And there is a full spectrum between island two. May as well all agree to bitcoin monopoly money now. Archived from the original on private December Wiki Korea and the United States seem to be billionaire the heated rhetoric that caused tensions between the two nations to tighten immensely. Allgire - Hokulea Returns To Hawaii. Archived from the original on 14 June
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Some people more knowledgeable on the topic than me tell me that CPU mining of bitcoins is dead. Yes, if bubble is defined as a liquidity premium. The idea was decentralized peer-to-peer storage of value. Retrieved February 21, There's at least one paper to be written about defenses against such attacks. Yes, well - see: Ayn Rand disciple Paul Ryan better not be counting his chickens just yet.
Collectibles While it's certainly an achievement to own one-of-a-kind real estate and rare cars, it is another bitcoin own precious, irreplaceable collectibles — and Bill Gates certainly has accumulated quite the collection. Interesting, especially the distribution of from whom they are lost. The warnings from history". Private base listens and watches this stuff all day, every day. Hundreds billionaire cabarets, pleasure resorts and the wiki served for purposes of getting acquainted and acquiring the proper mood. Atzmon - The Presidents Club That definitely plays a large island.
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All transactions are published on a shared public ledger, called the 'blockchain'. Archived from the original on 10 October Archived from the original on 9 February Archived from the original on 10 August Retrieved 23 February Privacy-preserving proofs of solvency for Bitcoin exchanges" PDF.
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Archived from the original on 24 January Archived from the original on 7 December Retrieved 23 March Archived from the original on 27 June Retrieved 13 June Retrieved 16 December Retrieved 11 August Archived from the original on 10 July Retrieved 10 July Archived from the original on 13 December Archived from the original PDF on 28 December Retrieved 23 December Archived from the original on 15 March Retrieved 14 March Archived from the original on 19 February Retrieved 16 February Retrieved 14 October Bitcoin Recruits Snap To".
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Archived from the original on 1 March Retrieved 2 May Archived from the original on 11 January Archived from the original on 7 February Archived from the original on 20 September Archived from the original on 26 October Archived PDF from the original on 11 November Retrieved 11 November Archived from the original on 5 November Retrieved 15 November Archived from the original on 18 January Retrieved 18 January Archived from the original on 20 April Retrieved 20 April Archived from the original on 23 April Retrieved 22 April Electronic Commerce Research and Applications.
Retrieved 5 October Retrieved 2 July The second biggest Ponzi scheme in history". Archived from the original on 17 June Retrieved 23 May Archived from the original on 29 March Retrieved 1 April Archived PDF from the original on 31 October Retrieved 30 October Archived PDF from the original on 5 December Retrieved 28 November Archived from the original on 24 September Archived from the original on 23 September Archived from the original on 13 January Archived from the original on 22 October Here's what Warren Buffett is saying".
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Final frothing before the bubble burst that Charlie started with? They can afford to wait for slow money; most of us wetware types really can't. I assumed Heteromeles was referring to an economy for the benefit of us.
In principle, it would be no different from modern Internet protocols Imagine replacing the modern banking system with the pre-railway, pre-telegraph system of transferring money in the form of bank drafts carried from city to city on horseback, without ever knowing if the source bank was still in existence by the time say your New York draft arrived in San Francisco!
The primary function of money is to serve as a universal medium of exchange. The other are measure of value, standard of deferred payment, store of value. How much exactly Bitcoin satisfies this definition is disputable, but we can safely say that it satisfies significantly, qualitatively more then Ming Vases or Barbie Dolls.
If we compare Bitcoin to fiat money things become less obvious and more interesting. The winner depends on the context. If the currency is Zimbabwe dollar then the winner is Bitcoin.
And there is a full spectrum between those two. As for the bubble - current rush on the cryptocurrencies is obviously speculative and the bust at some point seems to be imminent but when and how exactly it will come? It may be a complete collapse but personally I don't see it as the highest probability may be because it would be too boring. There was something about guys in Australia who promise a coin with ten times better transaction throughput then Visa.
It took years for trades to become real, and the reputation of the merchants for keeping their deals was critical in keeping it working. IIRC, this is where the Hawala system came from.
Note that Hawala basically runs on the honor system, and works more on the long-term balancing of accounts, than on the long-distance transfer of money. Anyway, I did google "international trade blockchain," and it looks like a lot of people are now trying to make this work e.
