Topic: Economic Totalitarianism - page 85. (Read 345758 times)

I had already 3 names and registered the domain names, two were 4 letters and one was 5 letters. But unfortunately I forgot to login to the free email account (which expires after 60 or 90 days) and may have lost access to the passwords for the names! This is an example of myself being overloaded. But I am not sure yet if I lost the names (and BTC1). Will check that later today.

This means I need to turn over some control to others. I can't handle all the details of managing names, passwords, etc, and also have my head deep in research and coding, as well community communication. It is too much for one person to handle. Nothing would ever get done at a fast pace with everything being done by one person.

I am not going to spill the beans now and write down a description of all my innovations. Any way I believe there was already sufficient angel investment $ available. I was trying to spread around the angel opportunity to more individuals, so it doesn't get too concentrated. Also I was trying to find a way to get my friend rpietila to invest and he could not comply with the computer security, so I had to change strategy about the communication with the community. So I don't need to say more and more about the vaporware. But at least yesterday I tried to display my expertise over in the altcoin forum to give some inkling that I am legit.

Some more of my recent posts which that hint at my knowledge and that my innovations may be ahead of others in the altcoin world:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.12135844

(there is a discussion that starts at the above post between smooth and I wherein I make my case that launch by mining is not a panacea)

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.12134345

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.12134246

good name for your tech should be developed too.

http://www.coindesk.com/itbit-adds-nsa-veteran-to-advisory-board/

http://www.coindesk.com/interpol-held-a-dark-market-war-game-using-its-own-cryptocurrency/

I've been making several posts comparing ShadowCoin and Monero. I think it gives some insight into my work as well:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.12130745

Max Weber is another source of the canonical definition of the State as the entity with a monopoly on violence.

Is your viewpoint that the State must crush any truly anonymous network?

Frankly I agree with that threat. But why waste our time kidding ourselves that I2P and Tor are anonymous against the twee ladder agancias. If we want to test our strength, let's actually create the anonymous network and give it a whirl.

I am hoping what we will discover is that the State is actually quite impotent once people discover they don't need to pay taxes on virtual commerce nor be controlled by arbitrary laws (e.g. the War on Drugs when in fact the Deep State is running the world's drug cartel).

Personally I hate addictive drugs (include even sugar in that as I never eat it any more), because they destroyed my family. But it is not my place to decide for others their lifestyle and poison. And besides freedom is needed in more areas than just drugs.

I will give you one example. Up until a few months ago when Sulit.ph merged with Olx.ph, I was able to buy imported vitamins online at about 200% of the Amazon.com USA prices. Importers were bringing them in using a service filoutlet.com and then reselling. The oligarches in this country put a stop to that (because it was untaxed) and now you can't find any vitamins online except sites that report to the BIR. Thus the least expensive I can find now are 300 - 400% of the price on Amazon.com in USA. So now I have to ship my own vitamins from USA via filoutlet.com. Eventually the bastards will shut down every small business and everything must go through their large operations such as ebay, facebook, etc..

We have to fight back or the entire world will sink into a NWO hell with China and Asia leading the way from 2020 forward with Smart meters on every home that track everything you do, etc..

I believe once people taste a little bit freedom, they will never look back. The governments can not stop a movement that is individually based.

I also believe Hillary Clinton will be using the anonymity network  

Another point is the non-anonymous internet may become non-functional. The States are moving to tax it to death. Was it Chicago that announced it will tax video streaming? The more they tax the clearnet, the more they will incentivize the economic demand for the anonymous internet. Perfect! I hope they tax more and more![1]

I agree it would be incredibly fun and hilarious watching the socialist States implode.


[1] Of course I wish the world wasn't going into totalitarianism. I'd prefer a more peaceful resolution. But the reality is the world is going into the collapse of socialism. We either find a way to provide a frontier for ourselves, or we all do down together.

