Richard stallman bitcoins

This is somewhat reminiscent of the use that some distrustful people made and surely still do to make purchases online: putting money in a special card with little money that they only use to make purchases online. It also reminds PayPal, where we only give an email to make payments through an intermediary.

Or Apple Pay, which also uses Tokens. The main difference from these systems is that GNU Taler is totally anonymous at all times. GNU Taler is not something that everyone can use right now, which makes sense considering that it hasn't been around for a long time, but the European Community seems interested in supporting the payment system and he has already done tests that have gone very well.

Why Taler? For privacy. Stallam is a huge advocate for user privacy and believes that digital payment systems are dangerous if they are not developed to be secure. Furthermore, in countries like China nothing is kept private and Stallman prefers that governments are not snooping on transactions. All these problems disappear if we use GNU Taler: nobody knows who has paid what, but the payment has been made. Will you trust him? The content of the article adheres to our principles of editorial ethics.

Education is an example of something we can't even measure the ROI on. We just know from observation that the better educated a society is, the higher its productive capacity appears to be a few generations down the line. We also know that some academies do a better job than others, and that some people are willing to pay more to have their children educated at those academies, with no guarantee that they will see a ROI.

The child could turn out rebellious, or just not smart anyway. People still invest in education despite there being no obvious profit motive - their child's future is more important than the value of the money. The real difference in investment when it comes to deflation is that people simply make better decisions. The incentive is skewed more towards saving than spending, but this is not absolute.

The argument against deflation is essentially the same as saying "people won't save money if there is inflation," because money is depreciating over time. The incentive is towards spending, but people still save money. The only time they don't save is during hyperinflation, when the value of the money depreciates more rapidly than they earn and spend it.

The reverse is true for a deflationary economy. As long as deflation is low, people will still spend, but with more preference to save. It is only if hyperdeflation occurs that people will "hodl" and only spend the bare minimum to survive. Hyperdeflation will occur as bitcoin gains adoption, but it is not the eventual state. Once peak adoption has occurred, the rate of deflation will begin to decrease, with the eventual state that it will be relatively stable. In the even longer term, bitcoin could become inflationary by accident, if the human population as a whole begins to decrease rather than increase - because demand will be reduced.

Most of my savings is in productive assets i. Some is in gold. The non-inflationary money however, sees people's purchasing power remain the same as their productive effort to acquire it, if not, increased from when they obtained it due to deflation. When two forms of money exist and one is better than the other, people will save the better money and spend the worse money. People do save with currency, usually in limited amounts or limited times, in large part due to its inflationary nature.

Inflation forces a high time-preference on labour because the non-spender loses value over time. Putting money into stocks is not the same as saving, but it is investment, with varying degrees of risk. None are guaranteed to even preserve value, let alone profit. At present, Bitcoin behaves like a stock because its value wrt USD is so volatile.

Gold is only valuable because of it's perceived scarcity and historical use as a store of value. It is not priced so highly due to its intrinsic properties as a metal it is neither that useful nor that scarce , unlike some other commodity metals. Bitcoin is the digital equivalent of gold. Its value is based on scarcity and perception of value due to the ability to find someone who will trade it at an expected market rate for other currencies or for goods.

So far your argument seems to be: 1 Saving is not the same thing as investment. It is unclear to me why it's good policy not to encourage investment. Both are only valuable because other people perceive them as value. However, people have perceived gold as valuable for thousand s of years. The fact that gold has value is deeply rooted in human culture and therefore not likely to change in our lifetime. None of that is true for bitcoin. So, what are we left with?

The only advantage of bitcoin that I can discern in all of this is that it can be transferred via the internet in a censorship-resistant way. I do not think that advantage is important enough for most people to outweigh the disadvantages. The problem with today's "investment" is that it is almost entirely on shit that won't last, and is for the purpose of short-term monetary gain than for investment into infrastructure which will last generations.

An "investment" today is concerned with the next quarter, 6-months or perhaps even a year. Most companies do not concern themselves with anything longer than 3 years, or anything to do with the well-being of the societies in which they operate. Most companies simply can't operate on the time-scales needed to build and eventually profit from creating infrastructure. Instead of building something with the intent of breaking-even in 10 years, one will instead still be paying back interest accumulated on loans taken out 10 years ago.

The end result is that the role of building infrastructure in developed nations is now almost entirely assumed by governments, or contracted by government, which ends up creating virtual monopolies propped-up or subsidised by the state. Private companies which are profiting hugely from public money, but do not operate like regular companies because they don't have to compete with anybody and have little accountability.

It's the worst elements of socialism and capitalism combined into one package. We're seeing stagnation in many areas of science because research which is not short-term profitable is ignored. For most of the working and middle classes, the high time preference results in them buying useless gadgets, largely for the purpose of wealth-signalling, eating junk food, getting wasted, anything to fill the requirement to spend the money one has earned, because it is not worth saving the money.

