Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
Don't forget the mine shaft gap, which seems to motivate most of the crypto currency frenzy. On 1/10/18, 08:24, byfield wrote: genealogy, from the 1957 Gaither Report's 'bomber gap' to Stiglitz's 'knowledge gap,' says a lot about how deeply militarism has pervaded # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
On 10 Jan 2018, at 5:18, Prem Chandavarkar wrote: The move from an underdeveloped to developed economy is described as a gap in resources, but it is much more of a gap in knowledge Free markets are praised as being efficient. However, markets are not efficient in promoting innovation and learning. For example, in the field of drug discovery, markets direct more effort and resources into fighting hair loss than into combating malaria. This lines up with Morlock's argument that another renaissance of literacy is in the offing, but this time around it's technical rather than textual literacy. We have no idea what it will entail, but let's say it's on the order of what the written word did — which, if you go with people like Eric Havelock, led to a profound rupture in subjectivity, of which 'philosophy' was just one byproduct. That general line of thought should pretty familiar to anyone who's dabbled in media theories of the last ~50 years: basically, that what we think and how we think it is inseparable from how we record and disseminate it. In that case, a lot of this pop hand-wringing about how [computation | digital | networks | mobile | screens] are producing new kinds of [people | organizations | societies | spectacles] — which are almost [incomprehensible | schizophrenic | psychotic] — is vaguely accurate. The problem is how we evaluate these changes. OT1H there are the nostalgists, who lament that technology is leading us astray and argue that we need to 'go back' somehow: parenting, education, law, regulation, etc. OT0H there are the futurists, from Arlington to Silicon Valley to Beijing to Moscow, who think the real challenge lies in figuring out how to exploit these new forms. Their styles differ, but one thing they share is a commitment to dissolving the boundaries of the self. And then there's Keith, who refuses to get dragged into this pessimism and argues, more or less, that these debates are just quibbling about what kind of wreath we should send to the west's funeral — and that broad statistical trends in the distribution of the world's population tell us much of we need to know. I admire his optimism, and I think the left needs to start looking much more widely for promising realities, rather than dwelling on threatening possibilities. Some of this dilemma is neatly summed up in a New Yorker–ish cartoon that's been doing the rounds for some years, of a few ragged people huddled around a campfire (in a cave, appropriately enough): "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders." https://economicsociology.org/2014/10/07/yes-the-planet-got-destroyed-but-for-a-beautiful-moment-in-time-we-created-a-lot-of-value-for-shareholders/ This all is a roundabout way of approaching the question what exactly would fill this 'gap in knowledge' that Joseph Stiglitz diagnoses. We should keep in mind the origins of this kind of 'gap' idea. As far as I know, the first one was the 'bomber gap' of the mid-'50s, followed quickly by the 'missile gap' of the late '50s on; but even if those aren't the first gaps, they played a decisive role in this kind of 'global' rhetoric with all its quantish-sounding comparisons — between the US and the USSR, between under- and over-developed economies, between the global south and north, etc. Both of those two gaps were mostly imaginary: they were shrill gambits made by the emerging security apparatus to justify vast expansions in the scale and scope of military R&D budgets, which Brian and I were talking about. This genealogy, from the 1957 Gaither Report's 'bomber gap' to Stiglitz's 'knowledge gap,' says a lot about how deeply militarism has pervaded intellectual cultures: even Marxoids and enviro-economists rely heavily on this 'gap' metaphor. I wonder how much power this idea of a gap exerts in the African social settings that Keith describes so lovingly. My guess is not much — not because Africans are unaware of the force of globalism (on the contrary), but maybe because their myriad cultures, coming from very different historical perspectives, don't see it as necessarily opposed to immediate sociability. Pessimism, and its attended sense of hopelessness, are learned. But, really, what is this gap? It's a differential — between an 'actually existing' state of affairs and an imagined anti/ideal. I think the gap metaphor has been widely successful in large part because it can be applied to almost anything: bombers or missiles, vocational or critical education, resources, income and savings, philanthropic funding, pharma R&D, trivial business plans, whatever. It's a neatly quasi-visual way of sidestepping philosophy (not a bad thing, IMO): instead of lying around on couches and praising Eros, as in Plato's Symposium, we construct more or less statistical models of a narrowly defined problem then debate what kinds of policies might get fro
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
Just looked up my notes from a lecture by Joseph Stiglitz which I attended in July 2016. Some key points: Sustained economic development requires a learning society Western economies started the transition into a learning society in the 1800’s. However, this has flattened out towards the end of the 20th century Schumpeter (and others after him) have shown that technological change has substantively more impact on economic growth than the accumulation of capital The move from an underdeveloped to developed economy is described as a gap in resources, but it is much more of a gap in knowledge Free markets are praised as being efficient. However, markets are not efficient in promoting innovation and learning. For example, in the field of drug discovery, markets direct more effort and resources into fighting hair loss than into combating malaria. Adam Smith’s invisible hand argues that the pursuit of private interests leads to the well being of society. However, although Smith recognised it, insufficient attention is given to the fact that free markets underproduce public goods. Unfortunately most governments follow the Washington Consensus which believes that development can be best promoted by improving the static efficiency of resource allocation and the accumulation of capital. This policy has gained public traction just when economists have proven it to be wrong. These policies are counterproductive for creating a learning society. Knowledge is a non-rivalrous public good. Its equitable distribution should be a major factor of public policy, since this will not be ensured by the market. Education can no longer focus on the transfer of specific skills and knowledge, and should be aimed at “learning to learn”. To this, I feel one has to factor in recent developments in digitalisation of the economy which has had the following impacts: Exponentially scaled up the high-capital speculative section of the economy, which means that for most people the cost of survival is determined by other factors and has nothing to do with the value they provide. Empowered the aggregation of individualised services by corporate capital, which pushes more and more people into a gig economy that offers neither economic stability nor social benefits like health insurance Used big data to move the political economy from public negotiations of causation to opaque value extraction through correlation, and overturned the equation between the private and public realm. The value of what one does is realised by others. > On 10-Jan-2018, at 2:41 PM, Patrice Riemens wrote: > > On 2018-01-09 22:25, Joseph Rabie wrote: > >> Their is a blind belief that capitalism and the market are one and the >> same, but this is not so. Markets have existed for as long as there >> has been specialization of labour. Capitalism is a modern mechanism, >> invented to enable certain forms of development, frequently of a >> predatory and corrosive nature. The time has come to uninvent >> capitalism, to return the market to its cooperative vocation. > > Why does this 'self-evident truth' need to be repeated over again while it is > being forgotten over and again? > Puzzling. > Ciaoui, > p+7D! > # distributed via : no commercial use without permission > #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: nett...@kein.org > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
On 2018-01-09 22:25, Joseph Rabie wrote: Their is a blind belief that capitalism and the market are one and the same, but this is not so. Markets have existed for as long as there has been specialization of labour. Capitalism is a modern mechanism, invented to enable certain forms of development, frequently of a predatory and corrosive nature. The time has come to uninvent capitalism, to return the market to its cooperative vocation. Why does this 'self-evident truth' need to be repeated over again while it is being forgotten over and again? Puzzling. Ciaoui, p+7D! # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
> Where there’s a funder, there’s necessarily a shareholder. Otherwise there’s > no accountability. The problem with shareholder accountability is that it is, in principle, uniquely concerned with profitability. The eventual taking into account of all other issues, such as working conditions, product quality or suitability, environmental effects, depend solely upon their impact upon profitability, and not upon their general effects upon society or the environment. Accountability should concern all stakeholders, be it all workers in the company, clients, suppliers, society and the environment at large. Profits “earned” by shareholders, who have a parasitic relationship with the company, should be abolished. > I guess this makes me an apologist for the status quo, but I’m still not > seeing how these proposed alternatives would be superior in practice. Superior according to which criteria? Certainly capitalism has been a boon for bringing extraordinary living conditions to the privileged classes, but at a criminal cost to all others and the environment. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
