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I guess a better way of putting it is "everything worth being recorded will be tokenized". Are you kidding man? The internet has changed almost every industry. Fraud will be a huge problem but I think its a solvable one. My guess would be writing some kind of reverse clause in the smart contract that nullifies it if it is determined that x input was incorrect/fraudulent, but I'll leave that to the developers to figure out. Crypto is going to be the greatest wealth transfer in history. My guess is anyone with more than a few grand in most coins today will never have to work a day in their life in a decade or two. The current market downturn wont even be a blip on the price chart.

It's mostly just a political buzzword imo. The travel ban is what's most effective, not extreme vetting, because people can just lie. I'm not sure it really matters if they want a better life. Most political parties in europe make Sanders look like Rothbard. It doesn't matter to me if someone is ethnically european if they're going to bring their european politics with them and influence things here. No way to verify it, but if I was in those places I would have gotten out asap. My assumption is that people who stayed had no problems when policies were being implemented but want out because it's gone horribly, predictably, wrong. The only way most europeans can be rehabilitated is by admitting the intrinsic failures and immorality of their ideologies. Short of that, the best thing that can happen is that their suffering serves as a warning to others. If people refuse to admit their causal role in what's happening in europe, then they're a lost cause and it will only hurt us by bringing them here. To be clear, I'm not saying that there is no one in europe worth saving, but my concern is that they are few and far between and it would be neigh impossible to sort them out from the undeserving ones. Do you think there is a way to reasonably do so?

I wrote an article for steemit on why I think the blockchain will end the world as we know it. I would greatly appreciate any feedback that you guys have to give. Here's a link to part 1 and part 2, I didn't realize they had a character limit so I had to make the conclusion it's own post.

There's no good way to ideologically vet people coming in, so I don't think it is possible to take only the good ones. But when things start going south, my guess is that the people fleeing will be the same ones who voted for these catastrophes. Anyone with any sense and two nickles to rub together got out of Europe/SA a long time ago. So by "that" I mean leftism. The constitution only exists as a protection so long as people want it to, so will millions of more potential leftists I don't see it lasting for very long.

Is it really a good idea to take in European refugees? Europe is the way it is because of Europeans. Why should we bring that here?

Hey, I'm in NJ too. The only advice I have is that you have to get your own life in order first before trying to change the world. You are the only one who you have the power to change. The government is going to do what the government is going to do whether you like it or not. Being underemployed isn't a good thing, but it doesn't have to be a bad thing either. I was working a job for a while that I absolutely despised but I realized that since I could do it on autopilot, I had 40 hours every week that I could dedicate to reading, thinking, etc.. It took a long time for me to realize it, but centrally planning your life is a bad idea because you're probably right where you need to be at this time in your life.

