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Negative interest rates redux (and pushing for "cashless society")
by Zenaan Harkness 06 Nov '15

06 Nov '15

OK, this one's actual negative interest rates, but on deposits (vs for loans), where you pay the bank to keep your money on deposit; this breaks the previous assumption/ model that the minimum interest rate can be zero %, at least for deposits, and so why not for loans as well, i.e. pay you interest to take out a loan - perhaps trial actual zero % loans first? : [the article contains a graph 'growth in notes in circulation across nations, USD, AUD, EUR, GBP, swedish KRO] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11895084/How-Swedens-negative-… " How Sweden's negative interest rates experiment has turned economics on its head Nordic experimentation with sub-zero interest rates has changed the way central bankers think about fighting recessions It has long been believed that when it comes to interest rates, zero is as low as you can go. Who would choose to keep their money in the bank if they had to pay for the privilege? But for the people who control the world’s money, this idea has recently been thrown out of the window. Many central banks have pushed their rates into negative territory and yet the financial system has still to come to an abrupt end. It is a discovery that flips on its head the conventional idea of how authorities could respond to future economic crises; and for central bankers, this has come as a relief. Central bank policymakers had believed they had run out of room to support their respective economies http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11704051/The-world-is-defensel… , with their interest rates held close to the floor. Traditionally, it was thought that if you wanted to boost the economy, the central bank would reduce its interest rates. Normally, the rates offered on savings accounts would follow, and people would choose to spend more, and save less. But there’s a limit, what economists called the “zero lower bound”. Cut rates too deeply, and savers would end up facing negative returns. In that case, this could encourage people to take their savings out of the bank and hoard them in cash. This could slow, rather than boost, the economy. What is happening now should not – according to conventional thinking – be possible. As central bank rates have turned negative, the rates offered on bank deposits have followed. Yet rather than stuffing cash under mattresses, people have left their money in the bank or spent it. Nowhere is the experiment with negative rates more obvious than among Nordic central banks. Sweden – the first to dabble with negative rates – is perhaps the prime candidate for such experimentation. The country already has high savings rates, the third highest in the developed world according to the OECD http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=51648 and, despite growing at healthy rates, there appears to be plenty of slack left in the economy to prevent an overheat. Unemployment is unusually high for an advanced economy at more than 7pc, still well above its pre-crisis levels of sub-6pc. Crucially, the Riksbank’s mandate suggests that such a radical experiment is necessary. Policymakers have battled with deflation since late 2012, and with inflation at minus 0.2pc in August, it remains well below the central bank’s 2pc target. To a great extent, the Riksbank’s hand has been forced by the plight of the eurozone. A tepid recovery in the currency union has required the European Central Bank (ECB) to bring in ever-looser policy https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&ved=0CDkQFj… . As the ECB’s actions have weakened the euro against Sweden’s krona, the cost of importing goods into Sweden has fallen, and weighed down on inflation. The Riksbank has had to cut its own rates in response in an attempt to avoid deep deflation. Sweden’s flexible approach to monetary policy has won it the plaudits of leading credit ratings agency. Standard and Poor’s recently reaffirmed the country’s triple AAA sovereign rating, remarking on the benefits it derives from “ample monetary policy flexibility”. Noting that the Riksbank had introduced both negative interest rates and quantitative easing, S&P said that “should inflation rates stay low or the krona appreciate materially, the central bank could lower the repo rate further”. Many City analysts believe that the Riksbank will continue cutting, reducing its key interest rate to minus 0.5pc by the end of the year. Switzerland’s is already deeper still, at minus 0.75pc, while Denmark and the eurozone have joined them as members of the negative zone. What was once thought impossible now seems something that could come to the UK in the years to come. And even in the US, which is thought to be just months away from an interest rate rise, the idea of negative interest rates has gained attention. At the most recent meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11873141/Federal-Reserve-inter… , which decides US interest rates, one unnamed member said that they expected negative policy rates at the end of this year and next. But can policymakers keep at this forever? Even if turns out that the lower bound was not negative, economists still believe that one exists. Attempts to estimate the unknown vary, but the fees charged by credit companies give some indication as to how strongly we prefer to use cash. These can be as low as minus 3pc according to Barclays, indicating that central bankers have much more room to slash rates. Pension funds might be among the first to abandon banks if things get too painful, because of what in effect can look like a tax on holding money. One solution is to give savers nowhere else to go. This idea was floated by the Bank of England’s chief economist in recent weeks, who made the case that sub-zero rates will be needed in the near future http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/bank-of-england/11874061/Negative-intere… . Andy Haldane, a member of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), the UK’s equivalent of the FOMC suggested that to achieve properly negative rates, the abolition of cash itself might be necessary. This is one reason why negative rates have been used in Nordic economies, where societies are already close to cashless. Even sellers of Sweden’s version of the Big Issue magazine - Situation Stockholm - are able to accept payment via debit or credit card. For the immediate future, the British obsession with cash appears to be intensifying. The Bank of England has said that demand for banknotes and coins outstrips total spending in the economy http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/bank-of-england/11865964/The-end-of-cash… . Some of like to hoard it for peace of mind, while many of us hold it for day to day transactions. And much of it is held abroad, often in bureaux de change. There are other - perhaps more sinister - motives to prefer non-electronic money. Unlike the money stored on spreadsheets, cash is almost completely untraceable. For those who value their privacy, or who deal in prohibited goods and services, there’s no beating it. Last week, Charles Goodhart, a former MPC member, said that Swiss and ECB central bankers had been “absolutely shameless” in continuing to issue high denomination notes, printing 1,000 Swiss franc and 500 euro bills. These high face values notes “are there to finance the drug deals”, Mr Goodhart said at the annual Money, Macro and Finance Conference in London. Sir Charles Bean, also a former deputy governor at the Bank of England, echoed Mr Goodhart’s concerns. He said that was “all in favour of getting rid of big-denomination notes, which are used in the black economy”. Such a move could increase the cost of holding cash, pushing the lower bound on policy rates even lower. Sushil Wadhwani, a former MPC member, said: “We should make it much more expensive to hold cash.” No politician is likely to prohibit cash entirely, at least not until it has already all but disappeared from day to day life. Concerns about surveillance and the power of the state are likely to grow, as electronic money is completely traceable. “Cash is useful for small transactions, and until it disappears naturally, I would be loathe to say let’s outlaw it,” says Sir Charles. "