...”hold it hostage as a source of permanent income via the dividends paid out on profits and on the potential exchange value of their shares”. ... # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
The whole point about capitalism is that those who provide the capital to create a company, those who are “prepared to take the financial risk as entrepreneurs” (in other words, speculate on its future success), hold it hostage as a source of permanent income via the dividends paid out on profits. In other words, for the capitalist, the company manufactures return on investment. For the capitalist, what it really produces (goods, services or whatever) is incidental, a byproduct. Imagine if investment capital were to be banned. Instead, to finance its creation, a company would loan money from a public bank at a reasonable rate of interest. Once this is paid back, all its ressources would go towards its own good, that of its workers and that of society at large. No more shareholders! Ideally the bank would finance projects on the basis of their social, cultural or environmental utility, and not on the basis of their potential profitability. Their is a blind belief that capitalism and the market are one and the same, but this is not so. Markets have existed for as long as there has been specialization of labour. Capitalism is a modern mechanism, invented to enable certain forms of development, frequently of a predatory and corrosive nature. The time has come to uninvent capitalism, to return the market to its cooperative vocation. Joe Rabie. > Le 5 janv. 2018 à 15:06, Norbert Bollow a écrit : > > Capitalism is efficient at creating companies which benefit so much > from making sales that it makes economic sense for them to spend a lot > of money on marketing. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
On Fri, 5 Jan 2018 02:57:55 -0600 Brian Holmes wrote: > Capitalism is more efficient, and therefore more powerful than our > ideals and projects. Capitalism is efficient at creating companies which benefit so much from making sales that it makes economic sense for them to spend a lot of money on marketing. Is capitalism also more efficient than our ideals and projects in any other respect? Greetings, Norbert # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
Hello Prem - warm greetings from cold Chicago. On 01/04/2018 11:30 PM, Prem Chandavarkar wrote: Lietaer’s solution is not a virtual currency like bitcoin - for that would only offer further opportunity to the speculative system; and the bubble in the increase in value of bitcoin over the last year reinforces that fact. He argues that breaking the governmental monopoly on currency should create the space for highly localised currencies decentralised to the scale of a city or province. Indeed, that argument has been advanced by all those trying to rework monetary exchange for human needs - and I think it was also the hope of many who supported Bitcoin in the early days. Given the recent excess in crypto-currency markets, one cannot even know if any such hope was ever realizable. Before local exchange can be attempted, the medium is taken over for international speculation. Meanwhile at the grassroots level, national moneys - and in some cases, dollars as well - with all their flaws remain more practical and more trustworthy for the day-to-day struggle of survival. The success of M-pesa mobile-phone banking in Africa underscores this. Capitalism is more efficient, and therefore more powerful than our ideals and projects. However, as climatology suggests, it is unfortunately also suicidal. The real question seems to be whether the kinds of social relations that one practices against all odds, as a continuous act of resistance, will retain any generative value after the coming collapse of capitalist society. Since that collapse will not happen in a day, nor probably in a decade, believing in what one does and maintaining its uncashable values is the great challenge. It doesn't mean that more local currencies shouldn't be tried, to the contrary. What matters most - the real currency - is the individual and collective capacity to justify life without a payoff. Let's make it real, Brian # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
Another argument against the governmental monopoly on currency is Bernard Lietaer, “The Future of Money”. But Lietaer does it for a different reason than Hayek. His concern is that speculative transactions have leveraged technology to exponentially increase their volume and presence. In the case of currency exchange, in the 1970’s close to 80% of currency exchange transactions were tied to a ‘real world’ economy of moving goods, services and people across international borders; and 20% was speculation. Now the situation is completely reversed: the speculation figure dominates, and it is estimated that the real economy share has fallen below 1%. This creates the following problems: The tail is now wagging the dog. Exchange rates are not tied to the real economy at all. Since speculation does not like stable rates, there is a systemic interest in instability People who are tied into the constraints of a localised real economy cannot compete against a globalised system driven by speculation. Firstly, the economies of scale of the speculative system will easily outprice local competitors. And second, your ability to compete is greatly constrained when you can only hedge your risk in a single local currency. The ability of governments to intervene in the system for a public interest is eliminated. The combined reserves of all the central banks in the world falls far short of half the volume of a single day’s currency trading. Unlike stocks and shares, where most countries have regulatory limits on the percentage of a stock you can buy without disclosure, there are no such limits in the currency market. While it is too large a market for any single player to influence, a trading system driven by current global communication technologies (with many transactions driven by algorithms) can create waves that can destabilise a currency within hours. The incentive of banks to underpin the real economy by offering credit is reduced, as they prefer to deploy their funds elsewhere. For many of the major international banks, currency trading is one of the largest sources of revenue. Lietaer’s solution is not a virtual currency like bitcoin - for that would only offer further opportunity to the speculative system; and the bubble in the increase in value of bitcoin over the last year reinforces that fact. He argues that breaking the governmental monopoly on currency should create the space for highly localised currencies decentralised to the scale of a city or province. > On 05-Jan-2018, at 4:37 AM, Felix Stalder wrote: > > > On 12/31/17 8:11 PM, Brian Holmes wrote: >> Beyond that, bravo for excavating the Austrian ideology of Bitcoin, >> they're all goldbugs and sure looks and acts like synthetic gold to me. > > The other part of the Austrian ideology of bitcoin lies, I think, in > appeal that the argument about the "Denationalisation of money", put > forward by Hayek in 1976, still holds. The book can be easily found > online. (Despite their unceasing support of markets and property, they > sure make those texts available easily and freely). > > In the introduction (which, I admit, is all I read), Hayek explains the > argument as follows: > > "In my despair about the hopelessness of finding a politically feasible > solution to what is technically the simplest possible problem, namely to > stop inflation, I threw out ... a somewhat startling suggestion ... that > government should be deprived of its monopoly of the issue of money. > > The task of preventing inflation has always seemed to me to be of the > greatest importance, not only because of the harm and suffering major > inflations cause, but also because I have long been convinced that even > mild inflations ultimately produce the recurring depressions and > unemployment which have been a justified grievance against the free > enterprise system and must be prevented if a free society is to survive. > > As soon as one succeeds in freeing oneself of the universally but > tacitly accepted creed that a country must be supplied by its government > with its own distinctive and exclusive currency, all sorts of > interesting questions arise which have never been examined. > > The main result at this stage is that the chief blemish of the market > order which has been the cause of well-justified reproaches, its > susceptibility to recurrent periods of depression and unemployment, is a > consequence of the age-old government monopoly of the issue of money. I > have now no doubt whatever that private enterprise, if it had not been > prevented by government, could and would long ago have provided the > public with a choice of currencies, and those that prevailed in the > competition would have been essentially stable in value and would have > prevented both excessive stimulation of investment and the consequent > periods of contraction. > > [Because] government more often than any private enterprise had provided > us with the
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