Okay, so if I understand you correctly, real and useful are almost synonyms to you? If we're being strictly pragmatic here, then no bitcoin is not more useful than dollars currently. Almost no one accepts it as payment, transactions can be slow and expensive, and it is a tax nightmare. But, what drives me to it is precisely the moral dimension of it. Decentralization has become kind of a buzz word, but what it really means is free from coercion. There is not a central bank that can print more bitcoins to fund their political machinations. There are no middle men who you need to get approval from to use your own money. And there is no third party that you have to trust for the security of your funds. I really like Peter Schiff. It was through his content that I found FDR. But what he gets so wrong is the idea that you need to choose between owning crypto or precious metals. Owning both is something I'm in favor of (silver as superior to gold, but that's a whole other issue), but that's because they do different things. The most concise way I can think of putting it is that PMs is betting on the badness of people and crypto is betting of the goodness of people. If everything goes to hell and society unwinds, then PMs will save you in whatever comes next. But if we are able to get society back on course, then crypto will be the backbone of ancapistan. It's sort of like buying oil fields before the car has been invented--it only makes sense to buy if you can envision a future with cars parked outside of every home. While the moral component is the most important consideration imo, it is not the only one though. The technology is still in it's infancy, but the potential for business makes it an incredible investment opportunity. Smart contracts aim to do what bitcoin does for payments for contracts. Currently, they are limited by what's known as the oracle problem. Essentially, if you want to use data that is not currently on the blockchain for SC inputs, you have to rely on a trusted third party, known as an oracle, to make the data readable. Since that creates a central point of failure and potential for corruption, it defeats the entire purpose of using the technology. But once that problem is solved, businesses will have no choice but to adopt the technology. This is akin to when computers were massive expensive calculators that took up an entire room. Then, there was very little use case for them. But after someone made a decent gui, businesses had no choice but to adopt the technology because of the increase in efficiency, or more precisely, if their competitors adopted the tech and they didn't, they'd be out of business. However, there is also the issue of timing. I'm a firm believer that there are no bad times to buy bitcoin et al, only bad times to sell. But since most do not buy based on the principles I outlined (or any principles for that matter), that is a profoundly unsatisfying answer. There are people who bought bitcoin during peak mania of December 2017 only to watch it crash 75% over the next couple months. In a sense, I can only be confident that the crash of 2018 will be as much of a blip on the linear chart as the crash of 2014 is today because I didn't buy at the very top. That's not to say that you can only know something based on lived experience (I'm not a leftist after all), but that negative experiences dampen one's conviction in the rightness of their judgment. Humanity's capacity for rationality is matched only by it's capacity for irrationality. The general sentiment in the crypto community around mid December after seeing the greatest year in nearly half a decade, where the price when from sub $1k to $10k, and then doubled yet again to $20k was that this was a new paradigm. To many it looked like there was no rhyme or reason, so reason went out the window. People said "hell, if it hit $20k so easily $100k or $1m isn't that far off," and they really believed it. But did that confidence stick around when people started taking profits? Of course not! As the price quickly declined, so to did the sentiment of the community. Now, as the price sits somewhere around $8k, there is an unrelenting depression and """predictions""" ranging from sub $4K to sub $1k. And this is because most investors here don't buy based on principles, but instead base their value as an investor on the value of their portfolio. I can unironically say that I see a future in which bitcoin is worth $1b, but I couldn't possibly tell you when that will be or if that will just be caused by inflation rather than a legitimate increase in purchasing power. But people don't, in general, actually want a real analysis based on principles, they just want me or whoever to sooth their anxiety by telling them they made the right decision. In December I would say exactly that about the price being $1b with my reasoning and people would generally agree. They might say I was being too optimistic, but that I was still directionally true. Now, I'll say the same thing with the same reasons and get laughed at. This is because in December they wanted someone to justify their irrational emotional buying decisions by saying "don't worry, you bought at the peak of the most massive bull run ever, but it's okay because there's still so much more to go up". Now they want someone to justify their irrational emotional selling decisions by saying "don't worry, you sold at a massive loss at the bottom of the bear market, but it's okay because it'll go down further and you can double your position". What I'm getting at in regard to timing is that there are short term price movements that have a huge impact on your psychology. This is especially true if you don't invest based on principles, but still applies to those that do invest based on principles. As absolutely certain as I am about the impact crypto will have on the future, I still think it is foolish to put all your eggs into one basket if only for the fact that it limits your potential to take advantage of market fluctuations. Even if you are 100% certain of the future for PM's, if you were 100% in PMs for 2017 you'd have missed an incredible opportunity to increase your stack. Even if you are 100% certain of the future for crypto, if you were 100% in crypto for 2017 you made some incredible gains, but lost most of them in January and are stuck watching an incredible buying opportunity with no liquidity to take advantage of it. But if you were half and half (not a ratio I necessarily advocate for, just for the sake of making the math easier), it gives you much more options. Let's say you bought 1 oz of gold and 1 bitcoin in Jan 2017 when they were roughly equal in price, you could have potentially sold the bitcoin in December 2017 for ~20 oz of gold. But since that relies on timing unpredictable and highly volatile markets, lets say that you didn't. Even if you just sat on both until today, you have the option to sell the oz of gold to take advantage of the price collapse in bitcoin which you could sell back for even more gold when the price recovers