The collapse of bitcoin

[Lawrence Crowell]

Currencies are in some ways just as artificial as cryptocurrencies. In fact, most everything humans chase after is spun up as whole cloth, from countries, to gods, to money to belief in comrades in arms and so forth. Most everything humanity does is ultimately fake. Money is stuff we just "make up." Even the value of gold is something we "make up." We might be better off if we stopped making this crap up.

 However, with currencies at least in a representative system the average person has some impact. The crypto-currency trend has been the culmination of Milton Friedman's strange dream of privatizing almost everything. In that setting the average person only has as much power in the system as what they hold. An Elon Musk or Bezos etc has vastly more and so they not only have more power, they have more power to get more. A world of complete private forms of currencies is one that will lead to a sort of monetary feudalism. There will at some point be a few people, financial institutions and banks that own it all. They would come to be the overlords of the world.

 The collapse of the cryptocurrencies and bitcoin is something of some relief to me. The next dark age may be forestalled a few years at least.

 LC

[spudb...@aol.com]

I tend to agree, and as blue oyster shells were exchanged as currency in the South Pacific islands (Blue Oyster Cult- more, cowbell!), the Australian guy (with a fake Japanese name) invented The Coin. My own thinking is human inventiveness in the 21st century might create electronic currencies based on technological creations and their means to extract "Valued items," for what is now inaccessible? 

Examples?

AI driving down the costs of recycling materials.

Also-

Mushroom building materials

The Science And Art Of Sustainable Mushroom-Based Building Materials (forbes.com)

Rare Earth Elements from dirty old coal

Rare Earths From Coal Ash Using A Coca-Cola Ingredient? Sandia Says Maybe (forbes.com)

Lunar Mining

The Lunar Gold Rush: How Moon Mining Could Work (nasa.gov)

If somehow, the demand for petroleum persists for decades more, the US has shale oil if we can figure out a magical way or extracting it?

Oil reserves in the United States - Wikipedia

There must be more examples? In any case, a currency based on expected extractable resources, especially renewable resources may work just fine! Back in the 70's A.C. Clarke used "solar's" for currency. 

S. 

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Jul 12, 2022 at 11:27 AM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Currencies are in some ways just as artificial as cryptocurrencies. In fact, most everything humans chase after is spun up as whole cloth, from countries, to gods, to money to belief in comrades in arms and so forth. Most everything humanity does is ultimately fake. Money is stuff we just "make up." Even the value of gold is something we "make up." We might be better off if we stopped making this crap up.

Barter is impractical so money comes in handy. Gold has retained its value over the centuries because it's still rare due to the fact that we haven't found a practical way to transmute elements on an industrial scale, but all cryptocurrencies have a fundamental problem, they are all based on the difficulty of making calculations and we certainly have found a way to make calculations  on an industrial scale  Bitcoin has an additional problem, the absurd amount of energy required for even a simple transaction. Quantum Computers could probably significantly lower that energy bill but quantum computers could probably also crack elliptic encryption which bitcoin uses. So I think the future of bitcoin is going to be pretty bleak.

   John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

lns

[spudb...@aol.com]

The aha on your energy observation seemingly would be resolved by huge electricity making. I will list the electricity makings that are likely to be ginormous if perfected?

MSR's for U235 & Th232-->U233

Fusion

Wide scale on rooftops Solar

Wind Turbines at Sea whose potential = 11 times the 2018 global production (IEA 2019)

Solar Power Satellites (a Gerard O'Neil fav) 

Beamed power from the moon (same as SPS) a Criswell fav, now a Japanese fav

Deep hot rock geothermal. 

You could also look at AI driving down manufacturing costs

BioSource materials 

Mining the Asteroid Belt for rare earths. 

"You can keep your Marxist ways, 

cuz its only just a phase,

For it's 

Money Money Money

Makes the world go round!

Money Money Money Money Money!

Monty Python's Money Song (with lyrics) - YouTube

Adieu!

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.

[smitra]

Warren Buffett's take on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVm7Pfb0ilY

Saibal

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Jul 12, 2022 at 8:33 PM <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:

> The aha on your energy observation seemingly would be resolved by huge electricity making. I will list the electricity makings that are likely to be ginormous if perfected?

That won't help because the energy cost involved in making a bitcoin is also increasing and it's increasing exponentially; there will never be more than 21 million bitcoins in the world because if there are 21 million of them the energy needed to make another one is infinite. Bitcoin is inherently energy inefficient and its inefficiency can only increase.

Other than it's inventor Satoshi Nakamoto the very first person to ever mint a bitcoin was Hal Finney in 2009, back then a typical home computer could make a bitcoin in just a few minutes, I remember he said on the Extropian mailing list I was on at the time that on a whim he once left his computer on overnight minting bitcoins. He claims that after that he forgot all about it but soon after he was faced with huge medical bills because he was diagnosed with ALS, the same disease Stephen Hawkings had, and about the same time he started reading about the huge increase in the price of Bitcoins. Finney no longer used that old obsolete computer but he still had it at the back of his closet, and the Bitcoins were still on the hard drive, they were more than enough to pay for his medical expenses.

Finney died in 2014 and to this day some people think he actually was Satoshi Nakamoto. It may be a coincidence that Nakamoto stopped posting and disappeared about the same time Finney got sick, or it may not be, but it would explain why although he owns billions of dollars worth of bitcoins not a single one has ever been spent by somebody who controls the Bitcoin account of "Satoshi Nakamoto". Even after this recent price collapse Nakamoto is still one of the richest men in the world, and yet he doesn't seem to have ever spent a single nickel of his vast fortune. It's weird.

   John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

3ch

 

[Jason Resch]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 7:23 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Jul 12, 2022 at 8:33 PM <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:

> The aha on your energy observation seemingly would be resolved by huge electricity making. I will list the electricity makings that are likely to be ginormous if perfected?

That won't help because the energy cost involved in making a bitcoin is also increasing and it's increasing exponentially; there will never be more than 21 million bitcoins in the world because if there are 21 million of them the energy needed to make another one is infinite. Bitcoin is inherently energy inefficient and its inefficiency can only increase.

Technically its energy efficiency should increase with each block reward halving. This is because the energy that it makes rational sense to put towards mining is directly proportional to the market value of the block reward. So when the reward is cut in half, as happens every four years, half the miners should go away and half the energy will be put into it.

Running the bitcoin network isn't inherently energy intensive. The entire network can be run on a single laptop. What makes it energy intensive are the market forces driving more people than necessary into mining. This, can also be seen as a design feature: the more valuable the network becomes, the more resources are put towards securing it (more miners with more computing power make the network more secure).

Market forces are driving mining operations towards the cheapest/free energy sources, such as when powerplants have excess power they can't otherwise use for anything and would be wasted otherwise.

Jason

Other than it's inventor Satoshi Nakamoto the very first person to ever mint a bitcoin was Hal Finney in 2009, back then a typical home computer could make a bitcoin in just a few minutes, I remember he said on the Extropian mailing list I was on at the time that on a whim he once left his computer on overnight minting bitcoins. He claims that after that he forgot all about it but soon after he was faced with huge medical bills because he was diagnosed with ALS, the same disease Stephen Hawkings had, and about the same time he started reading about the huge increase in the price of Bitcoins. Finney no longer used that old obsolete computer but he still had it at the back of his closet, and the Bitcoins were still on the hard drive, they were more than enough to pay for his medical expenses.

Finney died in 2014 and to this day some people think he actually was Satoshi Nakamoto. It may be a coincidence that Nakamoto stopped posting and disappeared about the same time Finney got sick, or it may not be, but it would explain why although he owns billions of dollars worth of bitcoins not a single one has ever been spent by somebody who controls the Bitcoin account of "Satoshi Nakamoto". Even after this recent price collapse Nakamoto is still one of the richest men in the world, and yet he doesn't seem to have ever spent a single nickel of his vast fortune. It's weird.

   John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

3ch

 

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[smitra]

If a multiverse exists then there are worlds where Hal Finney = Satoshi
Nakamoto and as long as you don't have any information that refutes
this, you have exact copies in such worlds.

Saibal

On 31-07-2022 13:22, John Clark wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 12, 2022 at 8:33 PM <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:
>

>> _> The aha on your energy observation seemingly would be resolved by

>> huge electricity making. I will list the electricity makings that

>> are likely to be ginormous if perfected?_

> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis [1]
> 3ch

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 8:19 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Running the bitcoin network isn't inherently energy intensive. The entire network can be run on a single laptop.

I don't see how that could be possible, the entire idea behind Bitcoin is to be decentralized and have multiple miners competing to be the first to verify the Blockchain and get a reward in the form of Bitcoins, so you can't have just one computer doing it all. And every time there is a Bitcoin transaction 707 kilowatt hours of energy is expended, and the more bitcoin is used the longer the Blockchain will be and the more energy it will take to verify it.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

uvv

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[Jason Resch]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 1:26 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 8:19 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Running the bitcoin network isn't inherently energy intensive. The entire network can be run on a single laptop.

I don't see how that could be possible, the entire idea behind Bitcoin is to be decentralized and have multiple miners competing to be the first to verify the Blockchain and get a reward in the form of Bitcoins, so you can't have just one computer doing it all.

You can. That's how it ran until the second person downloaded it. Then there were just two computers doing everything.

In theory all existing miners but one could power down and it bitcoin would keep on going fine.

And every time there is a Bitcoin transaction 707 kilowatt hours of energy is expended,

That figure is only because there are so many miners competing for the block reward. If there weren't so many miners the power requirements would be much less.

and the more bitcoin is used the longer the Blockchain will be and the more energy it will take to verify it.  

