Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 34

The key difficulties of cryptocurrencies are:

Until those problems are solved, the only real applications of cryptocurrency will by illegal activities, notably buying drugs, paying for ransomware. But also paying for anti-censorship services from inside dictatorships. Illegal activity can be good when governments are bad, and arguably selling drugs should be legal.

For this reason Ciro Santilli believes that privacy coins like Monero are currently the most useful cryptocurrencies. Also, people concerned with their privacy are likely to more naturally make fewer larger payments to reduce exposure rather than a bunch of small separate ones, and therefore transaction fees matter less, and can be seen as a reasonable privacy tax. Also drugs are expensive, just have a look at any uncensored Onion service search engine, so individual transactions tend to be large.

Hedgint against inflation due to money creation in fiat currencies is a another valid argument for cryptocurrencies. Money printing is a bad form of tax. But why not just instead invest in bonds or stocks, which actually have a specific intrinsic value and should therefore increase your capital and beat inflation? Even if crypto did take over, its value would eventually become constant, and just holding it would lose out to stocks and bonds. And pre-crypto, salaries should adjust relatively quickly to new inflation levels as they come, though there is always some delay. Also, without anonymity, governments will sooner or later find a way to regulate and pervert it. If you want to do things without anonymity, then what you really have to fight for is to change government itself, perhaps with a DAO-like approach, or pushing for a more direct democracy.

If crypto really takes off, 99.99% of people will only ever use it through some cryptocurrency exchange (unless scalability problems are solved, and they replace fiat currencies entirely), so the experience will be very similar to PayPal, and without "true" decentralization.

For those reasons, Ciro Santilli instead believes that governments should issue electronic money, and maintain an open API that all can access instead. The centralized service will always be cheaper for society to maintain than any distributed service, and it will still allow for proper taxation.

Ciro believes that it is easy for people to be seduced by the idealistic promise that "cryptocurrency will make the world more fair and equal by giving everyone equal opportunities, away from the corruption of Governments". Such optimism that new technologies will solve certain key social problems without the need for constant government intervention and management is not new, as shown e.g. at HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis (2016) when he talks about the cyberspace (when the Internet was just beginning): youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU?t=2375. Technologies can make our lives better. But in general, some of them also have to be managed.

In any case, cryptocurrencies are bullshit, the true currency of the future is going to be Magic: The Gathering cards. And Cirocoin.

One closely related thing that Ciro Santilli does think could be interesting exploring right now however, notably when having Monero-like anonymity in mind, would be anonymous electronic voting, which is a pre-requisite to make direct democracy convenient so people can vote more often.

TODO evaluate the possible application of cryptocurrency for international transfers:Of course, the ideal solution would be for governments to just allow for people from other countries to create accounts in their country, and use the centralized API just like citizens. Having an account of some sort is of course fundamental to avoid money laundering/tax evasion, be it on the API, or when you are going to cash out the crypto into fiat. So then the question becomes: suppose that governments are shit and never make such APIs, are international transfers just because traditional banks are inefficient/greedy? Or is it because of the inevitable cost of auditing transfers? E.g. how does TransferWise compare to Bitcoin these days? And if cryptocurrency is more desirable, why wouldn't TransferWise just use it as their backend, and reach very similar fees?

The British are very pragmatic. This has good and bad effects.

For example, a good effect is that many things work pretty well, such as the government. This also helped industry develop.

A bad effect is that they sometimes settle on local minima forever. Examples:If it ain't totally broken, just let it continue forever! See also: Section "History of the University of Oxford".

Ciro Santilli is very happy to meet people with related interests, he really loves his like-minded online friends. Even if you don't have something a specific goal in mind for the contact, please just say hi.

To contact Ciro publicly about any general subject that is not covered in a more specific GitHub repository, including saying hi or suggestions about his website either:

For comments about China, first read:and then create a GitHub issue at: github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/new

Publicly viewable contact is preferred if possible to more effectively share Ciro's wisdom with the world.

But if you feel more comfortable with private contact, no problem, either:

For other less good methods that will also work, use direct messages of the following profiles from under Section "Accounts controlled by Ciro Santilli":

If you are a privacy freak or are going to tell Ciro state secrets Ciro has this GNU Privacy Guard public key: pubkey.gpg.

Disqus comments were removed from his website in 2019-05-04, a manual dump is available here, removal rationale at: why Ciro Santilli removed Disqus comments from his website in 2019-05-04.

Ciro Santilli supports full legalization of all drugs, because he feels that it would be better overall for the world to have cheaper drugs and more drug addicts, but way, way less organized crime.

These should be extremely controlled of course, with extremely high taxes that puts their price just below the current illegal market, and a complete ban on any positive advertising.

Ciro believes that maybe the government could even go as far as giving free drugs to drug addicts so they don't have to rob to get a fix.

