Topic: Live debate tonight 7PM GMT - Gavin Andresen will be there - page 2. (Read 3648 times)

Yep, watched it. Gavin is a body washer in an NHS hospital (relatives, do hope he did not fingered your loved ones) .  Pathetic, all of them.  Gavin, please drink more/less/take a plug out of your bum/relax. Well, i guess you’ll need quite a few years on Bitcoin Foundation’s payroll before you can take it easy, man.  No pun intended.  I had sponsored you, hope it’ll do some good to represent Bitcoin. But thanks for trying, i guess.

Saying that using or not using is equivalent to a vote is far fetched.   It is not a vote.

   Great quote.

Gavin was the only rock star in attendance, and I say this not as a bitcoin partisan but because he brought the only truly revolutionary ideas to the program.  I was particularly unimpressed by Birgitta Jónsdóttir and her grassroots attempt to write a new constitution.  Given the chance, people are going to insert all manner of desires into a constitution and try to give them the legal standing of "rights."  Just because I want a unicorn that farts rainbows doesn't mean that I have a right to it and the rest of society should be enslaved in order to provide it to me.  It is my opinion that democracy has failed miserably all around the world, and we need to move away from the concept entirely rather than try to improve upon it with technology.  I think the sagacious comments quoted below reflect the correct way to think about the "rebooting" of society.

Depends on the point of view. From my point of view, in the world of open source, the mainline client/fork is the elected official, and users are the voters.
Every user or group of users can become/create an elected official by creating a fork of his/their own, and other people can vote for the official by using forked version of software.

Additionally, in open source every fork/elected official can have all/none/some of the features of all other forks/ellected officials, so IMHO open source democracy is even better than normal democracy.

Maybe I have too a restricted idea of what democracy is (no sarcasm here), but to me democracy is a system where divergences of opinions are resolved via vote, not secession.

No wait, this is also a democracy.
Anybody can make a fork and convince people to download & use his fork (vote) instead of the other candidate's fork.

Above all, democracy should happen where it is needed, and there is no need for democracy in free software.  The code is free: if you're not happy with it, fork it or don't use it.

who said democracy has to "scale" anyway? Local issues, local solutions. Indeed, the Greek word demos also means village, already hinting that it would not scale and things should stay decentralized. Today's nation states are too large and arbitrary lines through the landscape, they should be overcome.

Democracy can (and should) also happen at the workplace, or wherever you're invested in with your resources. You surely do want to have a say about the new road or bridge to be built if you help finance it, no matter if by taxes or voluntarily. Public vs Private is (should be) a false dichotomy.

That way, I can't conceive anything better than the concept of liquid democracy. All it merely says is everyone has a voice, and if you're apathetic about an issue, fine, give it to someone else. And if things go out of hand and you suddenly find yourself not so apathetic anymore, you can have your voice back.

The reasons democracy (liquid or not) will not scale:
1. group think (arbitrary priorities)
2. greed
3. apathy
4. ignorance of issues
5. guns and money (with malevolent intentions)
6. mob rule (similar to Gavin's argument)

This liquid democracy sounds like a movement similar to voluntaryism. All of these libertarian ideas sound neat, but are only theoretical, just as the US form of republican democracy was. I'm not against the seed of the idea, but the technology does not exist yet to make it viable. We need technology to overcome those six (and probably more) types of problems.

Having said this, the technologies we do have are useful to keep working towards something better. If we apply these tools scientifically and use the data wisely, we may discover patterns that even more powerful systems can use to make it work better. Human society is too complex for humans to handle alone. Our technology will eventually be able to help us identify these six problems before they become harmful.

the technological solution is called liquid democracy and liquid feedback.


Back then in anarchistic Spain (good doku), there were general assemblies, and the results of discussions were seen as merely recommendations. I.e., democracy without an executive branch.

One of my hobby is to bash democracy and get karma points for it.

Yeah-- "democratic" is such a loaded word. Everybody loves democracy, so I didn't want to bash it.

But democracy can be terrible if you're in the minority and the majority decides to trample on your rights.

I probably should have just said "Bitcoin is a lot more democratic than the system we currently have, where a handful of unelected central bankers control our money."

I saw what you saw to very interesting..

Great job, Gavin.

Quick aside. When Truthloader first came upon the scene a couple short months ago, I sincerely felt, and still do, that somehow Google is behind it. They only had a small handful of videos up at the time, each having very few view counts, but Google gave it tremendous juice on its news site. After kept seeing it over and over again at the time, and doing some research (basically finding nothing to support my theory), it still seemed like Google was/is behind it. I'm not saying that that's a good or bad thing. Just saying.

Boy, wouldn't that be something if we later learn that Google was behind Bitcoin from the get-go?

My apologies for the long aside.

~Bruno K~

Gavin kind of struggled when he had to respond to the "bitcoin is not democratic" argument.

I think the very concept of money is actually not democratic, or it should not be.

What I mean by that is that money should be like any thing that can be exchanged in a market.  So like any consumer product, it is not democratic because its use does not depend on some decision made after a vote.

Money is democratic only in a system where only one form of money is allowed.  The decision of which kind of money and how it should work MUST then be taken and the democratic way of making this decision is the vote.

But in the liberal way of dealing with the concept of money, there is not limit in the number of competing currencies in circulation.   In such a system, a currency is no more democratic than any stuff that can be exchanged on the market.   Is the iPhone for instance a democratic product?  Well, in a way it is, since it is used by a lot of people.   But in the pure sense of the expression, that is in the political sense, it is not democratic at all.

Same with bitcoin.


More generally, digital technologies offer more choice to people, and this increased number of choices decreases the need for a normalization of the way of doing stuff.   Democracy was a way to fairly organize this normalization.  With more choices, the need for democracy decreases because less normalization is needed.    So in a way digital technologies make democratic concepts more obsolete.  That's a point that was missed in the debate imho.

It was an interesting discussion. The Icelandic situation illustrates the dysfunction of the financial system. I agree with Gavin that direct democracy won't scale, but like everything else, there will be a technological solution. We just haven't developed him yet.

Thanks good watch

Nice! I had never actually heard Gavin speak and I was a bit afraid we'd end with an Amir Taaki situation... but good job!

That talk was pretty interesting.

Also, *amazing* job Gavin !