The computational cost of verifying the chain and transactions is insignificant, a single raspberry pi can do it. You can out together such a nose for about $200.

Think of it like this:

Imagine a lottery that guaranteed a winner every drawing. How much is spent to win?

It depends how many people choose to play. If only one person played there would still be a winner. But if a million people bought a ticket for $1 it would cost $1 million to win.

This is how it is with bitcoin. The protocol guarantees a winner every 10 minutes regardless of how many people are playing and regardless of how much computational power is expended. The prize is fixed at 6.25 bitcoin. People buy tickets with computational power.

Now if the prize drops, does it make sense for rational people to spend as much as they did before to buy tickets? No, if they are rational the amount they should spend (in aggregate) should approximate the value of the prize. It doesn't make sense for people to buy $1 billion worth of tickets if the prize is fixed at $1 million. Likewise if there were only 1,000 $1 tickets bought to win a prize of $1 million, it would make sense for rational players to keep buying more tickets. So long as the expected value of winning a reward is less than the cost of the computation they can put in (but the more others put in lowers their own personal chance of winning, since there can only be one winner).

As the block reward decreases, the amount of energy put into buying tickets will decrease. Note: This calculation assumes the value of bitcoin doesn't increase sufficiently to compensate for the halving. If bitcoin doubles in price between the halving period, then the cost of energy put in should stay constant.

Jason

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 1:47 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> In theory all existing miners but one could power down and it bitcoin would keep on going fine.

If one miner was in charge of verifying the Blockchain for all bitcoin transactions, or even just 51% of them, he could double spend bitcoins whenever he wanted to. And that would be the end of bitcoin.  

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

eob

[Jason Resch]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 2:11 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 1:47 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> In theory all existing miners but one could power down and it bitcoin would keep on going fine.

If one miner was in charge of verifying the Blockchain for all bitcoin transactions, or even just 51% of them, he could double spend bitcoins whenever he wanted to. And that would be the end of bitcoin.  

Bitcoin requires more than 51% of miners to follow the protocol. But a single honest one can run the network.

But my point is the energy requirements are not part of any inherent part of the protocol nor is there any inherent computational difficulty in validation the chain or transactions. The only high cost is the one the protocol adds for the explicit purpose of throttling new blocks to 1 every 10 minutes. If there are fewer miners, this cost is reduced by the protocol. If there were only 100 miners running on lower power laptops, this cost would be no more than the cost of powering these 100 laptops.

Jason

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

eob

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 2:20 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> a single honest one can run the network.

So bitcoin can avoid problems if they can just find somebody that everybody agrees is a saint. But you could say the same thing about the US dollar if everybody agreed that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is a saint. 

> But my point is the energy requirements are not part of any inherent part of the protocol nor is there any inherent computational difficulty in validation the chain or transactions. The only high cost is the one the protocol adds for the explicit purpose of throttling new blocks to 1 every 10 minutes. If there are fewer miners, this cost is reduced by the protocol. If there were only 100 miners running on lower power laptops, this cost would be no more than the cost of powering these 100 laptops.

If there were only 100 laptops mining for Bitcoins and I joined as the 101st then I could make a lot of Bitcoins on my laptop, and if I spent a few thousand dollars more to get a computer a few times more powerful than a typical laptop I could make even more. There will never be more than 21,000,000 Bitcoins so if the world switched over entirely to Bitcoin then each one would be worth a little more than 1/21 millionth of the world's economy, and because of technological improvements the world's economy will increase, so the amount of stuff you can buy with one Bitcoin will increase, so the incentive to mine Bitcoins and waste huge amounts of energy will also increase. 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

kqx
e

[Jason Resch]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2022, 3:43 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 2:20 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> a single honest one can run the network.

So bitcoin can avoid problems if they can just find somebody that everybody agrees is a saint. But you could say the same thing about the US dollar if everybody agreed that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is a saint. 

You don't need a saint. That's the genius of the protocol design, a trusted system without any trusted individuals. You just need no majority of the nodes to be working against the system.

> But my point is the energy requirements are not part of any inherent part of the protocol nor is there any inherent computational difficulty in validation the chain or transactions. The only high cost is the one the protocol adds for the explicit purpose of throttling new blocks to 1 every 10 minutes. If there are fewer miners, this cost is reduced by the protocol. If there were only 100 miners running on lower power laptops, this cost would be no more than the cost of powering these 100 laptops.

If there were only 100 laptops mining for Bitcoins and I joined as the 101st then I could make a lot of Bitcoins on my laptop, and if I spent a few thousand dollars more to get a computer a few times more powerful than a typical laptop I could make even more.

Yes now you've got it.

There will never be more than 21,000,000 Bitcoins so if the world switched over entirely to Bitcoin then each one would be worth a little more than 1/21 millionth of the world's economy, and because of technological improvements the world's economy will increase, so the amount of stuff you can buy with one Bitcoin will increase, so the incentive to mine Bitcoins and waste huge amounts of energy will also increase. 

Bitcoin allows one to freeze something of economic value (in this case energy) and convert it to money, after which it can facilitate an unlimited number of transactions basically for free and indefinitely, until it is lost/or destroyed. Ideally this shouldn't happen and it will happen less as technology improves.

Note that this same process underlies the creation of money in existing monetary systems:

E.g., invest energy in mining gold. The amount  people will spend to mine new gold is related to the price of gold. Gold, once mined, can be traded unlimitedly. It's a one time cost to freeze this energy and turn it into money.

The same is true also for USD. How do dollars come into existence? Something of economic value is created, a house, a car, etc., which required energy, and then money is created by borrowing against these objects. The total amount of USD in circulation is directly related to the amount of energy put into creating physical objects that still hold value, and the outstanding amounts borrowed again them. So in that sense, to mint $500,000 in USD, required building a $500,000 house (and note that much of thalis cost is derived directly or indirectly from the cost of energy).

I am not aware of any system of money that does not require an investment of economic energy roughly in proportion to the value of money created. The relationship is just much clearer with bitcoin.

Jason

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

kqx
e

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[spudb...@aol.com]

In one worldline, he's a Japanese economist. In another worldline, he's an Australian finance guy!!

No wait! In one world, he's The Batman, and in another, he's..he's..he's the Joker, who's a good guy, but with the Green Lantern's power ring!! See? This all explained by a physicist (Vilenkin) from Tufts University, Boston, pant-pant!! And, this is why BitCoin collapsed!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-Irg_E3gpw&t=5s

-----Original Message-----
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To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sun, Jul 31, 2022 9:11 am
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[spudb...@aol.com]

First, develop quantum computing into a fine art. Then, fire up all Interossiters, and ignite the Bussard Ramjets to full capacity!! 

Then, invoke K. Eric Drexler, strength, Nanofabrication to maximum velocity!! In this fashion, we'll manufacture carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, into all material products made! With the savings from these, we'll invest in Martian Real estate futures (excluding Phobos & Deimos), 

Yeah Buddy, weese all rich now!

Actually, my blathering has one advantage over shitcoin. That is, if we magically, achieved K. Eric Drexler's nanomanufacturing, it would be an actual material thing, like a solar cell, or a bushel of sugar beets. Something material. 

The only thing the Coin does is consume electricity in sizable amounts. 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>

To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sun, Jul 31, 2022 3:42 pm
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

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.

[spudb...@aol.com]

Well, JC, time for you to break out the Molten Salt Reactors that convert TH-232 into U-233!! These symbolic coins need lots of electricity apparently. Perhaps we can next use Tau Neutrinos as a currency??? All we have to do is get astrophysicists to locate the merge of two neutron stars and aim our detectors there. You know, the tanks of cleaning fluid, water, or photometers, and bingo, weese all rich!!!

https://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frym.2020.00045

Whoop Whoop Whoop!! Sound the Klaxons!

I also hear that TULIPS are going to be the next big thing!!!

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutch_tulip_bulb_market_bubble.asp

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To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sun, Jul 31, 2022 1:25 pm
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

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[spudb...@aol.com]

Maybe it'll cause the biggies in society to spend on Solar Power Sats in geosynchronous orbit. Actually, in an age of Putin and Xi, these would be sucker punches that we'd be setting ourselves up for. Yes, Vlad would leave the globe encased in scraped satellite parts, if we provide him the means. But, if we need electricity directly for economic processing of currencies, why not perfect nuclear fission, for example and get enough engineers to make inherently safe reactors?? I mean, now that there's a greater economic incentive?

For home use, I still am betting on solar power on every rooftop + batteries & and wind power at sea. 

Where's my inherently safe reactor, Ma? 

-----Original Message-----
From: Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com>
To: Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sun, Jul 31, 2022 8:19 am
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 4:12 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> So bitcoin can avoid problems if they can just find somebody that everybody agrees is a saint. But you could say the same thing about the US dollar if everybody agreed that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is a saint. 

> You don't need a saint. That's the genius of the protocol design, a trusted system without any trusted individuals. You just need no majority of the nodes to be working against the system.

Bitcoin is between a rock and a hard place. If the number of miners is reduced the energy efficiency increases but the security declines because it allows the elite to spend one of their Bitcoins and keep it too. If the number of miners is increased the security gets better but the energy required to complete an economic transaction increases. If you use Bitcoin or anything like it and you want honesty then you're going to have to expend a ridiculous amount of energy every time you buy a candy bar.

> Bitcoin allows one to freeze something of economic value (in this case energy) and convert it to money, after which it can facilitate an unlimited number of transactions basically for free and indefinitely, until it is lost/or destroyed.

As the number of bitcoins approaches 21 million the amount of energy required to mint a new one will increase exponentially and will approach infinity asymptotically. That's just not going to work. When Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin I doubt if he gave energy a single thought, but then I don't imagine he ever figured it would get as big as it has.

