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That I understand. Big chewy bloated terms like "minarcho anarcho radical yadda yadda" mean nothing to me.

The requirement to pay taxes in USD is the primary "inherent value" which makes that particular commodity circulate as money. The "inherent value" is to increase the odds that one may continue living outside of a cage.

When I call that value "inherent", I am obviously speaking very loosely and tongue-in-cheek. Remove the threat of force, and USD paper cash has no significant value -- it's too rough to use as toilet paper and doesn't even burn particularly well in the winter. It is durable enough to function as wallpaper, though with a rather busy and avant garde retro design.

Combine that dynamic with the Mandrake Mechanism described in "Creature", and you have a very powerful monopoly fiat money, consisting of cash and bank "deposits", useful for financing horrors like World War I, the Marxist overthrow of the Kerensky government, endless bailouts of banks and corporations throughout the '70s, '80s, '90s, and '00s, and a litany of other ridiculous, juvenile schemes.

It is the monetary inflation, produced by the central bank buying government debt (i.e. a promise to tax), which gives governments most of their "spending money". Taxation itself merely gives people a reason to accept the USD in the first place, and also serves as the principal means of social engineering.

When you look at it that way, taxation and inflation are seen as two mutually recursive functions, whose fixed point is the gun.

http://curvecp.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cjdns

http://www.waterken.com/dev/YURL/

I'm looking into cjdns, but I'm sure it's a lot of work establishing a peer network.

YURLs look very promising, if browser manufacturers would get a clue and support it (tho the CAs would surely howl).

I realize that "most people" want to type simply "bankoftheuniverse.com" and know they're at the "real" site, but I think Zooko's triangle has something to say about that, and those people may need to grow up a bit and just bookmark a yurl or something. Besides, many people will find bankoftheuniverse.com through a search engine anyway, and as long as they sign up at the real site the first time, they'll be fine thereafter (i.e. the ssh model).

What "anarchist"? Nobody I even know is an anarchist.

To anyone who notices, there's always "shut up and not notice." But there's also "oh that rsync you see there is for our geographically redundant backup facility" or whatever -- in other words, dissembling.

(By all means read "Creature from Jekyll Island" to learn the details of that deliciously evil story. :)

I do have an extreme philosophical position: that relations among people should be by mutual consent, or not at all. It is compromise that is dangerous.

That's the official story. In reality, those things are used to enslave people and keep them happy on the modern plantation, looking to the master to keep them safe. Freedom is the absence of coercion, and those things have utterly failed to safeguard that, and indeed have actively warred against it.

So, yes to more freedom, and please refuse to be terrorized https://www.schneier.com/essay-124.html . Freedom is the absence of coercion, and that is all the security I care to have. The chance of being murdered by a politically motivated hot-head is so low that it doesn't even register on my list of concerns.

https://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001431.html

Excerpt: "How is this apparent contradiction possible? It is generally done via secret arrangements not with the company, but with the employees. The company does not provide back-door access, but the people do. The trick is to place people with excellent tech skills and dual loyalties into strategic locations in the company. These 'assets' will then execute the work required in secret, and spare the company and most all of their workmates the embarrassment. ..."

In a discussion of this article (on a cryptography list) I observed this incredulous response: "Hmm. So what does that mean a team of ex-military/intelligence security people work there way up or get assistance with contacts and references, replace all the key people in a companies inner security department and start coding up backdoors, APIs and allowing VPN access to it? All without telling anyone or getting noticed by ops people etc."

To which the other party retorted: "Been there. They are noticed, but you get orders from on high to shut up and not notice."

If that's all true, then it sounds like only a very few engineers and managers acting as moles will have specific knowledge of the program. A few non-mole engineers will sense that something's afoot, but they'll stay mum. Maybe that's as far as it goes.

The reasons is simple: gold has specific physical characteristics which many people for a very long time have regarded as suitable for use as physical money: principally, it's durable, rare but not too rare, recognizable, and easily divisible. That widespread subjective assessment is unlikely to change.

I'm only about 7 minutes in, but I do also see a reference to Arismendi-Morillo "Int J Biochem Cell Biol" 41, 2062-68, 2009.

I'll keep updating here.

Perhaps you can find some references to peer-reviewed studies inside the content of the video. Let me know! When I get some time, I'll watch it again myself.

Someone once said that a lot of confusion could have been avoided if, instead of the terms positive, negative, and imaginary, they had instead used the terms forward, backward, and lateral.

Problem is, anyone viewing the code in a normal text display, e.g. on github or plain text editor, would see all the excruciating detail, all the time. But it's an interesting idea.

Perhaps instead of the expand/collapse, I could just use links. Vim users should note that when you're sitting on a word, if you type "gf" it will Go to that File (i.e. open it up right there), and you can use "o" and "i" the way you use "Back" and "Forward" in a browser.

[Edit: Ironically, he might have overlooked the first line of the commit message because it is highlighted in bold.]