Topic: Who could be trusted to do governance? (Read 3434 times)

Most above ground gold never trades nor created. All Bitcoin has been traded or created within the past 8 years.

I wrote precious metals, and r0ach has been pitching silver, so compare the volatility of silver to Bitcoin (roughly the same).

https://btcvol.info/
http://teucrium.com/files/pdf/commoditiesinaportfolio.pdf


No contradiction. I never predicted the scalepocalypse would mean anything other than what it means technically and the centralization of mining.

Bitcoin isn't going to the moon and will die and give away to something better just as will happen to Android, but not before move much higher in value.



Exactly. And Bitcoin is the reserve currency of altcoins.

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Excellent post. Plays right into the theme of my Rise of Knowledge, Demise of Finance essay.

Hell, how can you write that ?  Arbitrary choice of units, comparing 1/16 000 000 of market cap (a "bitcoin", vs mbitcoin, satoshi...) with one ounce of gold (why not a kg, a tonne, ...), which represents grossly 1/ 10^10 of the total amount of gold.  At this moment, bitcoin is less than 1/1000 of gold, and we're counting all lost coins in.  Probably the true market cap of bitcoin is closer to half of the official 16 million coins.  There's Satoshi's lost stash, there are a lot of lost address keys (especially in the beginning of bitcoin)...

It is amazing that you contradict your own prediction, which was brilliant, now that it is being realized: the scalocalypse.  It is happening right under our nose now.  So this will delegate bitcoin to the status of reserve currency for BIG PLAYERS (which are, most of the time, conservative dudes).


Android has no scaling problem.  I would rather say that in as much as this comparison is valid, you are looking at the evolution of alt coins, which are what android is like: many different flavours of the same idea.

@dinofelis regarding our discussion of the utility of Bitcoin:


The market is telling you that Bitcoin is the reserve currency of the experimentation that will unleash all that utility that crypto-currency and blockchains can do which precious metals never can. Bitcoin is now at parity with gold. The pattern of Android below is what crypto is going to do relative to precious metals:

Most probably.  I won't deny this.  I would like to discover them.  However, you might make the mistake to confuse my "utopic view of how the world should be" , my "theory of how the world is" and "what I'm interested in about this world".  These are 3 totally different, and almost unrelated things, and it is true that from one post to another, I jump between these paradigms.

As you wrote somewhere else, you think that I think that we will get rid of government in one generation.  No, I don't think that.  I think it would be a good thing, but it will not happen.  I think government is an unavoidable, but absolute, evil.  However, my idea is that KNOWING that government is fundamentally evil is a good thing.  I think that the best one could do, is make people see that government is the absolute evil.  But this will not work for most, and I know that, because people are gullible - which is exactly the reason why government can exist in the first place.  I'm absolutely convinced, however, that no good can come from any form of government ; that said, there are governments which are less worse than others, in the sense that some forms of government allow people who understand the system, from not being entirely enslaved, crushed and annihilated by it.  I think that that corner is the niche for "distributed/crypto/...".  But by far most gullible people (90% or more of the population) like to be enslaved, are too naive to understand that they are crushed, and cannot be annihilated because there's nothing to annihilate ; and are hence happy collaborators of the government.  They don't need "distributed", or "crypto".  They are all too happy to be part of the system.  They are hierarchical animals, they already started their loss of individuality and are becoming another species, while the 10% or less of us are individuals.  The hierarchical animals are simply another, dominant, species.  So there is simply no hope for individuals to be the dominant species.  We are like the mammals during the Jurassic epoch: the best we can do is live underground, in the shadow of the dinosaurs.  This is where crypto can help.   We want to live as if we were invisible, ignored by the dominant dinosaurs, only come out at night, and hide underground.  It is the only place where individual freedom can hide.  But hey, the mammals survived the mesozoic era !  So, anonymous, discrete, invisible, unknown, "in-existent", the only way to live freely.