On 12/31/17 8:11 PM, Brian Holmes wrote: > Beyond that, bravo for excavating the Austrian ideology of Bitcoin, > they're all goldbugs and sure looks and acts like synthetic gold to me. The other part of the Austrian ideology of bitcoin lies, I think, in appeal that the argument about the "Denationalisation of money", put forward by Hayek in 1976, still holds. The book can be easily found online. (Despite their unceasing support of markets and property, they sure make those texts available easily and freely). In the introduction (which, I admit, is all I read), Hayek explains the argument as follows: "In my despair about the hopelessness of finding a politically feasible solution to what is technically the simplest possible problem, namely to stop inflation, I threw out ... a somewhat startling suggestion ... that government should be deprived of its monopoly of the issue of money. The task of preventing inflation has always seemed to me to be of the greatest importance, not only because of the harm and suffering major inflations cause, but also because I have long been convinced that even mild inflations ultimately produce the recurring depressions and unemployment which have been a justified grievance against the free enterprise system and must be prevented if a free society is to survive. As soon as one succeeds in freeing oneself of the universally but tacitly accepted creed that a country must be supplied by its government with its own distinctive and exclusive currency, all sorts of interesting questions arise which have never been examined. The main result at this stage is that the chief blemish of the market order which has been the cause of well-justified reproaches, its susceptibility to recurrent periods of depression and unemployment, is a consequence of the age-old government monopoly of the issue of money. I have now no doubt whatever that private enterprise, if it had not been prevented by government, could and would long ago have provided the public with a choice of currencies, and those that prevailed in the competition would have been essentially stable in value and would have prevented both excessive stimulation of investment and the consequent periods of contraction. [Because] government more often than any private enterprise had provided us with the Schwundgeld (shrinking money) that Silvio Gesell had recommended." This argument about the beneficial effects of competition among currencies was very strong in the early days of crypto-currencies. Now, of course, it's a speculative frenzy, which goes totally against this theory, but then again, who needs theoretical consistency when you can make big bucks. -- | http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0C9FF2AC # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
On Mon, Jan 1, 2018 at 10:21 AM, byfield wrote: > > my objection to the idea of 'dual-use' technologies: it assumes there are > separate domains, war and peace, military and civilian. The freedom to > apply that distinction is precious indeed, and it's becoming very fragile. > I agree with you that major technological developments take place as a crisscross of corporate-capitalist and military-state efforts, and I'd add that what matters is the particular form that relation takes as it unfolds in time and space. That was true with the synthesis of nitrogen in Germany around the time of WWI (fertilizer/explosives) and it was true with nuclear power in the US during and after WWII (A-bombs/electricity). Today, the crisscross of self-driving cars and autonomous military vehicles is something that can be analyzed as it unfolds. From my viewpoint, the concept of dual use does not cloud the issue. Rather it asks that one interrogate, and maybe even seek to influence, the particular form of development that is unfolding. I'm fully aware that the world I live in has been decisively shaped by this relation between civilian and military technologies. Still I am as disgusted by the DARPA Grand Challenge as I am by the failed American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The revulsion that I felt at seeing American engineers, from garage enthusiasts to the high-end university professors, participating wholeheartedly in the development of the next generation of battlefield robots was not some unreflected moralism. It was a political revulsion - even though the weapon was, and still is, being pointed not at 'us', but at 'them.' To all that you might respond: But what is the real value of the supposedly 'peaceful' side of this divide? Isn't the self-driving car just a ploy to put millions of truck and taxi drivers out of a job? Isn't this supposedly 'peaceful' technology actually a weapon being pointed at us? Great questions! That's exactly the kind of analysis I'm missing. Because it points to major consequences of the way that specific interest groups are steering technological development. To me these kinds of questions are more interesting than the life and death of Bitcoin. Libertarian hackers think that with one rogue invention they can change the course of history. Meanwhile the nexus of corporate/military technology continues to evolve, provoking massive and radical transformations of society in its wake. We're unable to discuss it, much less influence it, because we don't have the analytical language to distinguish between possible futures. I can totally understand your frustration with this. The neoliberal world, in which things like Austrian economics and its associated technologies really mattered, is vanishing before our eyes. The whole point of being an intellectual is to see what's emerging on the horizon. best, Brian # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
There is an interesting read suggesting the shape of things to come from *ARPAs, starting at p.50 of https://community.apan.org/cfs-file/__key/telligent-evolution-components-attachments/13-14882-00-00-00-21-68-05/OE-Watch_2C00_-Vol-07_2C00_-Issue-11_2C00_-Dec-2017.pdf While 5 tons is far from the consumer product, given time I see no reason why these things wouldn't become as small and as popular as pepper sprays in designer containers (also note the little nugget - what happens when you cross the beams.) Device to brick handsets in the radius of few hundred meters is a great Christmas gift. Isn't it poetic that EMP shield would also disable handset's mothership link? On the more serious note, stuff like this can erase the 5 monopolies from the existence with a minor investment (blasts over each facility - probably less than 50 total.) Even if GOOG, AMZN, MSFT, APPL and FB keep backups on chemical (optical) media, months of downtime, and more importantly, absence of data inflows, would render them permanently defunct. The real deterrents may not be what we think they are. On 1/1/18, 08:21, byfield wrote: DARPA / etc certainly aren't clerical, and their impact has been beyond comprehension. And they're also just a vanguardist face of a much larger force. If anything, people tend to grossly underestimate the range and depth of military activities on the fabric of everyday life. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
To state the obvious, what is changing is knowledge (literacy) and its distribution - atoms and Standard model particles are pretty much the same. The acquisition and distribution of knowledge used to be much slower, so it was sufficient to control its substrate (culture) and its artifacts (gunpowder.) The pace accelerated to the point when that doesn't work any more, as the gap between the knowledge and the artefact almost disappeared. There's little stopping biohacking enthisuast to synthesize race-specific virus in the kitchen (big data, ML, sequencer.) Few years. Maybe even ideology-specific? The current equilibrium is combination of population dumbification and seduction of those who escape it. It works, but not perfectly - the seduction part deteriorates as there are fewer and fewer artifacts to hoard and offer. It seems that the individual's capability to acquire and apply knowledge (amount of the stuff one can do) is outrunning individual's social cohesion mechanisms (instincts. morality - the stuff one should do to maintain the group.) The disturbing part is that this makes anti-intellectualism almost a rational strategy. On 1/1/18, 08:21, byfield wrote: distinction, but I think that's backwards on every level. It assumes that things that were seen as benign or beneficial are now being misused. But I think the reality is that, for many people, those things were never entirely benign or beneficial — they were just the perks that one part of the population enjoyed. It's # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
On 31 Dec 2017, at 14:11, Brian Holmes wrote: the idea of 'dual-use' technologies... is mostly a clerical distinction So the people behind the DARPA Grand Challenges are clerics? Ted, we could have a relatively boring discussion about how US military investments have played a role parallel but not analogous to that of central-planning agencies like Japan's MITI when it comes to steering technological development - but either I misunderstand you, or you seem behind the curve on this one? What exactly is your objection? DARPA / etc certainly aren't clerical, and their impact has been beyond comprehension. And they're also just a vanguardist face of a much larger force. If anything, people tend to grossly underestimate the range and depth of military activities on the fabric of everyday life. Not so long ago the bucket of stuff we call 'technology' was mostly artisanal: variations on themes whose boundaries were defined by specialized types of labor. In a world were that legacy was still dominant, it made more sense to declare X or Y technologies 'military' and/or 'peaceful.' That's what I meant by 'clerical': file under . But times have changed. More and more energy has gone into filling in the blanks between X and Y: systematic efforts to assemble libraries of knowledge, techniques, and resources that turn the difference between (two arbitrary examples) a 'gun' and a 'ship' into a smooth continuum. So, to offer a silly example, a few centuries ago you'd go to a gunsmith or a shipwright; a few centuries from now you'll say here's the challenge, and the system will spit out some bespoke system that's that's sort of a gun and sort of a ship. But it could just easily be a 'sock' and a 'carburetor' or a 'bobblehead' and a 'stethoscope.' The endpoints matter less than the ability to fill in *all* the blanks between them: resourcing, materials, manufacturing, application, deployment, maintenance, and of course financial. Biochemistry is a good applied example: if you need a protein with receptors A/B/C arranged in spatial configuration X/Y/Z, then the challenge is to (a) identify the biochemically inert molecular scaffolds that'll support those specifications, then (b) work backwards to figure out which would be most efficient to manufacture, given resources D/E/F. But the boundaries that define biochemistry (or any other field) are becoming porous: increasingly it's just one approach among many for manufacturing whatever. In such a world, it becomes much harder to declare X or Y technologies 'military' and/or 'peaceful' — or, rather, the definition become more capricious. And, when every aspect of this relies on Turing machines, what exactly are we trying to define? This problem came into clear focus in something Morlock mentioned in earlier, ITAR, the US regulatory structure aimed at limiting 'International Traffic in Arms Regulations,' which until ~1997 classified cryptography as a weapon. Cypherpunks-type led the challenge to that by arguing that math is a form of speech, that you can't prohibit the laws of the universe, etc. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. With every passing day, we see how seemingly benign things can be 'weaponized.' We could dismiss that phrase as just some lite/pop appropriation of a bureaucratic distinction, but I think that's backwards on every level. It assumes that things that were seen as benign or beneficial are now being misused. But I think the reality is that, for many people, those things were never entirely benign or beneficial — they were just the perks that one part of the population enjoyed. It's not an accident that the weaponization of everything is happening precisely when a certain world order shows signs of collapse. The pearl-clutching classes will look around and tell themselves that the world is changing *because* evil-doers are weaponizing the stable ideas and institutions of society — for example, that Trump won *because* Russia manipulated the US elections. That may be true, but the analysis doesn't end there: we could look back at US efforts to bring down the USSR, or US interventions in others' elections, or the US's neglect of its own electoral machinery, or whatever. But beyond those debates, which are usually moral, we can see how the idea that things are being 'weaponized' is less about how they're being used than who they're being pointed at — 'us.' Hence my objection to the idea of 'dual-use' technologies: it assumes there are separate domains, war and peace, military and civilian. The freedom to apply that distinction is precious indeed, and it's becoming very fragile. We can respond by quoting lines from Yeats's Second Coming and praying that our retirement savings lasts longer than we do — basically what the 'centrist' US is doing. Or we can recognize what lots of people have been saying all along, that the distinction was never so clear. Cheers, Ted # d
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
> If Bitcoin's designer(s) had a dozen dozen possible strategies at their disposal, did > they happen to choose one that would mesh neatly with Austrian theory? I think there is a misunderstanding here. When I said "other (dozens) of competing ideas which simply could not get any traction", I didn't mean that designers of this particular one (Bitcoin) were randomly choosing between options - they might have been thoroughly monomaniacal in Ayn Rand sense, with a single evil intent in mind. I was referring to other groups/individuals/entities with different proposals, which did *not* catch on. There are many reasons for this, including resources, level of zealotry of supporters, etc. The point is that the society at large made a choice, and picked one over the others, not being able to make an informed decision. Which goes back to my original point - that abdicating from understanding, and playing futile blame game (deprived Cypherpunks did not get properly influenced by the general morality) goes nowhere. You seem to be taking the imposition of technology by the dark side as inevitable force, taking the ignorance of the unwashed as given and permanent. This is the position of superstitious ignorance. Then you continue to complain about dark forces being dark, which, as I said, is a dead end - they are not going to adopt your morality through some magic, ever (I'm curious what would you suggest as a cure for libertarian code writers - forced reeducation? off with goolies?) The technology as a vehicle for ideology works exactly because it's complicated and obscures the deeper logic. A more literate society at large may have not selected the Bitcoin alternative, just as the less literate society will not accept to eat its own shit for breakfast. Only the increased general literacy can make a difference. I'm aware that this is the same position which Zooko described as "and then the rest will become like us" fallacy, but it has more chance of working than the morality and values bullshit. So far, in human history, increasing the literacy never failed. Unlike the other thing. It might be interesting to investigate why do so many progressives have acute aversion to actual education and literacy that matters. Great analysis of 90s cpunks, BTW. There is a more complete archive (1997-2005) at https://marc.info/?l=cypherpunks # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
On 12/31/2017 12:50 PM, byfield wrote: the idea of 'dual-use' technologies... is mostly a clerical distinction So the people behind the DARPA Grand Challenges are clerics? Ted, we could have a relatively boring discussion about how US military investments have played a role parallel but not analogous to that of central-planning agencies like Japan's MITI when it comes to steering technological development - but either I misunderstand you, or you seem behind the curve on this one? What exactly is your objection? Beyond that, bravo for excavating the Austrian ideology of Bitcoin, they're all goldbugs and sure looks and acts like synthetic gold to me. best, BH # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
On 30 Dec 2017, at 16:51, Morlock Elloi wrote:
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, deep conspiracy and that
Bitcoin creator(s) actually did bother to read "Austrian economics"
(neither of which I think is probable - looks like a parallel
construction), and chose a hard limit instead of exponential backoff
or any other of dozen possible strategies. Let's also assume that
there were no other (dozens) of competing ideas which simply could not
get any traction at the time (and this is a patently false
assumption.) Invention of Bitcoin was therefore not a random event, it
was intentional dark design having roots in nearly hundred year old
ideology, and there were no alternatives to it.
No need for talk about 'deep conspiracies,' just look at the archives:
https://cypherpunks.venona.com/raw/
There are lots of theories about who Satoshi is, but no credible theory
proposes s/he/they didn't at least read the cypherpunks list in the
mid/late '90s. That list was *awash* in Austrian economics, so much so
that it's easy to misinterpret explicit mentions of Hayek and Mises,
along with their American spoor like Murray Rothbard: they were the
floor, not the ceiling, and it was the rule, not the exception, embraced
and expounded by the alphaest alphas on the list, like May. You could
probably quantify some off this by correlating traffic with other
mailing lists devoted to Mises (misesl...@mises.org) and Hayek
(haye...@maelstrom.stjohns.edu), if you're into that kind of thing. (A
nice tidbit I just found: ca. '98, Ryan Lackey's computer was called
'mises.systemics.ai' — I wonder if that's the laptop he dropped in the
ocean while he was being hoisted to/fro the SeaLand platform? 😹)
This is where, as Florian pointed out, your overly pat distinction
between ~technology and ~political agency breaks down. If Bitcoin's
designer(s) had a dozen dozen possible strategies at their disposal, did
they happen to choose one that would mesh neatly with Austrian theory?
Your answer is that the decision came from from /dev/rand, more or less,
but every good cryptohead knows you should never trust an easy source of
randomness because it isn't truly random. If you understand how it
works, you can find the patterns. The pattern here is Austrian: Bitcoin
is Austrian theory made digital flesh. The first waves of adopters
outside of those circles came from techie circles that were steeped like
forgotten tea bags in 'libertarianism' — which by that point, as Nancy
McLean has shown, was a cynical misnomer for free-market extremism. And
you could probably quantify some off that by correlating early Bitcoin
adoption with, say, conservative clubs at universities — some of this
history is recent enough that it hasn't crossed Google's event horizon
yet.
Also, contrary to what you said earlier, from the list's beginning in
'92 there were debates — extensive, explicit, and sustained — about
what currencies are/n't and how various digital payment systems relate
to them, practically and theoretically. And when you follow those
threads (literally hundreds of them), you'll see most of Bitcoin's basic
ideals and problems spelled out just in a few words within the first
year or so, say, by early '94. It's pretty astounding. Here's one
example, from Miron Cuperman on 20 Nov 92:
- Charge for the mix services with crypto-money. The crypto-money
could be some networking service. It could be even mix transmission.
For example, the basic currency could be the transmission of 10K
through a mix. One would have to create a mix and let the bank
route some traffic through it thereby putting credits in your
account. Once you have credits, you could spend them anywhere.
One might want to fiddle with the definition of the currency so
that it does not depreciate with time.
But your following point is interesting, if I may: a technology may be
designed to implement an ideology, but as its adoption expands, the
results are paradoxical — OT1H, it continues to carry or even amplify
that ideology, OT0H later adopters don't realize it. You can make this
point without cartoons about about supervillains and badly aimed rants
about 'political correctness.' But when you follow that full circle,
you'll quickly see how and why your claim that $TECHNOLOGY is $RANDOM
breaks down: everyone designing, implementing, funding, promoting,
adopting, and abusing new technologies does so *in a world that's always
already totally pwned by ideologies.*
Hapless adopters, unable to see Hayek's ghost in the algorithm, just
continued to use it until it was too late.
What does this mean?
