Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • TRUST Definition: “Your confidence that another will act with a necessary degree

    TRUST

    Definition: “Your confidence that another will act with a necessary degree of reciprocity (mutually beneficial) for the matter at hand, despite the opportunity to act out of an equal degree of self interest.”

    This definition addresses the spectrum of low trust exchanges to consanguineous interactions to high trust mutual insurance. Most definitions assume an equality of relations that never actually exists and as such those other definitions always seem wanting.

    It also explains when we are actually trusting someone, versus asking for a donation. 🙂 Trust is a matter of reciprocity given the relationship you have to someone else.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-26 06:06:00 UTC

  • INTOLERANCE DEMONSTRATES A LACK OF MORAL COURAGE –“social intolerance, kills no

    INTOLERANCE DEMONSTRATES A LACK OF MORAL COURAGE

    –“social intolerance, kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any active effort for their diffusion. […] And thus is kept up a state of things very satisfactory to some minds, because, without the unpleasant process of fining or imprisoning anybody, it maintains all prevailing opinions outwardly undisturbed, while it does not absolutely interdict the exercise of reason by dissentients afflicted with the malady of thought. A convenient plan for having peace in the intellectual world, and keeping all things going on therein very much as they do already. But the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification, is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.”– JS Mill

    COUNTER PROPOSITION (One of my favorite quotes)

    “Whenever we say we are being tolerant, we must ask whether our tolerance is a matter of convenience or conviction. Tolerance is costly. It is an investment in the commons. If being tolerant is easy, it’s most likely that it’s a convenience – we’re just failing to pay the cost of maintaining the moral commons.}

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-26 04:39:00 UTC

  • KIEV UPDATE Well the president refused to resign. Made an offer to give the oppo

    KIEV UPDATE

    Well the president refused to resign. Made an offer to give the opposition the prime minister’s office. Offer rejected. They want his resignation.

    The protesters have seized something like ten or eleven regional government offices. So confidence is spreading.

    It looks like they’ve taken over the House of parliament and are just tearing it to pieces in between setting off fireworks inside and out.

    Their spirits are very high. You can hear them chanting from my apartment.

    Sort of seems the world is finally paying attention.

    Cell reception is out over here. Not sure if it’s related.

    The russians only gave ukraine 15B. I don’t know how long that will last but it’s a drop in the bucket. Between the banks, and the investments here, Russia pretty much owns whatever the oligarchs here don’t own.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-25 17:10:00 UTC

  • Oct 31, 2012Business Management SoftwarePlace: Ukrainka, Kiev Oblast (50.1333, 3

    Oct 31, 2012Business Management SoftwarePlace: Ukrainka, Kiev Oblast (50.1333, 30.7333)Address: Ukrainka, Kiev Oblast

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-25 11:34:00 UTC

  • LIFE LESSONS : A YEAR AND A HALF OF RECUPERATION AND EXPLORATION The capitalist

    LIFE LESSONS : A YEAR AND A HALF OF RECUPERATION AND EXPLORATION

    The capitalist in me does not like very much what I’ve learned.

    The scientist in me forces me to accept it.

    The economist in me is surprised at what I have learned.

    The philosopher in me is fascinated.

    The male in me is overjoyed.

    The enlightenment experiment with government is almost over. It will die with the boomers, like the socialist experiment has died. But so will the anglo form of capitalism. It was very good while it lasted.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-25 10:39:00 UTC

  • BITCOIN IN STANDARD FINANCIAL TERMINOLOGY AND WITHOUT THE SPIN Bitcoin is a nove

    BITCOIN IN STANDARD FINANCIAL TERMINOLOGY AND WITHOUT THE SPIN

    Bitcoin is a novel monetary technology because it combines the properties of various other financial instruments to create a uniquely self financing substitute for money.