> Note that this same process underlies the creation of money in existing monetary systems: E.g., invest energy in mining gold. The amount  people will spend to mine new gold is related to the price of gold.

Energy cost is one factor that determines the price of gold but not the only one nor the most important one. And gold is irrelevant, it hasn't been an important factor in the world economy in over a century, but paper money has. And unlike Bitcoin it doesn't take an exponentially increasing amount of energy to run a printing press.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

vhe

[Telmo Menezes]

Am Mo, 1. Aug 2022, um 12:14, schrieb John Clark:

On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 4:12 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> So bitcoin can avoid problems if they can just find somebody that everybody agrees is a saint. But you could say the same thing about the US dollar if everybody agreed that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is a saint. 

> You don't need a saint. That's the genius of the protocol design, a trusted system without any trusted individuals. You just need no majority of the nodes to be working against the system.

Bitcoin is between a rock and a hard place. If the number of miners is reduced the energy efficiency increases but the security declines because it allows the elite to spend one of their Bitcoins and keep it too. If the number of miners is increased the security gets better but the energy required to complete an economic transaction increases. If you use Bitcoin or anything like it and you want honesty then you're going to have to expend a ridiculous amount of energy every time you buy a candy bar.

This is not how it works. Each mining attempt also tries to fulfill the outstanding transactions in the network -- or at least the ones that pay what the miner considers to be an acceptable fee. Each block contains many transactions.

Telmo

[John Clark]

On Mon, Aug 1, 2022 at 10:24 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

>> Bitcoin is between a rock and a hard place. If the number of miners is reduced the energy efficiency increases but the security declines because it allows the elite to spend one of their Bitcoins and keep it too. If the number of miners is increased the security gets better but the energy required to complete an economic transaction increases. If you use Bitcoin or anything like it and you want honesty then you're going to have to expend a ridiculous amount of energy every time you buy a candy bar.

> This is not how it works. Each mining attempt also tries to fulfill the outstanding transactions in the network -- or at least the ones that pay what the miner considers to be an acceptable fee. Each block contains many transactions.

If verifying a block takes an exponentially increasing amount of energy that asymptotically approaches infinity, and if a block is made up of many small transactions, then processing a small transaction will take an exponentially increasing amount of energy that asymptotically approaches infinity.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

vab

[Jason Resch]

On Mon, Aug 1, 2022, 6:15 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 4:12 PM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> So bitcoin can avoid problems if they can just find somebody that everybody agrees is a saint. But you could say the same thing about the US dollar if everybody agreed that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is a saint. 

> You don't need a saint. That's the genius of the protocol design, a trusted system without any trusted individuals. You just need no majority of the nodes to be working against the system.

Bitcoin is between a rock and a hard place. If the number of miners is reduced the energy efficiency increases but the security declines because it allows the elite to spend one of their Bitcoins and keep it too.

It is possible bitcoin has much more security than it needs for practical purposes. In which case energy usage could decline without practically reducing the security of the system. After all, the energy usage of bitcoin was much lower in the past and there were no 51% attacks against it.

If the number of miners is increased the security gets better but the energy required to complete an economic transaction increases.

I would have said "used" rather than "required", but otherwise I agree.

If you use Bitcoin or anything like it and you want honesty then you're going to have to expend a ridiculous amount of energy every time you buy a candy bar.

As it l is currently implemented, bitcoin only supports 7 transactions per second globally. It will never be able to scale to support individual transactions of candy bars or lattes. But "layer two" networks such as Lightning may enable this. Bitcoin then could be reserved for settlement of large transactions, while the Lightning system can support billions of microtransactions.

> Bitcoin allows one to freeze something of economic value (in this case energy) and convert it to money, after which it can facilitate an unlimited number of transactions basically for free and indefinitely, until it is lost/or destroyed.

As the number of bitcoins approaches 21 million the amount of energy required to mint a new one will increase exponentially and will approach infinity asymptotically.

Not necessarily, because as I explained the block reward decreases too. So the economic incentive also decreases. It will never make sense to spend more money on energy to mint a coin than the value of the coin.

Your theory of what will happen with bitcoin would conclude a gold miner will put in exponentially more and eventually infinite energy into mining a gold mine that is drying up. It doesn't make economic sense, and won't happen. They'll shift their energy and resources into more productive areas. As bitcoin mining becomes less productive, fewer will do it.

This leaves only the transaction fees as an incentives for miners to continue. Perhaps worth a few thousand dollars per block currently. I don't see why mining fees would increase exponentially.

That's just not going to work. When Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin I doubt if he gave energy a single thought, but then I don't imagine he ever figured it would get as big as it has.

> Note that this same process underlies the creation of money in existing monetary systems: E.g., invest energy in mining gold. The amount  people will spend to mine new gold is related to the price of gold.

Energy cost is one factor that determines the price of gold but not the only one nor the most important one. And gold is irrelevant, it hasn't been an important factor in the world economy in over a century, but paper money has. And unlike Bitcoin it doesn't take an exponentially increasing amount of energy to run a printing press.  

You conveniently (for you) cut out my paragraph showing the printing press does require vast expenditures of energy.

Since printed money is based on debt, and debts are typically secured against assets of value which required great expenditures of energy to produce (in line with the value of the asset, and therefore in line with the amount of money created).

Since these assets eventually decay and lose value, more energy must be expended to create new assets and new loans to keep the amount of money roughly constant (or at least in line with the economy's size).

With bitcoin at least, money is created with only a one time expenditure of energy. It doesn't disappear as an asset depreciates and or as the debt is repaid.

Jason

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

vhe

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[Telmo Menezes]

Am Mo, 1. Aug 2022, um 16:47, schrieb John Clark:

On Mon, Aug 1, 2022 at 10:24 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

>> Bitcoin is between a rock and a hard place. If the number of miners is reduced the energy efficiency increases but the security declines because it allows the elite to spend one of their Bitcoins and keep it too. If the number of miners is increased the security gets better but the energy required to complete an economic transaction increases. If you use Bitcoin or anything like it and you want honesty then you're going to have to expend a ridiculous amount of energy every time you buy a candy bar.

> This is not how it works. Each mining attempt also tries to fulfill the outstanding transactions in the network -- or at least the ones that pay what the miner considers to be an acceptable fee. Each block contains many transactions.

If verifying a block takes an exponentially increasing amount of energy that asymptotically approaches infinity,

The bitcoin protocol is designed in such a way that a new block is generated aproximately every 10 minutes. This is accomplished in the following way: mining difficulty is adjusted automatically for every 2016 blocks added to the chain. The adjustment of difficulty can be upwards or downwards and it depends on the number of participants in the mining network and their combined hashpower (the number of hashes that they can try per second). It's a distributed self-adaptive algorithm.

You seem to be under the impression that mining  becomes exponentially hard, but this is not the case. The reward in bitcoins per mined block is halved every 4 years, by design. The idea is to gradualy replace money supply with mining fees. Miners go from being payed in new bitcoins to being paied in transaction fees.

Does the amount of energy increase exponentially with the number of participants in the network? I really do not think so, but maybe I am wrong.

Telmo

[John Clark]

On Mon, Aug 1, 2022 at 10:58 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> As the number of bitcoins approaches 21 million the amount of energy required to mint a new one will increase exponentially and will approach infinity asymptotically.

> Not necessarily, because as I explained the block reward decreases too. So the economic incentive also decreases.

The number of bitcoins you get as a reward may decrease but that's not important, what's important is the amount of stuff you can buy with that reward, and as the economy increases in size, as it will as technology improves, then that reward will get bigger because each Bitcoin will be worth 1/21 millionth of the world's economy. 

> Your theory of what will happen with bitcoin would conclude a gold miner will put in exponentially more and eventually infinite energy into mining a gold mine that is drying up.

And that is exactly what a rational gold miner would do if gold kept exponentially increasing in price and was asymptotically approaching infinite valuation.

>>Energy cost is one factor that determines the price of gold but not the only one nor the most important one. And gold is irrelevant, it hasn't been an important factor in the world economy in over a century, but paper money has. And unlike Bitcoin it doesn't take an exponentially increasing amount of energy to run a printing press.  

> You conveniently (for you) cut out my paragraph showing the printing press does require vast expenditures of energy. Since printed money is based on debt, and debts are typically secured against assets of value which required great expenditures of energy to produce (in line with the value of the asset, and therefore in line with the amount of money created).

That does not compute. It doesn't matter if you're using Bitcoins, dollars, or monopoly money, the entire purpose of an economy is not to create money but to create assets of value, money is just a bookkeeping device and Bitcoin is an enormously inefficient bookkeeping device. 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

914

[Jason Resch]

On Mon, Aug 1, 2022, 11:37 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Aug 1, 2022 at 10:58 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> As the number of bitcoins approaches 21 million the amount of energy required to mint a new one will increase exponentially and will approach infinity asymptotically.

> Not necessarily, because as I explained the block reward decreases too. So the economic incentive also decreases.

The number of bitcoins you get as a reward may decrease but that's not important, what's important is the amount of stuff you can buy with that reward, and as the economy increases in size, as it will as technology improves, then that reward will get bigger because each Bitcoin will be worth 1/21 millionth of the world's economy. 

That's the worst case scenario in terms of energy use incentives (bitcoin replacing all other currencies). But it's still finite, and not exponential to infinity. (Unless you are counting the economy as exponential to infinity). Bitcoin value would have to double every 4 years to 2100 for energy usage incentives to stay constant over the bitcoin minting period. I am not sure that is possible because the world economy doesn't double every four years.

