Re: <nettime> 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 <[email protected]> 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".

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