Possible variation of Bitcoin to unify stock market & collective consciousness

[beavis]

(I know very little about the 2012 predictions, but I'm just matching patterns when I put things in this 2012 section, and I see big changes in consciousness already happening, so don't take this date thing too seriously)

Here's some unorganized thoughts which I need to think more about before posting to the bitcoin forum, but first I'll see what you guys think of it... Also, I had no part in creating Bitcoin and this software will not be called Bitcoin.

The part where it connects to the collective consciousness of the Human species is explained near the bottom. It will be a text forum weighted by a decentralized economy, so you invest in whatever sentences or paragraphs you think will become more popular in the future, and you make or lose money based on that. Since the algorithm is more balanced than a zen master's brain, the stock market and global consciousness field will merge. Depending on if I can get some fans of Bitcoin to help or not, and how governments react to it, we could be putting the force of the economy (which is REALLY powerful) toward expanding consciousness.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin is what Napster started 12 years ago, a first attempt at decentralizing the economy, currently in the millions of dollars of value as bitcoins are traded for real dollars. Bitcoin is to cash as this program I'm building is to a stock market, a forum with voting by investment, search engine, and democracy algorithm, which sounds like a lot of stuff to build but its almost the same code as the existing open-source bitcoin code. I'm not sure how well it would scale, but I don't know of any problems yet. This is the logical extension of bitcoin for more advanced things.

It will be a decentralized stock market where any string can be a stock. It works equally well for short and long strings.

As a forum, the thread title and posts in the thread are different paths through the same tree of text. Each post in the thread has the thread name as a prefix. Each reply to a post has the thread title and that post as a prefix, and so on. The tree of text can branch at any char if you want to pay this decentralized currency to create such a branch.

The currency will have its own network independent of Bitcoin but be a modified Bitcoin software.

For each string in the tree (path from root to leaf), there is some set of owners (Should it be anonymous? It would still change the world if identities were public.), and for each owner there is a number amount of this string that they own. They own that amount of stock in the string.

To create a new string of length n and add it to the network (tree of strings), you have to buy permission from n substrings which each start at char 0 to n-1. Other than that requirement, its a free market to choose which substrings to buy from, since you can buy permission from "" (empty string, the common currency of them all) "x" or from "xy" or from "xyz" to satisfy the third char requirement of "abxyz". The first char requirement could be bought from "" or "a" or "ab" or "abx" or "abxy". If you wanted to buy from "abxyz" you would buy its stock (from 1 or more of the owners, at whatever price they had set when they bought "abxyz" or had changed the price since then. There must always be a price for offering to sell each string, and any amount of stock of it can be bought at that price up to how much the owner of that stock has. They may divide their stock and give the pieces different prices so the price goes up when the cheaper stock is bought. The price of the next stock is already set higher as a strategy for selling). Set the prices however you want, or change them later. To create a new string and add it to the network, you pay a weighted-average of those prices to the owners of the substrings you choose on the free market. The average is weighted by the length of each substring. Its the total length of all substrings (which overlap eachother unless they are all length 1, since they start at indexs 0 to n-1). Sum the costs of substrings, weighted by their length, and take the weighted-average. That way, every string should cost approximately the same amount on average, depending on market fluctuations (how owners of substrings choose to set their prices). The common currency (represented by empty string "" instead of "a" or "ab" or "abx" etc) will cost more per unit than almost all other strings per unit because it is the most general and can be used to build any string even if the bigger substrings set their prices high. In general, the longer a string is, the lower it will set its unit cost of using it (to create a new string and add it to the text tree), because people will only choose to buy permission from it (for each of index 0 to n-1) for creating a new string if it costs less than shorter substrings which are prefixes of it. If you can use a string x to satisfy one of the n permission requirements (for creating a new string length n), then you can use any prefix of x to satisfy that same permission requirement, even if x is the empty string (the common currency of the whole text tree).

Based on all this, the market in this text tree (including people who own certain amounts of many different strings) will be balanced so that any random string is equally likely to be created, biased only by the strings that people prefer to write and predictions and reactions to market fluctuations, and most importantly, this way of balancing the market makes the value of a string depend very little on its length so whole paragraphs would be bought and sold in the stock market based on the prediction that others would see the paragraph and write strings that include it as a substring. Longer strings will be a little less valuable, and have a lot more market fluctuations, than short strings. Long strings are high risk and high payoff/loss. Short strings are conservative investments.

This tree of text, stored in a decentralized network, is a stock market, a forum with bitcoin-like money investments instead of voting, and a Coherent Extrapolated Volition and Collective Intelligence algorithm. As a forum, its reliability is backed by the value of the bitcoin-like money at the root of the text tree (which is the common stock object) and specific stocks as the branches. The forum (a tree of text) is influenced toward ideas more people agree on the same way it is made reliable. People buy and sell the strings they think are important, and such buying and selling may be from a person to themself (another account/address) so the software will need to look deep into such patterns to see which branches of the tree are really the most important, since the tree will be too big for any one computer in the network to contain. It will be the combination of a distributed hashtable (or something like it) and a bitcoin-like network. It does not need to connect to the bitcoin network. It will start its own network similar to how bitcoin started a new network and regulates its total currency amount. Each stock (a string path from root to leaf) will grow similar to how bitcoin's total currency amount grows over the years. In the early years, all strings will have owners with very small stock amounts. New owners can mine any stock they want, so just because you own all of "abxyz" and refuse to sell any does not mean nobody else will own some "abxyz" later.

The owners of a stock, through a median vote weighted by the amount of stock each of them have, choose the stock price, and have a new vote continuously as they each choose to change their vote any time they want. It could be done this way or each user could sell their stock at the price they would have voted that stock's price as (since voting is weighted by stock amount). Try it both ways. Median is harder to calculated in a decentralized network. Individual is less accurate because it lets buyers get the cheapest cost (heisenberg uncertainty would not allow this, see quantum theory below) instead of the median or, probably more accurate quantumly (see below), from a random selection of the stocks available for that string as found in the decentralized network, which should be much easier to calculate.

I said above that you can create "abxyz" by buying permission from 5 substrings (with choices of which 5, chosen on the free market from the different prefixes of those substrings). Should more of "abxyz" be creatable the same way after its first created? It could be a problem because if "abxyz" starts receiving lots of money (from bigger strings that use it as a substring) then people would start creating more "abxyz" so they receive their fraction of the profits from that stock, but that's not how its supposed to work. It may be ok, because its not much different from creating "abxy" and offering a lower price than "abxyz" offers.

To pay for the bandwidth and make sure new versions of the software (made by other people maybe) choose to continue storing and broadcasting the data in the text tree (everyone has a different part of it, plus the most important parts), something similar to bitcoin's "transaction fee" option should be used, and the fee should be higher to pay for the larger amount of data stored in a forum compared to simple money amounts and who paid who. The hashes and network structure should work mostly the same way as bitcoin's network, except buyer and seller are guaranteed to both move money and move stock at the same time so no cheating is possible there.

Because the text tree stock network will be organized as substrings, and longer substrings tend to be used, it will also act as a decentralized search engine. For example, you could broadcast a request to find strings that are indirectly related to a set of 5 other strings that share no common substrings. Related ideas will be adjacent to other branches that are, in forum terms, posts in the same thread (or other relationship that you may interpret the tree of text to mean), and the substrings of the parallel branch can be used to find similarity indirectly to whatever was searched for. It could also be used like a neural network or other connectionist system of spreading activation (1 or more numbers in each node). The neural activation stuff may not be a good idea, but the search engine is much simpler to implement. Its an associative network already. No search index needed. Its already shaped the way people think, since they choose which stocks to buy and can choose any string they think will increase in value. Artificial Intelligences could buy/sell on this stock market too, and knowing how people think would help, but they could make some money just by watching patterns of strings and substrings without knowing what they mean.

Overall the network is supposed to be a reflection of the thoughts of the Human species, so if you think any certain subject is going to become more popular then you should buy stock in strings related to it. In that way, this stock market is backed by the collective consciousness of the Human species, so unlike bitcoin, this stock market has value independent of what it can be traded for.

Completely by accident, but still very strategicly useful, because it does so many other things in a unified way (not different systems connected, but using the same nodes different ways), governments have no way to make this illegal, even if bitcoin is made illegal, while it has a bitcoin-like currency at the root of the text tree that can be used the same as bitcoin. They would have to make World Of Warcraft illegal too since the game money there is traded for real money sometimes, and Blizzard (and businesses in general) would lay the smackdown on them for even suggesting it. Its untouchable.


