virtual money

TRX
July 26, 2012
321:
I may have mentioned this here before... but I expect to see a rise in non- State-backed exchange; "virtual money."

The problem with direct barter is that if you agree to split firewood in exchange for a chicken, it's difficult to exchange your firewood obligation to someone else for leather. The use of tokens ("money", in the colloquial sense) with an agreed value makes it much easier to exchange services and goods.

There are still advantages to barter - exchanges across currency boundaries, practical exchange during times of hyperinflation or economic troubles, avoidance of official controls or taxes, etc. It would also be a useful way to wash stolen or illegally obtained money.

Now, with ubiquitous cheap networking and computing, keeping track would be possible.

Once such a system is created tax revenue loss could be large. Being virtual and distributed, it would be very hard to stamp out. The USSR spent its entire existence battling the black market, which became so large even military contractors sometimes depended on it.

And the tighter the regulatory screws turn, the more people will use a black exchange. In the USA, I first started hearing about armed and armored "task forces" breaking up boot sales and "unlicensed vendors" a decade ago.

How would this affect 2030s Scotland? It would be yet another burden for the police to bear; if unregulated, black exchange would probably be a crime to start with, as it would avoid taxation. And it would make washing criminal gains very easy. How do you "follow the money" when there never was any money to start with...

Years ago someone said, "it is difficult to defend against a highly distributed enemy." It would also be difficult to block a highly distributed resource...

TRX
July 28, 2012
460:
@345:
3D printed gun:
http://tinyurl.com/cbrpz22
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No. Not even close. What they printed was an AR lower. It's a non-stressed part, available commercially in injection-molded plastic as well as cast or forged aluminum. AR hobbyists have built lowers from cheap plastic polyethylene cutting boards, and even pine boards, though that one didn't actually work all that well.

All of the precision machining - and there's a lot of it - is in the "commercially available upper" mentioned in the article.

Basically, that's like putting an iPhone in a wooden box, and claiming you just carved an iPhone. The "commercially available electronic components" are only a negligible part of the overall phone experience, right?