The US Dollar, the first pure fiat world reserve currency, has lost almost all of its value against gold, falling from $1 to around $1680 per ounce.
It’s now looking increasingly likely that the record-high price of $1680 on June 8 represented the peak of a financial fraud that is now slowly unravelling. The interesting question is: where will the price decline stop?
Most assets have a “fundamental” value: the value that reflects the practical use to which that asset can be put. You can always live in a house regardless of what happens to the real estate market, so we can be confident that house prices won’t fall to zero. Similarly, if the price of gold fell too much, people could always use it to make jewelry, so gold is a relatively safe investment.
The puzzling thing about the US Dollar, is that the currency doesn’t seem to have any fundamental value at all. True, you can currently purchase many goods and services with Dollars. But despite the volume of Dollar-denominated commerce being high, Dollar-denominated prices seem to be driven up by the current rounds of quantitative easing (money printing).
The US Dollar is different from traditional currencies. The fact that there are 300 million Americans who use dollars for their day-to-day transactions creates a floor for the value of dollars. Most of us don’t pay much attention to the exchange rate between dollars and other currencies, because we’re used to thinking of dollars as our fundamental unit of value. And even if we wanted to stop using dollars, it would be hard to do since most of the people around us won’t take anything else. So, despite a major screw-up by the Federal Reserve, we can still count on the value of dollars not falling very much. This logic of course, will also apply to the new pure digital currency ‘Bitcoin’.
In contrast, there’s no significant community of people who conduct commerce exclusively (or even primarily) in Gold. And you can’t eat, live in, or make a fire out of Gold. And this means there’s no logical stopping point to Gold’s price increase. So far Gold enthusiasts have been buying Gold as the price increases, convinced that the price will go up eventually. But as the hoped-for Dollar rally has failed to materialize, more have gotten discouraged or bored and cash out the Dollar, pushing the price of Gold up further. This process has been going on for a couple of months, and now it appears to be accelerating. I suspect the Dollar is terminal.
The responses to Bitcoin from different camps that encounter it have been fascinating to read. Bitcoin, like the Internet, is a mirror reflecting the philosophy of the person who is talking about it.
Libertarians see it as a way out.
Statists see it as a way of receiving the blessings of the state.
and so on…
One of the many interesting sets of thoughts swirling around Bitcoin is the idea that somehow, the State must be involved in Bitcoin, and there are people out there who are keen to try and shoehorn any legislation or rule that is out there to fit the Bitcoin case.
Take a look at this:
FinCEN Brings KYC Requirements To Bitcoin?
The U.S. Department of the Treasury (“FinCEN”) issued a Final Rule making non-bank providers of pre-paid financial instruments subject to comprehensive Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) regulations similar to depository institutions.
Bitcoin is made up of cryptographic signatures that can be printed out as text. This means that they are clearly protected speech and not financial instruments.
Why should FinCEN have anything to do with Bitcoin at all? If FinCEN applies to Bitcoin, should it also not apply to Baseball cards?
Baseball cards or comics or YuGiOh cards could be used as money because someone somewhere values them.
They could be stored in a vault and then certificates issues against them that could be traded automatically at online exchanges.
Does that mean that these certificates are money? Does that mean that FinCEN rules should apply to them?
Of course it doesn’t. Applying FinCEN rules to Bitcoin, quite apart from the immorality of these regulations, is improper and ridiculous.
The regulations affecting “stored value” now use the term “prepaid access” which is more broad and technology-neutral. Though FinCEN has not formally asserted that Bitcoin would fall under prepaid access regulations, earlier contact with the agency referred to bitcoins as a form of stored-value. If correct, then Bitcoin sales to U.S. customers would likely be a regulated activity per this Final Rule.
The new regulations become effective on September 27, 2011, 60 days after its July 29, 2011 date of publication in the Federal Register.
This is absurd. Who made contact with FinCEN, and where is the written record of this contact? Who did the contactor represent, and whoever she was, she did not represent ‘Bitcoin’ or any of its users, but was acting on her own. The details of that contact are something that would be interesting to read.
To comply with the Final Rule, providers of prepaid access must register with FinCEN. Because bitcoins are decentralized, it is uncertain who a provider would be. Might every exchanger be considered a provider, for instance?
This is all springing from a false assumption, that Bitcoin is a store of value that FinCEN has jurisdiction over. It is not.
Also under the Final Rule, sellers of prepaid access must collect personal information from customers, maintain transaction records, file suspicious activity reports and comply with other requirements of money service businesses (MSB). Last month FinCEN issued a ruling that was intended to clarify the definition of an MSB and includes the possibility that even businesses outside the U.S. conducting money transfer over the Internet could still be classified as U.S. MSBs. Additionally, the definition no longer requires that an MSB be a business — any individual who receives funds in exchange for a stored value might be considered an MSB.
This is of course, absolutely absurd. Even if you concede that FinCEN has jurisdiction over U.S. companies and persons that deal in Bitcoin, to assert that people and companies outside the USA would need to register with FinCEN betrays a complete lack of understanding of the concept of jurisdiction.
Its like those very sad webmasters in the UK who put up DMCA takedown notification pages on their sites. The DMCA does not apply anywhere in the world other than in the United States of America, and no webmaster, publisher, company or person is required to obey its strictures who is not based in or who does not have servers in the USA.
If FinCEN actually tries to attack Bitcoin, and then tried to demand that entities outside the USA register with it, they should be met with this type of response.
Though the ruling has exemptions to not impact the typical prepaid debit card found at grocery stores, for example, the exemptions would likely not apply to Bitcoin. These exemptions give a pass to providers and sellers when the following conditions are met:
The funds cannot be transmitted internationally.
Funds cannot be transferred from one user to another.
No additional funds can be loaded except from a depository source (e.g., from a bank).
There is no way to limit where bitcoins can be spent and the value is easily transferred from one person to another so Bitcoin will not likely be considered exempt from the AML regulations.
Bitcoin, being a form of speech, should not be regulated by anyone. In the same way that you have protections against fraud (someone misrepresenting some reproduction Baseball cards to you as genuine, or someone stealing your YuGiOh cards) you have those same protections with Bitcoin. If someone defrauds you or breaches a contract they have with you, take them to court or arbitration.
The state is not needed to control Bitcoin, police it, regulate it or have anything whatsoever to do with it. It has, like the internet, grown in popularity all by itself, will grow in utility just like the internet has by virtue of people adopting it and using it, and any interference in it is illegitimate on its face.
Following these regulations will be a serious burden to sellers. For instance, compliance requirements as specified in an article by Perkins Coie LLP include:
Identifying information includes the customer’s name, date of birth, address and identification number. Sellers must retain this information for five years from the date of sale.
The records must be easily accessible and retrievable upon request from FinCEN, law enforcement or judicial order.
The bigger impact of following AML may not necessarily be the cost of compliance but instead will be the likely result — to effectively de-anonymize Bitcoin.
Following these regulations is unthinkable. Even if you accepted that these regulations were in some mysterious way beneficial, it would not and could not stop people from trading Bitcoins client to client, without identifying themselves to a parasitic third party.
When Bitcoin usage reaches critical mass, there will be trillions of transactions happening on a daily basis. The people who serve as enter and exit points for it would be recording meaningless details that would serve no use whatsoever after the first purchase of Bitcoins.
Bitcoin is not anonymous, despite what people think. There are services out there however, that can make it completely anonymous, and these will be improved and will multiply in number as the precise nature and level of anonymity in bitcoin becomes well understood by everyone. In the same way that The Anonymizer, Hide My Ass and the many proxy services that have come into being to cater for those who want anonymity, its a safe bet that the same entrepreneurs will apply their knowledge to the problem of making Bitcoin completely untraceable.
As for the cost of compliance, only US companies will be forced to pass the expense of these ridiculous regulations on to their customers. It will mean that customers, who see high prices due to regulation as damage and route around it, will choose exchanges outside the USA, simply because it is cheaper. This will create another tier of middle man in America; businesses that will take your money and then interface with foreign exchanges for you, rather like the Dorian Grey services we have written about.
Ironically, these new regulations may drive even faster Bitcoin adoption. These restrictions may cause many retailers to discontinue offering the prepaid cards that can be used at ATMs internationally. Since global redemption of stored value is a service that is legal to offer, is in huge demand and is something that Bitcoin does well — using digital currency might become the more popular alternative.
Unintended consequences!
And of course, as Bitcoin passes critical mass, it will become absolutely impossible to clamp down on the international flow of ‘money’, since Bitcoin is a peer to peer system.
When the global economy becomes dependent on Bitcoin, as it does now on SSL, no politician will dare raise a finger to control (damage) it, just as it is now completely unthinkable to regulate the cryptography behind SSL, as the French tried to do and which Dominic Strauss-Khan put pay to.
A more immediate consequence will likely be the employment of lawyers to specifically consider how this Final Rule affects Bitcoin.
Maybe so. Certainly there are people out there who are desperate to interface with the State when it comes to Bitcoin.
One way or another, the State is not going to control Bitcoin. Either because it is not in their financial interest to do so because it is a world-wide phenomenon, or because they cannot possibly stop the hundreds of millions of people who are going to be using it.
If only ten percent of all people use Bitcoin. No. Lets say five percent. That is 104,750,300 future users of Bitcoin. There is no reason why this number cannot not be achieved, and of course we are working only with today’s assumptions; there is no knowing what new innovations related to the block chain that are around the corner. Or innovations in the shape of client that people will be using. Imagine new versions of Google Chrome or Firefox that are not only browsers, but Bitcoin clients.
Every browser, doubles as a Bitcoin client.
Think about that for a moment. An HTML5 Bitcoin client, with an interface designed by Google or Mozilla. Easy to use and absolutely everywhere; on every computer in the world, by default.
One thing is for sure, there is no going back.
People have complained that ‘the next Google’ could not come out of Britain, because Britain is toxic to business.
If Bitcoin is going to be the biggest revolution since the internet itself, and the British establishment are desperate to entice companies to set up here and take root, then any regulation on Bitcoin (or for that matter, Internet Business which is serious business) is, to put it lightly, not a good idea. In fact, the smart thing to do would be to draw an arbitrary area on the map in London, and declare that area an Internet Free Trade Zone, where there are no restrictions, taxes or regulations, for a period of 150 years.
This would instantly attract every Internet business on the planet to the UK. There would be an unprecedented inflow of brains and money into London, making it the ‘Internet Capital of the World’.
Or, you could regulate Bitcoin, and be an also-ran gaggle of losers, while Hong Kong, Dubai and other jurisdictions suck up all the brains, money, skills and entrepreneurs.
To sum up, Bitcoin is to money as PDFs are to hardback books. Bitcoins are speech, not financial instruments. The State has no business interfering in Bitcoin in any way, and US regulations and laws do not apply to people and companies outside of the continental USA.
The Grauniad has an astonishing report of a newsletter published by Belgravia police station, where people are advised to report anarchists to the police.
I’m not making this up:
Anarchists should be reported, advises Westminster anti-terror police Islamist terrorists also mentioned in briefing, as anarchists complain of being criminalised for their beliefs
What should you do if you discover an anarchist living next door?
[…]
the answer, according to an official counter-terrorism notice circulated in London last week, is that you must report them to police immediately.
This was the surprising injunction from the Metropolitan Police issued to businesses and members of the public in Westminster last week. There was no warning about other political groups, but next to an image of the anarchist emblem, the City of Westminster police’s “counter terrorist focus desk” called for anti-anarchist whistleblowers stating: “Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police.”
What the HELL?!
The note was issued from Belgravia Police Station as part of Project Griffin which aims to “advise and familiarise managers, security officers and employees of large public and private sector organisations across the capital on security, counter-terrorism and crime prevention issues”.
The first thing that is interesting about that document is (apart from its appalling graphic design) that there is no named author.
What public servant was responsible for this gaffe, who told her to write this and why is she not accountable? You KNOW why.
Now lets think about this carefully.
Why has some uneducated person put this nonsense into that document?