...almost... Need to adjust 1 thing in that math. Instead of doing "weighted-average" by the length of the substrings, do it by the squared length of each substring, so you divide the total cost of squared permissions (for creating a new string) by the sum of squares of its components, and such squares average to 1.0. Why? Because there is not enough motivation to create a child branch of a long string if its not squared. I'm sure the string lengths should be squared, but I don't know if the permissions imaginary numbers should each be squared or just scaled (by a real number) by multiplying by the string length squared, or something like that. I can see the similarity to quantum physics, even though this system was not meant to be quantum at all, I mean its REALLY similar, like overlapping string indexs change an exponential distribution to a squared distribution like the black hole information thing where all the information fits exactly onto the surface of the black hole separated by plank distance. I didn't try to do that, but its in the algorithm I described, if you look at it in the right way. This needs to be explored in small networks.

We can think of the text tree like a light-cone, maybe, and in that context this quote of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer explains the squared:

If you measure the three qubits, you will observe a three-bit string. The probability of measuring a given string is the squared magnitude of that string's coefficient (i.e., the probability of measuring 000 = | a | 2, the probability of measuring 001 = | b | 2, etc..). Thus, measuring a quantum state described by complex coefficients (a,b,...,h) gives the classical probability distribution ( | a | 2, | b | 2,..., | h | 2) and we say that the quantum state "collapses" to a classical state as a result of making the measurement.

Why is quantum physics talking about strings of symbols? That's what I was talking about, what I'm adding a squared calculation to. Lets call the stock price at the time of first buying it, the probability amplitude, and like in quantum physics, observe it into existence by calculating it.

I did say it was a unified design including consciousness, right? Quantum too, through the subtle organization of events structured by this economy made of play money. What we can learn from Bitcoin is that sometimes things are real because we interact with them as if they were real. It works the same way for reality in general.


Again, completely by accident, but holy sh*t my stock market may support imaginary numbers for money, as in (5.5 + 3.21*squareRoot(-1)) dollars, and it gets normalized at each new string, avoiding square roots of imaginary numbers, because its divided by the sum of squares of the string lengths as the probability amplitude. I may have just upgraded money from real number to imaginary numbers. Makes sense, since money is imaginary anyways.


I guess this equation I wrote recently was in my subconscious mind when I was trying to merge my Free Speech Just Pay Shipping (FSJPS) software (which I've been planning for a long time) and Bitcoin. FSJPS was supposed to be kind of a strange-loop of game-theory in a chatroom way where the players make up the rules as part of the game, which becomes looped into more games fractally somehow. Its close enough. This software will be called Free Speech Just Pay Shipping. The equation...

http://www.kurzweilai.net/forums/topic/exponential-telescope-and-holographic-transmitterreceiver
electricFlux = sum_weighted_by_fourier_transform_over_short_time(multiplyAll(1 + dotProduct(momentum( particle{i} ),vector)/(squareRoot(n)*e)), for i from 1 to n)

So I'm missing the fourier transform since I'm doing this discretely with large granularity, but I guess I could shrink the time step which would mean running less data in each computer but more calculations on it. The fourier transform is for finding frequencies between these many dimensions (many particles at various angles and distances from a certain point in spacetime). In my algorithm, I chose to add instead of multiply (1 + dotProduct...) because the discreteness of it, and game-theory of people trying to play the stock market, would allow the stocks to become very small or very large numbers. The equation is correct based on my intuition, but I think it is a very small amount out of context here. It is relevant, but not completely. It has the squareRoot, the average of 1.0 per amplitude, and n symbols/particles. I'll fit this all together eventually.

[beavis]

A Compromise To Avoid World War 3.
Ben F Rayfield (beavis on astralpulse.com), 2011.
All my writing, here or anywhere else, permission granted to copy, since redundant is harder to censor.

This is about slavery to money and a way to change that by open-sourcing the economy using a common identity-verifying system and leaving other functions to the open-source code, for example, a branch of Bitcoin which has an extra key held by authorities.

The difference between a soldier and a terrorist is the terrorist knows what he fights for while the soldier does what he's told. Its war either way, and its often good to compromise to avoid war. You can have economic war, political war, or violent war, but usually its a combination. I'm going to make a proposal that reduces all 3 and leads to a more cooperative society, one where everyone tries to help everyone else because the structure of society rewards such behavior.

What I write here is going to be more about USA than other countries. I'm trying to write about the whole Earth, but nobody has the whole picture, so we need to start talking at that level. First I'll describe some important and relevant events in history, and then extrapolate where that leads, and what we can do as a compromise between authorities and terrorists to avoid World War 3. I don't serve authorities or terrorists more than anyone else. I serve the Human species and all life forms, so don't accuse me of making the threats I'm describing. Somebody has to say this, and if you want to avoid World War 3, you'll listen. Conflicts are esclating exponentially, and we don't have much time left.

I'm ordering the historical events by how they relate to eachother, not by time...

Then I'll describe where it leads and a Bitcoin-like identity-verified double-key system to open-source the economy, something that will outperform the central bank system in a fair fight, a free market where the best economy wins. Bitcoin is already a many million dollar economy and is up and running now, so don't think this is hard to do. We can start from Bitcoin's open-source code or create new software. We think computers are great at numbers and in our banks and economies we don't see why people should be involved in such calculations, so we have minimal overhead. This will be a system that anyone can build on with open-source code, as long as they use the same identity-verifying system.

We will design economies, in an open-source way, that influence society toward whatever we want it to become, and we will vote on these economies the same way politicians are elected today, vote with your money, so the best economies get the most people using them and the most invested in them. If people accept it as money, it is money, and when more people use it, it becomes more valuable. Bitcoin did it, and we can do it again for each new economy we design. Economic equations will evolve and compete the same way products evolve and compete today, and we will use that to organize society however we prefer, to make money flow to those who really deserve it in the democratic opinion of everyone who uses these new money systems. Many think its not democratic to vote with money, but that's the only way it can happen these days, and it will be more democratic to design such systems so money tends to flow toward everyone more equally than it does today. I'm not proposing any changes to election systems. I'm recognizing that money controls elections more than voting does, and our real master is the central banking system. We are all slaves to money, and its time to free the slaves again.

***History***

Thousands of businesses cooperate to create an internet with far more bandwidth and technology than the existing internet, called Internet 2 ( http://internet2.edu ), and for it to be only for businesses and not for normal people, and their plan is to replace the existing internet with one controlled only by businesses, where they have no obligation to obey "net neutrality laws".

Corporations are masters of governments. For example, in California USA, if I want to buy electric power, I am forced to buy it from Pacific Gas And Electric, and part of their budget goes toward creating laws such as for regulating the "standby mode" on electronics. They think it wastes electricity and electronics should have to turn off completely. What started as a way for government to save money by deferring electricity generation to a business, has become a tax on funding the creation of electricity related laws, by a private business. Where do I go to vote against Pacific Gas And Electric if I don't like the laws they put money into creating, my money which I am forced to pay for electricity? Corporations are a part of government that has no obligations of democracy.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. After reserching many charities, http://givewell.org ( http://wikipedia.org/wiki/GiveWell ) calculated that, based on supply and demand for Human life, the cheapest Human lives are worth 1000 US Dollars each. That's how much it costs to save a Human life (in the most efficient charities), and people aren't willing to pay it until the price comes down. Based on this calculation, the value of the buildings destroyed in the 9/11/01 bombings was more than the value of the 3000 people who died, since the people were worth 3,000,000 US Dollars at 1000 Dollars each. If you disagree, put your money where your mouth is and save a life. The point is people don't care much if other people die.

George Bush became president of USA. Then his son became president. George Bush THE SECOND. What is the chance that a man and then his son would be president if USA was a real democracy? Almost none. The system is powered by money, and the central bank system owns most of that money. To restore democracy, we must fix the money system so it tends to flow toward people based on what they do for society.

Guantanamo Bay is a prison USA created outside of USA for the purpose of not being subject to the laws of USA in that prison, so they can torture people for information. George W Bush had it created. Obama did not shut it down.

Ignorance Of The Law Is No Excuse. Police in USA often say that. Ok, lets see how that applies to USA's Congress who admit that they don't read proposed laws before voting on if they become laws or not. That's why the Read The Bills Act was rejected. Laws in USA are created so quickly that is it impossible for any one person to read them, even if they read laws all day everyday. You can't know if a law applies to you if you don't read it because the system is not advanced enough to search for an abstract idea, while some parts can be searched by words. The system is overclocked, running out of control, and they don't know how to fix it. Something big could easily break, and the gears of society would come to a halt, unless we change the basic way things work.

