Cryptocurrency will always be political | Hacker News Reader

Cryptocurrency will always be political

nautil.us

68 pointspmcpinto19 comments

Apropos crypto + political : excellent must read by Yanis Varoufakis, an economist that I greatly admire (but not always 100% agree with), on "Bitcoin and the dangerous fantasy of apolitical money": https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/04/22/bitcoin-and-the-da...

I probably say this every chance I get but the cleanest insult I’ve ever seen on the world stage was when, as Greek finance minister, he called eu austerity measures “fiscal waterboarding”.

I like Varoufakis, and I don't hold Bitcoins, but I didn't find that article particularly insightful. It's just the old Keynesian fear of deflation - which invariably uses the Great Depression, since there's very little evidence of the supposed harms of deflation besides it - and a fair criticism of Bitcoin being currently more driven by speculators than regular users, but with no explanation why that's an insurmountable flaw in Bitcoin.

My friend sent me a meme today that illustrated a view (not his) of what hardcore Crypto evangelists believe. In full disclosure I am not one, but believe there is probably some utility in it, I own a decent amount of BTC (not enough to make me quit working...enough to make me think about buying a house in the near future, depending on taxes), and I understand what the community is trying to do.

It was a meme of a scene from the Matrix.

>Neo: What are you trying to tell me? That I can trade my Bitcoin for millions some day?

>Morpheus: No Neo. What I’m trying to tell you is that when you’re ready...you won’t have to.

This view I think starkly disturbed me because it seems to signal that hardcore Hodlers really do think that on a long enough timeline the whole economic system collapses.

That you won't have to sell your bitcoins doesn't imply the "whole economic system collapses". It just means you can buy all the goods and services you need directly in bitcoin.

Yeah , I do think there are those who believe in a collapse of normal economic systems but the reality is that things would probably just transition to it.

That makes no sense whatsoever. If I can buy everything in BTC that demonstrates that something happened very wrong that makes USD untenable for basic, or any kind of, transaction.

That's a very American-centric view. The fact that Amazon UK accepts orders in euros doesn't mean that the pound is untenable for any transaction. Similarly, Amazon accepting Bitcoin (thus meaning you can buy almost everything with BTC) doesn't make the dollar obsolete.

Please. Normal Forex is not the same as a deflationary crypto currency being trusted enough for normal transactions. If in the future I indeed can buy everything with cryptocurrency then I stand by my feeling that something must’ve gone quite wrong.

Why is it not the same? It'll be fine.

Anyone who seriously and unironically bases any kind of world view on either:

a) Memes, or b) Lines from The Matrix

is probably not someone to take seriously.

In a catastrophe like our whole economic system collapsing (presumably somehow leaving Bitcoin's internet/mining ecosystem untouched) the last thing on anyone's mind is going to be computer money.

This cryptocurrency article misspells Bitcoin and Ethereum. o_O

Yes, lets dismiss it altogether. Crypto is adverse to the core culture of software engineering. Keep shunning it and it will go away. Lets not be disrupted.

This is only tangential, but I really hate everyone calling cryptocurrencies "crypto" (and Wikipedia "wiki"). These words had meaning before, you know, and it's really confusing if you start overwriting a term. "currency" was added to "crypto" to form "cryptocurrency" because the word meant something already.

urm, it did?

i thought it was just a shorthand for cryptography previously?

don't see a problem with shortening something else to the same string, as both are just terms you use because you're to lazy to actually spell it out.

Crypto is the new cyber.

Since currency is created by consensus, it's inherently political. Currently the political system underlying bitcoin - in which formally, decisions are made by voting with hashing power and informally, the bitcoin core developers and a handful of large miners / pool operators have enough power to call the shots - is a disaster.

However, even deeper than this social/political structure is a value system shared by bitcoin users - there are some changes to the system that would not be accepted by users no matter how much hash rate or which influential community members backed them.

It seems that the article is trying an artsy way to introduce cryptography and hashing:

Communication is easy, but it’s hard to tell who knows what. Messages pass one another in corridors; conversations fragment. When A replied to B, had she received your message yet, or was she reading C’s? Did she ignore what you said because she didn’t like it, or because it had yet to be delivered? When D proposes a simultaneous attack on the wardens as they deliver dinner, how many people received it? When A confirms to D that she’s in, will D see the message in time? Will D know that B saw it?

Here’s one solution, if a strange one. Write a message with a very difficult mathematical problem on it—a problem so hard that it would take a month of concentration to solve. Now wait.

And I don't get the point of this. Is cryptography bad because it needs to ensure things are not intercepted in between?

In the traditional economy, ledger or account are mapping real transaction, just like a shadow of the truth. We build a huge economic system to make it work. Whole economic system will be collapse when we use cryptocurrency.

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