Topic: Could Bitcoin be a solution for the raw milk market? - page 2. (Read 6313 times)

you clearly don't understand this...

the problem is people suing seeds that did come from Monsanto without paying them for the use of those seeds(like harvesting seeds from previous plants or buying them from someone else).

People are free to use seeds that didn't come from Monsanto. Why would they not...


That's how the laws work, if you are suspected of doing something illegal, they arrest you, they don't wait till they have full proof, that's the point of investigations and the resulting trial.

(Not sure if this is sarcasm but..) The FDA is far from honorable.

Uncle Sam likes the way you think

If the government has deemed raw milk is bad for you and has thus done the honorable thing and protected us from such a danger, then why question it?

We should be coming up with ways to use Bitcoin to reward politicians who pass more laws to protect us from ourselves.

I completely agree with this.  I think the best strategy is to help locate farmers for consumers and let them meet each other on their own terms.  Then, possibly, the site could handle the payments for the farmer so no money exchanges hands at the milk delivery. 

That gives me an idea around the law.  Instead of buying raw milk, you buy a membership to a website.  As a free gift, we arrange for you to get 1 gallon a week (or whatever) of free raw milk direct from the farmer of your choice. We give our farmers a regular monthly donation to be available to give our members the free gift.

Humans are, in many respects, unique among the animal kingdom.  We can actually metabolize a great many toxins, and are likely the most diverse animal in this respect.  A great example of this is chocolate, which can kill most predators if consumed in any quantity considered normal to above normal for an adult human.  Basicly the quantity required to give a child a stomach ache is likely to kill a dog without a vet's intervention.  Some things that we sometimes put into a salad are also toxic to carnivores, such as some mushrooms.  Coffee beans are mildly toxic, also.  Other less dramatic examples of commonly consumed foods that are toxic to other animals (and to some degree, humans also) include, but are not limited to, avocados, many nuts and partcularly macadamia nuts, peanuts (which, technically, are not nuts), raisins, onions, garlic, several common spices such as chives, and artifical sweeteners such as xylitol; although it's also arguable that all artifical sweeteners are also toxic to humans, by their very nature.

So the argument that humans shouldn't be drinking milk because it's not natural to drink another species' milk or beyond the age of four is, at best, lacking in scientific support.

Raw milk -> Pump -> Water block for GPU -> Pasteurized milk holding tank.
Just remember to adjust the flow rate with the temperature of the GPU to get the correct pasteurization temperature.

Also get some sponges that you can flush through the system to clean it periodically. This is how it's done at a dairy farm actually.

How we were built/evolved is about 97% speculation. So is the argument that milk is unhealthy.

Delivery of raw milk is actually the weak link - if you cannot get and consume it yourself on the same day, you shouldn't drink that stuff at all. There's a REASON that pasteurization exists, and it's not to "filter out blood" but to ensure you get less sick than you could. Most examples here about "it didn't harm me" were about milk consumed the same day or from very nearby - not shipped/delivered. Unless you have a valid business model that involves a "milk man", you're up for trouble once your first customer dies or gets seriously ill (and looking at a few pages about the wonders of raw milk I guess the people drinking the stuff are also the ones that might be of the "If I can still eat it out of the bottle with a spoon and don't need fork + knife, it's still ok!"-type). If you can manage to pick up milk at some nice local farmers and deliver milk from last evening to the doorstep for breakfast - good for you, but then you might be better off in accepting USD and making sure you operate legally.
Once some fanatics from southern Florida start ordering raw milk online with you, I'd recommend you to stay away from that stuff and rather sell drugs on silk road - less chance that a customer dies, or worse - survives and sues you.

Proteins don't break down, they coagulate. With raw milk they do this in your stomach (pour some hydrochloric acid in a glass of milk and be amazed - that's what happens), with pasteurized milk they (in small amounts) do it before. Also some vitamins don't really get along too well with heat, so they also get destroyed partly. The (often unhealthy) obsession of people with vitamins is left for another thread I hope though...

There's not much happening to the fat when being heated, what changes though is the homogenization treatment that most milk gets to make sure the fat doesn't swim on top after a while but stays in solution. This means the "fat bubbles" are made smaller and stay in solution over the lifetime of the milk.

More info can be found in wikipedia for example, in case you're interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk#Processing, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurization#Pasteurization_of_milk
As you can also see there, heating milk for a few seconds does NOT suddenly change it's contents and nutritional value completely.

If you use raw milk as ingredient for (especially) cheeses, you need to label them accordingly and again have to be very careful about contamination.
Butter = milk fat, more affected by quality than treatment
cheese = milk protein, see above. Raw milk cheeses exist but if you've seen how cheese is made, you'll also know why a few bacteria more or less won't matter there. Also the way cheese is created is not a very nice environment for germs to begin with.
yoghurt/kefir = more or less milk gone bad - here it might make a difference, but it would probably be far too risky to get a bad strain of bacteria in your milk. I doubt that you'd get really consistent quality out of raw milk and it pays off more to use good quality milk.
baked goods = far longer and higher heated than pasteurization during baking, why should a dozen seconds more matter in the final product?!

Again, it seems you are mixing "raw milk" and "high quality milk" in your mind - every milk on this planet starts as "raw milk" and can be used as such inside a dairy. It mostly isn't and that's for good reasons.

I'll do it, I just want feedback and suggestions on how it would help!

