Remember that your mother told you to "not put all your eggs in one basket"? This same principle applies to sensitive data; these records should not be kept in one place where a single hack can compromise all of the data. So why is this practice continuing? Because the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many. There's a huge profit to be made off collection of sensitive data which allows authority to manipulate the public in various ways for its own selfish purposes.
I just saw this announcement on my VMWare Windows 10 machine:
Lifelock has a conflict of interest because its future success requires future data breaches. What authority doesn't want you to know is that the technology exists which makes such attacks next to impossible to carry out. At the same time though, it would eliminate benefits to authority and they can't have that.
I don't keep personal info on this machine for a lot of reasons and have virtually all features of Windows 10 turned off. It's used for one thing only: as a place for writing my software. These days it's a good idea to have at least one machine that never connects to the internet. This is the machine that I use for private information such as the generation of cryptocurrency keys. You have to assume that every machine is taking screen shots and sending your private keys through your internet connection, so only do such procedures on a machine that never connects.
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This is why I don't like Windows 10 because it nags you to keep you connected saying that you won't be secure otherwise. Precisely the opposite is true. You can have all the malware in the world running on your machine and it won't matter one bit as long as you never connect to the internet. That's where you run into trouble. The way to handle this is to keep regular backups and if some ransomware tries to encrypt everything, do an fdisk and reformat, then use one of your uninfected backups to restore. Get a new HD if necessary (they're really cheap these days).
But authority doesn't want you to think this way. It wants to know everything about you in order to force you into surrender so that they have absolute control. They want you to store your data on the cloud (another mistake). This is known as a digital panopticon. If you're a responsible person, you shouldn't allow this. If you're smart, you'll understand that such control is the reason why terrorism exists in the first place. Terrorism is a byproduct of authority. Without authority, there can be no terrorism.
There's an excellent video that explains this entire situation by Andreas Antonopoulos called "Bubble Boy vs Sewer Rat"...
credit - Andreas Antonopoulos
Authority will never be able to protect your personal information. Only you can do that and you'll have to decentralize your habits. What is decentralization? It's the idea that there should be distribution, that information should be spread out and placed where it's relevant. Nature does this quite naturally which is why it's so stable because its design is flat and goes against hierarchy.
When data resides in one location, it creates a giant honeypot that is irresistible to hackers. Why? Because they can break into a database just once and get 145 million records. What would happen if each record instead resides on a single device separated from all of the rest? Then the hacker would have to break into 145 million devices.
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It's easy to see that the latter hack would never happen. This is because who has the time and electricity to hack into this many machines? The payout would be far less than your electric bill at the end of the month. The alternative under this latter situation would require a botnet attack, which is significantly harder to pull off with much less success.
The public has been brainwashed into thinking that identity is needed for transactions. A hundred years ago, even up to the current day, cash transactions have been done without identity. You don't need to know who someone is when selling something to someone else. You just look at the bill to see that it's real and that is all.
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Authority has been busy turning banks into a system of law enforcement. Their ideal is to make all transactions part of an authority structure that puts censorship ability first. KYC (Know Your Customer), AML (Anti Money Laundering) and CTF (Control of Terrorist Financing) have all been tools invented in the last 50 years to change the business of finance into one of absolute power and control. Under such a system, the vote no longer means anything.
The Model that Secures Life, Liberty, Property
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Bitcoin has as its underlying architecture the ability to eliminate these data breaches while at the same time assuring that transactions don't require your trust to be secure. It's accomplished by stringing together the transaction history into blocks that are hash dependent which means that once the history is committed, it becomes like sediment in the ocean; a permanent record of what actually happened. This is called "immutability" and is a feature of bitcoin.
We know that transactions can't be stolen or modified because to do so would cause the Merkle tree check of the hash to not match if it was modified. Thousands of computers across the world would know instantly this was not the "truth" of the network and would overwrite the correct transaction details with the correct hashes. At the end, anyone attempting to cheat in this way ends up with a large electric bill and nothing to show for it.
Your keys reside on a local hardware wallet (preferably) and never leave the security of the device. Software wallets are less secure in this manner. This is the model that should replace the banking system, and it will render the system of law enforcement of money obsolete.
The Myth that Government is Necessary
There is practically nothing that private citizens can't do better that government claims a monopoly on, from building roads to building buildings, if you benefit, you pay, but if not, you don't pay for what you don't use. Government is filled with parasites who grift from an unnecessary system of death and destruction. The biggest problem is how to reverse the trend toward hierarchy back into a flat system. This is going to happen anyway because of the coming equity drain into the 3rd world.
A few generations ago, my ancestors built Manwaring Rd. Here it is as it appeared in 1962...
We did it with our horses because we needed it. Later on our tractors smoothed it out because cars started coming through the dirt road creating potholes. My family in fact became government in this area which is why the family name is on the road. To people in the city who have been created as total dependents, this concept is foreign. But it is the truth. The difference is that long ago, the system was much more voluntary. Then suddenly, it became compulsory or armed gunmen would cart you off to a cage. This is not natural, but is a form of violence that most of you have been trained to ignore as necessary. But it is highly unethical and fundamentally immoral.
Bitcoin at its root is capable of rending the system of overseeing authority obsolete. Not quite yet today, but in a few years time, this underlying technology will render all forms of authority unnecessary. Some will ask, what about the law? The reality is that 98% of the people will do good things. The other 2% will get whacked in self defense in the future when law enforcement collapses anyway due to inability to fund the USD.