From their point of view, the only exposure to ‘Anarchism’ they have had is the agent provocateurs who routinely smash up McDonalds and bank windows. They equate this criminal behaviour with Anarchism because the people who do that violence say that they are Anarchists.
In fact, the truth is those people are not Anarchists, but are in many instances members of the police, sent out to cause trouble. This is a well established fact.
Now, not all the police are aware that their own force is being used as a tool in this way, and I imagine that they would be shocked, SHOCKED to find out that this was so; nevertheless, these compartmentalised, unnamed people are playing right along in their roles, obeying orders without any care or concern for their duties or the truth.
And they wonder why the ideas of Libertarianism are spreading like wildfire. All anyone has to do is read this Grauniad article to be completely outraged, as all of the comments on that article demonstrate.
Grauniad readers are staunch anti-Libertarians to a man, but they are not not stupid, and can tell right from wrong where their own rights overlap with the rights of others when it comes to free speech. They know that this statement is only one step away from applying directly to them and their ideas.
Thinking once again, from the point of view of an uneducated, low IQ man, how can you spot an anarchist? More importantly, how can you spot who is not an anarchist?
There is one easy way to tell who is or who is not an anarchist; anarchists are:
1/ Non violent: Anarchists do not use violence to achieve their goal of a stateless society.
Thats pretty much it. Anyone who smashes a McDonalds window, or who engages in any violence of any kind is not an anarchist by definition. The people who do that are CRIMINALS, not anarchists.
And for the record, the goal of a stateless society is a completely logical, moral, realistic and just goal, and that police report is correct in this single aspect;
Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local Police.
Lets do this.
Anarchism is a political philosophy.
CORRECT.
which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful,
WRONG.
Anarchists can PROVE, through logic, ethics and history that the state is harmful, unnecessary and undesirable. This is not something that anarchists consider or is something that is mere opinion, any more than people ‘consider’ that the sky is blue; the state IS evil, is not needed and is toxic to humanity and that is a fact, not conjecture, a belief, an article of faith or any of those things.
Now, taking all of this into consideration, that the ‘anarchists’ who attend demonstrations and smash things to pieces are not anarchists at all either because they are not philosophically anarchists or because they are agent provocateurs and given the fact that anarchists are non violent, and have the right to publish and espouse anything they like in writing or by any other means, if someone was to report an anarchist to the police at Belgravia station…
What are they going to do?
Arrest someone for reading a book? Or publishing a pamphlet? Or writing a blog?
Whoever they did that to, would be in line for MILLIONS OF POUNDS in compensation, after a sensational, high profile trial, which would be taken on a contingency basis by a line of Britain’s top law firms, who would queue around the block for a chance of easy money. Academics from all over the world would submit amicus briefs on behalf of the defense.
They would have a snowballs chance in hell of getting away with it.
I simply cannot believe that the police in Belgravia have so much time on their hands that they can even be doing this sort of infantile nonsense. No one wants these ridiculous, meaningless scaremongering reports. They do not prevent crime, cannot prevent crime, waste time and money and bring the profession of policing further into disrepute.
Of course, Libertarians have an answer to this.
Libertarians understand that the State should not have a monopoly on security. Security is a service that should be produced by the market:
The market and private enterprise do exist, and so most people can readily envision a free market in most goods and services. Probably the most difficult single area to grasp, however, is the abolition of government operations in the service of protection: police, the courts, etc. — the area encompassing defense of person and property against attack or invasion. How could private enterprise and the free market possibly provide such service? How could police, legal systems, judicial services, law enforcement, prisons — how could these be provided in a free market? We have already seen how a great deal of police protection, at the least, could be supplied by the various owners of streets and land areas. But we now need to examine this entire area systematically.
In the first place, there is a common fallacy, held even by most advocates of laissez-faire, that the government must supply “police protection,” as if police protection were a single, absolute entity, a fixed quantity of something which the government supplies to all. But in actual fact there is no absolute commodity called “police protection” any more than there is an absolute single commodity called “food” or “shelter.” It is true that everyone pays taxes for a seemingly fixed quantity of protection, but this is a myth. In actual fact, there are almost infinite degrees of all sorts of protection. For any given person or business, the police can provide everything from a policeman on the beat who patrols once a night, to two policemen patrolling constantly on each block, to cruising patrol cars, to one or even several round-the-clock personal bodyguards. Furthermore, there are many other decisions the police must make, the complexity of which becomes evident as soon as we look beneath the veil of the myth of absolute “protection.” How shall the police allocate their funds which are, of course, always limited as are the funds of all other individuals, organizations, and agencies? How much shall the police invest in electronic equipment? fingerprinting equipment? detectives as against uniformed police? patrol cars as against foot police, etc.?
The point is that the government has no rational way to make these allocations. The government only knows that it has a limited budget. Its allocations of funds are then subject to the full play of politics, boondoggling, and bureaucratic inefficiency, with no indication at all as to whether the police department is serving the consumers in a way responsive to their desires or whether it is doing so efficiently. The situation would be different if police services were supplied on a free, competitive market. In that case, consumers would pay for whatever degree of protection they wish to purchase. The consumers who just want to see a policeman once in a while would pay less than those who want continuous patrolling, and far less than those who demand twenty-four-hour bodyguard service. On the free market, protection would be supplied in proportion and in whatever way that the consumers wish to pay for it. A drive for efficiency would be insured, as it always is on the market, by the compulsion to make profits and avoid losses, and thereby to keep costs low and to serve the highest demands of the consumers. Any police firm that suffers from gross inefficiency would soon go bankrupt and disappear.
One big problem a government police force must always face is: what laws really to enforce? Police departments are theoretically faced with the absolute injunction, “enforce all laws,” but in practice a limited budget forces them to allocate their personnel and equipment to the most urgent crimes. But the absolute dictum pursues them and works against a rational allocation of resources. On the free market, what would be enforced is whatever the customers are willing to pay for. Suppose, for example, that Mr. Jones has a precious gem he believes might soon be stolen. He can ask, and pay for, round-the-clock police protection at whatever strength he may wish to work out with the police company. He might, on the other hand, also have a private road on his estate he doesn’t want many people to travel on — but he might not care very much about trespassers on that road. In that case, he won’t devote any police resources to protecting the road. As on the market in general, it is up to the consumer — and since all of us are consumers this means each person individually decides how much and what kind of protection he wants and is willing to buy.
I don’t know anyone who does not think that there are not enough police on the streets. If the police had any sense, they would understand that in a Libertarian system, there would be more of them, doing real police work for better money and conditions, and they would not be wasting their time writing silly pamphlets and enforcing laws that outlaw victimless crimes like the statues covering the current round of insane prohibition. Even the police are starting to wake up about that particular corner of the insane asylum.
While we are at it look at this:
Police to carry out on-the-spot fingerprinting in the street even for minor traffic offences
Police are now armed with a device that can scan fingerprints so they can correctly identify suspects who lie about their details.
In what sounds like something out of George Orwell’s dystopia 1984, suspects can now be finger printed in the street thanks to the new hand-held police gadget.
The mobile identification service scans a print, then checks it by trawling through a national database for the details.
There appear to be some people who are awake. Look at this top comment on the Daily Mail article:
If you have never been finger printed by the police, and the vast majority of the population have not, then how can this device tell a roadside copper if you are lying or not?
These devices exist not to protect you from criminals, but are there to make money for the vendors that manufacture them. Each one is connected to a Blackberry, and then there is the cost of the bespoke scanner attachment and the management of the database. This is nothing more than fleecing the population.
But I digress.
What these people are saying is that if you read a book and then agree with what is in it, you are a criminal, a ‘terrorist’. Its completely absurd of course, but it is an indication of a fundamental shift that is taking place.
These people are scared. They are scared of ideas. If these people are so terrified by ideas the whole edifice must be crumbling invisibly before our very eyes, and in fact, this is a very clear sign of that happening.
A society that is secure in its beliefs and values, in this case, the right of free speech and the right to believe whatever you want to believe, has no cause to turn against its own fundamental principles in order to ‘protect itself’. The fact that they are now (and have been for over ten years) turning against the core values of their ‘society’ is a clear sign that the system is slowly moving into panic mode. The problem for them is that they will not be able to stem the tide.
No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come. The reality is that all the violence is coming from them and the majority will do nothing while the edifice collapses. Then, one day, as it happened in East Germany, the State will simply cease to exist, only this time, there will be no ‘West Germany’ to take the place of the dead State. The world will not end, violence will not break out, there will not be chaos or a breakdown of order. There will only be a end to coercion by the State.
Depending on who you are and what you have come to know is the truth, this is either a very good thing or a very bad thing. You cannot un-know a truth; Libertarianism cannot now be un-seen or un-read or un-published. The ideas are out there, anyone who encounters them, because they are crystal clear in their truths, observations, analysis and logic, is converted to them. The economic collapse, predicted by the Austrians and the anarcho-capitalists is coming true like clockwork. They have the only correct explanation for it, and when you expose people to the fundamental principles of it, that are undeniably true, lo and behold, they understand and change their broken thinking.
This is inevitable, and will no doubt accelerate as a pound of butter goes to £5 in the supermarket.
The story of this newsletter is spreading virally across the internets as we speak. If the people who wrote this have any sense or decency left they will firstly identify who the author was and then apologise and revise their statements.
It appears that Anonymous is not releasing its mothelode containing 4GB of News of the World emails, because it may ‘prejudice the case’.
This is an error.
Seeking justice from a court that is run by the State is not rational in this case, and here is why.
Lets say that News International is found guilty of a crime and then is fined 500,000 pounds, or 5,000,000 or 50,000,000… so what?
What if both the Murdocks are sacked; once again so what?
News International continues to promote and lie on behalf of the bogus war on terror, the bogus war on drugs, democracy, lies in general, the erosion of liberty and it continues its unequivocal unquestioning support for the regime(s). A small fine is the most you can expect from any judgement a court might hand down, and of course, this is reasonable. Just because they have done some bad things, that doesn’t give a court the right to completely annihilate their business.
Justice in this case would be a total and completely effective boycott of News International by properly informed public. It would destroy them comprehensively and utterly, based on nothing more than their own words, as contained in the email motherlode.
No court in any country that wants to preserve its patina of ‘fairness’ can ever deliver this deathblow result, which would be real justice. Consider what happened to the jewellers Ratner’s who were almost put out of business overnight thanks to the honest words of its head in a single speech. That was all it took.
Anonymous has in its hands, a weapon that could be millions of times more powerful than the single utterance of the boss of Ratner’s. The News of the World has been listening in to the voicemails of thousands of people, now their communications are going to be probed. This is true, like for like justice. See Retributive Justice.
Libertarians understand that the State should not be the sole dispenser of justice, and that justice is a service, just like any other. The same people that murder men in other countries protect themselves with the courts that they effectively own. This is why Tony Bliar will never be brought before a British court to answer for mass murder, even though he is guilty of that crime as an accomplice and instigator.
Seeking justice from inside the matrix on its terms and inside its controls cannot, by definition, be real justice; it can only be a simulation of justice.
Anonymous can do whatever they like with the docs they have obtained. They took the risk to get them, and its up to them how they want to dispose of them, wether that is doling them out piecemeal, deleting them or releasing them in their entirety.
What they must understand is that they have the power to dispense justice themselves, by releasing the docs. The question that immediately comes to mind is are they being influenced by the media outlets they are working with:
One thing is for sure; working with newspapers is retarding their movement, which is the job of the Mainstream Media gatekeepers like the Guardian.
For the record, justice does not mean violence. The State and its fear soaked control addicts conflate justice dispensed outside of its courts with violence to frighten people away from the idea that justice is a service. Justice does not mean hanging or imprisonment or other violence, it means (in general) an equitable settlement of partie’s claims, based on the facts of a grievance, that is mutually satisfactory.
If the Anons wants justice, they should let everyone make up their own minds wether or not News International is a fit company to receive their money. The only way to do that is to release the documents in full.
Consider this. There must be information in that 4GB motherlode that might be useful to a victim of the State, that has no meaning to you as you gate-keep the gigabytes of information.