It takes A LOT to change something like that, but if everyone worked togheter it would be possible, it might take years though, and in the end it might not even be succesful.

It's a pitty farmers get raided regularily, I feel I get very angry just from reading about it, it is very unfair. Sooner or later some farmer is going to shot a sheriff, and the farmer end up in jail for a lifetime, if it haven't happened already.


Raiding a farmer for suspicion of milk sales........ only in the greatest country on earth..

that's certainly the best plan.  There are organized efforts to change these laws, but to my knowledge, nothing has changed, and farmers are regularly raided, even under the suspicion of sales.

Well, to me, the advantage is that you don't have to exchange money with the milk being exchanged.  So, if you are caught in a raid, the farmer is just giving people milk.  They would be hard pressed to prove that the farmer was receiving consideration in return for the milk, just due to the nature of bitcoin.

You are probably right, exchanging milk for consideration is probably considered a sale, in which case, BTC doesn't really help with that.

Bitcoin is easier to conceal, for sure.  I think people underestimate the size of the raw milk market in the US.  I've seen estimates that put it second to drugs in terms of size.  Even by my rough estimations, the market could be more than $15M annually, and I imagine it is several times that, just based on the prices people talk about.

I don't know if bitcoin makes this easier or better, but I thought it might be interesting to discuss.

Well - it would be possible to make an online portal of sorts where farmers could sell their stuff, and agree with locals to do the pickups. Of course the buyer could 'donate' to the farmer as a general donation, and then later on pick up milk in exchange for that donation, and then the formalities would have it that in fact it could not be classified as a bona fide trade, however I believe this would be wishful thinking, and I think consulting a lawyer on the issue might be the right way to go about it. As long as the intention with the trade is to get milk for cash/bitcoin/gold/whatever, then it's a trade as far as I can see.

Of course, hiding the funds as bitcoins as not as cash, it would be far harder for anyone raiding the ranch to find evidence of trade happening, the farmer could even have a brainwallet, so they would find nothing, even if they took all his electronics.

Still, there would need to be some contact between the farmer and the customers, and if anyone could sign up to such  site, then so could a law enforcement officer.

If you want to somehow circumwent a law that exists, then you should be damn sure that your loopholes won't backfire on you. Perhaps starting a campaign to actually have the law reverted would also be a good idea? Maybe it would not work, maybe it would, it all depends how much you'd put into it. I'd love to see 1 million people march to their local decision makers and ask them to reconsider their views.

not really.  Raw milk is about $5-$15 a gallon.

How is replacing "BTC" with "USD" any different than the status quo?  Unless you lie about it, which you could just as easily do with cash.

While you can certainly trade with people not using US Dollars (aka barter), and likely get away with that for a long time, eventually the IRS is going to want their cut of the dollar value of the bartering.

How is bitcoin any different?  Perhaps a little easier to conceal, and that's it.  If you are having problems concealing your giant phat piles of illicit cash from your illegal raw milk operation, then that market got to be a whole lot bigger than I remember.  I think the whole act of you giving product (milk) in exchange for consideration (bitcoin) makes it a sale.

If you want to pretend it's not an actual transaction - do so - but bitcoin really has nothing to do with it.

i read these threads where people think there is a massive difference between raw milk and pasteurised milk, for raw milk to be so dangerous, or not tolerable by many people.

the difference is this:

its been heated

.. and thats it! no special chemicals or additives are needed for the pasteurisation process. so if you cant tolerate raw milk.. just boil it up in a saucepan and then pour it into a container.

raw milk is cheaper then pasteurised milk so if i could get a regular supply of it, id buy it by the gallon.

Milk Road?

Most mammals stop drinking milk at a certain point in their childhood.  This is how we were built / evolved. 
A few others are pretty fucked up and drink it all the time despite the obvious health problems that result. 

not necessarily.  Most of the west's life expectancy can be attributed to health care, not diet.  In fact, life expectancy dropped considerably when agriculture was born, changing the diet to one primarily based on grains.  Only recently (last century or so) did life expectancy get back to to the level it was before the onset of agriculture, and the diet has not improved much.  Some would argue that it has decreased considerably in quality.  

"Primitive" cultures, like North America in the late 1400's had longer life expectancies than their Western counterparts.  In fact, something often noted by early explorers of America was how large and healthy the natives were compared to Europeans.

That doesn't mean it was raw milk as the cause of that. (correlation does not equal causation)  We do tend to assume that their diet probably had a lot to do with it, though.  And it is debatable how much milk those cultures actually consumed, anyway.  They were not eating frosted flakes with raw milk every morning.

There are "primitive" cultures in Europe that traditionally had longer lifespans than "civilized" Europeans.  One that comes to mind were cultures in the Swiss Alps that raised goats and cows.  They consumed raw milk and raw milk products regularly, and had better overall health than conventional Swiss people.  Again, the raw milk was probably not the only cause of their health, but it MAY have played a role.

most raw milk producers in the US have customers that inspect and visit the farms directly.  So, really, it is the ultimate credibility, the consumer can see for themselves the condition, etc of the facilities and farm.  Raw milk production requires a much higher level of sanitation and feed systems than conventional dairy to be successful.

unless feed stores, etc or services that the farmer requires take BTC.  I think that if a lot of farmers in an area started taking BTC, the suppliers to those farms would be quick to follow.

In my mind, it doesn't matter why people want something.  If they want to purchase it and someone wants to deliver it, then there is an active market.  And where's there's a market, there's a way.