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Replacing email with XMPP...why not?
by Cypher 17 Jan '15

17 Jan '15

I've been reading a lot about the need to replace email and I'm not quite sure why we're not moving to an XMPP based model. It seems rather perfect for this kind of thing: 1. Federated 2. Users are already familiar with the addressing format 3. Easy to use, could easily integrate with existing email 4. Easily piped through Tor or i2p or whatever Security could be handled by using OTR the first time users happen to be on at the same time and exchanging PGP keys automagically with some kind of validation that the user can actually understand in place. I really don't see this as incredibly hard to build. Why are we not seriously looking at it? Sure, it doesn't address meta-data (it probably could though) but it's a step away from traditional email and towards something new. Thoughts? Cypher

5 5

on money /2 (resend)
by brian carroll 16 Jan '15

16 Jan '15

(additional notes/thoughts on money & currency in relation to material bank notes and electronic exchange of money & data, as this further relates to profiling, tracking, surveillance, modeling, though also culture, development, latent technological possibilities) Here wanted to share a few more ideas related to the last post, if not because they may be of a different than standard interpretation and allow another viewpoint to consider in terms of what is/& not going on in these terms. perhaps necessary to distinguish also situationally: of the present situation, of a transitional condition of major changes and paradigm shifts, and then a future totally redeveloped context that may allow a more pure approach than relying on legacy systems of dysfunction as the basis for further development, extended onward. In the present day, it seems cryptocurrency is the placeholder or trial for a future or transitional model of electronic currency that the state (in its global context) could employ or deploy, wider than the existing electronic payment and cash systems whether via welfare support (in the US called EBT (electronic benefit transfer) for foodstamps and-or cash support) or bank debit cards and credit cards, which range from access to checking or savings accounts for card holders, to prepaid cards that store value or represent stored value that can be mediated via networked infrastructure as part of a payment system/structure. If considering alternative paper currencies that can legally exist (at least in the US within certain guidelines), it would not seemingly be too far off to imagine a 'bitcoin card' that could function as a parallel payment system carried in a wallet and used on or offline, if it were to be established in a widely distributed alternative currency model that exists offline, in a context of these other (if competing) systems. In that it could involve its own ecosystem of exchange, and yet likely would be required at some point to be brought into line with tax laws in some structural way, (unsure of existing status, how these issues remain suspended) though the larger point is that issues of security and privacy would be similar in nature to these other similar systems, in which a level of robustness and protection would be necessary for massive use of such an alternative, if it were to become normalized. (meaning: trusting good will of Satoshi Nakamoto would not be enough for this.) And maybe this is the informal versus formalization aspect involved, the difference between an experiment and a seemingly steady-state system that would provide a parallel monetary system or alt.currency. The difference here also being, in terms of state monetary resources and those of the federal banking system, as it relates to 'money' that is represented on these cards, then maps back to fiat currency and-or bank-notes, which is represented by symbolic 'monetary bits' that are numbers equated with a universally accessible exchangeable value (exchange rate if outside the system or converting USD currency, if paper or electronic currency, else inflationary/deflationary sliding-scale of value, locally, on the longer-term, month-to-month, year-to-year as things change, dynamics and relations mapped to price fluctuations.) In that, specifically, the dollar amount on these electronic cards of the formal system can be traded for paper currency or cash and when they exist as numbers representing money in an electronic system or as an electronic monetary value (or sign or representation) this is a coherent structural relationship between the numbers represented and this larger ubiquitous fielded monetary system and its currency, paper or electronic. The electronic money on the bank card is tied to existing paper currency (though apparently 'electronic money' of banks is not, and appears to be detached from the world and function as 'monetary information' as money, which appears to be the foundation for financialization, monetary engineering in which new monetary value can be created ex nihilo via various calculations and esoteric calculus, if not disembodied from the world in an abstract and separated realm, not just beyond the gold standard of the past, though also beyond the standard of 'trust' that is the basis for establishing money itself in terms of shared exchange, where something recognized the same can be made transferable. It that it seems to be "theoretical money" involved in some way, at least from a naive outside viewpoint - and here is where the 'bitcoin approach' seems quite similar to what is going on internally, within the state and within banks and financing sectors, it all rests upon issues of trust at the base of the system, and thus what if monetary exchanges and the currency becomes ungrounded via such calculative acrobatics, as with the nature of theoretical physics of a wrong cosmology, unchecked.) This is to imagine that perhaps the actual situation of formal systems of money today are very much like the intangibility of other start-up electronic currencies, it just so happens one of these is a de facto global standard and seemingly regulated at least externally at the level of citizenry and businesses. And yet simultaneously appears to be 'highly virtual' as money, where it exists increasingly as bits or virtual currency, where money is data or 'information', in that a simple display of numbers with a dollar sign ($10) in a certain context is a legal guarantee of such funds and allows them to be exchanged or transferred in an electronic context, as well as offline. Thus for instance, e-commerce as a surrounding environment, where online development occurs and is tied back into the offline world, where the virtual meets the artificial and nature realms outside of the infrastructure. In this way, the bank note with RFID is partly tied into this accounting system and its various dimensions and dynamics, and moreso the bank card and credit card, which then carry 'information' about money, or have access to this money, and can mediate exchanges in various scenarios (such as over the telephone, online, at a cash register POS machine, or an ATM). In this way, there is a grounding of what appears to be money, its representation as data, and its actualization as a shared system everyone operates within to varying degrees, as this becomes the great leveler in relation to other issues, how they connect, relate, function or malfunction or short-circuit or fail to exist or be modeled in these terms, which range from beneficial to malicious & cruel. The strange thing is, this money system has become so detached from its core issue of common trust, so ungrounded in terms of what is "represented" by the currency, which is an agreed upon connection between people of a shared state or condition to mediate events in these terms, that instead of this monetary system serving -everyone-, instead it has become onesided and an entropic like migration occurs via a structural imbalance that moves money from one sector of society into another, which then correlates with power based on this money, and the money has less value in certain contexts and more value in other areas (peoples, business sectors) given the way these dynamics can be mediated and subverted, against the other side of a supposedly shared exchange. In that bad faith can become the standard basis for exchange, which leads to unshared exchange, someone pays for something they do not receive, or that their work is not accurately mapped into the income level while for others it is exponentially inflated, and these dynamics are not agreed upon and instead are the work of politics and class differentiation and discrimination and otherwise. So there is not a level relation occurring in the basic dynamics of exchange, which is supposedly based on a shared assumption of value, that today is now 'virtualized.' For previous generations the shared value or recognizable common truth that is at the core of fair exchange then mapped to gold or other storable value that was not just of a rare and prized metal - it was also philosophical in meaning, in terms of ideas (and cosmology) as this relates to alchemy and core religious meaning. In that 'the sun' maps into this gold standard, as does 'the one' of a shared view and understanding. As this progressed to a more abstract less worldly form of guarantee, it seems to have relied upon the state itself as this basis for trust in a common view for exchange, that citizens had other citizens in their own best interest and would seek to swindle one another to gain money because their own trust would be impinged and force censure or other forms of reprisal for corrupted actions in these communal terms. Somehow even this 'shared state' or condition has evaporated, which seems to coincide with the rise of untethered theorization of society, which in its best aspects is like poetric philosophy, (insightful metaphysics), and at its worst a false ungrounded doctrine that is the basis for a deception and false perspective and worldview, the basis for establishing and sustaining a collective il/de-lusion. The basis for a collective beneficial exchange between people seems to have potentially begun or been established in a bounded aristocratic framework that served interests of a shared empirical set (powerful interconnected males/ else the public and private patriarchal 'son/sun' as a shared identity and basis for the collective reasoning and representation of values, goals, ideas, planning, direction) as this then literally mapped to valuable metals (gold as the basis for currency) and issues of wealth and prestige and in some sense, the height of this culture. What appears to have occurred since its material and tangible detachment is that money and currency appear to be more and more just about information and the dollar sign ($) as a guarantee of a certain institutionalized value, a symbolic mark that is essentially capable of representing an arbitrary custom-bank note value, to the decimal point, into a realm of pennies if not beneath this once limiting threshold due to its functioning in an abstract realm of numbers and calculations, primarily. So long as the state is cohesive, such a federal system and international order of shared currency seemingly could continue functioning as the common standard, as if there is some 'shared truth' underneath it all, a common viewpoint and value or *trust* that is held in common between people. And yet, if the state itself were to fracture internally, and citizen is held against citizen in a competing realm of survival of the fittest, the monetary system could be undermined, and the value represented by money and held underneath this global system could evaporate, if the exchanges became structurally unfair, yet guaranteed by this same money. For instance paying for an online good and then being sent a broken item and not being able to return it or have legal recourse for the swindle, ripoff, or predatory business practices as this is institutionalized and made normal in the day to day. This then transforms the realm of money, where banks and institutions and the state itself can represent such hostile forces functioning against populations, the citizenry, in a lopsided system of exchange, which then funnels value (and work, especially) out of certain sectors and into others, via entropic loss of value or devaluing and the artificaial or rigged increase of value in other areas as if a natural balancing and yet it is instead engineered this way, as a form of political and fictionalized subversion, again to support a certain limited group and their interests at the expense of the many. The same money in a poor person's hands and a rich person's are of different value. The poor person can pay exorbitant rates comparable to their income for items that have no impact on the rich person because they have vast surplus money and it has essentially no effect or impact on their livelihood. The poor person can be ripped off by exchange and has no representation or recourse, while the rich person can rip off people and be legally protected in doing so, because of having this "communal" money. And yet exist only to serve themselves (as the one, the sun, the symbolic son, when in a context of heavenly patriarchy whether secularized or not, god the empirical father, &c.) Thus identity and ego and religious-like belief in self worth and others lesser worth and moral inferiority can be mapped to these monetary dynamics, which then define relations and this is how people are also institutionally mediated, and 'representation' occurs within the state and government. Numbers and accounting for things the basis for communication about a fictitious, highly warped, onesided privileged censorial vantage of the status quo. The point being that 'truth' that should be at the center of this modeling of money is not there, and instead it is based on an ungrounded and unshared belief that is the basis for 'exchange' which has since collapsed and exists in a corrupted or fallen realm, this then directly connected to issues of the US Constitution that established these dynamics, in that they began and persist in a structural context of _private-man and private mankind, given all the power in society to that subset group that can act in its own self-interest without consideration of others, with legal backing and supported by state violence. In that "the enlightenment" viewpoint was limited, bounded to private man's beliefs and 'his truth' which should be easy to recognize today as subjective when universalized to everyone viewpoint which it cannot represent, if only in terms of varying demographics, though also, which makes mankind the basis for community, a private category that is then an enclave for 'the public' only insofar as it benefits the privileged in that specific class and categorization, whereby maximal advantages are provided to this 'reasoning' and viewpoint, and maximally represented structurally, including as the basis for the shared exchange and trust and truth involved in money. Not