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Re: lol the lol intercept lol but who is https://y6xjgkgwj47us5ca.onion/
by coderman 06 Nov '15

06 Nov '15

what's most amusing is that the other two generated vanity onions, while the intercept gave zero fucks. :P

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lol the lol intercept lol
by Juan 06 Nov '15

06 Nov '15

https://theintercept.com/2015/11/04/what-the-intercepts-new-audience-measur… " in April we became only the third internet service, behind Facebook and Blockchain.info, to allow people to contact us over HTTPS-encrypted connections to the anonymity network Tor." "it’s also important to disclose that there are other service providers we continue to use who do have access to information like your IP address, which articles on The Intercept you visit, and which computer operating system and web browser you use. Such partners include our content delivery network, CloudFlare; " But what I really like about the intercept is all their articles explaining how closely ebay and the american nazi government cooperate.

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btc price analysis
by Juan 06 Nov '15

06 Nov '15

I can't disclose my source, but I heard the pentagon is going to launch a prediction market denominated in btc. It's going to be open source and all western freedom fighters will be able to join the coding the effort. Hence the current spike. (It's all based on the scientific principle known as "the wisdom of crowds" - Individual retards are retarded but when millions of retards bet together, there's an emergent and huge surge in wisdom)

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Zerocoin Startup Revives the Dream of Truly Anonymous Money
by coderman 04 Nov '15

