I'm ok with gambling and I'm ok with the open market as well, including drugs. Not necessarily for my own preference or use, but free peaceful people can do what they want with themselves and their money. What business is it of mine. Also I'd say a majority of Americans are against the drug war so I'm not really concerned there either. The concern is how a very select, very powerful few would feel about it. Its ultimately none of their business either, of course, and ideally there's nothing they can do to stop it.
Where we disagree is when you say there is nothing they can do to stop it. They only have to raise the psychic costs on the users and no one will even try Bitshares just like the people aren't rushing to try Bitcoin now that it's associated with terrorists, with organized crime, with drugs, with scams. All of those associations whether warranted or not, are just raising the psychic cost.
To counter this you have to do your best to lower the psychic costs and increase psychic benefits. To be a part of the blockchain economy is to be part of the new elite, the new money, the new economy, the new Internet, and to be an early adopter is to be part of an exclusive privileged group which people should want to be a member of.
The rising Bitcoin price may have helped create that, so when the price is high the psychic cost of dealing with Bitcoin goes down and more people want to get into Bitcoin and altcoins so they can be cool or rich like early adopters. But then when the price is low like it is now, the psychic costs are high, maybe people don't think it's worth it.
Bitcoin and Bitshares at this time are easy to stop by the very people you say can't stop it. So you should focus on lowering psychic costs so that there is less political excuses for people to try to stop it, and also while controversy is okay, it should not be attracted to the development team, the witnesses, the Bitshares forum, or any public person.
Welcoming controversy to the blockchain raises the psychic costs on every participant. Even if most participants deep down feel similar to how you feel about these issues, the fact is that morality isn't really about how you the individual feel about something, but it's about the social norms, the feelings of the people who can do something about the people who insult their emotions, the people who have the power to hire and fire, or arrest, or bring accountability in extralegal extrajudicial forms to enforce their moral laws and traditions.
I think its easy, because bitshares is so small, to see this group of people on the forum or wherever as the "community", but thats not really the case. As bitshares becomes bigger, it will be less and less the case. So each individual, or small group, a buisness, or development team, should consider these psychic cost to whatever they are doing. But as a "community" (that includes the entire field of bitshares users) is impossible and undesirable to govern in this way.
I never said anything about govern. What I was talking about is interface and feature design. The interface and features have to be aware of the fact that certain demographics of people with certain sensibilities run the parts of society which are in the position to crack down on these technologies.
The approach taken by Bitcoin, to basically give the middle finger to authority and to entire demographics, is not smart. Silk Road was an experiment, but it raised the psychic costs for future demographics in order to attract the initial demographics. So it makes sense that yes you need to attract all demographics, but you have to in your interface and design, compartmentalize it and curate it so that the mainstream people, and the moral authoritarians, all can find something of value in Bitshares which outweighs the psychic costs.
This means you must offer psychic benefits to each demographic, which ultimately outweigh the psychic costs on each demographic, to attract the demographic. Sort of like how Peertracks has to attract artists to MUSE, but at the same time attract the file sharing community, and it's going to ultimately mean offering perks to both demographics, while lowering the psychic costs to both demographics.
So for the case of Muse for example, you don't need stealth transfers and all of that. You might need copyright supporting technologies, or copy protection, or watermarking, or other mechanisms to support the economy for music. It's not the same as a decentralized exchange.
Now take BitsharesPlay? BitsharesPlay participants will probably want stealth transfers. In that demographic having anonymity or privacy lowers psychic costs and is actually a psychic benefit. Each blockchain can specialize and will have a different demographic it is trying to bring to blockchain technology.
Identabit for example should focus on attracting people with law enforcement mind sets, or people who have conventional morality, which means people who want to appear normal, and normal people might not want to be associated with Bitshares, Blockchain, Bitcoin, or any of that. Any of those words and terms should be removed from Identabit and Idenabit should simply use Bitshares 2.0 technology on the backend without ever giving details of how it works or what is on the backend. This is because all of those terms introduce psychic costs to Identabit which may be greater than the psychic benefits.
If we start limiting ourselves based on this nations culture or that nations laws. There will be very little left we are able to do, that is not already being done. Laws can also be changed, so if the core is subject to some nations law, we're quickly losing the benefits of being decentralized in the first place.
No one mentioned limiting anything. Specialize different chains for different experiments and audiences. But in any chain you should at least be aware of the psychic costs of any feature or implementation of any feature. When you implement it, you have to do it in a way which minimizes psychic costs, so you cannot do it in a really stupid inflammatory way, meaning you don't have to give authoritarians the middle finger to solve a problem.
The principle of liberty is the core. Each user can decide what to do with it. Each business can decide how they use it, and what functions are available to their users.
Most people don't even know what liberty is. People who believe in censorship, who don't think for themselves, who rely on moral authorities, of course they'll be more concerned about how they look using Bitshares than abstract principle. How does it look if I'm caught using Bitshares, the anarchist drug gambling hacker nerd looking app? That psychic cost is enough to keep millions of people away. You have to lower those costs without sacrificing capabilities, and Linux did it, Bittorrent did it, TCP/IP did it, Facebook and Twitter did it, and all have been used in revolutions, for all sorts of purposes, yet because of the psychic benefits of them all, they ultimately get used.
Its the same argument that a USD dollar can be use for anything, taboo or otherwise. its the individual or buisiness that determines what they are willing to risk in psychic cost, with how they use the USD.
I agree with your points about psychic costs etc, but only as they apply to individual businesses particular offerings to the market built on top or alongside of bitshares. And those cases can make there own determinations and decisions. I don't think bitshares core should worry too much about it. As it is now, Bitshares can be used as a marketplace for buying and selling drugs, it wouldn't require any changes or additions to the core code, and there's nothing we can do to stop them from doing this.
If someone wants to be involved in drugs they should make a special asset just for drugs, and that asset should be separate from "Bitshares" itself. If that asset generates fees, the fees should go to the holders of that asset, or be burned, but it creates a psychic cost if the fees are somehow redistributed to the development team or used to fund stuff not associated with that. So I would say people can make any asset they want, but then with OpenLedger you probably don't want to flood people with advertisements for controversial assets.
Someone just has to build that website. I don't think this reflects poorly on bitshares, and would be a waste of time to try and stop.
No one said stop anything because it's not the role of developers or of us to try to stop anything. The point is it is the role of developers to design an interface, and features, and those features have to minimize psychic costs.
Because something is psychicly taboo in the US or Chile shouldn't govern the limits of a global, non-national system at its core.
Sorry for all the words, I think i repeated myself a couple times : ) and was more long winded then necessary.
For the most part we agree but you added some strawmen. Anonymous developers living in places unknown can create any assets they want without any psychic costs. The developers who are known, who are in known locations, cannot avoid psychic costs. Users and witnesses who are known, who are in known locations, cannot avoid psychic costs. The minimization of psychic costs is important because most users of Bitshares will not be anonymous and if you don't want Bitshares to be either banned or the users to have to somehow be ashamed that they use it, you have to be aware of psychic costs.
Given enough utility people will always use it, but when psychic costs are too high they will not feel good about it. They might use the file sharing app but not talk about it to anyone because everyone around them looks down on people who use that app. That is not what you want if you want to grow an industry.
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