like a private man's views of the world could be wrong or faulty, especially if they believe they are actually God. So it quickly moves into tyranny the moreso the issues are ungrounded and unchecked, as this correlates with 'trust me' in terms of exchange and money, where one citizen is then disadvantaged in an exchange that advantages another citizen, and thus flows of money migrate towards privileged groups who benefit and exploit and believe in these dynamics, if not as a reinforcement of a narrowed belief system, of their own superiority. This in terms of 'private man' as superman, as it relates to ego and action in the world, including over others, as if this is a moral victory of those fit over those deemed unfit. And the thing is, money today is completely mapped to that ideological assessment, that is the basis for the existing value of money today, as over centuries it has become detached from a human and equitable viewpoint and serves only some of the population at the expense of others, as this relates to work, to development, to reasoning, and how censorship and legal and political and police and other dynamics protect the worldview, enabling the house of cards to remain standing, where 'untruth' or falsity is at the center of the currency that is being exchanged, traded, and mediates 'human relations' in terms of private mankind, set against other men and in particular women and human beings in their public and private dimensions. What man needs to survive and conquer others in this system then maps to the id of surveillance, the police state regime, and accounting for other data in these same warped, onesided, and self-benefiting terms to those views. So imagine if the monetary system is believed by the hotshots to back their narcissistic and egotistic views and self-belief as if they are the gold standard for everything else that is occurring, the foundation and structure and manifest cosmic forces, as if pseudo-truth or ungrounded theoretical beliefs are unerring as binary ideological projections, and these "the observers" infallible in their superior viewpoints and awareness others unfit and lesser cannot understand, as this maps to their feelings and self-worth, except that if untrue and unreal this condition would be instead the centralization of everything in opposite terms, where instead of gold these people are lead, and economics and politics and society are being mediated in such frameworks instead, as if highest nature instead of lowest nature, and that it is a vast illusion and delusion and essentially institutionalization of madness that then is mediated in terms of power and brute force to conform other dissenting views, including keeping truth outside the false framework and effectively religious belief system, except that the gods enshrined are these men and those connected with their despotism. This is what is mediated by the US dollar as paper currency, believed to be gold in its symbolic value, when instead organizing everything in terms of these principles of lead. The more this value system is informationalized, made symbolic and calculable as data, the more power is accrued within this corrupt system, to further enforce such corruption. In this way, the creation of new money out of nothing, either as information or though the exploitation of information (as currency, and via its monetization) carries with it a power structure and social terms that rely upon expropriation of human worth and value, and of various other values and principles, including of females, women, and nature itself, if not beings in general and life, which then is subjugated and forced into these antihuman and anti-life and anti-nature hidden terms and conditions, beyond any checks and balances as this is legally backed by the corrupt bug-ridden US Constitution that allows for all of this. So it is all okay, then, because a bunch of rich patriarchs hundreds of years ago are held to be infallible as founding fathers.... except not. They themselves provisioned that this is a trap, and needs to be revised, upon future awareness and higher reasoning and truth yet 'reason itself' broke down via binary viewpoints and has since shut down other perspectives to a monologue of rightness based upon bureaucratized power run by centralized computer. In this way the god as state, except it is a non-living entity, dumb-AI, in service to a subset that has no qualms about enslaving and exploiting others for power, profit, and their pleasure. So everyone can suffer as long as it benefits them, and what does not benefit them must not be allowed to exist, else the entire system is delegitimated. The state thus made tyrannical. And not just locally, this occurring globally, institutionally, organizationally, via policies that are effectively operating beyond reason, and with illiterate populations unable to reason due to such devolutionary policies and frameworks and continuing and ongoing development, as antihuman culture. In this way the state is in service to private corporations of rich citizenry, where police, lawyers, and doctors mediate middle and lower class citizenry and the poor. The government itself in its representation is hollowed out and instead it is mediated in terms of monetary worth as a determiner of exchange and citizen value, proportionally, such that lawyers are the representatives of the citizenry with the state, not those elected for policy, and their decisions are on behalf of power, who has or will gain more money, in effect, as a basis for who is right or what truth supports the more powerful in a given scenario. It is just extremely ugly and ungodly, where shared governance of citizenry then becomes unshared and mediated by politics of policing, medicine, and legal rights, to onesided privileged benefit most often correlated to power as the shared and higher authority, and not of cosmic truth. So there is an enlightenment/anti-enlightenment situation involved, of a grounded perspective that can be shared by citizenry and an ungrounded (also increasingly virtual or reliant on this) belief of a subset that functions as and believes itself superior, the authority, the ruling class, though of course in hidden or cryptic terms. In this way, an invasion of the US by an incoming hostile population sent to conquer territory can replace the citizenry and operate within these self-beneficial conditions, while those on their own home territory can become disenfranchised and destitute via these polarized dynamics. If anything, it is most apparent in the luxurification and luxification of the middle-class lifestyle and easy money for certain groups of people (sans cultural insight and instead, new forms of factory labor though in terms of web skills, art galleries, etc) where 'new royalty' appear out of nowhere, and have upper-middle-class lifestyles sustained within such a bubble, of no financial issues whatsoever, able to eat out every meal with incomes at jobs that do not support such expenditures, with butler and concierge service via mobile Apps, the very industry most supporting this skewed worldview, and yet on the inside of this there is no higher understanding or truth that is the ancient connection with grounded royal hierarchy, of its spiritual dimension, and instead there is nothing there except base materialism at play. Again, lead instead of gold, as this then represents 'the masses' and self-beneficial collective decision-making of a particular self-interested private group or subset, siphoning away the commons for such unchecked excess, that also directly correlates with ego and immorality, and that anything goes via relativistic beliefs, and others are lesser beings to be exterminated. In this way, if you try to function as a human being within such an upside-down world in its ideological operation, lines of force exist to punish and force conformance and submission to the private collective diktat that is actually based in falsity and ungrounded information and unshared value at its center, mediated and represented and symbolized by money. A person may only function at one percent of their actual capacity, and may simply struggle to survive or adapt and remain sane or cognizant within such an antihuman condition, thus weathering the onslaught or downfall or fall the historic state itself, while imposters may be operating at 100% of their capacity as mimics or drones to perform symbolically in roles & routines, standing-in as 'representatives' or citizens though while against human citizenry, hostile to human being and principles of life, love, privacy, freedom, truth, democracy, etc. In this way, the fractional ability of human action then is combined and parts so divided in a non-empirical framework of the false perspective, of relativistic religious-like beliefs, then cannot combine into a whole viewpoint and thus the unshared view moves further towards zero the more that human citizens combined cannot relate in literate and complex terms, leading to hypothetical 0.000000000001 percent operational capacity of human agency in the world, versus 100% for the antihuman forces secured within fallen state bureaucracy, which then becomes the overseer and judge/jury/executioner based on evaluated fitness, though outside legal frameworks and inside these other realms of exchange and relation. Human efficiency, aptitude and agency per individual nearly negligible in the world today, whereas the entirety of humanity is serving these other interests to its own demise. In that everything is moving to that subset group, all advantages, all surplus, all rights, and it is also the view in charge of the surveillance apparatus, the overseer, or believed so. In this way 'the great eye' at the top of the pyramid, yet which may have issues of myopia, or perhaps even be blind to certain dimensions, if not testing and grounding vision to truth and instead correlating and focusing on an unreal, ungrounded view of cosmic relation. In that falsity may be what is aligned with, or bad ideas, or warped beliefs, false perspective. In this way the false economy, the faux society, lavender tattoos and fleur-de-lis piercings while such populations are shuttled to one location and other via personal Uber chauffeurs. In such a context then, "information" about people that is treated as if forests for pioneers to extract as a natural and free resource to make other things from, exploit to the fullest for self benefit regardless of connected ecology, to the point of practices of deforestation and ecological devastation. The business model apparently is: get or be given stuff for free, and then resell it at maximal cost and reap the rewards. Best practice is having the people exploited pay or volunteer for this expropriation of private value (of data, other) and then mine or otherwise subvert interactions to again maximally extract value whether in legal or illegal terms, as this relates to privacy, citizen rights, and issues of property that can be disregarded in such a hidden and advantageous, unregulated 'morally free market'; humans like nature exist to be exploited by others who are unlike, for their own advantage. This then closely aligned with issues of slavery and colonization, though in the form of subverted consumer electronics and apps as the new wave of antihuman colonization, and yet this is not made explicit due to protected interests, signed pieces of paper that armies of lawyers, the police, the state itself protect to allow for this 'commons' relation. So this is what money is in the middle of, these are the dynamics, and what it could or once represented was a common shared value that no longer exists between people, who are now in oppositional terms as citizens, of two separate and competing states, one functioning against its declared governing principles by exploiting legal loopholes as a basis for establishing power and overtaking the state as its tyrannical antithesis. The only piece of code able to address and engage this situation allowing for military takeover in a state of emergency, and a constitution convention to reboot the state in new and better terms, as agreed to by those convening in a new universal framework. This could be antihuman, and lead to the loss of the state itself, or human and the regaining of the state and its rewiring and redevelopment in terms of our humanity. Cryptography would probably be absolutely necessary to pursue such a path and yet it appears self-evident that crypto cannot be allowed to exist, that would enable such private communication that could threaten hidden and ruling conspiratorial interests. Thus all crypto must remain broken for the antihuman state to remain safe & secure. In this way, this is the immediate situation encountered with issues of currency as this spans from monetary systems to monetization of data and the centralization of auditing and accounting that functions as money, as currency, in terms of power that uses this to reinforce a certain biased or relativistic truth while censoring out others that may devalue ungrounded perspectives (on economics, other evidence, data, etc). So while trials of alternative currency may exist locally offline or even globally online, and systems of barter or various ecosystems of exchange/trade could be established, it remains within this overwhelming and oppressive default condition, which then is the prevailing force that determines what can and will happen, via its implementation and the potential for its subversion, how it can be maximally exploited in these same terms. Thus suggestions about what to do, say to establish a national cashless system, then occurs in a context of previously mentioned biased structures of taxation as well as other forms of leveraging and imbalances, that then would be further secured by the uncritical or uncareful rollout of such options or advances, making it all easier for the exploiters and all the more difficult and painful for the exploited, via unnecessarily increased suffering that by comparison can be exponential, in support of such tyranny. So near-term there is immense danger at doing anything without first recognizing the actual condition, parameters, dynamics, and stakes that exist in the questions and issues of development, particularly so highly connected technological systems that create massive centralized efficiencies that disenfranchise more local realities which are never accounted for or censored out or managed away via planned dysfunction. If this condition were addressed in straightforward terms, it may be possible to proceed in a way that protects people and prevents such dynamics from worsening, which can involve state and regional governance and federal and international changes in policy. And so what presently exists in the span of electronically-tagged bank notes, debit and credit cards, stored valued and prepaid cards, is already operating within this domain, as are other forms of electronic payment and barter, including 'rewards cards' and 'points' or electronic tallied perks that span dollar value currency