On 29 Dec 2017, at 10:01, Florian Cramer wrote:
The *goal* of the Bitcoin proof of concept was 'an electronic payment
system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any
two
willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need
for a
trusted third party.' So when the author of this avid-reader essay
complains 'but Visa... but FDIC... but NASDAQ,' one reasonable
response is:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The point of Bitcoin wasn't to succeed to the degree
that it
has, or in the way that it has.
Hi Ted,
If that had been Bitcoin's only goal, then it would have sufficed to
create
a crypographic peer-to-peer payment system based on/supporting
existing
currencies and their exchange rates.
Things got politically murky with the introduction of Bitcoin as its
own
currency based on Hayek's and Mises' economic theory, i.e. with
built-in
deflation and absence of political control except through owners.
Well, the difference is your addition of 'only,' as in it's 'only goal.'
If I say I love you, Florian, that would be special, wouldn't it? But if
I say I love *only* you, Florian, that's a different kettle of fish.
'Only' is one of those tricky words that serves as a mule for smuggling
entire ideological apparatuses. 'Still' is another one: 'You *still*
believe that?
As someone who's thought a lot about design, you probably understand
better than many what a proof of concept is: an implementation — or
we'd maybe we should think of it in more anthropological terms, as an
*artifact* — that, more or less, tests a specific proposal. How that
test is constructed, and the context in which it's conducted, involve a
lot of artifice. Many of the assumptions that shape that artifice go
unstated. The questions we're left with, in the case of Bitcoin, are
what those assumptions were, and what they might mean.
If I'd said that goal was Bitcoin's *only* goal, then I'd agree with
your objection, but I didn't: instead, I talked about the explicit
ideological beliefs that dominated the cypherpunks milieu, including
their implacable hostility to the state, their all but explicit aim of
attacking models of trust anchored in ~public institutions, the
ambiguity of their use of the idea of honesty, and — crucially —
their interest in Vernor Vinge's novella _True Names_. It didn't seem
worth the effort to say they were libertarian free-market extremists,
because that's widely discussed. So your point is right on, but it seems
like more of an elaboration ('and') than an objection ('but'). They
didn't think talking about Hayek or Mises in the original Bitcoin paper,
but as you say those ideas were baked into it from the beginning.
Whoever designed Bitcoin assumed that 'currency' and 'an electronic
payment system' were interchangeable or even identical. They (and I'm
pretty sure it was a group, not an individual) didn't set out to design
better banknotes *or* to develop a better PayPal, they set out to create
something entirely new that could function as either/both but wasn't
*only* limited to meeting those specifications.
That brings us to Morlock's point about whether Bitcoin succeeded or
failed. Two responses, one good, one bad. \_(ツ)_/¯.
This reminds me of discourses on theory and practice of communism. One
good, the other bad.
Bitcoin failed for practical/mundane reason: it ceased to be
distributed long time ago (today 4 Chinese mints control 50+% of hash
power), while talking heads deceivingly ignored this, and continued to
proselytize the initial but long extinct 'distributed' meme. It's more
centralized than US dollar.
PoW concentration is mandated by its technological nature and there
are no signs that anything will change any time soon. Every other
'proof' introduces either benevolent coordinating authority (which is
utter bs), or switches CPU for something that has not been
demonstrated as concentrate-able yet because no one bothered (such as
proof of space - big disks are naturally distributed ... right.)
There is little more to say. Bitcoin is a big lie, for many too big to
be acknowledged.
Possible futures and promises will continue to be built on the
miserably failed premise, with non-working workarounds (But maybe the
next workaround will work? ... Bitcoin is just the first try, the
concept is good? ... It's such great idea and must be revisited? ...
etc.)
Morlock, your point about its concentration nails it, and in that sense,
yes, Bitcoin was a miserable failure. That structural tendency toward
concentration was obvious in many of the experiments that contributed to
Bitcoin, like the distributed cracks of RC5, which were dominated by
actors with immense computing power at their disposal. Cypherpunk-types
loved heartwarming talk about how Zapatistas and victims of sexual abuse
would use PGP etc, but that was just playing to the crowd: they were
much more concerned with systemic architectures and their baked-in
biases because they knew cryptography was and would remain inevitably
*politically* asymmetric.
But as you may remember (if you're the same Morlock Elloi who was
kicking around in those circles), all that talk about crypto-anarchy
was, at its heart, about class. Much of what normal people think about
'class' depends on the state: if there's no state, there are no classes,
there are just arbitrary individuals and groups who are more or less
adept at navigating and negotiating whatever resources are available to
them. Whatever human potential gets lost in the fray is just the cost of
doing business — and 'twas ever thus.
So...if Bitcoin has made some people fabulously wealthy, enabled new
'free markets' (including dark commerce, a growing parade of ICO cons,
etc), and generally moved a bunch of Overton windows, do you really
think some of them — Tim May, for example — would be upset that it
was eventually dominated by a few Chinese mints rather than being
equitably accessible for sheeple-to-sheeple use? If all of history a
single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage, what's a
few more as long as they make you and yours rich?
What engineer ever objected if his/her/their proof of concept failed on
a specified front but succeeded in creating a dozen new ones? It's as if
the Wright Brothers' plane crashed — on the moon.
Cheers,
Ted
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
