Quote from: JorgeStolfi on April 19, 2014, 09:05:27 PM

Dear @AnonyMint, we could hardly be further apart in our political views, especially the value and role of government. Therefore I would rather not discuss that topic, but would like to comment on a few peripheral points:

* 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.

* 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.

In a free market, the price of a product eventually settles to the cost of production plus a few percent. But the cost of duplicating knowledge is almost nil now. Threfore, if/when knowledge will be traded in a few market, it will cost almost nil. We are seeing it happen now: newspaper paywalls, copyright, and DRM are only a nuisance, since people can get most of the news and entertainment they want from free sources.

Copyright and patent royalties can be collected only when and where the government is corrupted by the "intellectual property owners" to forcefully prevent the development of a free market of information. If that free market existed, "knowledge makers" would be paid only for producing new knowledge, and only while they are producing it; not for selling or renting knowledge that they "own" -- just as a mason only gets paid while he works, not for rent in perpetuity of the houses that he built.

* 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.

Bitcoiners claim that their contraption removes the need for mutual trust or a trusted intermediary in commercial transactions, but that is not true. A commercial transaction involves two transfers, money in one direction and goods or services in the other direction. Bitcoin only handles the former; but one still needs trust (or a trusted intermediary with teeth), in order to ensure that the customer will pay for the goods that have been sent, or that the merchan will ship the goods that have been paid. I don't see how to get that with anonymous transactions and without a government to enforce honest dealing.

Anonimity would be important in times when democracy has failed and citizens need to conspire underground in order to remove an illegitimate, undemocratic government. Unfortunately, such governments can and will easily prevent anonimity. Even technically sophisticated citizens will have little chance against a determined ditactorial government.

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.

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.

Dr.Zaius

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