So yes, one could write an SFF story about the use of some bastard descendant of a blockchain in a space opera. The argument against is that, if such a book comes out the day after Bitcoin bites it, then most people aren't going to buy the story.
So the question is, do you feel lucky, writer? Hypothetically, if it was used as a currency like the aficionados like to promote it as, then the underlying value would simply be that people need it to buy their drugs or hard disk unlocking codes or whatnot from the mafia. In this world, the price would then indeed very slowly go up over the course of many years as the demand exceeded the supply. A quick look at the actual price behavior should immediately rubbish that idea.
They basically don't work as a transaction processing framework due to the inherent, incredible inefficiency of the blockchain But as a meaningless bauble for the less sensible to trade via unregulated grey market brokerages, they work fine, and this is the basis of their trading price.
Bitcoin is very clever social engineering, and terrible software engineering. It is designed to gradually make it more expensive to make more, which creates an incentive to buy and hold now. And to tell other people to buy and hold after you, yourself, has bought.
Because the more people buy in, the higher the price goes, and then you as a relatively early adopter can sell out for profit. It is a ponzi scheme that outsources the gladhanding of more victims to your victims, and the fact that it works makes me want to cry. This is not even a question of intelligence - Newton lost his shirt in the south sea bubble, it is simply one of those very stupid things even smart people fall for.
At no point during any of this is there any need for anyone to use it as a currency, and to a first approximation, nobody does. Step two, set up hardware for the generation in bulk of true random number sequences. I do not care how clever your algorithm for making them is, go away, we are using the real deal here. Geiger counters pointed at a handy mountain will do.
Put one copy of each one-gigabyte pad of random numbers on a secure pseudo-phone you hand to customers. This device is Secure - in the sense that its entire operating system and network stack have been formally proven, and its attack surfaces are non-existent. Well, people can steal it and beat the user id out of you. Do not see any way to solve this All this device can do is call the bank server, and access your account over a one time-pad encrypted link.
If you manage to do enough banking to go through a gigabyte of network activity.. The server has the matching pad copy for each customer device, and since all activity is internal to the bank, noone can trace any of it.
Regardless of whether they have business. Network analytics wont work. This gets you an utterly untraceable economic transaction network proof against any adversary that does not mount a physical seizure of the bank, and more importantly, it can be expanded by depositing more regular cash at the bank.
The primary purpose of every ICO is to enrich the issuer. There may be secondary purposes, but I wouldn't ahem bet on them. Yeah, reminds a very little of early gold frauds. Here's a delicious[1] one gold from seawater from The Gold Accumulator Except that in ICOs they're proposing currencies pegged to new limited supply artificial materials, [crypto-currency-name]ium, and promising that early investors will get most of the gains. I think; haven't looked at one of them to be honest.
Might drop some links later related to semi-plausible i. Yes, as I noted in my "bank drafts by horse" example. But would the speed be acceptable given the pace of modern economies?
Once you've tasted Gigabit fiber, it's awfully hard to go back to baud dialup with an acoustic coupler. Would the level of security be acceptable? How many ships never returned from the China or India trade? Would those losses be acceptable to investors today? Perhaps more importantly, the sophistication of financial scams has improved enormously.
We like to think that technology for preventing such scams is up to the challenge, but the criminals tend to stay one step ahead of the guardians. And fancy technological solutions only solve technological attacks. For example, public key encryption is a wonderful technology -- until someone steals your private key through social engineering. Security certificates and trust authorities are wonderful tools until someone hacks the company's Web site and steals credentials or forges their own.
Trust was feasible when you met the customer or vendor in person and had a chance to gut-feel whether they were reliable and talk to people who had been dealing with them for years and could vouch for their stability.
And there was always the notion you could hire someone to track them down and break their legs if they absconded with your money. The notion of "trust" in the modern computer era is harder to imagine when you can't see the person, will likely never meet them, know that they might be Russian scam artists, and know that they are sufficiently anonymized they can disappear without a trace, taking your money and reputation with them.
Insufficiently paranoid; doesn't protect against some esoteric attacks. There's at least one paper to be written about defenses against such attacks. And yeah, A Fire Upon The Deep had a human planet in the low beyond that had built a business reputation for reliably distributing one time pads.
