Quote from: patvarilly on July 08, 2011, 09:19:18 AM

Quote from: hugolp on July 08, 2011, 09:05:50 AM

Quote from: patvarilly on July 08, 2011, 09:02:34 AM

Not to be glib, but remember that the foundation on which Bitcoin is built (SHA2, RIPEMD, elliptic curve cryptography, the Internet) can ultimately be traced back to government-funded research decades ago. Investors and entrepreneurs are wonderfully efficient at taking a kernel of an idea, fleshing it out and pushing it forward, but you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking that "the taxman" is the useless blood-sucking squid in this story.

Right, because if you leave the money to the private sector this things would not have happen, even in a more efficient and cheap way.

So the government takes the money by force, reducing the resources the private sector can dedicate to these things, then does all this things in a inefficient and expensive way, and then asks us to thank it. Yeah...

The private sector does lots of things wonderfully well. But thinking that it can do *everything* well is incorrect, just as incorrect as thinking that the public section can do *everything* well. Long-term research that may not have an impact within the next 5 years, exactly the kinds of fundamentals I listed, is precisely one of the things that the public sector is far better at doing than the private sector. Look at every successful OECD country and you'll find a good correlation between public research investment and growth. One of the reasons the US keeps being the source of large quantities of innovation is that there's a very well-funded and established pipeline of ideas in place, with lots of new things coming out at the end of that pipeline every day. Where I come from, government-funded research is virtually non-existent, and I can assure you that the private sector is not picking up the slack.

Sorry, but this is a big hand waving and saying that the middle point is always better (a fallacy).

You are saying that the USA private sector does not invest long term or does not do it right. This is a lie. You then compare the capacity of the USA economy with the capacity of the country you come from, which probably is not comparable. But lets compare zones that can be compared, like the USA and Europe. In Europe medicine is basically in the hands of governments (although there are private insurances and hospitals), and in the USA it was more in private hands (although this is changing quickly). What do we see? The USA is one of the biggest innovators in medicine and basically decimates the medical innovations coming from Europe (and yes, I know that there is some government involvement in the USA medicine investigation, but the comparation is still valid).

What you are doing all the time is taking the position of a bully. I take the money from you by force, stopping you from using it and investing in investigation, spend it in an inefficient way to discover some things, and then claim that you need me to discover those things. The question you are not answering is: What would have happened if you left those resources to the private sector?