Zenaan, you said:

Your communications on this list so far, seem to suggest that:

- you have not spent sufficient time to understand the basic "security" issues which all humans presently face when interacting on the Internet

- security, vs privacy, vs authentication, vs transparency - why would people on this cypherpunks list want taxation?

Most fundamentally, to be taken seriously with any supposed "advance", you might need to present that you properly understand the current shortcomings with current systems.

It's all very well to have a public chat about something that inspires you, but you have made certain proclamations (we can call them "challenges" or "assertions"), and the lack of background might, to some people, come across as though you are being a bit lazy, wanting us to do all the work of educating you about all the above things, and plenty more besides.

If you want to be taken seriously, you need to spend some serious time understanding current problems.

We use certain phrases to highlight things which appear as "flippant", such as the phrase "hand waving" - so e.g. when you replied with the following phrase:

"typical reaction to this is nah, you choose tax or anonymity, not both. Well, that's it, it can be done"

those words you chose to use, come across as flippant, or hand waving (imagine the Queen waving her hand), or not serious.

The words you used might make it seem "obvious" to some people that you don't really understand what you are talking about.

Words which demonstrate a little humility, might be good for you to start using, if you want more relevant responses to the things you say, e.g.: instead of "it can be done", you could have asked a question, e.g.:

Person ABC has claimed in the past that anonymous taxation collection is not possible - see this link: http://example.url/anonymous-taxation-is-not-possible.html

Based on my current understanding, anonymous taxation collection should be easy, just using an Ethereum algorithm which collects a little 'gas' on each transaction - am I missing something, or is it really this easy?

Then people can hopefully start to see your thinking, and you might get more relevant responses.

I'll extend my answer to anonymous taxation in more detail if that is what you claim. These hand waving words are in the question, (they wasnt said by me), I agree the response might seem lazy and lacking of signs of humility, but there is actually a response on this: ----------------------------------------------------------------- Q: Why do you think crypto anarchists would be interested in 'automating' taxation (theft) and 'public budgets' (distribution of stolen goods) A: It forms part of a fight against centralized governments which are expensive and do not respect privacy and financial freedom. Let's say there exist a real need to have roads, or public health or, more close to cryptoeconomy, a need to have financial services, any fundamental need that is potentially subject to mass consumption. This is run by what we call a public system, this is understood. I felt the need to try solve the problem using computers. I saw how a system not specifically crafted to that particular purpose doubles as low-cost public system. It is all about improving or replacing the establishment with technological alternatives.

Next, you should get an idea of what the intentions for this cypherpunks list are - for example, a place to discuss anarchy or anarchism, as well as (actual) libertarianism.

So, in the context of this expectation, why do you say we should care or be interested in a system which will collect tax?

Your question can be answered with the paragraph above which was located just below the one you commented. you've not understood my approach to libertarianism and to anarchy, which I am akin with. You're confused with my use of the word taxation, which for you it might sort of tabu, but for me is something that deserves to be discussed more in a way of how bad current Govs are collecting them paying common services, and how new approaches could work respecting privacy and anonymity. Anyway this is only one of the features that can improve the status quo of the society, which compared to the main one, the electronic cash system with renewed tech, which I also try to write about, is perhaps the most interesting one. I am not lazy, I work hard, I surface little.

Finally, you really should try to understand about anonymity on the Internet (it's --really-- hard); and also about human motivations - if you think people will start using your anonymous taxation system,

It is not a taxation system, this is a misunderstanding. It was a remake of bitcoin at the beginning which turned to be quite different at the end.

which people are the people you think will use it?

Anyone who values anonymity, privacy, technology, there is no exclusion.

You need to be ready to answer these questions, and try to answer the questions people ask - if someone asks the question, and you don't seriously try to answer, with some depth and detail, then some people will not even bother to keep 'talking' with you, because it is too much effort or too much work - some people might try, but others will just say to themselves "he is being much too lazy, asking me to do all the work to explain to him what he does not understand and to extract out of him even the basic understandings about what he is trying to do".

Good luck,

In general this post is ackward. Saying I lack of basic knowledge is a bit rude for someone who said forefront that has spent 3 years working on the development of system. I don't have a clue of why you would say I want to learn the basics from you. In fact I'm always opening to learning on top of me having pretty good knowledge and training on all topics surrounding cryptocurrency and hi-tech. I also empathize with the culture of this list. I apologize if my wording confused you about my background. Thanks for taking your time to answer. -- Other Arkitech

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Q: Why do you think crypto anarchists would be interested in 'automating' taxation (theft) and 'public budgets' (distribution of stolen goods) A: It forms part of a fight against centralized governments which are expensive and do not respect privacy and financial freedom.

This is a good foundation intention.