to other forms, which feasibly could be mediated by a single device or card system in the future. In this way, the up-and-coming Apple Watch could be the device most likely to mediate the depth and breadth of this situation, from taxation (hidden and overt) to payments (debit and credit to rewards cards to bitcoin exchange) and yet this concentration is also potentially a weak-spot for the individual and a maximal pressure point for those targeted in these dimensions, allowing more coherent control within a single device that could be used for exploitation, subversion, illegal monitoring, and on and so on. There would need to be a transitional scenario to address these concerns within a sufficient legal framework that protects citizens and establishes a new set of rules, for such integrated systems to operate in more bounded terms of expropriation of data and details that can be used against and disenfranchise human populations. Central to this would be a new infrastructure that allows for the conceptual rewiring of existing Internet of Things (IoT) ideology into a protected framework that serves and does not exploit common human interests for others to profit from this tyranny. The situation with money and currency is core to this. A new standard is needed to reestablish currency within a context and framework of truth, so rules of fair exchange are known and enforceable, establishing the shared social,economic,governing structure. It is likely the only way to accomplish this is through electronic currency, whereby the dynamics of the paper system are let go of, or released, and mediated in other terms more beneficial to economic principles than producing physical placeholders for value that devalue the monetary system itself. A penny more expensive to produce than its own value, (googled: "It costs the federal government 2.4 cents to make a penny and 11.2 cents to make a nickel."). This is obviously backward and counterproductive yet insanely the normalized ungrounded situation, the default everyday nonsense scenario. To get to a new monetary system or at least electronic currency, there is no way this can be achieved without first addressing the relation between currency and taxation, which is one issue in a context of paper currency, and another in a context of data as both currency and representative of money itself (i.e. guaranteed dollar sign amount). The big view involves necessary to comprehend dynamics that today the tax system and money both are frictional and function against economy, and this directly connects with data likewise that is limited by these forces in moving around or circulating in terms of its value, which can be monetized though also or more fundamentally, its relation to truth that can be accessible and achieved through reasoning, if made available/allowed. To free up data in a context of public and private infrastructure will require addressing issues of its taxation to enable public subsidy of the IoT infrastructure within a public framework and dimensions, this comparable to the need for the US as a nation when established to develop a federal national parks system [ref.ecddr], state parks, and greenways (such as the beautiful Twin Cities, or Central Park in NYC by Frederick Law Olmsted), including areas for recreation, fishing, baseball, picnics, dances, concerts, iceskating and skiing, trails for hiking, nature preserves, etc. This reflected shared public values of the citizenry to participate and interact and stay connected with nature as the basis for values, which has since eroded and been commercialized, turned into simulacrum, as if everywhere is now a sector of an unacknowledged private Disney themepark. A private corporation cannot represent or establish this shared public realm without distorting it to its narrowed business interests, involving a different motivating agenda. Instead, to create that public realm of data exchange would require public subsidization to allow for its development and sustenance, to enable exchange and interconnection in a wider realm of human interests and values, such as knowledge, cultural development, learning and education, policy and government planning and citizen representation and public-private collaboration mediated in the public sphere, not behind closed doors, in this way an agora for debate and discussion and commons, for culture to exist within. The insular, proprietarized introverted self-focused internet then could be extroverted and brought out of its shell and more fully integrate with peoples lives in a balanced way, including with issues of security and privacy (cryptography related, if of integrity) and yet to accomplish this 'data' itself would need to be addressed in the same way that paper currency and taxation likewise need to be, in that the granularity or the existing 'decimal' level resolution is completely insufficient to mediate issues of fair exchange and fair tax and shared value in these existing warped structural dynamics and a new higher resolution, micro- or fractional-value is needed in a data context that allows microtransactions and microdata (IoT) to exist instead of the default issues of audiovisual bandwidth for telecommuncations and big-pipe infrastructure layouts that functionally extort money to provide access, where scarcity is establishing maximal profit at the price of maximal friction for 'ideas' and 'reasoning' in the form of data that is either locked away or untransmissable due to red tape, barriers, ownership laws that turn something public into a private confined property that is valued by limited access yet is unjust in nature, and so on. Everything backwards, cannibalistic, to profit by not allowing things to happen, by hoarding, preventing, instead of freeing, interacting, building, it is erosion of interaction, knowledge, reasoning, ideas, etc. It is the Dark Ages 2.0 when in an information society of maximal communication shared truth has gone missing, empirical logical reasoning, instead relativism is ubiquitous, clueless to its own isolated individuated egoistic narcissistic condition. There is no knowledge within computing systems, within networking, beyond that of a highly biased tyrannical STEM framework that is the ruling technocratic ideology, that outside of its own parameters is completely ignorance and instead seeks to engineer culture while representing it in a quantified worldview, as if that simple. In this way the issue of theology and religion without truth or morality at the center, and instead an ideological version of onesided pseudo-truth believed universal and the just and legitimate framework to legislate collective reality in scientific terms. In this way experimentation on human populations occurs, illegal spying to gather data for social engineering, and so to, denial of public services, for such a goal and ideal of the utopic state of an ungrounded subset that is beyond external regulation, existing on the inside of the hidden state, turning dials and pulling levers of control. If these dynamics could be dealt with, some vastly improved margin of safety and realignment for the common human good and its welfare, then microtax and this microdata could relate to microfinancing, and various currency systems could co- exist in a shared framework. Such that the entrepreneurial imperative of the citizen could be realized in a sufficient framework necessary to realize its potential, such that telework and other visions could become standardized and resolved in terms of the previous domains of bureaucracy, which instead of limiting interactions can be made to allow easy and secured and guaranteed fair exchange, such that any interaction in terms of money could be automatically micro-taxed, whereby the previous issues of paperwork and auditing are not held as a Damocles sword over an individual's life, for trying to do something, and instead could be infrastructural and made as friction-free as possible. At the same time, data itself, its movement or transfer within certain parameters (such as IoT device-to-device or work output) could involve a basic structural microtax, subpenny, a tiny fractional amount that is tallied in the background that is extremely nominal per person, perhaps nearly nonexistent in terms of small coinage per interaction or day, though adds up in the background as a support for sustaining infrastructure, and thus provides the basis for subsidizing free public transaction spaces for interaction of devices and people outside a corporate controlled and defined framework. In this way, if the taxes are automatically dedicated and defined in highly sane terms which are essentially mediated entirely in a realm of electronics and numbers and nothing to do with paper currency or production of money, beyond an interface device (say currency card as meta-note) then lots of things could be possible that would allow short-term interactions in business and legal frameworks that then remove the threat of prosecution due to error or misreading or incapacity to deal with the bureaucracy that is purposefully unable to be mediated except by means of a professional middle-man which can exploit these dynamics politically, such that especially for the poor, no actions can be taken without retaliation and further repression for trying to operate at a higher level than the ruling class will allow, as this is enforced by IRS audits and monitoring, even of the poor, at the dollar level, this protecting power of millionaires and billionaires of great excess and surplus. (When is the last time you have had the power cut to your apartment complex in retaliation for having a coffee and banana bread at a cafe as a birthday gift? This indicating the entrenched level of corruption involved, its operational peak in wielding the power grid, telecommunications and surveillance to oppress.) What the future could hold, in this situation could be transformed, would be a realm that moves from a basic electronic currency that is guaranteed in truth, via a new constitutional and thus legal framework, is the unification of services including public and private, within a shared system of interaction and access. The grocery rewards points and airline miles of credit card today could be the approach to systems of barter or tiered access and achievement. For instance, the issue of Boy Scout merit badges translating a series of skills and aptitudes into an electronic structure instead, when then could be compiled per individual as to what events are tallied in such a system, as personal circuity, cartography of the self, whereby like degree programs at University, self-learning could occur via attending a particular class at one location or institution, and then another at another time or space, as these compile into a self-learning framework that can become an education and lead to employment or vocation or other approaches. In this sense, money as data, though also the gamification potential of learning and incentivizing certain learning and skill building, training, taking risks, etc. As this then can inform and develop a culture that is coherent, serving its needs and larger goals. Such as conservation programs for natural environments & wildlife, or volunteering as requirement for other perks that could be mediated privately and-or publicly, by businesses, governments, even within families as incentive. Thus in some sense like a running curriculum vitae, though across all areas. In this way, a non-monetary system that is about data as currency could also be established, in particular government support of institutions that then could change data dynamics likewise. For instance government funding for a museum could enable a perk akin to those for corporate workers, that a family or person would have a token to visit the museum twice a year for free, based on this public subsidy and also its benefit to shared culture and literacy. And perhaps even barter could occur between people, if someone wanted to see the orchestra. This would level the field for those without money to still participate in the culture versus banning people based on not having enough money to be included or to participate or be represented within culture. Likewise, if a digital picture frame the size of a large painting were commonplace, say an electronic ink version, then this same museum may allow the loan via copyright of a single image of an artistic work from their museum archive to be displayed via fair use in homes and dwellings, as part of this extension and interconnection of shared value. It costs nothing, except it mediates issues of property and copyright differently, in human public and private terms and not just onesided selfish private terms. In such a context, perhaps a person carries an avatar or some intelligent agent or their pseudonyms and a level of anonymity along with them in these systems, or that they can microfinance and allocate support to certain indiegogo/kickstarter like personal initiative at the level of penny stocks, though multiplied to millions of participants with small fluctuating amounts though secured through temporary or limited contracts, in this way microloans or investments that may socially benefit though not return money back to the person and instead develop culture or others capacity or programs, some moreso than others, including via the ability of the citizen to direct a proportion of their taxes into these variable programs, thus to have their interests served or represented by the distribution of their tax revenue. Thus scholarships may be funded decentrally or a public garden or an experiment, though perhaps within a higher realm of expectation than today, non-trivial and instead of creating and supporting junk, that an auditing of the ideas is involved such that it is of value to invest in, and reflects the principles of a given person or people to support. And thus foolishness or wastefulness may not predominate as the ground-up cultural development, funding pension funds for lazy digerati. So too, the literal realm of games, whereby perhaps a global videogame system is established and mediated in these same dynamics, as well as within education whereby a 'dream center' would allow each citizen to develop their skills within a grant-framework, honing their self-understanding through step by step development and then creating a structure to place them optimally within society for maximal contributive effect, via these same means, mechanisms, and structural dynamics. So for instance, like an urban treasure hunt today or gps waypoints in a wilderness obstacle course, so too education or learning or skill development or life itself, for instance going to location A (which may be a business) and mediating it within a certain set of parameters (say for a game or educational skills) and having this data tallied into the data currency framework, opening doors literal or figurative, whereby the labyrinth can be exited if finding and following the string of education. -- anything less is tiddlywinks -- ×¿‡Žâ“ §ß¤Ω∑∕÷ ©%¥2

