Topic: 2012-10-11 loper-os.org - Bitcoin, or How to Hammer in Nails with a Microscope. (Read 3544 times)

I was ready with knives and a roasting thermometer when I first learned of this article, however, some time spent considering your well-crafted essay has obviated the need for such implements.

You are correct in that technology implemented by well-meaning yet unsophisticated users is futile at best, especially when creating services that require strong security measures from the ground up.

Most horror stories center around lapses of users, admins and hopefuls that haven't done their homework. At the same time, it points to the scarcity and increasing value that bitcoin has - if it was considered worthless, there wouldn't be hackers and others out to get it.

I firmly believe that bitcoin will not be shut down as described in your article. I base that belief on the existence of other networks that continue to flourish, such as torrents, despite active measures at the internet level and legal avenues to restrict their activity.

Personally, I think the evolution of this hybrid payment-system-and-currency will go from exchanges transferring BTC (bitcoin) to other currencies to dying off all together as their services will slowly not be needed. As for governments not allowing such free commerce to exist, perhaps it would be a force to enact change - as taxes would become a more voluntary nature where we would only contribute to specific items that we actually need. (Instead of a flat 'fee' that is then distributed without the taxpayers consent.)

Bitcoin is a financial revolution that will change everything. Even if the current system falls under some unknown future threat, its existence has shown that there is another way to create a financial system that isn't dependent upon the failings of human decision processes and politics.

A bitcoin stock market, will involve 0 law,

But the down-side is that we won’t learn just what sort of world is possible given a functioning, decentralized cryptocurrency

He has a valid point, though.

Bitcoin, or How to Hammer in Nails with a Microscope.


Stanislav
2012-10-11

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=939

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Can you, dear reader, ferret out from the above text the general trend which dooms Bitcoin, firing squads or no firing squads?  And this incident is certainly not the first of its kind. Or even the most destructive in purely financial terms.  A hint: the secret does not lie in the abundance of fraud artists which have flocked to Bitcoin: traditional currency has attracted fraudsters for as long as it has existed.  Nor is it the absence of the customary legal mechanisms for keeping honest people honest (police, courts, prisons.)

The answer instead is that, while the unknown inventor of Bitcoin was quite clever, most of its users are alarmingly dull.  This includes the “pioneers” who set up Bitcoin-based financial services of every kind.  Why? Because they are pounding in nails with a microscope. These fools have been handed a technology so clever, so disruptive and revolutionary, that the rulers of the world would have to fully unmask themselves as ruthless tyrants in order to suppress it, — or give up their thrones on their own free will — if it were used correctly, that is. But at present, the microscope again and again goes “clang!” against the table, the nails slowly and crookedly creep inward, and tiny shards of the world’s finest lenses fly in all directions.

Bitcoiners are pounding in nails with a microscope, because they have insisted on faithfully re-creating the financial institutions of the meatspace world – banks, stock markets, derivatives trading, and the like – without any of the familiar meatspace law enforcement mechanisms (police and courts) or the best-known traditional black-market alternative to these mechanisms: the threat of immediate physical violence as an incentive to promise-keeping.
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And on the positive side, a few die-hard activists might thus avoid facing the firing squad.  Using Bitcoin will become its own punishment, the way sniffing glue is.
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