Imagine that some poor person without the connections or resources to fight the oligarchy / State has been suffering under their heel; lets say someone powerful wants his land or his house, and has framed him up to steal it from him. The evidence of this might be in a motherlode of files that you are poring over, that you might miss because it doesn’t seem important; but it is important to that man who is being victimised.
An even more germane example would be evidence that the News of the World has run a smear campaign against a person or company; the evidence is in there waiting to be released to vindicate the vilified person. Even more interesting would be an expose of all the PR companies that have been feeding stories to the News of the World. We all know that Facebook has been caught running a PR campaign against Google, can you even begin to imagine the number of emails from PR companies that must be in that motherlode, and how they will completely expose the way newspapers simply churn out stories that are fed to them? That would be a real public service, and no one would ever read a newspaper with the same eyes ever again. The spell of churnalism would be broken forever, and everyone reading a newspaper story would immediately, instinctively put up a barrier between them and the print that keeps the story from entering their consciousness uncritically. From then on, the first thing everyone reading a story would ask before and after reading it would be, “Now, I wonder who is paying for this story”. It would constitute an unprecedented healthy scepticism that would spread throughout the world.
All this from the release of a single tarball.
That is justice.
That is moving forward and never going back.
That is progress.
That is solving problems.
Everyone needs to have access to everything for the dam holding back justice to be broken.
Finally, some who agree with the stance that Anonymous takes on things still believe that democracy is a good thing. They claim that the Norwegian president saying that the answer to violence is more democracy is correct. This is patently false. Democracy itself is violence:
The answer to violence is to say “NO” to violence.
That means “NO” to all violence and coercion, no matter where it comes from.
Democracy is violence and coercion. You cannot be against violence and for the violence of the State at the same time. If you are for the State, and for democracy, then you are for all the bad things that come out it, its violence and all the bad stuff that you quite rightly want to see and end of. You cannot, or at least, should not, hold two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time. Unless you are a quantum physicist.
This is a difficult concept to understand at first, but once you grasp it, it becomes clear that the answer to violence can never be more violence, especially the unprecedented mechanised industrial scale violence of democracy and the State, which is more violent than any mafia gang or any organised entity in the history of the worl.
It will be interesting to see what happens to that 4GB file, especially when Topiary, who has apparently just been arrested, is made the next victim of the standard and insidious mainstream media character assassination that is done to everyone like that. You need only look at what happened to Julian Assange for a good example of how mainstream media deliberately sets out to poison the perception of people, and of course, evidence of a coordinated PR effort to smear Assange could very well be in that motherlode.
THe title of this blog post is the number of seconds it took for the hive mind of Anonymous to reach the next iteration that we wrote about in December 2010. Here is the tweet posted around the time of the light bulb moment:
What is so exiting about this is that 229 days (or 329,760 minutes or 5496 hours) is not very long for an iteration, and if the time between iterations is getting shorter and shorter, it will not be long (since Anons are highly intelligent) before they come to the Final Boss of of this game: The idea of the State itself.
When they come to the conclusion that the State is not needed, is the source of all the evils they are railing against, that it is a new cancer and not at all inevitable, Murray Rothbard will spell everything out for them in a tome that is not TL;DR, and which will simply blow their minds.
PayPal’s ridiculous regulations are a product of the State. If if were not for the State, they would not be doing what they are doing, i.e. blocking access to accounts, closing accounts at the behest of the state, restricting the flow of your money etc etc.
If you look behind the curtain at everything that is going wrong, from the insane wars, to the restrictions on free speech, DRM, the ban on vitamins, the RIAA/MPAA, Domain seizures, your money becoming worthless, widespread poverty, the ‘War on Drugs’, the patent trolling, the endemic corruption, the bank bailouts… EVERYTHING – the State is the direct cause of it.
People who are clear thinking are not wedded to any particular idea out of habit. They hold their ideas because they are arrived at by reason, and if by reason they must abandon wrong ideas, they do so immediately.
The idea of the State is a habit, a bad one, like heroin, and anyone who refuses to accept the State as the Final Boss is a brainwashed, drug addled addict.
It looks like the tipping point has been reached. Anonymous and its legion are moving inexorably towards the locus of Libertarianism. They are quickly shedding all operations that are ineffective or that involve disrupting other people’s property (like LOIC). Closing your PayPal account and switching to another service is an incredibly powerful act. By moving to another service, you can ensure that the flow of information (money) is not interrupted. The question then becomes, which service to switch to?
If you switch to any service that is regulated by our enemy, the State, you will be moving from one frying pan into another. What is needed is a way to move information (money) that does not involve a third party. A middlemanless system that is controlled by the masses for the masses.
That means Bitcoin.
The next obvious iteration is to get millions of people to move to Bitcoin as the main way they transact with money on the internet. That means dumping credit cards, PayPal and any other payment system that is regulated by the State.
Even if the number of places where you can buy things with Bitcoin is small now, if millions of new challengers appear holding it and eager to spend it, I guarantee you that Bitcoin will be integrated into every e-commerce package out there in less than a month. This will dramatically bootstrap the Bitcoin economy, decimate PayPal and the credit cards and bring forward the date of the inevitable demise of the State.
Remember; the taint of the State is the root problem. Apply this simple test to anything that you can think of that chafes at your sense of decency and liberty.
“Is there a law or regulation that makes this bad thing happen?”
If the answer is yes, then the State is behind it.
Try it. You will be amazed at how everything bad you can think of can be traced back to and is a direct result of the existence of the State.
The inevitable next question is “what are we to do without a State to tell us what to do?”. Murray Rothbard and the Libertarians have the answer, and this answer is not based on theory alone; it is based only on provable facts.
A critical mass of non violent change is coming where the State will simply cease to exist, just like it did in East Germany. This time it will be different however. There will be no West Germany to fill the void. There will be nothing; nothing but the good will and power of collective non violent voluntarism and the unprecedented prosperity that will follow as day follows night.
One last thing.
Some people say, “this is how you do it, keep it legal and legit”. This is wrong, ‘in the matrix’ thinking.
If you restrict yourself only to what is legal, then you will most certainly fail.
If they outlaw Bitcoin, or any of the other 17 alternatives to PayPal, and remove your ability to change services and stay ‘legal and legit’ how will your boycott end? It will end in total failure.
Your strategy should not be based on doing what is or is not legal, because the State, the enemy, decides unilaterally what is or is not legal. Constraining yourself in this way is thinking inside the box created for you by the State. It will not work.
Your strategy must be based only on what is moral and what is effective. That means refraining from doing anything that is immoral and only doing things that are effective.
If they make payment systems other than PayPal illegal, that is an attack on your liberty that you can respond to without committing an immoral act; in the same way that smoking marijuana, despite it being illegal, is responding to an outrageous infringement of your liberty without committing an immoral act. You simply refuse to obey, en masse.
What has changed is that everyone is connected to everyone else, and withering, debilitating, concentrated, tsunami death blow boycotts can strike with incredible ferocity if the conditions are correct.
Just wait for the critical mass condition to arrive, when the penny drops and the State dies… I imagine that it will be like the change of weather on a day where it has been raining and all of a sudden, the rain stops and beautiful sunshine burst into the day.
Its a terrible thing when people are murdered. It does not matter who is doing it or why, it is a crime, a savage and terrible crime. It is however important to put this shooting in Utøya into the correct context straight away and then to think about it clearly and carefully.
Some people are saying that the ’emotionlessness’ with which this gunman murdered his victims is “midnboggling”.
Why?
Why is it that when an individual commits murder everyone becomes breathless, shocked and ‘cant sleep at night’, but when its done with drones or soldiers there is a greatly reduced amount of outrage?
What is the difference between this man committing murder and people sitting in an office somewhere commanding a drone to kill men women and children in a wedding party, just as dispassionately, calculatingly and emotionlessly? We have all seen the leaked footage of operations in Iraq where the controllers of the drones calmly murder people and speak in measured, relaxed, dispassionate voices as they do so. The fact that people can do this should not be surprising to anybody, especially when they believe they have a just cause.
The just cause the desk bound drone murderers are using is that they are ‘taking out’ the leaders of a group that could in the future, pose a threat to ‘their nation’. As you will see below, this is exactly what people are speculating this Utøya murder was about; the prevention of dangerous future political action.
The stock rationale given for lack of equivalent response to the murder of different people inevitably circles around the idea that brown people are not thought of as full human beings, whilst Norwegians, being ‘white’ are, or that war is ‘justifiable killing’ whilst individuals killing is not. None of this off the shelf thinking really matters; the only thing that matters is your reaction to murder, and your ability or inability to empathise with other human beings, especially if you want to see an end to politically generated murder.
When people are cut down, as in the case of “Collateral Murder” your feelings for those that are murdered should be identical to the feelings you have when you see people in Oslo blown to bits, or students attending a political camp on an island slaughtered.
There is absolutely no difference between these events; they are all unjustifiable, immoral and repugnant murder and if you have stronger feelings because you personally have been to the places where the attacks happened or have some other ‘real connection’ to the event, then there is an urgent adjustment that needs to be made to your ability to empathise with the plight of other human beings. The only exception to this, where stronger feelings are a correct, natural and explicable response, is when you witness a murder in person, or a member of your own family is killed. No one can be expected to be rational when something like that takes place, but for all other murders, wherever they happen, when you are watching film of it or reading a report of it, your reaction should be exactly the same. Your ‘real connection’ to other people is no less real because you have not met them or been to their houses or cities. That is how real human beings feel about other human beings.
Once again, there is nothing surprising or staggering about the methodical and emotionless killing of human beings. It is done every day, sometimes on an industrial scale, by people just like you and me. When man gets it into his head that the only way to have order is the use of violence, there is nothing that he will not do, no lie he will refrain from telling himself and no level he will not sink to.
People are speculating that this killer wanted to wipe out the next generation of socialist leaders. Violent people have no problem in doing this; the end justifies the means, and the State does exactly the same thing. This is the motivating thought behind the drone attacks and it is also (for example) the true origin of inheritance tax.
Inheritance taxes are explicitly designed to prevent wealth from accumulating in the hands of families. In order to achieve this end, the State uses violence to make sure that this wealth accumulation does not happen. The State does not kill to achieve this end, but they use violence as a means to it. If you are for inheritance taxes, then you are of the same mindset as the people who think that it is a fit and proper solution to a political problem to murder individuals or a whole generation of nascent leaders who will inevitably turn out to be socialists. You are for violence.
This is the hard truth that people do not want to swallow; immoral violence at different levels is behind the edifice of the State, and all Statist thinking, its fallacious justifications and immoral actions. If you are for any of it, no matter what the justification, you are violent.
People are asking, “What kind of psychopath has that kind of forward-thinking planning?” The answer is, the same sort of psychopath that orders regime change, and like Madeline Albright, is prepared to order the deaths of children to achieve U.S. policy objectives because, “we think the price is worth it”. The same sort of psychopath that kills millions of people for dollar and oil supremacy. The same sort of people who devise plans to kill ‘their own citizens’ so that they may have a pretext to go to war. In other words, the people who run the State.
Once again, why do people rail against individual psychopathy but not the small army of psychopaths that man the controls of the State, who have a proven track record of mass murder, extrajudicial killing, rendition, torture and rape and every other unspeakable crime that can be committed? Why the sleepless nights, the speechlessness, the loss for words, the histrionics over people in one country, but not for people in another country, being killed on a much greater scale and at a greater frequency?
All of these people are human beings with the same rights, they eat the same way, think the same thoughts, have families… they are indistinguishable from each other on a human level, so why does everyone who goes berserk over a small number of students, not literally go insane over the daily murders carried out by the State?
Madeline Albright said straight out that she is willing to kill children, just as was done in this case, to achieve an end, and yet, when this is said right to your face, as murderers from the State have openly said again and again, the reaction is nowhere near as shrill and tear filled as when something terrible that is personal (that isn’t really personal at all, just more local, ‘close to home’) happens. This is wrong, especially when in the belief system of the people who are having this disproportionate response, it is held that the State is a creature acting under the direction the voting public; where murder is done on their behalf, in the name of ‘the people’.
