transaction fees

First of all about your last sentence. I think the most beautifull and worth living for things are not profitable. So by itself i think it is a non argument against governments. Socializing unprofitability can have great benefits to society. On the other hand, profit doesn't give shit about society. If a banker could sell his mother for more profit he would. In fact, most of our current problems stem from the fact that there are people who put profit before the human race and get away with it.


Anyway, if the state can take a large enough stake in minig so it becomes inviable for private miners then they can completely control the network by 51% attack. So there is no reason to even speculate about private miner profitability. It would just become state controled.
But that still requires some government to actually do it and when they do the system is broken so fundamentaly that there would be no reason for people to use bitcoins at all.

So the only outcome of such a takeover would be that the system would become unusable.
But that would be a very strange thing to do because states have the power to break a sytem like bitcoin with much fewer resources. They could simply create a law that would force ISPs to frustrate the use and people will run away.

So i don't think that the government would attempt such a thing.
If they wanted bitcoin gone they can use any number of techniques to break it beyond usability.

And i still don't see your point. Almost all transactions are already digital. If you think that the bilderbergs own some state then they already have enough power to control just about anything in that state. If they wanted they could have controlled bitocoin already. Or maybe bitcoin is their idea and satoshi works for them, right? 

Anyway, if they somehow indeed control bitcoin then any control they excert would be noticed by everyone. It would be documented in the forked blockchains. It would be clear to everyone that bitcoin is not free anymore and that it is time to move on to the next best alternative. So even if they control the network they cannot use it without being exposed.

If you have $trillions then millionaires are the least of your worry.
The bilderbergs control a lot of the companies that feed a lot of people.
Try dealing with angry workers, that will teach you about power.

Not sure what to make of the 666.

The bigger threat is the government will not shut it down, but rather embrace, help it grow, and control it so they can turn off your ability to eat individually if they don't like you:

I am almost ready to abandon any work on cryptocurrencies. They appear to not be a solution to anything:

https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/189239.msg2129228#msg2129228

Sorry to say. I am awaiting any refutation.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4944&cpage=1#comment-401419

LOL,.,
People in 3rd world countries do not usually have cell phones and when they do i don't think they have internet, never mind the money to pay for upkeeping the blockchain.
And what are they going to use their bitcoins for? Buying from silk road?
For these people bitcoin is the most useless thing in the world.
The idea that 3rd world people will become enslaved by bitcoin isrealy stupidly crazy. There is just not even the slightest posibility bitcoin will be meaningfull to these people.

If it would happen then it would be fascism, but it's just not very likely to go that way.
These people would first need to have food, housing and work before bitcoin would start taking on a meaning.


About the bilderbergs designing bitcoin/technology.
If you can't trust bitcoin then you can't trust any device in the world. Bitlderbergs would already own your ass.
If such groups could organize stuff on this level then society would already be completely controlled by them. Nothing you say or do will make a difference and you will be their slave all your life.

You call it statist but actually its called the information age.
We live in transformative times. Technology has opened far more doors than we can possibly look through at once. We need to find a new balance within these new posibilities.

I mean, ok, lets assume the bilderbergs know how much bitcoin i have in my account. Then what? They will just take it? And i wouldn't notice and post it on a blog or forum for everyone to know?
The point is that if they want to control bitcoin they need to control all the computers and networks already.
But if they already control the computers and networks then there is no point for them to control bitcoins. They would already be able to do arbitrary things with the exisiting substrate of technology.
In reality there are much more effective tools to unilaterally control society, if one wanted.

So i find it ammusing that you ignore the older possibilities for complete and total control in favour of new and unproven techologies of complete and total control.
You have to ask yourself, why would they want to control bitcoin if they already control everything that is needed to run bitcoin?

You also seem to have a lot of misconception about how bitcoin works.
First of all, they can have hidden nodes all they want but as soon as they start doing funky stuff the blockchain will fork and everyone will know they are manipulating transactions. At that moment everyone will have a choice to either work with the new chain or revert back to the old chain. I think most people will hear from their neighbours that its best to use the old chain and get out of that system asap.
I mean, if you hear that your bank is being robbed at random then you will want to take your money somewhere else.
So there is no realistical way to control the network like this.
But then you backpeddal and define control as the ability to see the transactions.
Well, have i got news for you!
You can already do that. This information is already widely available as there are sites that keep a record of the IP addresses that made the transactions. It is public information.
Sure, you can use things like Tor, but that is just a general layer of obfuscation. It has nothing to do with bitcoin and so controling the bitcoin network won't give you any extra information.
The only thing that having more than 50% of the network is good for is to forge transactions, but that is detectable and so unusable for the long run.

