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

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

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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