fuuuuuuuu
i think i have a book. current word count 30,410/15,000 (35,546 if you include the footnotes).
prodded the loved one yet again to get preliminary sketches started for the great cover idea ASAP (a similar problem to me as far as turning simple ideas into sistine chapels). perhaps an art card or two or three.
need to also do a “business” cover. (dunno how two covers works out on amazon if at all, WE SHALL SEE)
i have one more bit to add to the text, chatting to steve from the pembury, which is literally the most successful merchant adoption of bitcoin for legitimate commerce i know of. and even he thinks he might switch off the bitcoin thing soon.
installed calibre to do the ebook conversion. it’s as much of an interface abomination as i remember. the conversion scripts are pretty cool but. let’s see if i can work this thing.
(when i had a blackberry i used the calibre command line tools all the time, because the ONLY ebook reader was mobipocket. and you had to get that off shady websites because amazon took it down when they bought mobipocket and adapted .mobi to be the kindle format. and converted epubs to mobi for it. and yeah, FBreader on my android phone is better in every way.)
now going through, rewriting and proofing obsessively and adding jokes. someone suggested i say … wait for it … “buttcoin”.
excerpt below is at: davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/the-conspiracist-gold-bug-economics-of-bitcoin.html
(and THERE'S A MAILING LIST you can sign up for too)
The conspiracist gold bug economics of Bitcoin
The design of Bitcoin, and the political tone of its early community, makes sense only in the context of the far-right crank ideas that are ancestor to the cyberlibertarian subculture it rose from.1 Most of its problems as money are because it’s built on crank assumptions.
Old ideologies come back when they fill a present desire and there’s an opening for them. So these claims, somewhere between wrong and not-even-wrong, showed up full-blown in Bitcoin discussion, proponents straight-facedly repeating claims from earlier blatant conspiracism as if this was all actually proper economics.
The gold standard – an economy with a fixed money supply – sounds plausible at first. Even prosperous first world countries tried to run on gold until the 1930s. But they suffered manic booms and devastating busts, over and over. It took until the Great Depression for governments to realise that managing the money supply was not optional. Countries recovered from the Great Depression pretty much as they left the gold standard behind, because managing your money supply – inject money every now and then, manage interest rates, require banks to be regulated and insured, run fractional reserves and so forth – works ridiculously better, and the people in your country are much happier.
But a standard mode of pseudoscience is to adopt and fervently defend a discarded idea, and “gold bugs” were no exception.
(Gold bugs are frankly bizarre. There are lots of rarer metals than gold, but you never hear about “rhodium bugs,” “scandium bugs” or even “platinum bugs.”)
American far-right group the John Birch Society have long claimed that inflation comes from central bank increase of the money supply2 – in fact, they try to redefine “inflation” to mean this – for the purpose of stealing “value” from the people, and that this is why the gold standard was abolished and the Federal Reserve founded. Eustace Mullins furthered the theories amongst conspiracy theorists with the 1993 reprint of his 1952 book Secrets of the Federal Reserve, which blames the Fed’s creation on “the Rothschild-controlled Bank of England”. (Mullins was also famous for his anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, though thankfully those didn’t make it into the Bitcoin ideology.)
These ideas had also been propagated in the mainstream by Ron Paul in the wake of the 2008 credit crunch and the quantitative easing that followed. (Though he's not a fan of Bitcoin – he wants a return to actual gold after he abolishes the Fed.3)
Bitcoin ideology bought in early to the entire Federal Reserve conspiracy package: that the Fed is a plot to use inflation to steal value from the people and hand it to a shadowy cabal of elites who also control the government; that the worldwide economy is in danger of collapse at any moment due to central banking and fractional reserve banking; that gold – sorry, Bitcoin – has intrinsic value that will protect you from this collapse. Advocates repackage and propagate these ideas almost verbatim, even though they almost certainly don't know who or where they trace back to.
In this context, and particularly in Bitcoin discourse, you’ll see many words that appear to be English but are actually specialised conspiracy theory jargon. "Liberty" means only freedom from government; "tyranny" means only government; “force” and “violence” mean only government force and violence; “open societies” is a code word for “free market without regulation”; “freedom” means “free market without regulation” and only that.
Nakamoto’s original Bitcoin software implementation, a descendant of which is still used today, strictly limits the supply of bitcoins: there will only ever be 21 million BTC. So advocates claim Bitcoin is, somehow, sufficiently similar to gold to serve as a “store of value” in the desired manner. This is despite its extreme volatility making it almost useless as a store of value, and way harder to use than any currency should be even for its few use cases.
The conventional view is that inflation is a phenomenon of consumer prices, consumer confidence, productivity, commodity and asset prices, etc., which a central bank then responds to with monetary policy. The conspiracist view is that it's the central bank intervention causing it. Bitcoin ideology assumes that inflation is a purely monetary phenomenon, and that Bitcoin is immune due to its strictly limited supply. This was demonstrated stupendously false when the price of a bitcoin dropped from $1000 in late 2013 to $200 in early 2015 – 400% inflation – while supply only went up 10%.
Nakamoto’s 2008 white paper alluded to these ideas, but the 2009 release announcement for Bitcoin 0.1 states them outright:4
The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.
Bitcoin failed at every one of Nakamoto’s aspirations here. The price is ridiculously volatile and has had multiple bubbles; the unregulated exchanges (with no central bank backing) front-run their customers, paint the tape to manipulate the price, and are hacked or just steal their users’ funds; and transaction fees and the unreliability of transactions make micropayments completely unfeasible. Because all of this is based in crank ideas that don’t work.
A week after Bitcoin 0.1 was released, Jonathan Thornburg wrote on the Cryptography and Cryptography Policy mailing list: “To me, this means that no major government is likely to allow Bitcoin in its present form to operate on a large scale.”5 The important point here is that governments totally did, and treated it like any other financial innovation: give it room to run, make it very clear that regulation applies, give it a bit more room to run, repeat. The advocates’ ideas of how governments work were already completely at odds with predictable reality.
(I’m still baffled at the notion that the governments of first-world countries are somehow fundamentally against the idea of people doing well with innovations in finance.)
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1 This section draws heavily from The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism by David Golumbia (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), a short but very useful academic survey of just where this particular crank idea cluster sprang from.
2 The conspiracy theory is most famously set out in Robert Welch. “The Truth In Time”. American Opinion, November 1966.
3 David Ferguson. “Ron Paul slams stability of U.S. dollar and Bitcoin in pro-gold rant”. Raw Story, 23 April 2013.
4 Satoshi Nakamoto. “Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency”. P2P Foundation forums, 11 February 2009.
5 Jonathan Thornburg. “Bitcoin v0.1 released”. Cryptography and Cryptography Policy mailing list, 17 January 2009.
ここには何もないようです