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on money /2
by brian carroll 16 Jan '15

16 Jan '15

(additional notes/thoughts on money & currency in relation to material bank notes and electronic exchange of money & data, as this further relates to profiling, tracking, surveillance, modeling, though also culture, development, latent technological possibilities) Here wanted to share a few more ideas related to the last post, if not because they may be of a different than standard interpretation and allow another viewpoint to consider in terms of what is/& not going on in these terms. perhaps necessary to distinguish also situationally: of the present situation, of a transitional condition of major changes and paradigm shifts, and then a future totally redeveloped context that may allow a more pure approach than relying on legacy systems of dysfunction as the basis for further development, extended onward. In the present day, it seems cryptocurrency is the placeholder or trial for a future or transitional model of electronic currency that the state (in its global context) could employ or deploy, wider than the existing electronic payment and cash systems whether via welfare support (in the US called EBT (electronic benefit transfer) for foodstamps and-or cash support) or bank debit cards and credit cards, which range from access to checking or savings accounts for card holders, to prepaid cards that store value or represent stored value that can be mediated via networked infrastructure as part of a payment system/structure. If considering alternative paper currencies that can legally exist (at least in the US within certain guidelines), it would not seemingly be too far off to imagine a 'bitcoin card' that could function as a parallel payment system carried in a wallet and used on or offline, if it were to be established in a widely distributed alternative currency model that exists offline, in a context of these other (if competing) systems. In that it could involve its own ecosystem of exchange, and yet likely would be required at some point to be brought into line with tax laws in some structural way, (unsure of existing status, how these issues remain suspended) though the larger point is that issues of security and privacy would be similar in nature to these other similar systems, in which a level of robustness and protection would be necessary for massive use of such an alternative, if it were to become normalized. (meaning: trusting good will of Satoshi would not be enough for this.) And maybe this is the informal versus formalization aspect involved, the difference between an experiment and a seemingly steady-state system that would provide a parallel monetary system or alt.currency. The difference here also being, in terms of state monetary resources and those of the federal banking system, as it relates to 'money' that is represented on these cards, then maps back to fiat currency and- or bank-notes, which is represented by symbolic 'monetary bits' that are numbers equated with a universally accessible exchangeable value (exchange rate if outside the system or converting USD currency, if paper or electronic currency, else inflationary/deflationary sliding-scale of value, locally, on the longer-term, month-to-month, year-to-year as things change, dynamics and relations mapped to price fluctuations.) In that, specifically, the dollar amount on these electronic cards of the formal system can be traded for paper currency or cash and when they exist as numbers representing money in an electronic system or as an electronic monetary value (or sign or representation) this is a coherent structural relationship between the numbers represented and this larger ubiquitous fielded monetary system and its currency, paper or electronic. The electronic money on the bank card is tied to existing paper currency (though apparently 'electronic money' of banks is not, and appears to be detached from the world and function as 'monetary information' as money, which appears to be the foundation for financialization, monetary engineering in which new monetary value can be created ex nihilo via various calculations and esoteric calculus, if not disembodied from the world in an abstract and separated realm, not just beyond the gold standard of the past, though also beyond the standard of 'trust' that is the basis for establishing money itself in terms of shared exchange, where something recognized the same can be made transferable. It that it seems to be "theoretical money" involved in some way, at least from a naive outside viewpoint - and here is where the 'bitcoin approach' seems quite similar to what is going on internally, within the state and within banks and financing sectors, it all rests upon issues of trust at the base of the system, and thus what if monetary exchanges and the currency becomes ungrounded via such calculative acrobatics, as with the nature of theoretical physics of a wrong cosmology, unchecked.) This is to imagine that perhaps the actual situation of formal systems of money today are very much like the intangibility of other start-up electronic currencies, it just so happens one of these is a de facto global standard and seemingly regulated at least externally at the level of citizenry and businesses. And yet simultaneously appears to be 'highly virtual' as money, where it exists increasingly as bits or virtual currency, where money is data or 'information', in that a simple display of numbers with a dollar sign ($10) in a certain context is a legal guarantee of such funds and allows them to be exchanged or transfered in an electronic context, as well as offline. Thus for instance, e-commerce as a surrounding environment, where online development occurs and is tied back into the offline world, where the virtual meets the artificial and nature realms outside of the infrastructure. In this way, the bank note with RFID is partly tied into this accounting system and its various dimensions and dynamics, and moreso the bank card and credit card, which then carry 'information' about money, or have access to this money, and can mediate exchanges in various scenarios (such as over the telephone, online, at a cash register POS machine, or an ATM). In this way, there is a grounding of what appears to be money, its representation as data, and its actualization as a shared system everyone operates within to varying degrees, as this becomes the great leveler in relation to other issues, how they connect, relate, function or malfunction or short-circuit or fail to exist or be modeled in these terms, which range from beneficial to malicious & cruel. The strange thing is, this money system has become so detached from its core issue of common trust, so ungrounded in terms of what is "represented" by the currency, which is an agreed upon connection between people of a shared state or condition to mediate events in these terms, that instead of this monetary system serving -everyone-, instead it has become onesided and an entropic like migration occurs via a structural imbalance that moves money from one sector of society into another, which then correlates with power based on this money, and the money has less value in certain contexts and more value in other areas (peoples, business sectors) given the way these dynamics can be mediated and subverted, against the other side of a supposedly shared exchange. In that bad faith can become the standard basis for exchange, which leads to unshared exchange, someone pays for something they do not receive, or that their work is not acurately mapped into the income level while for others it is exponentially inflated, and these dynamics are not agreed upon and instead are the work of politics and class differentiation and discrimination and otherwise. So there is not a level relation occurring in the basic dynamics of exchange, which is supposedly based on a shared assumption of value, that today is now 'virtualized.' For previous generations the shared value or recognizable common truth that is at the core of fair exchange then mapped to gold or other storable value that was not just of a rare and prized metal - it was also philosophical in meaning, in terms of ideas (and cosmology) as this relates to alchemy and core religious meaning. In that 'the sun' maps into this gold standard, as does 'the one' of a shared view and understanding. As this progressed to a more abstract less worldly form of guarantee, it seems to have relied upon the state itself as this basis for trust in a common view for exchange, that citizens had other citizens in their own best interest and would seek to swindle one another to gain money because their own trust would be impinged and force censure or other forms of reprisal for corrupted actions in these communal terms. Somehow even this 'shared state' or condition has evaporated, which seems to coincide with the rise of untethered theorization of society, which in its best aspects is like poetric philosophy, and in its worst, a false ungrounded doctrine that is the basis for a deception and false perspective and worldview, the basis for establishing and sustaining a collective il/de-lusion. The basis for a collective beneficial exchange between people seems to have potentially begun or been established in a bounded aristocratic framework that served interests of a shared empirical set (powerful interconnected males/ else the public and private patriarchal 'son/sun' as a shared identity and basis for the collective reasoning and representation of values,goals,ideas,planning,direction) as this then literally mapped to valuable metals (gold as the basis for currency) and issues of wealth and prestige and in some sense, the height of this culture. What appears to have occurred since its material and tangible detachment is that money and currency appear to be more and more just about information and the dollar sign ($) as a guarantee of a certain institutionalized value, a symbolic mark that is essentially capable of representing an arbitrary custom-bank note value, to the decimal point, into a realm of pennies if not beneath this once limiting threshold due to its functioning in an abstract realm of numbers and calculations, primarily. So long as the state is cohesive, such a federal system and international order of shared currency seemingly could continue functioning as the common standard, as if there is some 'shared truth' underneath it all, a common viewpoint and value or *trust* that is held in common between people. And yet, if the state itself were to fracture internally, and citizen is held against citizen in a competing realm of survival of the fittest, the monetary system could be undermined, and the value represented by money and held underneath this global system could evaporate, if the exchanges became structurally unfair, yet guaranteed by this same money. For instance paying for an online good and then being sent a broken item and not being able to return it or have legal recourse for the swindle, ripoff, or predatory business practices as this is institutionalized and made normal in the day to day. This then transforms the realm of money, where banks and institutions and the state itself can represent such hostile forces functioning against populations, the citizenry, in a lopsided system of exchange, which then funnels value (and work, especially) out of certain sectors and into others, via entropic loss of value or devaluing and the artificaial or rigged increase of value in other areas as if a natural balancing and yet it is instead engineered this way, as a form of political and fictionalized subversion, again to support a certain limited group and their interests at the cost of the many. The same money in a poor person's hands and a rich person's are of different value. The poor person can pay exorbitant rates comparable to their income for items that have no impact on the rich person because they have vast surplus money and it has essentially no effect or impact on their livelihood. The poor person can be ripped off by exchange and has no representation or recourse, while the rich person can rip off people and be legally protected in doing so, because of having this "communal" money. And yet exist only to serve themselves (as the one, the sun, the symbolic son, when in a context of heavenly patriarchy whether secularized or not, god the empirical father, &c.) Thus identity and ego and religious-like belief in self worth and others lesser worth and moral inferiority can be mapped to these monetary dynamics, which then define relations and this is how people are also institutionally mediated, and 'representation' occurs within the state and government. Numbers and accounting for things the basis for communication about a fictitious, highly warped, onesided privileged censorial vantage of the status quo. The point being that 'truth' that should be at the center of this modeling of money is not there, and instead it is based on an ungrounded and unshared belief that is the basis for 'exchange' which has since collapsed and exists in a corrupted or fallen realm, this then directly connected to issues of the US Constitution that established these dynamics, in that they began and persist in a structural context of _private-man and private mankind, given all the power in society to that subset group that can act in its own self-interest without consideration of others, with legal backing and supported by state violence. In that "the enlightenment" viewpoint was limited, bounded to private man's beliefs and 'his truth' which should be easy to recognize today as subjective when universalized to everyone viewpoint which it cannot represent, if only in terms of varying demographics, though also, which makes mankind the basis for community, a private category that is then an enclave for 'the public' only insofar as it benefits the privileged in that specific class and categorization, whereby maximal advantages are provided to this 'reasoning' and viewpoint, and maximally represented structurally, including as the basis for the shared exchange and trust and truth involved in money. Not like a private man's views of the world could be wrong or faulty, especially if they believe they are actually God. So it quickly moves into tyranny the moreso the issues are ungrounded and unchecked, as this correlates with 'trust me' in terms of exchange and money, where one citizen is then disadvantaged in an exchange that advantages another citizen, and thus flows of money migrate towards privileged groups who benefit and exploit and believe in these dynamics, if not as a reinforcement of a narrowed belief system, of their own superiority. This in terms of 'private man' as superman, as