> Your theory of what will happen with bitcoin would conclude a gold miner will put in exponentially more and eventually infinite energy into mining a gold mine that is drying up.

And that is exactly what a rational gold miner would do if gold kept exponentially increasing in price and was asymptotically approaching infinite valuation.

Why do you have think bitcoin value is going to infinity? Even the most optimistic "bitcoin maximalists" don't seem to believe that.

>>Energy cost is one factor that determines the price of gold but not the only one nor the most important one. And gold is irrelevant, it hasn't been an important factor in the world economy in over a century, but paper money has. And unlike Bitcoin it doesn't take an exponentially increasing amount of energy to run a printing press.  

> You conveniently (for you) cut out my paragraph showing the printing press does require vast expenditures of energy. Since printed money is based on debt, and debts are typically secured against assets of value which required great expenditures of energy to produce (in line with the value of the asset, and therefore in line with the amount of money created).

That does not compute. It doesn't matter if you're using Bitcoins, dollars, or monopoly money, the entire purpose of an economy is not to create money but to create assets of value, money is just a bookkeeping device and Bitcoin is an enormously inefficient bookkeeping device. 

You may be confusing money creation with the bookkeeping process. For gold, dollars, bitcoin, the bookkeeping is trivial and easily done by computers and spreadsheets.

For creation of gold, dollars, bitcoin, it's energy intensive for them all. You could argue that one difference with debt based money is we get a house or a car out of it, while for bitcoin, gold, collecting seashells, we get only waste-heat and a medium of exchange. But there is utility in having a medium of exchange, which can justify the energy expenditure. I agree that with debt based money we get both the medium of exchange and a useful economic product at the same time, but this kind of money has a finite life, whereas gold, bitcoin, seashells so not. It is an interesting trade off to consider.

Jason

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

914

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[John Clark]

On Mon, Aug 1, 2022 at 11:56 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

That's the worst case scenario in terms of energy use incentives (bitcoin replacing all other currencies). But it's still finite, and not exponential to infinity. (Unless you are counting the economy as exponential to infinity).

Even if you make the outrageously conservative presumption that we will never be able to build rockets that travel any faster than we can right now we could still make one Von Newman probe (we'd only need one) and in less than 50 million years the entire galaxy could have a Dyson sphere around every star in it. Granted that is not infinite, but it's pretty damn big.

>> And that is exactly what a rational gold miner would do if gold kept exponentially increasing in price and was asymptotically approaching infinite valuation.

> Why do you have think bitcoin value is going to infinity?

Actually I think it far more likely that bitcoin's value is going to zero.  

>> That does not compute. It doesn't matter if you're using Bitcoins, dollars, or monopoly money, the entire purpose of an economy is not to create money but to create assets of value, money is just a bookkeeping device and Bitcoin is an enormously inefficient bookkeeping device. 

> You may be confusing money creation with the bookkeeping process. For gold, dollars, bitcoin, the bookkeeping is trivial and easily done by computers and spreadsheets.

I think you're the one who is confused. Dollars and Bitcoins are just markers, they are not assets of value. Food, houses, airplanes and computers are assets of value. Historically gold has proven itself to be useful as a symbol, a symbol for assets of value, but during the last century paper money has largely taken over that role. Gold has a few other uses but not many.

> You could argue that one difference with debt based money is we get a house or a car out of it, while for bitcoin, gold, collecting seashells, we get only waste-heat and a medium of exchange.

And that difference is astronomically ginormous!

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

kq1

9

[spudb...@aol.com]

What's this? Talk of no star travel whilst we are very near to producing the mighty Bussard Ramjet to cleveth the night sky with a mighty roar! Actually, I think all the fusion power stuff may be uneconomic (unaffordable) till our AI is fast enough to cut through the maths in diverse areas of science to make it cheap enough. BUT, it will be peachy keen for interplanetary travel. For Dyson Sphere's yeah, we do the solar system (descendants) and then red dwarf stars which are said to last some 2-10 trillion years. I visualize these as some sort of very long holiday, for some reason? 

On money, speaking of space travel, why not do a long bet on how quickly our species will use sunlight (I am thinking of giant solar collectors off planet) and send the power near and far via microwaves. Use this a currency. Or, should we count computing cycles as greater currency? Regular quantum or would photonic-quantum be the fastest? 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Mon, Aug 1, 2022 12:37 pm
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

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[John Clark]

On Mon, Aug 1, 2022 at 9:44 PM spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> What's this? Talk of no star travel whilst we are very near to producing the mighty Bussard Ramjet to cleveth the night sky with a mighty roar! Actually, I think all the fusion power stuff may be uneconomic (unaffordable) till our AI is fast enough to cut through the maths in diverse areas of science to make it cheap enough. BUT, it will be peachy keen for interplanetary travel. For Dyson Sphere's yeah, we do the solar system (descendants) and then red dwarf stars which are said to last some 2-10 trillion years. I visualize these as some sort of very long holiday, for some reason? 

That is a very ambitious plan but I see no scientific or technological reason that would make it impossible, however there might be other things that could prevent it from happening, Nancy Pelosi's trip to Taiwan could be one of them. That's why I hope she doesn't go. Nobody knows for sure what will happen if she does decide to but the possible risk doesn't seem worth the possible reward. You might say that China's threat is just a bluff and maybe that's true, but are you willing to bet your life on it? And the timing is particularly bad, China's economy is stalling and this fall the 20th Communist Party Congress is supposed to give Xi an indefinite extension of his role as leader, so Xi needs something to make him look strong and get the people's mind off pocketbook issues, ramping up hostilities against Taiwan could do that.  We already have one hotspot in Ukraine that could lead to nuclear war, we don't need another one in Taiwan.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

awt

[Lawrence Crowell]

Taiwan is becoming the "Berlin" of the second cold war. 

LC

 

awt

[John Clark]

On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 7:17 PM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> What's this? Talk of no star travel whilst we are very near to producing the mighty Bussard Ramjet to cleveth the night sky with a mighty roar! Actually, I think all the fusion power stuff may be uneconomic (unaffordable) till our AI is fast enough to cut through the maths in diverse areas of science to make it cheap enough. BUT, it will be peachy keen for interplanetary travel. For Dyson Sphere's yeah, we do the solar system (descendants) and then red dwarf stars which are said to last some 2-10 trillion years. I visualize these as some sort of very long holiday, for some reason? 

>> That is a very ambitious plan but I see no scientific or technological reason that would make it impossible, however there might be other things that could prevent it from happening, Nancy Pelosi's trip to Taiwan could be one of them. That's why I hope she doesn't go. Nobody knows for sure what will happen if she does decide to but the possible risk doesn't seem worth the possible reward. You might say that China's threat is just a bluff and maybe that's true, but are you willing to bet your life on it? And the timing is particularly bad, China's economy is stalling and this fall the 20th Communist Party Congress is supposed to give Xi an indefinite extension of his role as leader, so Xi needs something to make him look strong and get the people's mind off pocketbook issues, ramping up hostilities against Taiwan could do that.  We already have one hotspot in Ukraine that could lead to nuclear war, we don't need another one in Taiwan.

> Taiwan is becoming the "Berlin" of the second cold war. 

It's even worse than that, West Berlin did not mass produce a vital ingredient necessary for the world economy to function, such as cutting edge semiconductor microprocessors, but Taiwan does. I just hope Xi doesn't have a temper tantrum now that Nancy Pelosi has visited there. 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

nix

 

[spudb...@aol.com]

JC, I agree with your analysis of the coming up Party Congress to make Comrade Xi the 3rd term successor (permanent) leader. Pelosi arrived and departed. Xi performs a week of live fire exercises around Taiwan. You say "We," and your are correct, We don't matter if We are weak like Joe does things. 

We, even under Donaldo, didn't build in hypersonic missiles of previous discussions (which is faster). Personally, I see Xi, based on Communist Party ideology, and Chinese Mainland culture as seeking the extermination of the US and its population. See? I call these non-ideologically (I think) and whether it's Don or Joe, they were both a bit weak. 

When the old saying of, "They only respect force," in some cases this is sadly true. The Chinese "soft power," is merely bribery and it works. Pelosi should be able to talk with whomever she wants. Threats or no, bribes or no. 

It'd be a better world if Xi and Putin were not in power, but that is beyond our control. Even with Joey, it's Policy that matters and not the man. The democrats love ad hominem attacks because Party Philosopher, Saul Alinsky used it as one of his 13 Rules for Radicals. It works fab for the dem voter, but less so for Reps and Indies. 

Another matter is, I still view  fusion technology as easier to do in space or maybe even nuke subs, over commercial power, despite the advances made. I'd love it if I was wrong. Back to war, as I mentioned to Telmo, I understand why the Germans don't want to Mil-Up, but with Vlad or one of his chums in power, this seems unavoidable. One pundit viewed the Germans and the EU simply wishing to be a large Switzerland (neutral) and purchase Russian gas, while selling their Mercedes to the Chinese. Not bad (for them) if you can do this, but mindsets of the Russians & Chinese deny this in a sustained manner. 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tue, Aug 2, 2022 8:05 am
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Aug 3, 2022 at 9:23 AM <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:

> We, even under Donaldo, didn't build in hypersonic missiles of previous discussions (which is faster).

So what?  They have their ideas about what would make a good weapon and we have ours, I don't think we should feel obligated to build every sort of weapon that any other country in the world has. Last year Russia spent 65 billion dollars on defense and the USA spent 801 billion dollars on defense, I think that's enough especially when you consider that however much US money is wasted on inefficiency and corruption it is TRIVIAL compared to the waste and corruption inherent in the Russian system that extends every step of the way from Vladimir Putin all the way down to the lowliest supply sergeant.  Corruption is simply part of the Russian military culture and is probably the primary reason the Russian army has performed so poorly in Ukraine.

