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

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

I'm not sure I understand this 'goal' concept. Technology is just tool. 
New tech is more or less randomly created, with randomly focused goal by 
its designer, and then gets used for other random goals, more often than 
not unrelated to the original one. Like hitting a particle in the 
accelerator - you never know what will come out. That's the beauty and 
the horror of tech. Efficient FFT library gets used to kill thousands, 
weapons become cures, privacy systems enable tyrannies, etc.
What was the original goal of Bitcoin (ie. PoW in chained hash + 
algorithmic transitions) is less than irrelevant. What we choose to use 
it for is more than relevant. It was a new metal from which to forge 
stuff. What one forges out of it is a different story, but don't blame 
the metal designer - that would be like blaming Victor d'Hupay or Karl 
Marx for Stalin and Khmer Rouge. Assigning deep intentions to Bitcoin 
designer, or implying that any thought was spent on relationship of 
currency and payment system, makes no sense.
On the higher level, algorithms are like speech - anyone can create 
whatever one wants. Fortunately trigger warnings and safe spaces were 
not in vogue then, so we have some interesting stuff to play with. One 
may argue, though, that shouting "Bitcoin!" in disintegrating stratified 
society should be banned, and that algorithm designers have moral 
responsibility for their effects, but that's a slippery slope. Dice 
needs to be thrown now and then, even deities do that.
Cypherpunks were specific phenomenon riding on the wave of (then) new 
tech industry, enabled by several people striking it rich on patent 
royalties, high salaries in general, staffed by uprooted clever 
newcomers with spare time (there was really nothing to do in the South 
Bay after 6pm, just like now) and e-mail enabled echo chamber (spam 
hardly existed, e-mail access was only for the elites.) The mix produced 
many interesting concepts in a very short time, some of which linger on 
now. Was it about class? Nothing was inherited, there was no legacy 
'wealth', it was a brutal meritocracy, thriving on income from employers 
who were totally unaware of the whole thing. The ideology was not a 
secret: https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html . Everything 
outside that was irrelevant, and no one gave a flying f*ck for political 
correctness (like May's views on race & women, for example.) The 
Cool-Aid was excellent, resulting in near-comical clashes with reality 
(HavenCo), but without it there would be no Deep Crack, SSLeay, PGP, 
crypto would still be under ITAR, Assange would be a farmer.
I find it ominous that technology creation is getting subjected to 
social justice correctness and intents are getting scrutinized. What is 
needed is more technical literacy and more dice throwing, not suspecting 
the literate ones or requiring registering of typewriters.


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