So again, there are no good reasons for any group to hijack bitcoin except to destroy it or make a quick buck (while destroying it).
Excerting real control will be difficult without a lot of extra facilitating control and if that is in place then the actual matter of bitcoin or another currency is immaterial.
What i'm saying is that there are much better places to furbish with mechanisms of control.

You tell me that i don't know about economics but then you go on to tell fables about biology/evolution..  

First of all, the most prolific life form on earth is the humble bacteria.
Small things grow fast because they are simple and their genes can adapt faster.
It's not about the opportunities, it is about being capable of adapting fast enough to be able to capitalize on the many opportunities nature provides.
That is why we get niches. Big complex organisms have a completely different set of opportunities than small simple ones and so they act according to different rules.

Anyway, if the bilderbergs need to control bitcoin to fight off millionairs then they have no real control at the moment. All this paranoia is nonsense if they can't already control most of the world.

And your techocratic underdog fantasy is also nothing more than a fantasy.
You claim that the recent crisis is because machines are more efficient than humans and and so humans become obsolete.
But the actual problem is human greed. It has nothing to do with workers but everything to do with a finacial system that thrives on profit and self-enrichment. So basically human nature.
The problems we have come from the fact that the financial world acted completely irresponsibly on the freedoms society allowed them. They were pushing credit without being properly secured against defaults.
If we can learn anything from this is that people cannot be left free with the kind of power one can ammass in society. People are assholes and start acting like it once they gain power.
Nothing will change this because we are all humans.
It's not the bilderbergs screwing us, it's our fellow citizens. We all grew up with the fantasy that the sky is the limit. It just turns out to be not true. There is no room for everyone to be at the top but that sure doesn't stop people from trying.

And still your arguments are twisted.
You say that these big groups are slow and irresponsive to changes.
But that is a GOOD thing as well and you never mentioned it.
Do you realy think they could get away with too much change? How many people would get fired? What kinds of consequences would it have on society if milions of people would be replaced by robots? How would you be able to maintain stability and peace?

You completely disregard the fact that these bilderberg people get their power from the workers in the factories. That is why they are so central. They actually represent a large portion of society. It is much more an ecosystem than a strict hierarchy. All involved parties need each other to create this reasonably stable and prosperous world we live in.
If you go back less than 200 years then our society has changed tremendously.
Just think of what we have developed in the last century and a half and specifically the later half of the last century.
Trains, planes, automobiles, cinema, electricity, television, hygiene, water, housing, shops, food supplies, luxury goods, communication, electronics, transistors, integrated circuits, computers, computer networks, genetics, medicine, lifespan doubling, information technology, satelites, space travel, human rights, global trade agreements, voting rights for women, etc, etc, etc.

Humanity never had it this good on the average.
So of course it is in our own interest to not want to change it too radically.
These millionairs you speak of would need to provide food and job for them to be able to gain any momentum.
But even then a sappling has no chance of surviving withour properly adapting to the environment (the big old trees).
If the sappling grows too close to the old tree the shadow from the big tree will naturally prevent the sappling from growing. Balance is the key word here.
Sure you can make a factory that runs on only robots, but that also means that 200 people won't get money that they can spend on buying your product.
The first question you need to ask is if it is economically viable to have only facories that work with robots.
Programmers won't be needed in the future as computers will be able to program themselfs.
So in the future these people won't need anyone to make a factory run. But who will have money to buy their product?
It turns out that there is only so much that you can automate without losing buying power. And without buying power your economy will stagnate and everything will collapse. It is not a strategy that will allow you to survive.

I whish things worked as superficially as you want them to but in reality there are many many societal dependencies and the only way to look at it is from an emergent ecosystem pov. Then you can see that control is not as clear as it might seem on first glance. There are a lot of niches.
I think that instead of obsesing with these bilderbergs you should realy take a wider view and see that the bilderbergs have their own set of dependencies and that they are more like shapers than like controllers. They are not concerned with how much money you have in your bank account. They are worried about whether they will have enough schooled workers for their airplane factories so they need schools and engineers to be planned beforehand. They do not have absolute power but they are a big cohesive force keeping shit together.
It takes a lot of responsibilities and i can imagine it's not easy to structure society into a system that is this stable. Never before in history did humanity manage to organize itself into such a complex and productive entity.
At the moment it's not only about organizing the next cool thing. It is much more a question of keeping the current level of prosperity going because we never gotten this far in history of mankind.
To have this level of society we need to plan ahead. There is just no other way of having the cake and eating it.
On the societal scale you are confronted with completely different sets of problems.
The bilderbergs are in a sense the emergent manifestation of the solution to these problems.
They grew naturally out of the dynamics of our development and have a function in giving society shape.
That is why there are these meetings.
It allows for the tuning of resources. Industry can communicate their needs i terms of resources (workers, energy, etc) so that they can provide the jobs for people. Then the politics can act on this by providing the resources. And then the politics can state demands from the industry to provide a good to society. It's an interaction.