it relates to ego and action in the world, including over others, as if this is a moral victory of those fit over those deemed unfit. And the thing is, money today is completely mapped to that ideological assessment, that is the basis for the existing value of money today, as over centuries it has become detached from a human and equitable viewpoint and serves only some of the population at the expense of others, as this relates to work, to development, to reasoning, and how censorship and legal and political and police and other dynamics protect the worldview, enabling the house of cards to remain standing, where 'untruth' or falsity is at the center of the currency that is being exchanged, traded, and mediates 'human relations' in terms of private mankind, set against other men and in particular women and human beings in their public and private dimensions. What man needs to survive and conquer others in this system then maps to the id of surveillance, the police state regime, and accounting for other data in these same warped, onesided, and self-benefiting terms to those views. So imagine if the monetary system is believed by the hotshots to back their narcissistic and egotistic views and self-belief as if they are the gold standard for everything else that is occurring, the foundation and structure and manifest cosmic forces, as if pseudo-truth or ungrounded theoretical beliefs are unerring as binary ideological projections, and these "the observers" infallible in their superior viewpoints and awareness others unfit and lesser cannot understand, as this maps to their feelings and self-worth, except that if untrue and unreal this condition would be instead the centralization of everything in opposite terms, where instead of gold these people are lead, and economics and politics and society are being mediated in such frameworks instead, as if highest nature instead of lowest nature, and that it is a vast illusion and delusion and essentially institutionalization of madness that then is mediated in terms of power and brute force to conform other dissenting views, including keeping truth outside the false framework and effectively religious belief system, except that the gods enshrined are these men and those connected with their despotism. This is what is mediated by the US dollar as paper currency, believed to be gold in its symbolic value, when instead organizing everything in terms of these principles of lead. The more this value system is informationalized, made symbolic and calculable as data, the more power is accrued within this corrupt system, to further enforce such corruption. In this way, the creation of new money out of nothing, either as information or though the exploitation of information (as currency, and via its monetization) carries with it a power structure and social terms that rely upon expropriation of human worth and value, and of various other values and principles, including of females, women, and nature itself, if not beings in general and life, which then is subjugated and forced into these antihuman and antilife and antinature hidden terms and conditions, beyond any checks and balances as this is legally backed by the corrupt bug-ridden US Constitution that allows for all of this. So it is all okay, then, because a bunch of rich patriarchs hundreds of years ago are held to be infallible as founding fathers.... except not. They themselves provisioned that this is a trap, and needs to be revised, upon future awareness and higher reasoning and truth yet 'reason itself' broke down via binary viewpoints and has since shut down other perspectives to a monologue of rightness based upon bureaucratized power run by centralized computer. In this way the god as state, except it is a non-living entity, dumb-AI, in service to a subset that has no qualms about enslaving and exploiting others for power, profit, and their pleasure. So everyone can suffer as long as it benefits them, and what does not benefit them must not be allowed to exist, else the entire system is delegitimated. The state thus made tyrannical. And not just locally, this occurring globally, institutionally, organizationally, via policies that are effectively operating beyond reason, and with illiterate populations unable to reason due to such devolutionary policies and frameworks and continuing and ongoing development, as antihuman culture. In this way the state is in service to private corporations of rich citizenry, where police, lawyers, and doctors mediate middle and lower class citizenry and the poor. The government itself in its representation is hollowed out and instead it is mediated in terms of monetary worth as a determiner of exchange and citizen value, proportionally, such that lawyers are the representatives of the citizenry with the state, not those elected for policy, and their decisions are on behalf of power, who has or will gain more money, in effect, as a basis for who is right or what truth supports the more powerful in a given scenario. It is just extremely ugly and ungodly, where shared governance of citizenry then becomes unshared and mediated by politics of policing, medicine, and legal rights, to onesided privileged benefit most often correlated to power as the shared and higher authority, and not of cosmic truth. So there is an enlightenment/anti-enlightenment situation involved, of a grounded perspective that can be shared by citizenry and an ungrounded (also increasingly virtual or reliant on this) belief of a subset that functions as and believes itself superior, the authority, the ruling class, though of course in hidden or cryptic terms. In this way, an invasion of the US by an incoming hostile population sent to conquer territory can replace the citizenry and operate within these self-beneficial conditions, while those on their own home territory can become disenfranchised and destitute via these polarized dynamics. If anything, it is most apparent in the luxurification of the middle-class lifestyle and easy money for certain groups of people (sans cultural insight and instead, new forms of factory labor though in terms of web skills, art galleries, etc) where 'new royalty' appear out of nowhere, and have upper-middle-class lifestyles sustained within such a bubble, of no financial issues whatsoever, able to eat out every meal with incomes at jobs that do not support such expenditures, with butler and coceirge service via mobile Apps, the very industry most supporting this skewed worldview, and yet on the inside of this there is no higher understanding or truth that is the ancient connection with grounded royal hierarchy, of its spiritual dimension, and instead there is nothing there except base materialism at play. Again, lead instead of gold, as this then represents 'the masses' and self-beneficial collective decision-making of a particular self-interested private group or subset, siphoning away the commons for such unchecked excess, that also directly correlates with ego and immorality, and that anything goes via relativistic beliefs, and others are lesser beings to be exterminated. In this way, if you try to function as a human being within such an upside-down world in its ideological operation, lines of force exist to punish and force conformance and submission to the private collective diktat that is actually based in falsity and ungrounded information and unshared value at its center, mediated and represented and symbolized by money. A person may only function at one percent of their actual capacity, and may simply struggle to survive or adapt and remain sane or cognizant within such an antihuman condition, thus weathering the onslaught or downfall or fall the historic state itself, while imposters may be operating at 100% of their capacity as mimics or drones to perform symbolically in roles & routines, standing-in as 'representatives' or citizens though while against human citizenry, hostile to human being and principles of life, love, privacy, freedom, truth, democracy, etc. In this way, the fractional ability of human action then is combined and parts so divided in a non-empirical framework of the false perspective, of relativistic religious-like beliefs, then cannot combine into a whole viewpoint and thus the unshared view moves further towards zero the more that human citizens combined cannot relate in literate and complex terms, leading to hypothetical 0.000000000001 percent operational capacity of human agency in the world, versus 100% for the antihuman forces secured within fallen state bureaucracy, which then becomes the overseer and judge/jury/executioner based on evaluated fitness, though outside legal frameworks and inside these other realms of exchange and relation. Human efficiency, aptitude and agency per individual nearly negligible in the world today, whereas the entirety of humanity is serving these other interests to its own demise. In that everything is moving to that subset group, all advantages, all surplus, all rights, and it is also the view in charge of the surveillance apparatus, the overseer, or believed so. In this way 'the great eye' at the top of the pyramid, yet which may have issues of myopia, or perhaps even be blind to certain dimensions, if not testing and grounding vision to truth and instead correlating and focusing on an unreal, ungrounded view of cosmic relation. In that falsity may be what is aligned with, or bad ideas, or warped beliefs, false perspective. In this way the false economy, the faux society, lavender tatoos and fleur-di-lille piercings while such populations are shuttled to one location and other via personal Uber chauffeurs. In such a context then, "information" about people that is treated as if forests for pioneers to extract as a natural and free resource to make other things from, exploit to the fullest for self benefit regardless of connected ecology, to the point of practices of deforestation and ecological devastation. The business model apparently is: get or be given stuff for free, and then resell it at maximal cost and reap the rewards. Best practice is having the people exploited pay or volunteer for this expropriation of private value (of data, other) and then mine or otherwise subvert interactions to again maximally extract value whether in legal or illegal terms, as this relates to privacy, citizen rights, and issues of property that can be disregarded in such a hidden and advantageous, unregulated 'morally free market'; humans like nature exist to be exploited by others who are unlike, for their own advantage. This then closely aligned with issues of slavery and colonization, though in the form of subverted consumer electronics and apps as the new wave of antihuman colonization, and yet this is not made explicit due to protected interests, signed pieces of paper that armies of lawyers, the police, the state itself protect to allow for this 'commons' relation. So this is what money is in the middle of, these are the dynamics, and what it could or once represented was a common shared value that no longer exists between people, who are now in oppositional terms as citizens, of two separate and competing states, one functioning against its declared governing principles by exploiting legal loopholes as a basis for establishing power and overtaking the state as its tyrannical antithesis. The only piece of code able to address and engage this situation allowing for military takeover in a state of emergency, and a constitution convention to reboot the state in new and better terms, as agreed to by those convening in a new universal framework. This could be antihuman, and lead to the loss of the state itself, or human and the regaining of the state and its rewiring and redevelopment in terms of our humanity. Cryptography would probably be absolutely necessary to pursue such a path and yet it appears self-evident that crypto cannot be allowed to exist, that would enable such private communication that could threaten hidden and ruling conspiratorial interests. Thus all crypto must remain broken for the antihuman state to remain safe & secure. In this way, this is the immediate situation encountered with issues of currency as this spans from monetary systems to monetization of data and the centralization of auditing and accounting that functions as money, as currency, in terms of power that uses this to reinforce a certain biased or relativistic truth while censoring out others that may devalue ungrounded perspectives (on economics, other evidence, data, etc). So while trials of alternative currency may exist locally offline or even globally online, and systems of barter or various ecosystems of exchange/trade could be established, it remains within this overwhelming and oppressive default condition, which then is the prevailing force that determines what can and will happen, via its implementation and the potential for its subversion, how it can be maximally exploited in these same terms. Thus suggestions about what to do, say to establish a national cashless system, then occurs in a context of previously mentioned biased structures of taxation as well as other forms of leveraging and imbalances, that then would be further secured by the uncritical or uncareful rollout of such options or advances, making it all easier for the exploiters and all the more difficult and painful for the exploited, via unnecessarily increased suffering that by comparison can be exponential, in support of such tyranny. So near-term there is immense danger at doing anything without first recognizing the actual condition, parameters, dynamics, and stakes that exist in the questions and issues of development, particularly so highly connected technological systems that create massive centralized efficiencies that disenfranchise more local realities which are never accounted for or censored out or managed away via planned dysfunction. If this condition were addressed in straightforward terms, it may be possible to proceed in a way that protects people and prevents such dynamics from worsening, which can involve state and regional governance and federal and international changes in policy. And so what presently exists in the span of electronically-tagged bank notes, debit and credit cards, stored valued and prepaid cards, is already operating within this domain, as are other forms of electronic payment and bartar, including 'rewards cards' and 'points' or electronic tallied perks that span dollar value currency to other forms, which feasibly could be mediated by a single device or card system in the future. In this way, the up-and-coming Apple Watch could be the device most likely to mediate the depth and breadth of this situation, from taxation (hidden and overt) to payments (debit