Quote from: Guru on August 04, 2012, 07:49 amThere is more than a certain tinge of sadness, even deja-vu for me in your comments. Reading the cypherpunks mailing list back in the day, many of them were absolutely convinced that crypto-anarchy was not only inevitable, but that it was even imminent! Well, I am not saying it's happening tomorrow in my comment, only that I do think it is inevitable. You have lost a little faith Guru, you need a little fire in your blood, you need to be hooked into a marvelous coca, a good fireplace and a comfortable chair like pine frequently is (:This is not exactly religion, but sometimes there are big questions that cannot be definitively answered by analysis because they are too huge to calculate. But, we must still make decisions in this complex world, so sometimes we need a little faith, some intuitions to guide our path. Science is a very slow process after all. Motivation is important too.The Truth is that Revolutions are not really Revolutions. They are the summation of perfectly logical incremental evolutionary steps which take the public by surprise. Take the most famous revolution, the French one. The thing about it is that there was no 1 revolution, there were many attempts at revolutions. Most were failures, and one of them changed the world permanently. Emily Dickinson has a nice quote from a poem about something else entirely that I think applies to revolutions: 'and then sense broke through'. That is how I see this subject. The solutions hammer away at our brains, and we see the shape of them generally, but eventually they break through. Efficiency is a natural law when both motivation and competition are there.Why did it take until now for these separate technologies to exist?Onion routing has existed in concept form at least for a long time. So has public key cryptography. So have ideas like Digicash and Bitcoin. In fact, I'd say all these ideas existed in 1980 or before. 30 years have pasted.Why then, does the Silk Road exist today and not 4 or 5 years ago? The answer is simply that the black marketeers like myself were ignorant of them until recently. Sometimes it takes a while for things to crystallize, and then once they do they are off to the races. After all, the number of people knowledgeable of both high technology and the black market are relatively rare mammals. The Silk Road has changed that, now thousands of geeks see the money making potential here.Quote from: Guru on August 04, 2012, 07:49 amNeedless to say, it didn't pan-out. David Chaum had some brilliant ideas for truly anonymous digital cash, even having it issued from a bank in the U.S. -- the Mark Twain Bank. Needless to say, governments today are even _less_ enamored with the idea, if anything, than they were then. Back in the day, the authorities were only concerned with drugs/money laundering. Now, of course, terrorism and its' funding have been thrown into the mix, meaning that there is going to be even more official (not to mention unofficial) resistance than we have ever seen previously. Well, with all due respect, that is hardly surprising. You were fundamentally dependent on getting permission from the State to carry out your objectives. DigiCash, good idea, yes. But reliant on the government's tacit approval and the existing financial services industry (credit card companies in particular) with which it was actually competing! wat!This is not a problem anymore. Bitcoins themselves will probably eventually become declared illegal or counterfeit by some dumbass bureaucrat in the United States, and then we'll get going proper without the clearnet exchanges.BitTorrent has shown the way that it is possible to adopt a technology that is almost impossible to eradicate. The approach of DigiCash was closer to Napster than P2P in the way it relied on existing infrastructure and support from existing entities like Visa and the Mark Twain Bank. B$ relies on you having a computer and an internet connection, period.The same thing with E-Gold. The guy who did it was great, had a brain and his heart in the right place. But he was also relying on the approval of the State for it to work. It didn't approve. And they tried to bang him up without any evidence.Side Note: I believe David Chaum is the most likely candidate for being Satoshi, not sure why nobody else has mentioned this, it seems obvious. It pretty much all fits together like a hand to a glove.In short. Don't rely on the enemy when you're working against his interests. That does not make any sense. Break the law instead. There's a lot geeks can and should learn from black market operatives, since we essentially are both of the same hacker ethos.Quote from: Guru on August 04, 2012, 07:49 amQuote from: pine on August 04, 2012, 05:04 amThe rules of the game have completely changed suddenly, it's just going to take the scene and LE a while to realize the full implications of an independent financial network, strong cryptography and real anonymity. Not one killer app, but 3 killer apps with synergistic qualities. This is the holy Trinity of economic growth, we're not going to ever experience a recession here within our lifetimes. Pine, with all due respect, this is little more than wishful thinking, although I would that it were not so. Strong cryptography is nothing new, relatively speaking. It was available two decades ago, in the form of PGP, cypherpunk and mixmaster remailers, to name a few of the tools developed then. There was even a form of anonymous digital cash by the name of "magic money". See: http://koeln.ccc.de/archiv/cyphernomicon/chapter12/12.12.htmlBitcoins are, in a sense, almost the opposite of magic money, in that they were NEVER designed to be anonymous, unlike Chaumian digital cash. I agree with you on the facts completely! I just draw different conclusions because I am pine and a little mad. I also think you are underestimating two things.1. The *actual*, *practical* existence of easily applied tools to use those technologies we are talking about. Onion routing may have existed for a long time, but in whitepapers and elite comp sci circles on usenet or mailing lists. Only since the Tor Project has onion routing become available for the masses. The same thing with Bitcoin software. PGP has been around for a long time and has had tools for it for a long time, but it's only in the last 12 months that the online black market has begun to seriously start using it like Shannon has said before.It would have been practically impossible to obtain publicly and popularly available useable software to complete pine's 'holy trinity' ten years ago, even five years ago. The cypherpunks were merely a decade or three ahead of their time, that is all. What is easy for them, was extremely difficult for everybody else.2. The black market. You didn't