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Let's say there exist a real need to have roads, or public health or, more close to cryptoeconomy, a need to have financial services, any fundamental need that is potentially subject to mass consumption.

OK.

To help the discussion, please list some of the "financial services" you are thinking of, because with more detail, we can get to the heart of the things that are needed to discuss to think about your system.

I think of concepts like loans or investment, like money transfers these are services a public platform should provide as these are basic financial services. In a way like if I want a loan for something I may push the request and given my credit history people acting as investors can have the choice of taking some calculated risk and contribute to fulfill such loan. If someone gets away with the money they kill their credit history and have to start it over again asking for small loans.

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This is run by what we call a public system, this is understood.

Actually, need to be very cautious - may be some understand, may be some don't.

We should probably take smaller steps in the conversation, so people like me can follow along - I get lost if too many assumptions are assumed, sorry... so I have no option but to slow the conversation down if I want to participate.

I am happy with it, I like slow cook as well.

I think the easy solution, is to take one "system" at a time, e.g. roads, or "public health" etc, and discuss just that one system for a little bit, and how DC and crypto tech might apply for that system.

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I felt the need to try solve the problem using computers.

The feeling and intention and actions to solve real problems, is an honourable thing. On behalf of all humans, thank you for your intentions and actions :)

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I saw how a system not specifically crafted to that particular purpose doubles as low-cost public system.

You might be right, but I am struggling to understand your concepts at the moment - sorry.

I see a 'machine' able to remove gov-in-the-middle. My personal challenge is to design such a machine, hopefully in agreement with this honorable list

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It is all about improving or replacing the establishment with technological alternatives.

This is a good idea in principle.

One thing we should be careful about is thinking in the context of current system, and thinking that just replacing it, but without overhead of "democratic government" would be better - truth is that probably would be better, and it might be a good transition strategy, and we might even end up with something that looks like that.

A transition of where the truth is. From govs made of some humans who concentrate the power, to a distributed mostly automated gov where humans retain their power.

But, there might be similar or different pathways, and may be end goals which look quite different.

Let's take example public health:

Public implies a system applied to everybody.

Libertarians/ voluntarists/ anarchists, usually say nothing should be compulsory, all should be voluntary.

So public health means "many people contributing to a money pool, so those people who get sick and do not have money, can get medical care".

OK, so compulsory taxation is a mechanism.

Voluntary donations is another mechanism.

When we have a "universal" system - e.g. every txn is taxed, and tax goes into a pool, then we must think about how to allocate the money from that pool - public medical care, national defence, etc, and who gets to make those decisions - and these sound like really fundamental questions which we should probably think about, before jumping into a particular technical proposal.

The top level main loop can be: (executed every consensus cycle (1 minute)) 1.- all accounts are seen by the consensus public algorithm, who is in charge of modifying balances upon cryptographical evidence (transactions). 2.- Fees are accumulating as tx are being settled. 3.- Accumulated Fees are used to pay public services. They are fed into a structure of public budgets which are defined via [to be discussed further (dont want to mess the simplicity of this loop)] If not enough money is available to pay public services then the money is taken from the accounts (taxing). 4.- Remainder are distributed across nodes. 5.- go to 1. The big complexity comes in step 3, or how to distribute profits to pay public service, or the bourocratic pipeline (sorry for the horrific word). This is something to discuss, I have some ideas but my development stage for this 3rd step is 0. My system under test just spread all the collected profit across nodes, skipping step 3. Please excuse me for using words like tax or budgets, we can invent other words for these conceps to not get confused by using real-world words that are subject of disapproval in the cypheranarchyst culture. According to a rough calculus, if fees taken from transactions can run companies like Visa or Mastercard, if we manage to create a system that include mass consumption financial services, fees would be enough to pay a good public system, which means that taxes are perhaps not required or if they are they would be much less than today's taxes. I'd love to have the time investigate more on how cheaper a public system could be compared to current ones.

(Of course, a technical system might be interesting and worthy of discussion by itself - but you have presented a high minded (good thing) 'big solution for A, B and C' type of conversation, so you lead us automatically into these fundamental questions, the philosophical questions.)

I am not a good fan of leadership, because it represents a centralization and this goes against the spirit. But happy to discuss around tech designs that could make us happy. I find this list is full of people with good knowledge that can challenge my advances, for the good.

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Next, you should get an idea of what the intentions for this cypherpunks list are - for example, a place to discuss anarchy or anarchism, as well as (actual) libertarianism.

So, in the context of this expectation, why do you say we should care or be interested in a system which will collect tax?

Your question can be answered with the paragraph above which was located just below the one you commented. you've not understood my approach to libertarianism and to anarchy, which I am akin with.

Thank you. Yes I do not understand, that is why I am trying to slow down and simplify the conversation, so I can understand :)

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You're confused with my use of the word taxation, which for you it

Probably.

