"I miss the Soviet Union, at least they respected the personal and social freedom (but, yes, I know Stalin was a lunatic). " I hope you don't really believe that. On 2 August 2014 17:11, Fernando Paladini wrote:

But when they say "criminal penalty for mining and other operation", what they mean? I say, how can Russia know who are using Bitcoin, how can Russia know who are trading or mining Bitcoin?

I think this image can describe the idea I want pass: http://news.insidebitcoins.com/sites/default/files/government-banning-bitcoi... Am I wrong about that?

I miss the Soviet Union, at least they respected the personal and social freedom (but, yes, I know Stalin was a lunatic).

2014-08-01 20:29 GMT-03:00 Troy Benjegerdes :

On Fri, Aug 01, 2014 at 08:10:55PM +0000, Anton Nesterov wrote:

...

...

Ministry of Finance of Russia drafted a bill to ban cryptocurrencies with administrative or criminal penalty for mining and other operation. Also they want to censor bitcoin-related websites.

This will come into force in 2015.

http://top.rbc.ru/economics/01/08/2014/940521.shtml (in Russian)

I don't know anything about russian politics, but US politicians draft idiotic rules/legislation all the time that get dramatically changed.

(exhibit a:

http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/07/17/ny-financial-regulator-releases-dr... )

If Russia wishes to exclude themselves from the world economy, that is their choice, but I suspect their oligarchs will still want to hide money in New York

http://nymag.com/news/features/foreigners-hiding-money-new-york-real-estate-... and they'll have to get a Bitlicense to properly launder the transaction.

My prediction is that Bitlicense will evolve into being the much vaunted 'anonymous digital cash', and you'll just need to pay the proper protection fee to the state of New York or they will get a bank to hold your funds for ransom like they are doing to Argentina's on-time debt payments.

I also fully expect other states and nations will get into the licensed cryptocoin protection racket in ways that reflect their local culture and values.

Don't mess with flyover land if you want to get insurance.

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/tech/2014/05/16/des-moines-area-insur...

-- Fernando Paladini

-- Pozdrawiam, Paweł Zegartowski

2014-08-02 19:28 GMT+02:00 Fernando Paladini :

It's a joke, keep calm :P

What if they actually did give that respect, but it's all been propaganda'ed into oblivion?

On Sat, Aug 02, 2014 at 07:47:39PM +0200, Lodewijk andré de la porte wrote:

2014-08-02 19:28 GMT+02:00 Fernando Paladini :

...

It's a joke, keep calm :P

What if they actually did give that respect, but it's all been propaganda'ed into oblivion?

The Soviets had some damned good engineers and scientists, and their designs (soyuz) are still flying. The space program of the leader of the free world keeps giving more money to defense contractors. Now tell me again who won the space race? War is peace, freedom is slavery, and Carl Marx was right about from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. This is proven by the market penetration of the GPLv2 linux kernel. Capitalists need high quality softare, and they cannot afford the capital to own something that actually works. I do not expect copyright will get any weaker until long after a viral copyright cryptocurrency has proven more reliable and stable than any fiat or other currency that can be co-opted like the BSD/MIT licensed Satoshi Bitcoin client.

On Sun, Aug 03, 2014 at 10:02:44AM -0700, Reed Black wrote:

I may be responding to a troll posting, but it's a fun one, so...

I should probably not read Thomas Piketty's Capital and then post on the internet in the same week timespan. But it's been quite an amusing digression.

On Sun, Aug 3, 2014 at 12:14 AM, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:

...

On Sat, Aug 02, 2014 at 07:47:39PM +0200, Lodewijk andré de la porte wrote:

...

2014-08-02 19:28 GMT+02:00 Fernando Paladini :

...

It's a joke, keep calm :P

What if they actually did give that respect, but it's all been propaganda'ed into oblivion?

...

The Soviets had some damned good engineers and scientists, and their designs

(soyuz) are still flying. The space program of the leader of the free world

keeps giving more money to defense contractors. Now tell me again who won

the space race?

The Soviets also had some damned bad engineers and scientists. Someone in an ivory tower decides soaking seeds before planting them will make them grow better, the state requires it, seeds mold in the ground. How many die because Soviet science didn't come as an option?

How foreign was the concept of a flush toilet to Soviet troops who ripped them off the walls when invading westward? They baffled that the toilets ceased working when leaned against a tree or a tent. Basic conveniences were utterly foreign to any but the heads of state and their chosen pets. Even where they had advances that compared to what was available in the west, it hardly mattered to most of the population.

As to the space program, at their pinnacle they end up copying the Space Shuttle and other US projects, right down to the placement of left-handed screws. What lesson were we meant to draw here?