have the (awesome) likes of pine, shannon, kmfkewn, dpr & co :) See. all the points about 'tools' above are irrelevant without motivation. We got oodles of motivation. You need that kind of energy! Have you any idea of how much money I can make off this place? Even bringing my most trivially simple black market business plans to market here gives me a yield of 100 - 1,000 percent returns on investment. The arbitrage possibilities are absolutely fucking intense, there's no other way of putting it. It all practically runs itself, it's great. I mean, I'd tell you more details but I don't want people working out how I operate and cutting into my margins lol.Quote from: Guru on August 04, 2012, 07:49 amQuote from: pine on August 04, 2012, 05:04 amThis is the industrial revolution of the black market. The black market was not substantively structurally different from 1700 to 2000. Contracts to generate trust and cooperative behaviors were never possible in RL. Here they are thanks to advanced cryptography. And that will make all the difference.I'm aware that this might sound like hyperbole, but I don't think it is. I think the above is just a statement of fact. Unfortunately, I am forced to disagree. Rather than a statement of fact, I believe this is to be a statement of what you would _wish_ to be fact. To quote Yogi Berra: "It's deja vu all over again." I'll freely admit that things are different now than they were 20 years ago. Computers, networks, bandwidth are all better than they were then. I will also grant you that there is much less trust in the 'traditional' economic system, since the banksters crashed the economy in 2008. Once again, this is nothing new. However, all of these are _not_ enough to bring about the changes that you envisage. In order for an alternative financial structure to be adopted, the older, more established system must be perceived -- by a clear majority of the public -- to be broken enough, corrupt enough, and painful enough to retain, so as to allow for the adoption of a new system. Correspondingly, the advantages of any new system must not only be clearly obvious to the public, but be overwhelming enough to spur its widespread adoption, even in the absence of government opposition. One of my elderly relatives lived through the crash of '29, and the Great Depression that followed. She had NO use for the banks -- the worst word in her mouth was too good for the 'damn bankers'. After she died, we found money squirreled-away everywhere in her house. The difference between then and now, is that in her day, it was possible to deal almost primarily in cash. What I believe is most important factor governing the adoption of any new socio-economic system, however, is human nature -- that has most certainly NOT changed. I believe we have become blinded by the speed of technological change and, as a result, have forgotten that people (and societies) change far, far more slowly. I will grant that the rate at which change appears to be taking place is accelerating, no doubt due to the velocity at which information travels today, but substantive changes are still going to take years, even decades. I don't believe I am going to live long enough to see such a transformation as you envisage; depending on your age, you may not, either. What is important to remember, is that money is, when you boil it down, essentially a social convention. Anything can be money. When the French originally populated what is now Eastern Canada in the 1600s, at one point there was a currency shortage. As a stop-gap measure, playing cards signed by the Governor, became the accepted currency. Beads were considered valuable by the Indians; to the Europeans, beads were of little value, as they could be cheaply manufactured. To the Indians, however, they were a treasure as beads were made by hand, and required an enormous amount of labour to produce. The Europeans traded what they perceived as having little value, beads, to the Indians for what the Indians considered valuable -- beads. Furs were plentiful, and the Indians were quite happy to hand over the plentiful furs for the beads. One only has to look back at history, and look at the resistance of the population to the adoption of paper money. For thousands of years, people had used coinage, usually made out of some proportion or other of precious metals. Paper money took a few generations to become established. Even as late as the mid-1940s, there were populations that were still leery of paper currency. Fast-forward to today, where credit cards and electronic transactions are commonplace. I'm old enough to remember when they weren't, when all transactions were done on paper. I remember the first banking machines, and the first credit cards. The first credit cards were not issued by banks, but by department stores. They were little metal plates, not plastic, and they were called, at least in this country, "Charge-a-plates". In my parents' day, there was little or no credit -- any credit that you might have had, was with individual merchants. The idea that one could have a plastic card that could allow one to walk into virtually any store and walk out with merchandise without having to lay down any coin or bills was quite literally the stuff of fancy. It took several decades for credit cards to become entrenched, I would be extremely surprised if Bitcoins did not take a similar amount of time to become generally-accepted, if ever. Guru[/quote]What you say is very interesting, and a great history lesson thank-you. I wouldn't think the "recession" is over yet. Far from it, I think it's going to get much worse before it gets better. You'll get your disenfranchised civilians alright. I think London and New York will be on fire in the next five years, riots up the wazoo. I mean how unlikely is a mass bank run today? Not that unlikely. People are shifting capital ASAP in the Eurozone right now I can tell you that for nothing, particularly in Greece, and the banking sector there is essentially doing a case of STFU everybody in case the entire market panics.I don't think Bitcoin is the solution by the way, it's just the first one for us, we'll leapfrog onto something else ASAP when something better comes along with internal blind signature mixes etc. That would also greatly enhance anonymity and security for mass adoption. Bitcoin is the Netscape Browser of anonymous digital cash. It's crap at what it does. But it's the first one, so let's hold the horses.I do think that network level changes will occur far faster in future than you envisage, essentially because "The Internet".Anyway, enough talk. Let's simply wait and watch it unfold. I'll be busy turning the wheels of my various projects in the meantime. You could be right, or I could be right, there is no way to prove it in either case.