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Show: Reality Exploit Roundtable
Episode: 18
Date: Mar 01, 2013
Topics: Anti Drone Fashions, Gov & IT fight Online "Radicalization", Reckless and Smart on Wall Street, The Anonymity Fantasy vs. The Cashless Utopia Mirage
Moderator: Hiro
Panelists: Voodoo, Wise-Guy, Smuggler, Plato
Tags: Drones, Economics, CamOver, Bitcoin, Digital Cash, Wall Street


Intro music by Sun Araw – “Deep Cover”

Panelists

• Voodoo: Black and Yellow Pages, Beer Can Engines
• Smugggler: http://anarplex.net, http://shadowlife.cc
• Plato: Twitter, Reddit
• Wise-Guy
• Hiro: Podcasts: AgoristRadio | News: OrlinGrabbe

Topic 1 – smuggler

Anti Drone Fashions

Smuggler, I read an article about rulescaping on Anarplex. As the eyes in the
sky breed, do you think we’ll develop new social conventions to maintain our
privacy? There’s plenty of locations where you cannot wear masks. Will there be
locations where it’s taboo to show your face?

• Wired: Anti Drone Fashions
• Top 22 Al Queda Tips for Dodging Drones

Topic 2 – plato

Government & Industry to fight Online “Radicalization”

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the White House plan to counter “online
radicalization” is it’s plan to work with “industry” to do so. “The Federal
Government will collaborate with industry to explore how we might counter
online violent extremism while protecting lawful Internet use and the civil
liberties and privacy of individual users,” according to the White House.

Plato, what will be the consequences if Verizon teams up with the Government to
fight terrorism?

• AlterNet: What Could Go Wrong? White House to Partner With Big Business to
  Combat ‘Online Radicalization’

Topic 3 – voodoo

Why It’s Smart to Be Reckless on Wall Street

This SciAm article outlines a few strategies that traders use to get rich. The basic
strategy is place big bets with company money. Worst case scenario you lose nothing.
Voodoo, in a well functioning market, the unfit traders are supposed to lose
all their money so they drop out of the market. Apparently individual Wall Street
traders can just profit with the firms’ money. How on earth do the firms stay in
business?

• Scientific American: Why It’s Smart to Be Reckless on Wall Street

Topic 4 – wise-guy

The Anonymity Fantasy vs. The Cashless Utopia Mirage

Matoins on Forbes: “Let’s not kid ourselves, because the end of money, as we know it,
really means the beginning of the transactional surveillance State, which makes this a
serious debate about the boundaries of State power and the dignity of an individual.

• The Anonymity Fantasy
• The Cashless Utopia Mirage

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Jon Matonis, an Austrian School Economist and author of The Monetary Future Blog joins us for a chat with Hiro on the topics of “The Social, Economic and Political Disruptive Technology of Bitcoin”. Jon gives us some of his background and history relating to digital currencies and issues surrounding the New Monetary Future. We spin off on many topics related to the Bitcoin ecosystem, news items, the concept of money and the reactions to Bitcoin by the State, Gold-Bugs, old-man-bitter-Cypherpunks and more. This is our first episode with Jon and we hope to have him back on a regular basis as there are very few in this world with the background and understanding of what is going on right now and who Really GET IT.

Links:
http://themonetaryfuture.blogspot.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jonmatonis

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A stunning treaty on “What is Money” by Frederick Bastiat. From wikipedia: “Bastiat was the author of many works on economics and political economy, generally characterized by their clear organization, forceful argumentation, and acerbic wit. Economist Murray Rothbard wrote that “Bastiat was indeed a lucid and superb writer, whose brilliant and witty essays and fables to this day are remarkable and devastating demolitions of protectionism and of all forms of government subsidy and control. He was a truly scintillating advocate of an untrammeled free market.”[1] Among his better known works is Economic Sophisms,[4] which contains many strongly worded attacks on statist policies. Bastiat wrote it while living in England to advise the shapers of the French Republic on pitfalls to avoid.

Links:
What is Money? – Frederick Bastiat
http://bastiat.org/en/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Bastiat

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Justin from Voucher-Safe is back to discuss some Problems that Voucher-Safe is out to Solve, and some things that it has no interest in solving, namely the “better money” problem. Listen in to hear what Justin has to say about this. Also discussed are some early history of pre-internet days when the feds cracked down on an early barter network that exchanged warehouse receipts… Interesting stories…

Some more details on how Voucher-Safe has many layers with Zero-Knowledge like interactions. You can’t give up, what you don’t know. You don’t need to know, what is not necessary to know.

