Amir, you are far more sentient and cognizant than you realize!  Keep up your good works and grow Daily in Knowledge and Power.  Remember that Knowledge is Power only when applied skilfully and with right care.... -- BillOrlando, FloridaUSATelephone: 407-255-7693 and 407-286-7007SKYPE:  williamp910  "KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!!!"     26.04.2014, 15:43, "Amir Taaki" <genjix@???>:Sorry but Bitcoin doesn't work like that.Bitcoin is not a fixed thing gifted to us by Satoshi.Bitcoin is a consensus of the parties involved inside it, involvingdevelopers, users, miners and infrastructure.Technologies that are developed and used affect the operation of Bitcoin,and our freedom to utilise the tool in different ways.This kind of complacency is just choosing to ignore the real impact of ouractions. It's not so simple as Bitcoin is here so lets do everything toget everyone using it and the world will be free. It's deeper.The real situation is Bitcoin is here, and it can evolve in a milliondifferent directions. Are we going to place our trust and infrastructureinto gatekeepers who betray us? Are we going to choose & empower thedevelopment decisions which gain greater convenience at the cost of highlycentralised mining? Are we going to put our resources as an industry intomore tools for tracking, surveilling and censoring users while a smallgroup of overworked individuals works to undo the damage from those tools?Or are we going to instead put our resources towards developing the realnext generation of technology that will enable new forms of humanassociation and trade to flourish on the internet.It's a very naive viewpoint and level 1 thinking to understand Bitcoin asa big family where rainbows and rabbits flourish in a big united utopia ofpayments innovation. Bitcoin is more complex, and our actions are feedinghow it mutates (which it is).It's an incredible tool with massive potential and possibilities. Ouractions simply decide how much of that potential we decide to unleash orsuppress.Remember, when faced between A and B where A benefits free trade and Bbenefits consumer convenience, which choice will we take. And how about1000 of these small choices on an everyday individual level. What kind ofBitcoin businesses do we want to build? Innovative flourishing enterprisesthat truly exploit this technology to its fullest, or companies that pusha united front, exert control and push Bitcoin where they want it.Question: what happens when The Foundation starts paying large numbers ofBitcoin developers financed by industry heads? What are the kinds ofthings they want to see in Bitcoin?If you still don't believe that features can be developed that are againstsmall business, p2p transfers and the blackmarket, but pro consumers andcorporations then see Mike Hearn's last proposal for improving thesecurity of 0conf payments with the unfortunate side effect of enablingminer blacklists.http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/23r9n2/lets_use_mike_hearns_coinbase_reallocation_to/And this is just the most malicious and prescient example. The vastmajority of proposals are non-controversial and non-noticeable to mostpeople. But don't forget, it's the sum of those decisions that affectsBitcoin. And it's not enough that Bitcoin is opensource. We actually needparticipating developers who understand these issues deeply. That's whyI'm so glad we have people like Peter Todd, who really see things deep andunderstand the true social, political and technical ramifications of ourdecisions that the 99% majority of developers (myself included) don't see. The beauty of Bitcoin is not that it is libertarian or anarchist. The beautiful thing about Bitcoin is that it can unite together democrats, republicans, socialists, anarchists, libertarians, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, people in Botswana <http://youtu.be/HmtDsvO407Y>, and people all over the world. The most important thing about Bitcoin is not the speed of transactions or even inexpensive payments - these are great features but the critical thing is that Bitcoin is decentralised. An entrepreneur running a VC backed firm (like myself) can create a proprietary, closed, walled-garden type system and try to get regulators to do certain things - but Bitcoin simply will press onwards. A programmer can try to change the protocol to enable infinite amounts of coins to be created, but Bitcoin will simply press onwards. If government regulators, VC-backed entrepreneurs and closed systems being involved in Bitcoin and trying to further the community and adoption is a bad thing - then we clearly are afraid that Bitcoin is not decentralised. If Bitcoin really is what we believe it is - then we have nothing to fear from anyone joining the community. If that is the case then we should welcome involvement from as wide and as diverse an audience as possible and not worry about the potentially. Unless these "suited men" and "false doctrines" can somehow push changes into the core bitcoin software that can get past all the core developers, let us welcome their efforts. Unless they can fool the minds of the brilliant and diligent people here on this list and elsewhere, let us welcome their efforts. Unless they can successfully sneak a change in which is accepted by the majority of nodes and miners, let us welcome their efforts. Let's not seek to find enemies where none exist. Jeremy Allaire may speak different words than you Amir, but you might find that he is working towards the same goal (furthering Bitcoin), albeit through different means. If Bitcoin is truly decentralised - we have nothing to fear and everything to be excited about. On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 7:34 PM, Amir Taaki <genjix@???