Cross-posting...
* It is debatable whether Europe went into 600 years of darkness after the fall of Rome. Our view of History is biased towards recorded History, and the end of the Empire meant the end of the largest and most punctillious record keeping organization of that Millenium. The centralized administration collapsed, and with it the supply network that sustained the large population in Rome; but it seems hard to evaluate whether the life of the Europeans as a whole regressed in the following centuries, or continued to improve. Many cities throughout Europe surely kept growing and became more "civilized". Perhaps the "total degree of civilization" kept increasing, but in a quantitative rather than qualitative sense --- that is, a lot of people improved, while a few regressed. To tell whether this happened or not, one would need statistics that seem largely unavailable.
Moreover, if one looks a bit beyond Europe, one can say that the center of civilization simply moved elsewhere, to the Caliphate -- that built an Empire about as large as the Roman one, and was just as civilized and progressive as the Romans had been.
Pottery records show activity collapsed after the 5th century.
That activity continued or increased elsewhere is of no consolation to those who had to abandon all their real estate as Rome collapsed from 1.3 million to 30,000 population. No mention those who lost their lives.
* You are right that knowledge may be 1000x more valuable than matter, in terms of the results it may produce; but value does not equate to price (that is, how much one can obtain in exchange for it). Just consider that air is infinitely more valuable than caviar, for example.
That shows how utterly stupid you are, to compare an abundant
fungible resource to
knowledge production that is not fungible.
[snip]
* I am very skeptical of anonimity as a "weapon of freedom". On one hand, one cannot build a functional society only with anonymous interactions. What makes society work it is the network of person-to-person interactions, where the parties know and trust each other. In anonymous interactions, outside the reach of government, there is no incentive to honor deals or build a reputation.
You entirely missed the upthread point made that reputation does not require personal identity.
Btw, we always had anonymity with cash, now we are losing it. And so now we move to the slavery State if we don't have anonymity.
The real goal (and Agenda 21 fits in) is Smart Growth which is moving people into cities to be slaves:
http://youtu.be/hfbpNpq0YBIThe man-made global warming hoax, environmentalism, carbon taxes, Smart Electric Meters, and Technocracy is all tied in.
Make sure you see my
Agenda 21 and Georgia Guidestones posts upthread.
Dumb-ass masses have been
manipulated by fear, and their pre-frontal cortex shut down and converted into Malthusians. Malthusians have never been correct ever in the history of mankind since Mesopotamia.
This is a global plan and you can see most of the dumb-ass masses all over the world have fallen into this
"Save the Earth" mass delusion.
Sometimes I wish this site wouldn't allow n00bs newbies to post in my threads, until they've gained some reputation. I wish I had a moderator setting for that. I could delete their posts, but that would make it look like I have no counter-argument.
Any way, I guess it is good to refute this drivel, but I grow weary of repeating myself...
Well said. Bitcoiner's using the term "trust-less" is ridiculous. This has done nothing but lead people into a den of scams and thieves. Trust requires prudence which is a moral virture. A successful society therefore must be a moral society. Economic exchange cannot occur on large scale without trust. The bitcoin ecosystem is the exact evidence of this, a "trustless" system where 1 in 2 transactions are scams of some sort.
Cash was anonymous and this did not lead to a world where 1 in 2 transactions are scams of some sort. Well actually the entire fiat financial system is a scam, but you wouldn't be bothered with that minor detail would you.
And even if were true, why would I care? Each party can choose to know the reputation of the person they are dealing with. Whether you pay with sea shells or wampums doesn't make any difference.
The anonymity is optional.
What you mean to say is you don't want there to exist any anonymous form of payment, because you want the police to be able to catch all the criminals.
This is the most insane fantasy bubble thinking which stems from reading Peter Pan and The Little Mermaid when you were a child and never living in the real world hence. First of all, the police are always last to the crime scene and when they are first it is because they are doing the crime.
More saliently yet, if you remove all anonymity, then when the
power vacuum of democracy (i.e. promise everything, leave nothing unstolen) leads to totalitarianism as it does periodically through out history, then a fully tracked 666 society means megadeath and eugenics on a massive scale that will make Hitler and the Stasi look like child's play.
Anonymint is pretty correct about Rome collapse. Capital flight took place on a mass scale, and gold was hoarded to the point where we are still digging up old coins. However monks ended up salvaging most of civilization and building fortress monastery's which are still evident in Europe. Eventually they were able to civilize the barbarians which had ravaged most of Italy. This took hundreds of years, I don't think 600 is accurate. It was also the first time in history where human labor was actually valued. Roman's were not progressive's, their economy was based on slavery and money lending. It wasn't until the Christian monks instilled a value for human labor to the barbarians that Western Europe began slowly recovering. Benedictine monks are the fathers of European identity, and exhibited one of the most successful applications of decentralized local rule systems ever. Despite the false promises of the internet, the modern world is more centralized then at any point in human history, even more-so then the Romans at peak empire.
Sorry to bust your fantasy, but feudalism is not an economically prosperous paradigm. The
velocity of money (commerce) plummeted and stayed that way as everything was buried into private hoards and warlords. The anti-usury Dark Age was miserable abject poverty. Have you forgotten Robin Hood?
And the barbarians
co-opted and became (
imitated) the Roman system, they were never conquered so to speak.
And the Roman system was all about maximizing production via road networks and military protection for commerce. It just so happened that in that era, manual labor was so valuable that the system ran the best on an indentured model, because otherwise there was no means to fund the military and keep the movement of goods over a road network that spanned Europe all the way to the UK.
I have explained upthread that we now enter a Knowledge Age, where knowledge is not fungible (manual labor mostly was) and thus slavery is a non-functional paradigm.
If you want anonymity use paper cash, gold etc, and stay off the internet.
They can still track you. The
NSA has satellites that can read the 2 inch (5 cm) VIN# on the dashboard of your car. New cars have GPS tracking built in. There are cameras every where
tracking your license plate. The government will soon
require you join Facebook in order to receive government services (and that will include a permit to drive on government highways). They track your cell phone. etc.
The NSA revelations have merely proven what many have warned for ages. The internet is far from anonymous nor private.
We are fixing this. It is time to replace the internet protocols.
Anonymint, I don't get what you are trying to convey here. You want a 100% anonymous internet based crypto coin that is fundamentally based on government approved and pioneered cryptography?
Yes on first part, and no on Bitcoin. We don't want government approved crap.
And you want the world using it before your projected 2015-2016 debt apocalypse. Sorry to tell you, but that scenario involves rolling power blackouts(see Greece), kind of nips your idea in the bud. Crypto currencies require sophisticated infrastructure RUNNING in order to work.
WiFi mesh networking is now in the iPhone and coming in Android.
I guess you've heard of batteries.