For many, paying rent is preferred to buying property, because the latter requires saving to achieve, which is hard when people see their stored value decaying in their bank accounts. The shift from inflationary money to non-inflationary money will fundamentally affect people's decision making in their purchases.

It isn't going to happen overnight, but as people realize they can accumulate wealth without risky investments, they will come to value saving over spending.

Remarkable crypto ipo london sorry, that

What is a cryptocurrency? It is the use of a particular technological method. If a government implements that method, I don't see that it's a contradiction. But if the government uses it as a surveillance device, I think that is vicious. Privacy means being able to say and do things without there being known to some powerful entity that can use them to attack you. In general, the things you do should not go into a database. The things you say to a few people, they shouldn't go into a database.

Now, exceptions to this are sometimes justified. We want the government to investigate. This needs a bit of editing. We want the government to investigate crime and catch criminals. And that can require getting private information from people and about people. Any systematic attempt to recognize people other than people subject to specific court orders, perhaps, a limited exception because their limits are safe for society.

They will not lead to general repression. That's the approach that has to replace data protection. Have you ever held or transacted something like Bitcoin? Richard Stallman: The answer is no. I don't do any kind of digital payments, and the reason is the systems that exist do not respect the user's privacy, and that includes Bitcoin.

Every Bitcoin transaction is published. Now, people might not know that my wallet belongs to me, but if I used it more than a few times it would be possible to figure out that it's me. People with enough information could do so. I'd rather use cash. And that's how I buy things. I do mail checks for a number of things where businesses know who I am. When I pay the electric bill and the gas bill, well I have an account with those businesses and I have to pay it.

They send me bills with my name on it, so I don't lose anything by sending them checks with my name on them too. But, when I go to a store and buy something, the store has no right to know who I am. And I won't let it know who I am, so I don't use the existing digital payment systems.

There is one other thing I don't like about Bitcoin, and that is that it is easy to use for tax evasion. Now, I don't do that, but there are businesses that do tremendous amounts of tax evasion, and it is a big problem.

It impoverishes most of us. It means the government doesn't have enough money to do the things the government should be doing. There are a lot of things we need the government to do to have a society that is good for everybody.

Cointelegraph: What about various Bitcoin modifications designed for privacy? Richard Stallman: I am not convinced about them. GNU Taler is not a cryptocurrency. It is not a currency at all. It is a payment system designed to be used for anonymous payments to businesses to buy something. It is anonymous through a blind signature for the payer. However, the payee has to identify itself for every purchase in order to get money out of the system. So the idea is you can use your bank account to get Taler Tokens, and you can spend them and the payee won't be able to tell who you are.

It won't be able to tell that you got the token from a particular bank account at a particular time, even though you did so. To convert your payment into money in its own bank, the store the payee will have to identify itself. So this gives privacy in a much more reliable way than cryptocurrencies do, and it blocks the idea of using this system to enable tax evasion.

The notable omission was a kernel. The existing programs from the GNU project were readily ported to run on the resultant platform. This has been a longstanding naming controversy in the free software community. Stallman argues that not using GNU in the name of the operating system unfairly disparages the value of the GNU project and harms the sustainability of the free software movement by breaking the link between the software and the free software philosophy of the GNU project.

Stallman's take on this was to canonize himself as St. IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs [43] [44] and acknowledge that "vi vi vi is the editor of the beast ", while "using a free version of vi is not a sin ; it is a penance ". Win or lose, Stallman will never give up. He'll be the stubbornest mule on the farm until the day he dies. Call it fixity of purpose, or just plain cussedness, his single-minded commitment and brutal honesty are refreshing in a world of spin-meisters and multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns.

This has resulted in a landmark decision to switch all school computers in 12, high schools from Windows to a free software operating system. Protesting against proprietary software in April , Stallman held a "Don't buy from ATI , enemy of your freedom" placard at a speech by an ATI representative in the building where Stallman worked, resulting in the police being called.

Stallman initially thought this would be legal, but since he also thought it would be "very undesirable for free software", he asked a lawyer for advice. The response he got was that judges would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would be very harsh toward them, and a judge would ask whether it was "really" one program, rather than how the parts were labeled. I've campaigned for freedom since , and I am not going to surrender that freedom for the sake of a more convenient computer.

Community" where he reviews the state of digital rights management DRM and names many of the products and corporations which he boycotts. In the talks, he makes proposals for a "reduced copyright" and suggests a year limit on copyright. He suggests that, instead of restrictions on sharing, authors be supported using a tax, with revenues distributed among them based on cubic roots of their popularity to ensure that "fairly successful non-stars" receive a greater share than they do now compare with private copying levy which is associated with proponents of strong copyright , or a convenient anonymous micropayment system for people to support authors directly.

