Mike G wrote:
> From: [email protected] On Behalf Of Michel Bauwens
> Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 5:37 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: moving to a socially sovereign, post-westphalian, currency
>
> Why the P2P Foundation is paying its salaries in Bitcoin
>
> http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/why-the-p2p-foundation-is-paying-its-
> salaries-in-bitcoin/2012/03/28
I gather that Mike and the original poster to Nettime found this of
interest because of the unconventional use of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an
interesting development but it has failed to grab me. The highly
technical infrastructure of the implementation is as opaque and
inaccessible to the ordinary person as the US Fed and all the other
arcana of the present system of banking and money supply.
Like Facebook, smartphone apps and many other recent innovations, it's
superficially exciting new stuff to play with but it appears to me to
have its core existence in a remote and possibly hermetic place over
which the users have no control.
What did catch my attention were these lines:
> The cooperative is conceived as being a global phyle, a
> community-oriented enterprise that aims to generate income for the
> contributors to the commons and the Foundation, so that we become
> financially sustainable. As a phyle, we operate globally with
> cooperators located in different parts of the globe. [1]
Phyle? That's a term I've only encountered in a fictional context.
Wikipedia describes only its meaning in relation to classical Greece.
The referenced URL [1] attempts to explain the concept as it is held
by the author but it sounds like he's making it up as he goes
along. [2] But down toward the end, we find:
Back in the late '90s...Neal Stephenson introduced the concept of
"phyles" in The Diamond Age. Phyles filled the void left after
encrypted commerce and digital currencies had deprived the
Westphalian nation-state of most of its revenues, and most of the
world's states were either substantially hollowed out or had
collapsed altogether into Balkanized collections of
city-states. The phyle was a distributed,
non-geographically-based, global civil society, providing -- much
like the medieval guilds at the height of their vigor -- a range
of support platforms for its members: reputational rating systems
and quality certification, cooperative buying and marketing,
assorted benefits like health and unemployment insurance, legal
and security services, encrypted currencies and virtual
marketplaces, and so forth.
Unless you're severely put off by fictional worlds that depart far
from conventional realism, Stephenson's book is well worth reading.
It does a far better job of exploring some if the aspects of phyles
than the above-quoted rather dry paragraph (or even that whole web
page). How do you engender trust within your phyle? Do you test that
trust? What protections does it offer? What sacrifices does it
demand? What secrets must you keep? What power may your phyle acquire
and how should you wield it if you get it? When is loyalty paramount
and when are you free to leave and join another?
The matter of trust within a phyle (or within any distributed group)
is a critical one. Techies tend to turn to technical answers such as
encryption and digital signatures. I've never trusted the SSL
encryption now standard with web browsers, not because if
cryptological weakness but because such trust is synonymous with
trusting large, impersonal and distant for-profit corporations. This
has subjected me to derision by those who are keen to do their banking
and shopping on-line. My distrust has been justified by recent events
that resulted is at least one cert issuer being shut down after
transactions that subverted the whole process.
So I'm looking forward to reading Bruce Schneier's latest book, Liars
and Outliers. I've read one of his previous books (Applied
Cryptography) that is purely about the nuts and bolts of crypto math.
His new book goes far beyond these narrow technical details of
communication security.
When we think about trust, we naturally think about personal
relationships or bank vaults. That's too narrow. Trust is much
broader, and much more important. Nothing in society works without
trust. It's the foundation of communities, commerce,
democracy -- everything.
In this insightful and entertaining book, Schneier weaves together
ideas from across the social and biological sciences to explain
how society induces trust. He shows how trust works and fails in
social settings, communities, organizations, countries, and the
world.
In today's hyper-connected society, understanding the mechanisms
of trust is as important as understanding electricity was a
century ago. Issues of trust and security are critical to solving
problems as diverse as corporate responsibility, global warming,
and our moribund political system. After reading Liars and
Outliers, you'll think about social problems, large and small,
differently. [3]
Bruce Sterling's book, Distraction, also explores the subject of trust
in a post-hierarchical, nearly post-national world. Once again, you
need not to be put off by a rather wild yarn if you want to think
about the elements of trust and distributed social entities
represented.
So, getting back to Mike G's original forwarded piece, how'm I gonna
come to trust Bitcoin? If I manage to get some, are they safer from
theft than the coffee can of Canadian Two-nies [4] buried in the back yard?
Will they evaporate in the next Carrington Event? Where does the
verifiable representation of my bitcoinage live? On my HD? In some central
digital repository like Bastionhost?
More on this, perhaps, after I've managed to get Schneier's book and
read it.
- Mike
[1] See http://p2pfoundation.net/Phyles
[2] The same author's much longer piece at
http://deugarte.com/gomi/phyles.pdf
seems less scattered but I haven't more than lightly browsed it
yet. I think it might be an interesting read. I'd never heard of
the "Dunbar number" before although I came up with a similar
notion on my own long ago.
[3] http://www.schneier.com/book-lo.html
Also a relevant short essay and an interview at:
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-1203.html
[3] A 2 pound coffee can holds about $4,000 in rolled twonies. And no,
I don't actually have one buried in the back yard.
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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