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Another question arises: what is it good for? It certainly isn't empancipating or empowering ordinary people. Apparently, it saved the bacon of some Venezuelan

Another question arises: what is it good for? It certainly isn't empancipating or empowering ordinary people. Apparently, it saved the bacon of some Venezuelans.

runarberg 6y ago
They standardized international shipping to everyone's benefit. I wonder what is keeping them from standardizing international transaction of government issued money? It seems that bitcoin was useful in this particular instance only because of the failure of multiple other systems. Fixing those failure would seem like the easier option indeed.
- mannerheim 6y ago
  Overthrowing a government doesn't sound like an easy option to me.
  - stcredzero 6y ago
    In 2021, you don't overthrow an organization. You crawl up inside it, and offer to do its bureaucratic skut-work. Make yourself useful and indispensable. Then you bring in more and more of your friends and start putting in rules and strictures as a trap. You get key, powerful people out of the way by springing those traps. Eventually, it's an entirely different set of people who are just wearing the branding and regalia of the old organization like a skin suit. Another alternative: You come up with a new way to do X which is 10X better. Then, you get the classic S-shaped adoption curve. Another alternative: You expand the context of your operations, so that those governments just become little annoyances and quaint dusty backwaters inside a larger world.
  - runarberg 6y ago
    Whoa! You must have misunderstood me dramatically. One does not need to overthrow a government to issue international standards. That certainly wasn’t the case October 1874 when they standardized international mail, nor was it needed in April 1951 when they standardized shipping containers for the global trade network. My question was simply: What is keeping banks and governments around the world from standardizing money transfer between nations, like they did so well 150 years ago with mail? And my statement: Perhaps it is easier to settle on a standard way of transferring money between nation states then to rely on bitcoin to save some people from hyperinflation + predatory money transfer solutions.
    - mannerheim 6y ago
      Isn't SWIFT such a standard? It's quite common to use it for bank transfers in Europe.
- stcredzero 6y ago
  They standardized international shipping to everyone's benefit. I wonder what is keeping them from standardizing international transaction of government issued money? That's one way you can think of the next generation of blockchain. Think of it as a "container" for transactions. Lots of transactions in 2021 are still frightfully primitive. The whole recent GME/Robinhood debacle is actually an example. The only reason why online trading companies need such large amounts of liquidity, is that it takes days for the transactions to fully settle! Blockchain will transition from a weird, new, shiny doohickey, to a way to facilitate transactions. Just like the Internet did.
  - runarberg 6y ago
    Nah, I’m much more hopeful of a good old fashion international treaties, perhaps a UN issued mandate, and perhaps an ISO standard to save the day. That’s really what happened when they standardized containers (and to a greater extent international mail delivery in 1874). There was no new technology, just agreed upon standards that governments signed up on.

Another question arises: what is it good for? It certainly isn't empancipating or empowering ordinary people. Apparently, it saved the bacon of some Venezuelans.

runarberg 6y ago

They standardized international shipping to everyone's benefit. I wonder what is keeping them from standardizing international transaction of government issued money? It seems that bitcoin was useful in this particular instance only because of the failure of multiple other systems. Fixing those failure would seem like the easier option indeed.

mannerheim 6y ago
Overthrowing a government doesn't sound like an easy option to me.
- stcredzero 6y ago
  In 2021, you don't overthrow an organization. You crawl up inside it, and offer to do its bureaucratic skut-work. Make yourself useful and indispensable. Then you bring in more and more of your friends and start putting in rules and strictures as a trap. You get key, powerful people out of the way by springing those traps. Eventually, it's an entirely different set of people who are just wearing the branding and regalia of the old organization like a skin suit. Another alternative: You come up with a new way to do X which is 10X better. Then, you get the classic S-shaped adoption curve. Another alternative: You expand the context of your operations, so that those governments just become little annoyances and quaint dusty backwaters inside a larger world.
- runarberg 6y ago
  Whoa! You must have misunderstood me dramatically. One does not need to overthrow a government to issue international standards. That certainly wasn’t the case October 1874 when they standardized international mail, nor was it needed in April 1951 when they standardized shipping containers for the global trade network. My question was simply: What is keeping banks and governments around the world from standardizing money transfer between nations, like they did so well 150 years ago with mail? And my statement: Perhaps it is easier to settle on a standard way of transferring money between nation states then to rely on bitcoin to save some people from hyperinflation + predatory money transfer solutions.
  - mannerheim 6y ago
    Isn't SWIFT such a standard? It's quite common to use it for bank transfers in Europe.
stcredzero 6y ago
They standardized international shipping to everyone's benefit. I wonder what is keeping them from standardizing international transaction of government issued money? That's one way you can think of the next generation of blockchain. Think of it as a "container" for transactions. Lots of transactions in 2021 are still frightfully primitive. The whole recent GME/Robinhood debacle is actually an example. The only reason why online trading companies need such large amounts of liquidity, is that it takes days for the transactions to fully settle! Blockchain will transition from a weird, new, shiny doohickey, to a way to facilitate transactions. Just like the Internet did.
- runarberg 6y ago
  Nah, I’m much more hopeful of a good old fashion international treaties, perhaps a UN issued mandate, and perhaps an ISO standard to save the day. That’s really what happened when they standardized containers (and to a greater extent international mail delivery in 1874). There was no new technology, just agreed upon standards that governments signed up on.