Bitcoin, or How to Hammer in Nails with a Microscope

[Severian]

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=939

The answer instead is that, while the unknown inventor of Bitcoin was quite clever, most of its users are alarmingly dull.  This includes the “pioneers” who set up Bitcoin-based financial services of every kind.  Why? Because they are pounding in nails with a microscope. These fools have been handed a technology so clever, so disruptive and revolutionary, that the rulers of the world would have to fully unmask themselves as ruthless tyrants in order to suppress it, — or give up their thrones on their own free will — if it were used correctly, that is. But at present, the microscope again and again goes “clang!” against the table, the nails slowly and crookedly creep inward, and tiny shards of the world’s finest lenses fly in all directions.

Bitcoiners are pounding in nails with a microscope, because they have insisted on faithfully re-creating the financial institutions of the meatspace world – banks, stock markets, derivatives trading, and the like – without any of the familiar meatspace law enforcement mechanisms (police and courts) or the best-known traditional black-market alternative to these mechanisms: the threat of immediate physical violence as an incentive to promise-keeping.

Satoshi Nakamoto, the supposed inventor of Bitcoin, could be a Bourbaki or a man in a grey suit drawing an NSA salary.  But whoever he was, he handed this lot of morons a true jewel of “alien technology.” With which they proceeded to knock one another on the head with, exactly as they did with their stone-age cudgels the day before.  Bitcoin allows the user to exchange value without physical proximity, without the use of a central arbitrating authority, anonymously, and without having to trust anyone (save for the “Byzantine-condition” assurance that a plurality of users are running the actual Bitcoin algorithm, and not a subverted version.)  And yet the fools insist on building shoddy copies of meatspace institutions where the cryptographic perfection of this jewel is all for naught, and we’re back to having to blindly trust the user on the other side of the Internet connection when he insists that he will invest our virtual coins in real-world commodities (or the paper imitations thereof), and return some of the proceeds to us in the future.  And with none of the admittedly-limited safeguards of meatspace in the mix. 

Yes, the meatspace universe contains Bernie Madoff, Jon Corzine and their many merry friends.  But in the present-day world of Bitcoin, any digital bum who can set up a Linux box and string together some slick words imagines himself a Corzine.  And, what is far sadder, fools invariably show up, ready to part with their Bitcoins on their own free will.  They give them up in exchange for promises, backed by nothing at all. And then have the gall to complain.

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[The_Duke]

While many users do exactly as he says, "most" is a bold claim.

Can you give some arguments to that statement? Feel free to leave out pirates, SEC, Matthews, MtGoxes, Bitinstants, etc.

[cypherdoc]

This says it all:

" Reply

Stanislav says: October 11, 2012 at 8:05 pm

Dear Omnifarious,

If you look closely, this page has an ordinary donation button. Which takes donations in boring old national currencies. As you can probably guess, I am not, at present, much of a Bitcoin user. (Although my collection of FPGAs, kept around for an entirely different purpose, sometimes mines Bitcoin.)

Yours, -Stanislav"

LOL!  From the author himself.

[hazek]

This says it all:

" Reply

Stanislav says: October 11, 2012 at 8:05 pm

Dear Omnifarious,

If you look closely, this page has an ordinary donation button. Which takes donations in boring old national currencies. As you can probably guess, I am not, at present, much of a Bitcoin user. (Although my collection of FPGAs, kept around for an entirely different purpose, sometimes mines Bitcoin.)

Yours, -Stanislav"

LOL!  From the author himself.

I'm sorry but why the need for an ad hominem, why not use logic and evidence to rebut his argument? Could it be that it's because he makes a good argument?


*need to read the entire thing before I give my opinion*

[Pteppic]

Most bitcoin users are people. That means they act like people. That means they sometimes get taken in and scammed.

Anyone involved with bitcoin at this point is an early adopter. It is a bit much to expect people who are early adopters not to be enticed by something novel and potentially rewarding, but with little track record.

[Richy_T]

The reason that analogs of traditional financial institutions are being created is that they work and often were in place long before banking became the province of centralized government.

The test is if, in a free market, without government interference, those institutions which fail to provide value should quickly fail.

[justusranvier]

Oh, and someone thank him for making an observation but offering no solution. Thousands of people die of starvation every day, apparently food sucks.

All my comments are directed at the quoted text, I didn't bother to click the link.

I was very confused about how you could say he offers no solution when he puts forward no less than three in the article, but then I saw that you admitted to jumping to conclusions in the absence of evidence and your post made a lot more sense.

[acoindr]

The reason that analogs of traditional financial institutions are being created is that they work and often were in place long before banking became the province of centralized government.

The test is if, in a free market, without government interference, those institutions which fail to provide value should quickly fail.

+1

[cypherdoc]

This says it all:

" Reply

Stanislav says: October 11, 2012 at 8:05 pm

Dear Omnifarious,

If you look closely, this page has an ordinary donation button. Which takes donations in boring old national currencies. As you can probably guess, I am not, at present, much of a Bitcoin user. (Although my collection of FPGAs, kept around for an entirely different purpose, sometimes mines Bitcoin.)