In my case, that is sufficient.  My only goal in life, apart from enjoying it, is to understand as much of the world as I can.  This is something that can be achieved in an anonymous, discrete, invisible, and unknown way.  Unfortunately, there are material and other needs that must be filled in, and unfortunately, those expose you to the dangers of recognition, visibility, and hence, all the hatred, theft and violence that goes with the dominant, government-believing species.  Some interaction is difficult to avoid. 

@dinofelis you are very smart (and probably more knowledgeable than me about many things), but (regarding your prior two replies) you have some huge blind spots. Absolutely huge. I could drive an 18 wheeler through your blindspots and you wouldn't even know it.

Sorry I am not up for the tit-for-tat debate right now (very eager, but I know the limits of my scarce available time+energy and priorities). But we'll engage someday...

Hopefully as my delirium fades, I'll think of a way to elucidate to you more convincingly and concisely. As I said, being re-enabled to assimilate more information will help.

What value ?  The actual consumer-happiness value (the ultimate source of all value) by the existence of bitcoin is essentially nothing.  It is that economic creation of value that would not have existed if bitcoin didn't exist.  What is that value ?  What better cars are running because of bitcoin ?  What better food is being eaten because of bitcoin ?  What better education is sold because of bitcoin ?  What markets became more efficient and allocated their resources better than bitcoin ?  I mean, outside of the little crypto world itself ?  Yes, probably a few people are "creating value" by earning salaries when setting up coindesk.com and so on.
But apart from a self-serving little world, what value creation did bitcoin allow that fiat didn't ?
There is, at the moment, only one true application: dark markets.  There is true value creation in dark markets, especially of drugs.  People (consumers) really value drugs a lot.  The value creation for these consumers is huge.  But because of the legal barriers to that value creation, dark markets are risky to do with fiat.  So, yes, value creation happens on dark markets thanks to crypto in general, and bitcoin in particular.

There's another utility, which is related.  Privacy-related services on the internet.  VPN for instance.  This is value creation that is facilitated by the existence of crypto.  

However, on these two aspects, bitcoin is dangerous, because not private enough.  Only crypto with privacy-related features can, in the end, deliver on this.

But how much is this in terms of value creation, as compared to everything done with fiat ?  Crypto has enabled WAY WAY WAY less than 1/30000 of the world's value creation, because essentially all of the market cap of crypto (bitcoin included) is NOT by Fisher's formula for its demand as a use as a currency, but just by greater-fool speculation.  The *REAL* currency market cap of bitcoin is ridiculously small, probably less than 1% of its official market cap.  Remove all hope for "greater fools", let bitcoin's price crash to its level of demand as a currency (its only "value creation enabling" feature) and you end up with the true economic value of bitcoin, which is essentially insignificant.

I think it is.  Of course, not immediately.  Raw processing speed is a *necessary* condition.  But it will become a sufficient condition because what is possible, will happen in this kind of thing.  Simply because it not happening is a meta-stable situation: if it happens once, that's enough, and will introduce the equivalent of a phase transition.  It is like undercooled water.  It has the potential to freeze, but it simply didn't... yet.  One perturbation that starts nucleating the freezing, and the water undergoes a phase transition.
There is no "stabilizing force" that takes any step towards machine intelligence "back again", on the contrary.  Once machine intelligence can improve itself, there's no stopping to the run-away effect.

"neurons" aren't, of course, "processors" in the machine paradigm, but are run-time objects (computer science objects).  In a run-time environment, objects are just as varied as biological neuron types.  The variety of "neurons" in a biological brain corresponds, if you want to, to the class structure of the running software in the object oriented paradigm.   

The "processor" is the underlying layer: the bio-chemistry of neurons, at least the part of the bio-chemistry that is essential for the data processing (the metabolism biochemistry is not necessary).

But again, the idea is most probably NOT that we implement a bio brain imitation in silicon. 


This is not a problem.  You cannot upscale the human brain to a 1 MW processor.  We would simply catch fire.   You can easily upscale a silicon machine to 1 MW.   And cheap energy is available for machines, much more so than it is available for human brains. 