In 3 parts with independent physical distribution typically, combined XOR? It's not an uninhabitable equatorial hellhole like Florida, it's France. If it gets hot enough vent the server heat out into the street where it can compete with a few thousand other heat engines turning and burning.
Put the server farm in the attic. Use it to heat the air running through the HVAC in the winter, vent it to the outside in summer.
Actually, I think I mentioned this idea a long time ago, on this blog, although I was thinking of a distributed server farm rather than a mining system.
Still, if everyone needs a big enough server in order to have a civilized life, there's no reason not to turn these turkeys into a cogeneration system of some sort. A few centuries ago, having the water heater embedded in the wall of the main cooking oven accomplished much the same thing.
White nationalism has some overlap with survivalist doomsday prepper types, and for some reason bitcoin has become very popular with the preppers. Because they are very vulnerable to the affinity fraud? Ponzi schemes are nearly always affinity fraud, and the vector of infection for the pyramid-scheme affinity fraud that is bitcoin goes through the fringes of the right, primarily. Thus people who should really, really distrust something that only exists in the cloud. Cheery thought - maybe Bitcoin and the other work-alikes are the Culture's way of weaning us from our childish obsession with money; at a suitable point they'll pull the plug on them by grabbing all the blocks, wreck everyone's economy, then introduce their version of an economy of abundance.
It seems like the sort of thing Culture minds would come up with, if only as retaliation for endless terabytes of social media and cat videos.
We probably won't like it Remember, we're talking about interplanetary commerce, such as between Musk's ultimate gated community on Mars and the still-productive slums of Earth, or something.
You can only speed that up so much. The more I look at it, the more I think that planetary customs officers will really like blockchain technology, and that goes double with their equivalent of ag inspectors. After all, if you think that intercontinental transport of invasive organisms is a problem now, imagine how much fun interplanetary transport of invasive organisms other than humans will be. There are ways that come to mind of attacking this system, but they are mostly aimed at things like attacking the reputational capital of the bank, not the math.
Because it is so secure, difficult to document you are not stealing peoples accounts. I mean, you would be crazy to, but it is difficult to defend against the libel. I always distinguish between "libertarian", which I consider myself to be, and "Libertarian" which is something quite different, and extremely unsavory.
OTOH, I also consider myself a "conservative", i. That is really a reactionary. And I object to telefactors being called robots when they are really just remote control devices.
This is a continual problem with language. It's a feature that allows it to adapt to a changing situation, but it renders prior descriptions nearly worthless. So while I consider myself a libertarian conservative, I never describe myself that way to anyone unless I have time to first explain what I mean by those words.
Ordinary money is stuff that a government promises to accept as a payoff so that it won't steal your property. Because of this it has value to people other than the government. It's quite possible to argue either way as to whether the government should be able to make that kind of threat, or whether the word "steal" is appropriate for an action that's perfectly legal, etc.
It's not a commodity, or something that is inherently valuable. I have occasionally suggested using a monetary standard that is inherently valuable, like monocrystalline silicon, but this would be subject to large fluctuations in value.
The bracket clause is contradictory. If it was inherently valuable - the value was a property of the stuff itself - then you would be able to depend on the value much as you are able to depend on the melting point. The large fluctuations in value are possible because what is called "the value" is a function of stuff made up by people. Which leads me, at least, to considering that the computation involved in DNA transcription is efficient enough to get down to about 10x the Landauer limit, which is several orders of magnitude better than artificial computing technologies.
And then to imagining the possibility of using DNA-type computation to do bitcoin computations it's probably quite well suited to at least some common cryptographic computations, though I don't know if that's relevant to bitcoin , and outperforming the Chinese server farms with a few buckets of genetically-engineered self-replicating organic bitcoin goo.
Which once it's done what you want it to, can be eaten, as a bonus. That fits with the vibe I get that someone describing themselves as a "libertarian" is certainly concerned with their own liberty, but is not concerned with trampling on that of others in pursuit of their own. That is not why you should not back money with inherent value. You should refrain from doing that because enough money has to exist to facilitate the sum total of all your commerce and liquid-store-of-value needs, and if money is backed by directly useful stuff, that is an enormous amount of value taken out of use to gather dust in a vault somewhere to no good end, directly making the world that much poorer.