Yours, -Stanislav"

LOL!  From the author himself.

I'm sorry but why the need for an ad hominem, why not use logic and evidence to rebut his argument? Could it be that it's because he makes a good argument?


*need to read the entire thing before I give my opinion*

what makes you think i didn't read the entire article first, dummy?  

an ad hominem is pointing out an irrelevant, unrelated negative argument to avoid arguing the main point. using fpga's to mine Bitcoin is a highly relevant fact in pointing out the hypocrisy in the author's arguments against Bitcoin.  that's ok; all we need is more skeptics like him to desire obtaining a few Bitcoin "just in case" to make it rock.

to get to the main arguments his can be boiled down to two:

1.  Bitcoiners can be very stupid and persistent in trying to develop meatspace financial markets or interfaces.  can't argue with this one.  i've always thought Amir, Donald, and now Nefario were stupid to pursue "approval" from regulators.  i find it interesting that failures have been confined to the UK.  devs should be active in trying to develop a distributed exchange.

2.  the jackpot of gov't regulation will stomp out Bitcoin.  this argument is nothing new and has been debated up, down, and sideways.  the market price and current longevity of Bitcoin argue against this and we have plenty examples to back the decentralized argument like bittorrent.

*i still think you're a shitty moderator for having allowed Atlas to post no less than 5-6 simultaneous threads bashing the devs and the BF.*

[acoindr]

devs should be active in trying to develop a distributed exchange.

Interesting, how might this work?

[DannyHamilton]

I'm sorry but why the need for an ad hominem, why not use logic and evidence to rebut his argument? Could it be that it's because he makes a good argument?

Nah, it's just due to lazy debate.

The author points to GLBSE as well as those who

have insisted on faithfully re-creating the financial institutions of the meatspace world – banks, stock markets, derivatives trading, and the like – without any of the familiar meatspace law enforcement mechanisms (police and courts) or the best-known traditional black-market alternative to these mechanisms: the threat of immediate physical violence as an incentive to promise-keeping.

And makes the assertion that

most of its users are alarmingly dull.  This includes the “pioneers” who set up Bitcoin-based financial services of every kind.  Why? Because they are pounding in nails with a microscope

(emphasis added by me)

There is a problem with the following argument:

Bitcoiners are pounding in nails with a microscope, because they have insisted on faithfully re-creating the financial institutions of the meatspace world

The fact that some people have insisted on re-creating the financial institutions of the meatspace world (or transacting with those creations) is not evidence that most people have engaged in this activity.  With no statistics or reliable polling on the matter, this is an assumption that could very well be false and incorrect.  It is the opinion of the author, but there is no factual argument behind the assertion.

[Mushroomized]

I agree, to some extent, that people aren't using bitcoin to the full capacity that's possible. However, my theory is that the more stuff that gets shut down or hacked, the better things pop up afterwards. For example, the end of GLBSE has prompted a lot of development of smart property and colored coins.

[Explodicle]

devs should be active in trying to develop a distributed exchange.

Interesting, how might this work?

For crypto securities, Open Transactions + multisig (not yet supported). The Silk Road proves that some limited trust can be built anonymously. If I remember correctly GLBSE ran a modified version of OT, but without multisig Nefario was able to take the coins by himself.

In my opinion the main Bitcoin dev team has been doing a fine job with multisig, and they should probably remain distanced from controversial black markets. All we needed from them was to provide the means to decentralize control over an address; third-party software can take care of the rest.

[wormbog]

Oh, and someone thank him for making an observation but offering no solution. Thousands of people die of starvation every day, apparently food sucks.

All my comments are directed at the quoted text, I didn't bother to click the link.

I was very confused about how you could say he offers no solution when he puts forward no less than three in the article, but then I saw that you admitted to jumping to conclusions in the absence of evidence and your post made a lot more sense.

The author offers no ideas, only insults and criticism. Since we're all so foolish, I invite him to use his profound vision to unleash bitcoin's true potential and make his fortune. Otherwise he's just another pathetic Balph Eubank.

[evoorhees]

I actually thought this was a very well-written and well-argued piece. The criticism he's levying against the bitcoin community is valid. Many Bitcoiners have been fools, and it is a shame to be a fool with this amazing technology.

With great power comes great responsibility, and the fact is that many people can't handle that responsibility. Now, fortunately, in the Bitcoin world most people can only hurt themselves with their mistakes... mistakes cannot be socialized to others. I did not lose money with Pirate because I'm not retarded enough to invest in obvious scam. Pirate's scam didn't affect me, because I was prudent.

What people should take away from that article is this - Bitcoin is serious technology. If you are going to use it, use it seriously. Learn it, respect it, and work to build it with wisdom and prudence.

With that said, that author should recognize that a large number of people are actually building amazing things with this technology. They are using it well, and growing it. They are playing with fire, so that some day others will have light. The majority of people have not been fools, but the fools stand out with their unfortunate antics. Admitting that there are fools using this stuff, as the author points out, is an important lesson for us all, so that we can be ever-diligent in avoiding foolishness ourselves.