more. If you want to get more into the strategic side of investing, I'd highly highly highly recommend reading the books Antifragile and The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Those are where I've derived a lot of my ideas about investing from. His idea that your investments should look like a dumbbell is essentially what I described. Basically, on one end of your portfolio you have highly stable investments that act as an anchor--here it is gold--and on the other end you have high risk investments that massively outpace the market--here it is bitcoin. The benefit is that you limit your potential for losses significantly while having room to take advantage of significant upsides. I think in the book he used a 90/10 split for his examples. The ratio isn't super important for understanding the concept, but in the the example I gave of buying 1 oz of gold and 1 bitcoin, your potential for taking losses is only 50%. This is because bitcoin could potentially go to zero for one reason or another, but an oz of gold will pretty much always be worth somewhere around $1.2k adjusted for inflation. In other words, you could take a massive loss but still be in the game because half of your portfolio will be unaffected. The reason why this strategy is superior imo to the strategy that gets advocated by people like Shiff, that you should pick between PMs or crypto, is that you and I don't know what the future holds. If I had a crystal ball and could say for certain what will happen AND when (so I could time it right), I'd say sure go all in on x or y. But since I don't have one (please lend me yours if you do), I can't make the best possible choice, but I can make my decisions based on the best possible system. That is precisely why I am so fond of doing a crypto/PM split. It has all the benefits of Taleb's barbell system and one extra. If crypto takes off and does to finance what the car did to travel, I have massive exposure to the parabolic gains that will result. If crypto fails completely, much of my investments will remain unaffected, so I wont be utterly ruined. But here's the part that I like so very much about the crypto/PM split: when the fiat based pyramid scheme that we call the modern economy inevitably collapses like a house of cards, and we are in great depression 2.0, BOTH asset classes will massively outperform the market. We saw this during the financial turmoil in Greece and during the peak of the 2008 recession. When the Greeks implemented currency controls and it looked like they were going to confiscate the funds of depositors to pay their debts, the price of bitcoin skyrocketed. Likewise, silver shot up to nearly $50/oz during a similar time period in the US. So, I guess to answer your question as to if bitcoin is real or not, I'd have to say that is the wrong question to ask. Rather, is it useful? It is difficult to actually spend bitcoin right now because people still have faith in dollars. But will they always? Certainly not. As long as the underlying code remains provably secure, debating whether or not it is real, if it meets the Aristotelian definition of money, or has "intrinsic" value is only a luxury we have right now. Does bitcoin have intrinsic value? I don't know. I'd say that its scarcity, security, lack of counter party risk, and liquidity is intrinsic value compared to PMs, but that's not always accepted. But will it be used as money when everything goes south? Absolutely. There are certainly problems with the technology to be sure, but this is only a problem if you look at bitcoin in a vacuum and disregard all the rest. The decentralized and open source/royalty free nature of the tech ensures that the best currencies rise to the top and their protocols are adopted by others. Bitcoin has issues because transactions can be slow and expensive and the public ledger makes it so there is no fungibility in real terms. It's not a good thing that it can take an hour or more for a transaction to confirm, or that it could cost between $50-$100 if the network is congested, or that a government agency can trace a transaction back to you and everyone who ever had that bitcoin in their wallet. But these are known problems. People like speedy transactions, low fees, and privacy, which is why there are so many competitors trying different things to get it right. Cryptocurrencies like litecoin, nano, or even dogecoin for that matter have much faster transaction speeds and much lower fees. Cryptocurrencies like monero have essentially completely private transactions. However, each of those cryptocurrencies have their own problems because of their deviations. Most are less secure because their networks have a lower hashrate than bitcoin, are more prone to double spends, or just haven't stood the test of time, but most importantly because they have more centralized control by the developers. Bitcoin had a huge kerfuffle over an upgrade last year that split the community. To make a long story short, they were trying to scale the network so that transactions were faster and cheaper and there was a lot of disagreement over the best way to do that. This concluded with bitcoin forking into bitcoin cash. What this means is that there are two bitcoins now competing for the same network resources from miners. Most would say that they are two distinct projects now, but, without digressing too much, this is not the case. It all has to do with consensus, or in other words, one of them will become bitcoin over time as they compete. That point is important because this is not the case for a cryptocurrency like litcoin for instance. Without much debate, the developers upgraded the code to support segwit transactions. It seems like a pragmatic action on their part, but it is a crack in the edifice. There is only one litecoin which means that the users are at the mercy of the developers. They may have gotten a good upgrade today, but will they tomorrow? Possibly then too. But if a government wanted to force the developers to make an upgrade favorable to their aims, they are a central target that does not exist with bitcoin. Privacy coins like monero have that problem too and two more. Privacy means having the currency do redundant things for the sake of obfuscation, which causes transactions to cost more by default compared to coins that don't have privacy. But the worst problem is that even if your transaction is private today, it might not be tomorrow because of advances in technology. People who bought drugs and other contraband off of the deepweb a few years ago with monero are probably losing sleep over the fact that new technology is allowing those old transactions to be de-anonymized. This begs the question that if it is more than likely that transactions today wont be private in the future, why bother at all with privacy features? It really seems like a monkeys paw here. You can get your features, cheap transactions, and privacy, but it ain't gonna be free of negatives. Even higher order changes like changing the way networks are secured adheres to the law of