t byfield on Sat, 4 Mar 2017 19:27:45 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> In Praise of Cash (or just another luddite nationalist |
More could be said about all that, though it'd mostly be embroidering on meta / tragic / boring themes. But what prompted me to write was the witty brilliance of Morlock's insight:
On 3 Mar 2017, at 21:56, Morlock Elloi wrote:
product note to self: consumer electric heater that mints
This is GREAT. I don't mean someone-should-do-it great, though — it's more like chindogu, 'useless Japanese inventions' raised to an art form: a baby's onesie with a dust-mop front, so your infant can clean the house while s/he crawls around, or a pair of chopsticks with a fan attached to cool off your ramen between the bowl and your mouth. Or this piece of accidental chindogu, a bobblehead-esque solar-powered wind turbine executive desk toy:
http://imgur.com/fl5gp5JA heater that mints bitcoin would reach degree zero when the value it generates precisely pays off your utility bill. But the infinitesimal frictional differential needed to recognize that exchange as such would leak, generating recursively exotic derivatives — which, in turn, would generate ad-hoc 'markets' for aggregating the infinitesimal, leveraging it infinitely, and gaming it randomly. The ensuing crashes would get bigger and bigger and come faster and faster, until they're just more background noise.
This kind of hallucinatory speculation can go on forever, but after a certain point its allure will wear off. The value of 'Bitcoin' — scare-quotes because it lumps together so many disparate things — has less to do with misleading extractive-industry metaphors than with the simple act of verifiably recording that some event happened, i.e., making it more efficient (for the time being) to record an event than to forge it. That's it. Right now, what's mostly being recorded is noise — not in the blockchain but in all the externalities this tautology contributes to (e.g., carbon emissions). The challenge is to figure out what's worth recording — which is literally the oldest problem in the book.
Cheers, T # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: