34 sats \ 4 replies \ @elvismercury 24 Mar \ on: Jaromil's 2011 Bitcoin Manifesto bitcoin
From 2011 -- hopefully that guy bought a few hundred bucks worth and is now a tycoon directing his fortune toward good things.
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