Don't copy that floppy? I'd argue the Soyuz was and is the pinnacle of human manned flight, because it (as far as I know) was not a copy, and it's still flying.

...

War is peace, freedom is slavery, and Carl Marx was right about from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. This is proven by the market penetration of the GPLv2 linux kernel. Capitalists need high quality softare, and they cannot afford the capital to own something that actually works.

GPL has little to nothing to do with Marx.

GPL relies entirely on private ownership of intellectual property for its enforcement. Private property is GPL's very foundation. And nobody is compelled to use GPL licensed software, or to agree to a GPL license. Those who do enter into an agreement aren't even required to redistribute their changes unless they redistribute the derivative product. There's no compulsory communal property here, no Marx.

Observe that generally, one can set up GPL and various other forms of voluntary communal contracts under capitalism. But that doesn't make capitalism communist/Marxist. It does make capitalism the more flexible system. One in which the GPL linux kernel is indeed doing well, along with countless privately owned projects.

Marx was worried about endless accumulation of capital by industrialists. I find it rather hilariously amusing that for Marx's commons to work, it has to be in the capitalist framework of intellectual property ownership. The brilliance of the GPL(v2) is the 'compulsory communal' aspect only kicks in when you sell something. No sale, no compulsion to share with your customers. It will be interesting to see how the AGPLv3 plays out long-term. I see a lot of code getting released under that license, and I expect at some point it will start eating the market share of closed-source cloud 'service' providers, because no capital owner can afford to pay engineers when the competition is doing the work for free. I guess Marx got trolled by Richard Stallman.

On Sun, Aug 3, 2014 at 3:43 PM, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:

On Sun, Aug 03, 2014 at 10:02:44AM -0700, Reed Black wrote:

...

I may be responding to a troll posting, but it's a fun one, so...

I should probably not read Thomas Piketty's Capital and then post on the internet in the same week timespan. But it's been quite an amusing digression.

It's basically Das Kapital, with charts and new predictions and suggested remedies. Nearly a hundred mentions of Marx, and the same blindness about what happens to capital that's accumulated, but reinvested as all major accumulations are. One need only look at any ten years interval where the wealth gap expanded, and then examine the quantity and quality of goods affordable by the poorest in that time. It gives question to his predictions and his radical plans for 80% tax rates and the like. Trying to pull up the wage earners by pulling down the wage payers hasn't worked yet. But it does have an interesting parallel to the below...

...

...

according to his ability, to each according to his need. This is proven by the market penetration of the GPLv2 linux kernel. Capitalists need high quality softare, and they cannot afford the capital to own something

War is peace, freedom is slavery, and Carl Marx was right about from each that

...

actually works.

GPL has little to nothing to do with Marx.

GPL relies entirely on private ownership of intellectual property for its enforcement. Private property is GPL's very foundation. And nobody is compelled to use GPL licensed software, or to agree to a GPL license. Those who do enter into an agreement aren't even required to redistribute their changes unless they redistribute the derivative product. There's no compulsory communal property here, no Marx.

Observe that generally, one can set up GPL and various other forms of voluntary communal contracts under capitalism. But that doesn't make capitalism communist/Marxist. It does make capitalism the more flexible system. One in which the GPL linux kernel is indeed doing well, along with countless privately owned projects.

Marx was worried about endless accumulation of capital by industrialists. I find it rather hilariously amusing that for Marx's commons to work, it has to be in the capitalist framework of intellectual property ownership.

The brilliance of the GPL(v2) is the 'compulsory communal' aspect only kicks in when you sell something. No sale, no compulsion to share with your customers. It will be interesting to see how the AGPLv3 plays out long-term. I see a lot of code getting released under that license, and I expect at some point it will start eating the market share of closed-source cloud 'service' providers, because no capital owner can afford to pay engineers when the competition is doing the work for free.

A car maker is at a competitive disadvantage if it wastes time trying to perfect sheet metal screws and socket wrenches. The other car makers use commodity parts for anything that isn't a unique selling point and differentiate by building the last, non-standard parts. Most businesses and other competitive constructive ventures are like this. Expect open source software to eat into the platform of just about every vertical, but expect that to happen with proprietary software developers' full cooperation. At some point, printer drivers stop being a value added differentiator and capitalists see the best returns in integrating and building on top of CUPS. Font engines become uninteresting and FreeType makes sense. Filesystems, network protocols, web development frameworks, etc... It's why they'll cooperate to help open source projects develop best of breed implementations from the bottom up, but stop where proprietary projects still differentiate themselves in interesting ways. When it gets close to the consumer, we'll always have gaps the size of the space between an xtank and a Diablo III. I'd expect open source projects to subsume more and more things covered by proprietary software and services today, but I'd also expect closed source software and walled gardens to continue to be the points of competitive innovation. By the time there are open source solutions commoditizing today's cloud services, tomorrow's cloud services will be doing appealing new things the public thinks it can't live without. That's not a blind prediction, but an extrapolation of what's already happened. Free WebDAV implementations are here, but now the public wants built in media transcoding for mobile, syncing, and other features as part of their web filesystems. Virtualization systems exist with virtually zero overhead, but now CTOs expect automatic scaling, monitoring and security as push-button add ons. Most every well-established cloud service one can name has a lightweight open source alternative that looks like that cloud service only a few years ago. In a way, capitalists need to keep ceding to the commons to control their costs as they build atop the old in order to afford to stay relevant, or they need to seek other revenue channels while nearly giving the actual service away to all comers. It's a bizarre but wonderful generative system.