> The democrats love ad hominem attacks

Thank goodness Donald Trump would never dream of doing anything like that!

 > Pelosi should be able to talk with whomever she wants.

Nobody is denying that, but is it wise of her to do so, is the potential risk worth the potential reward? I tend to think it is not.

> One pundit viewed the Germans and the EU simply wishing to be a large Switzerland (neutral) and purchase Russian gas,

That may have been the view before Russia invaded Ukraine but not now.  

> Another matter is, I still view  fusion technology as easier to do in space or maybe even nuke subs, over commercial power,

You don't need fusion to make a nuclear submarine, and with Tokamaks, the most promising type of fusion reactor, the larger they are the better they work, and that indicates it would be easier (but still far from easy) to make a large commercial power plant than a small one powering a ship. 

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

fpp

 

[Telmo Menezes]

Am Mi, 3. Aug 2022, um 15:23, schrieb spudboy100 via Everything List:

One pundit viewed the Germans and the EU simply wishing to be a large Switzerland (neutral) and purchase Russian gas, while selling their Mercedes to the Chinese.

"Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none."

Thomas Jefferson

[spudb...@aol.com]

Backwards-down response.

I am betting on inertial confinement fusion as the technological and commercial winner, someday. Lasers driving deuterium-tritium for maybe scientific testing, maybe industrial. Proton=Boron11 wins the race. Space won't be magnets either, maybe MHD propulsion?

I don't think is corruption, alone, but soviet thinking on war that loses the battles. 

Trumpo liked to hit back which is why he was elected by us, and not some demure, patrician, smughead, like the Bushes or Romney. 

Probably what determines national leadership in the US may be decided by the honking of other, unrecognized or unappreciated, Black Swans, swimming about.

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: spudb...@aol.com
Cc: everyth...@googlegroups.com <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wed, Aug 3, 2022 10:07 am
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

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[spudb...@aol.com]

The Cold War came in sequences I say. The Nixon interlude, and Jerry Ford selling grain. Then, back to the fight. Which will count s #2. 

Mao created Taiwan, unintentionally, and then unintentionally starved 50 million of his own people to death via The Great Leap Forwards. 

So, a Berlin Wall in the Pacific will rely on missiles and maybe lasers (pulsed with particle beams) to decide?

-----Original Message-----
From: Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com>
To: Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tue, Aug 2, 2022 7:17 pm
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Aug 3, 2022 at 11:27 AM <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:

> Trumpo liked to hit back 

The biggest hit the US ever received happened on 911, and the two men most responsible for it were Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Republican George W. Bush did not hit back against Osama bin Laden, but Democrat Barack Obama did. And Republican Donald Trump liked to talk tough but he did not hit back against Ayman al-Zawahiri, but Democrat Joe Biden did. And although 15 of the 19  911 hijackers were Saudi Arabian citizens and the leader of that country sent assassins to Turkey to cut up a reporter into pieces with a bone saw in their embassy, Trump recently held a golf tournament at one of his tacky golf courses that was sponsored by Saudi Arabia.  

> which is why he was elected by us

Neither George W. Bush nor Donald Trump were elected by "us", they were elected by the elite members of the electoral college; the American people wanted Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, but under our screwed up system their wishes do not count.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

mul

f

[spudb...@aol.com]

Yes it seems sensible, Telmo. Yet the other fellow has a voice too, and that fellow wants to use his nukes if he can get away with it unscathed?

Also, lets not forget that Jefferson had been nailing Sally Hemmings since she was quite young. She was Jefferson's women but not officially his wife. 


https://www.monticello.org/sallyhemings

Humans are very flawed.

Lets see if we can survive Vlad and Xi's ministrations?

Bata o Magnífico

-----Original Message-----
From: Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net>
To: Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com>

Sent: Wed, Aug 3, 2022 10:53 am
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Aug 3, 2022 at 11:59 AM spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> Also, lets not forget that Jefferson had been nailing Sally Hemmings since she was quite young.

If that's important to remember then it's also important to remember that Donald Trump hired a prostitute to spank his naked ass with a magazine that had his picture on the cover, although what either has to do with the US's Chinese foreign policy eludes me. 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

xaq

[spudb...@aol.com]

Funny. You are referring to the Steele-Danchenko allegations (Fusion-GPS) which has proven wrong. It was an opposition campaign by Hillary back in the day. All the while hubby dwelt on Epstein Island. Also, its good to remember that those hostile to old Thomas Jefferson are Team Dem. Removal of statues, all of those Stalinist revisions. Like a Rolling Stone, like a complete unknown cuz it didn't happen. Nothing came of it. Poof!

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/steele-dossier-analyst-arrested-igor-danchenko-1253151/

What it has to do, is that for all his intellect, Old Tom's quote that Telmo used doesn't seem to apply in our world, is what it has to do with Comrade Xi and the PLA. Telmo's point was that with many of our species, kicking back and raking in the cash isn't enough. That one must crush all potential opposition. Their values ain't Our values. That!

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com

Cc: te...@telmomenezes.net <te...@telmomenezes.net>
Sent: Wed, Aug 3, 2022 12:09 pm
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

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[spudb...@aol.com]

The days of me supporting the Bushes are long past. My unanswered question circa december 2001 is did he allow Bin Laden to flee to Iran, which is a rumor I have heard? Joey just did another thing that Obama did, is when your ratings go low, hit a a Jihadist and look like a hero. The funny thing is that I had seen Ayman al Zawahiri post on Twitter that he had evidence that he would present that would get Hillary Clinton arrested. Was that what triggered the drone strike?? I don't think so, but the Jihadist obviously was attempting to look relevant when CIA whacked him. 

Yeah, I believe that CIA had the dude tracked for months and the whacking of the jihadist was performed for Joey's benefit. Timing is everything. 

On getting rid of the electoral college, I am good with this if all election laws in 50 states & territories, are made tamper proof, it seems reasonable. Will this happen? Unlikely. 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: spudb...@aol.com
Cc: everyth...@googlegroups.com <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wed, Aug 3, 2022 11:56 am
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Aug 3, 2022 at 4:25 PM <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:

> Funny. You are referring to the Steele-Danchenko allegations (Fusion-GPS) which has proven wrong.

That hasn't been proven to be wrong and wasn't even what I was talking about  The Steele dossier was about Trump paying Russian prostitutes to pee on a bed that Barack Obama once slept on in Moscow while he watched, I was talking about something entirely different, I was talking about Trump paying Stormy Daniels to spank his naked ass with a rolled up copy of Forbes magazine that had his ugly mug on the cover. But your error is entirely understandable, there have been so many Trump scandals, sexual and otherwise, that it's very easy to get them confused.

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

uw0

xa

[John Clark]

On Wed, Aug 3, 2022 at 4:38 PM <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:

> I had seen Ayman al Zawahiri post on Twitter that he had evidence that he would present that would get Hillary Clinton arrested. Was that what triggered the drone strike??

That is evidence only that most of the stuff on Twitter and all of the stuff ultra-religious nationalists say is completely imbecilic. But apparently you think it is evidence for something more than that, and that explains why your worldview is so nonsensical. 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

erw

mul

[spudb...@aol.com]

I am not broken hearted if the Don did partake in female attentions. It works ok for Hunter Biden, (long dismissed by Team Dem as a Russky disinfo campaign) and Don never portrayed himself as a more than a twice a year kind of Christian. Sure he took fundamentalists votes. 

As Dr. Johnson is quoted, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." Allow me to note that now that we have had the economy and governance of the Globalists, I will happily trot back to the nationalists! Thus, if and when a Canadian sees the best interest of the Canadians being best served by a Canada-First politician, business leader, etc., I say more power you me brother. 

My point the golden shower tape never existed, and if it did the people most disappointed would still be hardline democratic party voters like yourself, upon failing to see the Religious Right excoriate Don-baby as your team had hoped! No gnashing of teeth, no wailing. They didn't condemn The Great Sinner, nor, did they call for his Peaching either. 

To which I intone, bwah hah hah, etc.

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: spudb...@aol.com
Cc: everyth...@googlegroups.com <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wed, Aug 3, 2022 4:51 pm
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

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[spudb...@aol.com]

Oh sorry Stormy!! Yeah, I feel so ashamed, just like you feel ashamed over where Billy Willie went on Epstein Island. 

My sense of things is, as a US peasant, increasingly ground under by an (economically at least) fascistic ruling class, I have other things to ponder. In my opinion, Joey used to be a solid politician till he became Barrack's doormat. He never recovered from that, nut was sharp enough to promise free stuff in the 2020 campaign. Free stuff is hard for people to say no to. Many people simply cannot turn it down, psychologically. So it was a campaign winner for the lad. 

Next up? Surviving ourselves, Putin, and Xi. 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: spudb...@aol.com
Cc: everyth...@googlegroups.com <everyth...@googlegroups.com>; te...@telmomenezes.net <te...@telmomenezes.net>
Sent: Wed, Aug 3, 2022 4:41 pm
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

[John Clark]

On Wed, Aug 3, 2022 at 5:49 PM <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:

> I am not broken hearted if the Don did partake in female attentions.

And yet you think Hillary Clinton should be criticized if her husband was unfaithful.

