Bitcoin is Venice: Difference between revisions

This is a massive, magnificent, learned, contrarian work. Few practitioners in modern financial services would not benefit from reading it, just for the challenge it presents.  

For anyone who wants to hold forth on cryptocurrency, for or against — and in financial services, that seems to be most people — this is an as good a foundational text as you could ask for. It does not pretend to be neutral: this is advocacy: the case for Bitcoin, put optimistically, and without barely a sideways glance to its many criticisms. There is no discussion of bitcoin’s relationship with terrorist financing and money laundering nor the widespread and pervasive fraud in the cryptocurrency sector. The authors might well say those issues are well canvassed elsewhere, and this is true, but to not mount any defence while claiming, explicitly, that bitcoin fixes everything, seems an oversight. Everything? Well, according to the authors, bitcoin does the following:

* cures the slow-motion collapse of “degenerate fiat capitalism”

* prevents the degeneration of markets into oligopolies

* fixes the architecture of the internet

* obliges us to think long-term, and not short-term

Like any communal activity in which there are things to be gained and lost — i.e., ''any'' communal activity — “[[financial services]]” is what [[Thomas Kuhn]] called a “[[paradigm]]”:<ref>{{Br|The Structure of Scientific Revolutions}} (1962).</ref> a community intellectual structure which develops its own rules, language, hierarchies, defeat devices, articles of faith, and credentialisation process, usually encrusted in so much obscurant flummery that it is impossible for non-initiates to get near it without being swatted away on ground of ''detail'' — insufficient grasp of buried, esoteric intellectual constructs that only the truly learned can know.  

This is an evolutionary design feature of any [[power structure]]. (I take it that “power structure”, “paradigm”, and “intellectual construct” are essentially synonyms, describing any self-organising, bounded community of common but esoteric interests). Power structures are in equal parts benign and malign: without ''some'' commitment to the cause — some unconditional trust and faith in the wisdom of elders — no bounded community consensus can take to the air in the first place. But once it does, the higher it flies and the more it ''[[scale|scales]]'' — and the more entrenched those elders become. The harder it is to assail them; the more there is for those with [[skin in the game]] to ''lose'' — the more ossified and moribund it must necessarily become. We see this time and again, with [[Power structure|power structures]] of all kinds, but financial services and law in very specific particular.

We will, therefore, either get so close to the [[weeds]] that we can scarcely see beyond them — and once we do, those weeds being nourishing as they are, there is little incentive to ''look'' beyond them — or we won’t, in which case we never earn the intellectual credibility needed to be taken seriously by the elders within.  

This is why “cross-paradigm” arguments are so joyless and draining. They are failures of translation. [[Richard Dawkins]]’ amassed arguments against religion might be ''scientifically'' immaculate, but scientific method counts for naught within the magisterium of religion. The scientist who best understood this was Dawkins’s arch-nemesis, the late [[Stephen Jay Gould]].<ref>See Gould’s spirited attempt at reconciliation, {{Br|Rocks of Ages}}. </ref> ''There is no machine for judging poetry''.   

It is, at some level, a Catch-22. Paradigms endure because anyone with enough internal gravitas has too much invested in keeping them together to pick them apart. They paradigms strengthen as, progressively, they prefer form over substance, it being assumed that, over time, the substance has been proven out by the very resilience of the paradigm, and can be taken for granted.