As most people laugh at Ray Kurzweil's history-based calculations that technology will continue to advanced exponentially and the future will be here much sooner than most people expect, those people demonstrate their ignorance by not knowing that today for 300 US Dollars they can buy a hat (Emotiv Epoc) which reads some of their thoughts, including emotions and thinking about moving and turning, which allows them to play video games by thinking. This kind of technology isn't far from what's needed to network our minds together into a bigger mind which would be able to control us the same way we control Monkeys, but this mind would also be us.

The Zeitgeist movement gains popularity quickly. One of their best videos is this version of "Zeitgeist Addendum" which you can watch for free at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EewGMBOB4Gg
From their website http://thezeitgeistmovement.com (but they are not as centralized as it appears),
QUOTE:
The Movement's principle focus includes the recognition that the majority of the social problems which plague the human species at this time are not the sole result of some institutional corruption, scarcity, a political policy, a flaw of "human nature" or other commonly held assumptions of causality in the activist community. Rather, The Movement recognizes that issues such as poverty, corruption, collapse, homelessness, war, starvation and the like appear to be "Symptoms" born out of an outdated social structure.

While intermediate Reform steps and temporal Community Support are of interest to The Movement, the defining goal here is the installation of a new socioeconomic model based upon technically responsible Resource Management, Allocation and Distribution through what would be considered The Scientific Method of reasoning problems and finding optimized solutions.

This "Resource-Based Economic Model" is about taking a direct technical approach to social management as opposed to a Monetary or even Political one. It is about updating the workings of society to the most advanced and proven methods Science has to offer, leaving behind the damaging consequences and limiting inhibitions which are generated by our current system of monetary exchange, profits, corporations and other structural and motivational components.
END QUOTE.

The Open Source movement (software which everyone has the right to use, copy, modify, and distribute with much less legal restrictions and usually for free) is as strong as the businesses who create software. Open Source tends to be peer-reviewed more, instead of hiding its flaws inside of .exe files without the text files which they were generated from. Open source programmers have learned to work together to advance their common goals. Businesses, being motivated more by profit than by good products, only let others build on their work as long as the business stays in control, able to pull the plug on the whole project if they don't like where it goes. Open source gives every user the legal right to take the project wherever they want, and the creator has no legal right to stop them or change the contract later. The contract normally says things like give credit where its due, don't connect this to proprietary (not open source) systems, or some give permission to do anything at all as long as the author's name stays on it. The majority of Open Source software is at http://sourceforge.net and the website for SourceForge is one of the open source softwares. If businesses can't learn to work together more than is profitable, they will not be able to compete. People would not use Bitcoin if it was not open source.

I heard that around the time central banking was created in USA, some president tried to shut it down soon after it started. This is something I'll need to research later and update this writing, or you could research it and respond. This is how a decentralized society works.

Military Industrial Complex:
"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together."
--Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961, former president of USA.
His predictions are now reality.

In the year 1999, Napster became popular, allowing anyone with internet access to share music files, if they had legal rights to those files or not. This was followed by many decentralized and sometimes anonymous networks, and eventually led to the combination of Bitcoin and Tor networks to move large amounts of money from anywhere to anywhere anonymously. Since it started, governments have been fighting decentralized networks, but legitimate uses of these networks has slowed their attacks. As part of these attacks, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have failed to upgrade their systems to IPv6 even though it has been available for over 10 years, and without it the workaround is Network Address Translation (NAT) which creates severe problems for decentralized networks. Specificly, most people are behind NAT addresses, and communications go out but they don't come in unless they are an immediate response to a communication that just went out. When 2 computers both have NAT addresses, neither can send the first communication to the other, so they can't communicate at all without going through a non-NAT address, also known as a server. Wasn't the internet supposed to be a network of computers where everyone has equal ability to network to everyone else?

The Pirate Party advocates getting rid of intellectual property laws, like patents and copyrights, so everyone benefits from the many things which already exist and has the freedom to build more things without making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The Patriot Acts are created in USA which give government legal ability to do almost anything they want, including kill suspected terrorists on sight without a trial, and spy on financial records through automated systems on a large scale.

"My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government."
--Barack Obama, president of USA, 2009, http://whitehouse.gov/open
Looks like Obama may want to help with this. What's more open than open-sourcing the economy based on a common identity-verifying system?

The "Anonymous" group hacks at computers of Federal Reserve.

Wikileaks distributes secret government documents, which motivated many people to make changes in their governments.

Through the internet, revolutions are organized, like happened in Egypt to replace its government.

Wikileaks hacks at various financial computer systems as a response to such systems freezing the money accounts of Wikileaks.

News, radio, and some of the most popular forms of communication are censored. You don't see dead soldiers brought home from war, for example, on the news. They don't want people to pay attention to the wars in that way.

A "kill switch" is installed into large parts of the internet, so authorities can control the internet. If your website does not obey their rules, contain only approved content, then your website will not be accessible to others.

Some groups threaten others for displaying pictures of Mohammed, which their religion commands against. Talk starts about further censoring communications.

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, but I've heard he was forced into it. Compare that to everyone being a slave to money and now through cryptocurrencies we can free the slaves again.

Bitcoin is created as a response to the financial system and forcing of identity on transactions of money. Combined with the Tor network, it can be used anonymously to move millions of dollars from anywhere to anywhere. Bitcoin devalued the Dollar by many millions and moved that value into Bitcoins, but competing currencies have been doing that for hundreds of years.

Currently there are no tax laws about Bitcoins or World Of Warcraft Gold, since they're just numbers in a computer that people trade. Through the bridge of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, governments will be tempted to tax game money, and if they do it will lead to destroying themselves with complexity. World Of Warcraft Gold is a real currency, like Bitcoin, just implemented a different way and connected to a game before it became a real currency. Want to buy some? http://warcraftgoldstore.com This currency is normally used to buy things in the World Of Warcraft online game, but since it can be exchanged both directions with dollars, it should be subject to the same laws as Bitcoin, and the last I heard, if you get paid in Bitcoins you are supposed to report it on your taxes (some people say, but its debated). Can anyone give me a good legal reason why Bitcoin and World Of Warcraft Gold should be taxed differently? If not, the next purchase of armor or a flying dragon to ride on, should be reported on your taxes. When the auditor asks, tell him "Yes, I bought a flying dragon for xx World Of Warcraft Gold, but I didn't get a receipt." There is a contradiction here. Either we are going to have to start paying sales tax for buying an extra life in a game in a simulated economy with game money, and non-player-characters taxed for spending that same game money, or Bitcoin doesn't get taxed. Which is it? In World Of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment is God, and nobody would bat an eye if one of their characters walked on simulated water. If employment laws merge between virtual worlds and the real world, bad things will happen, and the paradoxes will expand without limit. Do your lawyers dare tread in the World Of Warcraft? I really hope so, because one of those non-player-characters was racially discriminating in who he hired for his simulated dragon store. That racist a-hole said he wouldn't hire my character because he had green skin, a hump back, and large claws, which is typical of my simulated species. My whole simulated life, I've had to deal with discrimination against Orcs, and this is the last straw. I am suing for the lost potential World Of Warcraft Gold, in US Dollars please. Second Life is a more advanced game where such employment laws would be more likely to apply, especially in future versions.


***End of history events, ordered by how they relate to eachother instead of time.***


***How does all that fit together?***

Its a battle between centralized control and decentralized organization of society, which is fought politically, economically, and sometimes violently. As long as Humans have existed, there have been hierarchies of control: countries, presidents, kings, cities, department of motor vehicles, money systems which you're not allowed to compete with, etc. As technology advanced, organizing society in decentralized ways became possible. The authorities represent centralization of power. They work against decentralization because it reduces their power. As they recently learned from Bitcoin and various attacks through the internet, they are not as powerful as they thought, and as technology continues to advance, they will continue to lose power to decentralized ways to organize society. They could shut down Bitcoin, but they couldn't stop 10 more advanced variations of it from being created.

There are a few random elements also. In reaction to threats if pictures of Mohammed are displayed, there was an "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everybody_Draw_Mohammed_Day and an episode of "South Park" in which Mohammed appeared delivering a pizza, as if it wasn't anything out of the ordinary. We can solve the problems between centralization and decentralization, but these more random things (people don't want you to do x for religious reasons, so others do x) may never be solved. The best we can do is try to avoid escalating such conflicts, like by not making demands that others obey our religion and not reacting to such demands. If people didn't think that USA's government may outlaw pictures of Mohammed, then those reactions to it would have been much smaller. These many random elements make a complete consistent solution impossible, but we can build a society much better than what we have now.

