Brewster Kahle's Blog

Bitcoin image from http://bitcoinme.com/ which has a good intro video

I have been playing around with Bitcoin, the mathematically very cool digital currency.     It occurred to me that it is the “local currency” of the Internet.   There are local currencies like Ithaca Hours or Bernal Bucks that facilitate trading within a community.

Bitcoins are kind of like that.   It is for those of the Internet.   I found getting it going was an adventure which ended in my figuring out how to donate to the Internet Archive, which was fun.   People have donated over $5000 worth of bitcoins in the last 2 years to the Internet Archive.

I was able to buy a physical bitcoin, which makes a good souvenir.    I was interviewed for an upcoming article in Bitcoin Magazine.   And been giving out 10 bitcoin cents to friends that I can find their bitcoin address.  I can not sure when I have to stop this gesture, but it seems to be encouraging some to set up bitcoin-qt on their computers.

Rick Wesson had an idea to use the DNS to publish your bitcoin addresses for those that want to send you money.    If you take your email address, replace the @ with a . to make it a hostname, then put it in the txt record (takes some knowledge of dns).

brewster$ dig rick.wesson.us txt
...
;; ANSWER SECTION:
rick.wesson.us.        300    IN    TXT    "BTC=1\; 1GCVXLfF1TcpnnDLJRHk845NZhuJWQTnUD"

Jim Shankland, at the Archive, nicely set me up so I could be a cool kid too, so if you want to send me bitcoins you can find my bitcoin address with the dig command as well:

brewster$  dig brewster.archive.org txt
;; ANSWER SECTION:
brewster.archive.org.    1800    IN    TXT    "BTC=1\; 1MHViGVu72KWj7dMsqcypGVih385YoQzUb"

I feel like I am part of a club, and it is fun.   I hope to find more things I can do to play with this promising system.

My address:  1MHViGVu72KWj7dMsqcypGVih385YoQzUb

A friend mentioned an organization in Marin County: Community Land Trust Association of West Marin that was set up to buy or get bequests of housing and use it for those that work in the area.  The problem is that local workers can not afford to live in west marin because the house prices have risen so much.

I have written to them to find out how they select people that live in their houses.   But this is close to the Foundation Housing idea outlined talked about here.   It is also encouraging that their tax filings show a all-volunteer management (I found the salaries in family foundations to be often over $100k and even over $400k).

Anyone know of any other projects where foundations own housing to benefit workers?  I am specifically interested in public benefit workers, but looking for examples.

Thank you!

My brother-in-law runs an auto repair shop that opened a couple of years ago in a town of 30,000 in northwestern Georgia.   He joined a “Barter Exchange” and this has lead more customers to him, and helped him buy meals and dentistry services.     When I visited, we went to a Fudrucker’s for dinner and paid with “biz2biz dollars” (it is a franchise so the local proprietor has this flexibility).     This local currency seems to be working.

As I understand it: this barter network has one of any type of service, so my brother in law is the only auto repair in the network.

My brother-in-law’s customers can pay for the labor with biz2biz dollars, but the tax and parts are paid with dollars.   He builds up an account surplus and when he spends it, then the biz2biz organization takes a 10% fee.   (This seems high to me, but the Visa system takes 3-5% for its service, so it is all relative).

Taxes are paid through 1099B forms filled out by the barter network.

My brother-in-law is happy with the system because he believes he is getting customers he would not otherwise get.   He is hoping the network grows to include an orthodontist, but overall he is enthusiastic about the system.

This is the town that has more predatory lending stores than I have every seen, and two new micro-finance places opened on this sad strip in the last 6 months.   I do not know if this barter network is a way out, but at least they have one member that is enthusiastic.

What if we could have headphones that changed what music played based on where it was?   If we could make a 100,000 square foot public space with different music playing in every square foot, and then cluster the types of music, we could make an art space out of any large public space where people could explore exotic types of music, and end up clustered near others that like the same type of music they do.