> wrote: Luke, I also respect your contributions and have advocated your work because I believe you come from the heart and your ideals. Our ideals are not this political affiliation or that ideological dogma. Our ideals are a shared set of values around openness, fairness, empowerment of the common user and freedom of information. These values are the basis for the internet and why it's a success story. They are also the reasons why the printing press was able to reform Europe taking power away from corrupt catholic churches who had institutionalised their religion and turned it into a tool against actual followers of god who were being misled into following fake rules that were added in by men. Today we now follow suited men who sell us false doctrine and have elevated themselves up as beyond mortal men with the mirage that they hold a secret knowledge or power that we as people don't possess. When Christ kicked the money changers from the temple and washed the feet of the poor, it was a statement about who we as people should stand with. They are thieving from us, the people, everyday and now Bitcoin as tool is going to bring back technology into our hands. And I'm glad for that. So tell me, why should I embrace these white knights coming to legitimise Bitcoin with their surveillance and censorship palming it off with their gibberish newspeak. These people are real motherfuckers and what motivates them primarily is greed at your expense. They don't see Bitcoin as empowerment. They see Bitcoin as convenience, and are willing to compromise the empowerment aspect for more convenience. Bitcoin will grow, but the question is in which direction. I'm confident that Bitcoin will play an established and central role in our future financial infrastructure. My objective now is to maintain the integrity long enough for Bitcoin's empowerment aspect to play out, and grow it in the right directions that give us the power. Just like the struggles now to keep the internet uncensored and neutral, so too must we struggle to keep Bitcoin uncensored and neutral. And it's funny because all this talk of Bitcoin as being politically-neutral is a way of downplaying the values I've been talking about above. You can never be politically neutral. That's a fantasy. Technology embodies values. Satoshi had values. On 26/04/14 13:11, Luke-Jr wrote: Amir, I think you contribute much to bitcoin, and I value that. But Bitcoin is *not* libertarianism. Bitcoin is *not* anarchism. Bitcoin is *not* "volunteerism". Bitcoin is *not* a movement for financial freedom - or any political movement at all. Bitcoin is a technology, which can and should be embraced by people of any political affiliation. Adoption by people with views contrary to your own is not an attack on Bitcoin, it is growth. On Saturday, April 26, 2014 5:33:48 PM Amir Taaki wrote: I get what you're doing, but we both know that really isn't the case. Allaire speaks from his heart, and they hired Mike Hearn. I don't think we'll ever know the whole truth as that's not how these proprietary cultures work. Check this quote by him: "A lot of the safeguards that businesses and consumers take for granted in their everyday interactions and payments don’t exist in bitcoin [...]" or "if your goal is to ensure widespread adoption of bitcoin, there needs to be rules around its use, he says, arguing that it’s not good enough to imagine bitcoin can exist above society." This doesn't sound like descriptions of systems that empower users to self-regulate. This is the exact speech used behind many surveillance and censorship tools to push them on us. Things like "anti-fraud" blacklists or researching correlation techniques on consumer activity. If this tech is developed it will be deployed or pushed upon places like Coinbase. Coinbase is the only business (or US?) in the valley with a banking relationship which they have due to a special relationship with JP Morgan and one of their bankers on their board. And that's where these products that work against their users will come into play. Maybe the industry doesn't have enough balls, and big Bitcoin businesses with a large following (CoinBase, BitPay, ... whoever) start "self-regulating" by spying, tracking and censoring their users. On 26/04/14 06:31, Peter Todd wrote: On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 10:37:11AM +0100, Amir Taaki wrote: reducing the risk is newspeak for censorship protection against fraud is codeword for surveillance. Maybe it is; maybe it isn't. I hope Circle is just implementing all the decentralized technologies we've been talking about for ages that let people chose on their own terms how to reduce the risks involved in their transactions; best case is all this talk about moving Bitcoin away from its libertarian roots is just PR material. After all, Dark Market is an example of that approach, yet could also be marketted as "bringing Bitcoin into the mainstream with anti-fraud, lower costs, greater privacy safeguard, and protection against identity theft". I'm not very hopeful that's the case, but lets hold off on the torches and tar until they publish hard details on what exactly they are doing. _______________________________________________ unSYSTEM mailing list: http://unsystem.net https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unsystem _______________________________________________ unSYSTEM mailing list: http://unsystem.net https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unsystem _______________________________________________ unSYSTEM mailing list: http://unsystem.net https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unsystem_______________________________________________unSYSTEM mailing list: http://unsystem.nethttps://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unsystem