Bitcoin is Venice: Difference between revisions

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.  

* Resists and disincentivises violence

* Remediates our criminally oppressive, unsustainable and unjust social order

* Cures the slow-motion collapse of “[[degenerate fiat capitalism]]”

* Prevents markets degenerating into oligopolies

* Optimises the transmission and clearing costs of energy generation

* Fixes the internet’s fundamental architecture  

* Forces long-term over short-term thinking

* Obviates regulatory incompetence

This is wishful, to say the least, but Farrington seems to realise this, and offers it up as rhetorical flourish, somewhere between punctuation, irony and gallows humour.

{{Drop|L|ike 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 understand. And understanding is your ticket to the club.

This is an evolutionary design feature of any [[power structure]]. (I take it that “power structure”, “paradigm”, “research programme” and “intellectual construct” and maybe even “corporation” are 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 community consensus can take wing in the first place. But once it does, the higher it flies and the more it ''[[scale|scales]]'' — 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 the research programme must become. We see this time and again, with [[Power structure|power structures]] of all kinds, but financial services and law in very specific particular.

A common complaint about Kuhn’s [[paradigm]] is its liminal vagueness: where does it start and stop? At what level of abstraction does it operate? How local is it? The best answer is that paradigms are sort of fractal — they operate at ''every'' level of abstraction. Just as an ecosystem is a complex metasystem of interacting subsystems and components so is a market — however you define it — a complex metasystem of inchoate, indeterminate, undescribable subsystems, all of whom interact with and react to each other. It is necessarily non-linear and, literally, ineffable, which is why no supervising power can tame or even predict it, and all those who try eventually fail.

So nebulous, but requiring of education, indoctrination, credentialisation, so that those who enter either get so close to the [[weeds]] as to be quite unable to see beyond them, let alone ''[[inclined]]'' to — those weeds being nourishing as they are, there is little incentive to ''look'' beyond them — or they won’t, in which case they never earn the intellectual credibility needed to be taken seriously by the elders within.  

The very nebulousness means it is hard to tell how far you have made it into the program, and no-one tells you. This serves as its own incentive to lean in harder, of course. It is all part of the mantra.

This is also why “cross-paradigm” arguments are so joyless and draining. They are linguistic failures — translation errors. [[Richard Dawkins]]’ amassed arguments against organised religion might be ''scientifically'' immaculate, but science poses and answers different questions than does religion. The scientific method counts for naught beyond its magisterium. It is no more fruitful to criticise quidditch for its impossible aerodynamics.

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