I found this thing genjix (Amir Taaki) posted on bitcointalk in 2011. I find it fascinating to see how early bitcoiners were thinking about the project and what it was for. He says it is from his friend jaromil, who I wasn't able to find on bitcointalk. I particularly enjoyed his comment that emerging technologies should not be judged by the sensationally bad taste if early adopters. Give the whole thing a read, it's a different perspective than you usually hear.
bitcoins - isn't this simply a distributed structure to do capitalism with?
That's not even the worst you can do with it. you can do money laundering, buy drugs online and sex toys, all anonymously. but that's not the point, because despite the coercion imposed by all kinds of regulatory systems so far, also current official monetary systems are full of that shit, on top of the capitalist pie.
Emerging technologies should never be judged by the sensationally bad taste of early adopters. it's like being concerned about the shit that fertilizes some beautiful flowers, wasting their seeds.
What really bitcoin is, I finally understood on the 6 april (which somehow always ends up being a magic day, eh!): this is now the end of the flow capitalism, which consists of the monopoly on transactions, the hegemony of banks on the movement of values and not just their storage, this middle-man mafia strangling the world as we speak.
How right are now those South American countries asking the "taxation of transactions", an argument refrained in many speeches of the companeros. They studied the system and understood that there is a crucial problem there, that needs to be solved urgently. Yet i'd argue here taxation on transaction cannot be the solution. The solution is to eliminate the flow capitalists.
If i want to give you money i'll give it to you. me and you, period. its fine that we'll pay our taxes for our communities, don't get me wrong this is not a tea bagger argument. its just not right that all what we do is in the hands of a third party, that has been caught cheating already many times: look at what happened at the paypal accounts of the Iraqi linux user group back in 2004, or even more recently to Wikileaks.
We don't need those fat cheaters to be in between our value transactions anymore; the flow capital has played its disgusting role in the little laps of history for which it has been needed, now sadly these people won't give up what they have accumulated, so it makes more sense to leave them alone and multiply more monetary systems that work efficiently across diverse networks and that rely on the neutrality of a cryptographic authentication.
the death of the flow capital is a new stage for the necrotization of capitalism.
ciao
I wonder what Amir is up to nowadays, iirc he went to Kurdistan to fight ISIS (?)
reply
And I think this meme fits perfectly with those words from those early years and how is Bitcoin now...
reply
Haha All the sheeple who got in too late and are butthurt about it.
reply
From 2011 -- hopefully that guy bought a few hundred bucks worth and is now a tycoon directing his fortune toward good things.
reply
No kidding. Do you think money without middlemen is still an achievable goal?
reply
Sort of. You can transact directly on-chain, but if btc succeeds, this will start to become intermediated by institutions, of one type or other, under various interaction models. I don't see a way around it. But the money itself will be non-state, which is most of what matters.
reply
I pretty much agree with you. But it does seem like a departure from some of what people were excited about early on. (I know there were others like Hal and maybe Adam Back who expected third parties to intermediate).
The idealist in me wants to see this p2p money world, but the realist thinks we can't do it yet.
I'm not sure that it is enough for the money to be non-state. It is a very interesting question to ask how much of the bitcoin value proposition unwinds if you can't unilaterally control a utxo.
reply
But it does seem like a departure from some of what people were excited about early on. (I know there were others like Hal and maybe Adam Back who expected third parties to intermediate).
I think you're right that most people weren't thinking this way. It's weird that the arguments a lot of bitcoiners make on the inevitability of the system, simulating it forward, did not include simulating the implications of limited block space. And yet the implications were there from the beginning. The bcashers at least have had a consistent approach the whole time, even if it's the wrong approach.
It is a very interesting question to ask how much of the bitcoin value proposition unwinds if you can't unilaterally control a utxo.
It's a deep question, for sure. To me, this is the most interesting -- and almost never discussed -- aspect of the whole btc experiment. Money is, at its deepest level, a social technology. Fiat, and our way of interacting with it, have led to a certain shape in society. Btc will lead to some other form, if it succeeds. But which other form? You can imagine a number of them, with vastly different consequences for the shape of society. Few people are talking about that, sadly.
reply