Bikeshedding this some more because HN is for bikeshedding... I am toying around with the wacky heresy that Karl Marx (not Lenin) was right. Capitalism will ev

Bikeshedding this some more because HN is for bikeshedding... I am toying around with the wacky heresy that Karl Marx (not Lenin) was right. Capitalism will evolve into socialism. It would be a form of socialism we haven't seen yet and that would have been technologically impossible in the past. Capitalism's role is to develop the technology, wealth, and infrastructure to enable it... as Marx said. Tech titans, startuppers, hackers, and VCs are in this view actually communist revolutionaries of a sort. The new socialism would be fully decentralized, consensus based, anti-fragile, nameless, leaderless, borderless, and viral as hell. It would just take over by viral attrition. Later on historians would be like "wow, we now have a completely new social paradigm." My read on Marx's original speculative idea was closer to that and quite far from the USSR. The USSR was like the ancient Egyptians deciding to build social media based on this vague wishy-washy futurist idea of what that is but without any of the tools or core innovations. They would have ended up with something that basically didn't work and in no way resembled Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Without the core enabling innovations they would not have been able to even imagine those, let alone build them. The apparatchiks and politburo of the USSR could not have imagined distributed consensus operating at global scale. The tools to even think about that didn't exist. They basically tried to force-fit the goals of socialism using the methods of fascism with predictably awful results. I also think many capitalists of the Randian/libertarian school will see this as capitalism and not socialism since it will retain capitalist elements or at least entities and institutions that outwardly resemble them and fulfill the same functions. There will still be money, fund raising, capital gains, corporations in some form, etc. That's fine. Names don't matter. It will be nameless and formless. Edit: I still see Bitcoin as version 0.1 alpha of something much more significant. I am more interested in what version 2.0, 3.0, or 4.0 might look like. I think Ethereum is version 0.5 beta. Version 1.0 will be something that somehow ditches the expensive boat-anchor of proof-of-work, resolves transactions a lot faster, and is way more secure and powerful. I also do think Bitcoin at the moment is a bubble. Something being a major innovation and a bubble are not mutually exclusive. In fact most major innovations lead to bubbles when they first start climbing their hype/adoption curve.