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Topic: Is a Madmax outcome coming before 2020? Thus do we need anonymity? - page 30. (Read 102814 times)

hero member
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Add the following linked post written by myself to my archives of explanations of the power vacuum, the end of stored capital, etc.:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4757&cpage=1#comment-394401


CoinCube, indeed the only known algorithm for global maximization (of an entirely unpredictable solution space) is a repeating cycle of random jumps followed or preceded by some gradient method, such as gradient descent or Newton's method. It is generally impossible to always find the global minima without the random jumps because the gradient method can get stuck in a higher valley (of the N dimensional solution space). Also in real life the solution space is dynamic and there are a plurality of simultaneous minima searches which are interacting with and modifying the solution space for others. Indeed there must be some order (i.e. not infinite entropy) otherwise there are no reference points from which to form any judgment of quality of position (c.f. my blog article The Universe). In my universal theory (which is partially elucidated in my blog article The Universe and spread out over numerous forum posts else where), a black hole is matter disordered (high entropy) than can be perceived by our judgments, i.e. I haphazardly posited more disordered than Planck's constant. I have not formed an understanding whether black holes must have infinite entropy. I need to study (the math of) them more. I expect the math to point out that only a lonely, unprovably existent God could have infinite entropy, but then he would be all alone with no recognizable patterns to join such an omniscient God.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4757&cpage=1#comment-393293

Quote from: me
I posit that Eric is smart enough to recognize his mistake. Eric, you are conflating the mathematical duality of the inductive construction of the universe with the coinductive construction of infinity.

Quote from: Eric S Raymond
> First, give up one of omnibenevolence, omnipotence, or omniscience.
> Then we could talk contingent existence.

Indeed it would be impossible to construct an INSTANCE that is simultaneously all good, all powerful, and all knowing, because nothing imperfect could be constructed. Perfection would require infinite degrees-of-freedom, thus a dynamic, competitive world could not exist– the Second Law of Thermodynamics could not exist.

In type theory, top is the inductive bound and bottom is the coinductive bound. Top is the intersection of all types and bottom is the union of all types. Thus bottom can never be constructed as an instance, yet it exists as type bound.

Shift your frame-of-reference into the type of types domain of the universe to find the existence you claim is impossible.

Note that the operations (e.g. methods of a class) of an inductive type are a coinductive type and dually vice versa, e.g. the top class type contains the union of all methods of all types in the universe, thus can not be constructed. And dually, the bottom class type contains the intersection of all methods of all types, thus can be constructed.

Quote from: me
Quote from: Eric S Raymond
You’re uttering nonsense. The relationship between mathematical theory and observed reality is not even nearly that simple.

I understood your tripartite impossibility claim to be that a good God would not be powerless to make good all that is in the universe.

The claim is illogical in several orthogonal ways.

1. Good does not exist without evil. Perception requires contrast.
2. Good is evil, and vice versa, from different perspectives.
3. Some cases of global or greater good require local or lesser evil.

Essentially by implication you claimed that infinity (infinite degrees-of-freedom to attain good at all possible perspectives) must be observable, else it is impossible. Or by implication you claimed that we can prove the universe is finite, thus the necessary degrees-of-freedom would be observed and achieved by such a God.

Some theories of the universe posit that infinity exists as an unreachable bound in some domain, e.g. entropy, space, time, or precision. True or not, we can not prove that infinity does not exist as unreachable bound. Your claim of impossibility is too strong. Such a God can not provably exist, because we can’t observe for infinite time, precision, etc..

A possible interpretation of your linked essay on math, is that an infinite universe can not be completely described by any finite set of theories or axioms.

Infinity can not constructed inductively from a starting point, because infinity (final unreachable bound) can not be observed.

Whether it exists or not, infinity or the finite bound is decomposed co-inductively as observations directed towards its final unreachable or finite bound that we can not prove is final.

How sad a finite universe would be, where the scientific method could be shelved and knowledge would cease to expand at some finite bound. The scientific method requires that we never trust a bound (e.g. Planck’s constant precision) as final and continue searching and testing forever.

Quote from: me
Quote
> I read JustSaying’s comment and maybe I don’t know enough math to appreciate what he is saying

Induction is the construction of expressible structure, e.g. defining the natural numbers with an iterative function. Co-induction is the decomposition into parts from a structure that is unknown a priori and not until all parts have been enumerated, e.g. reading a stream:

http://tunes.org/wiki/algebra_20and_20coalgebra.html

There is a tradeoff between expedience and getting stuck in local valleys (which can in the power vacuum of democracy morph the solution space towards zero entropy if there are no independent movements) and directionless randomization that never converges on any recognizable qualities (i.e. order).

Anonymity is not infinite randomization. It in theory increases the degrees-of-freedom (options) for the individual human actors in the economy, but it doesn't eliminate (and rather stimulates since it discourages the collective backstop) the economic incentives the humans have to optimize their individual outcomes. Optimization of individual economic outcomes (as contrasted with group-wise optimization) is a form of local gradient method.

So what is the informational value of the collective (aka socialism) which appears to me to be chains on our individual ankles? What do we lose by discarding it so that individuals can optimize more freely?

The collective had high utility when we needed to apply large quantities of manual labor in the industrial revolution. It enabled us to find collective balances between slavery and unionized labor, so as to prevent the capitalists from the unoptimal outcome of squeezing blood from a turnip, which could possibly have stifled the individual creative development which provided for our current knowledge age. In other words, it was the necessity of stored capital because of the negative scaling law of physical economic processes, which required lower degrees-of-freedom (i.e. lower entropy). Technology has advanced and we can now eliminate much of this requirement for stored capital with the positive scaling law of for example computer programming (and other hitech that can be done more efficiently individually without capital requirements). In order words, the granularity of economic optimization has moved to the individual from the corporation. Study the Theory of the Firm[1] to see why the utility of the corporation is dying too.

But now the economic solution space has changed , c.f. my upthread (or in my archives) points about positive scaling law and the Mythical Man Month. Stored capital and manual labor are dying. We are now moving to a new freedom of the individual where capital is what is stored in one's brain, and money will be a more ephemeral unit-of-exchange.

Thus to move forward we must destroy the old order which has lost its utility and is standing in the way of progress.

This realization is not random, rather a reasoned judgement, so there is no infinite randomization involved here. Yet it is also derived from the high entropy that enables me to be unique, think of it, and freedom-of-speech to write it. Note the current dying top-down socialism is starting to outlaw freedom-of-speech. We will soon have the technology to tap directly into the brain's thoughts, so then a powerful totalitarian collective could outlaw freedom-of-thought!


