Topic: rpietila Altcoin Observer - page 244. (Read 387493 times)

While I am personally not a tax dodger, there have been plenty of sound cases put forward as all taxes forced by coercion being inherently evil.  Humans were once hunter gatherers, then they began to practice specialization.  That specialization led to abundance, then the parasite class and taxes formed to exploit that, and here we are today.  Paying taxes isn't a patriotic duty, it's you voting towards supporting that particular ideology.

The word libertarian is somewhat based on identifying that system as either a necessary evil, or completely unwanted phenomenon, and minimizing it's effects.  If there's anyone with a logical flaw in their argument, it's probably you.

I'm all for a pseudonymous open ledger, but at the present cryptocurrencies are used primarily by drug dealers, tax dodgers, libertarian wackos, and high risk traders.  So I'll be betting on Monero

So we should launch a bitcoin spin-off based on cryptonote technology and see what happens

I'm on my phone and can't write too much.

I sort of see what some of you are saying but at the same time I think you're missing the potential importance of a crypto currency that isn't based around maintaining a clean open ledger like bitcoin.

A currency like Monero, without a huge focus on a ledger and with its feature being anonyminity will be useful for millions.

It might not be as useful and accepted as bitcoin, but true anonymous crypto currency transactions will be very useful for a lot of people.

To think that the way the bitcoin crypto currency works will be enough for all humanity is a joke.

Even if an anonymous currency went underground and only was used by criminals, it's value would be on par with the legal, safe open bitcoin.

Wow.  

I thought it was just me who'd been having these thoughts about radical open-ledger business and cutting out the corruption.   I'm glad to see someone else going there.

The fact is our current business models are highly inefficient.  We sacrifice up to 50% of the value we produce in virtually every level of marketing.  We'll always need marketing that deep for consumer products, because that's all about exploiting bugs in human neurology; but when we're talking about B2B stuff, it really is a nearly complete waste.  Entire organizations of people are paid millions of dollars to convince three or four other individuals a year to make particular decisions - which those people could make correctly, easily and without their "help," if they just had the financials open in front of them.  

We sacrifice another 10% or thereabouts of total production, just in the premium we pay CEOs and other upper management for having personal connections.  If decisions were made mainly on the basis of (open) information rather than personal connections, the CEO would have influence only in terms of actual  financial judgement talent, and paying for personal connections would be a misallocation.  

We sacrifice actual talent and hard work by promoting well-connected brown-nosers over people who could run the company better.  If the books were open so you could see what kind of results are attributable to whom, you couldn't ever justify that decision to the stockholders.  

Much of the money given by businesses to politicians could be saved for business purposes if the ledgers were open.  Of course that won't be a popular idea with most politicians, but I can imagine some stockholders going for it.

We sacrifice yet more money paying armies of accountants to demonstrate that we haven't been breaking the rules - when anyone ought to be able to demonstrate that instantly, automatically, and without cost, at any time.

And then there's the corruption issue D'Angelo brings up.  Depending on where you're doing business, corruption is not just the norm, it's the dominant form of the whole damned economy.  The thing all of those places have in common is that corruption prevents the domestic economies from producing any significant value.  My God, can you imagine how wealthy the Russians would be if they got out from under the thumbs of their mobsters?  Open books means no room for thieves to stay secret.  

James D'Angelo also makes a great case for full transparency in business. I think this could be revolutionary.   
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC4j-V585Ug

Three brilliant posts in a row, Cryddit.  

I think you just killed the entire "protocol-enforced privacy" alt-coin sector.

In the second place, 'soft' anonymity is not 'no' anonymity.

I accept that Alice and Bob are not going to do business in the real world without knowing who each other are.  Not for any serious, major amounts of money.

That means Alice cannot keep her financial dealings with Bob private without Bob's cooperation, and Bob, likewise, cannot keep his transactions with Alice private without Alice's cooperation.

As long as they cooperate - as long as neither of them releases the key they can use to prove something - then they have privacy.  

That extends to privacy by mutual consent, but it doesn't extend to ripping someone off with impunity.

It doesn't mean someone can look into your ledger and know exactly what you're doing with a third party, without that third party's cooperation.  That's a completely open ledger with no option for even 'soft' privacy, and that would be a *VERY* radical departure.  