There was some interesting stuff in that post, but I was kind of surprised you don't share my viewpoint about anonymous coins.  If the anonymous function was relatively bulletproof, and reached large circulation and market cap, there would be a high probability of it abolishing the state, or the state as we know it at least.  I know you've talked about how a non-opaque blockchain could allow the state to extract even more than they do currently, so it seems logical an opaque one could put them in a death spiral where it wouldn't function at all.  It will honestly be hilarious watching far leftists cringe in horror as large governments cease to be able to function if this ever does come to pass.

As a side issue, your current username reminds me of the fringe "Report from Iron Mountain", heh.  The thing that says the primary function of the state is war and it cannot exist without it.  It was said to be a hoax, but it has some convincing points.  Obama called the state, "a monopoly on violence", so maybe it was not a hoax.  Either Obama read that report as educational material, or the books from Machiavelli that most world leaders read also teach that viewpoint.

If I remember correctly the person who did that work (whom I remember well since he and I got in a heated argument about some technicalities because I at the time was working on a similar sort of hash before I developed the latter one based on a NIST candidate) was generally praised and appreciated by the community for fixing a problem that had the potential to cause much more harm. So I concur with your clarification. I suppose his profit was viewed as fair by the community.

I would prefer to avoid the potential problem entirely by not putting so much pressure at the launch on needing the hash to be perfectly and fairly optimized at launch. And especially with entirely new hash again (well based on a NIST candidate, yet never widely deployed afaik). Fully optimizing the assembly language of the hash is another burden that would slow me down towards launch. I did write down the assembly code for Intel and AMD 64-bit, but there are so many hardware variants, GPUs, etc..

Also I think it is helpful (and in defense of Monero) to point out the conditions under which Monero was formed. It was basically an adhoc rescue of a great technology which was being destroyed by those who created it. The community reacted in a necessary haste to try to wrestle the technology away to save it. So there wasn't the opportunity for planning it out in some other way. Doing a fair distribution via mining was the probably the only possible fair reaction that was workable in that situation, especially given there was no opportunity for exclusivity for any period of time (as numerous clones had already popped up).

Edit: link to thread about Cryptonote's storied history:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11986713

And another concise summary:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.12103449

Someone informed me that the New Scientist article is still available with a slight typo in the url:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229744-000-hackers-reverse-engineer-nsas-leaked-bugging-devices/

Note Michael Pettis's old blogs have been scrubbed from archive.org.

To be fair that was a bit of a special case, as the code was deliberately deoptimized and obfuscated, then taken over by a group that wasn't familiar with it at all (and had many different aspects of the code to be concerned with, not just PoW), and then became popular and skyrocketed in value quickly.

Removing any of these elements would have made the windfall much smaller. Certainly removing the deliberate deoptimization and obfuscation should be easy.

Anyway, I'm not sure that changes any of your conclusions, but generalizing from Monero is likely wrong as it was a special case.

It will estimate 3 - 4 months to get to testnet, assuming it all goes smoothly.

With a lot of snags and setbacks along the way, it might take 6 months to get to testnet.

By sheer will power of my own coding ability, I won't let it stretch too far beyond that in any case (meaning I can just code and code ignoring every one else if necessary and reach testnet even with perhaps some errors that have to be fixed before going live net). Especially if I can shut up, which is part of the motivation for assigning someone else to talk publicly. Hopefully I don't need to go to Australia until after reaching testnet ICO. I am thinking I can hang on until then. Just need to get out to the gym twice a week and keep up my vitamin D3. Also I felt really good today. Who knows maybe I am starting to cure naturally[1]. I been on a no carbo diet now for a couple of months.

Perhaps there might be some demonstrations of progress along the way, but we need to be careful that competitors don't copy too soon. Need to think about what we can reveal without spilling the beans to the competition.

Of course everything will be open sourced at ICO. That is one reason the first ICO would have less demand than latter ones, because the open source code would not have been publicly reviewed for a long time yet.

Of course I have some others who will be doing peer review privately. One is a math PhD.

