Rick Falkvinge

I find Falkvinge's libertarianism[1, 2] much more compatible with the idea of a pirate party than direct democracy; democracy can outvote individual freedom and create a majority rule over an individual[3]. Other pirate parties are a good example of how the core principles can get outvoted and diluted with off-topic issues. In 2015 Pirate Party of Iceland overthrew the blasphemy laws[41, which is a great success. I honestly hope they do not take the way of the modern left and introduce the concept of "hate speech" which limits free speech to only ideas the ruling group likes. It has happened over and over. Still, I see this victory as a positive move. I hope the party will succeed in passing a meaningful copyright and patent reform. [1] https://falkvinge.net/ [2] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/ [3] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertar… [4] https://www.rt.com/news/271645-iceland-pirates-blasphemy-law/

I'm a fan of the party. For a good idea of what sort of ideas this spawns from, check out the founder's blog https://falkvinge.net/ Basically imagine libertarians with a strong drive to consider practical matters over ideology. Individual liberties, but drop the ideology and do what works for people, and what the people want as a whole.

I wouldn't call putting people before corporations and opening up government wedge issues; they're right in line with the Pirate Wheel[0] which leads to all pirate politics' positions on issues. I think these are excellent examples of what the US Pirate Party should focus on. [0]: https://falkvinge.net/pirate-wheel/

We can also attribute the quote "Child pornography is great" to Mr Schlüter. Overall nasty guy. https://falkvinge.net/2012/05/23/cynicism-redefined-why-the-copyright-… “My friends,” Schlüter said. “We must filter the Internet to win over online file sharing. But politicians don’t understand that file sharing is bad, and this is a problem for us. Therefore, we must associate file sharing with child pornography. Because that’s something the politicians understand, and something they want to filter off the Internet.”

Follow-up: https://falkvinge.net/2017/06/11/right-money-bitcoin-hits-3000-1000x-e… No numbers anywhere, but if he held on to it (and didn’t get stolen/lose it/etc), that’s retirement level even with 1k invested

Good post. Here's an even more visionary post (at least in terms of adopting it even earlier in 2011) from the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party: https://falkvinge.net/2011/05/29/why-im-putting-all-my-savings-into-bi… Personally, I'm not so sure it's Bitcoin the one that will be worth $100,000 or $1 million per coin, and it may not be Ethereum either. I think there's a long way to go till we get there, and a lot of new innovative ideas and coins will come-up until we do.

As a followup, someone apparently flew from Australia to Japan to try to get his BTC and has just posted an interesting writeup: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x9gue/my_protest_at_mtgox_of… MtGox has been building up failed transactions for over a week: http://falkvinge.net/2014/02/04/major-bitcoin-exchange-not-executing-w… Relatively realtime tx data: http://coinsight.org/mtgox.html via http://thegoxreport.com/

Great article, just one major inaccuracy concerning the Pirate Party: > they have a silly name and their focus seems to be solely on ‘sharing culture’ at the expense of everything else. Then you go on to say: > What we need in this country is a protest party that campaigns on the issues of Internet privacy, censorship, copyright/patent reform and computer misuse laws. The Pirate Party campaigns precisely on these issues. For those that think the Pirate Party is just focused on protesting against unfair monopolies, please look up their actual ideas. A good illustration is given on Rick Falkvinge's blog: http://falkvinge.net/files/2012/manual/PirateWheel-2012-11-10.pdf

You could try following up with this guy: http://falkvinge.net/2011/05/29/why-im-putting-all-my-savings-into-bit… (for reference, HN discussion was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2596475)

Carbon tax becomes a peculiar piece of legislation when viewed from Pirate Party's perspective (not necessarily that I agree with it, no ad hominem please). According to Rick Falkvinge [1] legislation must: * Be targeted at a problem * Solve the problem * Not create other problems in best case, worse problems in worst case * Be evidence based Carbon emission is considered a problem because it contributes to climate change. For carbon tax to be considered targeting a problem we must accept that climate change is a problem. Does it solve a problem? At least not directly. Taxes on tobacco and alcohol do not eliminate consumption, prohibition in US created a Mafia, jail-time for drug possession does not eliminate consumption, we have hard evidence confirming that. Such tax hinders accessibility, though. Since at least transportation is fossil fuel dependant, more or less everything (commodities including: food, public transportation) will get more expensive, thus less accessible. Do we have hard evidence (numbers, not general economic speculation) that x level carbon tax will lower carbon emissions by y? [1]: http://falkvinge.net/pirate-wheel/principles/quality-legislation/

The whole price of Bitcoin is an illusion that they use to get people to keep buying. It's the result of a bidding war. There is an article here about that basically explains (this is my interpretation not his words) how the price of BTC is kindof like the sticker price on an item in the store. It doesn't represent the real value, it's simply the value as perceived by consumers and is, in a way, fixed -- http://falkvinge.net/2013/09/13/bitcoins-vast-overvaluation-seems-to-b… But the fact that early adopters are psychotically rich for doing nothing is... one of the many signs of a flawed system. Basically if everyone started selling the market would destabilize because supply/demand curve would change & I'm pretty sure the value of what they're selling would plummet before they can unload most of their stack. EDIT: Since I was immediately downvoted, please note that this happens regularly any time you speak ill of Bitcoin's pyramid scheme aspects and is completely expected/anticipated when I post these responses. It's a public service that I will drop eventually, but think about this -- even people who own a ton of BTC (article I linked to) criticize it as being insanely flawed. They only stay with it because as they point out, they believe the price will continue to rise. Speculators love it because they KNOW it's flawed, but still feel confident in a bet that the price will rise. I think it's why ultimately it will take gov…

