> similar to how Bitcoin salespeople spent most of a decade saying it’d be better than cash and credit cards before trying to claim they’d had different goals all along.
As someone following Bitcoin for a long time since just after genesis, I can assure you that replacing cash and credit cards was never on the original agenda but instead a byproduct of the goal. Make no mistake, the goal was always to decentralize currency and give the “power” of money back to the people. That said, in a decentralized system, there can be more than one goal and goals do not need to be unified across participants. That freedom is one of the beauties of decentralization.
As long as a third party central authority controls our money system, we will always be subject to the whims of the few. Bitcoin is helping to liberate us and it’s absolutely working.
> it’d be important to have real cost and control information to show that it wasn’t trading ICANN for a different group which has similar control
This exists by virtue of our trust in cryptography - which for me is absolute.
> As an aside, Symantec screwing up does not seem relevant to a discussion about ICANN. Perhaps you could explain why you believe it to be?
Less directly and more by way of overall system architecture, the separation of DNS and “truth” has caused many issues to the Internet. It’s relevant because Handshake finally combines DNS and truth [1] by essentially completing the once incomplete DNSSEC.
> As long as a third party central authority controls our money system, we will always be subject to the whims of the few. Bitcoin is helping to liberate us and it’s absolutely working.
A bold claim without evidence. In fact, the opposite may be true [1]. This is but one counterpoint; another notable problem is the centralization of bitcoin mining in China [2].
The same can be said about any money system in a capitalist economy (e.g., 1% owns 40% of the wealth in the US [1.1]).
> This is but one counterpoint; another notable problem is the centralization of bitcoin mining in China [2].
I'm not sure this is 'looming' today as the article boldly claims, but centralization is definitely a risk. It's important for everyone to participate in the system as they can for a more equal distribution of ownership - akin to how one should exercise their vote in US elections.
> As someone following Bitcoin for a long time since just after genesis, I can assure you that replacing cash and credit cards was never on the original agenda but instead a byproduct of the goal.
As someone who was also there, I stopped reading at this point. The things getting circulation were bold predictions about replacing cash and credit cards in daily life and anyone who questioned that inevitability was dismissed as not understanding it. Everyone knew it was an attempt to dress up “use your money to make me rich” in a more noble guise but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
I disagree with the claims about effectiveness, but this is otherwise correct.
Bitcoin emerged from the Cypherpunks crowd; while nobody has positively IDed the 'real' author of the paper, the ideological motivations are rooted in anarcho-capitalist thought. The operative theory is really not that different than Grover Norquist's; attack the tax base and the state withers. Grover is just less ambitious.
The flaw in the bitcoin thesis is that the internet is powerful tool of centralized control and reinforces authoritarians, not the opposite.
I'm resigned to losing internet points any time I open my mouth about bitcoin. I'm neither a cheerleader nor an opponent, so approximately nobody involved likes what I say about it.
We probably disagree on other things bitcoin-related, but right here I think it is only about how we're defining 'success'. I agree that it is an existence-proof for decentralized currency, and am not trying to downplay the significance of that.
I think Bitcoin was stopped, it was adopted by a secondary tier who were only using it to speculate, then it was brought into the tax systems of governments, now it's treated as principally something other than for daily transactions.
It's so volatile it's useless except for speculators.
Greed ruined it, I feel, like it does with everything else.
As someone following Bitcoin for a long time since just after genesis, I can assure you that replacing cash and credit cards was never on the original agenda but instead a byproduct of the goal. Make no mistake, the goal was always to decentralize currency and give the “power” of money back to the people. That said, in a decentralized system, there can be more than one goal and goals do not need to be unified across participants. That freedom is one of the beauties of decentralization.
As long as a third party central authority controls our money system, we will always be subject to the whims of the few. Bitcoin is helping to liberate us and it’s absolutely working.
> it’d be important to have real cost and control information to show that it wasn’t trading ICANN for a different group which has similar control
This exists by virtue of our trust in cryptography - which for me is absolute.
> As an aside, Symantec screwing up does not seem relevant to a discussion about ICANN. Perhaps you could explain why you believe it to be?
Less directly and more by way of overall system architecture, the separation of DNS and “truth” has caused many issues to the Internet. It’s relevant because Handshake finally combines DNS and truth [1] by essentially completing the once incomplete DNSSEC.
[1] https://github.com/handshake-org/hdns