Quote from: the_end_is_near on June 07, 2017, 12:49:48 AM

@r0ach, fungible money is the problem. Collaboration via forced consensus is the solution. Solving the defect-defect problem is the paramount issue. Gold and silver have nothing to offer.

Hopefully @CoinCube will post my last private rebuttal to @dinofelis, and I am banned, so do not expect this comment to stay here very long.

Goodbye, I will see you on the Bitnet side if you are smart.

Government is going away. Networks never will go away again. Your conceptualization is all wrong.

The Luddites (those who refuse to accept that technology changes everything) are always the losers.

@r0ach why dont you go join the Amish? But they do not use gold and silver.

Quote from: anonymous

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6f5wjt/august_1st_is_bitcoinindependenceday_make_sure/diggr88/?st=j3mdn09c&sh=2f34786a

Lukejr (bitcoin dev) seems to want to create an altcoin but calls Litecoin a scam. Quite humorous if you ask me. Proves how fragile the state of Bitcoin truly is.

Ignore the drama. Bitcoin is not likely going away any time soon. (Orthogonal to selling high and buying low, and buying altcoins which actually introduce something very new such as when I advised to buy Byteball at $1 million mcap because the consensus algorithm introduced something important and new, although Byteball has serious other flaws it has not stopped it from being an excellent speculation during a bullish BTC market phase)

Bitcoin will likely spawn important ecosystem effects (i.e. was Napster representative of the final outcome of P2P networks and decentralized file sharing?), some of which may correct flaws and expand on what decentralized consensus is really for (which is not mainly fungible money, but rather fixing the defect-defect problem of civilization and hopefully eliminating the winner-take-all power vacuum if the ecosystem figures out how to do this).

The silver of Litecoin is that it can apparently be modified more easily, as it is apparently more controlled by Bitmain. Good or bad, it is what it is. (In 2013, LTC reached 0.05 before BTC crashed. Might happen again, might not.)

@sidhujag, the black swan is not very black. We know it is the dollar short vortex stampede as the EU goes into cardiac arrest. That will only be a dead-cat bounce for the USA though. The Western governments+socialism are a clusterfucked morass that will destroy itself in an accelerating rate with the EU going over the cliff first 2018 or 2019ish (and the USA+US dollar+US equities will be a deadcat bounce beneficiary and then the USA follows into absolute political chaos by 2022ish and then actual chaos in the streets 2024 forward and by 2032 - 2040 the USA will wither away in the height of coming mini Ice age which is confirmed by scientists). The intelligence and technology of the West can not overcome the defect-defect organization of society at the winner-take-all devolution end game stage. And Chinas demographic problem is not as catastrophic as it is feared to be, because they and Japan have billions of people in their economic region which they will migrate to, cultivate, and invest in. It is the common cultural values that most all Asians actually believe in hard work, family, death penalty for drugs, etc... all those core values of a productive, coherent civilization we lost in the decadent West. So Asia can coalesce in one economic region with no significant demographic weakness, unlike the USA and Europe whose immigration has lost the cohesiveness of a common language and set of core, productive values. Note there are laggards in Asia, but the leading productive societies in Asia can cherry pick migrants and thus the laggards will either get their heads out of their asses or wallow in squalor (socialism will not be coming to their rescue any time too soon ... socialism is what destroyed the West). That the white Asians are forced by economics and demographics to cherry pick integrate with the brown Asians is another factor that will drive the economic engine of the region and counter-balance the historic xenophobia. In Singapore, I saw Indian workers all over. I know more and more educated filipinas are in China. I just hope we do not go into a Dark Age. The tinfoil hats would take us there if most productivity was buried in the ground as they do (which is an abomination in the Parable of the Talents), but hopefully the technologists will show us the way forward with decentralization technology.