It is an entirely new code base from scratch and I have confidence in my abilities to accomplish this.

Again no one should put more than 5% of their net worth into this (that is for those who want to attempt to rise from average to wealthy on a single speculation), for most it shouldn't be more than 1% (and for wealthy individuals not more than 0.1%).

The angel investor amounts will be publicly revealed just before the first ICO so everything is transparent. The identities of the angel investors will not be revealed. They can individually reveal their participation if they wish.


[1] For those who don't know, I have a mild (sometimes worse, sometimes better, i.e. relapsing and relenting) Multiple Sclerosis. I described the effects upthread recently. I cope very well and am still athletic at age 50. Yesterday at the gym, I found I could still get to the basketball basket on a driving layup finger roll to the front lip of the rim fast enough to get around filipinos half my age (and note they are very quick, look at Manny Pacquio). So other than the recent scare with my vision, I feel confident I can avoid the Australia trip until after testnet launch. I was hitting driving dead stop fall away jumpers, leaping on one side of the rim and hanging in the air to other side with a reverse layup, etc.. My breathing was huffing and puffing (30 Centigrade with 80% humidity) but other than that (and my first step not being quite as explosive as it was in my 20s and 30s), I am still competitive.

Edit: the optometrist measured the vision yesterday in my non-blinded eye at 20/30 to 20/40 without a contact lens. With a 0.75 - 1.00 lens, my vision is 20/20 in one eye.

"Timing is very important and looks like all the timing is falling right into place. We got lucky."

Do we have a timeline for development?

How To Invest in AnonyMint's Project

I suddenly realized I need to open up the communication more because there is difficulty with communicating with potential angel investors.

I had always wanted to release a project without announcing AnonyMint's involvement. I wanted a project that could succeed on its own white papers, marketing, and technical merits, in order to avoid politics (attacking AnonyMint or thinking I am using AM's reputation to push one project over the other). Unfortunately it is very, very difficult to achieve this goal as explained below.

It seems I am having difficulty communicating with potential angel investors in order to be sure the innovations I design for anonymity (coin and network) and decentralization (solving the problems plaguing Bitcoin with scaling and also making mining centralization very unlikely) are developed and launched, because it is difficult for a myraid of individuals to each individually implement the required computer security. I think it asking too much from individuals and it is also not a very secure paradigm to have myself communicating to numerous individuals all of which I have assumed are running a sufficiently secure setup. If any one of them screws up, then my anonymity (plausible deniability since everyone knows I am working on "something") and privacy (encrypted communication) is destroyed.

Also all this communication is eating away at my time for doing actual development work (coding, white papers, etc). Thus I need to make one very long message now and try to clear up all points so I can go back to my programming cave and be mostly undisturbed while others handle the community.

Thus I am contemplating a change in organizational and communications strategy, which I hope to coordinate and announce within a day or two (maybe three maximum).

I am trying to find one individual capable of implementing the required security setup and who is willing to be the communications hub for the controlling group of the project that will incorporate my innovations. I will be able to communicate securely with this individual and to make my contributions to the project anonymously and securely. Everyone else will be able to communicate to this individual using normal means of insecure communication. In other words, this anointed individual would become the public face of the controlling group of the project, thus relegating me to a publicly silent anonymous contributor role. My communications to the community would come in the form of math and text in white papers, source code, and contributions to text and concepts in marketing and communication communications. But never sent directly from me, and often copy edited to remove my particular writing style.

I'd still be there behind the scenes, but I would be doing my best to turn control over to others (who prove worthy and trustworthy) as much as possible, because a project like this can't be just one person in control. It must be a community wide effort.

So I can't pay the math PhD and do other development needs without funding. And the angel investors and the community needs communication about details.

Thus to move this forward, I have one individual in mind for this role if he will accept. If not, I will look for another individual. I might even have two, one as a backup to other. Again I hope to announce this within a couple of days or so. The individual must not be an US citizen, so we can sidestep SEC regulations. This individual may or may not attempt to remain anonymous when communicating with the community and angel investors other than myself (will discuss with that person).

