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

It's not either-or (technology and political agency), but both-and. The two things aren't cleanly separable. And this isn't any new or revolutionary insight, but exactly what McLuhan meant with "the medium is the message" and Wiener with the "human use of human beings" (or Lenin with his equation "communism = soviet power + electricity", for that matter), and what newer philosophies have rebranded as "apparatus".

I thought that we no longer needed to discuss this on Nettime, of all places. Hacker culture, too, has been aware of it since its beginnings, as any annual Chaos Computer Club congress demonstrates. (Btw., the motto of the ongoing 34C3, "Tuwat" ['Dosomething'], references the legendary Tunix/Tuwat conferences that took place in West Berlin in 1978 and 1981 and not involved early hackers like Wau Holland, but also Michel Foucault.)

-F

On Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 10:51 PM, Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com> wrote:

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, deep conspiracy and that Bitcoin creator(s) actually did bother to read "Austrian economics" (neither of which I think is probable - looks like a parallel construction), and chose a hard limit instead of exponential backoff or any other of dozen possible strategies. Let's also assume that there were no other (dozens) of competing ideas which simply could not get any traction at the time (and this is a patently false assumption.) Invention of Bitcoin was therefore not a random event, it was intentional dark design having roots in nearly hundred year old ideology, and there were no alternatives to it.

Hapless adopters, unable to see Hayek's ghost in the algorithm, just continued to use it until it was too late.

What does this mean?

It means that technology has became effective carrier device for the ideology, amplifying it as everything else it touches, and if ordinary people cannot see through it ("out of the question") as they could see through Nazism and similar, well, then the ordinary people are going to get fu*ked in perpetuity, and there is absolutely nothing one can do about it (bitching notwithstanding.) All Dr. Evil has to do is carefully design a shiny object, and cretins will unconditionally descend on it. Easier than organizing rallies.

It's a worldview that goes exactly nowhere. It doesn't even have afterlife.

Try coding instead.

You left out the most important design decision: to cap the number of
Bitcoins in circulation, therefore building deflation into the currency.
And that decision has nothing to do with crypto, science or technology,
but is purely political and based on a cyberlibertarian reading of
"Austrian economics".

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