It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
What also doesn’t make any sense is the prominence these stories get. The number of people who die from these events is statistically insignificant when compared to all the other forms of unnatural death. Why is everyone putting these deaths up on a pedestal? Surely the murders of the State should be put on the same level, and that level should be off of the front page? More people die from bee stings, peanut allergy, alcoholism, road accidents and many other unnatural causes, so why not put these deaths on the same level? Why report them at all? The threat to you is not grater than the threat of other unnatural causes, so to place these deaths higher than other deaths is simply base emotionalism, sensationalism and irrationality.
These murders are terrible, revolting and unjustifiable. They are just as terrible, revolting and unjustifiable as the murders of the State. These murders however, should not be used a a pretext for anything other than a thorough investigation into the murderer and his motivations. There should be no new legislation, no increased surveillance, no Police State strictures. NOTHING in response to this other than a criminal investigation.
Your chances of being killed in this way are infinitesimally small. The magnification of this event into something bigger than what it actually is, is trillions of times more harmful to you, your descendants and your life than the event itself.
Do not magnify this event; it is not any more or less important than any other murder. It is not more significant, statistically or morally. It is just as repugnant as other murders and just as statistically probable.
Any emphasis upon it that is greater than the emphasis that is given to the murders of the State is itself immoral and repugnant.
Finally, people are beginning to realise that all is not quite right with these events. The photos of the perpetrator are “picture perfect”, his background and messages “intended to be found”. The whole thing stinks to high heaven. But then again, so does the State, and its mass murder. You must take three steps back and also cast the same skeptical, critical, logical eye on the existence of the State itself, its murders, excuses, pretexts, fictitious enemies and bogus justifications for what is plainly immoral.
If you do not do this, then you are not thinking logically, but are being emotionally manipulated into believing that somehow, a man murdering 80 plus people is different to the State murdering 80 plus people, and that because of this, you must accept changes imposed upon your life.
Did you know that you cannot buy a SIM card in France without presenting State ID? Appalling!
It seems to me that they need to have a little Stonor Saunders injected into their ‘debate’, and Google Translate is more than happy to oblige:
+++++++
Cela a été envoyé à moi.
Ceci a été écrit à l’origine par STONOR SAUNDERS Frances.
Frances Saunders est l’ancien rédacteur en chef des arts du New Statesman, auteur de La Guerre froide culturelle, Diabolical Anglais et Le Diable Courtier et a été attribué William la Royal Historical Society de Gladstone Prix?commémoratif. Elle vit à Londres. Il vaut bien lire et si vous souhaitez, s’il vous plaît le transmettre à autant de personnes que vous le pouvez.
«Vous avez entendu ce que la législation créant cartes d’identité obligatoires franchi une étape cruciale dans la Chambre des communes. Vous pouvez penser que ID cartes ne sont pas de quoi s’inquiéter, puisque nous avons déjà de photos d’identité pour nos passeports et permis de conduire et une carte d’identité ne sera pas différente de que. Qu’est-ce que vous n’avez pas été dit est la pleine portée de cette identité proposée Carte, et ce qu’il signifie pour vous personnellement.
La carte d’identité proposée sera différente de n’importe quelle carte que vous tenez. Il sera être connecté à une base de données appelée le RIN, (National Identity Register), où toutes vos données personnelles seront stockées. Il s’agira notamment de numéro unique qui sera émis pour vous, vos empreintes digitales, un scan de la arrière de votre œil, et votre photo. Votre nom, adresse et date de la naissance sera évidemment aussi y être stockées.
Il y aura des espaces sur cette base de données pour votre religion, le statut de résidence, et de nombreux autres faits privés et personnels à votre sujet. Il est illimité espace pour tous les autres détails de votre vie sur la base de données NIR, qui peut être étendu par le gouvernement avec ou sans d’autres actes de Parlement.
En soi, vous pourriez penser que ce registre est inoffensif, mais vous seriez tort de venir à cette conclusion. Cette nouvelle carte sera utilisée pour vérifier votre identité contre votre entrée dans le registre en temps réel, chaque fois que vous le présenter à «prouver qui vous êtes».
Tout lieu que vend de l’alcool ou des cigarettes, chaque bureau de poste, tous les pharmacie, et chaque banque aura un terminal de carte NIR, (tout comme les lecteurs Chip and Pin qui sont partout maintenant) dans lequel votre carte peut être “glissée” pour vérifier votre identité. Chaque fois que cela arrive, un record est faite à la PIR de l’heure et le lieu que la carte a été présentée. Cela signifie par exemple, qu’il y aura un dossier du gouvernement de chaque fois que vous retirez plus de £ 99 à votre succursale de NatWest, qui maintenant ID demande pour ces transactions. Chaque fois que vous avez à prouver que vous sont plus de 18 ans, votre carte sera glissée, et un enregistrement fait à la PIR. Restaurants et licences hors exigeront que votre carte est glissée de telle sorte que chaque reçu indique qu’ils vendaient de l’alcool à quelqu’un de plus de 18, et que cela a été prouvé par l’accès au NIR, les indemnisant à partir
poursuites.
Les entreprises privées vont avoir accès à la base de données NIR. Si vous voulez postuler pour un emploi, vous devrez présenter votre carte d’un coup. Si vous voulez demander une carte Oyster à Londres Underground, ou un la fidélité des supermarchés carte ou un permis de conduire, vous devrez présenter votre Carte d’identité pour un coup. Va de même pour obtenir une ligne téléphonique ou une téléphone mobile ou d’un compte Internet.
Oyster, DVLA, BT, et de Nectar (par exemple) fonctionnent tous de bases de données très détaillée de leurs propres. Ils seront autorisés à accéder au NIR, comme tous les autres entreprise sera. Cela signifie que chacune de ces entités seront en mesure de enregistrer votre numéro unique dans leur base de données, et placer tous vos déplacements, enregistrements téléphoniques, des activités de conduite et les habitudes d’achat détaillée sous votre numéro unique de NIR. Ces bases de données, qui peut facilement s’adapter sur un stockage appareil de la taille de votre main, seront vendus aux tiers légalement ou illégalement. Il sera alors possible pour une entité non-gouvernementales pour créer une dossier détaillé de toutes vos activités. Certes, le gouvernement aura l’accès à tous les clandestins d’entre eux, ce qui signifie qu’ils auront une complète record de tous vos mouvements, de combien et quand vous vous retirez de votre compte bancaire pour les médicaments que vous prenez, jusqu’au niveau de quelle sorte de pain que vous mangez – tous accessibles via un numéro unique dans une base de données centrale.
C’est tout à fait un bond significatif à partir d’une carte d’identité simple qui montre votre nom et le visage.
La plupart des gens ne savent pas que c’est le vrai caractère et la portée des proposé de carte d’identité. Chaque fois que les détails de comment il fonctionnera sont expliquées pour eux, ils changer rapidement d’être ambivalente envers elle.
Le gouvernement va vous obliger à entrer vos coordonnées dans le NIR et de réaliser cette carte. Si vous et vos enfants veulent obtenir ou renouveler votre passeport, vous serez obligé de prendre vos empreintes digitales et vos yeux scannés pour le RIN, et une carte d’identité sera émis pour vous si vous voulez un ou pas. Si vous refusez de prendre ses empreintes digitales et oculaires numérisées, vous ne serez pas en mesure d’obtenir un passeport. Votre carte d’identité sera, juste comme votre passeport, ne pas être votre propriété. Le ministre de l’Intérieur aura le droit de révoquer ou de suspendre votre identité à tout moment, ce qui signifie que vous ne pas être en mesure de retirer de l’argent sur votre compte bancaire, par exemple, ou faire tout ce qui vous oblige à présenter votre carte d’identité émise par le gouvernement.
Les arguments qui ont été mis transmise en faveur des cartes d’identité peuvent être facilement réfutée. Cartes d’identité NE SERA PAS arrêter les terroristes; chaque Espagnol a une carte d’identité obligatoire, de même que les Bombers de Madrid, et probablement la plupart des les criminels 9 / 11. Les cartes d’identité ne sera pas «d’éliminer la fraude aux prestations», qui en comparaison, est faible par rapport au coût astronomique de cette proposition, qui seront évalués en milliards selon l’Ecole LSE (Londres des Economics). Ce schéma existe uniquement pour exercer une surveillance totale et contrôle sur le citoyen britannique ordinaire libre, et ce sera remplir les poches des les entreprises qui créeront des systèmes informatiques au détriment de la votre liberté, d’intimité et de l’argent.
Si vous ne saviez pas toute la portée du système de carte d’identité proposée avant et vous sont instables comme je suis à ce que cela signifie vraiment pour vous, à cette pays et son mode de vie, je vous exhorte à l’email ou une photocopie cela et lui donner à vos amis et collègues et tout le monde pense que vous devez savoir et qui se soucie. Le projet de loi a procédé à ce stade en raison de l’absence de renseignements exacts et complets sur cette proposition soient rendues publiques. Ensemble et main dans la main, nous pouvons informer la nation toute entière, si tous ceux qui reçoit ce qu’elle transmet. ”
Ce message n’a rien à voir avec la politique – il est à faire avec notre liberté. Mais ce sont les politiciens qui dans l’ignorance vont voter pour la carte d’identité et donc nous rapprocher de l’Etat de police qui semble être le but de notre actuelle Gouvernement. S’il vous plaît transmettre ce message – et d’utiliser votre prochain vote Élection générale pour se débarrasser des gens qui veulent détruire notre chéri démocratie.
Envoyer le traducteur de cet article, un Bitcoin à cette adresse: 14ScQgQRi2U5o6cdAJNhgyzY6w5UtwmX16
There is another interesting article over at Lew Rockwell about Bitcoin, which is a transcript of a conversation with Doug Casey, who we have blogged about before. This man is a truly great speaker and thinker, and as proof of this, I direct you to watch Mr. Casey in action.
In the interview, Doug Casey says something truly astonishing, because if it is true, it means that the next iteration of Bitcoin is already here and is sure to fulfil the promise of a decentralised, unregulated, freedom and pure value centred money. Here is the line that I am talking about:
So, way before the dollar value of Bitcoins stepped off a cliff last weekend, I was telling people who asked me that I didn’t use them and didn’t plan to use them.
Frankly, I can’t see why anyone would, when there’s already an electronic digital currency like Bitcoin but backed with gold: GoldMoney. I should disclose that I’m a small investor in the company.
It says its ‘simple and secure’ and that you have ‘Complete ownership of the metal you buy’.
Better and better!
But where is the ‘download’ link? I want to start using it right now!
When you click on ‘Find out more about how to get started with GoldMoney’
Ooookkkkkk.
OnMouseDown we are not presented with a link to some software but instead we are displayed the following:
At GoldMoney we make it very easy for you to conveniently buy, own and store precious metals. The first step is to sign up for free to open a Holding, which is a personal record of your activity in GoldMoney and the metal you own. After a short verification process, you can transfer money to fund your Holding and start buying metals to preserve your purchasing power.
You have to sign up for a ‘holding’, complete ‘identity verification’ and then transfer funds.
Personal Record?
Verification process?
This doesn’t sound like Bitcoin at all!
It gets worse.
They then ask you for your country of residence. What on earth has that to do with MY MONEY?
And then it gets even WORSE:
Country of Residence
Depending on the country you live in, you can sign up for different types of Holdings. GoldMoney accepts customers from 93 countries. If your country of residence is not one of the countries listed above, unfortunately we are currently unable to accommodate your application. If you are temporarily living in a country not listed above but your primary country of residence is on the list, please contact us to discuss your situation. For example, if you are an international aid worker temporarily assigned to a non-listed country but your primary residence is in the UK, we will most likely be able to accept you as a customer.
If you move to another country after you open a Holding, please take into consideration that this could affect the type of Holding you are able to have.