When the parasites are driven from the system, you won't have to work so hard to survive. That's when the incentive for crime will subside. The corporate driven world of hierarchy is the source for all crime and terror and the reason why the USA is #1 in the number of people incarcerated. How is this not completely obvious?
You are completely responsible for your own welfare and safety whether you realize it or not. Anyone with a badge promising otherwise is making promises they can't keep. They are not your God.
Donations (public bitcoin address):
3FwxQsa7gmQ7c1GXJyvDTqmT6CM3mMEgcv
I really enjoyed reading your post and I quite agree with most of it.
I only dont think we are ready to go that road. Giving "power to people" may be the biggest mistake ever. Steemit is a great example of it. You may see so many "local warlords" here. People who invested in steem power and they are playing gods.
Assumption that 98% people are good and 2% is bad only tells me, that you didnt really spent much time with people. I've seen so much evil on this earth and so little good. I would rather say: maximum 5% of population is good. Few % I would consider neutral and majority are either bad or evil.
And if you would remove goverments then this would get only worse. We are just not ready for that step. i dont think we will be in many many years (if not generations).
Chhers,
If one had just awoken from a coma into the present time, I would agree with you, but the situation wasn't always like this. I'm nearly retired now and spent 21 years working for the Department of Social Services through Elmcrest Children's Center.
That 2% number wasn't just guessed. It's based upon psychological experiments that have tested what people would do if they thought that they weren't being watched. I only became a programmer later in life after initially being introduced to it back in the early 1970's.
The whole point of decentralization is to counter the negative side of giving power to the people. The psychopaths have risen to the top and the only thing countering other psychopaths is other psychopaths, but we've given them so much money and power that it amplifies it to the danger of extinction. The goal here is to minimize that concentration of power so that can't happen. Consensus algorithms in bitcoin can make that happen.
Of course the situation could get worse at first by removing government because large populations of people have not learned how to self govern. That wasn't always the case though. Steemit is an improvement in the governance model compared to existing human driven government, but it isn't perfect. It would however be difficult to get all 21 witnesses to agree to press the nuke button.
Thank you for your kind reply. Im sorry for what's happening in Turkey lately. Im trying to follow up news and I see so much misery and pain. Hope you're well.
I agree with you that situation wasnt like that always. Sometimes world wasnt such an awful place. But now it seem to be that way.
I must admit that your post had made me think. Made me ask myself some questions. I appreciate it a lot. But my girlfriend clearly doesnt haha :)
"The whole point of decentralization is to counter the negative side of giving power to the people. The psychopaths have risen to the top and the only thing countering other psychopaths is other psychopaths, but we've given them so much money and power that it amplifies it to the danger of extinction. The goal here is to minimize that concentration of power so that can't happen. Consensus algorithms in bitcoin can make that happen."
I may be wrong but what Im witnessing seem to be far from giving power to oridinary people. By the time "regular joe" will be able to enjoy benefits of blockchain technology - those who have money to invest now will become rulers.
Regular joe will become excluded from that wealth. Once and for all. Honestly that's how I see what is happening. Big centralized powers will be able to build their empires here very easily.
Cheers, one more time thx
The reason the current rulers are so wealthy is because of the printing press. They simply use government controls to exclude the average person from competing with them. This is what corporatism does. The reason they don't like bitcoin is because they can't control the amount of it that gets printed in the same way they do with USD and other flag currencies.
Take the ability to print money away and suddenly their war machine will be threatened. Did you wonder how they were able to do it in the past? World wars were only made possible by going off the gold standard. Wars stop because cost stops them, but not when you have a printing press and can mint up all you want. With bitcoin this is impossible.
This half hour talk will make it clear for you...
Thank you for your great comment!
"The reason the current rulers are so wealthy is because of the printing press."
I agree with you. And now all those weathly rulers will be able to enter crypto market with money we regular people dont have.
And their power will become even greater than ever before.
" The reason they don't like bitcoin is because they can't control the amount of it that gets printed in the same way they do with USD and other flag currencies."
I completly agree with that statement.
"With bitcoin this is impossible."
I dont think wars will stop because of bitcoin or blockchain. Why would they stop? This technology is nothing else but shifting powers from current goverments to forces and people we do not know yet.
Cheers,
Piotr
I have been thinking about getting a pure offline pc as well. When that pc needs new software i can download it on usb stick (or external hdd) and install. Now my question. Do you think I can later format that usb stick and reuse it on an online pc or should it be destroyed? Am I getting paranoid?
Formatting should erase everything. If you want to be extra careful you can encrypt a USB drive. I start out with a machine that has no significant personal info but connects to the internet which then checks for viruses, trojans, and other malware. Then anything I need from the internet is brought from a USB drive to my unconnected machine. This transfer is always one direction. Never do I transfer anything from the private machine to the internet connected machine. If I have to do the latter, such as passwords, then I write it out on a piece of paper and type it into a masked field. My keystrokes are encrypted using Zemana Antilogger, so this latter method should be safe.
Outstanding post
Resteemed
Hello.Thank you for stotyu.Ochen useful and valuable.
Another great piece of work. Informative and so easy to read.
Please continue up with creating interesting content. Steemits needs solid content builders.
Already followed. Cannot upvote this time since I kind of run out of voting power.
Would you mind if I resteem it?
Yours, Piotr