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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 >

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

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

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

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

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

I lost interest in Bitcoin a while ago beyond occasionally ruing the alt.fact that, after spending years and years paying attention to cypherpunks+ lists, I guess I could have been one of the first few hundred people to screw around with it. So what I say here is based largely on happy