It means that technology has became effective carrier device for the
ideology, amplifying it as everything else it touches, and if ordinary
people cannot see through it ("out of the question") as they could see
through Nazism and similar, well, then the ordinary people are going
to get fu*ked in perpetuity, and there is absolutel
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
Very possible. The mechanism of financialization of the society is inherently artificial and divorced (or just separated) from 'value'. The traditional requirement that it is somehow tied to the reality (as 2nd or 3rd derivative) is seen as deficiency. Bitcoin may finalize the divorce. Dealing with few Chinese mints will be preferred over dealing with quirks of the real estate market in California, for example, which is one of the primary vehicles for parking private money these days (ironically, mostly Chinese money.) On 12/30/17, 14:38, byfield wrote: After the 2008 meltdown it became clear that taking entire nations hostage, with ransoms paid in form of public bailouts, was a viable business strategy. Would it really be surprising if Bitcoin, in some aspect, turns out to be TBTF? The # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
I more or less agree with this, not sure if others do. Having gone through cycles of development, I see randomness - sheer luck, and not doing something utterly stupid as key factors, in that order. The original volume of proposals is high, people try everything, and only a tiny fraction gets a traction (rhymes!) The most dramatic successes are often accidental, the designers had something else in mind - which is to be expected, as the hardest thing when creating something new is unlearning the context, one simply doesn't invent on demand. Once the traction happens, it's attractive to re-create the narrative and 'explain' how it came to be, deep insights, talent, mystical powers, etc. Moving ahead from the invention point, there is progressively more influence "culture, world view, and politics", reacting with invention in novel ways, and in the end that is the only factor that matters. On 12/30/17, 14:04, Matt Nish-Lapidus wrote: Do you see a possible scenario where it's not a nefarious plot, but instead that technology is invented, iterated, and adopted based on culture, world view, and politics that are often latent and/or are held in complete obliviousness? # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
On 30 Dec 2017, at 8:51, Felix Stalder wrote: And besides, the ever rising transaction costs (because of the low number of exchanges that can be settled per second, which Zooko puts at 3, rather than 7) make it as an actual means of exchange almost useless for everyday transactions (including illegal ones). The joke is that the rising cost and slow rate of transactions look like bugs in the context of a rising bubble, but they could just as easily be features in other contexts: just call them something different, say, processing/application fees, queues, cooling-off periods, etc. Right now, Bitcoin's value seems to lie in the nexus of speculative profit and supposed anonymity. Imagine a scenario — let's ignore for now whether it's technically or politically realistic — in which (a) someone figures out how to steal enough coins from enough people, and (b) some magical global entity retroactively ~insures lost Bitcoins and effectively introduces legal amnesty at every level. People around the world would happily sign up to get their money back. For them, Bitcoin's value would suddenly lie in the nexus of 'nymity' and minimizing losses. After the 2008 meltdown it became clear that taking entire nations hostage, with ransoms paid in form of public bailouts, was a viable business strategy. Would it really be surprising if Bitcoin, in some aspect, turns out to be TBTF? The concentration in ownership suggests that there might be ways to (1) drive its value down suddenly, (2) buy up coins for 'pennies on the dollar,' (3) negotiate with key national governments to immunize the covered transactions, then (4) drive the price back up again. Someone, somewhere is planning something like this — maybe with variations that'd involve exchanging Bitcoin for new coins promoted as 'clean,' say, through association with well-known entities, like an ICO backed by Goldman Sachs. Is it any more exotic than the Hunt Brothers trying to corner silver, Soros attacking the pound, vultures hovering around Argentina for years on end, etc, etc? Rocket science ain't what it used to be. And a few governments might be interested, in part because it'd help to isolate the criminal wheat from the speculative chaff, both retrospectively and prospectively. But beyond the speculative bubble, there are very powerful ideological drivers in this development. One is anarcho-capitalist ideology which wants to break the government monopoly over money (along lines developed by F.A. Hayek in the 1970s) and the other is techno-libertianism that believes, as Zooko puts it, that if you "empower" people, the resulting good will, somehow, outweigh the bad. Someone from the audience raised the question about enormous inequality in coin ownership, to which he had no reply beyond "that's a really good question!". These guys are, as they say, priceless. Apropos, at the risk of provoking the Wrath of Morlock, here's something a recent talk by Tim May talking about 'thirty years of crypto anarchy': https://youtu.be/TdmpAy1hI8g As you said about Zooko's tallk, really interesting and entertaining because it's so full of contradictions. Cheers, Ted # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
On 2017-12-30 23:04, Matt Nish-Lapidus wrote: Do you see a possible scenario where it's not a nefarious plot, but instead that technology is invented, iterated, and adopted based on culture, world view, and politics that are often latent and/or are held in complete obliviousness? It feels like much of this tech (Bitcoin, or other modern economic "innovations" i.e. Uber) embodies a specific world view, economics, morality, ethics, and politics that the creators are not necessarily well versed in or even aware of, but has a huge impact on what they decide to do and how they do it. Nothing is created in a vacuum... Cfm. It's called the 'Zeitgeist'. HNY! p+7D! # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
It's not either-or (technology and political agency), but both-and. The two
things aren't cleanly separable. And this isn't any new or revolutionary
insight, but exactly what McLuhan meant with "the medium is the message"
and Wiener with the "human use of human beings" (or Lenin with his equation
"communism = soviet power + electricity", for that matter), and what newer
philosophies have rebranded as "apparatus".
I thought that we no longer needed to discuss this on Nettime, of all
places. Hacker culture, too, has been aware of it since its beginnings, as
any annual Chaos Computer Club congress demonstrates. (Btw., the motto of
the ongoing 34C3, "Tuwat" ['Dosomething'], references the legendary
Tunix/Tuwat conferences that took place in West Berlin in 1978 and 1981 and
not involved early hackers like Wau Holland, but also Michel Foucault.)
-F
On Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 10:51 PM, Morlock Elloi
wrote:
> Let's assume, for the sake of argument, deep conspiracy and that Bitcoin
> creator(s) actually did bother to read "Austrian economics" (neither of
> which I think is probable - looks like a parallel construction), and chose
> a hard limit instead of exponential backoff or any other of dozen possible
> strategies. Let's also assume that there were no other (dozens) of
> competing ideas which simply could not get any traction at the time (and
> this is a patently false assumption.) Invention of Bitcoin was therefore
> not a random event, it was intentional dark design having roots in nearly
> hundred year old ideology, and there were no alternatives to it.
>
> Hapless adopters, unable to see Hayek's ghost in the algorithm, just
> continued to use it until it was too late.
>
> What does this mean?
>
> It means that technology has became effective carrier device for the
> ideology, amplifying it as everything else it touches, and if ordinary
> people cannot see through it ("out of the question") as they could see
> through Nazism and similar, well, then the ordinary people are going to get
> fu*ked in perpetuity, and there is absolutely nothing one can do about it
> (bitching notwithstanding.) All Dr. Evil has to do is carefully design a
> shiny object, and cretins will unconditionally descend on it. Easier than
> organizing rallies.
>
> It's a worldview that goes exactly nowhere. It doesn't even have afterlife.
>
> Try coding instead.
>
>
> You left out the most important design decision: to cap the number of
>> Bitcoins in circulation, therefore building deflation into the currency.
>> And that decision has nothing to do with crypto, science or technology,
>> but is purely political and based on a cyberlibertarian reading of
>> "Austrian economics".
>>
>
> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission
> #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: nett...@kein.org
> # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
>
--
I'm on diaspora*, a non-corporate social network:
https://social.gibberfish.org/people/a76da580ba9b01353317cb0b1a05
# distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#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: nett...@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
Do you see a possible scenario where it's not a nefarious plot, but instead
that technology is invented, iterated, and adopted based on culture, world
view, and politics that are often latent and/or are held in complete
obliviousness?
It feels like much of this tech (Bitcoin, or other modern economic
"innovations" i.e. Uber) embodies a specific world view, economics,
morality, ethics, and politics that the creators are not necessarily well
versed in or even aware of, but has a huge impact on what they decide to do
and how they do it.
Nothing is created in a vacuum...
On Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 4:51 PM Morlock Elloi
wrote:
> Let's assume, for the sake of argument, deep conspiracy and that Bitcoin
> creator(s) actually did bother to read "Austrian economics" (neither of
> which I think is probable - looks like a parallel construction), and
> chose a hard limit instead of exponential backoff or any other of dozen
> possible strategies. Let's also assume that there were no other (dozens)
> of competing ideas which simply could not get any traction at the time
> (and this is a patently false assumption.) Invention of Bitcoin was
> therefore not a random event, it was intentional dark design having
> roots in nearly hundred year old ideology, and there were no
> alternatives to it.