So what I want feedback on now (in private message or in public post your choice) is who will be interested in availing of being able to place a small BTC angel investment in this project with this new project communications paradigm?

I'd say investments should range in the $3000 - $20,000 range, but perhaps less than $3000 will be accepted. We don't need too much angel investment. If I don't need to go to Australia for fecal transplant before launch of the project, then that is perhaps $5000 - $10,000 less that isn't needed. My health feels fine today. Getting out to the gym yesterday seemed to rejuvenate me. My eyes are still a bit sore, but hopefully they will fully rejuvenate with more frequent gym days and less frequent 16 hour work days.

I'd love to see say 5 - 10 angel investors, so that there is a solid base of support and interest at the earliest stage.

Who doesn't wish they had sold that pizza for BTC10,000 back in 2010. Taking on a little bit of risk in something that looks very promising is how you go from being average to wealthy. Speculators take small punts on projects with huge upside. This project fits that description in spades. Nearly no overhead. No manager leeches like Ethereum. Purely funding coding.

Angel investors receive a special offer. They receive M x their investment in $us dollar in terms of coins at the first ICO, where M is the number of months (divided by 2) that elapse between the placement of their investment and the first ICO. Originally I wasn't going to divide by 2, but the reality has shown me that development takes longer than I anticipated thus realistically we must divide else we give too great of a % of the project to the angel investors which would thus appear to be a premine which would kill the project. I am also wondering if the community thinks divide by 3 would be more fair than divide by 2?

In other words, let's say at the first ICO, the community values the project at $1 million market cap with 10 million coins projected, thus a price of $0.10 per coin. So someone who invested say $5000 in late August and assuming first ICO in January, would be getting a M = 2, thus $10,000 of coins divided $0.10 = 100,000 coins. Obviously I think the first ICO will valued more in the realm of $10 million market cap so the angel investor would get only 10,000 coins. I am hoping for that sort of result and am striving to make sure the first ICO will be very enticing.

If development takes longer than anticipated (which can happen because of all the issues), then angel investors in August or September might end up with a M = 3 multiple by the first ICO. Does anyone feel this is insufficient motivation for the risk of investing early?

Angel investors can also get early insight into details so they can be better poised (i.e. prepared and informed with ample time to think over) to make a decision to buy more coins in the early ICOs at lower prices than latter ICOs.

The plan has been (unless we receive severe admonishment to do otherwise) to launch a coin with a series of ICOs, not just one. Each ICO would follow the prior one by a month or perhaps two (needs to be decided by the community). Each ICO would be 2X more coins than the prior one. Each ICO will be an auction format, where participants place a bid & qty in a transparent auction and then at the close of the auction, the top bids are filled and the rest refunded from the escrow agent (of course the community must select a trusted escrow agent who has a great reputation or perhaps we can design some sort of block chain escrow that is automated). The point of this is everyone can see the bids and adjust their bids during the auction period, so that there is a market pricing effect. We want an honest market result. This also insures the controlling group can not get any of the funds until after each (monthly or bimonthly) auction closes, thus the controlling group can not bid in the auction using other bidders' funds. This provides a mathematical proof that the controlling group can not own more than a certain amount of coins by the time all the planned ICOs are completed.

For example, assuming there will be 10 millions coins sold in ICO, the ICOs might be:

   32,768 x 10
   65,536 x 10
  131,072 x 10
  262,144 x 10
  524,288 x 10
-------------------
1,015,808 x 10 = 10,158,080 coins

The calculation for the maximum coins the controlling group could retain if they used all the proceeds of the auction to purchase their own coins of each subsequent auction is as follows.

Assuming the market driven auction price of the coin was constant across all ICO auctions, the controlling group could purchase 0 coins in first auction, 32,768 x 10 coins in 2nd auction, 65,536 x 10 in 3rd auction, 131,072 x 10 coins in 4th auction, and 262,144 x 10 coins in 5th auction. Thus the controlling group could own at most 491,520 x 10 coins or 48% of the ICO money supply.