and credit to rewards cards to bitcoin exchange) and yet this concentration is also potentially a weak-spot for the individual and a maximal pressure point for those targeted in these dimensions, allowing more coherent control within a single device that could be used for exploitation, subversion, illegal monitoring, and on and so on. There would need to be a transitional scenario to address these concerns within a sufficient legal framework that protects citizens and establishes a new set of rules, for such integrated systems to operate in more bounded terms of expropriation of data and details that can be used against and disenfranchise human populations. Central to this would be a new infrastructure that allows for the conceptual rewiring of existing Internet of Things (IoT) ideology into a protected framework that serves and does not exploit common human interests for others to profit from this tyranny. The situation with money and currency is core to this. A new standard is needed to reestablish currency within a context and framework of truth, so rules of fair exchange are known and enforceable, establishing the shared social,economic,governing structure. It is likely the only way to accomplish this is through electronic currency, whereby the dynamics of the paper system are let go of, or released, and mediated in other terms more beneficial to economic principles than producing physical placeholders for value that devalue the monetary system itself. A penny more expensive to produce than its own value, (googled: "It costs the federal government 2.4 cents to make a penny and 11.2 cents to make a nickel."). This is obviously backward and counterproductive yet insanely the normalized ungrounded situation, the default everyday nonsense scenario. To get to a new monetary system or at least electronic currency, there is no way this can be achieved without first addressing the relation between currency and taxation, which is one issue in a context of paper currency, and another in a context of data as both currency and representative of money itself (i.e. guaranteed dollar sign amount). The big view involves necessary to comprehend dynamics that today the tax system and money both are frictional and function against economy, and this directly connects with data likewise that is limited by these forces in moving around or circulating in terms of its value, which can be monetized though also or more fundamentally, its relation to truth that can be accessible and achieved through reasoning, if made available/allowed. To free up data in a context of public and private infrastructure will require addressing issues of its taxation to enable public subsidy of the IoT infrastructure within a public framework and dimensions, this comparable to the need for the US as a nation when established to develop a federal national parks system, state parks, and greenways (such as the beautiful Twin Cities, or Central Park in NYC by Frederick Law Olmsted), including areas for recreation, fishing, baseball, picnics, dances, concerts, iceskating and skiing, trails for hiking, nature preserves, etc. This reflected shared public values of the citizenry to participate and interact and stay connected with nature as the basis for values, which has since eroded and been commercialized, turned into simulacrum, as if everywhere is now a sector of an unacknowledged private Disney themepark. A private corporation cannot represent or establish this shared public realm without distorting it to its narrowed business interests, involving a different motivating agenda. Instead, to create that public realm of data exchange would require public subsidization to allow for its development and sustenance, to enable exchange and interconnection in a wider realm of human interests and values, such as knowledge, cultural development, learning and education, policy and government planning and citizen representation and public-private collaboration mediated in the public sphere, not behind closed doors, in this way an agora for debate and discussion and commons, for culture to exist within. The insular, proprietarized introverted self-focused internet then could be extroverted and brought out of its shell and more fully integrate with peoples lives in a balanced way, including with issues of security and privacy (cryptography related, if of integrity) and yet to accomplish this 'data' itself would need to be addressed in the same way that paper currency and taxation likewise need to be, in that the granulatiry or the existing 'decimal' level resolution is completely insufficient to mediate issues of fair exchange and fair tax and shared value in these existing warped structural dynamics and a new higher resolution, micro- or fractional-value is needed in a data context that allows microtransactions and microdata (IoT) to exist instead of the default issues of audiovisual bandwidth for telecommuncations and big-pipe infrastructure layouts that functionally extort money to provide access, where scarcity is establishing maximal profit at the price of maximal friction for 'ideas' and 'reasoning' in the form of data that is either locked away or untransmissable due to red tape, barriers, ownership laws that turn something public into a private confined property that is valued by limited access yet is unjust in nature, and so on. Everything backwards, cannibalistic, to profit by not allowing things to happen, by hoarding, preventing, instead of freeing, interacting, building, it is erosion of interaction, knowledge, reasoning, ideas, etc. It is the Dark Ages 2.0 when in an information society of maximal communication shared truth has gone missing, empirical logical reasoning, instead relativism is ubiquitous, clueless to its own isolated individuated egoistic narcissistic condition. There is no knowledge within computing systems, within networking, beyond that of a highly biased tyrannical STEM framework that is the ruling technocratic ideology, that outside of its own parameters is completely ignorance and instead seeks to engineer culture while representing it in a quantified worldview, as if that simple. In this way the issue of theology and religion without truth or morality at the center, and instead an ideological version of onesided pseudo-truth believed universal and the just and legitimate framework to legislate collective reality in scientific terms. In this way experimentation on human populations occurs, illegal spying to gather data for social engineering, and so to, denial of public services, for such a goal and ideal of the utopic state of an ungrounded subset that is beyond external regulation, existing on the inside of the hidden state, turning dials and pulling levers of control. If these dynamics could be dealt with, some vastly improved margin of safety and realignment for the common human good and its welfare, then microtax and this microdata could relate to microfinancing, and various currency systems could co- exist in a shared framework. Such that the entrepreneurial imperative of the citizen could be realized in a sufficient framework necessary to realize its potential, such that telework and other visions could become standardized and resolved in terms of the previous domains of bureaucracy, which instead of limiting interactions can be made to allow easy and secured and guaranteed fair exchange, such that any interaction in terms of money could be automatically micro-taxed, whereby the previous issues of paperwork and auditing are not held as a damocles sword over an individual's life, for trying to do something, and instead could be infrastructural and made as friction-free as possible. At the same time, data itself, its movement or transfer within certain parameters (such as IoT device-to-device or work output) could involve a basic structural microtax, subpenny, a tiny fractional amount that is tallied in the background that is extremely nominal per person, perhaps nearly nonexistent in terms of small coinage per interaction or day, though adds up in the background as a support for sustaining infrastructure, and thus provides the basis for subsidizing free public transaction spaces for interaction of devices and people outside a corporate-controlled and defined framework. In this way, if the taxes are automatically dedicated and defined in highly sane terms which are essentially mediated entirely in a realm of electronics and numbers and nothing to do with paper currency or production of money, beyond an interface device (say currency card as meta-note) then lots of things could be possible that would allow short-term interactions in business and legal frameworks that then remove the threat of prosecution due to error or misreading or incapacity to deal with the bureauracy that is purposefully unable to be mediated except by means of a professional middle-man which can exploit these dynamics politically, such that especially for the poor, no actions can be taken without retaliation and further repression for trying to operate at a higher level than the ruling class will allow, as this is enforced by IRS audits and monitoring, even of the poor, at the dollar level, this protecting power of millionaires and billionaires of great excess and surplus. (When is the last time you have had the power cut to your apartment complex in retaliation for having a coffee and banana bread at a cafe as a birthday gift? This indicating the entrenched level of corruption involved, its operational peak in wielding the power grid, telecommunications and surveillance to oppress.) What the future could hold, in this situation could be transformed, would be a realm that moves from a basic electronic currency that is guaranteed in truth, via a new constitutional and thus legal framework, is the unification of services including public and private, within a shared system of interaction and access. The grocery rewards points and airline miles of credit card today could be the approach to systems of barter or tiered access and achievement. For instance, the issue of Boy Scout merit badges translating a series of skills and aptitudes into an electronic structure instead, when then could be compiled per individual as to what events are tallied in such a system, as personal circuity, cartography of the self, whereby like degree programs at University, self-learning could occur via attending a particular class at one location or institution, and then another at another time or space, as these compile into a self-learning framework that can become an education and lead to employment or vocation or other approaches. In this sense, money as data, though also the gamification potential of learning and incentivizing certain learning and skill building, training, taking risks, etc. As this then can inform and develop a culture that is coherent, serving its needs and larger goals. Such as conservation programs for natural environments & wildlife, or volunteering as requirement for other perks that could be mediated privately and-or publicly, by businesses, governments, even within families as incentive. Thus in some sense like a running curriculum vitae, though across all areas. In this way, a non-monetary system that is about data as currency could also be established, in particular government support of institutions that then could change data dynamics likewise. For instance government funding for a museum could enable a perk akin to those for corporate workers, that a family or person would have a token to visit the museum twice a year for free, based on this public subsidy and also its benefit to shared culture and literacy. And perhaps even bartar could occur between people, if someone wanted to see the orchestra. This would level the field for those without money to still participate in the culture versus banning people based on not having enough money to be included or to participate or be represented within culture. Likewise, if a digital picture frame the size of a large painting were commonplace, say an electronic ink version, then this same museum may allow the loan via copyright of a single image of a artistic work from their museum archive to be displayed via fair use in homes and dwellings, as part of this extension and interconnection of shared value. It costs nothing, except it mediates issues of property and copyright differently, in human public and private terms and not just onesided selfish private terms. In such a context, perhaps a person carries an avatar or some intelligent agent or their pseudonyms and a level of anonymity along with them in these systems, or that they can microfinance and allocate support to certain indiegogo/kickstarter like personal initiative at the level of penny stocks, though multiplied to millions of participants with small fluctuating amounts though secured through temporary or limited contracts, in this way microloans or investments that may socially benefit though not return money back to the person and instead develop culture or others capacity or programs, some moreso than others, including via the ability of the citizen to direct a proportion of their taxes into these variable programs, thus to have their interests served or represented by the distribution of their tax revenue. Thus scholarships may be funded decentrally or a public garden or an experiment, though perhaps within a higher realm of expectation than today, non-trivial and in- stead of creating and supporting junk, that an auditing of the ideas is involved such that it is of value to invest in, and reflects the principles of a given person or people to support. And thus foolishness or wastefulness may not predominate as the ground-up cultural development, funding pension funds for lazy digerati. So too, the literal realm of games, whereby perhaps a global videogame system is established and mediated in these same dynamics, as well as within education whereby a 'dream center' would allow each citizen to develop their skills within a grant-framework, honing their self-understanding through step by step development and then creating a structure to place them optimally within society for maximal contributive effect, via these same means, mechanisms, and structural dynamics. So for instance, like an urban treasure hunt today or gps waypoints in a wilderness obstacle course, so too education or learning or skill development or life itself, for instance going to location A (which may be a business) and mediating it within a certain set of parameters (say for a game or educational skills) and having this data tallied into the data currency framework, opening doors literal or figurative, whereby the labyrinth can be exited if finding and following the string of education. §Ãœ ˝ç∆∑√∞ ¶•©¥º«

