Amazing!

Quote from: bitAndy on February 01, 2015, 04:37:09 am

I can imagine in a stateless society coordinated shunning - otherwise known as social ostracism - would be the go-to choice for private defense agencies dealing with criminals and other distasteful behavior. There's nothing immoral with socially ostracizing others - your just denying them access to your property. It's by far the most efficient way at curbing behaviors - from both an economical point of view & from a punishment point of view; we're social animals, we can't survive without the tribe.

If a person doesn't uphold a contract, or commits a petty crime, I would imagine their name would be placed on a database (maybe a blockchain) which would be sent out to all businesses in a local or national area.  These businesses would have an incentive not to do businesses with this person as if they are caught they would likewise be shunned. This would mean the criminal would have no access to private roads or be served by businesses. Very quickly the criminal is going to realize he is going to have to offer restitution for his behaviors unless he wants to live the rest of his life isolated from civilization.

Let's pretend there is a community that has a reached a consensus that they will demand that every person, on the day of their 18th birthday, sign a particular contract or be shunned out of their community. The contract requires the signer to honestly provide an established organization with their income and business expenses throughout the year and then by a certain date the next year pay a certain fee to the organization that is calculated uniquely for them based on the information they provided. If they do not pay this fee by a certain time or they falsely report their income and expenses, the contract stipulates that the signer gives the organization the right to seize and sell their property to cover the expenses + additional penalty for going through the hassle. And if even after this process there is excess money owed by the signer that the contract signer cannot pay back with interest over the course of the next year, then the contract signer agrees that they will leave the community and never come back unless they pay restitution to the organization (amount they owed + penalties + interest accumulated over the length of time they had been gone). If the contract signer refuses to follow any of the rules of the contract they signed, the community will be forced to shun them.

Is everything fine so far or is this crossing a line?

Okay, now what if the size of this community in consensus with the terms above has grown to encompass a typical metropolitan area? The area of a typical state/nation? An entire continent? All habitable land on Earth?

Is the criticism with the current system simply that violence should never be used (except perhaps as self-defense in situations of immediate danger) but this sort of coercion is just fine? Or is it that people believe this sort of nearly unanimous coordinated shunning on a massive scale would never actually be successful in practice and so there will always be pockets of society that someone can flee to that is more aligned with their morals? 

If the coordinate shunning can be nearly unanimous over the medium scale, is that any different than having a global civilization composed of small nation-states but without imperialistic tendencies? And then what happens when some of them do decide they want to be an empire? The neighboring nation-states would need sufficient defense to protect themselves from losing their sovereignty/identity (and perhaps their lives).

On the other hand, if the coordinated shunning can only exist in the small scale, perhaps is it sufficiently different that one should make a qualitative distinction between that organization of society and one consisting of multiple states. But then I worry that with coordinated shunning that is only effective at such a small scale, there would be no real deterrent against power-hungry actors trying to organize a sufficiently well-armed group willing to use violence to exploit and take advantage of everyone else. Everyone would be forced to defend themselves and their families from this powerful group. Even if successful at thwarting this attack (perhaps at great cost), I would imagine that without changing the organization structure of the society it would only be a matter of time before another power-hungry group decided to fill that power vacuum.

As much as right wing libertarians believe in individualism, self ownership & respect for private property norms they are unfortunately at the whims of the community they live in. There is no tangible reality to private property ''rights'' or ownership of property. Ownership is a social construct, granted by the community that allow you to keep what you have. That doesn't make it completely subjective; we make strong philsophical arguments for self ownership, homesteading theories to justify private property norms & hope that the community is rational & accepts our arguments.

Regarding the ''okayness'' of an 18 year old having to sign a contract to give up income, which is referring to the State,  or have his resources stripped from him is going to depend on which philosophy you adhere to. To statists it's completely okay. What if there communists who adhere to socialist property norms? To libertarians, a contract is only valid when theres explicit consent & his property should thus be defended against the State. But again, it only works if the majority accept private property norms.

Once you get rid of the State, communities will self organise according to values. If those values were more consistently libertarian then theres less conflict. If communists want to set up areas that ostracise those who attempt to start capitalistic businesses, I don't really care since there will be enough land for everyone & they can just move.

I'm no saying shunning should be the only deterrent against criminals, of course private defence agencies would have sophisticated weapons & be able to carry out physical coercion in self defense but violence is expensive & theres no guarantee the good guy will win. In a free market for defense, they cheapest, most efficient method would win. Ostracism is far cheaper than pro-actively chasing down criminals & having to build expensive prisons to house them.

If they have an identification system for validating email addresses then my murrayrothbard@gmx.com I used to sign up with will be completely useless LOL

Unless one of you libertarian collectors out there have Rothbard's old driving licence sitting around...

I have basically invested as much as I can afford into Bitshares & think I'll just HODL long term. I still need to claim my vesting AGS balance but I'm sure I can do that in the future.

Until I'm confident using linux distros (I'm using windows) I would rather just delete the wallet file off my computer to be safe & have the json files on a number of usb sticks to import months down the line. But is it best practice to keep the wallet, update & export from the most recent wallet that's out or is it completely safe to import old jsons in the future... So if I export at 0.5, there would be no reason as to why that wouldn't import at say 1.5?

This pisses me off. Western State's see some blowback after meddling in the Middle East since post WW1 & they then punish their citizens by chipping away at the remnants of what freedom they have left.

I've just installed Lubuntu 14.10 onto a 32 bit laptop. It's the first time I've ever used Linux, are there step by step instructions on how to compile the wallet?

I've looked at Arhag's thread on compiling a wallet but pretty much all of it is going over my head. https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=5951.0

Should I learn the basics on compiling before I start this kind of task?

I used Safello for the first time the other day. Had no problems with it & it had the best price for buying btc (from the UK).

The new password did include a space character....but so did my old one which I never had a problem with!