Bitcoin is Venice: Difference between revisions

==== On paradigms in crisis ====

{{Drop|T|his is not}} to say contrarians cannot be popular or correct — [[Gerd Gigerenzer|Gigerenzer]], [[Nassim Nicholas Taleb|Taleb]], [[Benoit Mandelbrot|Mandelbrot]], [[Kathleen Stock|Stock]], [[David Graeber|Graeber]], [[James C. Scott|Scott]], [[Jane Jacobs|Jacobs]], [[Rory Sutherland|Sutherland]] and others ply a healthy trade damning the absurdities of our institutions — but our institutions blithely carry on, regardless.

Well, at least until real-world facts intrude: only when it becomes clear a paradigm not only ''should'' not work [[Paradigm failure|but, in practice, ''does'' not]], does it go into a crisis. In the worst case, it cannot recover and a wholesale redrawing of the landscape is on the cards: a new paradigm must be born, that accounts for the changed practical facts, with new rules, new elders and a new mandate.  

But before that, [[paradigm|paradigms]] have a habit of shapeshifting, reframing anomalies around their fringes and boxing on. You cannot defeat a paradigm with a purely theoretical argument: you must ''punch it in the mouth''. In this way [[Karl Popper]]’s idea of [[falsification]] doesn’t really describe the way science progresses in practice. But — ironically — the [[falsification]] [[paradigm]] hangs on, not yet having been punched hard enough in the mouth.

So we should listen to the theoretical arguments of outsiders like David Graeber and Allen Farrington, but not be surprised if they don’t carry much water. They can still, in their way, shape and direct the way even experts think about the world. And bitcoin is in no sense a spent disruptive force: it may not yet have thrown a telling punch, but this is not to say it won’t. Allen Farrington is clear: soon enough, it will.  

[[David Graeber]] was, properly, an outsider: an anarchist anthropologist and one of the leading conceivers of the ''Occupy Wall Street'' movement.<ref>https://novaramedia.com/2021/09/04/david-graebers-real-contribution-to-occupy-wall-street-wasnt-a-phrase-it-was-a-process/</ref> Allen Farrington is, in one sense, not — he is a well-read industry insider who would not tear it all to the ground, but would rather “make finance great again” by restoring capitalism to its Venetian apex — but in another sense he ''is'', because his means of doing so would be with [[bitcoin]], and by destroying what he sees as the “strip-mining” mentality of the capitalism yielded by fiat currency.   

Yet Farrington cautions against excessively theoretical approaches which, he says, got us to where we are — this may be an attempt to disarm the elders as aforesaid — but there is some irony, for his own defence and exegesis of Bitcoin is intensely theoretical, and where it stretches to its potential, charmingly, but hopelessly, utopian. What he has on his side, for now, is Bitcoin’s sustained defiance of the elders of finance who have predicted seventeen of its last two implosions. At the time of writing, despite [[FTX]]’s collapse, [[Sam Bankman-Fried|Chauncey Gardiner]]’s conviction and with Binance at least on the defensive, bitcoin is surging back toward historical highs. This, perhaps is the proof of the pudding: you can’t, as fellow contrarian, but bitcoin antagonist, [[Nassim Taleb]] would say, “lecture birds how to fly”.

Farrington believes that bitcoin is an asset, not ''just'' a currency and as it has independent existence it is not tethered to a bank or a central bank, it need not “degenerate” the way fiat currencies do thanks to central bank monetary policies and investment bank grift.  

[[Bitcoin]] is pure abstract, tokenised ''capital''. It is to ''actual'' capital what a [[non-fungible token]] is to art. Only ''generalised'': whereas an [[NFT]] is a token for a specific item, bitcoin is a token for just “capital” in the abstract sense of general value — a shared community resource, before it is transmogrified into any particular form.