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DHS fingered Mt. Gox's Mark Karpales as original Silk Road founder
by Seth 15 Jan '15

15 Jan '15

Hat tip to UnSYSTEM mailing list http://www.dailydot.com/crime/ross-ulbricht-silk-road-mark-karpales-fbi/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2sjuvu/defense_in_silk_road_trial_…

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bitcoin tinfoil-hattery
by Troy Benjegerdes 15 Jan '15

15 Jan '15

Theory of the day: 1) Naked short bitcoin (not sure how, but I'm sure some bankster did) 2) http://blog.cex.io/news/cex-io-temporarily-suspends-cloud-mining-services/ 3) use profits from shorting to hire cex.io 'idled' capacity 4) double-spend on competing exchanges (or against competing investors funds) 5) buy an island or three, or a politician or 5 Plausibility on a scale of 1-5 .. I say 4, what say you all?

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Cypherpunk reviews of products [was: peerio.com]
by grarpamp 15 Jan '15

15 Jan '15

Regarding peerio.com thread... The issue there is that so far it appears they're just another commercial startup of the day trying to figure out if they can monetize it by witholding the server. Their interest does not yet appear to be in you, but in holding your accounts. Which they or govt can cancel (censor) at any time. Just like any other centralized commercial service on the net. While not the content, they apparently have access to all your messaging and storage metadata and friend lists, so that's a non improvement. And non-optional read message notification back to the sender? Well, if you like being trapped by senders. They claim to be 'peer reviewed' and "professionally audited' in big letters but provide no such backing papers anywhere. They say "tested and proven security" and all sorts of other marketing drivel and hype (look at their github site commits) and provide few self-caveats. Their source probably doesn't match the binaries they're distributing. How exactly do they plan on being "free and ad-free and not selling you" while existing past year one. Wasn't one of the author's Cryptocat flawed too? Etc. Here's another classic game being played... "we [...] require the user to confirm their email or phone number." Really, wtf, default to that if you want for the masses security/recovery illusion, but make it optional for those that don't want the tracking reality. Don't forget, their "invites" are not just a fun party and name reservation, but tracking too. Interesting API/model, it may even be a step in the game such that you might consider inflicting on your friends, or even paying for yourself (because free isn't free so you will pay somehow), nothing wrong with that. But just saying its neat looks good and whatever other two-bit reviews were made is not doing the public much service. Cypherpunks should in fact review and endorse "step in the game" commercial services as they come along, if they're worthy. (All the upstart browser based on the fly crypto central email services not being one of them, that's what Thunderbird and Enigmail are for.) Just know that in this field, a good review needs to call out the marketing BS and be seriously candid about what exactly the stepwise advances in the game are, what they defeat, how any caveats make them moot in particular or on the whole compared to more mature solutions, and where if anything can be improved. This isn't email, texting, facebook, using the phone or giving a speech in public. Privacy and crypto assertions and statements to uses for such purposes made by products to a new and clueless user base are serious business and have highly different needs requiring careful analysis (even if the bottom line summary attached to it is "looks good"). And as cypherpunks, why not also swipe parts of its model, replace the backend with some sort of distributed anonymous p2p storage grid where you get what you donate over it. Similarly, with a $10 shell account and the server side you could have an analog to the group messaging and storage of peerio. Further what about RetroShare and other similar things that already exist. It's clear that with many new products appearing, there needs to be the emergence of reviews by reviewers that are steeped in the same space. Consider what could be done similar to this: https://www.prism-break.org/ with review centric nature of these (before they went pop) https://www.anandtech.com/ mashed with more detailed facts and tables and openness like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_P2P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_disk_encryption_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_sharing_applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_webmail_providers

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Re: Russian blockade of common bitcoin sites
by Ryan Carboni 15 Jan '15

15 Jan '15

> > This is a different issue. As I read the Perspecsys piece, it's about > protecting Russian users' data from the NSA etc, and not about censoring > online activity. And the Nazi invasion of Poland was to protect ethnic Germans from Polish atrocities. The same goes for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I think Putin is trustworthy. His most trustworthy moment was when Snowden called in to his yearly TV show and he told Snowden that Russia does not spy on it's citizens like the NSA. Let's take the word of a politician at face value, what could go wrong?

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Official RFC: Opportunistic Security: Some Protection Most of the Time
by Georgi Guninski 15 Jan '15

15 Jan '15

Official RFC: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7435.txt Opportunistic Security: Some Protection Most of the Time V. Dukhovni Two Sigma December 2014

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on money (actual & virtual; atoms & bits/ matter & data)
by brian carroll 14 Jan '15

