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.
>I am toying around with the wacky heresy that Karl Marx (not Lenin) was right. Capitalism will evolve into socialism.
that Marx discovered is that the degree of socialism rises and of capitalism decreases linear with the rise of entropy of ownership distribution. One owner of a factory - full capitalism. Many shareholders without any major concentrated holder - any such BigCo feels very close to socialism (where everybody is nominally an owner of everything) as we experienced back at the USSR.
> fully decentralized, consensus based, anti-fragile, nameless, leaderless, borderless, and viral as hell.
characteristics of high entropy, except for the consensus based and leaderless which are supposed to be an emerging property to manage the target object, yet as history shows delegation emerges to make management tractable in high entropy situations and it results in concentrated management power without corresponding ownership - typical socialism of USSR or BigCo or Federal government managed assets and agencies. Thus such a theory predicts some management "council of BTC Jedi-s" to emerge.
I'm trying to see how small numbers of bourgeois nerds running energy intensive get-rich-quick schemes - often with the help of billionaire backers - resembles the Marxian concept of the proleteriat fighting to gain the full benefit of their day's labour and struggling tbh...
Lenin, 1918, in an article called "Left-Wing Childishness":
Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. [...]
Only those are worthy of the name of Communists who understand that it is impossible to create or introduce socialism without learning from the organisers of the trusts. For socialism is not a figment of the imagination, but the assimilation and application by the proletarian vanguard, which has seized power, of what has been created by the trusts. We, the party of the proletariat, have no other way of acquiring the ability to organise large-scale production on trust lines, as trusts are organised, except by acquiring it from first-class capitalist experts.
We have nothing to teach them, unless we undertake the childish task of “teaching” the bourgeois intelligentsia socialism. We must not teach them, but expropriate them (as is being done in Russia “determinedly” enough), put a stop to their sabotage, subordinate them as a section or group to Soviet power. We, on the other hand, if we are not Communists of infantile age and infantile understanding, must learn from them, and there is something to learn, for the party of the proletariat and its vanguard have no experience of independent work in organising giant enterprises which serve the needs of scores of millions of people.
You're right. I'm not talking about Bitcoin but about the technology and understanding that it represents. Bitcoin itself is a proof of concept project that's unfortunately become a silly bubble.
Forget about coins or even currency. Consider what these systems are doing. They are giving you trust and coherence without authority.
USSR implemented socialism, and all countries that ever called themselves "communist" were socialists.
There's a big difference between communism and socialism. And I think cryptocurrency will enable communism and not socialism. Socialism was a compromise path to get to communism, but failed because of its centralized nature.
With decentralized currency you don't need to go through socialism, you jump straight to communism.
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.