> My point the golden shower tape never existed,

I don't know if the golden shower taped exists or not and you don't either, but if it doesn't I Vladimir Putin must know something equally disturbing about Trump that he threatened to make public.  I say that because I can't think of any other explanation for Trump's chummy relation with Putin and never daring to say a single word against him, doing that didn't help the nation and it didn't even help Trump secure the loyalty of his right wing zombies. I don't know what it is but Putin must have something on Trump, otherwise his actions simply make no sense.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

8vc

wdz

[spudb...@aol.com]

Why do you think that I ever considered the Clinton marriage to be anything other than an "open marriage?" You know the 60's, swingers, swapping, all that fun stuff? The last rumor ten years ago that I recall was that Huma Abedin who at the time was the wife of NY Dem congressman, appropriately named, Anthony Weiner, and was employed by Hillary as a senatorial assistant, who occasionally bunked with Hillary, while Weiner was away...Weiner-izing. 

The showers or spankings were never presented, & if they were, so as to better ruin Don's ascendency to the presidency. It hasn't shown up yet and so we await the release of the evidence, along with Bigfoot, ESP, and the thunderous roar of the might Bussard Ramjet a-cleaving the night sky. I think we iz loyal to El Trumpo not because he is so wonderful, but rather your team, JC, is a very  bad combination. The combination is incompetence, combined with a fanatical zeal to an ideology, whether it functions well or not. 

Thus, you rail against Donny, rather than any policy he produced. Go Team!  For me, it's all policy and the results. 

I wish Don or Joe was chummy with VLAD! Maybe either could have talked the maniac out of Ukraine? I prefer peace over war, but do not now trust either dictator. I don't blame Joey for Putin's invasion as I have mentioned before. I don't blame Trumpy. I do blame fraulein doktor Merkel for not following Don's and Obama's (yes) suggestions that they buy US nat gas instead. She didn't want to listen because she didn't want to wreck the relationship. :-/

That, is in the past and is relegated to another MWI track. If Putin had something on Trump, oh well. The Bidens took donations from Chinese businesses, but even here, Joey is forced to react, if he doesn't want PLA troops in Hawaii or Cali. This apparently is a current thing with Chinese and Russian leadership. Allegedly. 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: spudb...@aol.com
Cc: everyth...@googlegroups.com <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wed, Aug 3, 2022 6:18 pm
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

[John Clark]

On Wed, Aug 3, 2022 at 7:53 PM <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:

>  wish Don or Joe was chummy with VLAD! 

Do you also wish that when VLAD tells Biden one thing and his own intelligence service tells him the exact opposite Biden takes the side of the Russians and not be Americans like Trump did? Do you wish Biden would fall in love with Communist North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un like Trump did? Do you wish Biden would get chummy with Xi?

> If Putin had something on Trump, oh well.

I can't think of any other explanation for Trump's bizarre behavior regarding Putin, it certainly didn't benefit the country and it didn't even benefit him politically. And I think the proper response to the idea an American president is being blackmailed by a foreign dictator should be something a little stronger than "oh well".

>   For me, it's all policy and the results. 

I agree, and the policy of the Trump presidency resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, abolishing a right women had for half a century, vastly increasing the amount of anti-intellectualism in the country, and an unsuccessful coup d'état.   

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

cdt

8vc

[spudb...@aol.com]

The intelligence community has not been so wonderful to Americans at large for the last several decades, so if Trumpo wanted to keep the door of communication open, that was ok with me. The world respects a strong man, and I do mean man and Joe-Joe's a whimp! Joey also ignored warning from the DIA not to withdraw from Afghanistan back in July 21, only Joey ignored this, OR intelligence dudes dropped another lie to CYA? 

If he was blackmailed by Vlad, so what did Vlad receive out of this. Can you identify it? 

Where's the quid pro quo? 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: spudb...@aol.com
Cc: everyth...@googlegroups.com <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thu, Aug 4, 2022 5:43 am
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

[Russell Standish]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 07:22:28AM -0400, John Clark wrote:
>
> That won't help because the energy cost involved in making a bitcoin is also
> increasing and it's increasing exponentially; there will never be more than 21
> million bitcoins in the world because if there are 21 million of them the
> energy needed to make another one is infinite. Bitcoin is inherently energy
> inefficient and its inefficiency can only increase.
>
> Other than it's inventor Satoshi Nakamoto the very first person to ever mint a
> bitcoin was Hal Finney in 2009, back then a typical home computer could make a
> bitcoin in just a few minutes, I remember he said on the Extropian mailing list
> I was on at the time that on a whim he once left his computer on overnight
> minting bitcoins. He claims that after that he forgot all about it but soon
> after he was faced with huge medical bills because he was diagnosed with ALS,
> the same disease Stephen Hawkings had, and about the same time he started
> reading about the huge increase in the price of Bitcoins. Finney no longer used
> that old obsolete computer but he still had it at the back of his closet, and
> the Bitcoins were still on the hard drive, they were more than enough to pay
> for his medical expenses.
>
> Finney died in 2014 and to this day some people think he actually was Satoshi
> Nakamoto. It may be a coincidence that Nakamoto stopped posting and disappeared
> about the same time Finney got sick, or it may not be, but it would explain why
> although he owns billions of dollars worth of bitcoins not a single one has
> ever been spent by somebody who controls the Bitcoin account of "Satoshi
> Nakamoto". Even after this recent price collapse Nakamoto is still one of the
> richest men in the world, and yet he doesn't seem to have ever spent a single
> nickel of his vast fortune. It's weird.
>

Interesting. I did not know that. Of course, some of us old-timers
remember that Hal was a member of this list.

--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

[John Clark]

On Thu, Aug 4, 2022 at 6:35 PM <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:

> The intelligence community has not been so wonderful to Americans at large for the last several decades,

The US intelligence community is not perfect but they've done one hell of a lot better than Donald Trump and your other fascist chums that know nothing except how to press your brain bypass button, all they have to do is mention words such as China, border, Antifa, immigration, alien, and of course "unfair", that last one is Trump's favorite.  And the American intelligence community performed magnificently in providing information that was so precise it enabled a drone strike in the middle of a crowded city on Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri that killed him and nobody else.

 

> so if Trumpo wanted to keep the door of communication open, that was ok with me.

Keeping the door of communication open has nothing to do with the President of the United States publicly saying he believed a militarily aggressive Russian dictator more than he believed the American intelligence service that he was the head of. We both know if Barack Obama had done that you'd be foaming at the mouth in righteous indignation, but that's because Obama was not as skillful as Trump at finding your brain bypass button.

> The world respects a strong man,

You think publicly announcing you are Vladimir Putin's lap dog shows strength??!  

 

 > I do mean man and Joe-Joe's a whimp! Joey also ignored warning from the DIA not to withdraw from Afghanistan back in July 21,

So you think American soldiers fighting and dying in Afghanistan for 20 years was not quite long enough, you think if they had just stayed there for 21 everything would've been peachy keen?

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

pkt
c

[spudb...@aol.com]

Its like when Obama needed a boost, CIA was there to show him as a patriot when Bin Laden was whacked. This works big with dem voters. So, Joey had the same thing done for him by CIA. For intelligence caviling against China, which you are kind enough to attribute to us Republicans, I have only to view headline news. 

As CIA Warns China “Most Important” Threat to U.S., Is Biden Pursuing a “New Cold War”? | Democracy Now!

Your fellow dem pols are hollering now as Abbott and Desantis ship illegals to their new Sanctuary Cities, where liberals can put their money where their Virtuous mouths are.

Report: Pentagon Shoots Down DC Mayor's Request to Assist With Migrant Influx (ijr.com)

For Afghanistan, first, there were no anti-war protests of any memory in the US which would validate the progressive-soviet mindset of the democrats. Nothing. No Vietnam War. Zip. Nada. The Afghanistan Withdrawal Fiasco is plain for all to see, and one of the viewers was obviously Putin. 

U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan are nightmare scenario for Biden | Reuters

For Obama, I would state that I try not to vote for people who see me as the great enemy. For Trumpy, he was much better for US survival than Obama. He came up with a few interesting fixes that I wouldn't have thought of on my own. I didn't have great confidence in the guy, so I was pleasantly surprised. My opinion of Joey has always been, nice guy, old style democrat. But he kind of sold his soul to the Stalinsts and Billionaires that now possess the DNC. 

For now, honestly, there is nothing to be done with US governance. Dems always focus on personality, as advised with Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals. 

"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.. In conflict tactics there are certain rules that the organizer should always regard as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and “frozen.”

So, did this work with El Trumpo? Among the dems, worked like a charm. Independents? The DNC had to offer free stuff, and cater to the laziness of many after holing up with Covid#1 & Covid#2. This was the ballot collection laws funded by Zuckerhead. Coach Potatos sit at home. Want goodies. Joe promises, and like a Pizza guy, someone appears at their door to collect the ballot, pay cash, help them fill it in and whola, Joey wins!

Mark Zuckerberg Ends Election Grants - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

So, JC, this tactic is so successful, that the RNC is going to do this in November. Great marketing! Instead of free things, we'd offer the independents relief from Joe-Flation, Illegal Immigration, and especially violent street crime, aided and abetted by Soros Family-funded dem, big city prosecutors who ensure the thugs are bounced to rob, and often kill the public. 

George Soros's groups have spent $40 million to elect 75 progressive prosecutors over last decade | Daily Mail Online

This could (maybe?) kick us over the margins to run the House and Senate. The upside for you is that to your fellow voters, for whatever bad happens, we'd catch the blame. I never said the world and human affairs are not Darwinian. 

This is why I like technology as a first go-to for societal problems. If we get the engineering to work, life would still get better anyway, because better engineering means having more options, workarounds, opportunity. For example, if K. Eric Drexler's nano-manufacture ever was successfully produced, (fantasy) one could blather on about socialism, capitalism, but the machinery would produce goodies in such abundance and low cost that as Engels & Marx 

This would absolutely achieve Engels and Marx's Socialist State Withering Away. 