    Those instruments are:

    1) Token Money (like when you buy tickets at an amusement park)

    2) Stock Certificate (like when you buy a public company)

    3) Title Registry (like when you research to title to your house, or register the title to your car)

    (You can use wikipedia if you need to learn more about each term.)

    THE BLOCKCHAIN SHARES THE PROPERTIES OF A TITLE REGISTRY, NOT A LEDGER.

    Financial ledgers pool quantities – they ‘roll up transactions’. The Blockchain does not pool quantities. When you pool quantities into aggregates, you launder causality from the data. BTC are not laundered at all by aggregation. Just the opposite. They are anonymous, or at least marginally so, but the are not laundered into aggregates.

    A title registry contains records of the transfer of ownership, so that your ownership is verifiable in the event of a transaction. No history is laundered through aggregation. Each change in fractional ownership is recored.

    The block chain does not perform as a financial ‘ledger’ as much as it functions as a title registry – registration of changes in ownership: like when you buy a home, you buy insurance that the title is clear, and the government owns the title registry (but is unreliable) so you have to get insurance that the seller actually owns the thing before you buy it. A ledger records transactions. A registry records transactions and ownership. The block chain maintains ownership.

    The difference between BTC Shares and ordinary shares, is that while you can’t infinitely divide your home, you CAN to some degree divide up your farmland. BTC title registry operates just like a land registry. Each time you divide your land into smaller plots you register the title of the new plot with the local registry of titles.

    The block chain is a very simple title registry for an almost infinitely divisible bit of property: the Bitcoin share – out to eight decimal places.

    It is a title registry for shares of Bitcoin stock. A Bitcoin entry in the blockchan represents a change in ownership of a share of stock in the Bitcoin Network. Every BTC owner, does own a fraction of the Bitcoin network. When that share is issued it is placed on the title registry. All transactions related to that title are recorded in the registry. Unlike shares of stock which are indivisible, Bitcoins are divisible – out to eight decimal places.

    The Bitcoin registry is public and because of encryption, trustworthy, so we don’t need to pay for INSURANCE when we conduct exchanges.

    MONTARY FACTS

    1) BTC are NOT classifiable as Money Proper (commodity money, backed by natural universal demand)

    2) BTC are NOT classifiable as Fiat Money Proper (backed by a corporation called the state)

    3) BTC are NOT classifiable as a money substitute (backed by a deposit of money, a physical commodity, or a government monopoly.)

    4) BTC ARE classifiable as Fiduciary media (claims not backed by a deposit of money.)

    5) BTC ARE classifiable as Token Money because they are limited in acceptance to other BTC network shareholders where they function as an intermediary money substitute between Fiat Money Proper, Commodity Money Proper, Fiduciary Media, and other Money Substitutes.

    6) BTC ARE classifiable as claims of ownership of shares of stock in the BTC network. They are issued in exchange for computational work. The appreciation of these shares provides the incentive for network members to construct the network and advance the networks interests.

    7) The financial innovations BTC provides, besides the obvious use of public infrastructure to eliminate costs (the internet);

    (a) the use of token money as shares with which to finance the construction of the network.

    (b) extraordinary divisibility of shares of stock into new tokens.

    (c) the use of a nearly inviolable title registry for the ownership of those tokens.

    (d) the near absence of transaction costs.

    MICRO ECONOMIC BENEFITS OF BITCOIN

    (1) If Bitcoin becomes both popular enough to produce a stable price, then it it will function as a store of value. It is not stable enough now. If it was stable enough there would be no incentive for miners. And no value in speculatively purchasing them. So BTC is financed as a share stock in the BTC network, purchased by earning those shares using computing power. By the time BTC becomes stable the value of BTC in the network is so high, that self interest drives perpetuation of the network.

    (2) If Bitcoin evolves such that they’re widely accepted, it will not lose its status as token money. Token money is something you buy to use to purchase something else, but is externally dependent upon some association (the BTC network). Just like tickets at an amusement park. Some of the value of your purchase is captured by the amusement park. Some of the value of your purchase of btc is captured by others as both appreciation and fees for mining coins.

    (3) As long as the current incentives for miners remain such that no one can monopolize the mining process or alter the chance of creating BTC, then no one can cheat the purchasing power of BTC without a self harm.

    (4) Fees are not currently necessary because it is unnecessary to finance the float needed to manage currency exchanges (although you must inventory BTC by pre-purchasing them in addition to your other currencies which may or may not eradicate most of the advantage of not paying interest.)

    (5) Unless regulated by threats from government, no one can impose unnecessary transaction costs on any of your transactions. And competition guarantees at least some access to transaction approvals. (History suggests that eventually, fees will be small but universal.)

    So far, no other medium has effectively free transaction costs, because every other medium IS somehow backed, even if only vaguely, and therefore the transaction must compete against other uses of money in the form of fees that compete with interest rates.

    MACRO ECONOMIC, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL BENEFITS OF BTC

    1) Ease and speed in reconciliation of the exchange different currencies encourages free trade, especially for information and entertainment media.

    2) Restoration of our power to save, since the government cannot dilute the value of BTC, by constantly redistributing from savers to spenders.

    3) Disempowerment of the privileged, gate keeping, financial system from extracting fees. In effect BTC eliminates upward redistribution.

    4) Disempowerment of the government to tax or charge fees. In effect depriving the state of the ability to govern us using money.

    5) Disempowerment of the government to inventory our wealth, and the restoration of financial privacy.

    6) Disempowerment of the government to seize our assets.

    WEAKNESSES OF THE CURRENT GENERATION OF BTC

    1) It is very hard to understand how BTC can function as a common medium of exchange if it takes more than 10- seconds to process a common retail transaction, and 30 seconds to process less common transactions.

    2) It is very hard to understand how BTC will not become regulated and ‘taxed’, since it remains necessary to purchase BTC using the existing financial system.

    3) It is very hard to understand how BTC will not be abused by major miners once the initial wave of appreciation is over.

    4) It is hard to predict what transaction costs will be charged in the future – and I cannot understand why they wouldn’t be charged.

    5) It is very hard to understand how BTC will function at scale without the ability to federate (split up) the block chain, and archive portions of it.

    6) It seems that there is no way of consolidating BTC fragments, and it’s unclear if that would be necessary or beneficial. But without doing so it seems that we cannot maintain the long term viability of the block chain.

    Hopefully this frame of reference will be useful to someone. 🙂 Writing it has been useful for me.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-25 09:36:00 UTC

  • CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS You know, it’s freeing cold outside, and we are approachin

    CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS

    You know, it’s freeing cold outside, and we are approaching a state of revolution nearby. But on this Saturday mid-afternoon, in this middle class neighborhood, in this ordinary restaurant, there are more beautiful women (and men) than you can find in the entirety of most major cities during a warm june day.

    I love these people. They’re beautiful because it matters to them.

    Americans, other than girls in puberty, demonstrate their status by how careless they can pretend to be.

    Sorry west coast people. I love you. But the whole east coast traditional elegance thing just wins hands down. And the farther east in europe you go the better it gets.

    Self respect is beautiful.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-25 09:18:00 UTC

  • It would be very interesting if we sold shares of common stock in corporations l

    It would be very interesting if we sold shares of common stock in corporations like btc, and I’ve considered building an exchange for doing that actually; because it would cut out the major financial houses from the investment process and make it much harder to manipulate stocks and profit from gating a market. If you think BTC is revolutionary for the government, imagine the effect that zero cost transactions on fractional stock purchases would have on the NYC financial system: it would destroy it. All trades would be transparent.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-25 08:41:00 UTC

  • THE ANSWER TO UKRAINIAN POLITICAL CONFLICT IN OBVIOUS TERMS

    THE ANSWER TO UKRAINIAN POLITICAL CONFLICT IN OBVIOUS TERMS

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-25 06:30:00 UTC

  • ROTHBARDIAN ETHICS ARE A PARASITIC SCAM. Rothbard’s ethics are just another a pa

    ROTHBARDIAN ETHICS ARE A PARASITIC SCAM.