>
> Hapless adopters, unable to see Hayek's ghost in the algorithm, just
> continued to use it until it was too late.
>
> What does this mean?
>
> It means that technology has became effective carrier device for the
> ideology, amplifying it as everything else it touches, and if ordinary
> people cannot see through it ("out of the question") as they could see
> through Nazism and similar, well, then the ordinary people are going to
> get fu*ked in perpetuity, and there is absolutely nothing one can do
> about it (bitching notwithstanding.) All Dr. Evil has to do is carefully
> design a shiny object, and cretins will unconditionally descend on it.
> Easier than organizing rallies.
>
> It's a worldview that goes exactly nowhere. It doesn't even have afterlife.
>
> Try coding instead.
>
>
> > You left out the most important design decision: to cap the number of
> > Bitcoins in circulation, therefore building deflation into the currency.
> > And that decision has nothing to do with crypto, science or technology,
> > but is purely political and based on a cyberlibertarian reading of
> > "Austrian economics".
>
> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission
> #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: nett...@kein.org
> # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
>
--
Matt Nish-Lapidus
--
@emenel
# distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#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: nett...@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, deep conspiracy and that Bitcoin
creator(s) actually did bother to read "Austrian economics" (neither of
which I think is probable - looks like a parallel construction), and
chose a hard limit instead of exponential backoff or any other of dozen
possible strategies. Let's also assume that there were no other (dozens)
of competing ideas which simply could not get any traction at the time
(and this is a patently false assumption.) Invention of Bitcoin was
therefore not a random event, it was intentional dark design having
roots in nearly hundred year old ideology, and there were no
alternatives to it.
Hapless adopters, unable to see Hayek's ghost in the algorithm, just
continued to use it until it was too late.
What does this mean?
It means that technology has became effective carrier device for the
ideology, amplifying it as everything else it touches, and if ordinary
people cannot see through it ("out of the question") as they could see
through Nazism and similar, well, then the ordinary people are going to
get fu*ked in perpetuity, and there is absolutely nothing one can do
about it (bitching notwithstanding.) All Dr. Evil has to do is carefully
design a shiny object, and cretins will unconditionally descend on it.
Easier than organizing rallies.
It's a worldview that goes exactly nowhere. It doesn't even have afterlife.
Try coding instead.
You left out the most important design decision: to cap the number of
Bitcoins in circulation, therefore building deflation into the currency.
And that decision has nothing to do with crypto, science or technology,
but is purely political and based on a cyberlibertarian reading of
"Austrian economics".
# distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#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: nett...@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
On Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 7:12 PM, Morlock Elloi
wrote:
But I want to get back to Bitcoin as a random mindless technology that
> found its receptors in the society, and use proof by negation: Bitcoin has
> three key components: asymmetric crypto (for signatures), Merkle tree (for
> chains) and virtual machine that executes code. Asymmetric crypto uses
> modular arithmetic in the finite field, Merkle tree uses one-way hash
> functions. Which of these technologies/inventions or combinations thereof
> start to present the moral failure? Should we blame Whit Diffie, Ralph
> Merkle or Von Neumann and their respective societies? Where do you draw the
> line, and how is that line not arbitrary?
>
You left out the most important design decision: to cap the number of
Bitcoins in circulation, therefore building deflation into the currency.
And that decision has nothing to do with crypto, science or technology, but
is purely political and based on a cyberlibertarian reading of "Austrian
economics".
- I'm phrasing it this way (instead of writing "based on Hayek") after
having read the fascinating blog article "Was Friedrich von Hayek a
Nihilist?" ("War Friedrich von Hayek ein Nihilist?") in Frankfurter
Allgemeine, a politically conservative, pro-free market newspaper. Written
by its financial markets editor, the article suggests by implication that a
lot of the Hayekianism in AnCap and cyberlibertarian subcultures is based
on a narrow reading of Hayek's earliest positions - positions that Hayek
himself later renounced: most of all, that interest rates shouldn't be
lowered (=money shouldn't be inflated) in times of economic crisis.
According to the article, Hayek had been - as a young economist -
overambitious with his model. Refuted by academic peers, he later accepted
that "deflation is no good" and shifted his work from financial market
theory to social theory.
Hayek is quoted in the article, in English, with the following statement:
"I probably ought to add a word of explanation: I have to admit that I took
a different attitude forty years ago, at the beginning of the Great
Depression. At that time I believed that a process of deflation of some
short duration might break the rigidity of wages which I thought was
incompatible with a functioning economy. Perhaps I should have even then
understood that this possibility no longer existed. . . . I would no longer
maintain, as I did in the early ‘30s, that for this reason, and for this
reason only, a short period of deflation might be desirable.“
Frankfurter Allgemeine's editor concludes his article with the sentence:
"The phenomenon that economists base their political recommendations on
their own world view, even when theoretical insights of the economic
sciences contradict them, may not have died out in our times".
http://blogs.faz.net/fazit/2017/12/27/war-friedrich-von-hayek-ein-nihilist-9489/#1.5359731
-F
# distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#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: nett...@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
There is one: you can quickly estimate one's ethics based on whether they own Bitcoin or not :) On 12/30/17, 05:51, Felix Stalder wrote: Zooko -- a long-time, deep operator in the field -- could not come up with a good, actual use case. The best use-case was donating money to # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
If one rejects that Bitcoin 'happened' to us, and that there is a
system/deep intent behind it, then what's left is that Bitcoin is a
moral/ideological failure of its designer(s), and the society as a whole
failed to inform the designer(s). But the idea that the the society
needs to develop a body of morality (by, I guess, producing more liberal
arts and comparative lit grads?), which will then trickle down (up ?) to
techies, making them do more good than bad, is a non-starter these days;
it may have worked in far more cohesive societies with a volume of
intrinsic "values" and low tech environment, where mechanical gizmos
were more or less obvious, so the public could easily tell the immoral
from the moral ones, and properly condemn/reward the inventors.
Abdicating from understanding the subject matter, and trusting that the
morality will somehow permeate into and inform those who do understand
is unlikely to work - it definitely does not work today. Techies
spontaneously develop a "class" of their own, regardless of where they
come from, which insulates them from the unwashed (but supposedly moral.)
The only alternative that has (greater than zero) probability of working
is a dramatic shift in the general technical literacy, like we had a
shift in the general literacy. If that cannot be done ("out of the
question" as you claim), then there is only one thing left to do: cut
off their goolies ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04clpd7h0b0 ) ,
which is a bit barbaric even for the 21st century.
But I want to get back to Bitcoin as a random mindless technology that
found its receptors in the society, and use proof by negation: Bitcoin
has three key components: asymmetric crypto (for signatures), Merkle
tree (for chains) and virtual machine that executes code. Asymmetric
crypto uses modular arithmetic in the finite field, Merkle tree uses
one-way hash functions. Which of these technologies/inventions or
combinations thereof start to present the moral failure? Should we blame
Whit Diffie, Ralph Merkle or Von Neumann and their respective societies?
Where do you draw the line, and how is that line not arbitrary?
Technology inventions may look like a progeny of ideology and politics
to the outsiders, but they are usually not. Most are truly random and go
through a random series of application stages before they catch on or
die. Ideology and politics come later, when one of these application
stages start to look as a promising substrate for the particular
ideology/politics to parasite on. With Bitcoin it happened only in the
last few years.
On 12/29/17, 17:17, byfield wrote:
So Bitcoin was a failure, in your view, except that whoever designed it
didn't have goals or their goals were random, because $TECHNOLOGY? Or
something like that. It's hard to make sense of some of what you're
saying. I think I agree with some of your less grumpy points – for
example, I brought up the political beliefs that informed the design of
Bitcoin not to blame anyone (?!) but to explain why the avid-reader's
analysis (not as good as Visa, FDIC, NASDAQ, etc) are completely off the
mark. And *that* was incidental to my main point, that context-specific
*disposable* blockchain-type stuff will probably be the most durable
effect.
