Come Together, Right Now

The Pledge of Allegiance

"...One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Almost all Americans know the pledge of allegiance by heart, because we would recite it every morning throughout our school careers. Until today, I never gave it much thought, and I've realized that it carries a very important message: That divided we fall indeed.

To Divide is to Conquer

Yet another old, overlooked phrase of wisdom is "divide and conquer." Something clicked when I then thought about the two party system and how it keeps our country divided and causes us to inadvertently work against our own mutual best interests. I've always considered myself politically independent because I believe the two party system is perhaps the worst enabler of government corruption. Consider what we have seen throughout the Obama administration's time. There has been so much bipartisan hatred and collision that congress could not even pass a budget, and the federal government shut down. That alone is unacceptable, and it does not need to be this way. By constantly re-enforcing this  'one side or the other' idea, it causes Americans to accept terrible things that the party they are loyal to does, because they believe it has to be that way, that they must choose the lesser of two evils. Jerry Garcia once said that when you do that, you are still choosing evil. Well, I am here to ask us all, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike to remember the pledge of allegiance, put our differences aside, and work together to better our futures and save our country.

Come Together

From this point on, this is the way I am going to approach my political outreach. I believe that there are issues that effect all Americans. We all have mutual interests, regardless of party affiliation. For instance, it's safe to say that most Americans agree that there is an unnecessary and unfair division of equality today. At least, I know that almost all of my generation feels that way. After factoring in inflation, the average American makes less today than we did in the 60's. Is it just me or are we going backwards here? This is the first time in American history that an entire generation is making less money than our parents did. Up until the financial deregulation that led to the stock market collapse in 2008, if you look at big picture, we did have almost a century of economic growth. Much of that can be attributed to the economic boost during World War II and the cold war years, because, (as every historian knows) war is good for a winning side's economy. Yet, we are still fighting ever-so-pointless wars and the economy is still getting worse. The system is so broken that we're now not only dependent on a perpetual war driven economy, but the economy is not even benefiting from all the horror.

From Wikipedia:

"Household net worth fell from 2007 to 2009 by a total of $17.5 trillion or 25.5%. This was the equivalent loss of one year of GDP.^[7] By the fourth quarter of 2010, the household net worth had recovered by a growth of 1.3 percent to a total of $56.8 trillion. An additional growth of 15.7 percent is needed just to bring the value to where it was before the recession started in December 2007.^[2]"


There is something seriously wrong with that picture. It seems that American citizens have been robbed blind since right after I graduated high school in 2007. Can we at least all agree that this is a fact, and a problem? If we can do that, than maybe we can all work together to fix it. For too long we have been a divided nation. Too often, our government's right hand does not seem to know what the left hand is doing, and I'm not speaking strictly about parties either. I'm also referring to all the covert operations that you pay for with your taxes, which your government then classifies under the same lame grounds of "National Security" (which also happens to be a very old tactic of dictatorial states). It's time to unite. It's our country, and I feel like I am barking in the wind when I try to remind America that the government is supposed to be one by, for, and of the people. Can you honestly tell yourself this is what we have today? I don't think any sane person could. In almost all social media circles, no matter what we are arguing about, it is apparent that more and more people are viewing the police as a threat, rather than a force here to protect and serve us. It's also apparent that more and more people agree that we have a serious wealth gap issue in this country, caused by corporate lobbying and greed.

In 2016

When the next presidential election starts, I am asking America to pause for a moment to put our differences of opinion aside, and focus on what we can work together on to change, instead of focusing on which party will occupy the Whitehouse. Forget about political parties and start thinking about the actual issues facing us as a nation. If that happens, well... who knows what could happen. The future may be brighter for all of us. What have we got to loose?

With BTC Prices Dropping, Which Altcoin Could Replace It?

Lately the price of BTC has been plummeting. We were sailing smooth around ~$600 for months and months, and then over the last month I've watched the price get lower, and lower, teetering just under $400 today. There are a lot of people freaking out about this, and there is a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) going around as well. Meanwhile, there's over 200 noteworthy altcoins (alternative cryptographic currencies) such as Litecoin (LTC), Dogecoin (DOGE), and Darkcoin (DRK) emerging from Githhub. I wrote a blog a little while ago about Dogecoin, and what a joke I thought it was. Well, I've stopped laughing, as the 65,000 Dogecoin that I bought to 'mess around with' is now worth 400% what I paid for them. And despite LTC's price theoretically being intrinsically tied to BTC; the price of Litecoin has gone up, while BTC has gone down. In other words, there are people holding these alternative currencies for reasons other than just buying for the sake of reselling them for Bitcoin. That gives them value independent of whether Bitcoin lives or dies. Follow?

Bitcoin has been around for about 5 years now, and over those years the network has become slower, and slower. Since running a Bitcoin node is very resource intensive on a computer, the average Bitcoin holder does not operate a node, but rather uses a light wallet to store their coins. A light wallet does not require the user to download the entire 26GB (and counting, exponentially) blockchain and verify every single transaction before it's useable. Instead, a light wallet relies on other servers full (heavy) bitcoin nodes to operate. While this is very convenient for the user, it has slowed the network down immensely, because when you run a light wallet, you are not contributing to the network.

While I tend to use light wallets for BTC these days (on my personal computers anyway), I do operate a Bitcoin node on a lonely VPS server just to help the network out a bit. However, for altcoins like DOGE and DRK, I have no problem running a full node as my client on my computer. That's because the blockchain of these coins is much smaller, and thus much less resource hungry. Not only that, but I can send DOGE or DRK and have the transaction verified and confirmed within seconds, while it can take up to an hour to confirm a Bitcoin transaction. The network speed and blockchain bloat are just some of the problems that the Bitcoin developers need to fix if Bitcoin is to remain to worlds (shall we call it) reserve-cryptographic-currency.

If slow transaction speeds and blockchain bloat are not bad enough, there is one more little detail that the Bitcoin developers need to, but have been hesitant to address. That is, anonimity. You see, while Bitcoin does give one a great deal of anonymity when compared to say, credit cards, that does not mean that BTC transactions are anonymous at all! Say huh...? Well, every Bitcoin transaction that ever has and ever will occur is forever logged, publicly, on the blockchain. There are ways of 'laundering' your Bitcoin, but it's a real pain in the ass. This is another problem that some of the altcoins are trying to fix, particularly Darkcoin.

But not only is there Darkcoin, there is Anoncoin, Stealthcoin, Blackcoin, whateveryounameitcoin, and new ones coming out everyday. At the moment, it appears that ANC (AnonCoin) is the most valuable (second to DRK) of the ever-emerging and anonymity-promising coins. Third in line, (in my honest opinion) is XST (Stealthcoin). StealthCoin was gaining a lot of traction, and the developers were talking about opening up a decentralized marketplace called OpenBazaar where anyone could sell anything to anyone, anonymously. But then one of the biggest whales and earliest investors (or was it developers?) dumped a ton of XST and bought up his own new coin SSD (Sonic ScrewDriver), and then I heard that it turns out that XST was a direct clone of RZR (RazorCoin) to begin with! What a clusterfuck, right? But wait, it gets worse...

Today, I heard that bitcointalk forum accounts are being SOLD for Bitcoin! That means that a reputable developer could sell his reputation to some scammer who could then promote (OtherRipOff)Coin and so on... I am still trying to sort this one out. If it's not true, than XST may be the best buy on the market right now. If it is true, than... I just don't know. Any thoughts, anyone?