Quote from: nybble41 on April 22, 2013, 11:58:49 PM

And yet, it [planting trees] is a wasteful act, precisely because it isn't the first thing worthy of funding. You are diverting present resources from high-ROI investments to a low-ROI investment. This is wasteful.

I don't buy this. Planting trees is more wasteful than sitting on your money? Not in my world. Ideally I want myself and everyone else to minimize procrastination and do and evolve things, and not sit drooling over increasing numbers on our virtual accounts like a retard until mold has consumed what could have been a beautiful and useful forest.

That is a prime example how a wrong system of tokenized value twists our preferences to a level of perversion and deceitfully discourages growth. Growth of just numbers on your account (heck, "economy"!) is not true growth but delusion.

I like Impaler's explanations. The benefits of demurrage over inflation (interest) are getting clearer. Investing into productive assets becomes the equal of what saving is now. It is saving for the future, discourages sitting on your money and may lessen needless consumption.

Besides, demurrage is a natural phenomenon. If we sit on a truckload of apples to survive the winter, some of them go sour. We'd be better off trading some of the apples in the autumn to a contract that provides fresh food throughout the winter. It is usually good to imitate natural phenomenon, and value transfer system should be no exception.

Quote from: justusranvier on April 23, 2013, 12:16:06 AM

Naturally would-be thieves prefer the arrangement which provides them with the most job security. Now that the masses are catching on to the inflation game it's time for a new strategy.

Well said. See, there are administrative costs (governmental parasites, if you like) to any monetary system. We just have to choose what and how much to feed them.

Also I'm beginning to see how you can enforce a value transfer system to the masses. We're being enforced to use bitcoin within the arbitrary limits built in the system. It takes great effort to get even a chance of circumventing those slightly, and still it's unlikely you can defeat any basic principles Satoshi designed.

All limits need to be built into the technology. The intended effects to society arise covertly from those technological limits. Bitcoin may be a panacea when compared to the old system of money. But a "total freedom" is delusion - there are quite a bit of restrictions in any system that steer the economy to a predefined direction. I have no trouble envisioning the chance for a system with better rules taking over at some point.