Title: What would Marshall McLuhan have to say about Bitcoin? Post by: legendface66 on March 10, 2014, 01:57:46 PM And along the same lines, how will Bitcoin alter the minds of the people who use it?
How will exposure to Bitcoin effect language? tldr: Should we use the word control and abandon the word ownership? I, like many people, have had trouble sleeping recently. The upshot of lying awake in bed is all that extra thinking time. So here's what I have been wondering: We are used to thinking in terms of ownership. I owned a whole bunch of Bitcoins not so long ago and now I don't. What the hell happened? Well, ownership is an idea that rides on top of control. We appeal to an authority powerful enough to control our assets to establish our ownership. Today this is usually a combination of a holding institution - say, a bank, and an arbitrator -say, the civil courts. These are entities with greater ability to control the asset than ourselves and we turn to them for arbitration when ownership of an asset becomes an open question. Not anymore though. No one has greater ability to control the blockchain than the individual user. That's the whole idea. In fact, "Bitcoins" are a token representing control of the blockchain. The democratising quality of the blockchain is the absence of a powerful actor which would be capable of managing assets or arbitrating in case of dispute. Without this authoritative actor the idea of ownership is meaningless. All we have is control. We need to learn to not give that control away. That's a slightly sleep deprived ramble but maybe worth some discussion. |