mining. Without miners the system is dead.

I also agree with you AnonyMint that if mining could be equally available to all, the system would be much more sustainable in the long run. Professional miners could set up large mining rigs but also the average person with an average pc could also mine. I have put some thought into this before and was thinking about an algorithm that uses large amounts of memory per processor that would make it impossible to mine on GPUs or ASICs. How that algorithm would actually work I have no idea yet. I like your idea of a hard drive mining algorithm though. One advantage of your low power usage idea is that is makes the whole digital currency concept much more environmentally feasible which I think is a powerful selling point, in terms of the general public, going forward.

Seems this problem may be solved when the entropy is grabbed ever day or so, instead for every transaction block:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2120749

But the details are still unclear to me on how to have a global consensus on this randomized hash.

I don't want to get into that "diabolical cartel" talk. However, I totally agree in the very long term, coin generation should continue to provide incentive for miners to secure the system. Unlimited coin creation is a good thing as long as the trend is easily predictable.

I'd support something like, 0.1-1% annual increase in coin quantity in the very long term future. A small percentage of total "money supply" should be enough to pay for the computing power necessary for sustaining the network in the long term.

I agree that the technology for anonymity exists. And thus the market should move that direction once the governments go bezerk with capital controls.

Tor is not completely anonymous, because the injection node or the destination node may be compromised.

The solution is to inject your transaction from your mining peer (so you know it isn't compromised), but the way the system would be designed, it wouldn't be resolvable where a transaction was injected:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUTE

If enough of the peers are not compromised, it becomes very unlikely for traffic analysis to determine where transactions originated from. If transactions can't be tracked to an originating IP address, then there is no technical way to subvert the anonymity.

I still have the prior listed unresolved problem with my proposed design. I will report if I have resolved it.

I have briefly looked at a Proof-of-Share proposal:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2119596

Ehhr, you see to be confused. It's the US Dollar that is created out of thin air, not Bitcoin.

Easily ... the technology exists today so it is inevitable since that is the medium of exchange that the market will naturally select.

I share your enthusiasm for anonymity but I wonder if in the future we'll even be able to use a computer without being monitored. Will an anonymous currency even be accessible in an anonymous way?