Bitcoin’s good name having been somewhat stained by drugs and criminals, its advocates try to sell the technology to business as “Blockchain.” $1.5 billion of venture capital gets back, so far, zero. The main visible product is consultant hours and press releases. (Location 163)
To send bitcoins from your address to another address (a bit like sending money over PayPal), you generate a transaction that is sent out into the network and added to the next block of transactions. Once it’s in a block, that transaction is publicly visible on the blockchain forever. (Location 204)
Advocates describe Bitcoin as “secured by math.” This is because cryptography works on arithmetic that is fast going forward and impossibly slow to reverse – to make another data chunk with the same hash, you would have to go through a stupendous number of possible values. (Bitcoin mining relies on this – see below.) (Location 219)
Note: Quantum computers.
This electricity is literally wasted for the sake of decentralisation; (Location 250)
“Cyberlibertarianism” is the academic term for the early Internet strain of this ideology. Technological expertise is presumed to trump all other forms of expertise, (Location 279)
Note: For eluvio there is less ideology they are solving a problem. So therefore the intrinsic problems caused by ideology are not there?
In this context, and particularly in Bitcoin discourse, you’ll see many words that look like English but are actually specialised conspiracy theory jargon. “Liberty” means only freedom from government; “tyranny” means only government; “force” and “violence” mean only government force and violence; “open societies” is a code word for “free market without regulations”; “freedom” means “free market without regulations” and only that. (Location 352)
A story in The Guardian in the wake of the Reason story appears to be where the rest of the press picked it up. It speaks of some Venezuelans relying on Bitcoin for “basic necessities,” and was based on interviews with a Bitcoin exchange owner, one of his employees and two of his customers.42 The author had previously written of Argentina and bitcoin.43 These two questionably-founded stories were echoed and elaborated upon by the rest of the press, including – among many others – the Washington Post claiming that Bitcoin mining is “big business” in Venezuela,44 the New York Times that Bitcoin has “gained prominence” because of Venezuela45 or BBC News repeating claims from a Bitcoin boosterism blog46 – all of this being factoids repeated in a media game of “telephone.” (Location 561)
Its key innovation is that you can run smart contracts on a blockchain: (Location 1760)
gas (a certain amount of the currency token, ether, abbreviated ETH), which is paid to the miner whose computer runs the transaction or smart contract. This also keeps smart contracts from running forever. (Location 1764)
Ethereum’s pitch has always been ridiculously aspirational. It’s a “smart contracts platform,” it’s a “worldwide distributed computer,” at one point Wikipedia called it “Web 3.0,” at another a “publishing platform.” Anything other than a cryptocurrency. To this day, drive-by editors occasionally swing by the Ethereum article in Wikipedia to remove the word “cryptocurrency.” (Location 1772)
Smart contracts work on the wrong level: they run on facts and not on human intent – but legal contracts are a codification of human intent. Human intent is inexact, but contracts assume they will be running on human minds in the context of human institutions, for human purposes. (Location 1954)
Note: What about mini contracts such as with a subtitler.
If your question isn’t popular enough to attract sufficient uninvolved wagers – it would often be worth it for one party to just bribe the bettors – you will still have the oracle problem in determining whether the event has in fact occurred. (Location 1979)
Note: Does this matter? An event only being said to occur if it is statistically passed or said to have happened may be a sufficient basis on which to establish reality.
How many musicians have been so pleased with the first contract they signed, and understood it themselves so well, that they’d never want one dot of it altered? Including by, say, later court proceedings. (Location 1993)
There was no corporate entity, so it would default in most legal systems to being a general partnership, with the investors having unlimited personal liability, (Location 2077)
When blockchain schemes do promise some specific outcome, it’s usually the magic of full availability of properly cleaned up and standardised data. (Location 2202)
The blockchain proponents’ business goal is to become the organisation controlling the new data standard, with a monopoly maintained by network effect. (Location 2208)