What is Karl Marx's view of the future? This question relates the Communist Manifesto. - eNotes.com

Also with engineering the possibility of voting with your feet (like an illegal émigré!) would open up habitats in the solar system. One of my favs, though a tip o' my fascist hat to Patri Freidman's ocean communities. 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: spudb...@aol.com
Cc: everyth...@googlegroups.com <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Fri, Aug 5, 2022 7:30 am
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

[John Clark]

On Fri, Aug 5, 2022 at 9:57 PM <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:

> The Afghanistan Withdrawal Fiasco is plain for all to see

Yes, but for the losing side the last days of a war ALWAYS looks like a fiasco, and it had been obvious for years that the US was going to lose the war in Afghanistan, it was just a matter of time. If one didn't care about the good of the nation or the morality of ordering men to stand in harm's way for political purposes the smart thing to do would've been for Biden to do what his predecessors did, simply delay the withdrawal and let the next president get the flack. But Biden knew this couldn't continue forever and he had the courage to do it now even though he knew it would look bad and cost him a lot of votes.

> Its like when Obama needed a boost, CIA was there to show him as a patriot when Bin Laden was whacked. This works big with dem voters

If the nation didn't have the Antidemocratic Party it would've worked well for all American voters that were not Osama bin Laden fans! 

> For Afghanistan, first, there were no anti-war protests of any memory in the US which would validate the progressive-soviet mindset of the democrats. Nothing. No Vietnam War. Zip. Nada.

I have reread the above five times and I'm still unable to figure out what the hell you're trying to say. I am not fluent in your language and unfortunately Google translate does not include Spudeze. To clearly written need you to.  

 > My opinion of Joey has always been, nice guy,

Well, that's one thing nobody ever accused Donald Trump of.  

> old style democrat. But he kind of sold his soul to the Stalinsts

Stalinsts? Spud, you really need to find a new bogeyman to blame all your problems on, as I've said before, now that even China is communist in name only these days being an anti-Communist is like being an anti-Viking. All communist states are evil but not all evil states are communist.  

>  Billionaires that now possess the DNC. 

7 Billionaires Have Spent $90 Million to Buy GOP Congress

> For Obama, I would state that I try not to vote for people who see me as the great enemy.

And you know Obama sees you that way because ignorant fascist bloggers told you so, and they know how to press your brain bypass button. 

> Dems always focus on personality

In a way that's true. Unlike the Antidemocratic Party the Democratic Party has always preferred that the person who has access to the nuclear launch codes not have a unstable sociopathic personality.  For some reason those silly Democrats would rather the world not be destroyed.

 

> I never said the world and human affairs are not Darwinian. 

I could sum up my political philosophy with just a few words "do everything you can to ensure that human society is NOT Darwinian". I say that because I can't think of anything more cruel than Darwinian Evolution.  

> if K. Eric Drexler's nano-manufacture ever was successfully produced, (fantasy) one could blather on about socialism, capitalism, but the machinery would produce goodies in such abundance and low cost that as Engels & Marx 

Yes, and that's why I am no longer the strict libertarian that I once was, at least not concerning monetary matters.  

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

1mm

c

[spudb...@aol.com]

We weren't the losing side till Joey pulled out. If you want the Taliban/Al Qaeda surprised so they cannot attack the US successfully again, this requires violence and the violence is best done by the mils. Withdrawing shows weakness, which Putin must have been thrilled by. 

Meanwhile even your pals from CNN now report a growing Jihadi threat from the same crew from 9-11. 

Despite al-Zawahiri strike, US officials are concerned about tracking terrorism threats in Afghanistan (msn.com)

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: spudb...@aol.com
Cc: everyth...@googlegroups.com <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sat, Aug 6, 2022 6:42 am
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

[John Clark]

On Sat, Aug 6, 2022 at 3:35 PM <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:

> We weren't the losing side till Joey pulled out.

So I was right, you really do believe that although it was the longest war the US has ever been involved in 20 years of fighting and dying in Afghanistan wasn't quite long enough and if we had just stayed for 21 everything would've been peachy keen. And that belief is just dumb, the fact that the corrupt Afghan government we were supporting collapsed almost instantly after the withdrawal of American troops proves they could never stand on their own 2 feet, not in a million years; the contrast between Afghanistan and Ukraine is quite dramatic.  By the way, if you remember Trump came very close to pulling out of Afghanistan but chickened out because of the political flack that would involve, although I am quite certain that if he had gone through with it you would today be praising him to high heaven for doing so just as today you're praising him to high heaven for NOT doing so.

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

cbu

[spudb...@aol.com]

Yes, the cost of freedom (survival is eternal vigilance) sorry to say. I have no magic solution otherwise that to strike back and yes, eliminate. The enemies of the US both foreign & domestic are eliminationist so yeah, turning the other cheek I will leave for the Christians because it doesn't work with many of our fellow primates. 

Let me know if you've got a better method that achieves pleasing results? Because why not? I am a nationalist but not an ideologist, because it appears to benefit the greatest amount of people, unlike the democrats and their cash link to Wall Street globalists. Bush and Cheney and Bubba Clinton were the greatest advocates of political campaign Payola from the uber rich. Trumpo? Well, he pissed his fellow rich folk off. They all funded Joey because they wanted their CHINA MONEY back after Trumps's terrible tariffs. $$$$.

I wonder specifically who advised Joe of doing the withdrawal in 2021. Do you think it was Blinken, or was it Obama on the phone, saying, "show them (conservatives) that you're tough! If you back down on this, they will eat you alive domestically."

Admission. I did vote for Gore in the hanging chads election, because I liked what Bubba Clinton did with the economy, and liked that Gore talked about hydrogen cars, and I called Bush 43 "an Oil Boy." Rich mans son, Texas Gov, and Patrician. I never though about Gore being Big Coal's sonny boy, money & political inheritance. So I was being hypocritical and ignorant against Gore back then. Now, all I want to know is IF Bush released Bin Laden to Iran in Dec 2021? 

Joey, had Gore not run, would have been who'd I have voted for had he been nominated back then. I would have thought, he wouldn't screw up the economy that bad, and didn't know about Clinton ignoring the Saudis (as the Bushies did!) because Oil Money causes questions NOT to be raised. All before 9-11. 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: spudb...@aol.com
Cc: everyth...@googlegroups.com <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sat, Aug 6, 2022 3:51 pm
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

[Lessandro Ferreira Santos]

there are clean energies such as solar and wind, this discourse that BTC is not sustainable has no weight, the world spends energy and pollutes more with other things.  of the 21m there are already 19m the network will continue to work paid for by the fees the energy consumption will be for the use and not for the "creation"

Em ter, 12 de jul de 2022 12:27, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> escreveu:

Currencies are in some ways just as artificial as cryptocurrencies. In fact, most everything humans chase after is spun up as whole cloth, from countries, to gods, to money to belief in comrades in arms and so forth. Most everything humanity does is ultimately fake. Money is stuff we just "make up." Even the value of gold is something we "make up." We might be better off if we stopped making this crap up.

 However, with currencies at least in a representative system the average person has some impact. The crypto-currency trend has been the culmination of Milton Friedman's strange dream of privatizing almost everything. In that setting the average person only has as much power in the system as what they hold. An Elon Musk or Bezos etc has vastly more and so they not only have more power, they have more power to get more. A world of complete private forms of currencies is one that will lead to a sort of monetary feudalism. There will at some point be a few people, financial institutions and banks that own it all. They would come to be the overlords of the world.

 The collapse of the cryptocurrencies and bitcoin is something of some relief to me. The next dark age may be forestalled a few years at least.

 LC

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[Telmo Menezes]

It's posturing, it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Powerful people and institutions have some of their power threatened by cryptocurrencies. They don't like that. They have a lot of say on what the media focuses on. People who are more left-leaning have a natural antipathy towards unregulated transactions, and connecting this with environmental issues makes it an easy sell.

Meanwhile the ad-tech industry is probably using an order of magnitude more energy, while destroying democracies, increasing political polarization for profit and decaffeinating culture to make it "ad friendly". But they have a *HUGE* say on what the media focuses on, so that particular story does not get a lot of traction.

(Not even to speak of the modern web and its gigantic blobs of Javascript that keep CPUs running all over the world for who knows what. Nobody seems to care about that.)

I say this as a fairly left-leaning person myself. I am in favor of wealth redistribution to counteract the inexorable cruelness of the Matthew effect. I am for socialized health care, providing the best education possible for all kids, etc. I am also in favor of not using disingenuous and patronizing arguments to further political agendas.

Telmo

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[John Clark]

On Sat, Aug 6, 2022 at 4:16 PM <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:

>  I am a nationalist but not an ideologist, 

I'm not a  nationalist or globalist or a ideologist, I am a rationalist. 

>  unlike the democrats and their cash link to Wall Street globalists.

Unlike me you are not a rationalist so I'm sure a little thing like logic will not change your opinion one iota but for whatever it's worth, thanks to loopholes in the tax law 39 of the fortune 500 largest corporations paid no federal income tax at all from 2018 through 2020, not one cent. And the trend is getting worse, in 2020 it was 55 corporations, and 73 paid less than half the standard corporate rate of 21%. This includes T-Mobile which had profits of $11.5 billion and not only paid no taxes it actually received a $80 million tax refund! Just a few days ago all 50 Democratic senators voted for a bill that would require all corporations to pay a minimum of 15% taxes, and all 50 Republican senators voted against it, it took the Democratic vice president to break the tie and pass the bill. What was that you were saying about Democratic Wall Street globalists?