Asia is already integrating at a rapid pace. It is more an indentured servant model, and that motivates the brown Asians to take on the culture of the white Asians to some degree. But you are correct that they do resist cultural adaption to a large extent and do backslide, but then they get sent home and replaced with a new set of indentured newbies. Very strict laws and discipline in the white Asian countries. For example in Hong Kong there are timers on cross walks and police standing there if you do not obey. It is perhaps not as potent as the model we had in the USA importing white Europeans who quickly assimilated to a very hard working culture, but the sheer size of the population of Asia is a greater economic force and economies-of-scale. Also Asians can build their own economies with their diverse cultures in addition to coalescing with the white Asians, which seems to fit well with the coming age of decentralization (which will also fit well with breakaway States such as probably Texas and perhaps Florida). But I do not see why those breakaway communities would choose gold or silver as money! They will of course choose blockchains because more efficient, less dangerous, more options for fitness, etc..

If you must stay in the USA, I suppose pick your State and community carefully. Probably Texas and Florida (and maybe S. Carolina?). Also the Midwest such as Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, but the coming Little Ice age makes those unattractive. I am not European so I can not comment with any insight on Europe other than what I read from Martin Armstrong and hear from other European friends. I suppose there will be breakaway State (countries?) in Europe as well. It is not clear to me if the UK has made clean break and sufficiently away from socialism to abate the clusterfuck. I would probably lean towards States more affiliated with Russia and not in the EU. I am not there on the ground so I do not know which States have low levels of socialism in Europe?

Quote from: thejaytiesto on June 07, 2017, 05:33:33 PM

but it's still there somewhere and they can find it.

The government does not need to find it. They can stop you from selling it in liquid and safe markets. With all cash being electronic, they can shut off all reasonable black markets. Instead you will either bury it in the ground thus destroying all the capital it could have represented (impoverishing your future generations who inherit it), and/or when you do try to trade it at some ridiculously low trade value, you will also expose yourself to becoming a target of kidnapping, house break ins, ambush, and extortion. You simply can not trade gold without some people knowing that you did.

Tinfoil hats think the current gold dealers and trading options will remain or expand. They going to have a nasty reality check. And when totalitarianism and capital controls does abate after some decade(s), then the public is not going to want gold, because civilization will have so far advanced into the digital age. Really the epoch for tangible stores of value is ending. Those who cling to it are Luddite dinosaurs.

Also remember that the government will always steal the lowest hanging fruit first. So of course even though many people will stampede into gold as the governments collapse because it is historically known safe haven, it is the perfect way for the government to destroy the majority who do so. The minority will go into blockchains and will be too difficult and not cost effective for the government to confiscate en masse. Confiscating gold is very easy, just block all the on/off ramps and transport hubs (checkpoints). The majority is always wrong and always the greater fools.

I entirely believe gold is now entering its final days. Digital communication changed everything.

Quote from: CoinCube on June 07, 2017, 07:04:45 PM

not forced consensus but voluntary consensus that is the solution where ever growing transparency ensures honest participation.

Without a force of consensus there is no convergence and you get defect-defect divergence.

You are referring to it being voluntary whether to participate in the consensus. Well it is also voluntary whether you live and vote in the USA or not, but many people would argue it is not really voluntary to live in the USA due to family obligations and other inertia. And not voting does not mean it is voluntary to disobey laws created by governments who are voted in.

Quote from: CoinCube on June 07, 2017, 07:04:45 PM

I also think it is a mistake to group the USA and Europe together into "the west"

They both have the socialism and winner-take-all corrupt governance problem that will not resolved in any other way except collapse and disintegration.

Both must splinter into breakaway states in order to avoid a Dark Age.

Quote from: CoinCube on June 07, 2017, 07:04:45 PM

and similarly to group Japan and China together into "Asia".

At the macro level both are major technological and investment drivers of Asia. Japan is bottoming on its economic collapse at about same time as China is finishing its correction in 2020 and then both will rise together along with S. Korea & Singapore leading Asia to be dominant in the world. India will also play a role. And China is massively investing in Africa as well.

That to me is the dominant theme, although of course there will be other sub-themes such as your Christianity focus as historically tried solution to defect-defect (which works but also leads into ideological decadence like any other mass delusions so, i.e. it makes a very fertile soil for Marxism, socialism, totalitarianism).

Quote from: CoinCube on June 07, 2017, 07:04:45 PM

Culturally China is undergoing a transformation that will profoundly alter the country and set it on a path to future prosperity whereas Japan appears utterly locked into a medium term spiral of stagnation and decline.

See:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1373864.msg18308732#msg18308732

As usual and expected, I think you demonstrate aliasing error confirmation biases because of your infatuation with religion as a solution.

Christianity is one of many phenomenons going on in Asia. It is not the macro dominant theme as far as I can detect.

The dominant theme afaics (and I am here) in Asia is 1800s style capitalism.

Quote from: CoinCube on June 07, 2017, 07:04:45 PM

Similarly I would argue USA is in the process of slowly decoupling from Europe.

USA and Europe both are gluttons on socialism. The USA is following Europes lead. When the USA economy collapses, then you will see how few Americans really have the independent anti-socialism culture of our ancestors. I suspect it is rather small minority.

It is easier for people to claim they are conservative when they are well fattened and have jobs. But when their skills are no longer needed, then we will see their true character when they beg the government to do something. And then fight and steal when hopelessness sets in.

Look at the churches. They are mostly all corrupt. Most all took non-profit status with the IRS and there is a huge corruption issue there.

White people are in a massive defect-defect arrangement stealing as much as they can from each other before the debt machine breaks down.

After that, all hell breaks loose and we will see the true character of people.

Quote from: CoinCube on June 07, 2017, 07:04:45 PM

Bitcoin shows us what can be achieved when a a small group chooses to voluntarily cohere around and promote an external ideal in a verifiable and transparent manner.

There are greater and more powerful ideals then that of sound money.

And it is not religion or any other such "solution" which operates by delusion and mind programming.

Decentralization technologies are what I am pursuing. I had my time to experiment with the religion delusion. Been there, done that.

EDIT: And CoinCube, I am not against the wisdom in the Bible on personal choice basis. What I am against is using ideological mind control as a weapon of mass destruction as the side-effect of employing as ephemeral defection prevention paradigm. I see you expecting that Christianity will sweep over China and cause a glorious transformation. But to me this is the sort of ideological conquest expectation that causes religion to be so dangerous. This morphs later into ideological conquest via other means such as socialism when the religion is unable to achieve absolute conquest (because the underlying motivation/desire/delusion for ideological perfection). I am so tired of snotty white people trying to "teach" others right and wrong, etc, when they can't even manage their own households. To all religion folk, keep it to yourselves on a personal (or even family clan or local community) basis as Jesus instructed in Matthew 6:5. Then we know your intentions are not overreaching. If I want to spread blockchain consensus, it is because it is an objective rational paradigm which has nothing to do with any particular ideology being forced on anyone. Only the consensus of ordering is forced by the blockchain. The blockchain is agnostic to what sorts of arrangements humans decide to encode on it.

EDIT#2: Of course, I want to help the world become one where diversity and maximum divison-of-labor can prosper. So that the world can become more interesting. That is congruent with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics as well, which is the trend to maximum uncertainty. Defection is only a problem when we require group coherence, e.g. for reproduction for example. But as we increase the degrees-of-freedom, we need less absolute total ordering of coherence. The paradigms are changing. We may not even need our bodies to reproduce when we become digital. When we think about how we relate to each other, are we able to truly accept and appreciate our differences? Jesus was I think very far along in terms of that. I think the scripture someone quoted for me Luke 9:51-62 he is saying that all these worldly things do not need to get in the way of aligning our heart with the basic principles of goodness in the Bible, i.e. do not covet, do not steal, do not idol, do not be selfish, basically respect the maximum diversity and support it within the limitations of the world in which we live in. But that world is changing. The degrees-of-freedom are probably increasing. I do not understand all of this yet. I need to think about this when I am well rested. I enjoy this philosophical stuff, but right now is not the right time for me to really dig deep on it. I think this is why I do not like organized religion. It stomps on diversity. I think I should have emphasized that blockchains may be trying to increase diversity of coordination more than they are increasing control against defection. They are increasing degrees-of-freedom and reducing the amount of total ordering consensus we require in order to interop in civilization. Instead of this monolith of governance+legal tender, we can flatten the structure to just a total ordering and let the diversity of partial orders proliferate within that less confining structure. I will have more to say about this when I am well.

