Re: <nettime> Never Mind the Bitcoin?

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

Bitcoin seems, to me, to indicate how much criminal, speculative money
there is out there, seeking risk worth taking, rather than "investing"
in a traditional sense. There is simply too much money held by too few
people who now trade it among themselves, rather than seeking to extract
surplus value from labor. There are only so many apartments one can buy
in Dubai and all that money needs to go somewhere.

Take the bitcoin exchange rate of the last three years as a fractal
image of the income/wealth distribution of the last thirty years.
Exponential acceleration within exponential acceleration.

That vehicle that this money latched onto is about the utopia of machine
peerage, tells us something about the state of the world, in which
technical thinking dominates and people simply don't count and, as long
as they remain necessary, most of them are forcefully written out of the
story. For a micro-account how invisibility is created/enforced, see
Andrew Wilson's great work "Workers Leaving the Googleplex"

https://vimeo.com/15852288

Machines, as Morlock pointed out, are simply more efficient at
everything (often in practice, but particularly in theory), in part
because we defined the world -- and ourselves -- in machine terms, by
accepting information theory as communication theory.

Back to the excess money. The sane option would be to tax that money,
but doesn't look likely in the US/EU, so the other option to break that
extremely unstable distribution of income and wealth become more likely:
war. Historically, this is how I understand Piketty, there have only
been these two options.







On 2017-12-13 20:41, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> Bitcoin successfully hijacked a sizable amount of public belief, which
> underwrites any fiat currency, and it doesn't get more fiat than Bitcoin.

<...>



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