praxeologist

No, I mean exactly what I said. Nothing has intrinsic value, ever.

>Therefore I propose a definition of "intrinsic value": something that all entities to whom "value" has meaning universally believe has that quality. For example, oxygen.

If I already have many lifetimes' worth of oxygen for my breathing apparatus, I might have no interest in and place no value upon your stock of oxygen.

Maybe the beings in question are some sort of alien life form that live in volcanos and breathe nitrous oxide. The type of error you are making is similar to calling air "superabundant" and then conflating that with "unlimited".

Bitcoin has no utility absent the present state of affairs where people believe in statism and government agents actively forbid money besides their fiat regime's. Some Austrian economists fail to see why bitcoin really is money, but it is because it has utility in this manner I mentioned.

A 'price' is a historical datum of an exchange. I valued my thing at X of your things, probably in terms of monetary units; you likewise valued my things in some sort of agreeable way that we voluntarily made an exchange.

"Intrinsic value" implies, "People will like this shit no matter what." Real value is subjective and only created by acting human beings.

Utility != intrinsic value. Nothing has intrinsic value.

>Give your customers a peace of mind.

There should be no 'a' and just be 'give your customers peace of mind'.

The homepage really isn't that great in presentation but the secondary pages are very "squashed":https://www.bitrated.com/faq.html#is-this-an-escrow-

You need to add some spacing/padding around these list items and titles otherwise it looks pretty crappy.

DAC stands for distributed autonomous corporation. "Corporation" in this context is a little bit wonky because bitcoin is a DAC. I could see there being both general gambling DACs or specific to poker. It takes a little while to wrap your head around the concept, so I will just give you some reading:

1 - http://letstalkbitcoin.com/dacs-that-spawn-dacs/#.Up0Y9uL3P2...

2 - http://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?board=9.0

http://ge.tt/7v8w1R61/v/0

Yes, it is true that India has a culture of corruption and bribery. I wonder if part of these girls' wages are taken for the housing or "company store" type things. There were some stories recently about workers in Dubai who are just lied to about the level of pay and then held hostage with visa or passport paperwork. If it is that type of case here, then it is fraud and the exploitation is due to the faulty legal system, lack of enforcement, culture of misogyny, etc.

I don't agree at all with the idea that wage labor by itself is exploitative. Basically the error with Marxist exploitation theory is that it ignores the concept of time preference. Wage laborers with a higher time preference prefer present goods in the form of wages to the process of saving and deferring some of the present enjoyment and then taking up their own entrepreneurial venture. Of course, the state by erecting barriers to entry and other distortions exacerbate the problem.

A polycentric legal order would have people living in one area who might subscribe to any number of different private security and arbitration firms.

>Most economic "laws" apply in competitive markets with limited barriers to entry. It is hard to see how they apply even in an unregulated situation where infrastructure costs are so high and one market participant already has infrastructure in place.

The problem here is certain city councils putting a price tag on the license to lay cable. Government creates a barrier to entry in order to aid Comcast's monopoly. All the laws of economics are intact and this isn't a problem of infrastructure costs.

>There can be more than one problem. In your area regulation may be a significant part of the problem but in other places (e.g. Europe) regulation can really help in places to enable competition.

Government is not a business. It does not enable competition ever. Maybe you feel better telling yourself such fairy tales but there is no example you can point to. People also generally believe things like that IP aids innovation, yet there is not a single study showing this and a bunch of studies showing it hampers innovation. IP is a state-granted monopoly over an idea/pattern/concept.

When it is favorable to certain corrupt city councils, they aid Comcast's monopoly. I didn't mention it but the place I live now which also has no FIOS is Harrisburg, PA. This is the Detroit you never heard of with 7x the public debt per capita vs. Detroit. The long-time mayor took a bunch of loans for stuff like a Wild West museum and left the city crippled with debt. They are in the process of selling off assets to avoid bankruptcy. Same deal here as Baltimore, too expensive to play ball with the city council so it isn't worth it to get a license but FIOS is everywhere in surrounding municipalities.

>In the state of Maryland, Verizon currently offers FiOS service in Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Charles, Harford, Howard, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. Thus, the only major jurisdiction in the state that is not yet wired for FiOS is Baltimore City. Verizon recently told members of the City Council that they have no plans to apply for a franchise agreement with the Baltimore City Office of Cable and Communications.

I'm not sure on all the ins and outs of it. Feel free to dig more yourself but basically Verizon needs some sort of permit to lay cable and the city council or this office has a certain price for it that makes Verizon see it as unprofitable to provide the service then, unlike most other areas.

Just because the internet is important doesn't mean the same laws of economics don't apply to it and it will somehow be better provided by government.

>refuse to accept the existence of any laws restricting their actions.

I was trying to focus on our lack of ability to choose, not so much what I advocate, but I do not advocate a lawless society. A corollary to "right to secede down to the level of the individual"—which is a law/rule BTW—would be that other people can't arbitrarily take control of you and not let you secede.

But what if there are disagreements? I try to approach this in a way that I feel is scientific. I think that we can discover an eminently "human" law but then still have a lot of variation in politics, maintain peace and prosperity with having a few fundamental rules dominate popular acceptance like democracy does now. I don't have time now to get into all of that but if you are genuinely curious I could help you learn.

What country is using liquid democracy though? What country is a "good/functioning democracy" right now in your opinion? I assume some European country will be pointed to, then I can still find slews of examples where the structural incentive problem is taking place and causing harm. Liquid democracy is the type of radically different idea that we ought to be able to experiment with.

Introducing a web of trust and having a mechanism for recall or direct representation by individuals is an improvement over the popularity contests we hold in the US every 2/4/6 years. If you slap liquid democracy on the idea of geographic monopoly, you still have an inferior system, because it only outputs one thing, the A or B in a box. If I want A but the chain of delegates chooses B, I am still losing out. What if we could have a way to have both A and B as well as all minority opinions C .. Z be expressed? (as long as they don't break the code so to speak)

Well, we already have this and it is called free markets. If I want soda, I go to an entity I and a bunch of other people have largely turned over power to control picking the best sodas: one of my local supermarkets. That is like the concept of handing over my votes to someone who can in turn give all those to someone they trust to represent them. Coke and Pepsi dominate as people's favorite choices, so they and their flavor variants occupy a lot of shelf space (think Earth's territory for the analogy). What if I want some guava soda or Jamaican ginger beer? Well, there might be some if there is enough demand in the area to make it profitable to carry it.

Obviously, I expect people to have all sorts of objections here to comparing laws to flavors of sodas. I think the availability of all sorts of niche things though is a great example of how markets make the individual consumer "king" whereas "typical democracy" only has the empty promise that anyone can rule.

The "democracy" option besides moving to an authoritarian country is what I actually call "democratic majoritarian rule", so yes this contradicts what I really believe democracy is. There's no options besides this except taking another step backwards to some dictatorship or whatever.

Give me a break. Nobody talks about such things during a crime in progress. All political programs promise to be the best way of bringing about what its adherents want. I'm not even talking about A or B or C being better. I'm saying it is undemocratic to be forced to choose option A, "democracy".

>Any sort of idealized community in the desert or floating around on a barge is going to need an umbilical chord to the rest of us. You can't leave and start your own brand new world.

This could have been said by an 18th century British bureaucrat too. The US was a noble experiment but it has failed, and, no, it's existence today doesn't contradict what I am saying. Tyranny was supposed to be kept at bay by a unique system of checks and balances + democratic representation. History shows that the US political elite has continually aggrandized itself instead. It's like a piece of software that is going to have terrible memory leaks no matter what. If you want a blazing fast app, you can't keep working with this setup.

Hacking can certainly be making the best with what you have but totally ignoring the possibility of the best option being to scrap it all and start over. I'd think that the startup world would be comfortable with at least considering such ideas.