Assuming the market driven auction price of the coin increased by 100% of each subsequent ICO auctions, the controlling group could purchase 0 coins in first auction, 16,384 x 10 coins in 2nd auction, 32,768 x 10 in 3rd auction, 65,536 x 10 coins in 4th auction, and 131,072 x 10 coins in 5th auction. Thus the controlling group could own at most 245,760 x 10 coins or 24% of the ICO money supply.

Assuming the market driven auction price of the coin increased by 300% of each subsequent ICO auctions, the controlling group could purchase 0 coins in first auction, 8,192 x 10 coins in 2nd auction, 16,384 x 10 in 3rd auction, 32,768 x 10 coins in 4th auction, and 65,536 x 10 coins in 5th auction. Thus the controlling group could own at most 245,760 x 10 coins or 12% of the ICO money supply.

The point is that no matter what happens with the prices of the ICO auctions, the maximum stake of the controlling group can be mathematically calculated.

The above calculations assume that the controlling group offers no bounties and pays for no development from the time of the first ICO until the last, which is not going to be the case. The controlling group is going to be attempting to spend the funds as quickly as possible to distribute the capital back into the community and drive the development of the coin and related ecosystem network effects as much as possible in order to drive up the price of the coin. The controlling group ideally wants to end up with about 1% or less of the money supply (and be abundantly wealthy enough from that). Selfish ecosystems don't scale and thus the controlling group would be the loser. I am not going to participate in any scam nor pump and dump. One of the reasons for doing ICOs instead of distributing the initial coin supply via mining, is so the capital of the community doesn't go to electricity and hardware manufacturing companies which return us no network effects. Instead the funds will be spent on development! So we have all the ease-of-use wallets, decentralize exchanges, etc. that we need. We can also integrate with other ecosystems such as Bitcoin and any others that have a large base (Nxt may still have a large base of investors for example).

I think one of the issues that plagued Monero for example is they don't have a lot of funds to spend on development, because the didn't raise any funds in an ICO. Thus no one is in charge and thus nothing really gets done fast in terms of new innovations, GUIs, etc.. Monero is starting to get some of those developments now, a year after. And there are much bigger developments that need to be accomplished that I presume Monero can not afford to develop, for example replacing (or improving but realistically replacing is what will happen) Tor, I2P, and Bitmessage with anonymity networks that are provably anonymous. That sort of development is a huge scale project that Monero could never afford to fund.

Also distribution of the ICO by mining is not really fair at all. Those with the most technical insight get most of the coins. How is that a diversified distribution? For example for Monero, I read that the guy who optimized the hash algorithm, first mined $150,000 of XMR for himself! There are these GPU miner coders who latch onto the launch by mining and make a business out of making secretly coded optimizations. All this crap interferes with a transparent market! We need transparent markets that any JoeBlow can participate in. More wide participation means more popularity, more network effects, and more ecosystem.

Also note that on launch, the community will be skeptical and thus early ICOs will receive less interest than latter ones as momentum builds and developments proliferate. This is why the price will likely be higher of subsequent auctions even though the supply of coins is increasing. The first ICO will probably be with the coin on a testnet, so that will be for those who have more insight and confidence than others. The second ICO would be pushing it out to the public network and working out any kinks, so still there will be some doubters. Maybe by 4th ICO, the various GUIs have matured, decentralized exchanges have been integrated, etc.. Thus I am thinking bimonthly is better than monthly, so there is more time for developments to accumulate (aggregate) between ICOs.

The model for distribution of coins has been most of the coins distributed at the start and fewer and fewer later on. This means all cryptoland has been essentially a pump and dump! If we want to distribute the coin widely then we should increase the # of coins distributed in latter ICOs and work hard to accelerate developments and momentum along the way. In that way we show the community that we are about long-term investment and not quick pump and dump for the early investors. This shows we are confident in our superior technology and our ability to drive developments forward for an ecosystem and network effects.