[wormbog]

I actually thought this was a very well-written and well-argued piece. The criticism he's levying against the bitcoin community is valid. Many Bitcoiners have been fools, and it is a shame to be a fool with this amazing technology.

Revolutionary ideas often comes after a long string of failures. I've heard it said, "An expert is someone who has already made all the mistakes that can be made in his chosen field." Trying ideas and failing is part of the process. The fools are the folks who don't learn from their mistakes, not the folks who try and fail.

Where do good ideas come from? Often from people who look at an idea that failed and say to themselves, "I can do better."

[justusranvier]

After reading the quoted text, I didn't feel it was worth my time to click the link. Yet, for some reason I did feel it was worth my time to comment.

In my defense, I'm only human! 

In that case here's a excerpt that contains a bit more useful content:

For those who like the idea of Bitcoin but are disturbed by the fraud artists who ply their trade with impunity, there are several choices to consider:

1) Stick with means of value storage and exchange backed by traditional, more-or-less reasonable and predictable legal systems, where the keeping of one’s word is encouraged using the threat of draconian punishment.  However, legal systems which meet the “reasonable” and “predictable” conditions specified here are growing rather thin on the ground. So quite a few people are sure to remain interested in the alternatives below:

2) Build electronic systems based on Bitcoin (or other decentralized electronic cash) which incorporate “web of trust” mathematics.  Perhaps this could even be done in some especially-elegant manner, where a Bitcoin in the possession of a widely-trusted individual is actually worth more “units of value” than one owned by a newly-created or disgraced account holder.  Study the theory of Secure Multi-Party Computation. Perhaps a low-tech inspiration for this kind of thing could be Hawala, a word-of-mouth banking system successfully used in the Islamic world since the 8th century – and which no modern country has been able to suppress, despite plentiful reasons to try.

3) Build electronic systems based on Bitcoin (or other decentralized electronic cash) which scarcely require you to trust anyone at all – just the same as Bitcoin itself.  The weak link here is the connection between the world of of electronic currency and real-world physical goods (and traditional money.)  Possible solutions here include mechanical delivery systems, perhaps controlled by multiple parties: dead drops, “geocaches” or even autonomous flying machines:

…Or: Bitcoin users could ignore the above, as I’m quite certain they will, and happily carry on signing up for “banks” and “stock exchanges” run by take-the-money-and-run artists. And steadily cement the reputation of the system as a sad joke. And on the positive side, a few die-hard activists might thus avoid facing the firing squad.  Using Bitcoin will become its own punishment, the way sniffing glue is.  But the down-side is that we won’t learn just what sort of world is possible given a functioning, decentralized cryptocurrency (perhaps an interesting, albeit somewhat macabre one.  Or possibly a somewhat boring one: something like a more consumer-friendly version of the world organized criminals presently live in – the world of Swiss numbered bank accounts and airborne luggage trunks full of diamonds.)

[evoorhees]

I actually thought this was a very well-written and well-argued piece. The criticism he's levying against the bitcoin community is valid. Many Bitcoiners have been fools, and it is a shame to be a fool with this amazing technology.

Revolutionary ideas often comes after a long string of failures. I've heard it said, "An expert is someone who has already made all the mistakes that can be made in his chosen field." Trying ideas and failing is part of the process. The fools are the folks who don't learn from their mistakes, not the folks who try and fail.

Where do good ideas come from? Often from people who look at an idea that failed and say to themselves, "I can do better."

+1

[kiba]

I actually thought this was a very well-written and well-argued piece. The criticism he's levying against the bitcoin community is valid. Many Bitcoiners have been fools, and it is a shame to be a fool with this amazing technology.

Revolutionary ideas often comes after a long string of failures. I've heard it said, "An expert is someone who has already made all the mistakes that can be made in his chosen field." Trying ideas and failing is part of the process. The fools are the folks who don't learn from their mistakes, not the folks who try and fail.

Where do good ideas come from? Often from people who look at an idea that failed and say to themselves, "I can do better."

+1

Moo. The argument is that bitcoiners are still hitting nails with microscope instead of using microscope to examine nails.

[markm]

Or to put it another way, they are trying to make a quick buck from the experimental apparatus instead of focusing on actually conducting experimental procedures with it to observer the experimental results and thereby refine the experiment.

A couple of experimental results so far seem to be that when/if the time comes to deploy an actual currency using technology based on that used in the experiment, certain legal hurdles seem likely to arise and that the experimental setting possibly lacks sufficient experimental armed forces and or experimental peace officers (experimental law enforcement, possibly including enforcement of the conditions of the experiment) to properly simulate the "real world" in which a "real" currency based on the experimental currency's attributes and technology will require.

Possibly it is that latter lack that has led some experimenters to blur the lines between "experiment" and "real world", unleashing experimental apparatus upon the real world before the experiments intended to determine whether it is in fact ready for the "real world" and, indeed, the "real world" ready for it, have been concluded...

-MarkM-