Netherlands & Netherlands Antilles
Due to a review on the rules applicable to the sale and storage of precious metals, we are currently unable to accept applications from Dutch residents.
Sucks to be Dutch then. I guess that the Dutch don’t have any property rights. I guess that if I am Dutch, I can’t spend money on the internet, with this ‘Bitcoin like’ money. What?
And then it gets unimaginably worse:
We claim that we are from Italy, and then say submit. You then get this:
Enter your name and contact details during the sign-up process
Upload a scanned image of a bank statement or bank cheque before the initial funds are sent from your bank account
Upload a scanned image of your photo ID (passport, national ID card or driver’s license)
Send a certified copy of your photo ID and an original bank statement or utility bill along with a completed CAP Form (letter or A4-size) to us by post
Additional verification of your identity and the source of your funds may be required depending on your circumstances and the Holding value
Unbelievable.
And this, given the interview, is the most surprising thing of all:
Security and integrity
As a company regulated by the Jersey Financial Services Commission, GoldMoney complies with anti-money laundering legislation, which requires GoldMoney to know the identity and residential address of each of its customers. We make use of a Customer Acceptance Policy (CAP), to ensure the security and integrity of the GoldMoney system. More information about the CAP and how to sign up for your GoldMoney Holding can be found in our CAP FAQ.
But in the interview, Casey says:
That’s why the U.S. government and its media lapdogs have been so antagonistic to Bitcoin, claiming it’s primarily of interest to drug lords who want to use it as soap for their money laundering. They always mention it in conjunction with Silk Road, which claims to allow purchase of any drug through mail order, using Bitcoin as its payment system. I have no problem with that, but it’s a totally impractical idea in today’s world. It’s just an idea intended to scare witless Americans. Frankly, I’m disgusted at the fact money laundering is even accepted as a crime; thoughtless people believe whatever they’re told. It’s not a crime, by any rational definition. But that’s another subject for another day.
Well, I certainly agree with that sentiment; there is no such thing as ‘money laundering’… but I digress.
This service is as far from Bitcoin as you could possibly be. There is no software to download, you cannot buy and sell it from anywhere without restriction, you have to integrate with the state at a very intimate level, indeed, they cannot even offer this service to everyone, even Europeans like the Dutch, thanks to the State.
I would never put my money into a service like this where the State is alerted of all your details and ‘holdings’. They offer no utility whatsoever in comparison with Bitcoin. You cannot spend your GoldMoney at retailers directly, you can only redeem your stored gold for cash, which you then have to either take in person or spend through another intermediary if you want to buy something from Bangalore. And of course, there are the myriad fees and taxes you have to pay each time you move YOUR MONEY around between these entities.
This is the reason why Bitcoins are valuable. There is no service like it anywhere.
You can get started with them instantly.
You do not have to identify yourself.
You can use them from any location.
You can send them to any location.
You can fund them with any currency.
You can spend them immediately.
Your transactions are private.
There are no taxes on transactions.
Transaction fees are so small as to be irrelevant, and if you are a miner, you get the fees back from other users.
All of these features and more make Bitcoin a tool with a very high level of utility. Bitcoins are scarce, and you need them if you want to make purchases without the onerous and illegitimate predations of the State.
If the ideas of Liberty are spreading, and they are, Bitcoin will have a very large and primed population of users who recoil at something like GoldMoney.
The utility of Bitcoin, which is a function of the number of users who want it, will entrench it, or at the very least, the idea of it.
We will never go back to government run money, just as we are not going back to music pressed on vinyl. The quality of sound has been sacrificed for Digital Convenience, and more music than ever before is in everyone’s hands, accompanied by a new economy where the middle man is being killed off. Digital music is here to stay, and so is Bitcoin. The middle men are going out of business, and everyone is going to benefit.
The frictionless utility of Bitcoin, like the experience of finding music, books, films and software and then downloading them immediately is something that once you taste it, changes your perception forever.
No one who uses Bitcoin is going to accept GoldMoney as ‘digital currency like Bitcoin’. Its like saying buying DRM’d iTunes files for 99¢ is like sharing FLACs on IRC / Dropbox with your friends (sorry, I slipped into ‘tecchie speak’ as the illiterates call it. What I mean is the experience of downloading and sharing unencumbered music files that you can play anywhere, freely, between friends and colleagues for nothing, is not at all like paying money for files from Apple, where what you get are files that you cannot share or use on all of your music devices. Apple is a cumbersome, restrictive and invasive intermediary vendor that spoils your music experience. Is that better? I can only dumb it down so much… sorry!).
The genie is out of the bottle, just as it is with file sharing. Eventually no one will pay for entertainment files. It will be culturally unacceptable and commercially impossible. Similarly in the near future, no one will accept that you cannot spend your own money whenever you want, however you want, without anyone other than you and the recipient having a say in it.
Bitcoin, or its immediate decedents will provide the secure infrastructure for this, and most certainly not GoldMoney or services like it.
This does not, obviously, invalidate the immutable, irrefutable idea that the best money is gold. All it means is that on the internet, if you want to spend money, the best way to do it is Bitcoin. It is the easiest, the most Libertarian styled, the most secure (yes, the most secure, all the recent problems with Bitcoin users have not been due to a problem with Bitcoin, but with the people who are running it and the incorrectly managed computers that they control) and transparent way of spending money.
Finally, it seems like the Ghandi rule is sweeping through the Libertarians who at first, instinctively and irrationally railed against the idea of Bitcoin.
The people on the wrong side of history appear to be very quickly moving from the laughing stage, and are already past the fighting stage it seems.
Bitcoin has already won.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
UPDATE!
Jon Matonis hit the nail on the head about this company back in 2009. His article is just the sort of thing that journalists cannot produce, and that the best Bloggers are good at; concise, rational even handed, insightful and purely fact based writing that spells it out just as it is. Read it!
It is now clear where the lines dividing freedom minded people on the issue of Bitcoin are drawn.
On the one side, you have mostly older computer illiterates who are out of their comfort zone, and on the other, you have younger computer literate people who are comfortable with both free market ideas, sound economics and computers.
The former camp, the computer illiterates, all use the same form of argumentation and fallacious reasoning to attack Bitcoin, including straw men. Here is a good example:
Approximately 2,000 years ago, Aristotle said good money must be:
Durable
Portable
Divisible and consistent
Have intrinsic value
The astute reader will immediately realize that Bitcoin does not possess any of those characteristics and was subject to trouble from the getgo — not to mention the security issues that immediately arise with anything computer– and Internet related. A computer generated currency is not durable, as the recent hack demonstrates. And it’s certainly not portable. Can you imagine bringing your computer to the door to pay for your next Chinese food delivery? You get the idea for the remaining characteristics.
The straw man here is the line about Chinese food delivery. There is no reason of course, why you could not pay for your Chinese food in advance by Bitcoin. Its like saying, “imagine ordering books by computer from a company, lets call it ‘Amazon’. Imagine the delivery man having to keep change for all the sales! Its a security nightmare. IT WILL NEVER CATCH ON!”
The astute reader recognises faulty reasoning when he sees it, and is not persuaded by straw men.
As for the Aristotelian qualities that money must have, lets go through them for Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is durable. In fact, because it is not a physical good but is instead, an idea fixed in media, it can last for an indefinite time as long as it is copied to another medium. You can keep backups of it, which of course, you cannot do with physical money. Once again, the fact that you can have two copies of your money and cannot spend it twice is the breakthrough of Bitcoin.
Anyone who says Bitcoin is not portable, is not thinking clearly. Bitcoin is the most portable ‘money’ ever created. It can be sent anywhere in the world in an instant. There is no other money like it in the world in this respect.
Bitcoin is divisible. Each coin can be divided into one million equal parts. Bitcoin is consistent in value, if we accept that the value of a commodity is related to its supply.
The only test Bitcoin fails, some would argue, is that it has no intrinsic value. Lets go to the dictionaries to be absolutely sure:
What Does Intrinsic Value Mean?
1. The actual value of a company or an asset based on an underlying perception of its true value including all aspects of the business, in terms of both tangible and intangible factors. This value may or may not be the same as the current market value. Value investors use a variety of analytical techniques in order to estimate the intrinsic value of securities in hopes of finding investments where the true value of the investment exceeds its current market value.
In finance, intrinsic value refers to the value of a security which is intrinsic to or contained in the security itself. It is also frequently called fundamental value. It is ordinarily calculated by summing the future income generated by the asset, and discounting it to the present value. Simply put, it is the actual value of a security as opposed to the market or book value.
An intrinsic property is an essential or inherent property of a system or of a material itself or within. It is independent of how much of the material is present and is independent of the form the material, e.g., one large piece or a collection of smaller pieces.
I think the last one puts the nail in the coffin of the argument that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value.
Bitcoin has intrinsic value, by definition, because the system has value to the people who use it. It also has intrinsic value, by definition, because the amount of material in a thing is not relevant to wether or not a thing has intrinsic value; Bitcoins are immaterial, and they are part of a system that has value.
The fact that a single exchange, MTGox was hacked does not demonstrate that ‘A computer generated currency is not durable’; this is another instance of fallacious thinking. For fun, can you pick the correct one?
Once again all of these fallacious arguments are being made on the internet, and the irony of this appears to be lost on the people making them.
Even if Bitcoin is only used by one one hundredth of the entire internet population regularly, the number of people using it will be enough. More than enough. “For what?” I hear you ask… anything we need.
The people who build the systems that change the world do not need luddites, computer illiterates and sticklers to urge them to do what they do. The internet was built by a small number of people, and it has spread everywhere. Bitcoin was devised by one person, and it has already changed everything.
While we are at it, there is another prediction that has gone out of the window, the lone wolf inventor was declared extinct a few years ago, the claim being that the research and development costs involved in creating new things meant that unshaven men in their garages would not be able to produce world changing technologies.
How wrong they were. Bitcoin and Bittorrent are only two examples.
This is true for Bitcoin and the systems that are going to come after it. You need only look at at a widely adopted system like Skype, which is a decedent of ideas behind Gnutella, which itself was a decedent of Napster.
This is another problem that afflicts the discussion of Bitcoin; not only do very few people have a knowledge of how software works in general, but even fewer know about the recent history of some of the amazing tools we now take for granted.
Take a look at Nautilus, the file browser. Did you know that a company raised 11 million dollars to develop it? The company was called Eazel, and now we all benefit from that massive investment whenever we use the file browser in our Linux desktops, since Nautilus is now free and open source. Before this company, file browsers on Linux were not so user friendly. The people who invested in Eazel might not have made a profit, but that is not the point. The point here is that a world class piece of software was released that made something that was hard much more easy. The same dynamic can happen with the Bitcoin client, and when it does, we are going to experience massive, permanent disruptive change.
When thinkers like Mark Shuttleworth or Justin Frankel or a consortium of developers with many millions of dollars in the bank decides to fork and polish Bitcoin, you are going to see the emergence of a new version of the Bitcoin client, which will be as usable as the Skype client, that will sit on top of the existing Bitcoin network. Adoption will then go exponential, and all the short sighted people who claimed that it will never catch on will be forced to eat their words.
This new Bitcoin client will not only address all of the problems of the present client, but it will introduce new features that will make the adoption of Bitcoin accelerate; like being able to print out your Bitcoins so you can spend them like paper money.
Thinking is hard. Reading and understanding technical specifications is not easy; you have to spend many hours cross referencing different documents, each of which is liable to cause you to have to read other difficult to digest documents.
If you are not willing to do this, its not a problem; the world will go on without you. Thats why all these people are able to send out email newsletters, publish websites and make Skype calls without knowing how it all works or the history of the tools they are using.
What you cannot do however, is claim that something, in this case Bitcoin, cannot work when you are not capable of understanding it or even worse, are unwilling to make the effort to research it properly, and then expect people to take you seriously.
Something as important, significant and world-changing deserves proper attention and analysis, not flippant twaddle masquerading as insight.
This is not a substitution, or an extraploated future scenario of the type we have used in the past to illustrate the dangers of centralized databases of your personal, private and sensitive data.