[1] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4867&cpage=1#comment-397546

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3753&cpage=1#comment-328383

Quote from: me
@Tim F., neither Metcalf nor Reed’s Law correctly models the human networking effects, because there isn’t only one category that is to be grouped pairwise (Metcalf) or N-tuples (Reed’s Law). However, categories (topics that cause people to interact) are numerous and often the participants’ set is temporal yet the interaction record is archived and persistently spawning new interaction. People can be in more than one grouping simultaneously, and even temporarily but persistently because they can put it down and forget about it, yet pick it up later at will. Many people remark that Google is their external memory. The Dunbar cognitive limit (~150) on human social groupings applies where we interact with those in the group personally. Technological groupings are not necessarily so limited, because for example with DCVS, it is possible for the effort of some group, to be taken up and extended by other people, without participants even being aware of each other. Although a particular case of interaction may reach diminishing marginal utility, new cases of groupings are spawned. This is life in action, it requires new births and deaths.

Bottom line is that paradigms which are decentralized are able to grow at exponential rates, because plurality of actors are not as retarded by top-down management bandwidth. The linear market-share growth of Google requires an exponential growth of nominal units, and this is possible because Google is not trying to doing everything top-down, but instead allowing network effects.

The analysis of any particular company’s or person’s strategy is not so interesting to me, because by definition of the Theory of the Firm, every company exists because there is some friction in the free market which enables the firm to arbitrage and take a rent on the active capital doing the work (e.g. $345 billion to Apple shareholders, only $3 billion developers market). In other words, I view management as necessary because of friction. One set of people sees the friction and attacks it with management and makes money doing so successfully. Another smaller set of people, sets off to create technology that eliminates the friction (i.e. democratization via technology, e.g. the personal computer). Those who battled the friction with brute-force eventually reach the natural limit of growth that coexists with the friction, and then those who created the technology to eliminate the friction take over to eliminate this limit. This is the cycle of life. The former is order directed, the latter is disorder directed. The thermodynamic (entropic) universe is on an overall perpetual trend towards eliminating friction, i.e. order. Along the way there, we build some temporal orders as stop-gap measures. Often we need these orders to get the work down to eliminate the friction that caused the order.

Google’s strategy is to increase as fast as possible, the number of people using the web, because their revenues are correlated. They are employing network effects to commoditize the web access devices, and marginalize the telcoms and others who might try to retard the exponential growth rate of the WAN participation. For me it is not a question of who is good or evil, because every person and every corporation is both. Every actor in the markets is playing their role.

Quote from: me
Regardless if one asserts that Apple doesn’t want to lower its “quality” to serve some markets, the mathematical model of lower degrees-of-freedom applies. The degrees-of-freedom on who can ship a legal iPhone clone or fork, is zero. Amazon will be serving Android to new markets that it wasn’t already reaching. This is a new grouping of users, developers, and it will to some extent be an orthogonal ecosystem, yet still adding value back to Google’s main goal. This is an example of the grouping power stated in Reed’s law, even there will be groups within the Amazon fork group. The potential groupings are limitless, Amazon could even add social networking features for developers to interact with users, etc, etc, etc, let your creative imagination run wild and if Amazon doesn’t provide a feature users want, other groupings can potentially spawn in the Android ecosystem. Meanwhile back at the walled garden, iCloud will have a more control of the “right way(s)” to interopt and group, and no alternatives are even potentially possible.

Degrees-of-freedom is the number of points in the network that are free to interconnect (i.e. provide fitness), e.g. think of the links in a bicycle chain for bending fitness, and in general these can be communication pathways, open source code, etc. These utility of these potential groupings due to increased degrees-of-freedom, are not always possible due to various frictions that I mentioned in one of my earlier comments, e.g. resources, legal (patents), political, vested interests, etc.. The potential exponential permutations from degrees-of-freedom exist and although the utility can be constrained by a lack of degrees-of-freedom else where, this model still needs to be respected, because a paradigm shift is where a blocking order is removed and the blocked degrees-of-freedom are unleashed in a period of rapid change. Note that blocking order is some friction, and friction is the transactional cost in the Theory of the Firm. Corporations only exist because of friction. With an ideal world of no friction, every human being would be his own company. The world is headed that direction, even though we have peaking fascism and debt at the moment. To an increasing extent passive capital (shareholders, stored money, usury finance) is peaking and will decline, with active capital (knowledge) taking a greater proportion of the value created. This is why I think Apple’s $345 billion valuation with only a $3 billion app market is an unsustainable balloon.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3689&cpage=1#comment-321944

Quote from: me
The fundamental problem is that in a material world, the transactional cost in The Theory of the Firm (thanks Winter), enables the corporate capital to accumulate faster than for those who produce the knowledge. However, I think we are entering a radical paradigm shift, where knowledge (the mind) becomes much more valuable than material production. Because industry can be automated (see the $1200 3D printer) but the knowledge isn’t static and can’t be automated.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2839

Quote from: Eric S Raymond
To answer these questions we need to go back to the basic Coasian theory of the firm, in which corporate scale is driven by the difference in communications and transaction costs between the interior of the firm and the exterior; the higher that difference, the more internal diseconomy of scale you can tolerate and still win. Now consider a business environment in which that difference is steadily dropping (because faster, cheaper communication is lowering overall transaction costs). The optimal competitive size of firms drops with it.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4946&cpage=1#comment-401597

Quote from: me
Quote
   I don’t want to earn less

What I really want to maximize is my earnings in knowledge. Money is just one fungible way of representing that, but it is more important for me to have a repository of knowledge that I am maintaining and it is sending me food and other material needs every day. The stored wealth should be in the knowledge, not in money that sits there and is stupid extracting rents and (not only) retarding civilization (but also enabling gaming production by statism leading to horrific societal busts via delaying annealing to technological acceleration).

Quote
   The point is that all the programmers get the wealth

The point is cut out the parasites by eliminating the impedance mismatch that provides the Theory of the Firm (thanks again Winter for turning me on to that some years back). So all of us earn more, and civilization improves.

As for those designers who are afraid of losing revenue without total control freak gardens, you are actually giving (a portion of) your work to the stockholders instead and being controlled (or retarded) by a paradigm of collective retardation.

Quote
   The danger is that there may well be no way to monetize the mindspace. People’s expectations are that they can get it all for free, and those who try to monetize what used to be free tend to face severe backlash.

