bitcoins
via 
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ie: bitcoins & organic farming (short documentary)
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 Aron Solomon (@aronsolomon)12/29/13 7:36 AM Love this @beltzner piece (via @markzohar) “Why I Want Bitcoin to Die in a Fire”antipope.org/charlie/blog-s… |
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crypto currency manifest
Olivier Auber on the P2P Money and Crypto Currencies Manifesto http://t.co/iEdKZJHdtO
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mbauwens/status/551080504334618625
from video:language as driving element of our structural culture..weapons evolved with language..money and capital most sophisticated and ultimate weapon
A possible conversation between a blockchain enthusiast and newbie:
“Bitcoin is electronic money! It is made from blockchains, which are electronic ledgers that can also support many kinds of electronic contracts and trades.”
“But we already have money, and ledgers. In fact, bank ledgers were one of the first computer applications.”
“Yes, but blockchain ledgers are decentralized. Sure, compared to ordinary computer ledgers, blockchain ledgers take millions or more times the computing power. But blockchains have no central org to trust. Instead, you trust the whole system.”
Misplaced enthusiasm about bitcoin in Kenya is another chapter in the “tech will let Africa leapfrog” story: https://t.co/tp0n8TPiIk
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/EthanZ/status/684029918330617856
they attempted to build partnerships with merchants like Bejo’s at first. They then realized they didn’t have enough users to focus on merchants, and that many of the 12 local businesses they worked with didn’t understand the blockchain. They put a hold on their merchant efforts, pivoting their focus to creating a microtransaction app for bitcoin.[..]The problem was that the remittance market did not catch on as predicted.[..]Bitcoin was also sold as a way of reaching the poor and unbanked, and investors who came to Africa would sometimes blend their sales pitch with an ounce of evangelicalism. Rossiello said she has to remind people she is not vaccinating orphans, that she is running a business, albeit in an emerging market. “We cannot tell you we believe we’re going to raise people out of poverty,” Rossiello said.
Rossiello has to stress this because these investors often don’t understand Kenya, or perhaps don’t even want to understand Kenya, but instead just see Kenya as a place without Western technology and that is thus in need of it.
[..]
Kipochi founder Pelle Braendgaard said M-Pesa, celebrated as a way of introducing digital money to the masses, actually used its immense power as a gatekeeper to keep startups out of the market. M-Pesa’s decision to stop bitcoin-related transactions on its platform is something Bitpesa and Lipisha Africa are currently challenging in court.
[..]
“It comes down to the general picture that has been drawn of Africa in the West. You might believe that you are helping, even though you are an entrepreneur just like any other.”
[..]
These narratives, however, are dangerous when they smudge the messy realities of African countries. The Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole, in an article critiquing America’s reaction to the Kony 2012 video, explains how Africa has always been seen as a playground for Western adventurers:
Africa has provided a space onto which white egos can conveniently be projected. It is a liberated space in which the usual rules do not apply: a nobody from America or Europe can go to Africa and become a godlike savior or, at the very least, have his or her emotional needs satisfied. Many have done it under the banner of “making a difference.”
[..]
“I love bitcoin to the bone,” Juma said. “I do not think bitcoin is going to change everything. I don’t think it is enough. I think there is more to improve. I think it’s great that we do have bitcoin, but I think Africa needs to develop its own solutions.”
a nother way… radical econ … and deeper.. deep enough
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Really remarkable (and not good) Bitcoin news: Mike Hearn quits Bitcoin medium.com/@octskyward/th…
From the start, I’ve always said the same thing: Bitcoin is an experiment and like all experiments, it can fail..
But despite knowing that Bitcoin could fail all along, the now inescapable conclusion that it has failed still saddens me greatly. The fundamentals are broken and whatever happens to the price in the short term, the long term trend should probably be downwards. I will no longer be taking part in Bitcoin development and have sold all my coins.
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@mbusigin
The fact that the single largest user of power in Iceland is bitcoin mining is a bug in capitalism.businessinsider.com/photos-iceland…
Emin Gün Sirer (@el33th4xor) tweeted at 2:10 AM – 23 Jun 2017 :
Chainalysis Says They’ve Found the Missing $1.7 Billion Dollar Mt Gox Bitcoins…. /Cc @jony_levin https://t.co/UYtM1vT6qJ (http://twitter.com/el33th4xor/status/878163408754843648?s=17)
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quotes from Arthur
you are also correct that I assert that it is not just Proof-of-Work wasted computation on crypto-cracking that is the problem. Don’t get me wrong, it multiples the problem a thousand-fold, but the fundamental problem remains. Bitcoin burns more electricity than the whole country of Ireland to achieve about 5 transactions per second. That is a pitiful and unforgivable waste.
But the problem does not end with changing Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-[fill-in-the-blank].
First of all, main contenders [Work] and [Stake] both amplify Pareto Effects ensuring the rich get richer, and the powerful get more powerful. That doesn’t really solve any of the problems of our monetary system. In fact, it is hard for me to imagine a decentralized digital currency design that could more accurately recreate all the problems of national currencies than Bitcoin. But that is a conversation for another time.