It seems like the argument that Bitcoin might as well have emerged fully
formed from the head of Zeus opens the door to the very things you've
lamented: the failure to understand in broad terms how and why PoW-based
projects are fatally flawed, or moral criticisms that they don't advance
parochial political agendas. You say that how we choose to use these
technologies matters more than their origins (who could disagree?), but
on what basis are people supposed to make those kinds of choices at any
scale? In your terms, what kinds of dice can be thrown and in what
direction? I don't think better STEM education is quite up to that task,
so the next best thing might be a slightly clearer understanding of the
social ideals that inform *some* aspects of new technologies. That's
pretty woolly, I know, but not as woolly as staging global magic-lantern
shows and asking everyone to cow-click on dis/like icons until the music
stops. And it's not even that woolly, really. Untangling blockchain-type
stuff from 'Bitcoin' (and in particular seeing how ISO 9000–level *dull*
blockchain stuff is) will be a necessary part of demystifying what's
going on.
You often argue for a certain kind of technological realism, but the
pace at which algorithmic tech is developing ensures that even
well-educated people will be left in the dust — and a lot of that dust
will be particulate bullshit. Maintaining detailed understanding across
fields will be out of the question. So what's left? A lot of the
technical literacy you advocate will be limited to schematic overviews;
and understanding who's claiming what will be essential to that. It's
not a simple past-vs-future problem.
Cheers,
Ted
# distribute
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
I just watched this lecture, which really interesting and entertaining, because it's so full of contradictions that it seems to be able to capture the complexity of the moment really well. For one thing, neither in the talk nor in the question period after, Zooko -- a long-time, deep operator in the field -- could not come up with a good, actual use case. The best use-case was donating money to Wikileaks when it was cut-off from the credit-card network. But even during the most heavy lock-down of the Wikileaks accounts, one could always donate to the WAU Holland foundation, which would then transfer it to Wikileaks. My hunch (totally unproven) is that more money reached Wikileaks this way than as bitcoins (at least on the valuation at the time). And besides, the ever rising transaction costs (because of the low number of exchanges that can be settled per second, which Zooko puts at 3, rather than 7) make it as an actual means of exchange almost useless for everyday transactions (including illegal ones). So, the only actual use case is, really, speculation and scamming (which might well be the same thing). But beyond the speculative bubble, there are very powerful ideological drivers in this development. One is anarcho-capitalist ideology which wants to break the government monopoly over money (along lines developed by F.A. Hayek in the 1970s) and the other is techno-libertianism that believes, as Zooko puts it, that if you "empower" people, the resulting good will, somehow, outweigh the bad. Someone from the audience raised the question about enormous inequality in coin ownership, to which he had no reply beyond "that's a really good question!". Felix On 12/29/17 9:00 PM, Morlock Elloi wrote: > And this morning on 34C3 in Leipzig ... lupus in fabula: Zooko on > "cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, etc.: revolutionary tech?" > > https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9240-cryptocurrencies_smart_contracts_etc_revolutionary_tech > > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSs3wzoVpl0 > > # distributed via : no commercial use without permission > # 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: nett...@kein.org > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: > -- | http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0C9FF2AC # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
So Bitcoin was a failure, in your view, except that whoever designed it didn't have goals or their goals were random, because $TECHNOLOGY? Or something like that. It's hard to make sense of some of what you're saying. I think I agree with some of your less grumpy points – for example, I brought up the political beliefs that informed the design of Bitcoin not to blame anyone (?!) but to explain why the avid-reader's analysis (not as good as Visa, FDIC, NASDAQ, etc) are completely off the mark. And *that* was incidental to my main point, that context-specific *disposable* blockchain-type stuff will probably be the most durable effect. It seems like the argument that Bitcoin might as well have emerged fully formed from the head of Zeus opens the door to the very things you've lamented: the failure to understand in broad terms how and why PoW-based projects are fatally flawed, or moral criticisms that they don't advance parochial political agendas. You say that how we choose to use these technologies matters more than their origins (who could disagree?), but on what basis are people supposed to make those kinds of choices at any scale? In your terms, what kinds of dice can be thrown and in what direction? I don't think better STEM education is quite up to that task, so the next best thing might be a slightly clearer understanding of the social ideals that inform *some* aspects of new technologies. That's pretty woolly, I know, but not as woolly as staging global magic-lantern shows and asking everyone to cow-click on dis/like icons until the music stops. And it's not even that woolly, really. Untangling blockchain-type stuff from 'Bitcoin' (and in particular seeing how ISO 9000–level *dull* blockchain stuff is) will be a necessary part of demystifying what's going on. You often argue for a certain kind of technological realism, but the pace at which algorithmic tech is developing ensures that even well-educated people will be left in the dust — and a lot of that dust will be particulate bullshit. Maintaining detailed understanding across fields will be out of the question. So what's left? A lot of the technical literacy you advocate will be limited to schematic overviews; and understanding who's claiming what will be essential to that. It's not a simple past-vs-future problem. Cheers, Ted On 29 Dec 2017, at 14:10, Morlock Elloi wrote: I'm not sure I understand this 'goal' concept. Technology is just tool. New tech is more or less randomly created, with randomly focused goal by its designer, and then gets used for other random goals, more often than not unrelated to the original one. Like hitting a particle in the accelerator - you never know what will come out. That's the beauty and the horror of tech. Efficient FFT library gets used to kill thousands, weapons become cures, privacy systems enable tyrannies, etc. What was the original goal of Bitcoin (ie. PoW in chained hash + algorithmic transitions) is less than irrelevant. What we choose to use it for is more than relevant. It was a new metal from which to forge stuff. What one forges out of it is a different story, but don't blame the metal designer - that would be like blaming Victor d'Hupay or Karl Marx for Stalin and Khmer Rouge. Assigning deep intentions to Bitcoin designer, or implying that any thought was spent on relationship of currency and payment system, makes no sense. On the higher level, algorithms are like speech - anyone can create whatever one wants. Fortunately trigger warnings and safe spaces were not in vogue then, so we have some interesting stuff to play with. One may argue, though, that shouting "Bitcoin!" in disintegrating stratified society should be banned, and that algorithm designers have moral responsibility for their effects, but that's a slippery slope. Dice needs to be thrown now and then, even deities do that. Cypherpunks were specific phenomenon riding on the wave of (then) new tech industry, enabled by several people striking it rich on patent royalties, high salaries in general, staffed by uprooted clever newcomers with spare time (there was really nothing to do in the South Bay after 6pm, just like now) and e-mail enabled echo chamber (spam hardly existed, e-mail access was only for the elites.) The mix produced many interesting concepts in a very short time, some of which linger on now. Was it about class? Nothing was inherited, there was no legacy 'wealth', it was a brutal meritocracy, thriving on income from employers who were totally unaware of the whole thing. The ideology was not a secret: https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html . Everything outside that was irrelevant, and no one gave a flying f*ck for political correctness (like May's views on race & women, for example.) The Cool-Aid was excellent, resulting in near-comical clashes with reality (HavenCo), but without it there would be no Deep Crack, SSLeay, PGP, crypto woul
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
> 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. -F -- I'm on diaspora*, a non-corporate social network: https://social.gibberfish.org/people/a76da580ba9b01353317cb0b1a05 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
And this morning on 34C3 in Leipzig ... lupus in fabula: Zooko on "cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, etc.: revolutionary tech?" https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9240-cryptocurrencies_smart_contracts_etc_revolutionary_tech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSs3wzoVpl0 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
I'm not sure I understand this 'goal' concept. Technology is just tool. New tech is more or less randomly created, with randomly focused goal by its designer, and then gets used for other random goals, more often than not unrelated to the original one. Like hitting a particle in the accelerator - you never know what will come out. That's the beauty and the horror of tech. Efficient FFT library gets used to kill thousands, weapons become cures, privacy systems enable tyrannies, etc. What was the original goal of Bitcoin (ie. PoW in chained hash + algorithmic transitions) is less than irrelevant. What we choose to use it for is more than relevant. It was a new metal from which to forge stuff. What one forges out of it is a different story, but don't blame the metal designer - that would be like blaming Victor d'Hupay or Karl Marx for Stalin and Khmer Rouge. Assigning deep intentions to Bitcoin designer, or implying that any thought was spent on relationship of currency and payment system, makes no sense. On the higher level, algorithms are like speech - anyone can create whatever one wants. Fortunately trigger warnings and safe spaces were not in vogue then, so we have some interesting stuff to play with. One may argue, though, that shouting "Bitcoin!" in disintegrating stratified society should be banned, and that algorithm designers have moral responsibility for their effects, but that's a slippery slope. Dice needs to be thrown now and then, even deities do that. Cypherpunks were specific phenomenon riding on the wave of (then) new tech industry, enabled by several people striking it rich on patent royalties, high salaries in general, staffed by uprooted clever newcomers with spare time (there was really nothing to do in the South Bay after 6pm, just like now) and e-mail enabled echo chamber (spam hardly existed, e-mail access was only for the elites.) The mix produced many interesting concepts in a very short time, some of which linger on now. Was it about class? Nothing was inherited, there was no legacy 'wealth', it was a brutal meritocracy, thriving on income from employers who were totally unaware of the whole thing. The ideology was not a secret: https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html . Everything outside that was irrelevant, and no one gave a flying f*ck for political correctness (like May's views on race & women, for example.) The Cool-Aid was excellent, resulting in near-comical clashes with reality (HavenCo), but without it there would be no Deep Crack, SSLeay, PGP, crypto would still be under ITAR, Assange would be a farmer. I find it ominous that technology creation is getting subjected to social justice correctness and intents are getting scrutinized. What is needed is more technical literacy and more dice throwing, not suspecting the literate ones or requiring registering of typewriters. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
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 becaus
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
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.) I wonder who will emerge as the Zizek of Bitcoin. It would make much more sense to dream about possible futures of US dollar or Swiss franc, as they have far more solid foundations. It's just that consumers of these dreams are too technically illiterate to see the fallacy, so Bitcoin is easier sell. The author of the avid-reader essay asked 'What if, ten years after it was invented, the reason nobody has adopted a distributed ledger at scale is because nobody wants it?' One answer: who cares what you want? The answer is *a lot of people* — but not for the same reasons you do. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
27;t expect a writer to define such a seemingly self-evident idea, but in the context of an effort to dismantle trust we should probably make an exception. It may well be that Bitcoin is based on sufficiently sound cryptographic theory and practice that it'll remain secure against 'dishonest' attacks *within* the system. In that case, Bitcoins may prove to have durable value — maybe in the way that certain postage stamps have drifted from everyday use to historical fetishists for hobbyists to collect. That's not a prediction — again, I don't know. But as blockchain-inspire techniques are integrated into general-purpose systems — again, with limited purposes in specific contexts to facilitate certain kinds of transactions at particular points — they won't have anything to do with Bitcoin. And every one of them will be vulnerable to attacks from 'without' — outside of — their narrowly oriented focus. Some of them will be quick-and-dirty thefts, others will be bogglingly long and deep cons, and all of them will be vulnerable to 'dishonest' attackers operating at every level from every perspective. The standard responses to that kind of concern is 'the market will sort it out,' but which market? The store where you buy an avocado is just an immediate, tangible manifestation: as with PLU codes, behind them there are markets upon markets upon markets that make that sticker useful: meta-markets, meta-meta-markets, derivative markets, etc. These meta- and derivative markets will define the values built into blockchain-inspire techniques, and their main criteria will be how effectively they shift risk-assessment functions onto the end user. The author of the avid-reader essay asked 'What if, ten years after it was invented, the reason nobody has adopted a distributed ledger at scale is because nobody wants it?' One answer: who cares what you want? The answer is *a lot of people* — but not for the same reasons you do. Here's another way to think about what this might mean: a world of honesty but without trust. Cheers, Ted On 28 Dec 2017, at 4:46, nettime's avid reader wrote: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 Dec 22, 2017 Kai Stinchcombe Everyone says the blockchain, the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, is going to change EVERYTHING. And yet, after years of tireless effort and billions of dollars invested, nobody has actually come up with a use for the blockchain—besides currency speculation and illegal transactions. Each purported use case — from payments to legal documents, from escrow to voting systems—amounts to a set of contortions to add a distributed, encrypted, anonymous ledger where none was needed. What if there isn’t actually any use for a distributed ledger at all? What if, ten years after it was invented, the reason nobody has adopted a distributed ledger at scale is because nobody wants it? <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 Dec 22, 2017 Kai Stinchcombe Everyone says the blockchain, the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, is going to change EVERYTHING. And yet, after years of tireless effort and billions of dollars invested, nobody has actually come up with a use for the blockchain—besides currency speculation and illegal transactions. Each purported use case — from payments to legal documents, from escrow to voting systems—amounts to a set of contortions to add a distributed, encrypted, anonymous ledger where none was needed. What if there isn’t actually any use for a distributed ledger at all? What if, ten years after it was invented, the reason nobody has adopted a distributed ledger at scale is because nobody wants it? __Payments and banking The original intended use of the blockchain was to power currencies like bitcoin — a way to store and exchange value much like any other currency. Visa and MasterCard were dinosaurs, everyone proclaimed, because there was now a costless, instant way to exchange value without the middleman taking a cut. A revolution in banking was just the start… governments, unable to issue currency by fiat anymore, would take a back seat as individual citizens transacted freely outside any national system. The killer feature: knowing you can get your money back It didn’t take long for that dream to fall apart. For one thing, there’s already a costless, instant way to exchange value without a middleman: cash. Bitcoins substitute for dollars, but Visa and MasterCard actually sit on top of dollar-based banking transactions, providing a set of value-added services like enabling banks to track fraud disputes, and verifying the identity of the buyer and seller. It turns out that for the person paying for a product, the key feature of a new payment system — think of PayPal in its early days — is the confidence that if the goods aren’t as described you’ll get your money back. And for the person accepting payment, basically the key feature is that their customer has it, and is willing to use it. Add in points, credit lines, and a free checked bag on any United flight and you have something that consumers choose and merchants accept. Nobody actually wants to pay with bitcoin, which is why it hasn’t taken off. The key feature of a new payment system — think of PayPal in its early days — is the confidence that if the goods aren’t as described you’ll get your money back. It would take 5,000 nuclear reactors to run Visa on the blockchain. Plus, it’s not actually that good a payment system — Visa can handle sixty thousand transactions per second, while Bitcoin historically taps out at seven. There are technical modifications going on to improve Bitcoin’s efficiency, but as a starting point, you have something that’s about 0.01% as good at clearing transactions. (And, worth noting, for those seven transactions a second Bitcoin is already estimated to use 35 times as much energy as Visa. If you brought Bitcoin’s transaction volume up to Visa’s it would be using as much electricity as the rest of the world put together.) __Freedom to transact without government supervision In many countries, and often our own, a little bit of ability to keep a few things private from the authorities probably makes the world a better place. In places like Cuba or Venezuela, many prefer to transact in dollars, and bitcoin could in theory serve a similar function. Yet there are two reasons this hasn’t been the panacea it’s assumed: the advantages of government to the individual, and the advantages of government to society. The government-backed banking system provides FDIC guarantees, reversibility of ACH, identity verification, audit standards, and an investigation system when things go wrong. Bitcoin, by design, has none of these things. I saw a remarkable message thread by someone whose bitcoin account got drained because their email had been hacked and their password was stolen. They were stunned to have no recourse! And this is widespread — in 2014, the then-#1 bitcoin trader, Mt. Gox, also lost $400m of investor money due to security failures. The subsequent #1 bitcoin trader, Bitfinex, also shut down after a loss of customer funds. Imagine the world if more banks had been drained of customer funds than not. Bitcoin is what banking looked like in the middle ages — “here’s your libertarian paradise, have a nice day.” [This issue is particularly near and dear to my heart because my own company, True Link, is designed to help vulnerable seniors — people likely to give out their credit card number over the phone, enter sketchy sweepstakes or donate to sketchy charities, participate in scam investments, or install password-stealing malware. As the people who most need security enhancements in banking and payments, they depend heavily on the