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might sort of tabu,

Yes, for voluntarists/ anarchists/ libertarians, any compulsory taxation just sounds bad from the start - so not the best marketing for your system :)

At the end of the day all of us hate tax, that's why I speak about it, trying to find a way to reduce its impact in real life or even make them dissapear. My low cost public system --> tax stops to make sense (because profits will pay the bill for us, if we manage to steal the business to VISA, banks, and the like)

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but for me is something that deserves to be discussed more in a way of how bad current Govs are collecting them paying common services, and how new approaches could work respecting privacy and anonymity.

Privacy and anonymity are key in my design. (I intentionally left IPv4 disclosure apart (I acknowledge it is a leak) because I plan to solve the issue as a patch in the Tor network). That's another this I'd like to discuss. If in the Tor network the entry/guard nodes (who are witnesses of your IP4 address) could forward a hashed version of the IP4, I would solve the sybil protection based on IP4 without exposing the real IP4 address. I don't (initially) think it would compromise anonymity

Yes, might be very productive conversation, but must be much slower for me to join in sorry - I have had to put a lot of brown paper bags over my head in the past, so unless I go slow, it's too embarrassing to join in conversation :D

I am very happy with slowlyness Thanks

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Monday, December 16, 2019 11:14 PM, Zenaan Harkness wrote:

I am largely DC illiterate, so I shall only respond to 1 or 2 points.

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 03:53:09PM +0000, other.arkitech wrote:

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Let's take example public health: Public implies a system applied to everybody. Libertarians/ voluntarists/ anarchists, usually say nothing should be compulsory, all should be voluntary. So public health means "many people contributing to a money pool, so those people who get sick and do not have money, can get medical care". OK, so compulsory taxation is a mechanism. Voluntary donations is another mechanism. When we have a "universal" system - e.g. every txn is taxed, and tax goes into a pool, then we must think about how to allocate the money from that pool - public medical care, national defence, etc, and who gets to make those decisions - and these sound like really fundamental questions which we should probably think about, before jumping into a particular technical proposal.

The top level main loop can be: (executed every consensus cycle (1 minute)) 1.- all accounts are seen by the consensus public algorithm, who is in charge of modifying balances upon cryptographical evidence (transactions). 2.- Fees are accumulating as tx are being settled.

Even step 2 is beyond my ability to comprehend - sorry, I really am a DC newbie. I don't understand "fees are accumulating".

My limited understanding of BTC is that nodes are computers, which do the BTC tx calculations, and they get a fee for doing these calculations. My understanding might be wrong.

when a transaction arrives to validating nodes (which know all balances of all accounts and have the capacity to alter them), they do 2 things: 1.- alter the balances of the implying accounts (in US-PUBLIC SYSTEM aka "usps") spend utxos and create new ones (bitcoin) 2.- alter balance of inputs to take a fee. This fee goes to a place in memory. (the expression "fees are accumulating" refer to this) (but they dont accumulate in your wallet at this stage, they stay in the mempool (like a temporary place))

So if I run a node, and help the network of nodes do txns, then I get some fees or "commissions", which motivates me to keep running my node (paying electricity and ISP fees).

Now, these "commissions" or fees, I assume, are accumulating into my wallet - that is, I get the benefit of my txn commissions.

I get the benefit of my txn commissions <- this sounds absurd to me In Bitcoin all the accumulated fees go straight to the miner who won the PoW (they go to an account controlled by the wallet of the miner). In usps these profits are used to "pay public services", and the remainder is spread across all nodes (all nodes have an account, all these node accounts see their balance increase) Now if "public services cost is defined 0 (like it is just now)" then it means that all profit collected by transaction fees go straight to nodes (as a subsidy for maintaining the node. It could be called universal salary, depending on the value amount. So it is a more complex problem to exactly define how to spend this money (the money for public services), but the important thing is that we have a source of money that cannot be censored or hidden, that can be pipelined to fill different budgets that nobody can alter individually (although there must exist a way to set it up and modify it (I suggest a new work e-politics?)), and a way to redistribute remaining profits collected by transactions in a fair way. In a way that can be seen as in "I run anode that works for the system and it gets paid for it". The cool thing of this automation is that this is 'public money' and the way it is spent is public, so there is no place for corruption.

Now I can make a guess, in your system, there is txn fee, and part of that is commission going into my wallet, and another part of that is "tax fee" going into "global tax" wallet.

Since a wallet is just a file with private keys they come with programs able to sign transactions wallets don't enter into account in the public system, they belong to the 'private system' and they reside in user computers, rather than node computers. (in usps the node runs both systems in the same computer, but this is for convenience, they are logically separated systems) I haven't introduced where are taxes taken into account yet, because in my previous explanation of how usps works I assumed that the cost of public services is lower than the profit made by transactions. So not only the system has money to pay them, but the remainder is used to afford a universal salary. In a more dramatic case, which is closer to the case we live every day, profits of transactions are not enough to pay public services. (this happens because in our world banks and private institutions profit privately from money transfers). So in order to be able to pay public services, participants must pay extra (taxes) and forget about having universal salary. This is also coded in usps, all account would be altered and reduced in enough quantity to be able to feed the public system pipeline.

