bitGold is a decentralized market pegged asset in BitShares, and that is what metaexchange deals with.  bitgold.com is a centralized service and you'll have to withdraw through them.  Many in this community don't think to highly of bitgold.com because BitShares used that name first, and I think they may have also tried to copyright the term.

Seriously? That's why the whole bitshares name was stupid in the first place. I understand why bittorrentcoin was chosen to help people understand what it was. But bitshares was stupid and then calling all assets bitblah and nobody saw this problem coming? Oh common! You can go the other way and argue that bitshares just wants to piggyback of the bitcoin name instead of going with an original branding. bitgold was talked about way before bitshares or even bitcoin existed and it will only become more troublesome as long as bitcoin grows and bitshares has no right to complain about other people lacking originality on the same level.

For the record I've been warning for this since I joined the forums and every chance we had to rebrand.

I think this a must read...
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-07/greferendum-shocker-tsipras-intended-lose-and-now-trapped-his-success

Yeah, interesting to see how this will play out.

It could all be part of a genius plan however.

On a serious note, what really is messed up is that just about every Joe Schmoe (and even little teeny JoeyD as well) knew this was going to happen right from the start, so the elite did everything in their power to prevent democratic recourse throughout Europe. What really bugs me is that key actors in the formation of the Euro-zone like the Dutch prime minister Kok (and he deserves all the connotation his name receives in English) and Kohl from Germany also knew that the whole concept was broken. They deliberately went through anyway, so that "they" (as in other people) would be forced to come up with a solution.

Auftragstaktik - Mission-type tactics where goals, resources and time constraints are dictated, but lower down command are allowed to independently achieve the aims without micromanagement (correct me if this isn't what you meant).

That's as good of a description I've seen anywhere else, I think you got it down.

I would agree with you that democracy could work if power was far more decentralized, except that some brave guys in America tried that and it didn't even last 100 years before their republic got fucked up.
Sustaining freedom under such a republic requires the teaching and continued investment on critical thinking. Good luck with that! I reiterate that humans care about themselves, and I believe that a peaceful society will emerge as the summation/aggregate of happy individuals who have the choice to govern their own lives as they see fit.

If power is there to be grabbed, then sooner or later a group of people are going to conspire to take it. If there was some way to make the media honest and ensure they tell people the 'truth' then maybe it could work.
BM posted an idea for a prediction market based journalism platform (can't find it, all the links are moved :/), that would function like Peertracks but for articles and such.
Maybe that is one way to make it work, but such systems of control (republics) aren't essential so why risk it all over again? What would the Founding Fathers do if they could try again? I'm not sure, but I bet they didn't predict just how HUGE an influence the media would gain over us, everyone has a bug in their pocket and a screen telling them what's "cool". That would need to be changed first

I agree with you so much, that I have been preemptively depressed about this for decades. But now that I can retroactively agree with you and know I'm not alone, I feel it was worth it.

(Sorry, just saying I agree gets a bit boring so I gave it a little swing.)

Quote from: JoeyD on July 06, 2015, 09:00:50 am

One problem I can't seem to solve with capitalism in general is that I rarely see the people who are actually providing or creating the value being the ones to profit. I haven't managed to figure out a capitalistic system that ultimately doesn't end up being in favor of parasites and malignant tumors.

Regulation encourages the rent-seeking behaviour, what we have now is Crony Capitalism or Crapitalism which is more akin to fascism than true capitalism.

In today's system, gains are privatised and losses are socialised.
Capitalism does not work if businesses are not allowed to fail and pay the consequences of not providing a valuable product or service to the market.

The problem of force can be solved with arbitration and reputation based conflict resolution.
If your reputation and respect in the market can net you $$$$ in profits for providing a service, then stealing $$ by being dishonest is nowhere near profitable. Crypto and real-time audits with smart contracts go a very long way to ensuring that arbitration is honest.

Nearly everyone has a problem with anarchy, as it's been sold by the media as chaos.

All markets and people have "problems". The crux of the debate is this: Who can solve problems more efficiently; a small group of "elected" officials (elections are media popularity contests) contained by "regulation" (competition stifling)
OR collections of motivated individuals with stake in the game (their savings), bound only by the risk of failure that they are willing to bear.

People are STUPID and individuals are SMART. It all comes down to mob psychology. Statism results in an apathetic attitude and dependence on other people.
I'll never believe in democracy unless someone can convince me that humans can be motivated to thoroughly research the political parties (hooray, we'll throw a BIGGER party if you vote for us! Don't sweat the debt!) when they are not directly impacted. Political change happens slowly and ain't nobody got time for that.
People care what affects them NOW. When you vote in a democratic election there is no way that you can consider society at large, predict the future, evaluate the profit-potetial (or missed opportunities) of each option, conduct interviews to ascertain foreign policy or perform background checks on your potential rulers. You vote for who you (are told) will improve your life the most.
"Newspaper says he'll give builders $$$, so I'll vote for him and lobby against anyone offering equal treatment, coz im a builder"
Would you want the popular kids at highschool running your life???

Capitalism acknowledges this fact and aligns the incentives for an overall outcome of progress and success, as determined by the choices made by individuals within society.

This may be a little off-topic but in a forum of a freedom-centric platform I would like others to understand that anarchy and freedom is possible.

To continue the tangent, I know what anarchy is and I agree it's not chaos. Honestly I personally have no problem at all with chaos and people having to be completely self-sufficient and always adapting and ever changing, but I realize that my point of view (of an ideal world) will never gain traction with the majority.

I'm all for breaking up the central planning monstrosities (in all areas not just in the form of nation states) we have now into many small ones. Democracy can work given enough transparency and information plus no micromanagement and no centralization of power. Or to use the modern term bottom-up instead of top-down-society.

During my time in the military I was struck by the concept of Auftragstaktik and I think decentralization like that would be the key to creating a better society on many levels, including business. Unfortunately the Cold-War utterly destroyed that line of thinking and seeing the same fear-mongering from that era being reintroduced I'm not too optimistic about the chances of the concept of decentralization of power catching hold anytime soon.

Time and time again I'm shocked at how people as a whole move towards cult-like OCD(control freak) behavior, be it forming political parties which I agree completely fucks up a democracy, but also cults like for example the Apple I-Phone users. Just about every party I go to, I am harassed by Apple users trying to convince me that it's okay that I don't actually control or own anything on that particular device and that I should just accept that as being superior and who needs options like fore example being able to just copy MY files/photographs to any device I want via USB. Sorry went a bit to far off topic there in a personal rant, but it does illustrate my point about people in general seemingly being unappreciative of independence and opposed or at the very least not supporters of the loss of their freedom.

Funny now that I mention this, one of the mental experiments I use to see if a political system or any other form of organization would work, is if it would be able to resist the coming of the Apple I-phone cult and their erosion of personal freedom  .

Man I wish I could believe in something like anarcho capitalism, but the more I think about it the less I believe it will work. I don't see any way it prevents monopolies or ultimately prevent the use of force. To be perfectly honest, to me it seems to be a just as easily exploitable divide and conquer stage as any.

Somehow I keep ending up back at democracy as the best of the bad solutions, as long as the scale is small enough and you have properly functioning accessible transparent information (supposedly that's what journalism-traders were supposed to be doing originally). While the minority might dislike being forced by the majority, the minority forcing the majority is even worse.

One problem I can't seem to solve with capitalism in general is that I rarely see the people who are actually providing or creating the value being the ones to profit. I haven't managed to figure out a capitalistic system that ultimately doesn't end up being in favor of parasites and malignant tumors.

Looking at one past example I have my doubts about the slow and steady decline. The only thing that will be slow and steady is human disbelief about what is really happening, because in dollar/euro we trust.

To me the current situation is more like the old Road Runner cartoons, with Wild E. Coyote temporarily running and standing on air above the abyss for comedic effect.

Also if even the IMF talks about a big reset 10 times in a 2 minute speech, then I'm not that confident that the big shots are oblivious of the current state of affairs. Actually the foundation of the brics, Great Britain and other western countries joining them and the deals with Russia, Iran and China to no longer take petro-dollars (without their leaders being immediately bombarded to kingdom come as with all previous attempts) plus all the countries stockpiling gold by the truckload, it seems that the end of the dollar has already happened.

While the "confidence" that our entire financial air castle is built upon might seem hard to disperse, doesn't necessarily mean that it will do so slowly once it does. Humans can change their points of view surprisingly quickly at very inopportune moments.

I'm pretty sure everybody realized that, but it's still funny though.

Besides, it's not like ONE BILLION euros _{and change} wouldn't help an itty bit.

Quote from: jsidhu on June 29, 2015, 02:40:34 am

euro is going to dissappear ...

Wait .. What?

He's most likely correct though.

A week ago I watched a documentary delving into the inception of the euro and the root of it's current problems, that pointed out some disturbing facts I wasn't aware of.

For example how our political leaders were fully aware of the euro being broken and unable to function right at the start. But in their inscrutable wisdom they figured it a good plan to set it up like that in order to force the members to come together and solve those issues afterwards. Talk about delusional.

And then we had France not wanting to be the worst economy in the union so they insisted having a number of weaker ones in order to make themselves look good (instead of fixing their economy). And then Germany of all countries, in the wake of their reunion with the DDR, set some bad precedents, making any hope of ever fixing the euro evaporate. Because if even Germany can bend the rules then why can't the others right?

Apparently even before the euro was final, quite a few US-economist laughed their asses off at the time about the stupidity of the plan. In the Netherlands a collection of economists wrote and presented a manifesto warning of all the problems that the euro is facing now. But our politicians instead of reacting normally they used everything in their power to defame these people and socially destroy them. Even now, after they've been proven right, those same economists are no longer willing to come out.

Anyways I agree with quite a few other experts that there is no way to fix the euro anymore. Still interesting to see how long they can keep up this charade, almost like everybody is in a state of denial about what a joke the whole thing is.