In designing an ideal for an open ledger, 'soft' privacy would be my goal.  In fact, even that much should be optional.  If people really want to get scammed and ripped off with 'hard' anonymity, they have that right.  

And if they want to do without even 'soft' anonymity, they should be able to just publish their damn keyring and then sit back and let everybody who can actually offer them better deals than they're getting, come straight to them without wasting their time and resources on the sounding-out processes we now pay sales staff fifty percent of the produced value to carry out.

The point is, I believe people (and businesses) don't want hard privacy.  Until they have enough experience to learn exactly how much they can save on cost-of-sales expenses, they won't want the completely open book either.  Hell, if the salesmen get to make the decision, they'll NEVER want the open book, because it means they'll be unemployed.  But at least in the short run, they just want protection from scammers, so they want 'soft' privacy rather than 'hard.'  They want to be dealing in things that police can trace and courts can recover.

In the first place, those things - those fears - are exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about when I say that values will have to change before a global ledger is *seen* to be a good thing for everyone.  Another way to view all of those situations is,

"Oh, your business model is based on deception and keeping others ignorant?  Here, asshole, let me fix that for you."

'Cause, seriously.  If you're getting away with paying people less than they're worth, specifically by trying to keep them ignorant of what they're worth - doesn't that make you an asshole? 

If someone is getting business when you can make a profitable offer at a ten percent discount under that price - then that person doesn't deserve the business does he?  He's running an ineffective operation. 

If you're giving X a discount for some legitimate business reasons, then doesn't Y have a right to be upset if it can offer the same business reasons but not get the same discount?  Or at the very least if Y can offer the same service, wouldn't it be the right thing for them to be looking for someone willing to give them that discount?

All I see here with the open ledger is more efficient honest business.  People who find that threatening are just conditioned to using less than complete honesty in order to make a profit at an inefficient business. 

That's adorable. Imagine running a multi-million dollar business and having all of your competitors see all of your financial transactions. Good luck getting them on board with that one.

"Why did you give "x" a discount and not us?"
"I noticed you did lots of business with 'x', so we bought them out, good luck!"
"Why does 'x' get paid a higher salary than me? Can you give me a raise?"
"Hello sir I see you're doing business with your long time private partner, allow me to offer you the same service for a 10% discount"
"I see you're taking bids for 'x' project, and now I can see the prices that have been submitted .. let me put in a discount"
...along with hundreds of other problems.

Just not how business is done man. They're not gonna buy into it, because it'll turn normally reasonable people into rats. I can see it sustaining consumerism at best.

But by all means, enjoy the one-man shops and desperate consumers .. anon/private tx's will be inviting the real money. You still have the ability to track transactions with even CryptoNote. I'd like to not devolve this thread into anon vs non-anon though .. it's speculative at best.

When you're buying things the size of a pizza it's mainstream.  And with a pizza there're witnesses who know where it was delivered and know that the payment was received.  (Starting with the delivery driver or the waiter.)

Walk into some car dealership with a suitcase full of cash and try to buy a car without ever showing any ID, and, witnesses or not, you'll see exactly how reasonable people think anonymous transactions for significant amounts really are.

How can you say such things? Cash is mainstream.

Liberty Reserve was 100% anon and maximum privacy (e.g. allowing privat payments: hiding the sender) and worked GREAT, until US govt killed it.
It had over 1.000.000 users from ALL over the world, more then 140 countrys. It was mainstream/short before mainstream.

Don't be silly.

Anonymous currency is fine for buying a dirty magazine and some hand lotion.  

But as the amounts grow larger, the risks aren't worth it.  If Alice has financial dealings with Bob but genuinely doesn't know and cannot discover who Bob is, then Bob will occasionally rip off Alice secure in the knowledge that nothing can be proven.  As this happens more often, Alice will learn to refuse to do business anonymously.  Once you're talking about value that is worth the effort to rip off, you're talking about a negative value proposition for 'hard' financial anonymity.  