Justin also discusses his positive feelings about what a system like Voucher-Safe can do for Bitcoin, referencing the recent show with Mike Gogulski on Bitcoin laundry systems, and all remailer type mixing of transactions. How Voucher-Safe can fit right in with bringing many things to the Digital Cash/Value Transfer System talbles that Bitcoin by itself does not solve.

We then get into the XMPP infrastructure that Voucher-Safe uses for inter system communications and client comms with users. Interesting setup, we discuss how some elements of Voucher-Safe can be run on Low Trust Servers with an economic incentive for those that run them. We also talk about some “best practices” for RPC/Request-Response calls over XMPP, he talks about existing solutions and things like timeouts, queues, and callback ids can be used. First half non-tech, second half heavy tech. As a whole Good Stuff.

Voucher-Safe.com main website. Screencasts, Download the Software…
Voucher-Safe Community / Developer Site
Voucher-Safe System Architecture
http://www.pecunix.com/
Openfire XMPP/Jabber Server
Spark XMPP Client
Smack XMPP API/Library

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Another piece from J. Orlin Grabbe on Digital Cash and the Regulators. Seigniorage, or Digital Cash issued by banks are actually Interest Free Loans to the Bank Issuers from the Cash holders? Interesting topics covered, and most issues still relevant today. One thing for sure, you don’t want to do this stuff in the USA.

Links:
Original Essay: “Digital Cash and the Regulators” by J. Orlin Grabbe

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Another Cypherpunk classic by Tim May. One of the most important points:
“No Middle Ground”. “Digital Cash IS Speech”

Untraceable Digital Cash, Information Markets and Blacknet”
Timothy C. May

Sections:
1. Introduction 2. Anonymous Digital Cash 3. Is Digital Cash Really Coming?
4. The Technology is Here 5. “Anyone a Mint” 6. Implications of Anyone Becoming a Mint 7. Applications at the “Margins” 8. Information Markets as an Example 9. The BlackNet Experiment 10. Espionage as an Information Market 11. Can Digital Cash be Banned? 12. No Middle Ground 13. Effects on Taxation 14. Crypto Armageddon: The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse 15. The Price of Digital Cash

Links:
Original: Untraceable Digital Cash, Information Markets, and BlackNet

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Orlin: “The world financial police are determined to eliminate all opportunity for individual financial privacy and anonymity. Their coordinated efforts to make possible the tracking of every financial transaction represent a direct fascistic attack on human freedom. And there is nothing secret about what they are doing. Their campaign is as overt as the war on drugs, and as well-funded as next year’s intelligence budget. New legislative proposals to make their political efforts “the law,” to expand their intrusive powers, and to criminalize their critics, pour off the assembly line daily.

Call their goal the Global Financial Jackboot. The jackboot’s construction proceeds according to a fairly detailed blueprint. Maybe you should take a look.”

Links:
Original Essay: The World Financial Police Attack Anonymity
Orlin’s Homepage

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Bill Frezza: “Perhaps, for the first time, sovereign individuals will have the tools to construct a practical realization of laissez-faire capitalism without having to resort to a problematic social contract with an all-powerful state to create the conditions necessary to sustain a stable political economy. At the root of this system will be new monetary institutions that must inherently rest on the consent of the participants.

Cyberspace, which promises to shield individuals from the ravages of coercive force and allow them to conduct their affairs in secure anonymity, will bring forth a burst of creative human genius not seen since the last time a new world was discovered.”

Links:
The Future of Money in the Information Age: Chapter 4: The Internet and the End of Monetary Sovereignty

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Bill St. Claire of the great http://billstclair.com/blog/ and author of the Truledger Anonymous Digitally Signed General Ledger and Trading System joins us for an Intro to the System and a walkthrough where we cover many aspect of the system. We discuss the client software, the servers. Digital Signatures, Coupons, destruction of account history. Lisp, multiplatform binaries, the future for iphone and android. How to run a Client, a Multi-user client and more. Very informative and interesting.

Links:
Truledger Website
Bill’s Blog http://billstclair.com/blog/

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A reading of a piece by Mark Herpel. Don’t confuse this with hysterics on the part of the author. Mark wrote this piece without commentary, only matter of fact, and only addressing FinCEN “concerns”. The issues raised are ones of Mega-Political, paradigm changing scope, clearly to be the single most Disruptive Technology seen to date. The issues are though, starting to cause hysterics, especially with those involved with wealth redistribution, asset confiscation, taxation theft, financial spy networks, and other financial/money monopolists i.e. Government thugs and their Big Bank/Corporate spouses.
Brief commentary and comments by Hiro at the end of the reading.

Links:
Original piece: Peer-2-Peer Digital Currency: The Long Road Ahead for FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network)
Digital Gold Currency Magazine