Authorities reduce freedom and increase military spending and spying. Terrorists become more angry and recruit more members. Both use more advanced technology and demand the other change. This escalation of conflicts is not going to stop on its own, and nobody will like what it leads to.

***That's history. What's next?***

If they make Bitcoin illegal, terrorists will attack, maybe not right away, and we don't know any details, but making Bitcoin illegal would be viewed as a severe attack on the decentralization of society. Does that make you want to make it illegal right away? I expect it does, because we are a very confrontaional species. But this time, lets wait and let the identity-verified system compete with Bitcoin and outperform it because businesses accept it into their infrastructure more than they accept Bitcoin.

Through the internet, many people have realized how the world really works, and we want our fair part of the power. We want a real democracy, and since money is power, we want the central banking dictatorship demoted to a free market where anyone can coin their own money if others agree to accept it as money, the same as currencies have been competing for hundreds of years. Because of new technology like Bitcoin (and its many million dollar economy), new currencies can be designed to do things that old currencies can not, so money does not have to be just a number anymore. Near the end of this writing, I will describe a system I want to create where money is more than a number, as an example.

None of us alive today chose the central banking system. We were born into it, like slaves were born into the system of slavery. Everyone is a slave to money. People say that like its a joke, but there is some truth to it. Anyone or anything that isn't followed by choice does not deserve to be followed. Its time to free the slaves again, this time from the central banking system, and allow us to design our own systems which people may choose to follow.

There are side-effects of these systems, and we must deal with that. The ends do not justify the means. The ends plus the side-effects justify the means. If Bitcoin does something bad to the world, we must do something about it instead of just continuing to use Bitcoin. That is the only way we have the right to design our own systems. For example, if the central banking system leads to the military-industrial-complex (nuclear weapons are created for profit more than for defense, for example), they should have to do something to fix that problem or another problem of equal destructiveness.

Below I will propose a new open-source money system that I think the terrorists and authorities can agree on, a compromise to avoid World War 3. I'll quote myself from the first paragraph: "The difference between a soldier and a terrorist is the terrorist knows what he fights for while the soldier does what he's told. Its war either way, and its often good to compromise to avoid war. You can have economic war, political war, or violent war, but usually its a combination. I'm going to make a proposal that reduces all 3 and leads to a more cooperative society, one where everyone tries to help everyone else because the structure of society rewards such behavior."

We don't need to change any laws or make laws against the central banking system. We just need protection from the central banking system who has extreme motivation to pay to create laws against our new money systems. We intend to create fair and balanced money systems, where there are no fees paid to us, and to defeat the central banking system in a fair fight, in a free market where the best currency system wins. It would be a "conflict of interest" for the central banking system, who is our competition, to make or pay to make laws that apply to our cryptocurrency money systems. Our money systems appear to fit the definition of a charity, providing the service of adding and subtracting numbers and whatever else our money will be designed to do. We can compete with huge central banking organizations because we understand that computers are good at numbers and we don't see why people should be involved in such calculating of numbers, open-source programmers work for free, computing power is entirely the responsibility of our users, so we have no overhead, and we're passing the entire savings to our users. Its a bank and a charity, so there is no way a central banking system could defeat it in a free market.

If you agree with what I'm writing and want such changes to happen, send a link to your friends.

***Details of the system***

To satisfy the authority's requirements, modify Bitcoin to be a double key system, one key held by authorities and one key held by each person, both keys needed to access any money. The authority's keys can freeze accounts and identify who did a transaction, or even freeze an account before a transaction since all transactions are sent to authorities for approval. The other key prevents authorities from using the money without the permission of its owner, like is done in a Fractional Reserve system. This open-source system will be flexible enough to build a Fractional Reserve system on top of, but it will not do that by default. Except for the identity-verifying system, anyone can extend it with open-source code.

There will be an authority-controlled identity system that holds the private-key of each person to identify that person. The modified Bitcoin will send a block of data to the authority's system, which will digitally-sign the block and send the signature back to the modified Bitcoin, which will assemble things in the normal way into a new block for the network. It will have to run on its own network independent of the existing Bitcoin network.

Any Bitcoin-like system which uses the common identity system would be accepted as a valid economic system which has whatever value people put on it by choosing to use it as money. It will be a free market competition between different equations and behaviors of economies. The best economy equations get more people to use them, more invested in them. If Fractional Reserve systems do not compete well with an identity-verified Bitcoin system, then Fractional Reserve would lose value of their money to that economy. The best systems win. Its a fair fight in a free market. In any free market, there will be a variety of products, not a monopoly, because a monopoly acts unfairly and the free market responds by creating similar products with fair rules. In this case, the equations and behaviors of an economy will evolve and compete the same way products evolve and compete today. Farther below I will explain an economy I want to build where money is not just a number.

It can not be used anonymously.

Accounts can be frozen by authorities at any time and is guaranteed to offer a freeze before each transaction is approved.

The integrity of the whole network is protected by digital-signatures of all people and authorities involved.

All data is public, but only authorities need to know which public-key is owned by which person, so its anonymous for everyone except authorities who observe them.

"Authorities" can mean anything, depending on which system holds those private-keys and does digital-signatures. It could be an OpenID system, or a USB device sold by governments, for example.

Because no new block can be accepted to the network on a large scale without being approved and digitally-signed by authorities (or a USB device they sell for such a purpose), authorities will have complete ability to stop any transaction in the network before it happens and to identify the people involved in any transaction by looking at the publicly available history of the network (which is the network itself because it grows new blocks from old blocks).

See the design document of Bitcoin for details, but Bitcoin is not the only system this would work for. "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Why would the underground accept such a system that sounds almost as bad as centrally controlled banks? Because businesses will accept it as part of their infrastructure competing with dollars, and because if authorities abuse their power we can build more anonymous money system like Bitcoin (or continue using Bitcoin) instead of using the identity-based systems. Every government or global organization needs a system of "checks and balances", and the constant threat that we'll build and use anonymous systems if power is abused serves that purpose. Regulate fairly and reasonably or don't regulate at all, and you know that's true because Bitcoin was created as a response to such unreasonable regulation. We don't have to overthrow any government to obsolete governments. We can build replacements that organize society in decentralized ways. Authorities can choose to work with us or become obsolete. People would simply stop going to work in government buildings because our systems work better. What if they had a war and nobody came?

***Technical details***

2 private keys. Authorities have 1. Each person has the other. 2 public keys, go in the blocks, same as Bitcoin already does for 1 key pair.

Its really simple. When digitally-signing a new block, it needs to be signed by both private keys, and both those signatures go in the blocks. The block has to be sent to authorities to be signed, since they're not giving out their key, and the result sent to the Bitcoin-like program, which combines the keys, signatures, and everything else the normal way Bitcoin does it.

There is also a third key pair held by the authorities which is used to sign each of many public keys of the authorities. Based on that, each node in the network will verify that identity signatures really are from authorities instead of made up the same way personal key pairs are.

***End Technical details***

***Start example economy***

Below I'll describe an example of a system where money is more than a number, which could be built on top of the identity-verifying system described above.

This system is called Free Speech Just Pay Shipping (FSJPS), and when I decide on the details I will put up a centralized prototype at http://freespeechjustpayshipping.com before creating the decentralized version.

Its a little like a stock market. Each money has an amount and some text, like you have 500 amount of "GOOG" which is Google stock in the "Nasdaq Stock Exchange" economy. There will be different amounts and texts in the "New York Stock Exchange" economy, for example. There are many economies that compete with eachother.

In FSJPS, the text can be anything you want and can be as long as you're willing to pay for. Longer text uses more space and bandwidth in the network, so whatever the free market decides will be charged for such bandwidth, paid directly to the computers who provide the bandwidth and storage. It will be a very small cost. For example, Bitcoin recommends a 0.01 Bitcoin "transaction fee", but I'm thinking more of a fee that continues to be charged as the network continues to store and broadcast your data, still a very small fee paid to the network. Because of that, the economy equations can be defined independent of the infrastructure costs. The infrastructure costs are amortized as a separate fee paid to the network based on free market choice of who your software pays to store and broadcast your data, subject to the network verifying such storing and broadcasting is being done correctly, which can be done because it will be stored extremely redundantly as it is in Bitcoin.