What Alice wants, for her own safety, is to be able to later prove that she did make a payment to Bob.  If she can't prove that, she has no legal avenues for recovery if Bob rips her off and, after a few hard knocks like investing in altcoins, she'll learn to refuse to do the deal at all.  If she can prove that, then Bob isn't going to be able to keep his financial records private without Alice's cooperation.  So his financial privacy is 'soft' rather than 'hard'.  

Likewise, Bob, who did receive a payment, wants to be able to prove he delivered or performed   the goods or services he offered for sale; if he can't prove that, then he has no legal avenues for defense if Alice claims she paid him and got ripped off.  If he can prove that, then Alice cannot keep the financials private without Bob's cooperation.  So her financial privacy, like Bob's, has to be 'soft' rather than 'hard'.  

People buying a dirty magazine and some hand lotion want financial privacy, and that's fine.  Although the embarrassment they now suffer will fade away as the open ledger makes it clear how utterly normal such purchases really are.  

But once they're into transactions big enough that they're afraid of getting ripped off?  Then they want to be dealing in assets that the police can trace and the courts can recover.  And if no cryptocurrency gives them that option, then no cryptocurrency will ever be accepted for mainstream use in purchases larger than a pizza.

I think the state is doing a great job of collapsing itself.
I think a bigger cause of the demise of the state, will be a blockchain backed decision making process, making the states secretive and corrupt nature finished. And with that the corruption, wars, etc.

Related will be what technologies like nxt and etherium will do to "business".

I'm not sure of the importance of an anonymous btc. Don't think we even need a separate anonymous currency, but I think regulators may lead to one.

The event horizon here, I think, is more than we can imagine....

It seems to me that the notion of privacy will soon become obsolete. Privacy was really only maintainable as long as humans didn't have the technology for large scale data mining... but as our technology improves privacy will inevitably go extinct. At some point in the future you'll be able to buy a little mini-drone and fly it all over the place taking pictures. Your phone will have an infrared camera so you can see through walls, watch people having sex. In the far future privacy will no longer exist, government or no government.

I don't understand why some people cling onto privacy as some golden ideal that we should all maintain. It's just another element of natural living that's been destroyed by civilization.

It'll be interesting to see if we can reverse the tide from programming standpoint. My guess is that mainstream society will not care enough, however privacy will remain as a niche among those who are passionate about it.

I think anonymous currency will eventually lead to the collapse or crippling of the state.  People will just hide their money and they'll be unable to finance the bureaucracy/control grid that gives them the power to do things like that.  So on one hand, the "global ledger" is a severe globalization and possible enslavement tool, but then anonymous currency counter balances that aspect, or possibly overruns it entirely.

Anonymous currency = Atlas Shrugged

That's absolutely the case.  In fact, someone could probably make a good Ph.D thesis out of trying to create a model that identifies the "lower minima" in cultural/economic space. 

It's relevant to this discussion in terms of whether the world does or does not need a "global ledger." 

I think that a global ledger is an inevitable (and beneficial!) part of an eventual world society. 

When I think of all the crimes and losses that have been caused by misrepresenting financial information, and all the damage to society it has caused, it's heartbreaking.  And then I think of the possibility that there could one day be a "global ledger" where any such claim could be proved by producing a cryptographic key, and that the failure to do so should amount to abandoning the claim.  And I say hell yes.

Bernie Madoff says "I'm making 20% a year on investments!"  Possible investors, if they've learned nothing else, have learned enough to say "sure, show me the key." 

Jim Leeson says "I'm making risk-free investments and earning 18% in the Asian Markets, with no oversight!"  Barents Bank, even if they have been such idiots as to let him operate with no oversight, shouldn't be such idiots as to NOT say, "sure, show us the key."

Altcoin developers say "No, we're not dumping our premine on the market."  Altcoin holders already go look and say, "uhh, the blockchain monitor says you're spending it on something...."  And if the ledger were a global ledger they could go right on and say, " ... and if it's not going to the exchange, then you should be able to give us a key that demonstrates it isn't."  But alas, the ledger is not global, so nobody can tell what they're spending the premine on.

I look at a truly global ledger as at least having the potential to make a decent start on ending financial fraud, and I think that's a good thing.

