Right. And, not for the first time I'm reminding you that straw man arguments such as "those who claim that bitcoin will be the solution to poverty, corruption, fraud, bank abuse, oppression, censorship, etc., etc.. " are bullshit and I'm calling you on it. Again. I know hundreds of people within this community both on the technical and financial side and I can't think of a single one of them that sees it in the way as you're trying to paint it here. Not one.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2015/04/02/how-bitcoin-will-end-world-poverty/ It's a tool. Some tools, like crossbows for example, are known to have levelled the playing field somewhat between the previously empowered and the disenfranchised. No longer did you need to be a trained full time professional belonging to a paid standing army to be useful on the battlefield.
What? Is that something people get out of World of Warcraft?
Like I said in my previous post, you're deliberately, disingenuously conflating tool and solution. I know you're smarter than that hence my facetious tone. [ ... ]Some tools, like surveillance databases, armoured cars and the like are known to have been of more use to those with privilege and power than those without. Did we throw out computers because IBM helped the nazis track dissidents and minorities with their punched card technology?
*You* keep saying that there are "good tools" and "bad tools". Not me.
The Internet is a tool that can be used by anyone for almost any purpose but, generally speaking, a society with ubiquitous access to a free and open Internet is a greater threat to the .1% than to the rest of us. [ ... ] You're certainly old enough to remember the painful death throes of the old guard music industry and how it flapped about and sued the hell out of anyone that moved in an effort to forestall the inevitable change that the Internet was bringing to their business models.
Well that ended in a complete overhaul of the industry in spite of their best, and most cunning efforts.
Good example! As we know, the copyright laws have been repealed, the RIAA and MIAA have been disbanded, and anyone can now share songs and movies for free without interference from the copyright industry. You can put up any movie or song you like on YouTube, and download songs from iTunes for the storage and bandwidth cost.
Yes, a "free and open" internet would be great. When it came out of academia, for a while it was hoped that it would be so. That was promptly fixed, and the remaining holes are being plugged.
In the early days, WWW servers were fully decentralized and anyone could set one up. Email was relayed by an uncoordinated SMTP nework. Then those functions got moved to ISPs, which could be forced by judicial orders to censor content and block users. Then they got centralized even further into global corporation services like Wordpress, Twitter, Facebook, Google, GMail, and YouTube; which essentially own any contents that people can produce, and can censor it instantaneously without bothering with laws.
So now, instead of discussing the next revolution with your friends in the back room of a tavern, you do it on Facebook or bitcontalk, where "the 1%" can spy on you from the comfort of their desks.
you've closed your mind to anything positive about Bitcoin and are determined to repeat ad nauseam negative arguments regardless of whether anyone's shot them down or not so if it were just the two of us here, I'd certainly save my breath.
Because the counter-arguments always end like "That is possible but I am 100% sure that that it will not happen"...
It its bizarre to see libertarians and anarchists fight for a system that is supposed to kill cash and independent banks, and force *everybody* to put *all* their money and *all* their money transactions -- from buying a coffee to buying Apple -- in a *global* public ledger, that can be effectively controlled by 4-5 large corporations...
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