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

[byfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

On 30 Dec 2017, at 8:51, Felix Stalder wrote:

> And besides, the ever rising transaction costs (because of the low
> number of exchanges that can be settled per second, which Zooko puts 
> at
> 3, rather than 7) make it as an actual means of exchange almost 
> useless
> for everyday transactions (including illegal ones).

The joke is that the rising cost and slow rate of transactions look like 
bugs in the context of a rising bubble, but they could just as easily be 
features in other contexts: just call them something different, say, 
processing/application fees, queues, cooling-off periods, etc.

Right now, Bitcoin's value seems to lie in the nexus of speculative 
profit and supposed anonymity. Imagine a scenario — let's ignore for 
now whether it's technically or politically realistic — in which (a) 
someone figures out how to steal enough coins from enough people, and 
(b) some magical global entity retroactively ~insures lost Bitcoins and 
effectively introduces legal amnesty at every level. People around the 
world would happily sign up to get their money back. For them, Bitcoin's 
value would suddenly lie in the nexus of 'nymity' and minimizing losses.

After the 2008 meltdown it became clear that taking entire nations 
hostage, with ransoms paid in form of public bailouts, was a viable 
business strategy. Would it really be surprising if Bitcoin, in some 
aspect, turns out to be TBTF? The concentration in ownership suggests 
that there might be ways to (1) drive its value down suddenly, (2) buy 
up coins for 'pennies on the dollar,' (3) negotiate with key national 
governments to immunize the covered transactions, then (4) drive the 
price back up again. Someone, somewhere is planning something like this 
— maybe with variations that'd involve exchanging Bitcoin for new 
coins promoted as 'clean,' say, through association with well-known 
entities, like an ICO backed by Goldman Sachs. Is it any more exotic 
than the Hunt Brothers trying to corner silver, Soros attacking the 
pound, vultures hovering around Argentina for years on end, etc, etc? 
Rocket science ain't what it used to be. And a few governments might be 
interested, in part because it'd help to isolate the criminal wheat from 
the speculative chaff, both retrospectively and prospectively.

> But beyond the speculative bubble, there are very powerful ideological
> drivers in this development. One is anarcho-capitalist ideology which
> wants to break the government monopoly over money (along lines 
> developed
> by F.A. Hayek in the 1970s) and the other is techno-libertianism that
> believes, as Zooko puts it, that if you "empower" people, the 
> resulting
> good will, somehow, outweigh the bad. Someone from the audience raised
> the question about enormous inequality in coin ownership, to which he
> had no reply beyond "that's a really good question!".

These guys are, as they say, priceless.

Apropos, at the risk of provoking the Wrath of Morlock, here's something 
a recent talk by Tim May talking about 'thirty years of crypto anarchy':

	https://youtu.be/TdmpAy1hI8g

As you said about Zooko's tallk, really interesting and entertaining 
because it's so full of contradictions.

Cheers,
Ted
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