This is notably considering that drug-led organized crime completely dominates and corrupts the politics of many production and trafficking zones, which are already generally poor fucked up places to start with:Ciro's experiences in Brazil such as mentioned at São Remo, the favela next to USP, although much less extreme than the above, also come to mind.

Drug traffic corrupts everything. It prevents development of honest people. It is a cancer, which we have failed time and time a gain to cure. The only cure is to accept the other less insidious of addiction.

Bibliography:

Our minimal definition of "electronic money" is the following.

Instead of creating legal tender such as Dollars as banknotes or transactions in some complex obscure banking system, the government offers an official simple centralized API that represents it instead.

Each citizen or legal entity has an account there, and transfers between registered users are just simple API calls.

So for example you would e able to put all your money in the government account instead of using useless banks. And then you would invest it as you want with the investment company of your choice, without tying the "my money is here" with "this is the best investment" aspects of banks.

A useless piece of paper (or digital version of it) that you can pay taxes with :)

As opposed to:

This term was invented by Ciro Santilli, and similar ideas certainly already exists with different names by other people. As the name suggests, it basically involves combining free education and gifted education, but with other more specific aspects crammed in that would make a precise name too long to read, as descried below.

Government must create selective, K-12 and university-level teaching institutions that are completely free.

As mentioned at pick few good bets and invest enough on thems, these do not need to be given to all students: what we have to do is to ensure that the top N-percent of the best students will get in, and that none of them will pay. Where N is as large as the budget society decides to put into this project, the larger the better. Therefore, perhaps "gifted education" is not the ideal name for this idea, as it generally implies very small N (1%?), while this project hopes for larger N, maybe 10%. But a minimal level of quality must be attained, it is pointless to dissolve the resources too much, if we only have enough for 1%, then so be it, start with 1%.

School must offer free accommodation for students.

These institutions must start from the very first school year, and go all the way up through K-12 to the end of university. It is useless to start at university-level only otherwise only the rich students will have a chance of getting in, like Ciro Santilli saw in Brazil at the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo in the late 2000's: one day all students were gathered in the amphitheater, and they asked the students who had only gone through free government K-12 schools to raise their hands. Those were notably worse than the corresponding private schools, and the situation is inverted in university, where the best schools are the government ones. Out of about 500 people, at most 10 raised their hands!

These institutions should not have affirmative action entry quotas, including most importantly at the university level. Both rich and poor should be able to apply. Passing the selection criteria is all that matters. We just must ensure that the schools are widely advertised amongst disadvantaged communities, so that they will at least get their children to try to apply from an early age. This way, even if the rich always have an advantage due to better overall conditions, the poor are so much more numerous that the majority of students accepted will still be poor.

The school should follow the basic principles of how to teach, notably:

These schools must pay mentors as much as the average good non-free schools so you actually get comparably good teachers. Mentor selection would also be highly competitive, just as that of the students.

Once admitted, students will have guaranteed access to the school resources for a few years. This way, they won't need to worry about passing useless exams every three months.

All that matters is that they are progressing in their development plan. Rather than exams, students will do regular progress report sessions with their advisors, and will get periodic reviews from other advisors with similar interests.

Such projects could be funded by much needed wealth tax or other measures to tax the rich, which the people should claim through Referendum, that would be come more common with the adoption of electronic voting. Because the politicians are simply not being able to do it.

Related:

While Ciro Santilli is a big fan of having "one global country" (and language), which is somewhat approximated by globalization, he has come to believe that there is one serious downside to globalization as it stands in 2020: it allows companies to pressure governments to reduce taxes, and thus reduces the power of government, which in turn increases social inequality. This idea is very well highlighted in Can't get you out of my head by Adam Curtis (2021).

The only solution seems to be for governments to get together, and make deals to have fair taxation across each other. Which might never happen.

Companies are getting too much power to distort regulations and destroy privacy.

Taxes pay for the physical car roads, so why shouldn't they also pay for the "online roads" of today?

The following services are obvious picks because they are so simple:

Other less simple ones that might also be feasible:

All of them should have strong privacy enabled by default: end-to-end encryption, logless, etc. Governments are not going to like this part.

And then if you ever forget a password or lose a multi-factor authentication token, you can just go to an ID center with your ID to recover it.

Hmmm, he does not know how to spell guerilla? sic? www.quora.com/What-is-the-correct-spelling-guerilla-or-guerrilla

Note to self: if you are going to commit a crime, don't publish your plans online.

Ross Ulbricht's diaries come to mind.

That's how Russian shadow library maintainers do it, they know how to crime good old Russians. Maybe there is a good thing about having dictatorships in the world that give zero fucks about American copyright laws. There will always be some random Russian academic who will implement this and not go to jail. Maybe it's even state sponsored.

Ciro Santilli believes that the Donald Trump bans were extremely unfair, and highlight the need for government to ensure greater freedom of speech in social media, more information at: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/unjust-social-media-censorship-in-the-west, related: globalization reduces the power of governments.

Related: