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

[byfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

On 30 Dec 2017, at 16:51, Morlock Elloi wrote:

> Let's assume, for the sake of argument, deep conspiracy and that 
> Bitcoin creator(s) actually did bother to read "Austrian economics" 
> (neither of which I think is probable - looks like a parallel 
> construction), and chose a hard limit instead of exponential backoff 
> or any other of dozen possible strategies. Let's also assume that 
> there were no other (dozens) of competing ideas which simply could not 
> get any traction at the time (and this is a patently false 
> assumption.) Invention of Bitcoin was therefore not a random event, it 
> was intentional dark design having roots in nearly hundred year old 
> ideology, and there were no alternatives to it.
No need for talk about 'deep conspiracies,' just look at the archives:

	https://cypherpunks.venona.com/raw/

There are lots of theories about who Satoshi is, but no credible theory 
proposes s/he/they didn't at least read the cypherpunks list in the 
mid/late '90s. That list was *awash* in Austrian economics, so much so 
that it's easy to misinterpret explicit mentions of Hayek and Mises, 
along with their American spoor like Murray Rothbard: they were the 
floor, not the ceiling, and it was the rule, not the exception, embraced 
and expounded by the alphaest alphas on the list, like May. You could 
probably quantify some off this by correlating traffic with other 
mailing lists devoted to Mises (miseslist@mises.org) and Hayek 
(hayek-l@maelstrom.stjohns.edu), if you're into that kind of thing. (A 
nice tidbit I just found: ca. '98, Ryan Lackey's computer was called 
'mises.systemics.ai' — I wonder if that's the laptop he dropped in the 
ocean while he was being hoisted to/fro the SeaLand platform? 😹)
This is where, as Florian pointed out, your overly pat distinction 
between ~technology and ~political agency breaks down. If Bitcoin's 
designer(s) had a dozen dozen possible strategies at their disposal, did 
they happen to choose one that would mesh neatly with Austrian theory? 
Your answer is that the decision came from from /dev/rand, more or less, 
but every good cryptohead knows you should never trust an easy source of 
randomness because it isn't truly random. If you understand how it 
works, you can find the patterns. The pattern here is Austrian: Bitcoin 
is Austrian theory made digital flesh. The first waves of adopters 
outside of those circles came from techie circles that were steeped like 
forgotten tea bags in 'libertarianism' — which by that point, as Nancy 
McLean has shown, was a cynical misnomer for free-market extremism. And 
you could probably quantify some off that by correlating early Bitcoin 
adoption with, say, conservative clubs at universities — some of this 
history is recent enough that it hasn't crossed Google's event horizon 
yet.
Also, contrary to what you said earlier, from the list's beginning in 
'92 there were debates — extensive, explicit, and sustained — about 
what currencies are/n't and how various digital payment systems relate 
to them, practically and theoretically. And when you follow those 
threads (literally hundreds of them), you'll see most of Bitcoin's basic 
ideals and problems spelled out just in a few words within the first 
year or so, say, by early '94. It's pretty astounding. Here's one 
example, from Miron Cuperman on 20 Nov 92:
> > - Charge for the mix services with crypto-money.  The crypto-money
> > could be some networking service.  It could be even mix transmission.
> > For example, the basic currency could be the transmission of 10K
> > through a mix.  One would have to create a mix and let the bank
> > route some traffic through it thereby putting credits in your
> > account.  Once you have credits, you could spend them anywhere.
> > One might want to fiddle with the definition of the currency so
> > that it does not depreciate with time.
But your following point is interesting, if I may: a technology may be 
designed to implement an ideology, but as its adoption expands, the 
results are paradoxical — OT1H, it continues to carry or even amplify 
that ideology, OT0H later adopters don't realize it. You can make this 
point without cartoons about about supervillains and badly aimed rants 
about 'political correctness.' But when you follow that full circle, 
you'll quickly see how and why your claim that $TECHNOLOGY is $RANDOM 
breaks down: everyone designing, implementing, funding, promoting, 
adopting, and abusing new technologies does so *in a world that's always 
already totally pwned by ideologies.*
> Hapless adopters, unable to see Hayek's ghost in the algorithm, just 
> continued to use it until it was too late.
> What does this mean?
>
> It means that technology has became effective carrier device for the 
> ideology, amplifying it as everything else it touches, and if ordinary 
> people cannot see through it ("out of the question") as they could see 
> through Nazism and similar, well, then the ordinary people are going 
> to get fu*ked in perpetuity, and there is absolutely nothing one can 
> do about it (bitching notwithstanding.) All Dr. Evil has to do is 
> carefully design a shiny object, and cretins will unconditionally 
> descend on it. Easier than organizing rallies.
> It's a worldview that goes exactly nowhere. It doesn't even have 
> afterlife.
> Try coding instead.
This relates to the 'magnificent bribe' thread, specifically to remarks 
about the roles that intelligence agencies may have in promoting certain 
technologies. I like the political realism in those discussions, but 
some of it makes me nuts — for example, the idea of 'dual-use' 
technologies, which is mostly a clerical distinction. The fact that some 
actors explicitly aspire to omniscience isn't God writ small, it's the 
psychotic Dr. Schreber writ large. As Deleuze put it:
> > Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest 
> > assured that it works: Judge Schreber feels something, produces 
> > something, and is capable of explaining the process theoretically. 
> > Something is produced: the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors.
So these actors explicitly aspire to know everything about everyone, and 
are even in a position to promote technologies and services that may 
move them closer to that goal — so what? Subjectivity and sociability 
can and will respond, and they'll move the goalposts. I'm not being 
glib: that generic observation doesn't do much to help people in the 
Khmer Rouge killing fields. But the shrill apocalypticism about the 
shifting bounds of privacy is, basically, middle-class Anglo-American 
anxiety.
Cheers,
Ted
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