14 Jan '15

was: Re: Cryptography Imaginary Property: Formalities of Cypherpunk On Jan 13, 2015, Troy Benjegerdes <hozer(a)hozed.org> wrote: >> Otherwise you would find yourself in an interesting world where applying >> encryption to data (both of which are not property, right) magically >> transforms something immaterial and "not-property" into "property". > > If I have an image I took of my farm, turn it into digital bits, and put > the DVD in a safe, so nothing can copy it, it's my property. > > If encrypt the image, and keep the private key in my safe, so nothing can > copy the original image, it's my property. Now maybe I install some robots > with guns to defend the safe too.... This provides a potentially interesting corollary with money and currency in terms of how it is conceptualized and conceived, as to what threats or dynamics may or may not exist, in a given framework or vantage. For instance, someone could imagine based on the default discourses available that paper currency has maximal autonomy in comparison to electronic money or currencies. And so that money (a physical thing) could be put into a safe inside a private dwelling and stored or exchanged outside the banking system, etc. Say for instance a person has ten dollars saved in a safe and they use that money at a local cash register, as if it an anonymous transaction at the level of monetary exchange. (The maximal gap being the legal trading or exchanging of paper currency for other items outside retail channels, where there is no middle-man infrastructure for the transaction, such as a cash register or other technical infrastructure or accounting apparatus.*) Someone might believe that the paper currency is only trackable in a retail setting by networked CCTV cameras and receipts and "traffic analysis" or other correlations between income and expenditures in a background calculation, not involving bank notes themselves. And in some sense, a notion of ~privacy may accompany use or storage or carrying of paper currency, as part of this view, where its function is in proportional support of their own material existence, proof-of-work in some abstract yet most tangible sense, as if truth realized in material form. Identity and all sorts of dynamics tied to how much a person has, can wield, what it is used for, perhaps the most vital variable in a given life, enabling lifestyles or great suffering depending on this relation. Yet what if the idea of money is not accurately conceptualized in the same terms applied to other things, that may be subsequent or dependent upon this relationship between people and 'their' money. What if for instance the symbolically protective safe with an electronic latch has a hidden money counter embedded in its circuity that is equivalent to technology of smart meters, where contents inside the safe could be read remotely, if there were nanoscopic RFID tags for tracking paper currency yet not identified as such because it involves a covert infrastructure. So for instance a secret agent could prowl the streets reading the interior condition of peoples private finances, legal or illegal, whether connected to mortage or real estate payments to banks or landlords, or the IRS keeping tabs on the real score for targeted populations. Something like this could be feasible, yet what would it mean if 'the information' connected to the paper currency or material object or thing as actually covertly modeled as data and as such was being tracked and monitored systematically over time. The modeling of money at this level of individual granularity then would be possible to analyze and review similarly in terms of cash register exchanges, if hidden RFID money counters were installed within these _networked devices where the receipts are centrally accounted for in today's profiling culture, as part of a threat monitoring environment. So where a person uses their currency could then indicate pathways through a economic or financial ecosystem which money laundering then would seek to short-circuit or avoid interaction with. The idea then that this material stuff may have a hidden information or data connected with it that involves its modeling and tracking that is accounted for in other unknown dimensions, as this relates to issues of rights, and potentially covert means of control and hidden power to shape events, via knowing something about the cards other players are holding. For instance, if a landlord were to use an illegal device to read the private bank accounts in real-time to determine maximal rent to charge tenants, this could apply a form of pressure that may otherwise have a different balancing due to abstract aspects of these relations. Having more information could lead to more power or even a power imbalance or one-sided accounting, which seems to be the game at the large and small scales, how all of this is accounted for. In conceptual terms, a worldview seemingly exists that perceives the world within previous centuries of physics, whereby a person inside their dwelling is not effected by others on the outside of this boundary, such that the walls and locked doors and windows that seal and secure the enclosure is capable of keeping out unwanted forces via this "physical barrier" that is immediately perceived by the senses. And yet this can be illusory form of protection. It is similar to the view that someone cannot tell what another person is thinking, including if they are lying, if they do not divulge information. That the true condition or state cannot be read or accessed otherwise, such as via ESP or mind reading whether by natural means (psychic) or technological (brain scanning as mind reading). So too the dwelling, like the safe, whereby the issue involves a paradigmatic change in conceptualization, and in turn, a recontextualization of the event and assumptions. In this way, paper currency in a non-electromagnetic evaluation cannot have these other covert dynamics functioning, whereas if it is allowed or rather acknowledged as the physical reality (Einstein/Maxwell, 18th-19th century onward) then this is the foundation for these various global infrastructure-related systems that are at the core of physical development of civilization, yet modeled or perceived inaccurately or insufficiently in terms of their "informational or data" dimensions and dynamics, for how such things more likely exist, in the day to day. Thus assumptions may exist about a certain level of autonomy that are nowhere near accurate to the condition 'things' are being mediated within or forces and dynamics and pressures that are interacting in what could be geological terms, at macro-scale. Whereby mountain ranges are built up and ice ages occur within realms of finance and connected ecologies, desertification, migration patterns, which could then be tracked via money, down to fine grain individual particles (citizens), which then gets into potentially metaphysics whereby fluid dynamics or other issues of geometrical stacking or whatnot could be used to determine how to shape situations at an abstract level, as the primary 'reason' or approach for societal human problems, via quantification and such modeling, which could be wildly inaccurate in terms of what is going on, and involve brute force dynamics to push changes through or keep things moving via crude if not unwieldy techniques that perhaps function as religion in their unchanged, yet heightened religious state, where financialization is high theology. In other words, it is to structurally associate the probable case that bank notes today are thoroughly tracked as a system, and likewise as mentioned, the biggest gap would be the distance between these notes and the surrounding infrastructure, for when they become pingable and enter back into the exchange system, perhaps not unlike tracking meteors that leave observational orbits then return at a later time. It would seem this is most closely comparable to assumptions about Schroedinger's cat, whereby a person may assume the 'thing' (in this case a feline, a living being) cannot be "known" without direct observation within a contained and secured area. Yet, this ignores the issue of entanglement of information and data, prior to placement of the cat in an isolated location (ie "safe"). If the cat were modeled in various informational terms, it could be remotely read beyond this limiting boundary, say if its state was connected to that of another cat and there were certain parameters that mapped to each other diagnostically, whereby what may amount to physical intuition or embodied knowing may indicate whether the cat still existed the same beyond a given boundary or not, via signs of another entangled entity that is thus read in terms of these diagnostic signals. Or, that an RFID chip in paper currency could be remotely read and tracked via infrastructure and in this way indicate the nature of events within a protected boundary, at a distance, as well as in dimensions otherwise not accounted for. And that this is basic, that paper money has an informational dimension (serial numbers, etc) associated with, and in this way also is entangled and involved in a centralized data modeling, whereby some of the most valuable information available would be tracking these 'things' that may be viewed as personal property by some, potentially, as related to their work-output or value as citizens, correlated with their importance, ego, lifestyle. In some sense, money as the highest truth in some peoples lives, the ultimate way of tallying the score. So if all of this is ignored, and then an issue like cryptocurrency is developed in a simpler context, as if _electronic money reliant upon a thoroughly surveillance based infrastructure would be able to sustain an anonymous monetary system or electronic currency, it could also be heavily reliant on ~beliefs in strong cryptography to allow for such a model or barrier to others interests or these larger state dynamics, and thus issues such as not knowing who the author of Bitcoin actually is could be taken on faith that all of this is still beyond the control of others or tracking or in-depth accounting due to boundaries and barriers presumed to exist in a certain viewpoint of these parameters, whereas if recontextualized in an electromagnetic context, if paper money were being thoroughly tracked within infrastructure, how likely is it that electronic currency could physically, tangibly exist beyond these same thresholds of control that collapse towards the same central management and evaluation of such structural interactions. Perhaps it is only experimental, yet what about the idea of not having the concept modeled correctly in terms of issues like property or security, whereby such barriers or boundaries may not feasibly exist yet are relied upon to rationalize what the ongoing and prevailing dynamics are. What if rose colored glasses are needed for the true believers. It just seems that an issue like privacy that is mapped to electronic currency is least likely to exist, far moreso than paper currency yet with the same issues of returning to a system to cash out or exchange the electronic currency, where end-points or junctures allow this accounting to take place, very probably in unknown dimensions that exist beyond any known literature or experience of users who are not vetted in top secret or other technologies or capacities, yet that are the foundation for the entire system these devices, tools or processes are built and function within, and rely upon. The circuit, the switch, electrons, processors, networks, that themselves are entangled to other things likewise and also thoroughly accounted for. It is to question what if the data model for something like Bitcoin exists beyond the Bitcoin data model, as this impacts issues of privacy, anonymity, exchange, as this relates to a more accurate threat model, that may not yet be accounted for in the dimensions or dynamics that actually exist, and perhaps cannot be due to related security issues involved. Is cryptocurrency potentially a mirage in such a context, if entanglement could be occurring in ways otherwise not recognized or revealed. And if this taken into account, how might issues or privacy or security be reevaluated, and how might public or private pressures exist if this were the case and could be exploited or used as a basis for blackmail or social engineering, out of view of its own represented view and ideals. It is not to second-guess the need for electronic currencies, though it is to wonder if auditing of transactions occurs only within tiny finite sectors versus system wide, as is likely the case with bank notes as this also directly relates with material development. It seems this is a conceptual issue related to 'things' in general, where bank notes are a particular category of example. And yet if taking into account the prime importance of money as data, and this structural entanglement that everything is mapped and relies upon and also functions within, in terms of forecasting and looking backward, then when a CD-R is ripped into files and its data is secretly tracked, is it not also entangled in some way to these other issues of copyright and mediates issues of privacy, similarly to assumptions with money, and in a literal sense, function as money via data that is monetized in other terms, and then dealt with differently or otherwise, beyond the limits or barriers or restrictions. Or moreso perhaps, an electronic-book that is sold for a certain amount and is restricted and has features to prevent file copying and distribution, and when this occurs, remains structurally entangled in other hidden dimensions of viruses and trojans or otherwise that then grant access, feasibly legally via loopholes enabled once a condition of use has been past or ignored, that then activate other dynamics, growing an alternative network of surveillance and monitoring and essentially auditing around these issues. And how closely is this relates to issues of paper currency that is tracked that then becomes increasingly electronic-in-nature, such that files are functioning as currency or that data is monetized, in legal and illegal realms as well as inbetween where challenges occur. In a non-electromagnetic viewpoint certain arguments could be made about what is occurring, yet that could be limited in their evaluation of the actual structural and non-negotiable dynamics involved in the default scenario, if unacknowledged or ignored. In this way, a larger threat exists within electronic payments and currency itself if not accurately perceived, because existing imbalances could be made structural and normalized without addressing the power imbalances built-into the technology, which may never be allowed to be recognized due to security and secrecy laws, and thus further infrastructuralization of money, into electronic data, then could lead to the securing of these hidden and oppressive dynamics that can function in unjust ways, for the furtherance of hidden power, by default of the ongoing scenario being extended without critical review in the terms necessary to acknowledge and limit such threats, instead of going along with them. One scenario is the small transfer of cash for a birthday gift, that in certain monitored frameworks of bank notes could lead to overzealous accounting of onesided power relations, where a landlord is trying to recoup that birthday money as part of their own profit model, while ignoring any such accounting of their own dubious gains in exponentially more egregious and literally criminal terms. In a paper currency model, they could RFID-read banknotes in a private safe and use that as leverage against a person in power politics, as hidden advantage and argument for administering and managing a tenant on 'their property'. Thus, they demand a piece of the birthday cake and view it as stealing if not gaining their share of the money. The IRS could be this way too, if corrupted to the degree necessary to prey on the poor. It is one scenario to have this occur in paper currency, in an informal economy in a context of small gifts or rituals that are the bedrock of culture and community, though it is another to transfer this menacing dimension into an electronic context, whereby no distinctions would be made if extending the existing dysfunctional evaluation of tax and revenue in highly politicized and disadvantageous terms in regards to ruling classes and underclasses, as warped power exchanges then become solidified in default practices of ubiquitous electronic taxation or other subversive unacknowledged dynamics based on hidden access to monetary or other profiling data, to enforce power structures of some over others, beyond government regulation or as government in its fallen state, of a despotic state preying on its own citizens. In this way, the small gift for a birthday in this electronic context likely would be taxed and a piece of the birthday cake would be removed for the state if not the overzealous landlord, and further erode what little autonomy or privacy exists in peoples lives as human beings who exist beyond a context of money or are not defined or beholden to it as the highest truth, which instead would become the case, where such data accounting (monetary or otherwise, event-based, history, tracking, offenses, relations, finances, etc) would be this 'currency' and map to every action and area of life and determine fate itself, where the labyrinth of the day to day eventually captures everyone. This seems to be the underlying condition and issue with electronic money, not as a form of detached utopianism if not hedonistic lust for unregulated or accounted for money, in some sense or applications, and instead the foundational technology to enable the grid to activate in its higher informational and interconnected dimensionality, as one form of culture or another, human or antihuman, and this in a context of a developing global to local police state that is thoroughly tied into and has vested interests in surveillance technology 'being right', or a view that is by default assumed correct due to its institutionalization and further systematic progression, that everyone should follow and will need to obey. An inaccurate modeling of crypto in such a scenario could actually be leveraged to promote not prevent these dynamics if not accurately accounted for. This is the problem of ideology and answered questions where presumptions are wrong and instead lead away from truth, not closer to it, the more and more dialogue, discussion, or actions occur in these ungrounded terms. (It is somewhat akin to a scenario of someone with a supercar delivering pizza, say a Bentley or Ferrari, versus someone in a used or inexpensive vehicle trying to work their way into a sustainable career, either this job a step or allowing a certain income zone whether livable or not. How might the issue of tipping occur, for instance, in one scenario or the other. Is a thousand dollar tip the minimum for a 15 dollar pizza, if lux. There is something about this scenario that does not add up in normal terms. And this is much like crypto today, electronic money, and other issues involved privacy and copyright. I cannot explain the analogy, though it is similar to the unknowability of electronic bank cards themselves and issues of accounting for funds. In a context of electronic money, people could receive 'free income' who are part of a connected group, in mirroring to the unemployed lower classes, yet in a middle-class or upper-class scenario and no one would be the wiser if it was a inside job, of a particular political group. There would be no way to find out unless on the inside of it. It is this kind of scenario that could play out in a warped rules of accounting, today focused on those on welfare cheating everyone, when it can be occurring in exponentially different ways at higher income levels, where huge subsidies are occurring on the backs of others lower, including at the price of their health and subsistence, to allow people to have their wine collections and second homes, and many cars, and yet feasibly contribute little or function in only ordinary terms while receiving disproportionate gains due to institutionalized corruption. That is the standard in electronic money, potentially, supporting such dynamics if not accounting for, protected by magic cryptography.)

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bitcomedy
by Juan 14 Jan '15

14 Jan '15

https://www.bitstamp.net/article/relaunch-faq/ What law enforcement agencies are involved in the investigation? Bitstamp is working closely with US and international law enforcement agencies specializing in digital-currency.

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