Proof-of-[Value] and [Cooperation] are well-meaning approaches trying to solve some of these problem, but they fail to get the core issue: Consensus. These are all methods which everyone pretends are about creating consensus. Because of course, we must all agree about the data for it to be valid, right?
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A Single Bitcoin Transaction Takes Thousands of Times More Energy Than a Credit Card Swipe
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ypkp3y/bitcoin-is-still-unsustainable
michel fb share
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World Economic Forum (@wef) tweeted at 5:30 AM – 21 Oct 2017 :
#BestOf: The electricity required for a single bitcoin trade could power a house for a whole month https://t.co/iD5tTmEwuD #economics https://t.co/0F3NQLtrzR (http://twitter.com/wef/status/921700106650472448?s=17)
? why spend any energy there..? (ie: measuring transactions.. validating people)
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you don’t understand bitcoin because you think money is real
[https://medium.com/@mariabustillos/you-dont-understand-bitcoin-because-you-think-money-is-real-5aef45b8e952]
Money itself is an illusion, a mass hallucination. You’re working hard to make it, grow it, and keep it, but even so, the only real thing about it is its symbolic power. Which is indeed awesome, considered from a certain angle.
The fight for stability in any currency is always in the process of being lost, because wherever there is a chance to game or forge a transaction, human nature is such that some will try to cheat. Even the limited and precarious stability we have in developed countries requires vigilance and work on the part of countless principled people, and there’s never certainty. The struggle to preserve the illusion that money is real is never over, and it never can be.
begs we disengage from measuring transactions.. that’s what’s intoxicating human nature.. just like the measuring ness of ie: school intoxicates human nature into cheating.. we need rat park.. not more ways to measure/secure transactions..
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OuiShare (@OuiShare) tweeted at 8:54 AM on Fri, Dec 08, 2017:
#techforgood The Social Impact Of Blockchain: by @ANA_Anacoin – “According to @wef, over $1.4bn has been invested into #blockchain technology since 2013.
So far, the majority of that investment has been in the financial industry, in the form of #bitcoin’ https://t.co/jVj0MkIRLChttps://t.co/XI1C4dlSrF
(https://twitter.com/OuiShare/status/939161223274344451?s=03)
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Nicholas Perry (@ultimape) tweeted at 5:45 AM – 15 Dec 2017 :
@leashless “As a surveillance apparatus, it is difficult to imagine a more perfect way to monitor how citizens behave than to link transaction histories to the currency itself.”
https://t.co/qoi7RzswhP (http://twitter.com/ultimape/status/941650325265682432?s=17)
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Steven Johnson on bitcoin – rather perhaps.. on blockchain
beyond the bitcoin bubble
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/magazine/beyond-the-bitcoin-bubble.html
But on a technical level, something miraculous is happening — *something that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. . t.. I’ve managed to complete a secure transaction without any of the traditional institutions that we rely on to establish trust. No intermediary brokered the deal; no social-media network captured the data from my transaction to better target its advertising; no credit bureau tracked the activity to build a portrait of my financial trustworthiness.
*cool.. but is that what we want/crave/need..? to get better at measured/secure transactions..?
And the platform that makes all this possible? No one owns it. There are no venture investors backing Ethereum Inc., because there is no Ethereum Inc. As an organizational form, Ethereum is far closer to a democracy than a private corporation. No imperial chief executive calls the shots.
who cares if no one owns it..? if the whole idea.. (of measuring transactions) is taking up our time.. we don’t own our time.. we have to get to be a people that is grokking about what matters .. everyday.. not just trying to improve on status quo ie: measuring transactions.
But in a way, the Bitcoin bubble may ultimately turn out to be a distraction from the true significance of the blockchain. The real promise of these new technologies, many of their evangelists believe, lies not in displacing our currencies but in replacing much of what we now think of as the internet, while at the same time returning the online world to a more decentralized and egalitarian system. If you believe the evangelists, the blockchain is the future. But it is also *a way of getting back to the internet’s roots..t
*indeed..as it could be – to connect us.. not measure/id us
The question is whether, after the bubble has burst, the very real promise of the blockchain can endure.
only if we let go of measuring things
The biggest problems that technologists tackled after 1995 — many of which revolved around identity, community and payment mechanisms — were left to the private sector to solve. This is what led, in the early 2000s, to a powerful new layer of internet services, which we might call InternetTwo.
how about we just go back to community.. sans payment/money.. sans id
You can’t fix the problems technology has created for us by throwing more technological solutions at it. You need forces outside the domain of software and servers to break up cartels with this much power..t
that would be.. 7bn alive people.. as energy.. let’s facil that
But the open protocols beneath them still have the potential to build something better.