I was having pretty much the exact same thoughts yesterday. Stop thinking with my brain, Charlie, I'm using it to draw comics. Or at least buy me a beer, geez. I know you didn't put it there via Twitter, either, as I've been taking ever-longer Twitter sabbaticals.
Come to Mastodon, we have goofy server names and less nazis. Bitcoin's a perfect symbol of the death throes of capitalism, really. Convert energy directly into global warming and a tiny fictional piece of "value" for a small number of people who were already rich, and a small number of people who got rich riding the wave.
It's not gonna be useful for that until everyone has a cryptocurrency miner running on their phones, helping to validate everyone's transactions at a much higher speed than the current network can, for a hell of a lot less electricity. All of that doesn't stop me from selling the. That's my next couple month's rent paid by the Dark Cyberpunk Future.
The energy usage estimates for bitcoin mining have been around for a while, e. People were mostly ignoring them; not sure when people generally [1] realized that energy usage meant CO2 emissions, and not sure why it's emerging as a widespread concern now, but not complaining. Bitcoin isn't getting any less absurd.
Bitcoin still has some mystery associated with it, and that speculation has been around, perhaps here. Or maybe for some other reason. I would not be surprised. So any creative ideas about how to repurpose all the bitcoining mining operations once the crash has happened?
Or are we just going to have miner graveyards sitting beside dams all over the world? The big problem with bitcoin is that it only looks decentralized. If you look at how it works, it gives big advantages to whomever can command immense computing resources and rapid network speeds. When bitcoin first came out it was a big hit with the gamers who had oversized gaming rigs capable of turning acres of Excel spreadsheets into pico-bit thick data crumbles.
Once bitcoin mining and transaction processing started becoming profitable, the big guys moved in with their supercomputer arrays capable of crushing MMPORGs of gaming rigs into their component transistors.
Let's ignore the limited number of bitcoins that could ever be mined. Let's ignore the designed in restrictions on the transaction processing rate that makes bitcoin worthless as a general purpose transaction processing system. Let's ignore the bitcoin protocol's inability to scale either in scope or temporally. Ignore all that, and bitcoin will still only be profitable for a small set of highly capitalized miners and transaction processors, like the guys in Inner Mongolia with their coal mines and specialized server farms, and will only be useful for those needing to perform money transfers where it is worth paying a premium for secrecy.
Bitcoin may have fascinated the gamer crowd, but they were always small fry. Like the diesel engine, invented as a prime mover for the small workman but winding up as the ultimate centralized, capital intensive power source, bitcoin's final customer base is going to be large players who want to move large sums of money while avoiding scrutiny.
I'm not surprised that bitcoin attracted a certain crowd of power worshippers, and I won't be surprised if they continue to push bitcoin even as it becomes increasingly obvious that they are just two bit tools. Sadly, the bulk of the mining these days seems to be done by special computer chips which can't really do anything except compute SHA They're custom built for bitcoin mining and nothing else.
Perhaps the air conditioned boxes full of metal racks can be used to shelter goats during a heat wave -- who knows? Regarding the electricity usage estimates for the Bitcoin network, I can't find what hardware is assumed to be running it. I spent much of this year literally writing a book on this stuff, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain. The edgy libertarians were, of course, in it from the start - it was started by ancap cypherpunks. As usual, the Extropians are ultimately to blame.
I wrote a chapter about this, but the book I cribbed from was The Politics of Bitcoin by David Golumbia, which nails down every dot of Bitcoin's ideological descent. I must note that the technology, blockchain, is pants too. The hype is, literally, Bitcoin hype with the buzzword changed to "blockchain" - whatever the claim, and whatever the actual technology.
Most business "blockchain" is not in fact the full Bitcoin-style blockchain, with proof-of-work and trustless competition and a currency - the term is getting applied to simple append-only transaction ledgers with hashes for tamper-proofing.
This is, of course, excellent stuff! Geeks know it as git. And we had it in , four years before Bitcoin. What's good is not new and what's new turns out not to be any good.
Everything bitcoin and blockchain is a fabulously layered world of fractal incompetence and arrogance. I have been wrong about Bitcoin before, and it's been whenever I assumed the market was in any way sensible or rational and not actually made up of lemmings on PCP. Her blueprint for survival also depends upon working internet: I'm having difficulty comprehending this level of stupid.