FSJPS is a simplified model of intellectual property laws applied at very small scales. Each text is simultaneously like a patent and a product. If you are the majority owner of "vote democrat" (which means you own more stock in "vote democrat" than anyone else), then your vote on the product price of "vote democrat" will be the only one that matters. Its done by median-vote. When you buy some stock, you set the vote for its product price. The actual product price of a text (like "vote democrat") is the median-vote of all stock owners weighted by how much of the stock they own. To change your product price vote of stock you own, sell it to yourself with a different product price specified, a transaction which doesn't change your amount of stock but will cost you for amortized_infrastructure_cost.

What does "product price" do? If the product price of "vote democrat" is 0.72, then when someone buys stock in "dont vote democrat" or "vote democrat because god said so", the price they pay includes 0.72 in the calculation.

Its not a linear calculation. Its a sum-of-squares(of prefix string length) average calculation.

In "vote democrat", start at each letter/symbol/space (which we will call "char" below), and do a weighted-average of the prices of each of those texts, which we will call "substrings" below.

The substrings are:
"vote democrat"
"ote democrat"
"te democrat"
"e democrat"
" democrat"
"democrat"
"emocrat"
"mocrat"
"ocrat"
"crat"
"rat"
"at"
"t"

For each substring, you have to buy permission to use it. You can buy such permission from any prefix of the substring. For example, if you need permission for "rat", you could buy it from "" or from "r" or from "ra" or from "rat". The software will be designed to look at the free market for the lowest price, but it can never be sure something is the lowest price because the network is decentralized and prices fluctuate nonlocally based on continuous median-votes for each text.

To use the system, you could look through the texts and amounts others have put into the network, and use it like a text forum or stock market, or you could simply type any text you want and an amount and it will tell you how much it would cost to add that to the network, and you would click a button to pay to do it.

The system would be a stock market of ideas. Since its priced in a free market of substrings and branched in a tree of text with similar texts as near branches, it will be organized naturally as an associative search engine. By buying stock in a certain text, you're paying the world to make that text happen statistically more on average, or at least to get people to pay attention to the text (advertising) and related texts. FSJPS will be a system where you can pay money into "legalize drugs" (for example) and if you pay enough money, it will really happen. Its a democracy algorithm. I can't be sure it would work that way, but intuitively it makes sense since its connected as an associative search engine and the world does what money is put into, and people will see theres money put into that text and related texts and will be affected when they buy texts which contain that text or parts of that text. You could buy stock in "legalize drugs" or "it would be stupid for any drug to be legal", and those would be related by the substrings of "legal" and "drug" and a few smaller texts. Buy stock in whatever text you want to say or based on your predictions of the free market.

You can also sell your stock in any string for any price you offer and someone is willing to pay. I haven't decided if it would include the ability to remove text from the network and convert it directly back to units of "" (the root currency, similar to Bitcoin).

"vote democrat" (length 13) has a unit product price (permission) of 0.91, but "vote dem" (length 8 ) has a price of 0.88 so that was used for permission instead.
"ote democrat" found only expensive permissions so bought from "" (the common currency at the root of the text tree) at a unit price of 1.0.
...
"t" has a unit product price (permission) of 0.98, which is less than the 1.0 for "" so take the 0.98.

You can always find a price for any text for at most 1.0 plus the infrastructure cost.

To calculate the price paid for buying stock in "vote democrat"...
unit cost of "vote democrat" =
(8*8*0.88 + 1*1*1.0 + ... + 1*1*0.98)/(8*8 + 1*1 + ... + 1*1)

Longer texts will tend to cost less than shorter texts, because if text x is used to satisfy a permission requirement, then any prefix of x could be used to satisfy that same requirement, even if that prefix is a text of length 0 ("", the common currency of the whole tree of text). The price for "" is fixed at 1.0.

Since "" is length 0, it has to be calculated as length 1.

The cost of adding 500.37 units of "vote democrat" to the network is unit_cost_of_vote_democrat*500.37 + amortized_infrastructure_cost*13, but I haven't defined amortized_infrastructure_cost yet, and I'm still thinking about how to do that part. Read above where I wrote "amortized" for details.

FSJPS would be a mix of free market and ownership of text, where you pay for permission to add new text to the network, and each text has a value that fluctuates like a stock price. Short texts are conservative investments. Longer texts are high risk and high profit/loss.

As a telekinetic (at rare times) person and mad-scientist, I expect FSJPS to have strong metaphysical effects on reality similar to how the the quantum double-slit experiment works (see the "nonlocal" pricing described above), by using wave-interference between the various strings and substrings in the associative network, interacting with peoples' brainwaves as they predict and react to the FSJPS system, to put the force of the economy (which is really powerful) toward expanding consciousness, but such speculation is not important to the system working. As a demonstration of telekinetic skill, the "psi wheel in a clear closed box 2" video on youtube. Its my example economy. I can make it do whatever I want. You can build your own economy or use an existing one if you don't like it, since its open-source (and using the same identity-verification system). I think, in some ways, we're all gods, and I want to amplify that using math. Dollars used to be backed by gold. My example economy would be backed by consciousness. Please do not regulate this part of my religion, which most parts I have thought of on my own. If you don't think it would work, that's your right to think whatever you want, but you don't have the right to stop me from trying.

Its a tree of text where the tree can branch at any char. It can be used as a text forum that way, where you can reply to any text by adding a new branch. A post in a thread would be a text starting with the title and ending with the post text. A reply to that post would be that same text followed by the text of the reply. Text can be added as a branch anywhere in the tree of text, and it doesn't have to be interpreted as a text forum.

The root of the tree of text is a text of length 0, and it works the same as Bitcoin works today, as a simple number of money, but all other parts of the tree of text are parts of an economy where money is more than a number.

FSJPS (Free Speech Just Pay Shipping) is an example of an economy where money is more than a number, a system which could be built on top of the identity-verifying system I proposed above, and compete with other open-source economies designed by many other people.

FSJPS would be an implementation of "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be", since the force of money is put on text which resists censoring (you would have to destroy the money to censor the text), and what people tend to agree on is stronger in the network, and any corruption in government (for example) that text exposes will be fixed in proportion to how much money is put on the text, since people see it in that proportion.

***End example economy***

***Conclusion***

We should not be slaves to money. We should be allowed to design our own money-like systems and get people to agree to use them as money, so society can choose how to reorganize itself. Until recent years, this was not possible so we were not really "slaves to money" (or not as much), but now that it can be done and is reliable and secure and satisfies the same legal requirements as centralized banking systems (but only the parts relevant to cryptocurrencies), it would be slavery to force us to continue using that ancient system.

Its not illegal to build what I described (except in China and probably a few others), but I expect the centralized banking system will try to change that, and we ask for protection from them using governments against us. It is our plan to defeat them in a free market where the best economy wins, so they have extreme motivation to fight dirty as they normally do, paying off politicians to make laws. Money is power, and they have most of it, a problem we can easily solve in a fair competition.

--Ben F Rayfield, 2011.

[beavis]

Important points from the http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=23054.0 thread (I thought you guys may have something to say about it too):

SUMMARY: Bitcoin proved that the open-source movement is strong and advanced enough to build economies, and now that we can do that for ourselves and let money advance into systems where its more than just a number, forcing us to continue using dollars (or other centralized currency) would be slavery. Extremely more businesses would accept an identity-proving system than an anonymous system, but we should use both for the inevitable time when authorities abuse such identity power and need to be pushed back into obedience to democracy, and on top of that we can create an open-source competition where the best economies get the most invested in them, so economies are created that influence society toward whatever the majority of people want it to become.

When I wrote that my proposal is something many authorities and terrorists could agree on and stop some of their wars, I did not mean it was only about them. I predict its something the majority of all people can agree on, and one of the bigger benefits of that is authorities and terrorists, which are the 2 extremes, are likely to agree on it. I see now that I implied it was about what they want but what I meant was its good for almost everyone, plus the wars between authorities and terrorists would be reduced, but the important thing is its the best thing for the Human species to do right now. I also meant that the history events I listed lead to World War 3 and if we do what I proposed that will not happen, so do what I said or billions of people will die, but the threat is not coming from me, and there are enough reasons to do my plan on its own merits without its connection to avoiding World War 3, but I don't think people think ahead enough paradigm-shifts to see such reasons.