THIS IS REAL! >> UPDATE: OR MAYBE NOT!
LulzSec:
Not sure we claimed to hack the UK census or where that rumour started, but we assume it’s because people are stupider than you and I.
Anyone in the world can copy and paste The Lulz Boat ASCII art and general lighthearted theme. Smarten up, check the feed first.
But hey, if someone out there hacked the UK government in the name of #AntiSec, well done sirs!
It seems that LulzSec may NOT have access to the UK Census Data! Or maybe someone else does, and wants to post it under their name…. who knows? If something turns up on The Pirate Bay, then we will know that its true. Even if a single entry from the Census DB is leaked, with the table structure and everything, that would mean that the data is O.U.T. OUT!
LulzSec should start PGP signing their statements so that no one can forge them…
Even if this time, the data has not escaped, this doesn’t invalidate what we and all the people who understand this problem have been saying.
There is nothing in the world that can stop a determined person from copying the data from any database, and there is no way that the UK Census Data is secure in any database where it is stored. That is an incontrovertible and indisputable fact. There is no way of knowing wether or not this data has not already been copied by someone. The statement relased by the UK Census people in response to this fake Lulzsec announcement said only that they are ‘looking into it’ not, “we have your data safe, and no one has copied it”. See what I mean?
MTGox, we discover, was the victim of an internal leak of their database. They were not hacked, and they are the victims of a criminal act of theft.
The facts in this matter do not concern the people who are gloating over this event. There are a group of people who are violent in nature, and who despise Bitcoin because they understand exactly what it represents; a direct threat to their sick and violent society which is based on coercion, the absence of freedom and the application of force.
Imagine a world where everyone had access to personal force fields via an artificially created gland that was made to grow into their abdomen by a nano machine / virus. These force fields could be activated either by the fear response or by the direction of your will, in the same way that you use your will to direct your arm to throw a ball.
Everyone would be able to protect themselves from any sort of physical attack, and all would be able to use similar technology to protect their houses.
It would then immediately become impossible for the State to send their agents to your house to rob you with bailiffs. They would no longer be able to force you to pay anything that you did not want to pay, and you would be able to protect yourself and your property from the other criminals and predators that are not sent out by the State.
In such a world, all flows of money would be voluntary by default. There could be no coercion of any kind, since violence against the person and her property would have been abolished by the advent of force fields.
The entire world would switch from one based on violence to one based on voluntary exchange.
This is exactly what Bitcoin is doing.
It is going to make it impossible for the state to stop people transacting at a distance, in any amount that they choose. It is going to remove the State from the equation as the unwanted third party in all transactions.
This is the true source of the animus against Bitcoin, and it explains why people like Tim Worstall and the other writers are dismissing Bitcoin so flippantly. Here is what I am talking about. These are quotes from an article by Tim Worstall that has just appeared:
The Bitcoin community faced another crisis on Sunday afternoon as the price of the currency on the most popular exchange, Mt.Gox, fell from $17 to pennies in a matter of minutes. Trading was quickly suspended and visitors to the home page were redirected to a statement blaming the crash on a compromised user account. Mt.Gox’s Mark Karpeles said that the exchange would be taken offline to give administrators time to roll back the suspect transactions.
Tim Worstall asserts that Bitcoin is finished because a single exchange has technical problems if this is the level of expertise operating at Forbes, you might be forgiven for taking everything that they publish with a big pinch of salt. There is no relation between the fictitious ‘Bitcoin community’ and MTGox, in fact, its a stretch to assert that there is a Bitcoin community at all. Is there an ‘internet community’ simply because people who peer on the network can send email to each other?
Not a good start!
For the record, Tim Worstall works as a consultant and dealer in scandium and other exotic metals. We can assume that he knows a little about how exchanges work, that there is normally more than one exchange for every commodity, and that you can get a feel for the price of a commodity not by looking only at one exchange, but by looking at them all at the same time.
He must also know that Bitcoin is in its infancy, and as other exchanges open, the problem of a single exchange running into difficulty will greatly suppress the triggers that initiate widespread panic. He should also know that a single technical fault in an exchange cannot be translated into a true loss of value in whatever it is the exchange deals in.
These fundamental facts and logic must be known to him, so why has he written this piece? What is the purpose of it?
The initial problem leading to the price collapse was that one user tried to sell more than the market could absorb. For of course the value of anything is determined by the balance of supply and demand for it. Thus the price crashed (and you can see a chart of how quickly it did here). However, it appears that this isn’t the only problem:
This demonstrates Mr. Worstall has at least a basic grasp of economics and how markets work. What he does not tell you, is that the sales were made not by one user, but by over 400 users simultaneously, who were all being controlled by a single attacker. Facts are stubborn things. Had this breach not taken place, the quoted price for Bitcoins on MTGox would not have dropped as it did. Worstall cannot distinguish between a wrongly quoted price and the true price of a commodity in a market.
Since I began writing this, it has emerged that details of more than 60,000 users have been stolen from the Mt Gox exchange. The compromised information includes hashed passwords.
No, the doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the Bitcoin experiment, but it’s a pretty good indication of it.
This is a baseless assertion, which other violent Statists will use in a faulty appeal to authority attack (“it came from Forbes, a trusted source”) against Bitcoin.
This event is not an indication of anything, other than that some of the user accounts at MTGox were exposed. If we apply this faulty logic to the other recent mass disclosures of usernames and passwords, we should expect Worstall to come up with similar nonsense lines:
The recent hack of SONY, where the credit card numbers, dates of birth and real names of TWENTY FIVE MILLION users were copied…
The recent hack of SEGA…
The loss from HM Revenue and Customs…
So, That’s the End of Credit Cards Then
So, That’s the End of SONY Then
So, That’s the end of SEGA Then
So, That’s the end of Her Majesty’s Government Then
Do you see what I did there?
Take a look at this if you want to gain some perspective on the matter of large scale data breaches, something that the Tim Worstall’s of this world seem to lack:
While we are at it, in the case of Parliament, the breach of the government data really should have instantly spelled the end of ContactPoint and the ill conceived, ill fated ID Card, but of course, it did not. Also, the breach of 25 million credit cards should put pay to the Coalition’s absurd plan to use credit cards as ID Cards to access government gateways. We have written about this recently:
Credit card fraud is rampant, and using credit cards to interface with the state will allow everyone with a fraudulent or duplicated credit card to masquerade as someone else when identifying themselves to a government portal.
Look no further than the recent SONY breach where the credit card details, dates of birth, names and addresses of SEVENTY MILLION people were copied.
The population of Britain is 61,838,154 – 2009 That means that a number of people, larger than the population of Britain had their credit card details copied.
It means that if such a thing happened in the UK, every single person who identifies themselves to the state with their VISA could be impersonated with ease. This means more benefit fraud, GUARANTEED.
The fact of the matter is that writing irrational pieces like this cannot be an accident. This is not an opinion piece, though the hatred of Liberty oozes out of every vowel. I want to know who is directing these drones to write hit pieces against Bitcoin. I am not the only one (not that that means anything in and of itself) to suspect that the organised chorus of anti Bitcoin propaganda, and it is propaganda, is just too perfectly in tune to be the random warbling of computer illiterates. Or maybe they are all perfectly brainwashed to the same tune piped out by the Government schools and State mandated curricula? Who knows?
Here is another piece in the key of Fail; Fortune ran this piece recently which everyone can see is a, “…thrown together and completely fact-optional piece. Seriously, this reads like somebody who spent 2 hours reading other news coverage headlines and decided to fill in the rest with make-believe.”
Oh dear.
The mainstream media and its gatekeepers have a terrible problem on their hands. They cannot tell a story without directing people to the facts that will disprove their propaganda. They are only a click away from every hit piece they write.
Anyone with curiosity can Google Bitcoin for themselves, download it and then run it. They can start accepting Bitcoins. They can integrate it into their websites and start getting paid for anything that they do.
Once they get a first hand feel for it, the lies that are being propagated about Bitcoin are instantly washed away. As more people use it, and the client improves, it will become harder and harder to lie about Bitcoin, and then the MSM drones will have to capitulate and start accepting it themselves. Once this happens, it will be forbidden by the editors of these rags to write an anti-bitcoin piece, because they would be being paid in Bitcoins themselvs.
That will be the tipping point; just as the newspapers all decided they needed to have online editions of their lie machines on the internet, and when they adopt anything, like social networking and Twitter feeds, eventually they will all have to accept Bitcoin or its successor. This is absolutely inevitable. For those that are interested, all of the websites of the newspapers are running some sort of Open Source Software. They might not like the economics or the philosophy of ‘free’ but they are all using it to spread their lies.
Forbes.com is running Apache on Linux and so is fortune.cnn.com. Both of these organizations would have railed against Open Source software from every possible angle, with FUD, “its not as secure as proprietary software”, “the business model cannot work”, “its not ready for the desktop” etc etc, and yet, they have all capitulated, and no one even discusses it any more, save to note how far and wide the software is spreading.
This is how these people operate.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
We are at the ‘ha ha’ stage now. It is only a matter of time before Tim Worstall or some other hack calls for Bitcoin to be banned or regulated. And for the record, you can replace Tim Worstall’s name with the name of any journalist that has written a piece like this. Even people who claim to be scientific in their thinking manage to write garbage about Bitcoin. They all share the same attributes (lies) and one is replaceable with any other, and the newspaper name or slant doesn’t matter either. I could cite dozens of shabby articles, but why bother, they are all pretty much identical in theme, deception, sneer and ignorance.
For there are certain things that we want from a currency. A medium of exchange, a store of value, we’d also like to it be liquid and security is important as well.
Once again, we have the ever present WE of the collectivists. What Worstall means by ‘security’ of course is the unfettered ability of the State to be able to interpose itself in all transactions so it can tax. Without it, his beloved collective dies, and Bitcoin is the first actual financial tool that could pull it off. This is why everyone who loves and lives by the State, its predations, its illegitimate regulations, its stolen loot, its bureaucracy and all the other vile stuff in its ecosystem where violence is the lubricant, hates Bitcoin with a passion.
No currency can have all of these features (and humans have used some pretty odd things as currency over the centuries, from copper sheets to cowrie shells via butter, salt, gold, silver and even pieces of paper with Dead Presidents on them, surely the final lunacy?) to perfection but a currency which doesn’t have any of them in appreciable quantities isn’t going to last very long.
This is simply not true. There can be a currency that has all of these features; just because you cannot imagine it that does not make it so. Three years ago, anyone you asked would have told you that the double spending problem could not be solved, because digital files are infinitely copyable. Lo and behold, a single man with a vision has solved the problem and his solution has applications beyond currency. Computer illiterate collectivists cannot even begin to see the sort of world that would emerge out of the idea behind Bitcoin. No matter. The world will change wether they like it or not.
As for odd currencies lasting a long time, did you know that the longest running currency was the tally stick? A strip of wood with notches cut in it that was then split in half; one half being spent out and the other reserved by the issuer.
The tally stick system lasted seven hundred years as a form of money.
Bitcoin can be used to send stored value across the world, in the same way that tally sticks were used. It can last a long time, and bring many benefits to the people who use it. Bitcoin, and the ideas that drive it are in no way ‘over’.
Bitcoins aren’t secure, as both the recent theft and this password problem show.
This is simply false, and betrays a complete ignorance of what Bitcoin is and how it works. All of the problems that have been falsely attributed to Bitcoin have not been a problem with Bitcoin itself, but have instead, been directly related to the platforms in which it is being used.
MTGox had a problem with their physical security; nothing to do with Bitcoin itself. The man who lost 50,000 Bitcoins had them stolen from a laptop running Microsoft Windows, either by physical access or remotely by a Trojan; nothing to do with Bitcoin itself.
Even if someone finds a flaw in the Bitcoin client, the idea of it is sound and has changed everything forever.
More people today are thinking about what money is, and understand what Fiat Currency is and how it is evil and institutionalised theft. That is thanks to Bitcoin. More people today have a real grasp of how simple money transfer over the Internet could and should be, if only the State would get out of the way. That is thanks to Bitcoin.