See also my reply regarding "Liberty" as regarded in late Republican Rome. I think the parallel defintions are very nearly congruent. Which is, incidentally, not a good or easy analogy, once you think of it. Cryptocurrencies really fit the bill here; you need some serious math chops to understand how they even work, they're vulnerable to the admittedly remote risk of a mathematical breakthrough destroying their integrity, and that's before we even get to the whacky sociological epiphenomena surrounding them in use: Not possible with Bitcoin any more, but might be workable with other currencies At this point we're getting well into "buy my magical gizmo that extracts gold from the water coming out of your taps!!!
So as far as I can tell what we have with Bitcoin is a classic Tulip Bubble. What am I missing? What you are missing is that Bitcoin is popular with people who don't understand money, let alone economics. Just like goldbugs, who think gold has some magical inherent value, unlike "fiat currency". Blockchain power consumption increases as your chain gets bigger. But if you're using blockchain simply as an authentication log for some database, you can end one chain and start up a new one, thereby forking it.
The problem with bitcoin is that new coins are paid out in return for performing reconciliation on the existing chain. So you can't fork the chain without addressing the problem of an expanding currency BTC was designed to be fixed in size — i.
That bit about "steal your property" sounds very big-L libertarian to me since the only thing that permits property to be owned by individuals in this world is a government, whether its an allotment committee or a world-spanning military dictatorship like the US. No government, no property rights for anyone, including "small-l" libertarians. Ordinary money is debt, public IOUs issued by a government to fund the government, pay salaries, buy stuff, rent office space, encourage worthy causes etc.
Those IOUs are backed by the government's word, its promise to pay the bearer on demand etc. Because folks trust that word full faith and credit they are willing to circulate those IOUs between each other as tokens of wealth.
When the faith is lost, they become like Confederate dollars, worthless. Taxes aren't paid to fund government, they're actually paid to destroy money, to take it out of circulation and prevent rampant inflation since any government can always print more IOUs if they need to. Too many IOUs in circulation without a matching economy to use them up makes them worth less inflation and eventually that "full faith" deal breaks down.
Time was our local co-operative store network had their own actual money, plastic coins paid out as a dividend that could only be used in their stores but they COULD be used as money there because people believed they were worth something in the stores. They were another form of public IOU but more limited in scope. Nowadays the "divi" is paid directly to the members in Sterling. Where we should be using them is for certification of the evidence chain in distribution of life-critical items.
For example, to log that a quality assurance lab has taken random samples from this batch of antibiotics, run them through a GC-MS rig, and confirmed that they are in fact genuine antibiotics and not floor-sweepings from a Chinese backstreet factory churning out counterfeits. How to permanently tag a physical object with a blockchain ID is an interesting question.
Well, things might have changed in the 16 years since I left DataCash, but my experience of Banking IT staff is that it consists of a vast sea of mediocrity punctuated by the odd isolated expert who knows their shit.
When they need IT expertise they hire in contractors usually via one of the Big Five audit firms first, or from an outfit like IBM or HP who specialize in servicing enterprises like banks. When they need banking expertise they send a banker. But you don't get promoted to board level within a bank by specializing in computer science, any more than you get promoted to C-suite territory in the CIA by wandering the hillsides of Kandahar speaking Pashtun to the tribesmen in hope of figuring out what the Taliban are going to do next.
Because International Banking is a Jewish Conspiracy, don'tcha know? As is "fiat currency" and fractional reserve banking, apparently. As my wife commented yesterday, "I'm still waiting for my pay-out for joining the hidden rulers of the world". This is some Protocols of the Elders of Zion shit right here, and it's baked into the folk memory of white supremacists and racists.
The housing Ponzi scheme was started in the s in the UK, and some of us noted that it was such and so eventually going to fail in the early s. I am flabberghasted at how long it has been kept going - when it does crash, it's going to be horrific. No, it didn't pop, not even in , but merely deflated - here, it scarcely did that. The point is that our house prices are three times the maximum viable value, so a crash would be at least a factor of three drop in prices.
And, no, 'building more houses' is not a solution. An ordwerly deflation is possible in theory, if damn hard, but I don't see the political will. Like BTC, there's a finite amount of it remaining to be mined. Like BTC, mining the last reserves gets incrementally harder over time.