Agreed. The peaking statism is perhaps funding much of this. Much of this excess stupid monetary capital (including all insurance and retirement plans that invested in bonds) should be wiped out soon, since it is just an illusion of debt being propped up on the backs of the authors in the hitech space in the developed countries and the labor in the developing countries. Then the expectation of free could be replaced with a reality of not many able to fund free software (unless it is paid for in some ancillary way).
legendary
Activity: 1946
Merit: 1055
Lets look at the distinction between the chaos of aggression and the chaos of productivity.  The former is often pure destructive chaos while the latter is the controlled harvesting of entropy to achieve a higher order state.

This is the fundamental bedrock of life itself which has mastered the deadly dance of harvesting entropy.  Absorb too much entropy and the species succumbs so mutation tumors and death. Absorb too little and the species stagnates eventually succumbing to competition from other more entropic/evolved species. Life walks the edge of a razor maximizing the harvesting of entropy.

You haven't defined "harvesting" mathematically. And it appears to have no meaning.

Anonymity allows uncontrolled destructive chaos.

And who are you to judge that individual freedom and responsibility produces destructive outcomes?
I am an anarchist. I believe in the math of optimal fitness.

So my task is thus to show that the math of optimal fitness requires anarchy to be contained and limited.
I accept your challenge.

When I referred to the harvesting of entropy what I meant was that life requires entropy to exist, but critically such entropy must be limited and contained. Entropy/mutation must not be allowed to exceed the error threshold. Error threshold was developed from Quasispecies Theory by Eigen and Schuster to describe the dynamics of replicating nucleic acid under the influence of mutation and selection.

If replication was without entropy no mutants would arise and evolution would cease. On the other hand, evolution would also be impossible if the entropy/error rate of replication were too high (only a few mutation produce an improvement, but most will lead to deterioration). Error threshold allows us to quantify the resulting minimal replication accuracy (ie maximal mutation/entropy rate) that still maintains adaptation.

This can be shown analytically at its clearest in an extreme form of a fitness landscape which contains a single peak of fitness x > 1 with all other variations having a fitness of 1. With an infinite population there is a phase transition at a particular error rate p (the mutation rate at each loci in a genetic sequence). In Eigen and Schuster (1979), this critical error rate is determined analytically to be p = ln(x)/L (where L is the chromosome length). When this mutation/entropy rate is exceeded the proportion of the infinite population on the fitness peak drops to chance levels.

This can be thought of intuitively as a balance between exploitation and exploration in genetic search. In the limit of zero entropy/mutation successive generations of selection remove all variety from the population and the population converges to a single point. If the entropy/mutation rates are too excessive the evolutionary process degenerates into random search with no exploitation of the information acquired in preceding generations.

Thus the optimum entropy rate should maximize the search done through mutation subject to the constraint of not losing information already gained.
Any optimal entropy rate must lie between the two extremes, but its precise position will depend on several factors especially the structure of the fitness landscape.

It is also worth noting that at least with genetic algorithms natural selection tends to reduce the mutation/entropy rates on rugged landscapes (but not on smooth ones) so as to avoid the production of harmful mutations, even though this short-term benefit limits adaptation over the long term.

I see some ying and yang balance ahead. It will sort itself out. There are no absolutes in the universe.

I agree and would argue that this applies to anarchism as well

I would like to stop expending effort writing. So if there are not suitable challenges after this, I will try my best to bow out so I can save my time for some real work.

Fair enough. In the interest of winding down this discussion I will concede that while the argument above demonstrates that entropy must be controlled/limited/harvested to achieve optimal fitness this does not mean we do not need anonymity now or that anonymity will push us over the error threshold for civilization at large. It appears far more likely that we are well below the optimum entropy rate currently and that an anonymous cryptocurrency will take us closer to an optimal state.

As you said anonymity is inevitable regardless of what you do.
Like minded individuals are already working to similar ends http://zerocoin.org/media/pdf/ZerocoinOakland.pdf
Should you lack the time for a response to this post I will not take offence
    
References:
Eigen, M., & Schuster, P. (1979). The Hypercycle: A Principle of Natural Self-Organization. Springer-Verlag.
Ochoa G., Harvey I, Buxton, H. Optimal Mutation Rates and Selection Pressure in Genetic Algorithms. Proc. Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2000
Clune J, Misevic D, Ofria C, Lenski RE, Elena SF, Sanjuán R. Natural Selection Fails to Optimize Mutation Rates for Long-Term Adaptation on Rugged Fitness Landscapes. PLOS September 26, 2008


  

hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 521
practicaldreamer, I coded in 1997 from a Nipa Hut eating only rice and beans (lost 10 - 15 kilos) arguably one of the world's first social network, coolpage.com, which had 1 million users (1% of the internet) and 335,000 confirmed websites (and millions of pages).

I had also been far up in the mountains in Guatemala and Mexico in the early 1990s, where the natives had dirt floors.

I attended inner city schools in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, where my sister and I were the only non-negro students and where they had never touched fine hair and so I had greasy hair from greasy hands stroking my hair.

I've been down to my last penny and slept in car eating only canned food on food stamps. Then accepted a job in 1995 for $80,000 a year and $million stock options the next month (which btw I forsaked to go live in squalor by my choice because I wanted to know the real world).

I've seen a lot man.

(my father was gone during my grade school, he became wealthy later as I entered high school, but I only availed of this for a short period of my life, then I was independent of any assistance)

And the dead weight are not the lower echelon, they are the ones who have been living it up on debt. The lower echelons like me had to fight for it and earn it. Thanks for appreciating that I worked hard and had foresight. In college I made a key observation-- computer programming requires no monetary capital. I observed that one person was more effective than 2 on the same project. I realized I had discovered an inverted scaling law.

At least you admitted that you (almost?) entirely refused to learn the math and the relevant logic. You'd rather paint some sob story to avoid dealing with the science of it. Which is precisely what (refuse to study+read+concentrate, sound bites, personalize issues, fluff, gullible for the propaganda) dead weight people do. And their day of reckoning is fast approaching, regardless of what I do or don't do.

However, it seems (?) you recognized that statism is what holds the lower echelons down? Or were you being facetious?

Technology will open many new opportunities for the lower echelons like I was, who want to strive for success. Because it removes the control of monetary capital, taxation, negative scaling laws, etc..
hero member
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OK - apologies - the pair of you aren't the same person - I am indeed paranoid  Cheesy You are merely two branches of the same tree.


So the gist is - you yourself (Anonymint) were a clean cut sort of kid who worked hard and made good in an industry that you had the foresight to see would take over the world one day. You were the sort of young man that you wouldn't mind your daughter bringing home for tea  Wink . It is therefore far from being your responsibility that those who didn't have your evolutionary advantage/gifts/work ethic/foresight/good looks/appeal to girlfriends mothers have been (and will continue to be) left on that great neo liberal/conservative technological scrapheap of human resources.