If we use Bitcoin AND an identity proving branch of it, we get anonymous and access to businesses and defeating the central bank system in a free market where the best economies win. Can anyone tell me why Bitcoin and dollars is better than Bitcoin and what I proposed?

About giving power to authorities... That could mean anyone who a group of people trust to hold their identity private-keys (to digitally-sign blocks and send the signature back). It could be government, OpenID, a bank which connects the decentralized system to debit cards, or run your own identity server. Run thousands of identity servers in a decentralized way if you want. If you don't like a certain group or authority, set up such a system with someone you do trust or build a decentralized system of identification and hook it into that. These are all things that would make businesses more willing to connect to a Bitcoin-like system, plus we would trade money between this system and Bitcoin.

To all banks and credit cards (and I know you're reading this based on the call I got from a debt collector who conveniently forgot to call me until now, and I'm going to pay it), you can use these systems since they're open source, but you can't defeat us in a free market because we run things like a charity and have complete automation while you hire many people to do things manually. Please, use our systems for free (it would help the economy and get people to accept it when we run them), but nobody can use them as well as we do, and the central banking system will be defeated by decentralization. Enjoy the free infrastructure until then. The "technical details" I wrote above would allow Banks to use such infrastructure, if they wanted to. I said "I serve the Human species and all life forms", and that includes the central banking system. I'm not your enemy (I don't hate on anyone, regardless of what they do), but technology has advanced and the way you do things is becoming obsolete.

On Obama page on Wikipedia it says: "In his first few days in office Obama issued executive orders and presidential memoranda directing the U.S. military to develop plans to withdraw troops from Iraq.[110] He ordered the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp "as soon as practicable and no later than" January 2010,[111] but during his first two years in office he has been unable to persuade Congress to appropriate funds required to accomplish the shutdown.", so if that's true then its another example of the central banks being masters of government.

Its important to remember that I don't know when this would happen, I don't know much about the 2012 predictions (except an advancement of collective consciousness and reorganization of the world was predicted), and in some ways, we're all gods, not just me, so anyone could equally write stuff here.

[Rudolph]

and in some ways, we're all gods, not just me, so anyone could equally write stuff here.

ok

Free market Capitalism and the Central Banking system did more to increase the wealth of the common man than any other system in the history of mankind.

[Xanth]

It's also going to be the downfall of our civilization.

[Rudolph]

It's also going to be the downfall of our civilization.

The deep denial and unbridled pessimism of the marxist-socialist crowd is a sight to behold. Civilization has grown and expanded in accord with the degree of free market capitalism extant.

What I said is an observable fact. Free market Capitalism and the Central Banking system did more to increase the wealth of the common man than any other system in the history of mankind.

The fear based doomsaying of the socialists is based on nothing but philosophical ruminations of the way things "should" be. Free Market Capitalists maturely accept what simply is and proceed to deal with reality.

Socialism must be enforced by tyrants.

Marxism just means everyone is equally poor. Heh! Talk about the downfall of civilization...!... Marxism kills economies rapidly and socialism kills economies slowly. Greece is doomed. Then Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland will be in the headlines. Then the Austrian banking troubles with Eastern Europe will emerge and eventually the entire Euro based economy will collapse. 

The Left is pure deception. There is no lack of money. Poverty is a state of consciousness. The ills of society are NOT because of capitalism but stem directly from the laziness and stupidity of the average schmuck running around trying to get something for nothing. The way so many of my peers have squandered the wealth that has fallen into their laps is astounding. They made a series of really bad choices through life and now they look around and say "hey, that guy has more than me" and they conspire with other lazy buffoons to legalize their system of theft.

[beavis]

Free market Capitalism and the Central Banking system did more to increase the wealth of the common man than any other system in the history of mankind.

Agreed, but we can do much better.

The fear based doomsaying of the socialists is based on nothing but philosophical ruminations of the way things "should" be. Free Market Capitalists maturely accept what simply is and proceed to deal with reality.

Socialism is the average of communism and capitalism. The Zeitgeist Movement (which I mostly agree with) advocates a completely new type of system unlike any of that.

The ills of society are NOT because of capitalism but stem directly from the laziness and stupidity of the average schmuck running around trying to get something for nothing. The way so many of my peers have squandered the wealth that has fallen into their laps is astounding. They made a series of really bad choices through life and now they look around and say "hey, that guy has more than me" and they conspire with other lazy buffoons to legalize their system of theft.

Agreed, but we are looking for a better kind of system that would influence them to contribute something valuable to society (not necessarily something that costs them much effort or resources) when they don't have to.

[Rudolph]

Agreed, but we can do much better.

Yes, by doing more of what we know works; we need to move ever closer to even more free market capitalism. No more of this half baked capitalism, no-sir-ee! We need to stop this wave of Socialist insanity sweeping the West and implement a more Spiritual society that respects the individual, free choice, etc.

Marxism is a big disaster. Socialism is a small disaster. Any system that depends on tyranny and theft to maintain, is obviously a bad choice. The non-stop lies from the Socialists is such an obvious bad joke on Conscious elements of humanity.

[beavis]

I will not limit my thoughts to what is known to already work, since that is against new ideas.

I do not completely support the Zeitgeist movement, Marxism, Capitalism, (and not at all Communism, which sucks), or any other way to organize people anyone has thought of yet. I'm just throwing ideas around to get debates started between people so they'll talk about how the want society to be organized.

The idea I like the most is that any organization only deserves to exist if it is funded entirely by charity, like the Free Software Foundation for example (and I'm not saying they don't sell things, but they're nonprofit) provides a useful service to many people, so they give it money. If a government was doing its job, people would want to donate money to it to keep it in power and avoid worse organizations from replacing it.

I also like the Zeitgeist movement which advocates a more scientific way to distribute resources instead of letting corporations and politicians control it, but their ideas have problems too.

We need to start thinking, and "doing more of what we know works" is not good enough until we try a lot more things.

[Rudolph]

We need to start thinking, and "doing more of what we know works" is not good enough until we try a lot more things.

Doing more of what we know works does not mean you can't can't try new things. By all means, get out there and start trying. I am just saying that it is criminal to FORCE people against their will to not just participate in some giant Udopian Pipe Dream, but to steal their property and redistribute it to others who make bad decisions and poor choices out of laziness and dishonest intent. (only to watch the easily gotten wealth get squandered on more poor choices). This is a very dishonest Spiritually ignorant scheme that is very destructive.

We can easily start thinking how "doing more of what we know works" is more than good enough -- and that it only makes sense. Until someone can put together a functional prototype that demonstrates better results and outcomes, a poorly considered shift to known inferior systems, enforced by tyrants who promise some fantasy la la dream world, is insanity.

[Stillwater]

Free market capitalism and factional reserve banking have indeed produced vast sums of wealth through competition and expansion of availible capital. I do think it is more than fair though to point out that several evils have also arisen in parallel; it is quite utopian to think that an unregulated free-market is either the absolute best system that could exist, or that we have access to developing.

It is fair to speak of the benefits, but let's also take inventory of the faults:


1) Since the U.S. runs by a "democratic" system, influencing public opinion will directly control who is elected and what policies they bring; control of media is in the hands of monied interests who finance them; therefore, having the ability to amass large sums of capital directly translates into ability to controll public opinion, and to partially dictate policy as a result. Add to this the fact that monied interests have been shown time and time again to have even more direct and powerful effect on policy through lobbyists, and it begins to seem like it is money righting the laws, not the public interest.

2) The profit motive which guides any and all possible successful companies under such a system generally leads to safe and clean products and procedures, but these are also not top priority- obviously profit is. We can't depend on corporations to regulate their own practices to benefit the whole of humanity's life safety, it is just not in their gameplan. Multi-nationals have proven time and time again they will dump carcinogens into the environment, release sub-standard and dangerous drugs, destroy necessary genetic diversity in agriculture (I'm looking in your direction, Monsanto), and buy-out more progressive and efficient products to continue to profit in the market they have come to dominate. In other words, corporations have given us some good things, but we need to understand that they are entities who are driven by profit above all else.

3) It is generally in the interest of companies to develop more advanced and efficient products and techniques, but as mentioned previously, if they are incapable of expanding into these progressive niches, they will actually block the progress of others as well, to continue to sell outdated and destructive products. For instance, are you telling me the country who figured out how to get the moon using slide-rulers in the 60's can't develop more efficient means of travel than hydracarbon-burning engines, or even advance these more than 30% or so over the course of more than half a century? It is quite hard to argue with artificial delay of progress in cases like these, and it is easy to see in who's interest such delays are occurring.