It turns out that to you need this interaction for society to profit.
Both parties are worse off when they try to control the whole too much.
The only way this is going to work is if a balance is found and both parties know it. Otherwise such a system is doomed to destabilize.
Just take a look at the glorious societal development of north korea and you can clearly see how far total control will take you. And the only way they can keep it together is by total information control. They can't have anyone talking about the wrong things. It's not something that is stable in the long run and getting this level of information control going in our modern world would be impossible.

So this won't happen in the western society without the world economy collapsig. And if that happens all bets are off. Everyone will have to struggle for food and society (including any power extracted from it) will collapse.


About the 666, i hope you realize it was originally written as a critiqe against the roman empire that was recording identity for the purpose of collecting taxes.
It is the inevitable consequence of organizing beyond the structure of a village and it has been around for millenia. There realy is nothing special about our current situation as every large civilization has to deal with these things.
In fact, taxes are much older than the romans and even the pharaos collected taxes in the form of grain (that was then stored) so that when that civilization was faced with bad crop years the pharao could still feed his people. This was so successfull that they could supply whole cities with a steady supply of food and water despite productio rate. This in turn reduced famine and unrest. If your crop failed this year you do not have to steal it from your neighbour who only had a partially failed crop. You will get some of your tax back. And it would never have happened if the pharaos didn't take a bit of everyones produce as tax.
If you want to describe people as sheep then this is it. People in general are too egocentric and short sighted to be able to organize themselfs beyond their direct surroundings. They need a kind of hyrarchy that gives them the security that they are not the only ones that pay into society and that secures the benefits they will get from the tax they pay. If this structure is missing then people get into micro wars (man against man, group against group) and society has no chance of flourishing. It would be a mess if you think about the kinds of physical harm one person can do with modern tools.

So taxes are not bad in and of themselfs. They are the fee for living in a stable society with so many usefull mechanisms.
What we do need are mechanisms of democracy.
We need a way to inject demands from the people into the whole so the structure of society keeps benefiting the people and does not become self serving.
And i think this is where it often goes wrong and statism can thrive.
But a thriving statist regiment does not equal a productive society.
Any government that is too statist will be outcompeted by states with more freedoms. Even war is not an option anymore because the states that are more free actually are the only ones capable of producing these toys of mass destrucion. It is just not economically viable to sustain a deeply statist construction. Even russia and china realized that.

On the other hand, states without any statism structures are bound to eat themselfs up as everyone will fight over food with their neighbors.

So the only way, from a government perspective, to have a stable state for the future is by not demanding too much tax and to use tax in an open and discussable way. That way you will have the people behind you and will be stronger as a state.
Complete statism is not something that can survive for long and so it is not in the benefit of any one party in our society to push it too far.

So i don't think you can take this statist thing as an absolute thing that is separate from society.
It is because of statism that we have such a successfull society in the first place.
Without it we would still be tribes fighting over the best berry field.
Statism is fully embedded in our society and it has its benefits.

The thing to worry about is keeping statism just for the purpose of statism.
But that's nothing new and humanity has been working on the problem for thousands of years.
The problem is that the optimum is a balance of freedom and structure so we are doomed forever to re-evaluate this balance.
You should not address statism itself. You should try to see how it should fit in society so we can achieve an optimum in a given situation.

Aah, so their solution is to have the people they don't like beg and steal for their food? Great way to have a nice stable society.. 

I don't agree with this in the sense that you only look at half the story (It makes me think you have no clue as to the function statism has in any society).
I think you are only talking about when statism goes out of control.
I fully agree that statism out of control is a bad thing. But no statism at all is also a bad thing.
The only solution is to make sure there is a healthy balance.
Megadeath will happen on both extremes.
Too much statism is megadeath.
Too little statism is also megadeath (because people cannot voluntarily peacefully co-exist when resources are scarse).


Wait, you're an accomplished programmer (that's what you said in anoteher thread) and you live in a 3rd world country and you hang around on bitcointalk talking about the bilderbergs?
LOL at how much fail is in that proposition.
You have no chance of not being part of the 1st world system, wherever you happen to live. Your whole thought pattern is prove of that. You concern yourself with luxury problems of our society with no regard to the actual problems (and solutions to those problems) of third world countries. You show absolutely no insight in the actual dynamics that drive world economy. You put all blame in one thing (and that happens to be the subject of rich westerners conspiracy fantasies) and then see everything from that point of view.
How could anyone in a 3rd world country be so thoroughly indoctrinated with western paranoia about the bilderbergs?