EDIT#3:

Quote from: the_end_is_near on June 08, 2017, 04:54:08 PM

Quote from: the_end_is_near on June 08, 2017, 04:44:45 PM

Quote

nothing inherently evil about polygamy provided it was voluntary with lifelong marriage if possible

It depends what we mean by voluntary. If we make everything voluntary for female, her instincts are to defect.

Women need structure because typically their priorities are short-term and localized (i.e. selfish and myopic). Women are not interested in building anything multi-generational such a group selection.

Weak men do not need anything, but to be allowed to destroy themselves.

Strong men need to prevent the weak men from having any access to the gene pool.

In that way of competition, the weak men are filtered out and we end up with strong men and more competition.

Bottom line is strong men need to cultivate compliant women and fulfill their happiness/purpose.

Weak women and men enter the defect-defect pool and mix their genetics. Hopefully strong men will devise a way to selectively extract the genetics without any of the other baggage.

Technology is radically changing the world and making organized religion unnecessary.

We needed governance and State religion when strong men depended on physical compliance of a preponderance of men for warfare. Warfare is now technological and soon digital. Thus we can simply ignore the weak men and women. We no longer need to organize and control them.

This will create new opportunities for designer cultures.

Women have myopia. Fulfill it is all that is necessary in order to maintain reproduction. Maybe eventually we will not even need women for reproduction, but then I wonder what happens to love, honor, and cherish. So it is a strange concept if we can move all the way to digital. But I suspect we can create virtual games that are analogous. In fact, perhaps our reality is just a holographic virtual game.

This is area of research I want to dig deeper into later. Relativistic quantum theory and this book OROBTC sent me Information Mechanics.

I do not like a historic prescription as dogma. I would rather base in actual study in fact. I am very skeptical.

In the past, the most successful evolutionary strategy for an alpha male was to not marry, but rather to scattershot his sperm.

We needed top-down force in order to prevent every male from competing to be an alpha male, because society would collapse without someone raising the children.

As we move into the knowledge age with maximum division-of-labor overtaking the Theory of the Firm, because of better coordination in the transparency of the Inverse Commons (why do you think I am working on blockchains for maximizing degrees-of-freedom of transparent coordination and filtering of free-rider defectors aka rent-seeker parasites Coasian costs/barriers such as closed source centralized databases!), scattershot no longer is effective because of the amplification that knowledge will provide. Thus now alpha males also need to shift strategies into harems where they are responsible fathers. If alpha males throw their male offspring to the chaos of upbringing in the general society, their offspring will rarely attain the knowledge to be effective in competition in the gene pool. Because we are moving from a random dart throw on mating to a categorization of genes and informed selection.

Information theory is becoming paramount.

An alpha male could potentially devise a system wherein he has other males doing the raising, loving, and cherishing, but these males can not be random. He can no longer just scattershot and walk away and expect to be successful. Well I guess that is what religion was for, so he could insure there was an adequate pool of compliant men to take care of his offspring. But top-down State level control is no longer effective due to advancement of information technology. Diversity is proliferating. So just as the economies-of-scale of fungible money, fixed capital investment, usury, and the Theory of the Firm are dying, so is the economy-of-scale of scattershot sperm for the male. Sperm needs to now be directed with information.

Alpha males need a more efficient and information based delegation system for raising offspring. Essentially organized religion was the efficient way to delegate the alpha males corporation of family. But now that level of economy-of-scale will no longer be viable/competitive.

So alpha males will become more numerous, not less. But their strategies will become more informationally attuned.

Moralizers and ideologues perspective is far too moralistic and arbitrary. They need to look at it more factually and scientifically. They idolize women too much for example. Just look at it from the standpoint of maximizing group selection. We do need the alpha males.

The historic nation-state level scattershot alpha males are failing now. We are in a transition to the smaller economies-of-scale and more specialization, and the society is highly misdirected into weak activities because of the debt bubble (which is going to have a catastrophic implosion). The top-most of those historic alpha males will attempt to move to globalized scattershot, i.e. increase economies-of-scale to offset the loss of efficacy, but this is futile (as the Bible predicts). We are moving forward towards "the return of Jesus", which I think is just an information theory advancement.