unintended consequences. The bitcoin network is secured through mining. Essentially, you give over computing power to solve problems and to be used by the network, and in return you mine some coins. Since the downside to this is massive electricity costs which many see as unnecessary, the proposed solution is switching to a staking model where you lock up x amount of coins and receive some in return. While this looks like a way to secure a network without high electricity usage, it has costs in other ways. The first is that the new coins have to be minted and sold initially by a third party. This is a huge problem because it massively rewards people that happened to be born at just the right time, are already independently wealthy, and implies the ownership of the original developer is disproportionate to everyone else. This seems like a who cares kind of issue that a leftist would bring up, but bear with me. If you want to go out and mine some gold, you can totally do it. It wont be as easy as it was say during the gold rush, but there's nothing stopping you from buying the equipment and doing it, and there still wont be in 100 or 1000 years because we're constantly developing new technology to dig it up in harder to reach places. The same is true for bitcoin. It wont be as easy in 100 years, but with increases in computing power it will still be possible. But with a staking system it is one and done, so if you buy up a ton now a huge part of that is because you happened to be born at the right time, in the right place. You might get wealthy and pass it on to your children, but this will create a new aristocracy because wealth wont be something that is created anymore. This is further amplified by the second problem. The more coins that you stake, the higher your reward will be. Over time this will lead to a massive centralization of power. If you're already wealthy enough to buy up say 10% of the coin supply, you're probably wealthy enough that you don't need to spend any of the coins and can just let them sit there to increase your stack. It wouldn't take long until there are only a few people at the top with 99% of the coins. I'm not a communist, so I don't favor any kind of confiscatory policies, but what I'm getting at is that this kind of incentive structure would create a class of people who not only have more money than they could spend in 1000 life times, but also that their descendants do too. If you inherited 1m bitcoins in the future, they're yours to do with as you please, but if you're not prudent you balance could go to zero in a heart beat and your children would be back at square one. However, if you inherited 1m coins that increase lets say 1% per year, there is almost no amount of financial ineptitude that could ruin you. Before, if you wasted half of your fortune before passing it on to your children, they did the same, and so on, it wouldn't be more than a few generations before someone had to start over. But with this way, the base amount of wealth could hardly be touched if you tried, meaning that the least deserving people will be the wealthiest over time. Take Trump for example, he's built a massive fortune over his lifetime. His children might be able to grow his empire a bit because they got a lot of experience being raised by him, but they probably wont do nearly as well and his empire will be divided between them, watering down the fortune. His grandchildren will still be unimaginably wealthy, but they wont have the same experience with him as their parents did and will inherit less than their parents if they have more than one child. After enough divisions of the fortune, someone will inevitably have to start from square one. This is a good thing because money is flowing towards those who can use it best. As a society we don't need people who spend more than they contribute, we need people who create (need is sort of a fuzzy word here, so you could replace it with "want", "are bettered by", etc.). And in a free market wealth flows to people who actually do need it because of prodigality. But just imagine if Trump's great great great great great great great great great great great grandchildren were all just as wealthy as he is today. They would literally be a new aristocracy. They would essentially be the gatekeepers of creation because their money would be needed for any kind of new research, so if they don't like something it in a sense coudn't be researched. I've digressed quite a bit, but my point here is that the crypto industry is a true free market for currencies. There is massive profit to be made by creating the true "currency of the future". It might not be bitcoin, but the best will rise to the top. There is so much a/b testing going on right now and all of it open source. Gold is just gold, it always has been and always will be. I will certainly continue to be a store of wealth, but only just that. It's very unlikely to increase in value, just maintain. Cryptocurrencies do everything gold does but better, will continue to get better over time, and are a significant opportunity to make an immense profit. It's not likely that governments will implement a gold standard again because it puts limits on their power to abuse the currency, but if they did, the value of gold isn't going parabolic. In this scenario it would have incredible gains, but it will be nothing compared to bitcoin. In the next financial crash, people will run to PMs and bitcoin, but the difference is that if $10T flooded into gold its market cap would do a bit more than double, but if that same $10T flooded into bitcoin its market cap would double 70 times. I think I've ranted on for long enough, so I'll end with a few questions to hopefully keep us on topic. Bitcoin might not be tangible but are PMs? If I want to keep a sizable amount of wealth in bitcoin its off somewhere in cyberspace and I can rest easy if I trust the security of the cryptography. But if I want to keep a sizable amount of wealth in PMs it is going to be stored somewhere in a vault that I have very little access to. Kind of a joke here because obviously a gold coin is a thing that I can hold in my hand, but I'm sure as hell not going to sleep with $1m of gold under my bed, so is it really physical if its in a vault 100 miles away? Do you think tangibility matters? Or is it counter party risk that matters more? I almost never use cash, but I'm still confident I have $1k of spending power if that's how much it says I have in my bank account. I think it would be similar with bitcoin except that I don't have the counter party risk from dealing with a bank or inflation. I know I said a lot all at once, but were any parts not clear? I have a problem where I'll have a conversation assuming we have the same or similar understanding of an issue, only to find out we're at different points. I don't know how to ask that without sounding incredibly condescending, but trust me I'm not, I just want to be able to better express myself. Is it worth debating "intrinsic value"? Seems rather subjective to me.