People could sit and listen, have lunch, flirt, whatever, in this several acre musical landscape.    Walking would sound like flipping channels– the cost of exploring the cuban funk area would be low– just wander over.    Try hanging out in the South Indian classical music area for a while.   Who would you meet there?

Your device would have information on the music you are listening to, and who else liked this location/artist.    People’s paths through the space might be interesting to watch and map and follow.

The Internet Archive is building a music library that underpin this, we would help in a clustering of the music to make it coherent, we need the headphones/receivers, and some whacko artists to figure out how to make all of this work and be interesting.

If people liked it, we could do it anywhere in the world, and may not need any permission from the authorities since it does not require any physical modification to the environment.

Red Square as a musical landscape, the park in front of the Pompidou, Union Square in NYC.
How about an abandoned factory?
office towers could be productively re-used (if we can do 3d locations),
Inside a large library?
Thinking bigger– a stadium, a town.

Sound interesting?    Not sure where to go with this, it has probably been done.   Are there 1-foot resolution add-on’s for smart-phones?      Up for it?

Interesting links coming in:
http://www.cmc.ie/musictrail/index.php from @jonathangrimes
http://www.gdgps.net/ and http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/gps/dgps-ip.html from Sam Stoller of the Archive

Silent disco is similar–  raj kumar

interlaced FM stations (raj kumar)  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_offset  http://www.icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspberry_Pi_Into_an_FM_Transmitter

Or have the headbands on the headphones have colors on top (or colored LED’s) and have a webcam from above chart where people are.  (raj kumar)

Doable, but less ambitious:   In the Great Room of the Archive, put a QR code on each seat that a smartphone can read, and then a channel plays.   if you like it, then others can come to your seat.  slide around to find a channel you like.    A channel is a webpage that plays music.  (javascript qr reading code:  http://www.webqr.com/ )

Do it world-wide: Location-based Internet Radio:  have each place, block, town, have its own radio station.  Start with randomly assigned, but then people at that place can vote for best station for them.   Maybe break up a large area into sub-areas each with their own radio station.    Use HTML5 to do this just by going to a web page on your smartphone.    Then when in Amsterdam, see what they selected.    By having to be in a particular place to change the station, it might keep down spam.    An overall map of what people have done where could be very cool.

"How I wish we could take this moment
 & freeze it
To come back again & again & again
To hold it to the light
 turn it in our hands
To study all the angles
To find out How
 and Why
   it's gotta go the way that it goes"

Jim Zarra of a church in New Jersey gave me a tour of 2 houses that they own and run that are in many ways, debt-free and public benefit.    They also have an 11 unit addition to their church that is also part of this program.   Their program leverages government money to get it going with no money upfront and then, in 20 years in one case, and 30 years in another, would be theirs free-and-clear making it a possible way to create permanently debt-free housing.

As I understand it, this is how it works:

They buy a house and fix it up using money from the county and then they repay the “mortgage” back to the county.     But this is a special mortgage, in that they do not have to pay anything while they use it for the purpose the county designated.     In other words, the mortgage payment is waived on the months they house people with the right issues they are trying to help.   In this case the tenants are homeless veterans, or those with mental health issues, or those recently homeless.

So the 501c(3) non-profit organization set up by the church buys properties and gets a one-time payment from the county to pay for the purchase price and the renovation.  In one case this was $100,000 purchase price and $40,000 for renovations to bring a 1200 square foot house up to snuff.   I toured this and one other and they look very nice.    Five formerlessly homeless guys live in one (2 in a room) and 3 young women live in the other (one in a bedroom).

Because the houses have no mortgage payment, they cost only 25% to 40% of what other rentals houses cost to operate.   Since they have been recently renovated, the number is actually much less.    They do pay property tax and insurance.

Further, these individuals have rent vouchers that are meant to pay for market based rent.    This can be $1100 or $560 in their cases.    This assumes that the landlord has more costs than a regular lower middle-class unit because of the special needs of these tenants.    But it still comes to much more than the costs of running these houses.  This means they are starting to build up a reserve that is allowing them to purchase more houses.