Sorry if my stance is not as romantic and more based in trying to discern what will evolve as factual success in terms of reproduction, maximal production, and maximal effective reproduction.

Quote from: CoinCube on June 08, 2017, 08:57:48 PM

I feel Bruce Carlton makes a compelling case
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1373864.msg19427375#msg19427375

Atheism is a religion. The problem is that it encourages defection to individual rationalizations yet provides no economic model to make that viable. Thus it only survives on debt socialism.

The economic model of Christianity is one of subjugating individual priorities for maximal production, cooperation, and non-destructive behavior. These principals and wisdom are fine. I think the key for me has been learning about how defecting from those principles actually destroys my individual multi-generational strategy. Then I do not need fear of a God to hold me accountable.

I think the fear is really about self-destruction. And isn't that what the Bible says. God does not decide to destroy us. We do it to ourselves.

My problem with religion is when people do not understand it rationally and get all wide-eyed. And also I do not like the notion that we have control others, such as control the weak men. Even the Bible speaks a lot about letting it work itself out naturally (delegating to God). Of course there is Romans as to what kind of strict governance we will get if we can not learn to not defect en masse.

I am trying to find the technological means to optimize. I do not like ideological dogma and winner-take-all top-down control of large-scale (eventually totalitarian) organized religion (this seems just like another form of governance which is why JAD is correct then you need a State religion).

Quote from: r0ach on June 08, 2017, 12:51:32 AM

Quote from: the_end_is_near on June 07, 2017, 12:49:48 AM

Without a force of consensus there is no convergence and you get defect-defect divergence.

The "force of consensus" = Schelling point = gold and silver, of which there are only two, not 700 different cryptocurrencies with horrible distribution of which there will never be convergence on anything. Cryptocurrency not only has no Schelling point, it has a...REVERSE Schelling point because you're incentivized to break off from bitcoin, buy a bunch of lower priced coins, then try to pump it higher (like Sidhujag). Nature, "god", whoever, created a very small amount of noble metals so it's not really possible to do this with real money.

You are only focused on the scarcity of the fungible money supply but that it not the main use case of blockchains nor the important future direction of civilization. Blockchains are about maximizing degrees-of-freedom of transparent coordination while providing an objective means to bypass and filter out parasitic Coasian costs. It does not matter if we have 700 different blockchains as long as everyone can find the coordination they need on one of them.

However, society does tend to rally around a standard. The problem up to this point is that none of the blockchains have gotten all the technological and marketing details honed well enough to take the standard bearer tag. Bitcoin had first mover status and the widest liquidity for the monetary token, but it can not scale on chain (ever no matter what happens bcz linear block size increases do not solve exponential scaling and unlimited block size does not have consensus!) and it can not fulfill the more salient use cases of blockchains. Ethereum and others still have not gotten the details worked out. All blockchain consensus algorithms thus far are winner-take-all power vacuums, i.e. that have a long-term failure mode analogous to democracy, governance, and politics. Why do think I am working on Bitnet. Once a blockchain attains standard usage for example replacing all the centralized databased on the Internet, the other 700 altcoins will wither away. And then one monetary token will win. It is difficult to predict how Bitcoin will evolve in this scenario. So many factors at this point are in competition and we do not know how all this is going to play out exactly. I for example am still moving frustratingly too slow because of the antibiotics make me delirious and can't keep my eyes open for more than few hours a day (but at most only about 45 more days of these fucking meds and I may just quit early because my liver seems to be at limit of the toxicity it can tolerate although this risks a higher chance of return of the TB). So much in flux right now so I can not give you a more definitive rebuttal at this time. Just stay tuned and do not think that no one sees the opportunity. Of course the majority of the ecosystem will continue to just focus on taking speculator money with the easiest half-assed bullshit copycoin designs. More masternode PIVX, Decred, etc nonsense. But there are some who are determined to do something and who have declined very gracious, lucrative offers to cash out to speculators (ask @sidhujag).

IMO, you are misjudging the ecosystem far too early as if you had said P2P file transfer will always fail because Napster failed.

Bitcoin is important at least because it enables this ecosystem that will very likely eventually spawn the government killing, fiat killing, precious metals killing solutions. Whether it ends up being Bitcoin or not is not really relevant as Bitcoin will appreciate in either scenario. Bitcoin will at least remain the on/off ramp between fiat and any crypto currency for the time being. And any transition away from that will have an adequate period of development to be obvious to all those who are paying attention. Maybe Bitcoin will somehow figure out how to do everything off chain, but do note that I already explained that Side chains are fundamentally insecure and can not be fixed. And I explained that off chain transactions are fundamentally centralized thus moving away from the entire use case purpose of blockchains. The links to these detailed expositions are in my archives and are cited in my whitepaper.

Quote from: r0ach on June 06, 2017, 06:18:59 AM

Yea, you can try and drop the blockchain to lower redundancy and increase scalability like Fuserleer is doing with Emunie, but then it becomes even less sound money (or scale via partial order instead of total order and blackswan the system to death).

The majority has an incentive to reject any invalidate state, because otherwise the entire blockchain becomes a farce. Defection becomes impossible over the long-term and the blockchain is self-healing. I think it is possible to attain this without PoW and without PoS.

So it is just a matter of having a deterministic rule and paradigm for recovering against exceptions, but the devil is in the details of this because most such designs would get stuck in a defect-defect divergence scenario, e.g. if the network splits then PoW splits into two chains which if sustained for too long can possibly never be re-merged due to the vested interests in the double-spends and block rewards that would need to orphaned. But this is because the miners are vested. Now if you change who is vested and the majority of those who are vested are not complicit in double-spending, then the recovery and deterministic rule is dominant. This is the sort of revolutionary design work I am doing. Again the further details are even more interesting.

Then everyone has an incentive to provide this redundancy. This is one of key design decisions in Bitnet which enables unlimited scaling. The details though are IMO even more interesting.

I have not yet seen eMunies (renamed to RadixDLT) consensus algorithm specification but that he is planning a pegged currency indicates to me guaranteed failure. When analyzing USDT, I researched all the pegged designs (e.g. Bitshares, etc) worked out the theory of pegged currencies and realized they can never be viable over the long-term, no matter how you design them (I forgot where I wrote down that analysis). I notice the Scrypto JavaScript based language for apps, so I wonder if they are trying to copy my Lucid PL ideas. Any way, no problem. I wish someone else would fix the JavaScript ecosystem so I do not have to, but I do not think anyone else will or can any time soon, so thus I must do it.

I think there are many very big possibilities that can occur in the world that can dramatically effect the future and our evolution that are not apparent or seem likely at this stage.

There is as much "science" that would support a mini ice age, as there is the opposite. 80% of humans could die from a natural or man-made disease. Etc etc

Its very interesting to speculate tho.... we just dont know.

Gold is not the future, blockchain tech is. Hard to see it going down otherwise.

Virtual Reality will have a much more dramatic effect in our future than I hear anyone talking about.

Imagine a corporation that allows you to "park" your organic body at their place, and you work for them in the virtual world. Something to that effect. Start there, and imagine......

VR will make heroin look like fucking ice cream.

It will be insanity.

Crypto fits right in here, gold and "things you can touch" lose much of their meaning.

The minute VR is to the point that you are "really there", all of it, and it is more real than reality is now, it will change our species in ways that havent even been articulated or dreampt up yet.

Thats just one thing, there are technologies that will come that we cant even imagine right now.

Life will be so different.

What will give us meaning?

Will scientists find ways into other layers of our reality?

In the near future (20-40 years, years some of us will see), the general ledger concept, and ideas built off of it will have more impact on our existence, than fiat does now IMO. Most likely in a virtual world that makes todays internet look like a book.

BTC will be left behind. I think more than one thing will take its place, and when it happens, it will happen in a way we most likely didnt even think of right now. But between here and there, is us, and these ideas and discussions, and that, to me, is more exciting to think about than some TV show or game.

AM hasnt always been right, but hes been right a lot. And he keeps it colorful and interesting, so Ive checked on what hes up to throughout the years, cause he just might solve, or help solve with his insights, the main problem at hand, concensus without centralization.