I am trying to understand the basic mechanisms here, and even that is probably a bit of a "rabbit hole" - I think the basic philosophical questions are probably more productive to discuss, before talking about technical how to.

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3.- Accumulated Fees are used to pay public services. They are fed into a structure of public budgets which are defined via [to be discussed further (dont want to mess the simplicity of this loop)]

Simple loops can be good sometimes, but too much simplicity can mask or hide the real problems. When I see what looks like too much simplicity to me, I sometimes think to myself "oh, he is just hand waving away all the real problems".

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If not enough money is available to pay public services then the money is taken from the accounts (taxing).

Woah! This is another step which is written as though it is really simple, easy, taken for granted, and "nobody needs to worry, it will just work".

"If" means a condition. So "if" more money is needed, "then" more money is collected.

This is a decision tree (re taxation), and sounds just like gov.

When we make simple statements, we make lots of assumptions.

Here's another assumption in the same statement - the word "need" (in my statement, "if more money is needed") - so "need" is another decision tree, another flow chart, involving more or same or other people.

Here's another assumption - "public services" - what services "should" be public, which should be private?

Who gets to decide?

Here's another one - if ... then money is "taken from accounts" - so is money taken as part of TXNs, or is money taken outside of normal txn (e.g. buy some petrol or milk) and a new "tax" TXN is created against -all- accounts, to increase the public budget, because more public money is needed for the public services?

This sounds too complicated for me, and I am way outside my depth because I don't really know about BTC.

I still think the basic questions about "public services" should be discussed more first...

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(Of course, a technical system might be interesting and worthy of discussion by itself - but you have presented a high minded (good thing) 'big solution for A, B and C' type of conversation, so you lead us automatically into these fundamental questions, the philosophical questions.)

Good luck,

Let me try to it in math with a simplified ledger of accounts with their balances: ledger: account1 1000 <-node account (where a node is paid for validation work) account2 1000 <-node account account3 1000 <-account account4 1000 <-account to pay roads account5 1000 <-account to pay health public system: takes 10 for roads and 20 for health Minute 1: profit from transactions: 100 profit after paying public services: 70 profit spread -> 2 nodes -> 70/2=35 per node; ledger: account1 1035 <-node account (where a node is paid for validation work) account2 1035 <-node account account3 1000 <-account account4 1010 <-account to pay roads account5 1020 <-account to pay health -------------------- Minute 2: profit from transactions: 50 50<70 profit not enough to pay public services. taxes: 20 (takes 4 from each account) (this a simplification for illustrating, the real algorithm takes from each account proportional to the balance) ledger: account1 1031 <-node account (where a node is paid for validation work) account2 1031 <-node account account3 1996 <-account account4 1016 <-account to pay roads account5 1036 <-account to pay health This represents fairly well how every cycle of consensus work in usps. (with some intentional imprecisions in aras of clarity) Thanks Zen for asking very good questions. My argumentation goes as my thoughts are for using cryptoeconomy to solve a public system that could compete with traditional governments. It will be the choice of the people to choose the better system. Happy to discuss about it. -- Oarch

On Sat, Dec 14, 2019 at 10:35:58PM +0000, other.arkitech wrote:

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Saturday, December 14, 2019 7:52 PM, Punk-Stasi 2.0 wrote:

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On Fri, 13 Dec 2019 23:30:51 +0000 "other.arkitech" other.arkitech@protonmail.com wrote:

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http://otheravu4v6pitvw.onion/misc/downloads/answers_to_questions.txt

"The operating system image contains a pre-configured raspbian system where user gov has sudo powers, hence you have root privileges. For maintenance purposes I have (temporarily) root access too, via ssh port 16671"

haha, you can't be serious...?

I understand your concern, but I am running an alpha version of the system and having an ssh access to the node allows me to maintain and update the software. I've been running 50 nodes for 1 year using this mechanism as a mean to tune the systems. (development setup) Obviously this requires trust on me. Removing this trust is as easy as removing the file /root/.ssh/authorized_keys But this is like disconnecting your OS from automatic updates. It is temporary maintenance priviledge, it will be gone when I release 1.0. It should not be a concern since it is a dedicated raspeberry pi and little I can do inside that represents a threat.

Recommendation: script everything - have a script that rolls out your "standard testing install", have a script so that nodes can "pull" updates, rather than receive centralized "push" updates by default. The git model is now ubiquitous because it works for people ...