That's what I try to make as a point: the human brain is a brilliant invention of evolution.  But it is what it is, and can only very slowly evolve.  In as much as it is radically altered artificially, it is btw also not a human any more, but a machine.  By definition, a human will be a thing with a current-human like brain.  It has huge capacity and so on, but only very slowly evolving. 
Technology under Moore's law evolves millions of times faster, and so the hypothesis of a singularity is simply that a faster-growing curve will, at some point in the future, cross an almost constant curve, and that this is inevitable.

The two exceptions are that the point may be further in the future than one thinks, or that the rising curve may flat out (end of Moore's law).  But if not, then their crossing is inevitable.


Again, you're confusing run-time objects and execution layer.  Neurons and their organisation and connection is "run time".  Like objects in a run time environment.  The execution layer is biochemistry of neurons for one, and silicon circuits ("processors", but maybe not von neumann architectures, but rather FPGA like structures, who knows) on the other.
And we don't have to implement brain like run time systems onto silicon, it may take totally different configurations: there's more than one path to intelligence.


You may very well have run time environments with thousands of classes of objects.

@dinofelis, due to my ongoing medication for TB, I don't have the cognitive energy to (assimilate all the information I need to) finish our discussion/debate right now. Maybe soon...

And I apologize that I don't explain the part that wasn't clear, but I'd rather not encourage the discussion to continue until I am back up to full brain power.

In the meantime, some tidbits:



Kurzweil's Singularity (nonsense!) also has an energy efficiency deficiency compared to humans:



I've been trying to make the point to you that raw processing speed isn't a sufficient condition to be indicative of superiority. Such a conclusion is very simpleton.

You are losing me here.  I can read that 10 times, and still not know what it might mean.  I try to wrap my mind around what you mean with "microstates superinposed".  If the system is isolated and in a pure state, it is of course in one single state (which may be a superposition of "base states" in which I like to express this state, but it is still just one single quantum state).  If the system is entangled (which it most certainly is) with the rest of the universe, it is entangled, which means exactly what I wrote earlier: several individual quantum states of the cup are, well, entangled, with states of the environment.  And that is exactly the entropy we are talking about: the number of those states that is involved.  If there were only state, the entropy would be 0, and if there are many, the logarithm of 2 of that number of states is the entropy of my cup (I'm assuming uniform distribution, which is not necessarily true, but which would diminish the entropy if not uniform).

There's no such thing as "cumulative entropy over time".  I think that is the error you are making, by thinking that the entropy is about the *entire history - and future* of a system.  No, entropy is the ignorance of the *current state*, not about its entire past and future.  That doesn't make sense, because if that were the case, entropy wouldn't be a time-dependent concept, and the second law could not even be formulated !

It is as if you were saying that the "velocity of an object is the whole of movement that an object did and will do in the future" or something.  But if that is the case, you couldn't talk about the acceleration (the *change* in velocity) and not write down Newton's second law !  Velocity is instantaneous, now, and doesn't care about the state of motion yesterday or tomorrow.  If it did, velocity would be an a-temporal notion, and you couldn't ask how velocity changes over time.

In the same way, entropy is an "instantaneous" notion, because the second law of thermodynamics tells us how entropy needs to CHANGE over time.  If all our past and future ignorance were already included, the entropy tomorrow would be the same one as today, as all ignorance would already been included, as well today as tomorrow.

I think you are confusing the notion of entropy itself, with the notion of dynamics.  If I know the dynamics of an isolated system perfectly well (which is very rare), then there's a kind of Liouville's theorem that tells me that my knowledge of the microstate (even if imperfect) is conserved.  When I know something about the microstate today, that knowledge is still pertinent tomorrow, and my entropy about that micro state didn't grow.
If however, my knowledge of the dynamics of the system is not perfectly accurate, OR the system interacts with the environment (of which, by definition, I don't consider the dynamics), then my knowledge of the microstate today will probably get lost gradually over time: my entropy of the system grows, until it reaches its full value of my total ignorance of it, given by one or another canonical statistical ensemble, constrained only by a few macroscopic parameters.