But that's a "global" value, in that I regard the financial markets as being properly an open record.  Obviously the powerful or rich can spy on everybody's finances now, easily, pervasively, and routinely, no matter what we do.  So privacy as we have known it is effectively over, and now we're falling back on another principle which is equal access.  So by this new standard, obviously any attempt to prevent the poor from having the same power must be seen as an argument in favor of tyranny.  Welcome to the age of aquarium.  If we can't have privacy from everybody, then at least we shouldn't allow a select few to unfairly hog the information all to themselves. 

The "traditional" view of such things -- from back when people actually could somehow keep their financial records private and it required actual human effort and personal risk to discover them -- was that such effort was usually applied only by inimical forces and would-be tyrants, and has therefore a very different model of right and wrong w/r/t privacy over individual financial records.

Excellent post, Cryddit.  

When I read it, I imagined different cultures as local minima (wells) on a big three-dimensional function.  The higher states of civilization have deeper wells, and when they interact with the more isolated cultures, something (I'm not exactly sure what that something is) starts to flow into the deeper well, and this process frightens some of the people watching from the "blue well" in this image below:




Although frightening, I think the process is unstoppable.  We keep falling to a new lower minima.

Civilization is a good thing, mostly.

It's when you get more of it than you're ready for that it causes problems.  

Cultures have inertia, and people need time to adapt.  Someone who grows up in a state of low civilization - say, a small village or a clan structure, using personal reputation, barter or simple 'cash' tokens - does not find it very easy to adapt to a much higher state of civilization - say, a nation state using an infrastructure for banking with payment cards and identity documents and all the rest of that.

This 'lag' isn't even just one generation long; it can take family structures, traditions, and values several generations to adapt to new realities and start producing people who are comfortable with and can effectively utilize the larger structure and all it entails.  

Right now the people pushing globalization, are the ones who'd succeed if it happened.  They understand that once everybody is adapted to it and able to take advantage of it, it'll be better for everybody - but they don't have the cultural memory of their six-times-great grandparents to understand what it would do to everyone else for the next five generations until they all 'catch up.'

And part of that is, people don't WANT to 'catch up' in ways that involve changing what they regard as fundamental bedrock values of right and wrong.  You tell a Polynesian shopkeeper that it isn't okay that when his cousin's getting married and the family just shows up and empties the shop of its inventory to furnish the wedding tables. He'll understand you to be telling him to be a dishonorable person who doesn't support his family.  The cultural Chinese, who've been doing commercial business for many centuries longer, are outcompeting the polynesians in that part of the world because their culture has had time to adapt to the realities of commerce, and they are honorable people who support their families ... by paying for the shop inventory they take when they're getting married, or else staging a smaller wedding.  

This is also the driving force behind militant Islam.  These people have very strong ideas of what is right and wrong, and they have very correctly identified western commercial culture as giving those with "wrong" ideals and motives an advantage.  In economic terms, this means that continued exposure to commercial culture will destroy their old fashioned ideas of right and wrong - where real decisions are made by religious authority and with the permission of the religious community, for example rather than in a permissionless way by whoever has the money to buy the resources to implement those decisions.  And they cannot abide that destruction because to them it is the destruction of their values and their way of life.

I literally cannot fault their logic; they are absolutely right that our entire capitalist way of life WILL choke the life out of religous authority in the long run.  Heck, it already has.  I live in a place where separation of church and state was written into law two hundred fifty years ago, and I like it that way and I think they should too.  Obviously, they vehemently disagree.

Anyway, the whole 'globalism' debate is all about whether we can find ways to be honorable decent people - a system of values that works with globalism and allows us to take advantage of the institutions it will evolve, and tells us what is honorable and decent under that system.  If our culture is still sufficiently tied to other ideas of decency and honor, such that we cannot yet find ways to be good people and also participate, then globalism will be bad for us.

So it comes down to how much and how fast.  How fast can our culture adapt, and how much should we push those who haven't adapted yet?  These become moral questions because adaptation itself changes our ideas of right and wrong.  We, like the Chinese shopkeepers in the area, would see the relatives of that Polynesian shopkeeper as thieves whose actions are morally indefensible.  We see the religious authorities who prevent some types of commerce as obstructionists who are depriving the people of good honest business.  But the moral questions aren't the same from the other side of the line.