04 Nov '15

Zooko++ http://www.wired.com/2015/11/zerocoin-startup-revives-the-dream-of-truly-an… Andy Greenberg Date of Publication: 11.04.15. Zerocoin Startup Revives the Dream of Truly Anonymous Money Bitcoin, despite its reputation as anonymous internet cash, was never designed for perfectly private payments. For the promise of fully untraceable money, cryptocurrency fans have been waiting for Zerocoin—a technology designed to have default uncrackable anonymity. After years of development, that incognito cryptocash is finally showing signs of a life, now in the form of a stealthy startup. Late last week, a company calling itself the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company published a post on Angel List, a website startups use to raise funds from private investors. Zerocoin’s new CEO and co-founder, cryptographer Zooko Wilcox-Hearn, confirms in an email to WIRED that the company will put into practice the Zerocoin (alternatively known as Zerocash) design initially created by a team of encryption researchers at Johns Hopkins in 2013, with the goal of creating a bitcoin-like currency with the greatest privacy and anonymity protections that modern mathematics can offer. “Bitcoin is HTTP for money. We are HTTPS,” reads Zerocoin’s Angel List description, an analogy to the layer of privacy enabled on encrypted web pages versus the surveillance perils of visiting an unencrypted site. In fact, Zerocoin’s privacy advantages over bitcoin could be even more substantial than that HTTPS comparison implies: Bitcoin transactions are published on the blockchain, the public record of all bitcoin payments that serves as the backbone of the bitcoin economy. Any slip-up that identifies a user’s bitcoin addresses also makes it possible for anyone to trace all of his or her payments from and to those addresses. Zerocoin’s blockchain, on the other hand, uses a cryptographic trick known as a “zero-knowledge proof” to guarantee that transactions in the Zerocoin economy aren’t fraudulent or forged. But that zero-knowledge feature means that in contrast to bitcoin, Zerocoin’s blockchain doesn’t reveal anything about the payment’s origin, destination, or even the transaction’s amount. (Read the full paper Zerocoin’s creators presented at the 2014 IEEE Spectrum security and privacy conference here.) In other words, Zerocoin will let users spend internet cash with theoretically perfect anonymity. But Zerocoin’s new Angel’s List page also notes that if necessary, the same zero-knowledge proof trick can also allow a zerocoin user to forego that privacy and choose to reveal proof that any individual transaction was his or hers—say, as a receipt for some zerocoin purchase. “We are adding *selective disclosure* to Bitcoin and Blockchain technologies,” the Angel’s List page reads. “Transaction metadata in the Blockchain is confidential by default but can be disclosed to specific parties. This allows the best of both worlds: both strong privacy and transparency on the Blockchain.” Just how Zerocoin will make money as a startup, however, is far from clear. For now, Wilcox-Hearn declined to answer any of WIRED’s questions about how the company will function, when it will officially launch, or how it plans to put its new cryptocurrency into circulation. Like any bitcoin alternative, Zerocoin will no doubt face stiff competition from bitcoin itself, which already has buy-in from millions of users and an exchange rate that’s appreciated sharply in just the last week. Even so, a roster of influential angel investors have already invested $715,000 in Zerocoin, according to Wilcox-Hearn. Two early backers listed on the Angel’s List posting are Naval Ravikant, an investor in Twitter and Uber, and Barry Silbert, the founder of startup equity trading platform SecondMarket. Another is Roger Ver, a staunchly libertarian bitcoin mogul who’s made investments in startups like Blockchain.info and Bitpay, and who used his substantial crypto-fortune to bankroll much of the criminal defense of now-convicted Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht. Zerocoin also cites an impressive collection of “advisors” on its Angel’s List page. In addition to the academic team that designed Zerocoin, led by Johns Hopkins computer science professor Matthew Green, those advisors also include Vitalik Buterin, the founder of buzzy cryptocurrency startup Ethereum, and Gavin Andresen, one of the first bitcoin coders and the chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation. The company’s CEO, Zooko Wilcox-Hearn, has crypto cred of his own: He’s the creator of the Tahoe Least Authority File Store, or Tahoe LAFS, a decentralized, encrypted file storage system. Even with those supporters, Zerocoin is sure to face criticism and even legal trouble because of the very privacy properties that make it unique: A cryptographically untraceable, anonymous currency could offer massive potential for money laundering and black market sales. The Silk Road’s federal prosecutors, after all, proved how valuable a tougher-to-track cryptocurrency would be to criminals, when they traced $13.4 million worth of bitcoin from the drug-selling site to its creator Ross Ulbricht’s laptop. Zerocoin’s creators attempted to answer that concern in their online FAQ, pointing out that criminals can already make anonymous transactions with cash, or even with bitcoin if they’re careful to use “mixing” services like Dark Wallet or Bitcoin Fog that are designed to anonymize transactions. “The introduction of yet another method to anonymously move money is of little consequence,” they write. But cash can’t be spent online, and mixing services only make tracing payments more difficult—they don’t render it impossible, as Zerocoin’s zero-knowledge proofs are designed to do. More convincingly, the Zerocoin authors also argue the opposite point: that the alternative to their cryptocurrency is to rely on bitcoin, whose blockchain can create real problems for any user seeking to keep his or her transactions private. “Would you want to publish your bank statement for everyone to see? Of course not: your bank statement can reveal…intimate details about your life,” they write. “For example, your payments to a psychiatrist could reveal that you have a mental health issue.” Zerocoin’s coming launch as a startup, by contrast, revives the cryptocurrency community’s dream of truly anonymous money—with all the promises and perils that come with it. Stay tuned.

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Tor cameo in the comic “Les Vieux Fourneaux”
by grarpamp 04 Nov '15

04 Nov '15

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Lunar <lunar(a)torproject.org> Date: Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 5:46 AM Hi! “Les Vieux Fourneaux” [1] is a comic in French published last year by Wilfrid Lupano and Paul Cauuet. Amongst other characters, it features a group of anarchist elders called “Ni Yeux Ni Maîtres” [2]. In the story you see them fighting gentrification by filling up a trendy lounge bar until it goes out of business. One of the elder is getting hacking lessons from “Arno Nimousse”. The latter has an onion sticker on his laptop. Some images: https://people.torproject.org/~lunar/volatile/2015-11-04-WplBy28xyVg/Les_Vi… https://people.torproject.org/~lunar/volatile/2015-11-04-WplBy28xyVg/Les_Vi… https://people.torproject.org/~lunar/volatile/2015-11-04-WplBy28xyVg/Les_Vi… [1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Vieux_Fourneaux [2]: Meaning “No Eyes No Masters”, but it sounds more funny in French. -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk

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Re: The BlackList
by coderman 04 Nov '15

04 Nov '15

On 11/2/15, jim bell <jdb10987(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > About the time you sent this message, you did something to screw up my Yahoo > email account. I started getting bounces, and eventually I was entirely > prevented from sending emails. Please explain what you did. Jim > Bell > From: coderman <coderman(a)gmail.com> > To: jim bell <jdb10987(a)yahoo.com> > Cc: Cari Machet <carimachet(a)gmail.com>; cpunks <cypherpunks(a)cpunks.org> > Sent: Saturday, October 31, 2015 4:44 PM > Subject: Re: The BlackList... Jim, i am often a well selected individual, as you must be at times, too. you should assume any centralized service will become unusable at any time. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon - they are all real-time malware conduits, when they're not simply denying service selectively, or en masse. the only thing i have seen survive the highest level of scrutiny are bespoke systems communicating only over hidden services with end-to-end crypto. (and by survive - i mean not immediately pwned - long term resistance is only through constant evolutionary and radical improvement based on interactions with attackers...) what a world we've built! best regards,

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Value of Earth Human Life
by coderman 04 Nov '15

04 Nov '15

for a US citizen: $7.9mm to $9.4mm for a Russian citizen: $40,000 to $2mm other legal precedent: ~$200,000-400,000 each earth human. for an AP target? should there be a "minimum kill price"? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life

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Re: [Cryptography] Happy Birthday, No Such Agency!
by grarpamp 04 Nov '15

04 Nov '15

On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 5:06 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: > Signed into existence by Presidential Decree in 1952 (same year I was > born!), even the name of the NSA for a secret for years. Who gives a fuck? If you can't resolve your issues and cooperate globally openly without resorting to dirty tricks, opression, subjugation, murder and more, what the fuck does that say about you? It's the 21st century, we're supposed to be better than that.

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Re: [Cryptography] Clipperz
by grarpamp 03 Nov '15

03 Nov '15

On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 10:29 AM, Stéphane Mourey <stephane.mourey(a)impossible-exil.info> wrote: > Has anyone tryied Clipperz (https://clipperz.is) ? > In any case, have you an opinion to share about it ? If they're pushing their miracle crypto code down into your browser for execution, then it's garbage. So are all other self proclaimed centralized corporate crypto services that do the same thing, or force you to use their special client. Because someday they will either be forced or subverted into pushing bad code and compromising some user, quite possibly you. Come back when you can install and pin down peer reviewed third party crypto code in your browser, or use any client that meets an open API spec they publish. Better yet, support and use p2p storage and messaging instead of central corporate services. Or at least do it locally and store it on a few $5 shells if you need it online. > Clipperz... "knows nothing about you and your data" Nothing? Really? I'll bet anyone on these lists .1337 BTC they do.

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