    It is indeed a combination of their own inablity to adapt to circumstance (largely due to low IQ levels) and a debt driven economy (which we can blame ultimately (along with the demise of the family,theft of earnings via taxation,substandard educational provision) not on the amoral/profiteering/inadequately regulated/frb banks but on collectivism/socialism/Government/unions/Arthur Scargill  Huh etc ) that has placed them in such dependant and ultimately parasitic predicaments.

   You can justifiably make value judgements on the lower echelons of society by calling them "dead weight" ( "But it will feel like chemotherapy to all those dead weight cancer.") and likening them to a cancer because you really have their interests at heart - plus your ex wife ran away with one such "dead weight" and went to live in a trailer park ?   You are "trying to clean up the mess and cut off their debt funding" because this would never have occurred to those of us not like minded politically to yourself.

    You quote Martin Armstrong extensively as a source of authority (whose analysis of Thatchers demise was that " She was ultimately driven from office because of her Euro-Skeptic Views"  Huh) on all things economic.

  I know I haven't addressed all your thought here - the knowledge economy,the power vacuum, the nature and role of entropy in the socio economic world etc etc - I simply don't have the time (nor inclination if I'm honest) I'm afraid. But I think I'm getting the gist of where you are coming from (?).

     
   I'll leave this thread alone now I think, knowing as I do that nothing good can come from ideas that seem to have their root in individual self interest and the derision of those others less fortunate than ourselves.
   
hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 521
I would like to stop expending effort writing. So if there are not suitable challenges after this, I will try my best to bow out so I can save my time for some real work.

Anonymity does enable the productive to keep wealth from being stolen (by tax, legislation, regulation, and confiscation) but it also facilitates, theft, abuse, murder, fear

Governments have murdered 200+ million over the past century. This was a figure reiterated by former UK Prime minister Margaret Thatcher:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/01/29/cycles-obamas-tax-free-bonds/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/conferences-2/thatcher-address-or-1996-conference/

For example, China killed 57 million in its Cultural Revolution. USA and its allies or surrogates has killed on the order of 10 million in the Middle east.

The killing fields have been temporarily kept subdued within the western nations since WW2, by expanding debt to keep the populace preoccupied. You will see the murderous nature of humans return in the western nations as their debt spigot is turned off.

The police are always the last people to arrive on the crime scene. The lack of anonymity doesn't prevent crime. What prevents crime is when people protect themselves individually, i.e. individual responsibility. Nanny States don't have any positive attributes or outcomes.

Theft is extremely high with taxation, i.e. without anonymity. Don't you see people in government stealing it all in every nation on earth today. This is what the very violent riots in the Ukraine are about now.

Armstrong's solution can't work long-term because of the Iron Law of Political Economics.

Armstrong's solution can only work to increase debt into the developing world as we come out of this crisis 2033. It can only drive us to the final 666 result of complete destruction when the entire developing world has been brought to the same state as the western world today.


Lets look at the distinction between the chaos of aggression and the chaos of productivity.  The former is often pure destructive chaos while the latter is the controlled harvesting of entropy to achieve a higher order state.

This is the fundamental bedrock of life itself which has mastered the deadly dance of harvesting entropy.  Absorb too much entropy and the species succumbs so mutation tumors and death. Absorb too little and the species stagnates eventually succumbing to competition from other more entropic/evolved species. Life walks the edge of a razor maximizing the harvesting of entropy.

You haven't defined "harvesting" mathematically. And it appears to have no meaning.

The unoptimal fitness outcomes from the assassination of a political leader is a very low entropy result. This meant the economy and political system was highly dependent on a central top-down authority. And the economy did not anneal towards individual responsibility and fitness, rather headed towards greater centralization with Communism.

Not doing the assassination would not have improved the matter, because obviously the political and economic system over there was very dependent on one event, i.e. very low entropy. That dead weight had been created over a long period of time leading up to that, i.e. the people were depending on top-down rule and organization. They were not individually self-sufficient. Note in a high tech anonymous economy there can be simultaneously self-sufficiency with individual responsibility while also maximizing the division-of-labor to attain greatest efficiencies.

Anonymity allows uncontrolled destructive chaos. It can be thought of as a form of chemotherapy.

And who are you to judge that individual freedom and responsibility produces destructive outcomes?

I entirely disagree. You fear precisely individual annealing and optimization of the economy.

You fear the optimal. I don't because I trust the math.

Anonymity is the antithesis of chemotherapy, rather as far as I can see it is the only possible cure. But it will feel like chemotherapy to all those dead weight cancer.

Yes it may achieve the goal of limiting the cancer of collectivism but it does so only at great cost to the greater host (humanity)

Giving the youth a pathway to survive in the most humane thing I can do at this late stage in my life.

Consider the alternative with no anonymity and the cancer of socialism will do a megadeath outcome. With an competitive anonymous pathway for people to avail of, the cancer might just collapse rather harmlessly as did the Berlin wall. The dead weight will be destitute, but their offspring will have opportunities and they can probably still eat and have hope for the future (of their children). Boomers might be so selfish many of them may put a gun to their head instead. I can't really judge their lives for them. It is up to them.

For this reason anonymity cannot last. No matter how well designed its very nature will destroy it. Once the acute need for it subsides and tumor of collectivism is contained the majority of the IT community will turn on it. No form of anonymity however well designed will survive that.

I very much doubt that. Once the IT community tastes the freedom, they will defend it vehemently to their last drop of blood of effort.

Do you see how passionate programmers are about ideals of open source.


P.S. We have the technology now to do in vitro fertilization (IVF) where one could design their babies by choosing a mother and father separately and them a surrogate mother to bear the child. We even have the ability to select eye color by fertilizing numerous embryos and doing DNA tests on the 10 cell baby before implantation. Also include stem cell treatments and research.

But some (most) governments restrict these activities. These are the sort of technologies that can flourish in a free market anonymous economy. I am looking forward to such things being readily available to anyone with money to spend.

Maybe what scares you is the loss of top-down control? You fear that people can make and defend their own individual choices? This is the typical comfort blanket of the socialist, that they believe they are somehow protected by some top-down control. But the fact is there are no positive atttributes of the collective, only delayed grotesque outcomes. Who are you (any of you) to tell me what my morals should be? Are you God?

As for quality assurance, that is what private rating agencies did quite well, e.g. United Laboratories (UL) before government took over the role.

I am an anarchist. I believe in the math of optimal fitness.


P.S. I see Eric Raymond wrote something today about the decadent dead weight socialism creates.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5220

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Actually, in a way it would it would be nice to think the wife-beater hypothesis is true and real feminists are off doing something healthier and more useful. Alas, I doubt this is the case; I suspect what we see here is what we get. So, under that depressing premise, what does it look like down the rabbit hole?

The most conspicuous thing is that these women ooze “privilege” from every pore. All of them, not just the white upper-middle-class academics but the putatively “oppressed” blacks and transsexuals and what have you. It’s the privilege of living in a society so wealthy and so indulgent that they can go years – even decades – without facing a reality check.

And yet, these women think they are oppressed, by patriarchy and neoliberalism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and there’s a continuous arms race to come up with new oppression modalities du jour and how many intersectional categories each player can claim.

While these children of privilege are filling out their victimological bingo cards…elsewhere, women are treated like chattels. Raped under color of law. Genitally mutilated. But none of this enters the charmed circle of modern American feminism. So much safer to rage at the Amerikkan phallocracy that provides them with cushy jobs writing about their outrage for audiences almost as insulated from reality as they are. Not to mention all those obliging men who will grow their food, fix their plumbing, mow their lawns, and know their place.

There were pictures. Such pictures! They all look alike, from the cutesy white chicks with hipster glasses to the black WOCs with dreadlocks. It took me a while to figure out why, but I got it eventually. It was like browsing some Renaissance painter’s gallery of fin-de-race noblemen. Such arrogance, such entitlement, all those faces suffused with a a bland and unimpeachable conviction of their own superiority and righteousness. No wonder they fight each other like cats in a sack!

I cannot do justice to the sheer, pluripotent absurdity revealed by these twitter wars; it would take the powers of a Jonathan Swift to do that. I think I may have some light to shed on how it got so hilariously you can’t-make-this-stuff-up awful, though.

Years ago, I wrote about kafkatrapping, and uttered this warning: “At the extreme, such causes frequently become epistemically closed, with a jargon and discourse so tightly wrapped around the logical fallacies in the kafkatraps that their doctrine is largely unintelligible to outsiders.”

I think that is almost exactly what has happened here. While I had certain varieties of feminism in mind when I wrote that, it now appears that I grossly underestimated the degree to which closure had taken hold or would do so. While I wasn’t looking, they went from incestuous to plain ridiculous.

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Ah well. This too shall pass. The university system and establishment journalism are both in the process of collapsing under their own weight. With them will go most of the ecological niches that support these precious, precious creatures in their luxury. Massive reality check a’coming.


http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5220&cpage=1#comment-422859

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>You work on gun rights in the US even though there are people who are desperate for weapons in Syria.

To be analogous to an American feminist I’d have to (a) argue that we shouldn’t arm anyone because violence is bad, or (b) deny that their desperation points at a real problem, or (c) deny that that it’s a problem anyone but other little brown foreigners. In fact I’ve always been in favor of sending weapons to people who want to kill Communists, Islamists, and other enemies of civilization, and said so.

As much as I admire Eric S Raymond's prose and intellect, he rubs me the wrong way (as I do him also) because he as far as I can see he is an inconsistent hypocrite. He spouts off about being an anarchist yet he wants to rescue women in other cultures. Fuck man, I am not going to waste my resources top-down "fixing" other people's culture unless I get some booty for my efforts to conquer their men. And I frankly don't find Middle Eastern women that enticing. I get plenty of booty for a lot less effort.

Let people have their own cultures. Eric fundamentally doesn't understand the concepts of entropy I've been explaining. He didn't understand it when I tried to explain on this blog, and he still doesn't grasp it. If their culture is really inferior and can't compete, then it will go extinct. If their women aren't happy, then eventually their culture will collapse in terms of being competitive in the knowledge age. There is no utility for Eric to pretend he is a God, although I see his ego needs it contrary to his claim. He is welcome to spend his own money on guns and ship them to the Middle East. Or he can go over there himself and fight if he wants. Yet he implies that I should pay for it via taxation.

So yeah really smart guys can still be really emotionally inconsistent sometimes. He basically derives his value as man from his "do good, community gift culture" image of himself and of positive society. Fuck that. I am X-gen. We only got what we competed to get on our own. I will go rescue their women not as a collective USA but by myself if I see one that is worth expending my resources on. For me life is all about competition. Love is about making children (and Eric only has a cat!), and be appreciated because you can compete really well. Westerners have all these silly fantasy emotions about "good".

One thing that really boils my blood are the "do good" westerners trying to fix everyone's life except their own (e.g. paying off their $150 trillion in debt to start with). Fuck man. Matthew 7.

And then he judges others. He fundamentally doesn't understand the inconsistencies of emotions are one of the ways humans anneal in decentralized trial & error fitness to unknown metrics. If I had a period of my life where I was exploring the concepts that basically no human on earth can explain (e.g. God, infinity, existence), then I have know there is nothing irrational (contrary to his razor tongued comments) about exploring it and having fuzzy emotional reactions, because fitness is not all about perfect testability at all times (because as we explained upthread, there is no global metric and even the Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem admits that we can't sample reality without aliasing error unless we sample infinitely, i.e. the signal can't be both band-limited and time-limited).

This guy is smart, but his mirror needs some polishing.

P.S. the typical excuse of someone like Eric is that religions have caused megadeaths, e.g. Inquisition, but again fuck that man! We have technology. Use it! Every man has to compete to protect himself and win. This is nature! It is about as realistic to think about eliminating or fighting religion as eliminating or fighting hurricanes and tornados. And atheists have religions too, e.g. feminism, idolizing democracy, science as an absolute truth, etc..
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And this is me 20 years ago (photos taken in mid 1990s):
http://www.coolpagehelp.com/developer.html

BTW- I find talk of "dead weight" offensive. You are one step away from suggesting they all be put in to labour camps. Where's your humanity man ?

Debt, central banking, and democracy (collectivism) create grotesque outcomes because they incentivize people to do wasteful activities and acquire skills which are useless as the next technological wave hits. This has occurred roughly every 78 years as I documented upthread with a link to a chart of the repeating cycle.

Do you know what it is like to not be needed by the economy? Go to India and view 1/3 of the population who can't eat 3X per day and where you can still buy a child especially a girl as they are an unwanted economic burden.

I didn't make the (many of the) westerners dead weight. They made themselves that way by availing of debt. I saw them in high school going college. While I was busy being a computer nerd (also an athlete and popular), they were working in construction, had a 4 X 4 Toyota and a hot chick and a boat on a trailer. Later they had the 10 bedroom house in southern California. My first ex lives in Pacific Palisades and married up to one of these "rich" I assume. I didn't take on any significant debt in my 20s and 30s, except a $5000 student loan (since I supported my own college) which I paid off. I was busy sleeping under my desk creating Word Up, Art-O-matic, Corel Painter, EOS Photomodeler, Cool Page, Turbojet, etc...