I guess Marx got trolled by Richard Stallman.

It's cute, but I never saw anything where Stallman himself seemed to believe free software was socialist in nature. (Anyone have pointers on that?) I know socialists/Marxists love to embrace it and him, but I suspect the movement and Stallman could at best be called fellow travelers of Marxism at best. There may be some common activities, but not goals or ideologies.

Dnia sobota, 2 sierpnia 2014 12:11:09 Fernando Paladini pisze:

But when they say "criminal penalty for mining and other operation", what they mean? I say, how can Russia know who are using Bitcoin, how can Russia know who are trading or mining Bitcoin?

This guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Vyshinsky ...once said: "give me a man and I will find a paragraph" (meaning an article of law to hang/imprison them). The proposed Bitcoin ban is just that: a law that is not going to be enforced for the general population (as there is no way in hell to do that en masse!), but will definitely be used against selected few individuals that Russian government has beefs with.

I think this image can describe the idea I want pass: http://news.insidebitcoins.com/sites/default/files/government-banning-bitcoi n.jpg Am I wrong about that?

I miss the Soviet Union, at least they respected the personal and social freedom (but, yes, I know Stalin was a lunatic).

Instead of asking how much personal or close family experience with the Soviet Union you have, or suggesting you read the article I linked above and educate yourself a bit, I guess I'll just ignore that statement. -- Pozdr rysiek

That would be a first! Wonder what exactly pushes their buttons. Perhaps just that it's a surrogate? Wouldn't surprise me. Giving the Bank of Russia censorship rights regarding alternatives is pretty pushy, but, soon, "in Russia legal tender is only tender". Shame for them they won't be able to actually prevent Bitcoin use, and soon only criminals will use Bitcoin. Might have a bad ripple effect on Bitcoin in the rest of the world. We'll see the price jump up soon.

According to regulations, the Ministry of Finance can either re-submit

So Ministry of Economic Development reacts negatively on that draft, says definition of "money surrogate" is too broad, in current redaction that can lead to ban on almost everything (gift cards, loyalty programs, etc.). It's not like they vote for Bitcoin, as RT says in title, seems like they just want more realistic definition. the revised bill to the Ministry of Economic Development, or submit it to the government without changes, enclosing a table of differences on the project. http://rt.com/news/218019-bill-ban-bitcoin-russia/ (English) http://top.rbc.ru/technology_and_media/26/12/2014/549d7fe89a7947847db1c19b (Russian) Anton Nesterov:

Anton Nesterov wrote:

...

Ministry of Finance of Russia drafted a bill to ban cryptocurrencies with administrative or criminal penalty for mining and other operation. Also they want to censor bitcoin-related websites.

This will come into force in 2015.

http://top.rbc.ru/economics/01/08/2014/940521.shtml (in Russian)

OK, draft is available now: http://regulation.gov.ru/project/17205.html?point=view_project&stage=2&stage_id=13089

Draft bans surrogate money and defines this as currency, including the electronic, used for payments or/and exchange, beside the ones described in federal law (definitely this includes bitcoins).

Emission, creating and distribution software for emission of money surrogates, distribution of information which can be used to emission money surrogates and/or operation with them, operation with money surrogates: 30-50k rubles ($750-1.25k) for citizens, 60-100k ($1.5k-2.5k) for govt officials, 500k-1m ($12.5k-25k) for legal entities.

Also it gives power to the Bank of Russia to censor websites related to the emission and operations with money surrogates.

If any Russians read this: you can add proxy=127.0.0.1:9050 to your bitcoin.conf/litecoin.conf/dogecoin.conf/etc., and this will proxy all your connection via Tor network (of course you need also to run Tor for that).

-- https://nesterov.pw GPG key: 0CE8 65F1 9043 2B11 25A5 74A7 1187 6869 67AA 56E4 https://keybase.io/komachi/key.asc