There will be mining of course and debasement due to mining, but this will not be detailed now because it is somewhat different due to the different design of a proof-of-work system that has the attributes that I mentioned in my prior post. The salient point is that the debasement due to mining will be very small, at most a few % per year. So most of the coins over the medium-term will be due to the ICOs.

If anyone can see a flaw in the strategy, please point it out to me in a public post or private message.

Investing as an angel investor at this time would be a way to diversify some of your investment out of BTC for the coming collapse in BTC prices. Your angel investment is locked in $us dollars.

Also note the first ICO is likely to come later this year or early next, thus the subsequent ICOs are likely to come after the project March/April bottom in the prices of gold and BTC. Thus another reason the subsequent ICOs are likely to be at higher prices than the first and second ICO.

Timing is very important and looks like all the timing is falling right into place. We got lucky.

Hopefully the above message demonstrates what sort of rational, fair, analytical, mathematical, astute, insightful developer I am. It is time we do things smart in cryptoland.

P.S. Some practical advice about your BTC. Apparently Gavin is going for a hard fork in March, so the chaos coming to Bitcoin land might contribute to the coming low which I am thinking will be back in the double digits, or at least below $150. Again I think BTC is a private asset in Armstrong's model, thus will be roughly correlated with the coming final capitulation in gold down to < $700. It is everyone piling on short, that drives the extreme low and then the short covering that sets the bottom. The bulls will have been separated from their capital by then, so they will be hiding in some corner licking wounds. So my thinking is you want to sell or hedge your BTC about now. We might get one more run up to $325 +/- $10 at most or we might not. Hedging crypto can be done on Bitfinex or Poloniex. I won't vouch for the reliability of any exchange. A third option is to purchase Nubits. I studied the model and it seems it might hold up, but again I can't vouch for it. Or just sell and hold $us dollars.

...

US$ is not a bad solution for the short-term.  And the "short-term" could drag out if there is a DEFLATION, making US$ a good hedge.

trollercoaster is in "Oz".  So, much of his assets are there.  Holding some US$ is already some diversification.  I don't know what's going to happen re Australia's and America's currencies.

My preference has always been to being extra-diversified.  TPTB is not impressed with my efforts, but I am reasonably happy with my present diversification program (involving Peru where our company is as well as lots of different assets including physical gold).

But, TPTB has shown himself to be a very smart & informed guy.  There is much to be said for preparing for a Knowledge Age as he has discussed.  And he is AT LEAST partly right, I am just too old to learn much.

Gold hasn't hit bottom yet (according to Armstrong) so I'm stacking up on $ to get in when all hope is lost, hopefully 

I'm curious as to why you'd want to be holding US$, since there are far better uses for your money instead of keeping it in an ever-inflating currency. have you considered gold or other precious metals? I know it seems ironic, considering the nature of this thread, but you probably still live in a free country, right?

Yer crazy shit happening more and more frequently, my goal for now is to hold US $ while everything else falls apart.

...

trollercoaster and amigos

A lot of weird stuff is happening re China now.  I have little doubt that those who say that Chinese economic numbers are made up (hey, if the USA is doing it...).  China is a black hole of trustworthy information, nothing good comes out.

There is a fair amount of speculation (last I read, things may have changed) about exactly what happened in Tianjin.

Nonetheless, this gold, Bitcoin and bearing guy is avoiding any investments directly involved with the BRICS.  I write "directly involved" because almost everything is tied one way or another to what happens in China now.  But, this thought really is more of a "Martin Armstrong" one...

Tianjin explosion

https://youtu.be/fPEB4nG6jJI

I'm not surprised that they're attempting to tax gold, countries around the world have managed to dig themselves into a huge amount of debt and they'll need any form of revenue to try and keep them afloat.

I wish the saying "Money makes the world go 'round" was still applicable, but it seems like that it's now "Debt makes the world go 'round".