The boomers are incredibly inhumane now by prioritizing themselves over the youth. We have massive youth unemployment in Europe (up to 60%) while the boomers legislate lifetime employment for themselves. They are driving the world into the abyss because they don't want the debt bubble to default and be over with, rather to double total world debt to $150 trillion from $75 trillion in 2008. Where is their humanity?

Please don't blame it on me that people destroyed themselves. I am trying to clean up the mess and cut off their debt funding so that we avoid the Mad max outcome, because they are incapable of controlling themselves collectively due to the Iron Law of Political Economics which is linked to and discussed upthread.

Armstrong explained how socialism destroyed the family unit:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/01/what-socialism-destroyed-govt-shutdown/

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/12/09/taxes-alter-behavior/
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Am I missing something here or is Coincube and Anonymint the same person ?
  
Could be the coincidental meeting of two like minded people - combined perhaps with Coincube being a highly "suggestible" individual I suppose - and apologies if that is the case.


I got a good laugh out of that one. I have been called many things in my life but I have never been called suggestible before. Stubborn yes, arrogant check, a know it all (heard that a few times) but suggestible is new. That cracked me up.

You have my assurance that I know nothing of programming that I am not making an altcoin and that I am not a figment of AnonyMint's imagination.  Cheesy

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Am I missing something here or is Coincube and Anonymint the same person ?

The language/vocabulary is very similar - as well as the value system expressed in the posts.
  
Could be the coincidental meeting of two like minded people - combined perhaps with Coincube being a highly "suggestible" individual I suppose - and apologies if that is the case.

But it could also be that Anonymint has himself created Coincube as his personal foil thereby giving his theories more gravitas and a Socratic dialogue type dynamic  Wink. This, along with an incisive exposure of the truth via a kind of good cop bad cop type routine.

No offence intended either way - its easy to be paranoid these days.


BTW- I find talk of "dead weight" offensive. You are one step away from suggesting they all be put in to labour camps. Where's your humanity man ?

legendary
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CoinCube aren't you missing from your analysis that:

1. Knowledge Age can create anonymity, so it will.

2. Anonymity in theory enables the productive to keep it from being stolen (by tax, legislation, regulation, and confiscation) by the unproductive.

As far as I can see, we only have two choices:

1. Anonymity and enable the technologically productive to cast away the dead weight.

2. The dead weight drags us down into an abyss Dark Age as the "99% target the 1%" and the socialism taxes and destroys everything that is productive.



I agree with your points above in regards to the immediate future and the inevitability of anonymity.

Conflating chaos of aggression with the chaos of productivity appears to be your error.

Here is where we do not yet have consensus. I believe your entropic theory contains the following oversimplification.

The entropic theory of knowledge states that entropy should be maximized to increase the degrees of freedom in the economy and thus maximize prosperity. I would assert that the goal is not the maximization of entropy per say but rather the maximization of the harvesting of entropy to achieve a higher order state.

Lets look at the distinction between the chaos of aggression and the chaos of productivity.  The former is often pure destructive chaos while the latter is the controlled harvesting of entropy to achieve a higher order state.

This is the fundamental bedrock of life itself which has mastered the deadly dance of harvesting entropy.  Absorb too much entropy and the species succumbs so mutation tumors and death. Absorb too little and the species stagnates eventually succumbing to competition from other more entropic/evolved species. Life walks the edge of a razor maximizing the harvesting of entropy.

Anonymity allows uncontrolled destructive chaos. It can be thought of as a form of chemotherapy. Yes it may achieve the goal of limiting the cancer of collectivism but it does so only at great cost to the greater host (humanity). I agree it may be needed at this juncture, but only because the majority of humanity is currently engaged in collective insanity.

Anonymity without the threat of collectivism is like chemotherapy without cancer it's just another poison.
Anonymity does enable the productive to keep wealth from being stolen (by tax, legislation, regulation, and confiscation) but it also facilitates, theft, abuse, murder, fear and thus limits the maximum harvesting of entropy. The Bitcoin assassination market is only a hint of what can be done.

For this reason anonymity cannot last. No matter how well designed its very nature will destroy it. Once the acute need for it subsides and tumor of collectivism is contained the majority of the IT community will turn on it. No form of anonymity however well designed will survive that.

The problem with Martin Armstrong's proposal of raising awareness and then the people rise up to stop the "99% target the 1%" (where the 1% becomes everybody in stages just see how every country fell into communism and/o fascism)

I would argue that Armstrong's solution is the only optimal long term answer. I agree it won't suffice for the current crisis there simply is not time and humanity is not quite smart enough. Long term, however, it is the only hope of an optimal outcome. The demographic trends you noted in your blog will help facilitate this (may take several generations)

Do we need anonymity?
Sadly for now we probably do.

Do I have any other ideas?
Perhaps consider bifurcating your coin into two versions one with the anonymity  features you are working on and another without. In the long term it seems likely that an anonymous coin will gets us through the crisis but an open coin will become dominate once the crisis subsides.
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See my prior post, I added to it.

CoinCube aren't you missing from your analysis that:

1. Knowledge Age can create anonymity, so it will.

2. Anonymity in theory enables the productive to keep it from being stolen (by tax, legislation, regulation, and confiscation) by the unproductive.

3. What other solution can you propose for the technologically unemployed who have misallocated their human capital (their years), because they were motivated to do so by the debt funded system (now IMF says debt is at 200 year high and I documented upthread that the global debt is $150 trillion) and it is too late for them to adjust?

4. What other solution can you propose for Europeans to hide their wealth from the coming IMF suggestion "financial repression" of confiscating money from Euro bank accounts? Sure they are busy buying land in the USA and else where to hide this money, but of course the G20 is planning to cooperate to track down all of this and confiscate it together (the formation of world governance).


As far as I can see, we only have two choices:

1. Anonymity and enable the technologically productive to cast away the dead weight.

2. The dead weight drags us down into an abyss Dark Age as the "99% target the 1%" and the socialism taxes and destroys everything that is productive.

The problem with Martin Armstrong's proposal of raising awareness and then the people rise up to stop the "99% target the 1%" (where the 1% becomes everybody in stages just see how every country fell into communism and/o fascism), is that the people are not employable. Oxford University predicts 47% of all existing jobs will be replaced within the coming 19 years.

People are accustomed to being entitled do not accept their fate for as long as they can vote for someone like Obama who promises them a solution.

