I am very excited about the potentials for society and you gave a great talk on that radio station yesterday! Everyone should listen.
Some differentiation: Would you agree that consensus technology can make civil law (partly) unnecessary but not penal law. Or would you want to challenge the centralization of the right to use force by the state? If so how would you want to make sure a violant person (for example a killer) gets arrested?
A violent person would thus be in a virtual jail, living in poverty, until they voluntarily check in to a work facility that provides them food, shelter, and clothing while they work to pay off their restitution.
Can't say I understand this particular idea. Where there is relative poverty, there will always be crime and violence. I hope I'm wrong.
The problem with work facilities is that the current justice system willingly frames people or creates conditions for people to find themselves paying restitution for life. There are many debt traps, poverty traps, or traps which will put decent people in for profit private prisons.
We have a lot to fix with the justice system and the prison system. I think in general what we should focus on is reducing the scarcity and cost of living. People will not have to resort to crime or government support if the market were deflationary enough that everyone could just have their basic needs met. It's only when people become desperate that they begin to take chances they would not ordinarily have taken to earn $.
The rest of what you're saying I agree with. I do think that having more opportunities to make a living in an information based economy benefits everyone. No one has a monopoly on information at this time. But I think we should not limit what we are doing to just information alone because information can be made physical with 3d printers.
That means poverty as we know it can be dramatically reduced without government involvement. I would expect that as poverty is eliminated and the needs of people are met then we will have less street thugs selling drugs to pay for themselves and child support.
Can't say I understand this particular idea. Where there is relative poverty, there will always be crime and violence. I hope I'm wrong.
More generally, where there are imperfect humans there will be crime and violence. The question is how to minimize it without participating in crime (by which I mean the violation of rights) or initiating violence.
I think about it a lot. Largely because I live in a neighborhood where i witness drug deals with some regularity and crime in general (petty theft mostly) is higher than average. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if nobody bought their drugs on the street and put the street-level dealer out of business. But then I figure that the people into dealing drugs are mostly poor kids who would be getting their money more violently if they couldn't sell dope. Young, uneducated, generally uncivilized -- how will they participate in the economy? What role would these type of people have in a new economy?
It's all a matter of tools. In the society of today the vast majority of people don't have the tools to survive and are in a state of desperation. Living day to day, paycheck to paycheck, or worse they are risking their lives and freedom to get beyond "street level".
We should be asking why are people so desperate? We should also be asking why government encourages people to have dependency on it's services but sets monetary and legal policies which may in fact contribute to the desperation people are under?
Finally we have to ask what can we do about this? Crime exists where ever human beings are desperate and the laws interfere with the free market. In a free market where selling drugs is not illegal then the drug dealing industry wouldn't necessarily be violent anymore. But let's be honest about it and also admit that if there were better opportunities the vast majority of people who sell drugs for a living would be convinced to do something else.
So until we provide better opportunities for people by building tools which cannot easily be confiscated, banned, outlawed, or have the access restricted, then nothing can be expected to change. The other invention we can provide is deflationary currencies/DACs.
Anyone can benefit from using their own currency so that they can avoid certain poverty traps. People who don't have good credit cannot go to a bank to get a business loan, but they can go into debt for college. Who decided that college is more important than starting a business?
The other important distinction is the distinction between currencies which inflate which means every year the holders will become more desperate and competitive to maintain their position, and currencies which are deflationary which don't require desperation but instead patience. When you have the currency itself programming people into thinking like a criminal because if they don't get all they can and spend it all as fast as they can't it wont be worth anything, then how are you supposed to get people to think long term or set long term goals, save or plan ahead?
Those who are promoting the inflationary model are promoting the thug mentality without realizing it in my opinion and we should look very carefully at the effects of deflationary currencies on different demographics to see if it results in a behavioral change.
From what I've seen in the Bitcoin community I've noticed it's remarkably well behaved with not very much violence. I also know most people in the Bitcoin community are not rich at all. So there might be an opportunity for a case study on the effects of deflationary currencies on different populations, could it be that deflationary currencies deter crime because people think if they just have patience and save they can get everything they'll need without having to hurt or compete with other people?
Topic: The Significance of what we are doing... (Read 14718 times)