LOL at your twisted brain.

Bitcoin can only be usefull if it has a benefit for the users.
So by saying that bitcoin will become usefull you already agree that these people have a benefit in using it. To use bitcoin they need computers and fast internet to be ubiquitous.
But in a 3rd world country these are exactly the kinds of things that are missing.
Bitcoin is so terribly expensive in use that it is pretty much meaningless for people in the 3rd world.
I think those people are much more worried about their food and water supplies than about the possibility to sell their luxury products to some overseas fat white guy.
Usually these countries have very low industrialisation so WTF are they going to sell on the internet and in enough quantities to maintain their bitcoin ecosystem?
If you don't have food then you can't invest in the kind of technology that is needed for bitcoin.
Bitcoin cannot ever help severely underdeveloped countries to get on top of their problems.
In some cases bitcoin could help but it can't change basic things like infrastructure or climate or political regime. You put too much faith in bitcoin and fail to see it is not some magical fix-everything currency.
It has some benefits, sure, but it's mostly a rich kids toy.

Yes, and fascism will be there with or without bitcoin. Welcome to the world, it has not been different since known history.
The solution is not in bitcoin, the sollution is in reducing the power of these bankers. Trusting in some technology to solve your problems for you is tremendously stupid.
And so trusting in bitcoin to solve all your problems is also tremendously stupid.
In the end all change starts with people, not with technology.
That is because the actual problem is people, not technology.

I don't know this Children's International. It seems it's a US organisation. Funny that you know about them when you live in a 3rd world country when i don't know about them and i live in a 1st world country.
I think you're bullshitting and have never in your life visited a 3rd world coutry.

Ok, so i'm going to assume you're from the US and not some 3rd world country.

If they own your ass then bitcoin never had a chance anyway. Your whole paranoia about a weakness in bitcoin is fantasy because they can control the societal dynamics despite it.
You realy need to let go of bitcoin as a magical technology that will free you from the tyrany of society.
What would actually help is to stop consuming all the products pushed on to you by the tyranny. Stop using bitcoins, stop using the internet, stop using computers, stop using cars, stop using supermarkets, grow your own food, don't visit doctors or hospitals, dig your own water pit, and have enough land to do it all without taking away from others.
But clearly you have it too good in the current situation to do all these things that are required to live a 'free' life.
It's funny to see people pretend to be revolutionaries that then use the tools provided to them by the system they oppose to prove the system is wrong. Their support of the system is contradictionary to their statements.
If you want real change then the first thing to do is switch off the computer.
The next thing to do is figure out how you can get all these nice things without any statism.
Once you get there we can talk again. But you won't because these nice things are the result of a certain ammount of statism.

Statism is just a tool and like any tool it can be abused. You don't want statism to go away, you want it to be a tool for society and you want to prevent it from becoming too dominant.
But again, that is not what bitcoin can achieve. The kinds of changes that are needed for this have nothing to do with technology.

LOL.,
Again with the brain twisting.
We have had technology to wipe out the whole world population for over a hundred years now.
There are chemicals that, once injected into the atmosphere, would kill almost all people.
So this could have been done even before the first world war, if that was the goal.

The thought that statism doesnt kill everyone because of inefficiency is truely bizar.
If they kill everyone (and as i say above, the tools have been there for a while now) then who will still make up the system?
What i can make of it is that you trust that some un-subvertable technologies will save your ass.
If you would indeed be an experienced programmer like you claim you are you would know by heart that there is no such thing as a system that cannot be subverted.
It is a stupid proposition to hope that technology will save your ass.


I did not mention bitcoins in this paragraph...

There is no 78 year technological disruption cycle.
If there are any cycles than they must be accelerating.
We used to have horses for milennia. Now in a short time we got both trains and cars.
Then only a slow evolution of these ideas without anything specific technological disruption.

The first and second world war had nothing to do with technological disruption.
If anything the wars themselfs were a big factor for advancing technology.

Please explain why we had 2 big wars separated by 20 years instead of 78.
What kind of cycle is that?
And why do you conveniently fail to count the many many wars between the world wars and now as significant? Why the arbitrary 78 years? In the last 78 years the world never stopped changing, so what is so special about these 78 year periods?

Please provide evidence that such a cycle indeed exists and then provide evidence why it must happen.

Treaty of Versailles. You could say it was one big war.