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

[Steven Schear]

I'm still hoping a new cryptocoin/fork implements a client-determined miner
selection capability similar to what we suggested in that 2013 paper I've
mentioned here. Heartening, Garzik & Company's decision their upcoming
Bitcoin United fork appears to implement some form of our suggested block
escheat.

On Dec 30, 2017 3:28 PM, "John Newman" <jnn at synfin.org> wrote:

>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> *From:* byfield <tbyfield at panix.com>
> *Date:* December 29, 2017 at 12:05:02 PM EST
> *To:* "Florian Cramer" <flrncrmr at gmail.com>, "Morlock Elloi" <
> morlockelloi at gmail.com>
> *Cc:* nettime-l at mx.kein.org
> *Subject:* *Re: <nettime> Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for
> blockchain*
>
> On 29 Dec 2017, at 10:01, Florian Cramer wrote:
>
> The *goal* of the Bitcoin proof of concept was 'an electronic payment
>
> system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two
>
> willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a
>
> trusted third party.' So when the author of this avid-reader essay
>
> complains 'but Visa... but FDIC... but NASDAQ,' one reasonable response is:
>
> ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The point of Bitcoin wasn't to succeed to the degree that it
>
> has, or in the way that it has.
>
>
> Hi Ted,
>
>
> If that had been Bitcoin's only goal, then it would have sufficed to create
>
> a crypographic peer-to-peer payment system based on/supporting existing
>
> currencies and their exchange rates.
>
>
> Things got politically murky with the introduction of Bitcoin as its own
>
> currency based on Hayek's and Mises' economic theory, i.e. with built-in
>
> deflation and absence of political control except through owners.
>
>
> Well, the difference is your addition of 'only,' as in it's 'only goal.'
> If I say I love you, Florian, that would be special, wouldn't it? But if I
> say I love *only* you, Florian, that's a different kettle of fish. 'Only'
> is one of those tricky words that serves as a mule for smuggling entire
> ideological apparatuses. 'Still' is another one: 'You *still* believe that?
>
> As someone who's thought a lot about design, you probably understand
> better than many what a proof of concept is: an implementation — or we'd
> maybe we should think of it in more anthropological terms, as an *artifact*
> — that, more or less, tests a specific proposal. How that test is
> constructed, and the context in which it's conducted, involve a lot of
> artifice. Many of the assumptions that shape that artifice go unstated. The
> questions we're left with, in the case of Bitcoin, are what those
> assumptions were, and what they might mean.
>
> If I'd said that goal was Bitcoin's *only* goal, then I'd agree with your
> objection, but I didn't: instead, I talked about the explicit ideological
> beliefs that dominated the cypherpunks milieu, including their implacable
> hostility to the state, their all but explicit aim of attacking models of
> trust anchored in ~public institutions, the ambiguity of their use of the
> idea of honesty, and — crucially — their interest in Vernor Vinge's novella
> _True Names_. It didn't seem worth the effort to say they were libertarian
> free-market extremists, because that's widely discussed. So your point is
> right on, but it seems like more of an elaboration ('and') than an
> objection ('but'). They didn't think talking about Hayek or Mises in the
> original Bitcoin paper, but as you say those ideas were baked into it from
> the beginning.
>
> Whoever designed Bitcoin assumed that 'currency' and 'an electronic
> payment system' were interchangeable or even identical. They (and I'm
> pretty sure it was a group, not an individual) didn't set out to design
> better banknotes *or* to develop a better PayPal, they set out to create
> something entirely new that could function as either/both but wasn't *only*
> limited to meeting those specifications.
>
> That brings us to Morlock's point about whether Bitcoin succeeded or
> failed. Two responses, one good, one bad. \_(ツ)_/¯.
>
> This reminds me of discourses on theory and practice of communism. One
> good, the other bad.
>
>
> Bitcoin failed for practical/mundane reason: it ceased to be distributed
> long time ago (today 4 Chinese mints control 50+% of hash power), while
> talking heads deceivingly ignored this, and continued to proselytize the
> initial but long extinct 'distributed' meme. It's more centralized than US
> dollar.
>
>
> PoW concentration is mandated by its technological nature and there are no
> signs that anything will change any time soon. Every other 'proof'
> introduces either benevolent coordinating authority (which is utter bs), or
> switches CPU for something that has not been demonstrated as
> concentrate-able yet because no one bothered (such as proof of space - big
> disks are naturally distributed ... right.)
>
>
> There is little more to say. Bitcoin is a big lie, for many too big to be
> acknowledged.
>
>
> Possible futures and promises will continue to be built on the miserably
> failed premise, with non-working workarounds (But maybe the next workaround
> will work? ... Bitcoin is just the first try, the concept is good? ... It's
> such great idea and must be revisited? ... etc.)
>
>
> Morlock, your point about its concentration nails it, and in that sense,
> yes, Bitcoin was a miserable failure. That structural tendency toward
> concentration was obvious in many of the experiments that contributed to
> Bitcoin, like the distributed cracks of RC5, which were dominated by actors
> with immense computing power at their disposal. Cypherpunk-types loved
> heartwarming talk about how Zapatistas and victims of sexual abuse would
> use PGP etc, but that was just playing to the crowd: they were much more
> concerned with systemic architectures and their baked-in biases because
> they knew cryptography was and would remain inevitably *politically*
> asymmetric.
>
> But as you may remember (if you're the same Morlock Elloi who was kicking
> around in those circles), all that talk about crypto-anarchy was, at its
> heart, about class. Much of what normal people think about 'class' depends
> on the state: if there's no state, there are no classes, there are just
> arbitrary individuals and groups who are more or less adept at navigating
> and negotiating whatever resources are available to them. Whatever human
> potential gets lost in the fray is just the cost of doing business — and
> 'twas ever thus.
>
> So...if Bitcoin has made some people fabulously wealthy, enabled new 'free
> markets' (including dark commerce, a growing parade of ICO cons, etc), and
> generally moved a bunch of Overton windows, do you really think some of
> them — Tim May, for example — would be upset that it was eventually
> dominated by a few Chinese mints rather than being equitably accessible for
> sheeple-to-sheeple use? If all of history a single catastrophe that keeps
> piling wreckage upon wreckage, what's a few more as long as they make you
> and yours rich?
>
> What engineer ever objected if his/her/their proof of concept failed on a
> specified front but succeeded in creating a dozen new ones? It's as if the
> Wright Brothers' plane crashed — on the moon.
>
> Cheers,
> Ted
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