Therefore the county is paying for the property and paying market rents.

At the end of the mortgage period the houses are the non-profit’s free and clear.   They can sell them or do whatever.    Of course, my interest is in making permanently debt-free housing, but this is not required in any way from the county’s perspective.    Seems like a very good deal for the church, and I commend their expansion in this area.

Is this how other housing projects work?    Does anyone know?

Iain and Gillian Boales in front of the new building on Fleet Street

Iain and Gillian Boal showed me their building before it is renovated that will be an archive and center for conversation about dissent, anarchy, and social movements.    It is great that it is located right across the street from Goldman Sachs (which does not bear any signage).    The first floor tenant is a pawnbroker– which gives an further idea of the current trades on that street.

Mayday Rooms “is a safe house for vulnerable archives and historical material linked to social movements, experimental culture, and marginalized figures and groups.”

They are working to have it last a long time because it preserves the alternative voices that have been forced out.

May the Anarchive live and educate forever!

Mayday Rooms building in Londond

Iain and Gillian Boales in front of the new building on Fleet Street

Iain and Gillian Boal showed me their building before it is renovated that will be an archive and center for conversation about dissent, anarchy, and social movements.    It is great that it is located right across the street from Goldman Sachs (which does not bear any signage).    The first floor tenant is a pawnbroker– which gives an further idea of the current trades on that street.

Mayday Rooms “is a safe house for vulnerable archives and historical material linked to social movements, experimental culture, and marginalized figures and groups.”

They are working to have it last a long time because it preserves the alternative voices that have been forced out.

May the Anarchive live and educate forever!

Mayday Rooms building in Londond

Proud father time.

Caslon at the polling place in the Presidio. No lines, paper record, nice people. All good.

Caslon Voting for the First Time

My friend Matt Ostrowski sent me a link to an article written in 2001 by Michael Hudson.  Not an easy read, but interesting because it was written in 2001, therefore the before the housing bubble popped in 2007.    It shows some of the favorable tax treatment afforded to the real estate industry, and the encouragement to trade properties to leverage repeated depreciation cycles to maximize this tax treatment.   I have wondered why properties never get past their 30 year mortgages, and this helps explain why.

Further this paper showed how the bubble could have been made more obvious except that the Federal Reserve stopped reporting some key statistics in 1994:

“But nationwide totals [of land and building values] were no longer compiled [by the Federal Reserve]. … Instead of making better land estimates, the Fed has dropped what had become a political and statistical hot potato. 1994 is the last year for which it has estimated economy-wide land and building values.”

But not reporting this is important because it fueled leverage buyouts (now called Private Equity) deals:

“Since the late 1940s ‘concealed value’ in the form of properties carried at outdated book values reflecting low acquisition prices was a major factor behind corporate raiding, mergers and acquisitions. Aggressive firms employed accountants to pour over the Stock Exchange’s 10K reports searching for such hidden values.”

This also shows how certain appraisal approaches help avoid income taxes through depreciating buildings over and over again:

“These fiscal considerations help to explain why it has been so hard to get Washington to produce national land value statistics.”

This lead investors to sell and resell properties quickly.

Combined with low cost credit leads to price appreciation and bubbles ensue.

Interestingly, nothing in this analysis has changed, so all these incentives still exist and the lack of public statistics and lack of political will to change seem to imply we are in much the same position we were before this last run-up popped.

This makes me more encouraged to find a way to create stable housing outside by changing some of the rules, in our case non-profit and debt-free housing.

Patricia Watts’ Mother at her Credit Union

A friend, Patricia Watts, sent this picture of her mother because she knew we are setting up a Credit Union. Helen M. Watts (1922-2012) managed a credit union in Phoenix, Arizona for 15 years (1961-1976). She was a pioneer in the movement and was a big inspiration to her daughter.

I love the quotation from Alphonse DesJardins, the instigator for North American credit unions.