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

[byfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

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 when the author of this avid-reader essay
> > complains 'but Visa... but FDIC... but NASDAQ,' one reasonable 
> > response is:
> > ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The point of Bitcoin wasn't to succeed to the degree 
> > that it
> > has, or in the way that it has.
>
> Hi Ted,
>
> If that had been Bitcoin's only goal, then it would have sufficed to 
> create
> a crypographic peer-to-peer payment system based on/supporting 
> existing
> currencies and their exchange rates.
>
> Things got politically murky with the introduction of Bitcoin as its 
> own
> currency based on Hayek's and Mises' economic theory, i.e. with 
> built-in
> deflation and absence of political control except through owners.

Well, the difference is your addition of 'only,' as in it's 'only goal.' 
If I say I love you, Florian, that would be special, wouldn't it? But if 
I say I love *only* you, Florian, that's a different kettle of fish. 
'Only' is one of those tricky words that serves as a mule for smuggling 
entire ideological apparatuses. 'Still' is another one: 'You *still* 
believe that?

As someone who's thought a lot about design, you probably understand 
better than many what a proof of concept is: an implementation — or 
we'd maybe we should think of it in more anthropological terms, as an 
*artifact* — that, more or less, tests a specific proposal. How that 
test is constructed, and the context in which it's conducted, involve a 
lot of artifice. Many of the assumptions that shape that artifice go 
unstated. The questions we're left with, in the case of Bitcoin, are 
what those assumptions were, and what they might mean.

If I'd said that goal was Bitcoin's *only* goal, then I'd agree with 
your objection, but I didn't: instead, I talked about the explicit 
ideological beliefs that dominated the cypherpunks milieu, including 
their implacable hostility to the state, their all but explicit aim of 
attacking models of trust anchored in ~public institutions, the 
ambiguity of their use of the idea of honesty, and — crucially — 
their interest in Vernor Vinge's novella _True Names_. It didn't seem 
worth the effort to say they were libertarian free-market extremists, 
because that's widely discussed. So your point is right on, but it seems 
like more of an elaboration ('and') than an objection ('but'). They 
didn't think talking about Hayek or Mises in the original Bitcoin paper, 
but as you say those ideas were baked into it from the beginning.

Whoever designed Bitcoin assumed that 'currency' and 'an electronic 
payment system' were interchangeable or even identical. They (and I'm 
pretty sure it was a group, not an individual) didn't set out to design 
better banknotes *or* to develop a better PayPal, they set out to create 
something entirely new that could function as either/both but wasn't 
*only* limited to meeting those specifications.

That brings us to Morlock's point about whether Bitcoin succeeded or 
failed. Two responses, one good, one bad. \_(ツ)_/¯.

> 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 
> proselytize the initial but long extinct 'distributed' meme. It's more 
> centralized than US dollar.
>
> PoW concentration is mandated by its technological nature and there 
> are no signs that anything will change any time soon. Every other 
> 'proof' introduces either benevolent coordinating authority (which is 
> utter bs), or switches CPU for something that has not been 
> demonstrated as concentrate-able yet because no one bothered (such as 
> proof of space - big disks are naturally distributed ... right.)
>
> There is little more to say. Bitcoin is a big lie, for many too big to 
> be acknowledged.
>
> Possible futures and promises will continue to be built on the 
> miserably failed premise, with non-working workarounds (But maybe the 
> next workaround will work? ... Bitcoin is just the first try, the 
> concept is good? ... It's such great idea and must be revisited? ... 
> etc.)

Morlock, your point about its concentration nails it, and in that sense, 
yes, Bitcoin was a miserable failure. That structural tendency toward 
concentration was obvious in many of the experiments that contributed to 
Bitcoin, like the distributed cracks of RC5, which were dominated by 
actors with immense computing power at their disposal. Cypherpunk-types 
loved heartwarming talk about how Zapatistas and victims of sexual abuse 
would use PGP etc, but that was just playing to the crowd: they were 
much more concerned with systemic architectures and their baked-in 
biases because they knew cryptography was and would remain inevitably 
*politically* asymmetric.

But as you may remember (if you're the same Morlock Elloi who was 
kicking around in those circles), all that talk about crypto-anarchy 
was, at its heart, about class. Much of what normal people think about 
'class' depends on the state: if there's no state, there are no classes, 
there are just arbitrary individuals and groups who are more or less 
adept at navigating and negotiating whatever resources are available to 
them. Whatever human potential gets lost in the fray is just the cost of 
doing business — and 'twas ever thus.

So...if Bitcoin has made some people fabulously wealthy, enabled new 
'free markets' (including dark commerce, a growing parade of ICO cons, 
etc), and generally moved a bunch of Overton windows, do you really 
think some of them — Tim May, for example — would be upset that it 
was eventually dominated by a few Chinese mints rather than being 
equitably accessible for sheeple-to-sheeple use? If all of history a 
single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage, what's a 
few more as long as they make you and yours rich?

What engineer ever objected if his/her/their proof of concept failed on 
a specified front but succeeded in creating a dozen new ones? It's as if 
the Wright Brothers' plane crashed — on the moon.

Cheers,
Ted
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