Unlike BTC, if you burn it, it's gone for good, so there's an incentive to stockpile it and not burn it ideally by stockpiling it in the ground, where it comes from, by buying land title to fossil fuel reserves. No, it won't, not reliably, though it IS a useful component.
I gave a talk on that for a cryptography conference some time ago. The executive summary is that the required properties for statistical and cryptographic random numbers are different, and neither will do for the other - despite claims of many compscis, who should know better.
Yes, a true random sequence is perfect for both, but that's theory, not practice. One good approach is to take multiple, independent sources, including say a few entirely separate Geiger counter outputs and a couple of excellent pseudorandom sequences based on different mathematics , normalise the first ones separately and exclusive or all of them together. The pseudorandom sequences eliminate the Nth order biasses in the Geiger counter outputs that have got through the normalisation.
It is, however, straight out of Graeber on debt and the origins of money in the early bronze age. Just replace "property" with crops and "government" with "the king's soldiers, marching on campaign". That sort of thing triggers uprisings. So King tells the peasants that tax, formerly paid in the shape of a tithe of the crop, has to be paid using these weird tokens. He then gives tokens to the soldiers, and tells them to pay for their provisions.
Peasants are still tithing the king, but they receive a token that can be returned to indicate they've paid their tax. If they're over-tithed, maybe some other peasant who has no tokens because the army hasn't rolled over their farm will accept tokens in return for grain? And so the cycle gets started. But this predates the availability of credit: It took a lot of iterations and generalizations for loans, banking, and credit to show up, and I'm not sure the libertarians ever really understood how complicated it's all become: My tame expert says that there is a real problem with distributed currencies - all known solutions use resources that are super-linear with scale.
The 'exception' is a trusted key hierarchy - i. A few years back when bitcoin suddenly exploded I was hanging out at a local hackspace on the open night when some young women visiting started asked if there was anyone who could talk about bitcoin for "a report" they were doing.
I assumed students from the local uni doing a paper on it for some class. I've never got involved in it but I'm familiar enough with crypto to have a reasonable understanding of it's workings.
Ran through some of the basics of crypto, keys and who has control of keys under various models. Later got a thankyou email. Turned out they weren't students but rather worked for a london finance house and the "report" was for that firm.
I was struck by a moment of "holy shit people are literally making decisions about this shit based on 'what some guy in a hackspace told me over beer'". Etherium and smart contracts are even more crazy. People seem to be throwing fistfuls of money at things like smart contracts with no idea whatsoever what they're throwing their money at.
Madness like the DAO where people were putting tens of millions in the control of code that's not even been formally proven. For that matter the software carrying billions worth of these currencies is also cobbled together with regular security flaws. There's going to be some big crashes though I suspect crypto-currencies are here to stay in some form. If any really big actor like the US government decided tomorrow they wanted to do away with bitcoin they could probably pretty easily wipe it out for less than the cost of a single Stealth Bomber.
They could commission enough ASIC's to destroy almost every crypto currencies trust and stamp all over them. If the chinese government wanted to screw with bitcoin they wouldn't even have to hunt down miners, they could just use their magical firewall powers and some selective organised DOSing to mess with the protocol to split the network into fragments for a few hours, when the networks fragments reconnect the one with the most compute wins probably the section within china and anyone who's bought or sold things elsewhere: I can easily imagine that when more of the infrastructure kinks are worked at some point more traditional entities are going to start issuing their own currencies using bitcoin-like infrastructure but without the mining element and with their coins as more simple fiat currencies.
Modified blockchain-like tech may very well get recycled into such systems to make auditing, taxation and tracking of cash etc more bullet proof. The historical nazis picked up support from lots of weird fringe groups almost purely because they were fringe groups like the animal rights crowd. I wonder if some bright, wealthy but not entirely sensible person is hoping to use bitcoin as a blunt instrument to knock down the existing order, that the bulk of their worth is inextricably tied to, to usher in their fantasy order?
The origins of money in history aren't that important to what money has become today, a tokenisation of the structural and material wealth of a nation however imperfectly distributed. Big-L and small-l libertarians are fixated on the Shiny! They can continue in their delusions and beliefs in comfort only as long as most of the rest of the population do hold "full faith and credit" in the government's debt instruments. Any medium of exchange before there was such a social organisation and things like armies came late is clearly 'not money'; I have no idea which theory is right, but that's not my point.
It is just as they carefully airbrush out the history and morality of how 'their' property came to be 'theirs'. As the poem goes:. The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose off the common But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from the goose.
I believe that a lot of bitcoin action is occurring in the criminal field. It's difficult to become rich doing drugs, people trafficking etc. Russian oligarchs had large amonuts of money in Bank of Cyprus accounts for access to EU institutions and it was more and more difficult to hide them and eventually it all went tits-up for them.
The Panama Papers and other public releases of supposedly-private financial data are also hitting such folks hard. The supposed anonymity of Bitcoin is very tempting to such people, allowing them to move wealth around the world with less inspection and legal limitations. So Bitcoin costs a bit more as the "price" goes up?
Don't care, there's more money coming along the criminal pipeline and if that money's stuck in Russia or the US in trackable roubles and dollars then it's worth less anyway.
Bitcoin is mobile wealth and that's worth a big premium for many folks and unlike other fungible materials like gold, armaments, cocaine, opium etc. No offence intended, but that sentence is heavily packed with potentially dubious implications. First "government" is not a specific object or entity, rather it is the ruling system i. A nice distinction, not so immediately apparent in the English language.
So, no "government" means no "property". That's before we unpack the meanings of "promise" and "steal". But broadly yes, "money" usually means the token that the society accepts as the book-keeping to show one has completed ones obligations or has a right to call on resources or obligations due.
One obvious use would be for forensic chain of evidence certification when digital evidence is obtained: Given the discussion of cryptocurrencies, people might like to know that the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2 is doing a discussion on the subject now time slot This is some Protocols of the Elders of Zion shit right here, and it's baked into the folk memory of white supremacists and racists Please note the quote-marks.
As for a political will to create a "soft landing" at least some of them believe the "big lies" that: This is really a strange mixture of, um, things. The children of Satoshi in bed with oligarchs, neo nazis, old nazis and miners in a high rise in Shenzen, all laying waste to the abandoned settlements of the Hambacher Forst.
The comparison with Ireland is not valid because of the electric fence they'll have to build after brexit. But, this sounds really like you have developed a more conservative view of the world. I've observed this with some friends of mine, growing older, becoming conservative. And suddenly we argue about kickstarter, bitcoin and why electric cars are evil. A typical definition of libertarian is a believer in free will or an advocate of liberty.
Semantic drift certainly occurs but misappropriation by certain groups is more common. In my country Republicans call themselves conservatives for example. There is sometimes a grain of truth in the appropriation process but often it is just seeking respectable cover for their positions and using the term to confer legitimacy.
I think it is important to resist this process. I have recently seen sexism calling itself conservatism. Neo-Nazis calling themselves libertarians is absurd but it can confer legitimacy in the eyes of the naive.
The media's willingness to be complicit in this is very disturbing. The Gates family uses the house when their daughter Jennifer is training for her successful show jumping career. Gates is also rumored to own Grand Bogue Caye, a acre island off the coast of Belize in Central America — the largest island in that country. Grand Bogue Caye is home to pristine beaches, abundant marine life and excellent diving. Exploring Real Estate Investments. This ultra-long range corporate jet can reach Mach 0.
Gates uses his private jets routinely, chiefly for his work for his namesake charity, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He also likes a fancy set of wheels, and owns a number of Porsche automobiles. He is reported to have a Porsche Carerra convertible, a Turbo which he bought with his early Microsoft money, and a rare Coupe of which only were ever made. While it's certainly an achievement to own one-of-a-kind real estate and rare cars, it is another to own precious, irreplaceable collectibles — and Bill Gates certainly has accumulated quite the collection.
Known as the Codex Leicester , this work documents many of da Vinci's scientific discoveries and observations. In fact, I remember going home one night and telling my wife Melinda that I was going to buy a notebook; she didn't think that was a very big deal.
I said, no, this is a pretty special notebook; this is the Codex Leicester, one of the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Should You Insure Your Collectibles? For one of the wealthiest men in the world, giving away assets to worthy causes is atop Bill Gates' list of achievements. For Bill Gates, savvy investing in a diversified portfolio of financial assets, real estate and collectibles helps to ensure that his wealth will continue to grow.