We are headed into a war between the technologically productive and the dead weight. We can go anonymous so the dead weight can't interfere, then that unfettered free market can begin to devise new opportunities for the dead weight who are so motivated by their destitution. For example, online education will make radical advances.

http://thenextweb.com/dd/2012/10/21/so-you-want-to-be-a-programmer-huh-heres-25-ways-to-learn-online/#!t7iiN

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article20857.html#comment92344

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/01/24/education-waste-of-time-money/

http://silverstockreport.com/2013/edumacation.html



A few links of the timing of the slide back down from the current deadcat bounce since 2008.

The global economy has turned and the flow is out of emerging markets into dollar and euro and the euro will crack when the IMF suggested 10% confiscation of all bank accounts begins probably this year (then the dollar will move to 118 by Sept 2015 when the strong dollar will strangle the US economy):

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/01/25/the-emerging-market-crisis/

Interesting 14 minute audio on comparing Japan as a prologue to what is coming globally (note I wrote about China upthread a few posts back):

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/01/31/conversation-between-glen-downs-martin-armstrong/

At the following link is a graphical chart of the timing of Armstrong's A.I. computer generated model:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/01/24/europe-outlawing-short-selling-and-there-goes-britain/

The following link talks about the coming attack on private property and production by this collapsing socialism:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/01/24/electronic-money-coming-everywhere-sooner-than-you-think/

In my archives on this site (click my name and show latest posts), I have explained the flaws in Bitcoin that cause me to believe it was planted by the NSA and is designed to condition the people to accept an electronic currency and Bitcoin can easily be taken over by the government. Since all the technologists will have all their profits in Bitcoin, then they will not agree to forsake Bitcoin as it slides away from decentralized to a corporate cartel and/or government fiat.

This is why we need an altcoin that does not have these flaws. And we needed it yesterday.
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CoinCube I know what I want to reply to you and it is along the line of thought in my prior post. But I am too sleepy to compose now. Come back later there will be a reply for you.

Conflating chaos of aggression with the chaos of productivity appears to be your error. Besides the assassination was probably done top-down by the banksters under the guise of a left-wing organization. Who killed JFK, Martin Luther King, etc..

I think it is documented that the elite were funding communist movements and top-down promoting the destruction of the free market and productivity. That is not an increase in entropy.

The fallacy of Bitcoin's Dystopian Future is that we would be better off going into the feudal abyss Dark Age with the technologically unemployed instead of pushing forward with the skilled technologists to create a shiny new prosperity. Not doing anonymity is going to be a more dystopian outcome.

We simply have no choice but to cut off the boomers. They will wallow in trailer parks. Maybe their children will care for them. That last sentence could be a karma retribution for the most-selfish generation and the destruction of the family unit by socialism.
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I believe we will see massive expansion of the fledgling prosperity from the high tech sectors and thus will avert a Mad Max outcome, but this will depend on being able to prevent the bankrupt and jobless masses (without high tech skills) from destroying the high tech sectors with taxation, confiscation, legislation, and regulation. More on that in the next post in reply to CoinCube...

Note either way the bankrupt and jobless masses (without high tech skills) are going to be suffering and this chaos may resemble some of the effects of a Mad Max outcome, yet without the complete hopelessness (and spiraling the abyss of the State gone totalitarian mad without escape routes) since the high tech sector will break away into anonymity as necessary to provide an opportunity for people with skills to prosper.

Mad Max won't happen for a very long time, at very minimum post 2020.

That is not a very long time and Armstrong's repeating cycles point to around roughly 2019 is when the crisis should enter the most violent stage.

His cyclic model says there will be radical increase in financial volatility after Sept 2015 (and note the US govt is funded to Sept 2015 and Senate control looks likely to go to Republicans next year), resembling the 2008 crash but much more severe and this time the central banks won't be able to contain it. We may get a slight deadcat bounce 2017ish, then all hell with break loose after.

The riots and political disintegration is ramping up now in 2014, e.g. severe riots in Ukraine, and will accelerate significantly globally after Sept 2014.




Armstrong has commented on AI where he has vast hands-on experience and he concurs with my point upthread about computation being deterministic and lacking failure (I presented a theory on the fuzzy fitness of emotions, and tie that "trial-and-error" into the upthread discussion on why we need massive failure in trial&error to reach optimal fitness):

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/01/31/understanding-intelligence/

Just as a matter of interest, what do you mean when you say "socialism" ? Why is "socialism" synonymous with government for example ?

I wince when someone hasn't read the thread and expects me to re-summarize. Lazy (dumb, blissful) people are the problem today, as they don't (make the effort to) understand what is going on.


No - I have made, and do make, a lot of effort to understand what is going on. To my mind the problem today isn't lazy/dumb/blissful people that don't make effort to understand what is going on. The problem to my mind is vain pseudo intellectual pedagogues dressing themselves up as the new Jesus Christ.
    I asked you what you meant by socialism as you seem to be using the term in a way that it isn't commonly used - indeed, you often seem to be using a private language.

   Anyhow, its your thread and you can speak in whatever language you see fit I suppose.

You apparently failed to read or comprehend the posts upthread about the Iron Law of Political Economics which describes the power vacuum of democracy.
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TBH this definition of socialism is so broad as to be next to useless - in fact there were more than a few broad brush strokes in those articles.

I disagree with you here.
I started the thread Economic Devistation for the sole purpose of exploring those very ideas.

I could not find any major problems with AnonyMint's economic theories so I promoted them to a wider audience to see if others could see major problems that I could not. The thread is six pages long now and actually pretty technical and tough to read.
So far no major flaws or inconsietencies have been identified.

This does not necessarily mean he is right, but I believe he is at least in his overall macroeconomic analysis. With regards to his solution, however, I still have some reservations.

The natural reaction to the chaos of anonymous decentralized currency is for the populace to blindly embrace increasingly centralized controls on commerce. This could help facilitate the strong, centralized, one-world government most of us on this form wish to avoid. Such a government would get its revenues by tightly reigning in freedom of commerce in order to collect taxes.
 
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Thanks for link. Just read it.

Also read "Central Banks Are Irrelevant" - [and I quote "Hopefully someday the following will be recognized as a canonical essay in the field of economics."  Grin]

In it the author talks about how usury leads to socialism - "I have thus explained that saving (and borrowing) with interest forces society towards centrally managed economies, i.e. socialism."

TBH this definition of socialism is so broad as to be next to useless - in fact there were more than a few broad brush strokes in those articles.

