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

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

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
> 
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