Morlock Elloi on Fri, 15 Dec 2017 19:56:44 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> Never Mind the Bitcoin?


Re-decentralization of Bitcoin (if possible at all) has only one purpose: to eliminate choke and control points (like 4 Chinese mints controlling 50+% of hash power today) and make the system more stable (convincing millions of miners to agree to a fork is totally different ball game from dealing with 4 mints.)

There is no fairness or anything else implied here: gold is distributed rather unfairly in earth's crust, it's extracted unfairly and hoarded unfairly. But one cannot (yet) change gold into gold2, make it disappear or become plentiful. There is no accountability and there shouldn't be - that's not the function of gold.

The question then becomes why Bitcoin when we have gold? The answer is that it's a bit easier to slice and move, *nothing* else. I guess it's like gold2.

On 12/15/17, 04:46, Nicolas Bourbaki wrote:
Decentralization fetishism will not save this ideology. What Saskia
Sassen also talks about, in her book Expulsions, is how systems that
distribute and decentralize also obfuscate responsibility and
accountability. Decentralization, and the focus on it, is not the cure
but the enabler of capital 2.0. Cryptocurrencies, most, many and
perhaps all, are Adam Smiths invisible hand encoded and now just when
we thought there may be a future where the market is NOT considered
nature, the anarchist and libertarian coders went and enshrined those
principles in code and distributed it in a manner that makes changing
it even more costly than before.

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