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Title: 2013-04-26 BBC news: A Point Of View- Bitcoin's freedom promise Post by: lunarboy on April 28, 2013, 11:18:21 AM Related to the Radio 4 documentary, but well worth a read http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22292708 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22292708) Title: Re: 2013-04-26 BBC news: A Point Of View- Bitcoin's freedom promise Post by: cypherdoc on April 28, 2013, 05:05:52 PM otoh, it just might work.
Title: Re: 2013-04-26 BBC news: A Point Of View- Bitcoin's freedom promise Post by: Roger_Murdock on April 28, 2013, 05:41:44 PM Yes, crime and violence will continue to exist in a world in which Bitcoin has become widely-used. And there will probably still be some violent criminal gangs who call themselves "governments." So what? The beauty of Bitcoin is that it empowers individuals and peaceful, voluntary exchange while disempowering thugs and coercion. Will Bitcoin make humanity perfectly free? Of course not. The real question is will it make us more free? I believe it already has. And my guess is it's just getting started.
Title: Re: 2013-04-26 BBC news: A Point Of View- Bitcoin's freedom promise Post by: davidgdg on April 28, 2013, 05:52:43 PM It's hard to take seriously anything that John Gray says. He is an ex-libertarian who went over to the dark side about ten years ago and now just seems permanently confused.
Title: Re: 2013-04-26 BBC news: A Point Of View- Bitcoin's freedom promise Post by: marcus_of_augustus on April 29, 2013, 12:09:08 PM Quote The trouble is that unlike the tranquil spiritual ether imagined by the ancient Greek mystic, cyber-space is all too clearly a human artefact. A site of unceasing warfare - abounding in worms and viruses, vulnerable to attack and decay, and needing scarce resources and energy to operate - the virtual realm of the internet is a projection of the human world with all its conflicts. It is hard to take seriously the opinion of a philosopher on things 'virtual' who only refers to the technology platform performing the "virtualisation" in the abstract and in analogies. He probably doesn't know the difference between a bit and a byte or how TCP/IP, packet communications, network routing, etc function. Yet here he is confidently espousing the technology's demise because why? ... because it is a "projection of the human world", a purely philosophical argument that has no basis in rational technical reasons. He should take a look into the large body of philosophical work surrounding network growth, emergent behaviours, automata, whole outperforming sum of the parts, crowd-sourced solutions, etc, that have a far more rigorous empirical and quantitative grounding than "it will be limited to only ever being a projection of the human world". Basically he is a technophobe, or techno-ignorant, defeatist ... so therefore it can't work. |