If we can’t figure out a way to introduce new, rival base-layer infrastructure, then we’re stuck with the internet we have today..t
infra: 2 convos ..as the day
ie: hlb via 2 convos that io dance.. as the day..[aka: not part\ial.. for (blank)’s sake…].. a nother way
(on bitcoin) – Together, those two ideas solved the distributed-database problem and the funding problem.
what if those aren’t the problem
let’s go deeper
In a blog post published in October 2017, Fred Wilson, a founder of Union Square Ventures and an early advocate of the blockchain revolution, thundered against the spread of I.C.O.s. “I hate it,” Wilson wrote, adding that most I.C.O.s “are scams.
How would a distributed ledger and a token economy somehow challenge one of the tech giants? One of Fred Wilson’s partners at Union Square Ventures, Brad Burnham, suggests a scenario revolving around another tech giant that has run afoul of regulators and public opinion in the last year: Uber. “Uber is basically just *a coordination platform between drivers and passengers,” ..t ..Burnham says.
imagine *a coordination platform between people and people/tribe via daily curiosities
The blockchain world proposes something different. Imagine some group like Protocol Labs decides there’s a case to be made for adding another “basic layer” to the stack. Just as GPS gave us a way of discovering and sharing our location, this new protocol would define a simple request: *I am here and would like to go there. . t
imagine.. *i am curious about ___ .. and bc/mech connects us to local people curious about the same
The true test of the blockchain will revolve — like so many of the online crises of the past few years — around the problem of identity.
what if the problem is solved when we let go of id.. ie: only label.. what are you curious about today..
So much of the blockchain’s architecture is shaped by predictions about how that architecture might be abused once it finds a wider audience. That is part of its charm and its power. ..Its rules are designed with one eye on how those rules might be exploited down the line. t
next day tweet:
Steven Johnson (@stevenbjohnson) tweeted at 7:15 AM – 19 Jan 2018 :
That’s it, I will never need another blurb for any of my books again. Thank you, sir. https://t.co/6Xgku0Swcj (http://twitter.com/stevenbjohnson/status/954356707542659072?s=17)
What if i tell you *he lays out a fairly convincing complex case that blockchain infrastructure is the only hope to undermine monopoly capitalism’s control of our identities, and also it reads like cormac mccarthy hosting a podcast with adorno, einstein & the kid from war games
*if only he had
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Taleb on bitcoin and insurance ness
[https://medium.com/opacity/bitcoin-1537e616a074#—0-337]
But its mere existence is an insurance policy that will remind governments that the last object establishment could control, namely, the currency, is no longer their monopoly. This gives us, the crowd, an insurance policy against an Orwellian future.
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Nathaniel Popper (@nathanielpopper) tweeted at 12:13 PM – 23 Feb 2018 :
Interesting estimate of how much the biggest Bitcoin mining company, Bitmain, made last year in profits — $4 billion. For comparison sake, that is the same that Goldman Sachs brought in. https://t.co/voEizsUDiW (http://twitter.com/nathanielpopper/status/967115282232655872?s=17)
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via ahmed rt
Luma Shihabeldin (@ThinkDesignLuma) tweeted at 12:30 AM – 23 Mar 2018 :
The challenges of blockchain (and it’s transparency);
“This vast trove of data is irrevocably tainted with unremovable links to illegal child pornography, which are inevitably distributed among and by all users of the currency.” #bitcoin #blockchain https://t.co/dNWGq2ytdh (http://twitter.com/ThinkDesignLuma/status/977070066012512256?s=17)
An analysis of the Bitcoin blockchain – the publicly accessible ledger of transactions upon which the system is built – has revealed this vast trove of data is irrevocably tainted with unremovable links to illegal child pornography, which are inevitably distributed among and by all users of the currency.
The discovery of this – in addition to other questionable and possibly outlawed content stored within the blockchain – hypothetically makes Bitcoin ownership illegal in almost every country that has laws against the possession and distribution of images of child abuse.
“Since all blockchain data is downloaded and persistently stored by users, they are liable for any objectionable content added to the blockchain by others. Consequently, it would be illegal to participate in a blockchain-based [system] as soon as it contains illegal content.”
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Arthur Charpentier (@freakonometrics) tweeted at 3:41 AM – 4 Dec 2017 :
Bitcoin Mining Now Consuming More Electricity Than 159 Countries Including Ireland & Most Countries In Africa https://t.co/FDWJRpL6sEhttps://t.co/PjtNAvJagk (http://twitter.com/freakonometrics/status/937632848739266560?s=17)
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Michel Bauwens (@mbauwens) tweeted at 5:51 AM – 21 Aug 2018 :
RT @JenniferSertl: 23 Fascinating Bitcoin And Blockchain Quotes Everyone Should Read https://t.co/X3psJBshfg #blochchain #scenarioshttp://twitter.com/mbauwens/status/1031871518748418049?s=17
noticing all the quotes are by people embedded in the fin system (huang security law) .. like feeding whales in sea world Oreos.. then asking them what they think about getting their own cookie jar et al
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be you. 