    Rothbard’s ethics are just another a parasitic scam seeking to replace low transaction cost state parasitism, with high transaction cost universal parasitism. Aristocratic Egalitarians (protestants) had it right: universal responsibility for the universal suppression of all involuntary extractions, thereby forcing every living soul to compete in the market for goods and services, where his efforts produce a virtuous cycle.

    1) We can describe all involuntary extractions of property as one of the following: Criminal, unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial (statist). Attached is one of my diagrams that illustrates this spectrum. The curve on the right is the DEMONSTRATED demand curve for liberty. Because it represents the REPRODUCTIVE return on forgone opportunities (opportunity costs).

    2) All costs are opportunity costs. That definition of property is the human behavioral definition of property, not some artificially constructed definition of property that was created to justify aggression against property by non physical means. (Which is the very purpose of Rothbard’s argument.) If all costs are opportunity costs then it is not possible to make the argument for bribery except as an excuse to justify theft. (and it is an excuse to justify theft, which is why it’s almost universally rejected except by social outcasts.)

    The human intuitive perception of property, the human normative description of property, and the reproductively and cooperatively NECESSARY and non-arbitrary definition of property, is defined by the requirements for decreasing transaction costs of cooperation. From the most severe and direct (crime) to the most indirect and imperceptible (displacement via outbreeding or immigrating. A fact which is illustrated in the diagram.)

    3) As I’ve said. Either the NAP is insufficient, or the definition of property rights is insufficient. I’m able to construct an argument that the NAP is sufficient as long as the definition of property rights is DESCRIPTIVE.

    But it is not possible to rationally choose an arbitrary description of private property limited to that which is necessary for economic production (private property) and its dependent ethics, and not ALSO leave unanswered the further definitions of property in all its forms that create the trust necessary for rational risk taking in a polity.

    My original assumption was that first mises made the error because of his obsession with commodity prices, which are a reductio example of property, and that rothbard further expanded that error with his appeal to predatory extractive ghetto ethics, as an group evolutionary theory. And I can forgive both authors for such errors. We cannot expect all men to be wise in all matters.

    But as time has progressed I’ve understood the damage that has resulted from the emphasis on a FAILED minority strategy (low trust society), to a successful majority strategy (high trust societies) in producing both eugenic reproduction and expanding wealth.

    4) What is circular reasoning, is the arbitrary definition of rothbardian private property rights as a means of justifying involuntary extraction via PRIVATE SECTOR PARASITISM, as a means of replacing involuntary extraction via STATE PARASITISM.

    Rothbard’s ethics, statism and socialism, are parasitic. ROTHBARD’S ETHICS ARE PARASITIC. Only high trust property rights are fully productive and NOT parasitic. ONLY those high trust ethics. ONLY THOSE AND NO OTHER. Northwestern europeans managed to almost exterminate all involuntary extraction and forcing all human action into the market for goods and services. All of it. Forbidding all other means of free riding.

    Apriorism is an interesting tool for deceiving mediocre minds via overloading. It works in mathematical philosophy for the same reason it works in ethical philosophy: because these reductive arguments rely on aggregation of concepts that obscure the causal properties. So, yes, rothbardianism is a parasitic scam.

    5) If we can get past that point we will get to the dispute over whether it is rational for people to exchange pervasive parasitism, pervasive transaction costs in daily life, for limited parasitic rents, corruption and conspiracy via the state.

    CLOSING

    All costs are opportunity costs. Humans DEMONSTRATE that they behave this way in all circumstances. And it is rational for them to do so. And irrational for them not to. And Rothbardian ethics are an attempt to trade one parasitic scam for another. Nothing more.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-24 21:18:00 UTC