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

ere

dcf

[spudb...@aol.com]

Since this has been a physics and cosmology forum of sorts, let us not stray too far from technology by positing that unless we can produce the "means of production," so cheaply and from basic materials through technology, our political economy remains the same. If through nano-fabrication we can produce abundance from CHON, carbon-hydrogen-oxygen-nitrogen, then the need for government becomes rather limited, because, why? 

JC is an ideologue who holds that whatever his party does is absolutely justifiable. For me, whether its Don or Abbott, with these I do have my differences, but was pleasantly surprised how well Don's policies actually worked. 

For JC, no sympathy for the devil. It's quite an absolutist way of viewing the actions of the monkey we call humans. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Joel Dietz <jdi...@gmail.com>
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Cc: spudb...@aol.com
Sent: Tue, Aug 9, 2022 7:00 am
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

John,

For libertarians that identify as rationalists there is a very clear way they can address your concerns. Namely, they could list all of the public goods currently provided by governments and then explain in which cases and over what timeframe they plan to turn them over to free markets. Additionally, if they are free market maximalists they could explain how they plan to move into enclaves where they have no dependencies on public goods provided by governments.

Here governments could be defined simply as "an institution which depends on tax revenue (i.e. a form of coercion) to institute its own version of good which may or may not intersect with that of its citizens" 

Here the overall story arc as promoted by Balaji and others is effectively that mega-corporations powered by crypto will soon be in a position to provide all state services and can effectively de-couple from traditional forms of governance. You could call this a "revolution." 

Best, 

Joel 

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Aug 10, 2022 at 4:22 AM spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> JC is an ideologue who holds that whatever his party does is absolutely justifiable.

 

As I've said more than once, for most of my life "my party" was Republican, I only abandoned them when it became clear to me that the Republican Party had lost its reason and had become irreversibly insane; I officially changed my affiliation from Republican to Democratic on August 3, 2011, the day after Republicans came within 45 minutes of defaulting on the national debt. Looking back on it now I realize I should've done it about 10 years earlier but because of my intense dislike of Democrat Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam war I was reluctant to do so.

I certainly don't think everything, or even most things, Democrats do is "absolutely justified", but it's true I have not harped on Democratic shortcomings as I have those of Republicans and there is a reason for that, if you added up all the bad things Democrats have done during the last 10 years it would amount to little more than naughtiness compared with the treasonous and dangerous crimes and blunders Republicans commit on a daily basis. And I'm not just talking about some Republicans, I'm talking about EVERY Republican currently in elected office who has a realistic hope of surviving the next election.  

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

ceo

[John Clark]

On Tue, Aug 9, 2022  Joel Dietz <jdi...@gmail.com> Wrote

> John,
For libertarians that identify as rationalists 

I'm certainly a rationalist and, unless I incur massive brain damage someday, I don't think that will ever change, however although I once proudly called myself a libertarian, words change their meaning over time and so I no longer feel comfortable calling myself by that name. For one thing I do not wish to be associated with the ridiculous and self-defeating antics of the Libertarian Party, I think it likely if they had not run a third party presidential candidate in 2016 Donald Trump, the most anti-libertarian (and stupidest) president in American history, would never have won in the Electoral College.  There is no concept in libertarianism that is more important than free markets but I know of many people who loudly declare that they are libertarians but don't give a damn about free markets and don't care much about the rights of individuals either, except of course for the right to carry a gun.

> there is a very clear way they can address your concerns. could list all of the public goods currently provided by governments and then explain in which cases and over what timeframe they plan to turn them over to free markets. Additionally, if they are free market maximalists they could explain how they plan to move into enclaves where they have no dependencies on public goods provided by governments.

Easier said than done. Adjusted for inflation the top 1% in the USA saw their total net worth INCREASE by $21 trillion in recent years but the bottom 50% saw their net worth DECREASE by $900 billion. And thanks to technological improvements this trend is accelerating.

Even the super rich, or at least the smart ones, realize this situation is dangerous and one way or another simply will not continue indefinitely, so they propose a wealth tax be imposed on the richest 10% of the richest 1%  so they could still have some control over how this trend stops. 18 billionaires have signed a petition calling for exactly that:  

 

A LETTER IN SUPPORT OF A WEALTH TAX

And they are far from the only ones, Warren Buffett has long advocated the same thing:

WARREN  BUFFETT on coddling the super-rich

And so has Bill Gates:

Bill Gates wants higher taxes on the rich

And Nick Hanauer, a member of the top 0.01%, also thinks the hyper rich should pay more and wrote a letter about it to his rich peers. I found this passage to be particularly illuminating: 

"I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now? I see pitchforks."

My Fellow Zillionaires

> Here the overall story arc as promoted by Balaji and others is effectively that mega-corporations powered by crypto will soon be in a position to provide all state services and can effectively de-couple from traditional forms of governance. You could call this a "revolution." 

 

That's true, but social revolutions don't necessarily make people happier, just think of the French revolution.  Due to technological advancements accelerating income inequality is a worldwide problem but the rate of increase is most dramatic in the USA. The US income inequality is greater than that in India or ANY country in Asia or ANY country in Europe, the only countries where it's higher are in Africa and South America where they tend to have revolutions every other day. And the USA also does poorly on economic mobility, Canada has twice as much and Denmark three times, in the USA if you're born poor you'll probably die poor but if you're born rich you'll probably die much much richer.

As much as I love free markets I love rationality even more, and I honestly don't see how free markets alone can solve the problem of income inequality, and this isn't just a moral issue it's a very practical one, in fact if the problem has no solution than that could be the explanation of the Fermi paradox. If history has taught us anything it's that extreme wealth inequality leads to social instability and I can confidently state with 100% certainty the gap between rich and poor that has been accelerating for the last 40 years will NOT continue forever, it might come to a controlled gentle stop or it might be a catastrophic collapse, but one way or another it will stop.  If I was one of the super mega ultra rich and if I prefered that my head remain attached to my shoulders I would either do everything I could think of to reduce that wealth gap or I'd start investing in a guillotine manufacturing factory.

> governments could be defined simply as "an institution which depends on tax revenue (i.e. a form of coercion) to institute its own version of good which may or may not intersect with that of its citizens" 

That is not a bad definition of government and if we were starting from scratch I think we could do better without government and instead embraced privately produced law and private protection agencies, unfortunately it's far too late for that now, we're one hell of a long way from starting from scratch and there is no way in hell we could start over from zero and finish before the technological singularity renders all matters of this sort moot.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

rim

[Brent Meeker]

On 8/10/2022 9:39 AM, John Clark wrote:

And Nick Hanauer, a member of the top 0.01%, also thinks the hyper rich should pay more and wrote a letter about it to his rich peers. I found this passage to be particularly illuminating: 

"I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now? I see pitchforks."

"Tolerance for risk" probably comes from being born into a family that owned a company where he worked as CEO.  You can tolerate a lot of risk if the worst that can happen is you go back to being CEO of your family's business.  "Intuition about what will happen in the future" is pretty much what everybody has plus a lucky guess.  I'm not against some people getting rich, even just based on luck.  But we and they should recognize that luck is a big part of it, as is bad luck for people not born to wealthy parents.  In primitive tribes, the hunter who got the kill, got to feed his family first...but the rest was shared out to the tribe.  That's the way we should looks at the Buffetts, Gates, and Hanauers.

Brent

[spudb...@aol.com]

This was one change you made, because LBJ & Nixon really couldn't mentally justify their conduct of the Vietnam War. The American people generally saw this as a place to send their men to die, when the Pentagon had abandoned the tactics that worked so well in WW2. In a nuclear age, this becomes less useful, and involves peril. 

This strategy still works to a point and that point is time. If say Putin could have done a blitzkrieg into Germany within 7 days, the US and EU leadership would have capitulated. It had been said that Putin and his voters want a new Russian empire, but their view is all about restarting the Soviet Union, and fulfilling it's goal of taking Europe. Their targets didn't crack as planned and so we now have Putin's War of attrition. No Fulda gap for you Vlad!

For me, I am a believer in evolution because it works. Because of the billionaires running the country, we are polarized, and your 2011 epiphany seems wholeheartedly endorsing one faith for another. As I see it, the rule by socialists and their billionaire pimps is a slow strangling of the US.  Right now, because of ideology, with abortion, and CRT, and economics and crime, we see a movement in populations. As of now we have a potential splitting of the US, and all the risks this entails. 

On taxes, I do like the saying, a Libertarian is a republican who doesn't want tp pay taxes. On the other hand I am not opposed to people making massive profits as a reward for technological innovation. So three cheers for whatever we can do to ensure survival. 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>

To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Cc: jdi...@gmail.com <jdi...@gmail.com>
Sent: Wed, Aug 10, 2022 9:40 am
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

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[spudb...@aol.com]

Expanding the pie rather than fixating on divvying it up to reward friends is not for me. How to expand the pie. Technological innovation. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com>
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wed, Aug 10, 2022 4:52 pm
Subject: Re: The collapse of bitcoin

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[Joel Dietz]

John,

For libertarians that identify as rationalists there is a very clear way they can address your concerns. Namely, they could list all of the public goods currently provided by governments and then explain in which cases and over what timeframe they plan to turn them over to free markets. Additionally, if they are free market maximalists they could explain how they plan to move into enclaves where they have no dependencies on public goods provided by governments.

Here governments could be defined simply as "an institution which depends on tax revenue (i.e. a form of coercion) to institute its own version of good which may or may not intersect with that of its citizens" 

Here the overall story arc as promoted by Balaji and others is effectively that mega-corporations powered by crypto will soon be in a position to provide all state services and can effectively de-couple from traditional forms of governance. You could call this a "revolution." 

Best, 

Joel 

On Tue, 9 Aug 2022 at 12:37, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

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