This "loss of knowledge over time" is intimately related to the second law.  It is always related to "the environment" of which the unknown microstate is much more entropy-rich than my system, and is an infinite source (for all practical purposes) of ignorance (= entropy).

This is also why the notion of "entropy of the universe" is problematic.  The universe cannot be entirely observed from the outside, and cannot connect to "its environment" ; as such, this notion breaks down.

No, of course not, and that is not necessary.

In order for a perception to be consistent, only those things that are *observed* from the secondary observer need to be consistent.  The rest doesn't matter.  If I can't observe it, ever, I don't care, it doesn't exist in a certain way.

Take the following case:

There is me, Joe, and a light bulb (in my reality).

I see the lightbulb glowing green.  (direct observation).
I see Joe saying "the light is green" (my observation of Joe)

This is a consistent world view, a consistent history of observations.

Nothing stops one, however, from considering now Joe's point of view (in Joe's reality).

Joe sees the lightbulb glowing red (direct observation)
Joe sees me saying "the light is red" (Joe's observation of me)

This is (another) consistent world view, a(nother) consistent history of observations.

In the consistent history view of things, both are not in contradiction.  My observing a green light, and observing Joe say "green light" is not in contradiction with Joe observing a red light and observing me say "red light".  Joe, as primary observer, simply has a different consistent history than me.

What would be inconsistent, is that I see a green light, and I see Joe saying "red light".  Or Joe seeing a red light, and seeing me say "green light".

Joe only exists for me to the extend that I can observe him, and that I can observe other things that might observe Joe and so on.  If all these observations are consistent, then that's my consistent view of reality.  Which may be entirely different for another primary observer, but to which I have no access.

Afaics, your conceptualization mistakes aliasing error as reality.

You take the point sample in spacetime of pouring a cup of coffee and presume that the microstates are ignored by yourself because they don't impact your perception of any event or state which is perceivable by you. But you are not factoring in the future of the Butterfly effect of those microstates' entanglement with the environment and the changes to the future you will perceive in the future based on the microstates in the cup of coffee you are pouring at the moment in time.

Thus your entire conceptualization collapses.  

Quantum mechanics models the microstates superimposed, because otherwise measuring the position at any point sample in time is aliasing error (a random result). Analogously we must model the entropy as superimposed into the future in our macro perspective. Your conceptualization of entropy as relative to an observer ignores the fact that the entire future is entangled with the entire past. Our perception of reality (decoherence) is but an aliasing error illusion. Information (order) is our mutual synchronization of a specific instance of illusion.

I hope you realize I'm stating that the objective reality is an unbounded superimposition of multiverses. Our perception of our universe is but an aliasing error illusion. And even humans don't share one consistent illusion (c.f. my prior post). The entropy of the universe is unbounded. Entropy w.r.t. to an observer is an ill-defined concept.

(P.S. I am still having significant issues with cognitive energy and its root concomitant gut/liver health. I am not able to explore this space we are discussing with the assimilation vigor that I feel I had been accustomed to. So do please understand if the limits of my current health prevent me from continuing the discussion or making the level of insights and explanations that I might be capable of at some other time.)

Wouldn't the ICO buyers just be another form of centralization?  What about the people who want to participate in the voting because they like and idea? Because they didn't participate in the ICO for whatever reason, but own tokens, they don't get to vote? Unless these tokens are specific tokens identifiable as ICO tokens?

I guess now that I think about it a bit more, having everyone vote would almost lead to an issue similar to Bitcoin's current issue, no?

Do ALL humans communicate ALL of their detailed existence to ALL humans? How could they even communicate this without an instantaneous speed-of-light? The state of everyone's perspective would always be on a lag at best, thus not ALL including the instantaneous present (otherwise stated as "the present never exists" because its always gone instantly before we can perceive/decohere it as mutual information).

In other words, is it plausible that everyone on earth could know (or at least received communication about) everything about everyone on earth.

Obviously it is a rhetorical question and it is intended to point to an inconsistency in your holistic conceptualization (although of course many of the points you've made are correct).