4) Corporate interest is dictated by short-term gains and quarterly profits. Solutions to our primary problems in society must be conceived of and implemented over the course of a decade or more sometimes. Thus, companies lack the motivation to advance forward-thinking strategies that require time and capital investments, since they cannot glean immediate profits from them. They are forced by the lean necessities of present competition to forgo developing solutions that would not only benefit their own coffers in the long-run, but also all of mankind. Case in point- the Japanese model: the Japanese government plays a far more active role in control of and planning of business efforts (some would so oppressively so, but let's put that aside for now); companies are actually expected to have 50-year plans for growth and development, rather than merely quarterly ones. The result: The Japanse infrastructure, despite economic troubles they faced in the 80's and elsewhere, is enviable by any standards; they have one of if not the most advanced rail-systems for transporting people and freight efficiently at extrememly low cost; they have some of the newest and most well-serviced factory equipment anywhere, and they have an unprecedented amount of automation multiplying production-rates- the Japanese alonea re in possession of about half of the world's industrial robots. So in short, a small island country who was among the losers of a world-war has potentially the greatest infrastructure per-capita of any country in the world.

5) By nature of the "interest" system which dominates our banking structure, wealth is guaranteed to flow out of the hands who possess the least of it, and even money which is saved is guaranteed to deflate in value over-time. When the government prints more currency to pay its debts, it is essentially imposing a from of indirect tax which is invisible to most, but incredibly powerful, as it saps the value directly out of all the U.S. currency anyone who possesses it, including U.S. citizens, and other comapines possessing U.S. debt money, and U.S. currency to trade for oil. Interest also facilitates this kind of tax, but in a more direct way, and as a way of taxing poor people for being poor. Bankining interests can sometimes obtain 2-3 times the value of a real-estate loan merely by interest; and add to this the fact that the fractional reserve system allows them to loan the same money to 10 or so different parties, means that they can multiply the same money in their hands 2000-3000%. This is another way that wealth is guaranteed to leave the hands of the lower class and concentrate into the hands of those who already possess all the capital. Add to this yet another form of taxation interest introduces: since the amount of money is equivalent to all principle possessed, any interest which is due based on that principle is money in excess of what exists. Since now more money is owed than exists, the amount of money needs to grow to compensate, and must deflate in value all the money that existed previously.

Now asking for solutions to these problems is not the same as Communism, which has been demonstrated to be a poltical accident. It is clear that very much good comes from market competition, and that a healthy society needs it to function and grow. This does not mean, however, that companies can be trusted to have everyone's best interests at heart, and will swiftly advance society in an 18th-century magical invisbile air-fairy-hand sort of way (why are we trusting people who never traveled faster than a horse can run, or lived in a world not controlled by state churches with our economic advice?).

It is grossly obvious to any observer that companies can be counted on to place profit above any other goal; this is okay, since once we understand what kind of animals they are, and what their place in society is, we can put in place regulation to use their productive abilities in a contructive manner which can be controlled for the good of all. When we allow corporations to run out of controll, and to amass so much wealth they actually begin to write laws into effect to further their own goals by virtue of the leverage their current wealth already possesses, we clearly have a monster on the loose. I don't care if you call it socialism or bearcloudfoolery, we need a harmony between private interests and companies, and government interests which have a view of the bigger picture in mind, which can regulate companies into producing solutions which make sense in the long term. It is not about a giant shadowy government that controlls everything (eveyrone knows the government is too damn big, and has too many powers), it is about understanding what rights and powers the government needs, and which ones it doesn't. The same people who are angry about the government getting larger and more powerful always somehow seem okay with laws being passed which limit the righst of individuals, and which expand the rights of corporations; so it is not about how big government is- it is about what needs controlling and what doesn't, and how govnerment can work in harmony with coporate interest, without allowing it to run amok.

[CFTraveler]

The same people who are angry about the government getting larger and more powerful always somehow seem okay with laws being passed which limit the rights of individuals, and which expand the rights of corporations; so it is not about how big government is- it is about what needs controlling and what doesn't, and how govnerment can work in harmony with corporate interest, without allowing it to run amok.

A big ol' Amen to that.

[Rudolph]

Free market capitalism and factional reserve banking have indeed produced vast sums of wealth through competition and expansion of availible capital. I do think it is more than fair though to point out that several evils have also arisen in parallel; it is quite utopian to think that an unregulated free-market is either the absolute best system that could exist, or that we have access to developing.

Indeed? Indeed what? No one has made this claim. Again I want to point out this trick of replying to something that was not said in order to pretend that a refutation of a threatening truth has been made.
[note: I am simply pointing out a mostly Leftist self-deceptive weakness here and I am not trying to make an outright accusation of overt dishonesty.]

No one made any claim to, "the absolute best system that could exist, or that we have access to developing"

NOT EVEN CLOSE!

My claim was that Free Market capitalism along with "Central Banking" (not 'factional reserve banking'... why did you alter the claim in that manner?...) has increased the wealth of the common man more so than any other economic system in the history of mankind.

The evils that have arisen at the same time are not a reflection of any characteristic inherent in that economic system but an expression of the creative capacity of the Souls that now are empowered, through monetary wealth, to generate positive or negative outcomes consistent with their level of Conscious Awareness and Spiritual Development.

The problem is NOT capitalism.

The problem is people.

(Lazy, dishonest, thieving people to be more exact.)

It is fair to speak of the benefits, but let's also take inventory of the faults:

1) Since the U.S. runs by a "democratic" system, influencing public opinion will directly control who is elected and what policies they bring; control of media is in the hands of monied interests who finance them; therefore, having the ability to amass large sums of capital directly translates into ability to controll public opinion, and to partially dictate policy as a result. Add to this the fact that monied interests have been shown time and time again to have even more direct and powerful effect on policy through lobbyists, and it begins to seem like it is money righting the laws, not the public interest.

But let us be clear about this and understand - the USA is not run by a democratic system. It is a Representative Republic. Though, those Representatives *are* democratically elected. It might seem like a nit-pik but the distinction becomes critical down the road a bit. (As the Citizens of Athens discovered, "any democracy is doomed as soon as the electorate discovers that they can vote themselves benefits from the public coffers"... true and pure Democracies are a very bad idea -- the Founding Fathers rejected "Democracy" in order to avoid the "Tyranny of the masses").

The monied interests are not a monolithic hierarchy. The Lamestream media, NBC, MSNBC (what a joke) - CBS, ABC, CNN are all in bed with the Socialists and bent upon global servitude to the la-la Udopian dream that only completely neurotic, deep denial loons could possibly accept as a real possibility in the real world. The VAST majority of the monied interests pour HUGE sums of their money and interest into Socialist and Marxist organizations and their propaganda. Why do you think that might be?... (hint; tyranny is built-in to those systems of government... it fits hand-in-glove with their intentions!)

Free Market Capitalism (note the word "free") is anathema to these tyrannical monsters.

I agree that "corporations" are a problem. The problem with "Corporations could be solved very easily;

All Corporations must dissolve and liquidate all assets and distribute those assets to the shareholders at the age of 75 years ... or some other number roughly equivalent to the average lifespan of a normal human being.

[Stillwater]

Quote from: Stillwater on Yesterday at 05:56:32
Free market capitalism and factional reserve banking have indeed produced vast sums of wealth through competition and expansion of availible capital. I do think it is more than fair though to point out that several evils have also arisen in parallel; it is quite utopian to think that an unregulated free-market is either the absolute best system that could exist, or that we have access to developing.

Indeed? Indeed what? No one has made this claim. Again I want to point out this trick of replying to something that was not said in order to pretend that a refutation of a threatening truth has been made.
[note: I am simply pointing out a mostly Leftist self-deceptive weakness here and I am not trying to make an outright accusation of overt dishonesty.]

No one made any claim to, "the absolute best system that could exist, or that we have access to developing"

The statement connected to yours, to which the "indeed" was attached, was idea of wealth creation, which you brought up earlier:

Free market Capitalism and the Central Banking system did more to increase the wealth of the common man than any other system in the history of mankind.

The latter part of the statement was not directed at any previous argument, but rather was an introduction to the rest of the post- it was not intended as a refutation.

My statements are not meant to support a "leftist" agenda, however. I don't support either side of our false political dichotomy, if you connect that to the parties. I am ashamed of pretty much every president since Eisenhower and Kennedy.

My claim was that Free Market capitalism along with "Central Banking" (not 'factional reserve banking'... why did you alter the claim in that manner?)

