Someone seems to agree with you vlad
Regarding change:
Ultimately the question is more along the lines of "Is technology liberating or a means to oppress?".
Ultimately the question is more along the lines of "Is technology liberating or a means to oppress?".
Cross posting an excerpt from an ongoing discussion in another thread...
1. I generally disagree with this one. Never in the history of mankind has the average Joe won in mass, IMHO. Somehow I don't believe it will magically happen now that Bitcoin is around.
Bitcoin is a technology. Most every time the benefits of a new technology, properly applied, have benefited the average Joe sooner or later.
Risto it appears you excel on "counting" games, but when it comes to logic it appears you over generalize (or choose the simplest understanding for efficiency) and this causes you to make mistakes. I suck at board games but I appear to excel at seeing all the conceptual issues in full range of depth and extracting the generative essence. Our brains appear to be wired differently. That appears to make you better at finding arbitrage opportunities than me (but gives you no advantage in timing market moves), but my skill appears to make me a superior visionary than you. I don't excel mentally with anything that requires me to interact with my external sensors. I excel with short I/O tape and then let my mind run on it, although normally my reading comprehension is very high but don't expect me to interact in parallelized real-time with my I/O i.e. that game you mentioned upthread (I tried while getting sleepy and only managed 16000 after several tries perhaps I would do better if I put some thought into how I should be calculating the move probabilities on that grid, but it appears to come naturally to you?).
I had the following insight before, but no one prompted me to share it. It is difficult for me to keep track of all my ideas.
Contemplate that the technologies which benefit the masses are those which have individual scope; whereas, those which subject the masses to greater extortion via the collective have collective scope. For example, washing machines have only individual scope and were rapidly (logistically) adopted across the breadth of the developed world. Whereas, nuclear power and nuclear weapons can't be individualized and have further enslaved us in the collective.
The internet (networking in general) is a mix of individual empowerment and collective enslavement.
What does anonymity do in theory? In theory it makes it possible to have all the individual empower without any (most) of the collective enslavement.
This is why I am so obsessed with making sure we have anonymity, not just in our money but in every aspect of the internet. The technology I am working on is not only applicable to crypto-currency. I want to change the entire internet to make it asymmetrically more of an individual empowerment.
Throughout history we had anonymity in our money because it was physical. Now Bitcoin comes along with a fully traceable public ledger and we give up asymmetric power to the collective. This alarmed the shit out of me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I said to myself a year ago, "hell no! not if I can do anything about it".
In geek speak, "you just don't get it".
The other asymmetric problem specific to Bitcoin is it uses ASICs thus mining is in the hands of the few, and also there is nothing in the design which economically discourages large pools thus
P.S. the other fundamental driver of asymmetric power of the collective on the internet is the client-server model instead of P2P.
It is a fact that a physical multifurcating network is more efficient than a fully connected mesh topology, i.e. running a smaller pipe from the water district to each house increases the cost and back pressure than running a main line and then multifurcating branches off it (cross-sectional area reduces by the square of the proportional diameter decreases). However, the transfer of data on the internet does not obey that physical law because we don't charge for data according to the path it takes. However the challenge is the efficient, redundant DHT storage and serve of data for a purely P2P internet. That is a more difficult technical hurdle.
P.S.S. I predicted a couple of weeks ago the IRS ruling would be what it is and that it would cause the price to dive. The post is some where in my public archives on bitcointalk.
