on the topic of Bitcoin philosophical musings and pressures: There unusually a lot of btc discussion on the list lately: technical (the fork), philosophical and practical. On the philosophical/political side: btc is great, I like it, I use it, but, come on, we all know that by design (increasing difficulty of the chain and proof-of-work system) btc is determined to be a space race. Before you can maintain the network with simple hardware, and get btc for it, now you have to be a mining rig. We know that btc is good for P2P financial transactions, but the first important question now is: How do you earn bitcoin? (as an individual, you can't mine, if you are not a programmer or a designer, how do you earn btc?) It becomes less and less of a question how do you spend btc, but still, unless I mined a lot in the past or bought it for cash, where do I get it? Secondly, the rhetoric we hear often in the mainstream btc discussion is "it is a solution for banking the Unbanked" This talk is obviously dodgy - lets say "the unbanked wants to be banked" if you have an account with nothing in it, and no way of filling it in, there is no point. The only good thing about btc walled vs bank account when its empty is that there is no one is proposing you to get an overdraft or a loan. But still, empty btc wallet is pretty useless. Rather decent response to poitical btc frenzy I found in this post - https://blog.caseykuhlman.com/entries/2014/bitcoin-somaliland.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=%24feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+underWater+desert+Blogging Another mainstream talk is: its not about bitcooin, it is all about blockchain technology. Thats correct, it can be useful for some stuff. But what drives me up the walll is a hype around it mixed with vagueness. "We can build all this amazing socio-technical systems with it" and very rarely, amongst general public (not blockchain devs) you come across concrete ideas of a design. What exactly does this weird data structure does in a very specific social context? What are exact detailed functions it has, how does it integrates with other layers - software and hardware. So the talk "some devs will write cryptographically verifiable scripts for us which interact on the blockchain and it will give the world some cool ways of interaction" is just dangerous. Similar rhetoric brought humanity things such as Facebook. The only thing which i consider right in the blockchain discussion that "ok, it allows adding some features to a system that can be useful in some particular cases" On the technical side: fork, xt-code etc - I would like to organise and stream a panel discussion on WCN http://www.worldcryptonetwork.com/ channel soon-ish. I dont want to turn cypherpunk list into a Bitcoin Talk :) but will ping a link here and the time we will schedule it. On 8 July 2015 at 01:22, wrote:

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Today's Topics:

1. Bitcoin philosophical musings and pressures 7 years in [drifted from: txrate, forking, etc] (grarpamp) 2. "Google is to surveillance capitalism what GM was to managerial capitalism" (Razer) 3. Re: Bitcoin philosophical musings and pressures 7 years in [drifted from: txrate, forking, etc] (Juan) 4. Re: Hacking Team has been hacked (hard) (Razer) 5. Re: Bitcoin philosophical musings and pressures 7 years in [drifted from: txrate, forking, etc] (Sean Lynch) 6. Re: Bitcoin philosophical musings and pressures 7 years in [drifted from: txrate, forking, etc] (Lodewijk andré de la porte) 7. Re: Bitcoin philosophical musings and pressures 7 years in [drifted from: txrate, forking, etc] (Sean Lynch) 8. Re: Bitcoin philosophical musings and pressures 7 years in [drifted from: txrate, forking, etc] (Lodewijk andré de la porte) 9. Re: Bitcoin philosophical musings and pressures 7 years in [drifted from: txrate, forking, etc] (Juan)

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Message: 1 Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2015 15:21:50 -0400 From: grarpamp To: Cpunks List Cc: bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org Subject: Bitcoin philosophical musings and pressures 7 years in [drifted from: txrate, forking, etc] Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

...

Then again maybe I am missing the key reasoning for this fork.

People often miss the fundamental reasons Bitcoin exists, the various conjoined ethos behind its creation. This is to be expected, it's so far ouside any thinking or life process they've ever had to do or been exposed to. It's also partly why figuring out what to do or code or adopt, is hard. And certainly not made any easier by the long term need and the current value at stake.

Creating a system in which a Botswanan can give a few bits of their impoverished wages to their friend in Mumbai without it being gated, permitted, hierarchied, middlemanned, taxed, tracked, stolen and feed-upon until pointless... this simply doesn't compute for these people. Their school of thought is centralization, profit, control and oppression. So of course they see txrate ramming up against an artificial wall as perfectly fine, it enables and perpetuates their legacy ways.

Regardless of whichever technical way the various walls are torn down, what's important is that they are. And that those who are thinking outside the box do, and continue to, take time to school these legacy people such that they might someday become enlightened and join the ethos.

Otherwise might as well work for ICBC, JPMC, HSBC, BNP, MUFG and your favorite government. Probably not as much fun though.

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Message: 2 Date: Tue, 07 Jul 2015 13:32:35 -0700 From: Razer To: cypherpunks@cpunks.org Subject: "Google is to surveillance capitalism what GM was to managerial capitalism" Message-ID: <559C3763.1000205@riseup.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

...

Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization

Shoshana Zuboff, Berkman Center for Internet & Society; Harvard Business School

April 4, 2015

Abstract: This article describes an emergent logic of accumulation in the networked sphere, ‘surveillance capitalism,’ and considers its implications for ‘information civilization.’ Google is to surveillance capitalism what General Motors was to managerial capitalism. Therefore the institutionalizing practices and operational assumptions of Google Inc. are the primary lens for this analysis as they are rendered in two recent articles authored by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian.

Varian asserts four uses that follow from computer-mediated transactions: ‘data extraction and analysis,’ ‘new contractual forms due to better monitoring,’ ‘personalization and customization,’ and ‘continuous experiments.’

An examination of the nature and consequences of these uses sheds light on the implicit logic of surveillance capitalism and the global architecture of computer mediation upon which it depends. This architecture produces a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power that I christen: ‘Big Other.’ It is constituted by unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new markets of behavioral prediction and modification. Surveillance capitalism challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the centuries long evolution of market capitalism.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 15

Keywords: surveillance capitalism, big data, Google, information society, privacy, internet of everything

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2594754