They are of course not identical, but I chose to look at central banking through the lens of fractional reserve as this is the main mechanism that has allowed the banking system to make so much capital availible from so little.

The evils that have arisen at the same time are not a reflection of any characteristic inherent in that economic system but an expression of the creative capacity of the Souls that now are empowered, through monetary wealth, to generate positive or negative outcomes consistent with their level of Conscious Awareness and Spiritual Development.

The problem is NOT capitalism.

The problem is people.

(Lazy, dishonest, thieving people to be more exact.)

Human nature is, as you say, a massive part of the issue, but with this understanding (that the systems in question will be run by humans), we have to see our economic systems in the real-world contexts that they must function in. Capitalism itself may not be inherently flawed, but a capitalist system run by present-day humans will almost of necessity develop these same problems described. We don't need to drop capitalism per se, but rather guide the system with preventitive and protective measures which compensate for what is lacking in human nature. We don't need the govnernment running the show- we all know how inefficient that is-but there do need to be checks in place that prevent corporate interests from serving their own needs at the expense of society.

But let us be clear about this and understand - the USA is not run by a democratic system. It is a Representative Republic. Though, those Representatives *are* democratically elected. It might seem like a nit-pik but the distinction becomes critical down the road a bit. (As the Citizens of Athens discovered, "any democracy is doomed as soon as the electorate discovers that they can vote themselves benefits from the public coffers"... true and pure Democracies are a very bad idea -- the Founding Fathers rejected "Democracy" in order to avoid the "Tyranny of the masses").

Yes, quite correct. That is why I say "democracy" (as in, democracy in name only).

All Corporations must dissolve and liquidate all assets and distribute those assets to the shareholders at the age of 75 years ... or some other number roughly equivalent to the average lifespan of a normal human being.

This is an interesting concept. It looks like you are connecting the idea of a corporation as personification of a company as it is understood today to the other typical features a person has. I can't accept or dismiss the idea... I would have to think about it, as this is the first I have encountered it, but it is novel. It seems like it might have some drawbacks though, since if the majority shareholders are simply the board of directors, they retain the the lion's share of the wealth of the company at the dissolution point, and can recreate a nearly identical company from that liquidated capital. But I am sure the idea also has some merits.

[Rudolph]

The statement connected to yours, to which the "indeed" was attached, was idea of wealth creation, which you brought up earlier:

My problem was that the "indeed" (implying some form of agreement or concurrence) was followed with an assessment that differed significantly from what a I had actually said.

Your "indeed" about capitalism  ==>
1. produced vast sums of wealth
2. through competition and
3. expansion of available capital.

My point was concerning 'specifically' the "common man" while your followup addressed the general sums of "wealth" (usually presented as being held by a few greedy bankers and robber barons, etc.). My point was that the wealth of the common man had been increased by free market capitalism. The self-deluded marxist mentality cannot see the improvement in the wealth of the masses. They are obsessed with the disproportionate distribution of that wealth. The fact that the common man enjoys a much greater condition of wealth just does not register. They are lost in a fog of ENVY.

Point 2. is off a little (competition did not create wealth) but point 3. is KEY -- the huge sums of money flowing through the hands of average folks is staggering. A typical USA family earning $75,000/yr has brought in over a million dollars in 13 years. Even a $50k/yr income is a million in 20 years. For New York garbage collectors wealth creation should be a snap!    Were it not for the idiot toys, more car and house than is needed, absurd vacations, maxed out credit card debt at 15% or higher, nonstop flow of mood altering substances... etc.
The problem is NOT that the rich aren't paying enough in taxes... the problem is lazy, self-indulgent stupidity run amok.
As long as The Fed pumps only enough cash into the system to maintain about a 1% inflation rate, productivity can grow and wealth along with it. When the Fed sells out to the politicians ... well, then there is going to be hell to pay.

No amount of inherently incompetent government oversight is going to change that.

The problem isn't the Presidents... the problem is Congress. They write the budgets. And the representatives merely represent the ignorance and lack of Conscious Awareness among the citizens. (Although FDR and his dopey socialist New Deal mired the nation in a Great Depression for a decade and it only ended when he died).

I think your claim about corporate wealth being concentrated in the hands of the Board is simply false. Obviously there are a few such cases but in general, no.

The idea about assigning a max lifespan to corporations came out of a gedanken experiment where I cogitated on the natural problems that we see arising in some sectors. The granting of Legal entity status equivalent to a human individual is a problem. But when that entity has the possibility of eternal life on Earth the problem is magnified hugely. Only true Saints can resist the abuse of power from so much knowledge and experience that long life can bestow. And simple sector rotation requirements of liquidated assets would fix the "Phoenix syndrome" you foresee. On such a large scale it would be much simpler to ensure than enforcing the "wash sale" rules in stocks, which is fairly easily enforced.

[Stillwater]

Point 2. is off a little (competition did not create wealth)

It is not the only factor, but it is still an important one. Competition ensures that if there are enough potential companies with the knowledge and resources to produce a significantly superior product (a computer with 4 times the capability of the model 3 years back; a new industrial robot with astronomically higher efficiency rating; a safer water filtration filter system; greater agricultural output, etc), then a single company cannot easily deny the market that improved product without collusion among the total industry to prevent progress.

There are two main ways you can increase wealth of an individual- you can provide the ability to procure a greater volume of aquistions, or the ability to procure aquisitions of better quality. What I am describing as wealth here is a mixture of value (the value of what labor can purchase) and quality which is thought to translate into quality of life.

The competition inherent to the system, when it is not artificially supressed by powerful monopolies, or by industry-wide collusion, will allow a common person to purchase more with their labor, and better quality than their counterpart 100 years back- that equates to wealth creation to me.

Were it not for the idiot toys, more car and house than is needed, absurd vacations, maxed out credit card debt at 15% or higher, nonstop flow of mood altering substances... etc.

This is true to an extent- the American lifestyle can be condemned on some levels; there are all kinds of ways, however, to end up pennyless without commiting a fault or an excess. If someone in your family gets a serious form of cancer, for instance, even if you have fairly good health-insurance, you can expect to be drained of savings, and lose your home and all of your assets, potentially. It is obviously not like that in every case, but our country makes it far too easy for medical debts to impoverish anyone.

The problem isn't the Presidents... the problem is Congress.

Yes.

I think your claim about corporate wealth being concentrated in the hands of the Board is simply false.

It wasn't so much a claim, but rather part of a conditional statement. ("if" being key here- if that condition were to be met, then "x" would be implied.) It was stated as the necessary prerequisite to the effect that I suggested (the "phoenix" idea), not necessarily that it was a common condition.

[Rudolph]

There are two main ways you can increase wealth of an individual- you can provide the ability to procure a greater volume of aquistions, or the ability to procure aquisitions of better quality. What I am describing as wealth here is a mixture of value (the value of what labor can purchase) and quality which is thought to translate into quality of life.

I think your idea of "wealth" is a subset of what I consider true wealth. To me, true wealth is the ability to wake up in the morning and proceed to move through the day in whatever manner I choose without having to pay heed to the demands of others (for a limited period of time - the longer that period ... the greater the wealth -- within reason).

I imagine a truly wealthy man as one who can can walk away from his source of income and sustenance for a period of time and return later and simply pick up where he left off, no ill effects to be observed.

What you describe sounds more like wealth as being measured in various types and quantities of acquisitions in a purely materialistic sense. The older man who must work 80 hours a week to keep his high-rise condo and mercedes benz, etc. is NOT wealthy, imho. But for those in their youth this may be necessary for a time. Those who wish to be wealthy would do well to target a debt-free financial status by 40 years of age. If you hit that goal by 50 and you have the basics like a desirable home, reliable transportation, satisfying entertainment, ... etc. well... you are then, well on your way to a wealthy status.

TIME is a precious commodity to me. I went through a recent period where I spent many mornings sleeping in at my leisure as I explored new OBE methods. In my younger years I did not enjoy such luxury.

This notion of "the value of what labor can purchase" sounds like Marxist drivel to me. How that moron ever got elevated to such high status is a mystery. Karl Marx was an idiot. No clue whatsoever....

Mere labor can be leveraged hugely with mental and emotional discipline to arrive at a very measurable condition of wealth. Dependency on the State is for slaves. A truly wealthy man depends first on himself, then his family, then his friends, then his community, and finally... last in line... way down the line, hopefully ... comes a dependency on the State... which is worse than slavery... in both the temporal and eternal sense....

God help us and save us.