PayPal and the Credit Card companies and their processors are shaking in their boots; you will never have your Bitcoin account frozen. You do not have to make any declaration of any kind, swear an oath, divulge personal information or suffer any State mandated humiliation to start receiving and spending Bitcoins worth millions of dollars. There are no artificial limits on how much Bitcoin you can receive and spend, and where you can spend it and what on. The only loser in all of this is the State and its army of cronies, clients, parasites and thugs.
The next Rebecca Black on YouTube will put her Bitcoin address in the description, and she will reap millions from her fans… even the ones who hate her.
Actually, thats an argument against Bitcoin, sorry.
They’re not liquid, nor a store of value, as the price collapse shows and if they’re none of those things then they’ll not be a great medium of exchange either as who would want to accept them?
This is, of course, nonsense. Lets take it one by one:
“They are not liquid”
What Does Liquid Asset Mean? An asset that can be converted into cash quickly and with minimal impact to the price received. Liquid assets are generally regarded in the same light as cash because their prices are relatively stable when they are sold on the open market. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/liquidasset.asp
Bitcoins, are becoming more and more liquid every day. You can trade them in the street, and there are services popping up that help you find people who want to sell or buy Bitcoins close to you, using geolocation.
“nor a store of value”
This is demonstrably false. If you can spend Bitcoins, they are a store of value by definition, just as the tally stick was, just as gold is and paper money is. This is nonsense on stilts, and we have addressed this before when we took apart Grant Babcock’ assertions.
“as the price collapse shows”
There was no price collapse, this is a falsehood. MTGox, a single exchange, suffered a technical problem not related to Bitcoin itself, and the price recovered immediately. The trades are going to be reversed where possible, and as you can see in this video:
the price at that broken exchange recovered. This is not reporting, or real journalism. It is utter rubbish.
“they’ll not be a great medium of exchange either as who would want to accept them?”
You can file this under the same nonsense like, “guitar bands are finished” (Beatles) or “no one wants internet access, because no one is on it yet”, or “the internet will amount to nothing” Clifford Stoll.
Note, attentive readers, that Clifford Stoll’s famous, “it will never catch on” piece appeared in Newsweek, a world class mainstream media lie machine, with a vested interest in killing anything that stops people from being free, reading the truth or from them selling dead trees. They have been dragged kicking and screaming into the future…. but you know this!
True, Bitcoin does still offer anonymity:
Not really, but why should we expect you to get this right?
but then so do copper sheets to cowrie shells via butter, salt, gold, silver and even pieces of paper with Dead Presidents on them.
Its only difficult to see what Bitcoin has going for it if you are an ignoramus in the literal sense of that word.
If you understand how cash works, then you should understand what Bitcoin offers its users and what it has ‘going for it’. But I think this article’s author knows full well what the potential of Bitcoin is, which is exactly why he has written this piece as he has.
No one born in 1963, who writes for ‘newspapers” and trades metals as a profession doesn’t know what the internet has done for man. People like that have experienced the internet revolution first hand, as it has transformed the way everyone works, plays, communicates, learns, spends money and thinks.
Bitcoin, its future iterations and its inevitable successors, are going to change the world again, in ways that are very difficult to predict, though we can have a crack at it for fun. It is a fact that Bitcoin already has changed the world.
One thing you simply cannot do in the face of something like this is intone, “it will never work” or “I can’t see the point in it”. These sorts of predictions, especially when they are related to technology are almost always wrong or short sighted, and in today’s day and age, with all of the experience of the last two decades under our belts, such an attitude is inexcusable stupidity.
I just came across this very wonderful post on copyright, excerpted here. Read the rest of it, its a classic, and do spread it.
A Crescendo of Copyright
Natural Finale and Reprise
Rejected by The Rethink Music Conference, April 2011, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University
Abstract
A prologue – mankind’s culture and copyright in perspective
Copyright’s 18th Century Overture
1709 Queen Anne’s privilege of copyright
1787 the philosophy of Paine and the (natural) rights of man
1790 the prestidigitation in which a privilege is inveigled as a natural right
Copyright’s Confrontation with Cultural Liberty reaches a crescendo
C19-20 the printing industry’s exploitation of its privilege
1990s the propertisation of published intellectual works as an entrenchment
2000s the piracy of published intellectual works as a natural liberty
2010s the persecution of the people for their piracy (cultural liberty)
Copyright’s finale, and the reprise of natural rights
20?? the prospectus for mankind’s future
Prologue
The extent of mankind’s primordial cultural activity stretches back at least half a million years, but thanks to repeated erasure by glaciation we start the notable cultural events calendar at 50,000BC.
51,709 years later a nascent empire and its pampered press have the impudence to decide that mankind’s cultural commonwealth would be so much better if a law was created to prohibit people from copying each other.
There are a few words for the precursory, unbridled cultural intercourse that still remain in the English language, though they are almost obsolete: ‘folksong’, ‘folkmusic’, ‘folktales’, and ‘folklore’. These primeval springs are still known to a few among us and can be found seeping through the pre-renaissance foundations upon which our modern culture stands.
Today we have the luxury of looking back over the last three centuries of ‘protection’ to see how much richer our culture has become, being effectively manacled and enclosed by corporations such as Disney. Permitted the liberty only to create purely original works, albeit with some tolerance for cultural cross contamination (if not too flagrant), we enjoy a far more creative and diverse culture. Or rather, this is what Queen Anne’s Stationers’ Guild and its descendant publishing corporations would persuade us is the consequence of her wise enactment of law to ‘protect’ published works from the grubby hands and mouths of the great unwashed.
Nothing to do with the printers’ monopolies then…
Let us see the historical accident of copyright in perspective:
65,000,000BC
Primates
2,000,000BC
Homo Erectus
500,000BC
Division into Neanderthal & Homo Sapiens
200,000BC
Homo Sapiens’ ancestral basis
140,000BC
Glacial retreat after 40,000 year long glacial period
50,000BC
Dawn of mankind’s culture: language, music, drawing, etc.
32,000BC
Cave paintings
30,000BC
Neanderthals extinct
20,000BC
Glacial retreat after 50,000 year long glacial period
17,000BC
Lascaux Cave Paintings
10,000BC
Holocene – modern epoch
9,000BC
Jericho
8,000BC
Stonehenge site’s significance
3,100BC
Stonehenge construction begins
2,611BC
First Egyptian Pyramid
753BC
Foundation of Rome
300BC
Library of Alexandria
48BC
Library of Alexandria accidentally destroyed by Julius Caesar
300
Book format outnumbers scroll format
1282
Water powered paper mill
1403
Corporation of London forms Stationers’ Guild
1440
Development and use of printing press begins
1492
Europeans discover New World
1536
Erasmus dies – 750,000 copies of his works sold
1557
Stationers’ Guild granted control over all printing
1572
Fall of Inca Empire
1695
Stationers’ Guild loses control upon expiry of the Licensing of the Press Act 1662
1703
Daniel Defoe endorses commercial piracy of his work – if true copies
1709
Queen Anne Establishes the Privilege of Copyright
1787
US Constitution
1790
Madison re-enacts Statute of Anne (tweaked for the US)
1791
Thomas Paine deprecates privileges
1814
Steam powered printing press
1837
Babbage designs Analytical Engine
1937
Relay computers
1943
Valve/Tube computers
1953
Transistor computers
1969
Internet begins with two nodes
1971
Microprocessor computers
1991
World Wide Web begins
2000
The people obtain the means of mass reproduction and communication
2010
The successors to the Stationers’ Guild seek possession of the Internet via ACTA
2011
Copyright recognised to be ineffective vs the people’s cultural liberty/piracy
2015??
Copyright is reformed to exempt individuals in the digital domain
2020??
Copyright is reformed to exempt individuals
2025??
Copyright is reformed to exempt the digital domain
2030??
Copyright is repealed
2031??
The author’s exclusive right to their writings is properly secured at last – ethically
Seen in a proper perspective, copyright is a legislative misadventure borne of political expediency and commercial self-interest. It is a hiccup in mankind’s history and, in the face of the diffusive nature of information, is coming to an abrupt and natural end.
[…]
read the rest of this epic, classic, brilliant, informative and insightful post here:
Some people believe that the design of Bitcoin is flawed, and that it cannot work. David Kramer is one of them and has made an interesting post over at Lew Rockwell, about Bitcoin. Lets take a look.
I’m sure by now many of you have heard about Bitcoin. The fact that it’s called “virtual currency” gives you an idea about its actual value as a real medium of exchange.
This isn’t true; the only thing that gives you an idea about its value as a medium of exchange is what you can exchange it for. Right now you can trade a bitcoin for 26.141 Federal Reserve Notes. This is the truth about what the value of a Bitcoin is right now.
While many people who are touting it on Facebook are enamored with the fact that it was voluntarily created by the marketplace (i.e., is not forced down our throats by a private central bank), I’m afraid that those people are losing sight of how a real medium of exchange arises in a free market.
Bitcoin was developed as a way to exchange between people in a cash like fashion at a distance, without a central clearing authority. It was created because there is a need for this service, which has been recognised since the days of Dr. David Chaum’s E-Cash.
The people who work on this project were not directed to by anyone, and no one told the man who made the breakthrough that this is what he should be doing. This is yet another example of free people solving problems for themselves, and that is a good thing.
We should point out that Satoshi Nakamoto could have patented this idea but choose not to; instead, he released his idea and the software he wrote to implement it as Open Source, so that everyone everywhere can benefit from his concept. This is a noble act, and it is proper that we recognise this.
A medium of exchange arises from something that had a material use/value in the market prior to becoming a medium of exchange, i.e., it was also a good being bartered for other goods and services. Over the centuries, gold and silver won out as the two most preferred mediums of exchange—with gold holding the number one position due to it being more scarce than silver.
You could argue that the electricity and the CPU cycles that are used to generate bitcoins had a use in the market prior to their use to create a Bitcoin, but we will leave that for today.
Over the centuries, gold and silver have been settled upon as the best medium of exchange by the market, and this is still true today.
Now fast forward to the twentieth century, which is happening right now. How can I transmit gold (or any thing that I and another person want to trade) without double spending, anonymously, to a person that is half way around the world, without a central clearing authority? Before Bitcoin, this was not possible, and now it is.
Bitcoin, whilst not conforming strictly to the definition of what money is, is a very useful tool to exchange value. It takes some understanding and knowledge of mathematics to grasp exactly how it works and why it is so brilliant, but even without that knowledge, it can still be used by everyone eventually.
Mr. Kramer can use email to send and receive messages without understanding SMTP or POP syntax. He can write blog posts without understanding HTTP requests or MYSQL, and most certainly he will be able to use credit cards and buy books from Amazon whilst his transaction is protected by SSL. None of these things, these very complicated things, need to be understood fully before you can grasp their importance. SSL, upon which the entire commerce infrastructure is built, is nothing like putting a paper document in an envelope to be mailed by the government monopoly postal system and yet, it is used every day to secure documents in transit. PGP and Public Key Cryptography is used every day to sign documents in a way that means they cannot be forged; signing a document with Public Key Cryptography is not the same as putting your ‘John Hancock’ on a piece of paper, but it is a quantum leap in a different direction that has uses way beyond what signing a piece of paper can do for you.
This is what Bitcoin is all about; it is a breakthrough in sending and receiving acknowledgement of ownership.
Anyone who scoffs at this is simply not seeing the big picture.
What was Bitcoin’s prior material use/value? Zero. It is just bits in a computer.
This is a straw man argument. David Kramer’s post, and the two links in his update to Murray Rothbard’s books (one of which I have read; ‘What has Government done to our money?‘) are just ‘bits in a computer’ and yet, these bits can be used to transform the thinking of men. Bitcoins when they are stored on a device, are represented by bits, but it is what those bits represent and their relationship to other bits on other people’s computers that is important. This line of Kramer’s shows that he really does not understand what computers are, how they work and why Bitcoin is a breakthrough.