He indicates that no form of non-commercial sharing of copies should be considered a copyright violation. He says that such e-books present a big step backward with respect to paper books by being less easy to use, copy, lend to others or sell, also mentioning that Amazon e-books cannot be bought anonymously. His short story " The Right to Read " provides a picture of a dystopian future if the right to share books is impeded.

He objects to many of the terms within typical end-user license agreements that accompany e-books. He considers manufacturers' use of encryption on non-secret data to force the user to view certain promotional material as a conspiracy. Stallman supports a general boycott of Sony for its legal actions against George Hotz. IGNUcius, wears a halo consisting of the platter of an old hard disk drive.

One of his criteria for giving an interview to a journalist is that the journalist agrees to use his terminology throughout the article. Copyright law was designed to promote authorship and art, and covers the details of a work of authorship or art. Patent law was intended to encourage publication of ideas, at the price of finite monopolies over these ideas — a price that may be worth paying in some fields and not in others.

Trademark law was not intended to promote any business activity, but simply to enable buyers to know what they are buying. After initially accepting the concept, [94] Stallman rejects a common alternative term , open-source software , because it does not call to mind what Stallman sees as the value of the software: freedom.

For similar reasons, he argues for the term proprietary software or non-free software rather than closed-source software , when referring to software that is not free software. He usually does not browse the web directly from his personal computer.

Instead, he uses GNU Womb's grab-url-from-mail utility, an email-based proxy which downloads the web page content and then emails it to the user. Giuffre, a minor at the time, had been caught in Epstein's underage sex trafficking ring. In response to a comment where one reply stated that Minsky "is accused of assaulting one of Epstein's victims", Stallman questioned whether the word "assault" was applicable in that case, arguing that "the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing.

Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to conceal that from most of his associates".

Something is. ethereum mining 8gb vs 4gb opinion obvious

Open a free account! But there is another even greater concern about bitcoin and other crypto. However, the father of free software was startled by the capabilities of another cryptocurrency, Monero XMR. Completely anonymous and private, XMR could be used to evade taxes and many speculate that it is the 21st century version of Swiss banks, but accessible to everyone. He also believes that if the State knew about all the transactions this would open the door to an authoritarian regime.

So, what is the ideal money for Stallman? The ideal digital money for Richard Stallman "I want anonymity," said Richard, who completed "the only data that will not be used in the wrong way is that which is not collected. So the program does what you actually want. These two freedoms you can apply by yourself alone.

And freedom 2 we make and distribute these copies when you wish. If the users have all four of these essential freedoms then the users control the program both separately and collectively. However, others believe that CBDC could be a surveillance method for governments to monitor the financial activities of its citizens. China is the enemy of privacy. China shows what totalitarian surveillance is like.

I consider that hell on earth. That's part of why I haven't used cryptocurrencies that are issued by the community. If the cryptocurrency is issued by a government, it would surveille people just the way credit cards do and PayPal does, and all those other systems meaning completely unacceptable.

What is a cryptocurrency? It is the use of a particular technological method. If a government implements that method, I don't see that it's a contradiction. But if the government uses it as a surveillance device, I think that is vicious. Privacy means being able to say and do things without there being known to some powerful entity that can use them to attack you.

In general, the things you do should not go into a database. The things you say to a few people, they shouldn't go into a database. Now, exceptions to this are sometimes justified. We want the government to investigate. This needs a bit of editing. We want the government to investigate crime and catch criminals. And that can require getting private information from people and about people. Any systematic attempt to recognize people other than people subject to specific court orders, perhaps, a limited exception because their limits are safe for society.

They will not lead to general repression. That's the approach that has to replace data protection. Have you ever held or transacted something like Bitcoin? Richard Stallman: The answer is no. I don't do any kind of digital payments, and the reason is the systems that exist do not respect the user's privacy, and that includes Bitcoin.

Every Bitcoin transaction is published. Now, people might not know that my wallet belongs to me, but if I used it more than a few times it would be possible to figure out that it's me. People with enough information could do so. I'd rather use cash. And that's how I buy things. I do mail checks for a number of things where businesses know who I am. When I pay the electric bill and the gas bill, well I have an account with those businesses and I have to pay it.

They send me bills with my name on it, so I don't lose anything by sending them checks with my name on them too. But, when I go to a store and buy something, the store has no right to know who I am. And I won't let it know who I am, so I don't use the existing digital payment systems.

There is one other thing I don't like about Bitcoin, and that is that it is easy to use for tax evasion. Now, I don't do that, but there are businesses that do tremendous amounts of tax evasion, and it is a big problem. It impoverishes most of us. It means the government doesn't have enough money to do the things the government should be doing. There are a lot of things we need the government to do to have a society that is good for everybody. Cointelegraph: What about various Bitcoin modifications designed for privacy?