Is it possible to both strongly agree and disagree with you at the same time? I forget in which book, but what you said reminded me about something Nassim Nicholas Taleb about the internet making it really profitable to go after the long tail. In essence, traditional bookstores wanted to carry only the most popular books because there is a high cost to store them, so they only wanted things that would sell quickly. But with the internet, sites like amazon are actually rewarded for niche content. When books are just stored in a warehouse or especially digitally, overhead is much less of an issue, so they can make a tonne of money by having a million different books that sell 2 or 3 copies. That variety is the "long tail" of the distribution curve. I'm not sure to what extent that can be extrapolated to people, but I thought you would find it interesting.

Interesting... I missed that update because I usually skip videos titled like that because I've already donated so requests to do so seem less relevant. I'll pay more attention going forward. That convo thread kind of summed up the current situation I am in. I don't agree with your argument that if commenters want to be heard on a larger scale that they should put in the work of content creators. Being a content creator is a full time job, which I am realizing as I am now trying to produce content. I already have a full time job that takes up a ton of my time, leaving little for side projects. These are things I would like to do full time, but it is kind of a catch 22. I don't have enough time to make my side projects profitable which means I have to spend more time working, but that means I have less time to make content. So I'll definitely have to look into steemit. I've recently finished some other projects that have taken up an inordinate amount of my spare time, so please don't misunderstand me and think that I believe it "should" be easy to make a difference in the world. Running something like FDR seems like a dream to many, but only if you ignore the responsibility of being your own boss. I don't think steemit allows for collaboration, but if it did that would be exactly what I described in my op. But do you think something like that has a future? I see your point that paying people to make content could perverse the incentives so that people only make content that will get liked. But how else could that be done? At the very least, it seems like that site makes it so people don't have to work full time at creating but can still influence things.

I think buffet said something like "Be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy". I would amend that to include "but also don't be retarded about it".

I am being somewhat glib about it, but the truth is the truth is the truth. Finding a woman who is both not a christian and not a statist feels like an impossible task sometimes, but we have the rest of our lives to compromise and surrender our ideals.

This argument is wrong, but porn is a violation of the NAP for other reasons. · There is a high correlation between the people who appear in porn and highly abusive childhoods · Using porn creates a market demand for more · Therefore, using porn incentivizes child abuse because it allows for a profitable outlet for said abuse which would have to otherwise be dealt with if there were no market for porn · Therefore, watching porn is a violation of the NAP

Quality =/= quantity. The majority of everything is average to subpar and it is better to have no relationships than bad ones.

It's one thing to understand an opposing argument, but another to actually believe it. How would you set up an incentive structure for good information if not by a rep system? Are there alternatives that I am not aware of?

I sure hope it is. There is no such thing as a God so if it is not possible for forgiveness without one, then forgiveness isn't possible.