Astrohacker

I've been standing for about 5 months now [1]. Assuming the research continues to stay the same (that sitting all the time, in spite of getting regular exercise, increases all-cause mortality), I will never go back.

[1] not continuously, lol

> And angry mobs coming to lynch you? Give me a break, such a thing is unprecedented

Maybe you've never heard of the French revolution. Such a thing is definitely not unprecedented.

> Currency is regulated into existence.

Nope. Gold and bitcoins come from the market.

I agree with everything you said with one important exception: The finance industry is not corrupt because of a lack of regulations. It is corrupt because of the regulations. The fact that Federal Reserve has been regulated into existence is a very deep problem, as is the fact that fractional reserve banks are always protected from failing by regulations. Regulations are the problem, not the answer.

Maybe, but there are a number of reasons why you might not want to:

1) The US financial system is unsustainable. Specialize in it and you will find yourself out of a job eventually.

2) It's unethical. If you understand that your excess salary is coming from wealth that is stolen from people through the mechanism of inflation, then you may want to opt out of the corrupt system for peace of mind.

3) If the people actually understood how much they were screwed by this system, they would come after bankers, and that might include programmers at banks. This sort of happened in 2008 when bankers received threats. If the US system collapsed, they might receive more than threats. Note that, although traders and bankers are not the same, traders often use leverage with new money created by the banks and the Fed, and thus are just one hop away from the new money and are almost as culpable as the bankers. And besides, the angry hordes might not make such a subtle distinction; anyone associated with finance would be subject to retribution.

Fun fact: Everyone knows the finance industry is highly corrupt, but point out the mechanism of the corruption and you will be downvoted.

I understand economics just fine, I just come from the Austrian School, which makes a lot of people angry (even though it is right).

3. Be willing to work for a corrupt industry.

So he does what any good programmer does, but he earns 5x as much. One reason they earn so much is that the companies they work for have corrupt ties to the Federal Reserve and the US government, and when the money supply is inflated, they get all the new money, and can thus pay their programmers (and all employees/partners/shareholders/owners) with the new money. Their salaries come at the expense of people who don't get the new money, like pensioners.

I call this the "problem of trust" and it is something I'm trying to solve. In order to be able to send out alerts, we need some sort of decentralized broadcast system. I am developing a P2P broadcast system called Proofnet which is based on proof-of-work to prioritize messages and minimize spam. I have describe it on the Bitcoin Forum here:

https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=31038.0

One of the applications of Proofnet is a decentralized web-of-trust where you can send out a scammer alert by giving someone a trust rating of 0 and broadcast that message with very high proof-of-work. See some more info on those efforts here:

https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=31198.0

Let's not forget that, in the US, the US government gives enormous amounts of funding to private universities. So the behavior of universities is not exactly the result of a free market with no government intervention... the government has a huge influence on the way universities work.

Then governments would be less forceful because people do not like to be forced to do stuff.

Congress is part of the problem. Even if they fixed patents, they would just screw something else up. The checks and balances of the US government aren't working. We need a free market of governments, so that if we don't like one, we just switch to a better one. Competition would provide the check and balance, like it does for everything else. This isn't possible at present because it is impractical or impossible for most people to switch governments. But imagine how quickly governments would fix this stuff if the people just left for somewhere better. It would be fixed instantly.

Is inflation tame according to the Fed calculations which ignore expenses that matter to people like oil, or according to meaningful calculations? Because it sure seems to me that the prices I pay are rising pretty quickly. Quickly enough that I can notice it. A cup of coffee that cost $1.95 a couple of years ago now costs $2.30. And I'm not earning any more money than I was then, so I can feel the difference.

That's probably the right answer, since they have the power to do this. But of course it is disturbing and unacceptable that they would violate someone's personal property with no crime or even a suspected crime having been committed (or even if there had been a crime committed). Unfortunately the only practical way to change this that I see is to wait for the US government to collapse due to its unsustainable financial policies.

It would be terrible in the short run, but it would be vastly better in the long run. Presently, the US is on the unsustainable trajectory of acquiring debt until it defaults. Not raising the debt ceiling would immediately end this problem. Is it better to have a smaller catastrophe now, or a bigger catastrophe later?

This is good advice, but of course it's pretty absurd that anyone has to take these steps to avoid the overly invasive US government.

We are clearly moving towards a world of more web-based applications, but I'm disturbed by this because it means all my data is stored unencrypted on other people's computers. We're slowly placing our lives in the hands of the essentially anonymous individuals who control the apps we use.

Here's an alternative that we could in principle choose: Apps can be delivered over the web, but data is stored locally. If it is backed up remotely, then it is encrypted first. If our app communicates with other users, then it does so P2P instead of through a central service. These steps would ensure the company whose app we use only knows that we are using the app, and not what our data is or who else we are interacting with. Unfortunately, this technology is not very easy with the present state of JS/HTML. I'm not even sure if it is in principle possible for a JS app to create a TCP server. Some quick Googling reveals it may only be possible if you use Flash.

What does that matter? If people know you by your screen name, that's a real name. Legal names are just nick names that are recorded by the government.

A screen name is no less "real" than a legal name.

I like being able to create new identities for different purposes. Why wouldn't Google+ allow that?

Same here. That's basically what I suggested here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2677140

Email addresses are typically controlled by a third party, so it doesn't make much sense to me that they should be equated with identity. Would you equate your identity with your IRL work address?

On the other hand, private keys are held only by the person whose identity they represent. They are a better way to represent identity because they do not rely on third parties.

Our smarts and sense are limited by our genes. What you're calling for is a whole new species.

This article makes it sound like laissez-faire capitalism is the problem, and yet simultaneously places blame on Goldman Sachs, which happens to have intimate, corrupt ties with the Federal Reserve and and the US government. I think the problem is actually not capitalism, but government, because government is corrupted by special interests (like Goldman Sachs) and thus the law is heavily abused for the good of those who have done the most corrupting at the expense of everyone else.

I believe the more fundamental problem is that there even exist central institutions with enormous amounts of power, like the Federal Reserve or the US government. Even if such institutions start out benevolent, they will inevitably be corrupted, because the temptation is so great. The only way to remove the corruption is to decentralize everything that gets corrupted, making corruption impossible. Consider that democracy is an example of decentralization. Bitcoin, the web, and the internet are further examples.

Thanks for that link... amazing how well bitcoin fits into that picture.

Could they be planning on suing all the small time startups that use the word "bitcoin" in their products? Perhaps they think they can extract some money from small companies by threatening them with lawsuits if they don't pay up.

It's not a scam. You have to distribute the coins somehow. Proof-of-work is a method to ensure no cheating. You can be sure the early miners did in fact perform computational effort to get their coins.

Obviously you should back it up, like you would be doing anyway.

I don't know. It would obviously slow down database access. It would be nice if someone tested this.

I think it may be prudent to begin encrypting all data on disk that can reasonably be encrypted while being able to set up the server remotely so that no one can just snatch your server and get all your data.

This could work by encrypting your database in a truecrypt volume that must be mounted by entering the password. Thus, the data is only ever saved on disk in encrypted form, and the key to access the data is not saved on the disk. Of course, it is still in principle possible for anyone to access that information if they have physical access to the computer while it's running, but at least this makes that much harder.