The following may be interesting:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=690

Ok, if you really want to get into this: physics is a relationship between an observer and "the rest of the universe".  That "rest of the universe" contains entities which the first observer might identify as observers (I will call them "secondary observers"), and in order for his physics to be consistent, whatever the first observer observes from those secondary observers, must be coherent with what the first observer observes, and what he would observe if he were in the place of those secondary observers.   In other words, the only consistency must come from what the first observer observes "directly" and what he observes when observing those secondary observers.   This is the "consistent history" view of physics.  At no point, an observer "needs to prove" anything to a secondary observer.  He simply needs a consistent view between his "direct observations of nature" and his "observations of other observer entities".

The idea that there is a single objective reality out there goes out of the window with that view, but for an observer, the consistent view of his observations of nature, and his observation of secondary observers, is what comes closest to his best guess of what his objective reality might look like.

This kind of consistent history approach (first formulated if I remember correctly by Gell Mann in the 1960ies) explains very easily a lot of quantum "paradoxes", like the EPR "paradox", and also explains apparent paradoxes like Maxwell's demon.

In as much as those "secondary observers" are actual observers of their own, what is needed for everything to be consistent is that they too, in THEIR view of reality, see the first observer as consistent with that.

The simplest solution to this is that all observers observe the same objective reality, which is a classical viewpoint, but difficult to reconcile with quantum mechanics.  But it is not the only solution to this, and "consistent histories" is another, much more complicated, but quantum mechanically compatible, view of things.  If you want to stick to the classical "objective world" view, you have to introduce many strange things in order to explain quantum mechanical effects, such as "spooky action at a distance", "non-causal effects going back in time" and other weird things, while consistent histories don't need all that stuff.

In the same vein, entropy is a relationship between an observer and a system: it is his ignorance about the system's micro state.  In as much as another observer DOES know this micro state (like Maxswell's demon), then that system has no entropy wrt to that secondary observer, but that secondary observer now has entropy wrt to the primary one.

However, in most all cases, "human observers" don't know microstates and hence, they all agree more or less on the physical entropy of most objects, give or take a few bytes.

A secret key has no entropy with respect to its owner, and has (hopefully) full entropy wrt to an attacker.  Maxwell's demon is like the guy with his secret key: he known the micro state of the gas ; but as such, the demon has as much entropy wrt us, than the gas itself.

You ignored the most damning point.

Are you chasing your tail yet?

It really is ill-defined, and in as much as you'd like to estimate it, you'll probably end up with 0.  Yes, zero.  Like the total energy content of the universe is also most probably zero, in as much as that even could have a meaning.

Most people talking about the "entropy of the universe" talk about the "entropy of the REST OF THE UNIVERSE with respect to an observer inside that universe".  But there's a subtle difference between what one would call the entropy of the universe (with respect to an "outside observer" hence ill defined) and the "entropy of the rest of the universe".



That really doesn't matter.  My cup of hot water is also entangled with the rest of the universe, but that doesn't increase its entropy with respect to me.
The "states of the internet" is the number of different states the internet can be in, and that is limited to the technical capacity of that system.  If we limit ourselves to the *digital states* (and not to, say, the heat in a micro processor - like I'm not taking into account the nuclear states when accounting for the entropy of my cup of coffee) of the devices that make up the internet: the nodes, the network devices and so on, their digital state is entirely determined by all bi-stable digital components, essentially memory bits (and a few register bits in processor units and FPGA).  If you know every single state of every single bi-stable circuitry of every device that makes up the internet, then you know the entire state of the internet.   That's equivalent to me knowing the quantum state of the entire set of molecules making up my hot cup of water: i'd know the microstate of my hot water.  The IGNORANCE of that microstate is what makes up the entropy I have about that cup of hot water, and the IGNORANCE I have of the state of every bistable state of every component of the internet is what makes up the entropy I have about the internet.

My rather secure guess is that the internet doesn't have 10^25 bistable circuits.  It would mean about 10 billion devices with each a Petabit memory state.  We aren't there yet (in a few years we will maybe).


