“So tell me, why should I embrace these white knights coming to legitimise Bitcoin with their surveillance and censorship palming it off with their gibberish newspeak. These people are real motherfuckers and what motivates them primarily is greed at your expense.

They don’t see Bitcoin as empowerment. They see Bitcoin as convenience, and are willing to compromise the empowerment aspect for more convenience. Bitcoin will grow, but the question is in which direction.

[…]

It’s funny because all this talk of Bitcoin as being politically-neutral is a way of downplaying the values I’ve been talking about above. You can never be politically neutral. That’s a fantasy. Technology embodies values. Satoshi had values.”

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“If you still don’t believe that features can be developed that are against small business, p2p transfers and the blackmarket, but pro consumers and corporations then see Mike Hearn’s last proposal for improving the security of 0conf payments with the unfortunate side effect of enabling miner blacklists.

And this is just the most malicious and prescient example. The vast majority of proposals are non-controversial and non-noticeable to most people. But don’t forget, it’s the sum of those decisions that affects Bitcoin. And it’s not enough that Bitcoin is opensource. We actually need participating developers who understand these issues deeply. That’s why I’m so glad we have people like Peter Todd, who really see things deep and understand the true social, political and technical ramifications of our decisions that the 99% majority of developers (myself included) don’t see.”

—Amir Taaki

I recently published episode #006 of Dark News, a reading of Jon Matonis’ article on deflation in currencies, and crypto-currencies in particular.

A viewer posted this thought-provoking comment, to which I responded, and I wanted to share the two comments more broadly.

Chris Johnson:

First off, I’m a huge advocator for bitcoin. Secondly, Kristov, I have seen all of your videos from one’s here on the WCN to Bitcoin Group etc and I’m a huge fan and would like to thank you for all you have contributed.

However, I see this video as very misleading. Mainly in terms of loans. You say “near 0% interest rate loans would be possible” as though it were a good thing.

Why would a bank, or anybody, take on the risk of issuing a loan if it their profit margin over saving bitcoin would be so low? Also, what if the value increase of bitcoins is in the realm of 10% or more, wouldn’t that mean loans need to be extremely expensive for the debtor in order for banks etc to be financially motivated to issue loans rather than to save? What if the value of bitcoin increases more than expected, leaving the debtor with the very likely problem that the value of their debt has risen to a point where it cannot be paid back?

As far as I can see, lending money in a bitcoin economy will continue to be a huge problem.

My reply:

Those are some interesting points. This was a reading of an article by economist Jon Matonis (@jonmatonis on Twitter) who would be better equipped to respond to that critique — I’m no economist.

I imagine that there might be less lending in a crypto-economy than there currently is. Good. There’s too much toxic debt out there. The kinds of lending that we really want are not so people can puchase houses they can’t afford, but to start new companies and ventures that add to the overall wealth of humanity. The empirical evidence so far is that venture capitalists are overwhelmingly willing to invest in Bitcoin-based businesses rather than just purchasing bitcoin as a speculative asset, so I wonder the degree to which these theoretical criticisms of deflation are applicable to the economy of the future.

Tails is a Linux-based operating system that users can boot from a USB drive or DVD in a “live disk” configuration. One of the chief benefits of the tool is that it routes all Internet traffic through the Tor privacy network by default. Tails is one of only two  methods of connecting to the Tor network recommended by the Tor project itself, the other being the Tor Browser.

Tor is a peer-to-peer network that allows users to hide their IP address from Internet services. In conjunction with other privacy technologies, Tor helps to provide users anonymity when connecting to the Internet. Since users assume the Internet connections of other Tor users in order to temporarily assume their identities, Tor also effectively circumvents Internet censorship by routing around points of failure.

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer, decentralized crypto-currency. With a multi-billion dollar market cap, Bitcoin is quickly becoming the de facto standard of cutting edge Internet commerce. Its decentralized nature gives it unprecedented monetary censorship resistance. However, Bitcoin’s public ledger system (blockchain) and lack of privacy features to date require users to utilize additional, opt-in technologies in order to achieve financial privacy.

Bitcoin and Tails are a natural marriage of technologies that provide users new-found un-censorship capabilities. Unfortunately, little attention has been paid to compatibility between Tails and the various Bitcoin clients in common use. Even Bitcoin clients that are eager to adopt cutting edge privacy technologies, such as sx, have not ensured compatibility with Tails. Tails is based on a semi-outed version of the Debian operating system, “Squeeze”, which has been officially superseded by the newer “Wheezy” version of Debian, and this has exacerbated some of the software compatibilities between Bitcoin clients and Tails.

I have created a record of tests between various Bitcoin clients and Tails. I am publishing this record as I update it in order to bring attention to compatibility issues. Where necessary, I will inform Bitcoin client developers of these issues, and file bug reports. My end goal is to help Bitcoin client developers and Tails developers to achieve better compatibility in the future, and thus provide users better access to private digital finances.

A link to the tracker can be found here: http://blog.anonymousbitcoinbook.com/bitcoin-client-and-tails-compatibility-tracker/

— Kristov Atlas

I will be re-introducing my old blog posts (including my cold storage tutorials) as time allows. Please pardon the wait for old blog posts and the appearance of the page, as I more fully integrate it into the anonymousbitcoinbook.com domain.

— Kristov