Looks like the answer is yes: https://falkvinge.net/2017/06/11/right-money-bitcoin-hits-3000-1000x-e… Although now he seems unhappy with where bitcoin has ended up: https://falkvinge.net/2017/11/17/new-google-management-decided-search-…

He bought in at $3, and as of 2017 he had a 1000x return on his investment. Today that would be circa 3000x. https://falkvinge.net/2017/06/11/right-money-bitcoin-hits-3000-1000x-e… Interestingly, he was very wrong about the 2nd reason to buy BTC (it hasn't exactly replaced the existing financial system), but the other two -- past performance and "civil liberties" (for drugs, ransomware etc) were close enough.

Offline shops already track you via bluetooth and wifi https://falkvinge.net/2017/04/15/schiphol-airport-tracking-every-singl…

https://falkvinge.net/2017/06/11/right-money-bitcoin-hits-3000-1000x-e… https://falkvinge.net/2017/11/17/new-google-management-decided-search-… Guessing that he moved it to Bitcoin Cash.

Of course there’s a CEO. Here’s an official statement from him: https://falkvinge.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/letter-from-the-ceo.p…

How does that not fall foul of the "I have nothing to hide" fallacy¹², and its various dangerous consequences³? 1: http://falkvinge.net/2012/07/19/debunking-the-dangerous-nothing-to-hid… 2: https://steemit.com/privacy/@tomkirkham/i-have-nothing-to-hide-privacy… 3: https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide

He has a recent update[1]. I think it's safe to say that he has done well for himself. [1]: https://falkvinge.net/2017/06/11/right-money-bitcoin-hits-3000-1000x-e…

Rick Falkvinge wrote an interesting article today about the SegWit patent situation: https://falkvinge.net/2017/05/01/blockstream-patents-segwit-makes-piec…

> They can't compel you to provide information from your mind, such as the passphrase to a phone. In the UK, they can [1] [1] https://falkvinge.net/2012/07/12/in-the-uk-you-will-go-to-jail-not-jus…

don't forget the fact that he was approached by the NSA to insert backdoors into linux, a fact his father testified to on the record before EU parliament[0]. 0. http://falkvinge.net/2013/11/17/nsa-asked-linus-torvalds-to-install-ba…

Dollar Hegemony, ELI5 version: http://falkvinge.net/2011/06/17/the-imminent-dollar-collaps-explained-…

The obvious counterpoint is that beheading videos are legal to watch. The last time this came up on HN that I remember, someone linked to these posts by Rick Falkvinge: https://falkvinge.net/2012/09/07/three-reasons-child-porn-must-be-re-l… https://falkvinge.net/2012/09/11/child-porn-laws-arent-as-bad-as-you-t…

For context: Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, which has representation in the European parliament and has spawned Pirate Parties in more than 60 other countries. Here, Falkvinge & Co. comment on information policy and civil liberties in Europe and elsewhere in the world. https://falkvinge.net/about/

What about it? It is certainly detestable, and we should prosecute whoever produces it, but censoring is censoring. There are some good articles by Rick Falkvinge[0] that has been discussed here a couple of times[1]. 0: http://falkvinge.net/2012/09/11/child-porn-laws-arent-as-bad-as-you-th… 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4495914

Seriously. Copyright infringement _is not stealing_. It has even been decided in court: http://falkvinge.net/2013/12/23/reminder-1-copyright-monopoly-infringe… Stop abusing the word.

The two women have not accused Assange of sexual assault. Ever. They merely went to the police and asked if it was possible to pressurize him to submit to STD testing. The accusations of rape are done by an overzealous prosecution office that has hijacked the case later; it seems they have the right to do that. That the office chose to make the accusations augmented by descriptive statements from the two women gives the impression that the two are the accusers. Both (or at least one, supported by the other) have since requested that the issue be dropped. To see the entire arguments of the prosecution and the defense in today's session, read the liveblog[1] by Falkvinge (now ended, of course). [1] http://falkvinge.net/2014/07/16/live-detention-lift-hearings-for-assan… EDIT: Minor nits.

There's very good coverage of the hearing over on Falkvinge's site, including a full translation of the arguments presented by the defense and prosecution, as it happened: http://falkvinge.net/2014/07/16/live-detention-lift-hearings-for-assan…

What would make you think that foreign governments would be any better? Supposedly privacy friendly European governments engage in plenty of wiretapping[1][2][3]. What I find different about what happens in the US is that these events are highly publicized, scrutinized, and court battles over wiretapping are extremely expensive for the US government, compared to other countries. I don't see that happening elsewhere. 1: http://ccc.de/en/updates/2011/analysiert-aktueller-staatstrojaner 2: http://falkvinge.net/2012/04/02/sweden-paradise-lost-part-1-general-wi… 3: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/09/fran-s09.html