Re: <nettime> Never Mind the Bitcoin?

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

Re-decentralization of Bitcoin (if possible at all) has only one 
purpose: to eliminate choke and control points (like 4 Chinese mints 
controlling 50+% of hash power today) and make the system more stable 
(convincing millions of miners to agree to a fork is totally different 
ball game from dealing with 4 mints.)

There is no fairness or anything else implied here: gold is distributed 
rather unfairly in earth's crust, it's extracted unfairly and hoarded 
unfairly. But one cannot (yet) change gold into gold2, make it disappear 
or become plentiful. There is no accountability and there shouldn't be - 
that's not the function of gold.

The question then becomes why Bitcoin when we have gold? The answer is 
that it's a bit easier to slice and move, *nothing* else. I guess it's 
like gold2.

On 12/15/17, 04:46, Nicolas Bourbaki wrote:
> Decentralization fetishism will not save this ideology. What Saskia
> Sassen also talks about, in her book Expulsions, is how systems that
> distribute and decentralize also obfuscate responsibility and
> accountability. Decentralization, and the focus on it, is not the cure
> but the enabler of capital 2.0. Cryptocurrencies, most, many and
> perhaps all, are Adam Smiths invisible hand encoded and now just when
> we thought there may be a future where the market is NOT considered
> nature, the anarchist and libertarian coders went and enshrined those
> principles in code and distributed it in a manner that makes changing
> it even more costly than before.

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