However, FWIW, I did like the sound of Copute and the principles behind it, so good luck with that.



legendary
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    I asked you what you meant by socialism as you seem to be using the term in a way that it isn't commonly used - indeed, you often seem to be using a private language.

When AnonyMint refers to socialism he is referring broadly to collectivism the tendency for society to pool private resources into ever greater centralized control.

Collectivism and its consequences is described in depth in his blog
Understand Everything Fundamentally
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Just as a matter of interest, what do you mean when you say "socialism" ? Why is "socialism" synonymous with government for example ?

I wince when someone hasn't read the thread and expects me to re-summarize. Lazy (dumb, blissful) people are the problem today, as they don't (make the effort to) understand what is going on.


No - I have made, and do make, a lot of effort to understand what is going on. To my mind the problem today isn't lazy/dumb/blissful people that don't make effort to understand what is going on. The problem to my mind is vain pseudo intellectual pedagogues dressing themselves up as the new Jesus Christ.
    I asked you what you meant by socialism as you seem to be using the term in a way that it isn't commonly used - indeed, you often seem to be using a private language.

   Anyhow, its your thread and you can speak in whatever language you see fit I suppose.
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On the government legislating against an anonymous cryptocurrency. BRING IT ON! Of course the technology must be strong enough to survive anything the government can do. And damn it, I mean it. For example, we can eventually go as far as hiding the protocol in HTTPS such that it appears to be regular website traffic.

You have convinced me that your fundamental economic analysis (in the three links below) is correct.
The Rise of Knowledge
Understand Everything Fundamentally
Information is Alive

As I mentioned in another thread these are simply the most insightful piece of economic theory I have ever read.
However, nothing in your analysis above requires anonymity.

Lets start with the premise that your economic analysis is essentially correct (I believe it is).
In this event the rise of the Knowledge Age is inevitable anonymity or no anonymity.
I agree anonymity might speed things up perhaps dramatically, but it does so only at a real cost. The problems of anonymity have been well outlined in Bitcoin's Dystopian Future. These problems only happen with anonymity.

I challenge your assertion that anonymity leads inevitably to maximum entropy. Total chaos can lead to extreme low entropy states.
Take Russia around 1880. Lets look at Narodnaya Volya. Here we have an organization born in a time when the people were slaves. They demanded convocation of a Constituent Assembly (for designing a Constitution); introduction of universal suffrage; permanent people’s representation, freedom of speech, press, and assembly; communal self-government; exchange of the permanent army with a people’s volunteer corps and other ideals.

In their zeal to destroy the state they killed Alexander II the most reformed minded monarch Russia has ever had. He was the man responsible for the emancipation of the serfs. The irony is that he was killed 48 hours before he was planning to release his plans for an elected parliament. Out of the chaos a hardliner oppressive monarchy was born which kept an iron thumb on the people until it fell to a wave in the opposite extreme our good friends the communists. We all know how that turned out. Had these particular anarchist not acted to destroy the state in 1881 Russia may have become a constitutional monarchy and the mega death of Stalin averted.

Others also have also argued that our industrial age leads inevitably to economic crises/collapse and advocated destroying government as a solution.

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The state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities - Karl Marx, Critical Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian’ (1844)  

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. - Karl Marx, Capital

Capital is money, capital is commodities.... By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.
Karl Marx, Capital

Marx was correct in some of his critiques of our industrial age. It was in his solution that he utterly failed.

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I appreciate discussion on anonymity because I don't have 100% confidence that it can be achieved, and also I doubt I can predict all the ramifications. However, I do have high confidence that a significant improvement over Bitcoin is possible.

I never intended for anonymity to eliminate the power law distribution of wealth. I don't think anything can, and I don't even think that distribution is a problem that needs to be solved, i.e. it is a natural result.

Rather I am more concerned that the power vacuum of taxation allows that power law distribution to be unstable where it becomes a cancer that must destroy everything in repeating bouts of severe economic failure, world wars and megadeath.

I explained upthread that if the super rich can't use the captured government to backstop their usury (i.e. socialize the failure of their loans), then they can't grow their wealth as fast as those with smaller capital. Refer to upthread explanations for why. Thus the goal is to recycle the wealth and create new wealthy that replace existing wealthy. This keeps competition and new prosperity high.

So eliminating taxation and thus starving government of funding is my objective. The government will still be able to tax the retail brick & mortar commerce, which is coincident+consistent with the decline of physical industrial age and the rise of the knowledge+information+high tech age.

On the morality of privacy and anarchy, I don't give a f8ck. People are going to do what they are going to do. Competition will sort it out. I don't prefer to enable the big Rockefeller type thieves in order to attempt in vain to stop all small scale thievery and other immorality. The government can try to hold society in an illusion that humans are not immoral, but all the sh8t blows out sideways any way and then one big Madmax outburst later. We simply can't stop immorality. All we can do is compete and allow freedom to run its course.

On the government legislating against an anonymous cryptocurrency. BRING IT ON! Of course the technology must be strong enough to survive anything the government can do. And damn it, I mean it. For example, we can eventually go as far as hiding the protocol in HTTPS such that it appears to be regular website traffic.

Agreed anonymity is difficult to maintain. But if one is clever they might keep part of the life anonymous (e.g. selling dowloaded software) and another part public which they paid taxes on. They might keep the anonymous portion entirely separate and never mix the two.

Also temporary anonymity may be useful to some in some situations.
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Just as a matter of interest, what do you mean when you say "socialism" ? Why is "socialism" synonymous with government for example ?

I wince when someone hasn't read the thread and expects me to re-summarize. Lazy (dumb, blissful) people are the problem today, as they don't (make the effort to) understand what is going on.

Do we need anonymity? In certain contexts yes, of course. But not in all circumstances - especially in a context whereby that anonymity might enable and facilitate the use and abuse of our positions within the community.

Community is the problem. There is no abuse, just different outcomes in a free market. It is irrelevant whether you like the outcomes or not. Go compete in the free market for what you want.

And get your communities' noses out of my privacy.

There are some things that can not be anonymous, e.g. buying from a retail store. The government can always show up there and demand record keeping. There is a high tech economy that can be anonymous, e.g. purchasing downloaded applications for your mobile or computer. Purchasing downloaded designs for 3D printing.
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One potential downside of increased anonymity is the government and the socialism are probably going to target it for destruction.


Just as a matter of interest, what do you mean when you say "socialism" ? Why is "socialism" synonymous with government for example ?


ps. Is a madmax outcome coming before 2020 ? I don't know - I haven't seen the film.

Do we need anonymity? In certain contexts yes, of course. But not in all circumstances - especially in a context whereby that anonymity might enable and facilitate the abuse of our positions within the community.
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