No, of course not, not any more than the swimming of a whale, which is entangled with every molecule in my cup of hot water for historical reasons, increases the entropy of my cup of coffee.  Because that's exactly what entropy is about: my ignorance of *just the cup of water*, and NOT its environment.  

The posts only contain at most the amount of bits that are needed to download the page (in compressed format).  And they were already taken into account by counting the empty bits on the page's server's hard disks.  So someone posting some stuff on the internet doesn't really increase its entropy.  A technician adding a few more disk units in a data center, does.


Ah, if you call "the internet" all of physical spacetime between here and Andromeda, of course we're talking about different stuff.  I'm talking about all the data that is available to be transferred and stored by all nodes with an internet connection.
Now, of course, you can say, there are sensors connected to the internet, so they bring in an "unbounded amount of entropy".  No, not really.  When that camera takes a picture, say, of 8MB, then these 8 MB are available and are entropy to you if you didn't know the picture.  But if at the next instant, the camera takes a new picture, the previous one is gone.  There's still 8 MB of entropy because of that camera.  If the previous picture wasn't STORED, and made available for download, the new pictures don't add entropy.  If you are looking at each picture, you get 8 MB of information THROUGH the internet.  But each time that picture gets refreshed, and not stored (nor on the camera side, nor at a cache site, nor at your side) on an internet-connected device, the internet's entropy doesn't increase.  In fact, when the camera takes the picture, its entropy rises (for you) with 8 MB.  When you look at it, you receive 8 MB of information, and hence the internet's entropy LOWERS with 8 MB wrt you.  When the camera takes a new picture you haven't seen yet, the internet's entropy rises again with 8 MB.  When you look at it, it lowers again with 8 MB.  Etc.

This is like a telephone wire.  The (digital) state of the wire is 1 bit at a time.  Whole conversations can go through a telephone wire.  But the state of the wire is at most 1 bit.  When you haven't received the bit yet, it has 1 bit of entropy.  When you read it out, it has 0 bit of entropy, until the transmitter puts another bit on it. Etc...

The internet, as defined by all the devices connected to it and their digital states, has less entropy than my cup of hot water.

A sensor, looking at the entire universe, has only the entropy of the data it has at a certain point in time, while you didn't look at it.  From the moment you know the data, its entropy falls back to zero, until the next (unknown) data are taken.

That is what I've been trying to tell you. (not ill-defined, rather unbounded)


And provable to no other observer.

for you?


As if memory capacity is the entropy of the Internet (and which memory specifically?). Since when was the Internet an isolated system and not entangled with the user's lives? Someone posts something to Facebook shares with a friend who is talking about and hours later posts something back to the Internet. The offline surprises are not included in the entropy of the Internet? How did you decide where to draw this arbitrary border around what is the Internet? Can you define this border unambiguously (be careful!)?

For example, to say I am in it only for the money and not for my vision is going to be mistake on your part.

Creators never do something only for the money. If I mostly wanted money, I would have manipulated with reputation and launched a snazzy ICO already.

In my case, I am doing it for: a) expression of my creativity, b) love of the process and challenge of creating (i.e. not boring), and c) because I want to have an impact. Yes I do need money, but I choose my work based on those a - c as my overriding priorities. I trust society to reward money (capital) to those who prove they allocate capital resources efficiently.

We don't know how much Satoshi was paid by someone (Hint: Rothschilds). The odds that Satoshi was one person are very slim (one person doesn't produce what he with the organization and foresight he had and disappear without a trace ... only covert agencies or their equivalents can do that).

I made a point which preceded your posts:


Any premine becomes an ever diminishing portion of the total supply if the emission of new money supply is perpetual. Whereas the greedy banksters and their fiat system continues to extract seigniorage ongoing and doesn't diminish. Any blockchain which continues to extract tokens to pay to the developers is akin to a greedy banksters, fiat system. They may employ a democratic governance to obscure the fact that they are really in control of voting to pay themselves from the blockchain. Notice I have not named the blockchains which do this, but you can figure it out.

Edit: more about this.