At the moment I don't have the time or bandwidth to engage with Mike S. as fully as I would like or as his disquisition on Bitcoin and "trust" deserves.
Just a couple of comments... Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation http://p2pfoundation.net which he heads are an extremely interesting phenomenon working to provide some alternative (counter-hegemonic) perspectives on labour, production, consumption and other matters that strike at the very heart of the current neo-liberal phantasmagon. (One need only spend a very little time in burgeoning Brazil as I am currently having the opportunity to do, to realize what we have lost as a society/culture in our seemingly unconscious headlong plunge into the neo-liberal depths. Brazil, is to my mind attempting (in part--there are conflicts) to build the functioning social democracy that we collectively have been so thoughtlessly abandoning over the last 20 years--and they are much the better for it socially, economically, culturally etc.etc. My second point is that the issue of trust is not really about inter-individual connections, rather it is about connections/relationships within communities -- I've written quite a lot about this in the context of Community Informatics but just to say that networked individualism is to neo-liberalism as trust is to community (informatics)--sort of... Mike G. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Saturday, March 31, 2012 1:18 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: <nettime> moving to a socially sovereign,post-westphalian, currency 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/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