And what’s with the “fixed” amount of Bitcoins? Who determined the “proper” amount? A computer programmer?
And why not a computer programmer? This is exactly the same as Lacy Clay saying Thomas DiLorenzo cannot talk about economics ‘because he is an historian’. For what reason are computer programmers excluded from inventing something that has a potential use in economics? Or should this be left only to the high priests? This is not a serious argument against the design of Bitcoin. Clearly there needed to be an upper limit to the number of Bitcoins in circulation, otherwise it would not be useful as a way of transmitting ‘money’. The person who designed Bitcoin, a computer programmer, set the upper limit. If the market will not accept this limit, then the system will not be used. But I digress.
Data is infinitely copyable. There is no limit to the number of times data can be copied. This means that any token in a system of exchange can be copied at will by anyone with access to the system at any level. This is where the problem of double spending comes from, and part of the breakthrough in Bitcoin is the solution to this problem, which computer programmers have been searching for for decades.
When you have even a slight grasp of how data and computers work, and you understand that the double spending problem has been solved, your first reaction would be to gasp, as the enormity of what Bitcoin is dawns on you.
Only the free market can voluntarily determine how much of a real medium of exchange is needed in the marketplace over time.
This is true, but once again, this has nothing to do with Bitcoin. By releasing Bitcoins slowly over time, by the efforts of the people who use it, there can never be a flood of Bitcoins. Satoshi Nakamoto must have grasped on some level, if not entirely, that money is a commodity, which is why he designed Bitcoin to be mined in this way, instead of starting off with 21,000,000 coins in circulation all at once. All we know about his thinking is what we see in his software and in his original proposal. We have between now and 2142 to see what the market voluntarily determines how much of a real medium of exchange Bitcoin is, and if the number of bitcoins is too small or too big. Whatever the outcome, there is nothing stopping someone else with another system from supplanting or improving on Bitcoin, by whatever means they can come up with.
While the idea of attempting to get rid of the Bankster monopoly on creating money out of thin air is commendable, Bitcoin is also money created out of thin air. Bitcoin is just substituting one bogus medium of exchange for another.
Declaring Bitcoin to be ‘Just Another Bogus Medium of Exchange’ is not an argument and is clearly false. It is also not true that Bitcoins are created ‘out of thin air’. Bitcoin is new and unique, and that is a fact; even if you believe it to be bogus, you have to demonstrate why it is bogus.
Tav addresses how Bitcoin works, acknowledges its breakthrough, demonstrates an understanding of economics, identifies what he believes the specific flaws in Bitcoin are, and explains why he concludes it cannot work, clearly and with precision. Here is another critique and another by the same author.
If you want to contribute something meaningful and useful that is the way to do it. There are arguments swirling around the ‘hoarding problem’; it would be nice to read a good analysis of hoarding and how it applies to real money like gold and silver, and how those dynamics apply to Bitcoin. In any case, I don’t care much for people who refuse to think hard about subjects like Bitcoin; something that is voluntary, harmless, an exiting breakthrough and which has massive potential even if in this iteration, it fails.
We have seen the failure of other systems, like Chaumian E-Cash before. Each of these iterations causes analysis, innovation and new products to emerge. This is something to celebrate, to think hard about, to address with logic and facts and indeed, to even try out on your own computer so that you actually have a grasp of what is involved in it.
Finally, whatever happens with Bitcoin, the individual wins.
If Bitcoin becomes the de-facto way of spending money on the internet, displacing all other systems like Credit Cards and PayPal, the public wins, and the State loses. That is win.
If Bitcoin fails because the State outlaws it, hatred for the State increases. That is win.
If Bitcoin fails for economic reasons, it will not be tried again in this form and the lessons learned will be folded into the next iteration. That is win.
If Bitcoin fails for technical reasons, same again, the lessons learned will be used in the next iteration, which is win.
Whatever way you choose to look at it, Bitcoin is a good thing.
+++++++ UPDATE! +++++++
In a well considered article, which I linked to above, “BitCoins: All Buzz, No Substance” by Grant Babcock, the problems with Bitcoin as perceived by the author are addressed. In listing his objections to Bitcoin, he actually argues for it. Lets take a look.
A given good’s exchange value has a tendency to snowball.
This is happening with Bitcoin right now.
If I believe that a larger number of people are willing to trade for a good, I am more willing to trade for that good myself.
This is happening right now with Bitcoin.
Eventually, we expect a single good or a handful of goods to emerge as the predominant media of exchange; they are then called monies.
This may happen with Bitcoin on the internet. If enough people download the client and accept it, and websites use the simple tools needed to accept it, we can expect it to emerge as a form of money. Bitcoins, by Grant’s own reasoning, are no different to coconuts, feathers, tally sticks or cowrie shells.
Historically, goods such as cigarettes, precious metals, shells, and many others have emerged as monies.
And so why not digital certificates that cannot be forged or ‘printed’ (mined or generated) beyond a certain number (21,000,000)?
People’s willingness to treat an item as money is based on experience. They forecast that a good will be accepted in trade tomorrow because it was accepted in trade the day before and the day before that.
And so, if enough people accept Bitcoins, they will treat it as money de-facto by this definition.
If we follow this chain back in time, eventually we arrive at a point where the commodity is has not yet been used as a medium of exchange and is only wanted for its use value.
The principle that the value of a currency can be traced back to a time when it was not yet a currency but just a commodity like any other is called the regression theorem, and interested parties can read more about it in Human Action Ch 17 § 4.
If you do not like tracing Bitcoins back to digital certificates, you could trace them back to the electricity used to make them. Or is electricity not a commodity because it is not physical? It is intangible, but is transmissible… hmmmm!
Typically once a commodity becomes a money, a variety of certification agencies will emerge.
Bitcoin has this, of course, in the form of its decentralized P2P clients. That is the breakthrough; no centralised certification agency.
Suppose for example that our money is gold — examples of certification might be an imprint on a gold coin stating its weight and where it was minted, or a piece of paper entitling the bearer to a certain amount of gold at a trusted repository.
A stamp on a bar of gold is meaningless, as we have seen with the tungsten centered fake gold bars. Bitcoin, in this respect, is superior to gold because each Bitcoin is absolutely certified.
This certification makes the commodity an even better money than it would have been without the certification. The certification is bundled with the commodity and traded, but is in principle distinct; the coin and the stamp in the coin are different “things.”
Indeed. As you can see, all the arguments presented here for gold as money, apply to Bitcoins as money.
Just as the computers and the internet changed the way letters and books are made and distributed and read, money is being changed in the same way.
This means that if you want to read a physical book, you still have to go out an buy one, or have it posted to you. If you want money in the real world, you should use gold and silver coins only.
If you want to read a book on your iPad, you get a PDF copy from somewhere on the internet, and then read it on your device. This does not mean that ‘PDFs are not books’ and no one with any sense says this. PDFs are for e-readers. That is their nature, its what they are for and the medium where they make sense is the computer.
If you want to send money to your cousin in Jodhpur, you take your gold coins to a shop in Manchester, turn them into Bitcoins and then send them. Your cousin can then turn them back into gold, or he can buy goods and services with them on the internet. Bitcoins are to money as PDFs are to books. Its not hard to understand, and the wow factor comes in when you understand that whilst PDFs can be copied ‘double spent’ ad infinitum, Bitcoins cannot, even though they are both digital.
That is simply incredible and its why everyone is so exited about them. Add to the mix the anonymity, the lack of central authority, the transparency in both the client software and the network, and you begin to see just what a revolution this is any why the word ‘revolution’ is appropriate.
Thanks to a lurder (yes, ‘lurder’) who knows just what buttons to push to cause a BLOGDIAL post to emerge, we have this amazing piece of violent assertion from http://www.theartistscharter.org/
Lets pull it to bits.
We the undersigned, writers, artists and musicians, along with our fans and those millions of people worldwide who work in or are otherwise supported by the creative industries say as follows:-
We have the right to earn a living from our work.
True.
We reiterate that basic human right to work enshrined in Article 23 (1) of the UN Declaration on Human Rights, and by virtue of Article 23(3) of that declaration to ‘just and favourable remuneration’ for our artistic endeavours.
False.Rights do not come from the UN. You have no ‘right’ to remuneration; you own your own body, and no one has the right to control you or force you to work under terms that are not agreeable to you. Those are the only rights you have with respect to your labor. There is no such thing as ‘just and favourable remuneration’; there is only what you will agree to work for and what you will not agree to work for. What that amount is for any particular task is up to you and the person who is hiring you to decide through negotiation.
We seek to make technology a friend and not an enemy of our creativity.
I doubt it.
We ask to be allowed to make a living, whether through performing, writing or recording music, derived from the power of our ideas and the commercial use of our talents.
You have a right to do what you want, on any stage or any medium. You already have this right, and should not ask to be ‘allowed’ to ply your trade.
We say it is a fact that the protection of our creative output depends substantially on copyright law, and we urgently call on all governments to assist us in the legal protection of our collective artistic output from piracy and other unauthorised infringement.
This is a lie.
It is absolutely not a fact that the protection of creative output depends substantially on copyright law. This is a myth, one that has been dispelled by by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine in Against Intellectual Monopoly and others.
When these people ask for all governments to ‘assist’ them, they are actually saying that they want the state to violently put grandmothers in gaol (for example) for copying from objects that they own.
They are asking for the State to do violence for them. This is wrong in every way that something can be wrong.
There is no such thing as ‘collective artistic output’. You own the physical objects that you produce. Once you release them, and someone else buys them or obtains them legitimately, you have no right to tell them what they may or may not do with their property. That means that you have no right to tell someone that they cannot make a copy of a record for someone else, or that they may not re-sell a book they have bought, or that they may not make copies of their own wedding photos or do anything of any kind with something that they legitimately own.
In sum, you have no right to suppress the rights of others by violence because you want to make money.
It is self-evident that any commercial enterprise requires revenue flows to not only survive, but thrive, innovate and take calculated risks.
True.
We say that the internet service provider industry must accept its share of responsibility for the rampant abuse of copyright online. Easy unauthorised access to our material goes unchecked every day across the world and infringers do not seek our consent when sharing our works.
False. Internet Service Providers provide access to the internet. It is not their responsibility to police their users, any more than it is the business of the operators of telephone services to spy on their users on behalf of a malignant and violent group.
ISPs are not part of some imaginary Socialist collective, with responsibility to everyone everywhere. They are private businesses with responsibility to their shareholders only.
Our creative industries are facing unsustainable revenue losses due to weak or unenforced copyright laws. This means one thing and one thing only: millions of jobs lost and young talent ignored.
There are no ‘our creative industries’. The record companies are dying because the world has changed thanks to computers and networks. This is a good thing that will benefit everyone, including the people who make music, write books and do other creative things that can be digitized.
Creative people (the ones who are really creative, and not just lazy, ignorant, unintelligent, computer illiterate luddites) will find a way to adapt to the new reality and thrive off of it, just as previous generations did with the advent of recorded music, VCRs, home copying and every other innovation that helped people spread ideas and wealth.
You people just don’t get it.
While our industry has collapsed to annual revenues of less than US$20 billion, the ISP industry has more than doubled its revenues in the last five years to US$250 billion — due in large part to infringement of our artistic works.
This is a lie. The ISP industry has grown because more people need access to the internet, no matter what is on it. As for the collapse in revenues, even if it is true (which it often is not) the opportunity the internet presents to creative people is without precedent; all that is needed is for you to go out and harness it. You do not need anyone’s permission, all you need is some software and… creativity.
We demand our indisputable right to copyright protection be no longer ignored. ‘Free’ should not come at such a terrible cost.
Copyright is not indisputable, and it is not a right. Copyright it is very disputable, and is in fact, entirely illegitimate. No matter how loud you shout, your buggy whip business model is dead and dying. New people are supplanting you, and while you waste your time trying to prop up the zombie corpse of the old business model they are getting on with the task of inventing the new ways of making money from music, that you will inevitably have to accept.
Stand with us to ensure the creative industries survive.
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