...Ultimately it foresees the blockchain freeing us all from government and corporate tyranny. It envisages a day when a cybernetic balance allows autonomous agents (like self-driving cars, owned by no-one) to serve you on demand, funded by bitcoins.
It is, in short, amazingly naive.
For one thing, it assumes that Bitcoin and open ledger systems are free. They are not.
At their heart they are funded by everyone who participates in them on a if-you-use-then-pay-to-support basis. Unfortunately, what was envisaged by Satoshi as an egalitarian utopia has already fallen privy to the problem of anacyclosis, which dictates that all anarchic systems end up organising around the strongest, smartest and most exploitative players — because hierarchy is innate to humankind. And hierarchy breeds corruption, which then induces revolution and change.
Systems by definition are not stable. This is especially true whenever there is value to be extracted.
The only way a real egalitarian system can be forged is if the world experiences true and absolute abundance with equal access to all. But then value itself would be annihilated so there would be no need for bitcoin. As long as someone has to operate, maintain, defend, fund or provide energy to the machines, hierarchy is made possible, which undermines any decentralised system.
If and when centralisation emerges (which it always will), all you get is the recreation of the old system. In this way, decentralisation ends up sowing the seeds for a corporate oligarchy made up of entirely new middlemen....
This is not empowering “the people”. It’s simply switching the powerbase away from government (which at least attempts to be democratic) and corporation (which in the public format is at least beholden to state rules) to an anonymous and unknown hierarchy — something which should be much more frightening than being spied on by the NSA.Dizzynomics
The new naivety
Izabella Kaminska
2 comments:
"Systems by definition are not stable."
Depends on what you mean by stable. Is the human body stable? Eventually it dies. Is the solar system stable? Not on the order of millions of years. Is the sun stable? It will eventually die. Isn't there a Buddhist saying that everything compound comes to an end. I don't think that eventually coming to an end means instability.
I do think that human systems are either chaotic or exist on the edge of chaos. But my belief rests upon observation, not definition.
Systems (so any sort of organised matter, ie. not fundamental particles soup) operate on the principle of metastability*. There is no such thing as an stable system other than a 'dead system' (low energy state), but a system can seem stable during a long period of time even if in the end it will return to it's natural low energy state.
Additionally, systems can only keep unnatural high energy states with enough energy flows from external systems (as per thermodynamic laws). Hence human civilization as we know it modernly (> 5k years), can only keep going as long as our technology allows us to extract and use efficiently the power of the Sun. Specially if we keep the current population levels, otherwise we will adjust to anew meta equilibrium at lower energy state (after a period of apparent chaos, which is the period when you transit from one energy state to other).
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability
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