Yes, that is certainly a tension here. I think it's easier to think of the paper as two broadly different subparts.
The first part is: "regardless of what you think, if something you do rearranges power, then it will become political". This is more a statement of fact than anything else.
The second part is: "now that I hope to have convinced you that crypto is necessarily political, here's the moral stance I would prefer for you to follow."
He doesn't really dig into what he means by apolitical, and what bitcoiners mean by apolitical.
One of the big risks with fiat currency is that your government might do "something stupid" or "something corrupt" with monetary policy and cause the fiat currency to crash in value.
The most popular cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) has a monetary policy that's set in stone. You're protected from an incompetent / corrupt government who either accidentally or deliberately break the money supply.
That's what bitcoiners mean by apolitical.
The article then goes on to point out how the monetary policy of bitcoin is not very good monetary policy. He's right when he says this, but you can only have good monetary policy if you've got a competent government. A lot of people don't have a competent government.
"starts spouting hyperbolic, overblown rhetoric about overthrowing the social order"
Because bitcoin is attractive to antagonists.
Just take it all with a grain of salt.
The 'Articles' of the statement I think are also objective - they're making what they think is a 'politically neutral, all inclusive' statement, when really they're not - their pushing a specific kind of ideal.
I think that technology can enable democracy, but that the two don't need to be really tightly bound.
I find the criticism of research papers on the part of Bitcoin supporters a bit ironic. Have people forgotten how poorly researched the original Bitcoin paper was?
Bitcoin !== crypto, and there are a lot of blockchains whose founding teams are far from libertarian.
Also, please point me to the places where the white paper espouses libertarianism?
The bitcoin genesis message isn't a direct criticism, and the politics can be interpreted in different ways. One narrative is certainly libertarian-aligned (government shouldn't interfere with businesses and just let market forces drive things). But it's not the only interpretation; for example, there's an argument to be made for a message like: letting banks overextend themselves and then needing to be bailed out is a regulatory failing, and peer-to-peer digital currency offers an alternative to a system that lacks regulation that protects consumers and instead relies on corporate bailouts.
I will concede that the Venn diagram with Bitcoin maximalists and libertarians is significant. But again, Bitcoin !== crypto, and if you look at other blockchains, there's a very wide range of ideologies in the apocrypha.
>I've read both the Bitcoin and Ethereum whitepaper and there's nothing about grievances of traditional governments usage of printing of their currencies
and
>[The desire to be a part of a "new elite"] is why the most popular currencies have a fixed supply. That way, if they're popular earlier adopters get to be a part of the elite.
Technical papers tend to focus on their contribution to knowledge. In Bitcoin's case it's a distributed systems paper that shows a globally consistent database is possible in an adversarial network with no central coordinator, if finality properties are allowed to be probibalistic in the short term. Though an cryptography author may feel passionately about Bill of Rights, 4th Amendment protections, they needn't say it in a paper they write about a cryptographic primative.
and
If we are to assume bitcoin is a "popular currency" and want to read the opinions of early thinkers rather than straw-man them:
I also do think that there is potential value in a form of unforgeable token whose production rate is predictable and can't be influenced by corrupt parties. This would be more analogous to gold than to fiat currencies. [1]
To me that doesn't read as advocating for the creation of a new "elite" (whatever that is)
>I do see value in a crypto that's pinned at a weighted average of every single currencies' worldwide weight. [People holding these 'weighted average' currencies a]re not getting rich
How is it that these supposed weighted average monies are superior while simultaneously no one in the market place is demanding them while simultaneously the demand for bitcoin is increasing?
The exchange ratio, what you're saying is price, cannot be arbitrarily decreed (Thou shall have X weighted exchange ratio with all government monies). Exchange ratios / prices are the result of many individual agents swaping, exchanging with eachother. All previous attempts at information/digital monies (see bmoney) failed because of this misunderstanding of how prices arise.
>My biggest concern is a fixed-supply currency gives no government the ability to provide stimulus if necessary.
How does printing/diluting money create wealth? If someone wants to work for a money that's costly for them to obtain (via work) and costless for someone else to obtain (money printing) they're free to do so -- the problem is that one will bankrupt themselves doing so relative to someone wants to work for a money that's just as costly for everyone else to obtain. Those still holding their wealth in fiat monies (euro, dollar, yuan, yen) or fiat-economy derivatives (bonds, fiat-company equities/stocks) are exposed to this bankrupcy potential -- it's the same dynamic as all currency debasements manifest.
>every government in world history that's pinned their currency to something that's relatively fixed has had a severe depression with some part of that depression being contributed to said pinning. It's just not good economics.
Governments aren't economies, Whether people can produce more than they consume (a functioning economy) is orthogonal to whether the same people who have the monopoly on violence also are trying to enforce a monetary monopoly as well. If a government fails because it consumes more than it produces, that reflects a failure in the management of said government -- not because someone, somewhere has a money in their posession. Typically, it's marginally harder for people to produce more than they consume when they're forced to be subject to a cartel/monopoly.
I'm not sure why you think bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency, things like digicash existed since the early 90s. In any case, did you even read the post? The author explicitly describes the failings of bitcoin's political processes. His concerns weren't some hypothetical issues of ideology, they were concrete examples of how those who control bitcoin are preventing it from growing in a very technical sense, and refuse to engage in any sort of compromise because it's not within their (business) interests.
edit: To clarify, I'm not trying to say I agree or disagree with the author, as I don't know anywhere near enough about the bitcoin community to say either way. I'm merely pointing out that the OP was talking past the author's points, not addressing them. (In particular, they built a strawman against governance and political solutions.)
Are there any factual assertions that you disagree with in the piece? Otherwise this seems to be more anti-Binance than crypto itself (although the author's viewpoint on crypto is clear).
That's because you're right and he's wrong. He's a well known bitcoin core apologist, and is just talking his political position. The original intended system design at scale had no need for non mining nodes.
This revisionism is a long running and well known war, here is the core political bloc in question actually attempting to justify editing the white paper to push their perspective over reality.
I agree that it's an error to describe bitcoin as free of ideology, but regarding the fact that it's an algorithm decided in the past and hard to change, wouldn't that describe Constitutions too?
Author declares themselves a "bitcoiner" and writes things like:
> PostNote: This article pairs well with my piece on Bitcoiners having integrity. What it boils down to is there is no integrity in Ethereum and nothing but integrity in Bitcoin
Oh sure, just back your argument with reference to a page that runs the Core Propaganda. Please evaluate the whitepaper, section 5 and really understand how bitcoin functions.
A part from the fact the he cited eth, that makes him not Bitcoin maximalist: he’s right.
Also because the arguments are always the same and in this same thread we have one of the most voted comments saying that the idea behind Bitcoin is “stupid”. Just that.
But it’s fine since we’re in HN, isn’t it?
Not surprising: Keynesian economist doesn't like Austrian economics explanations.
Surprising: Bitcoin part is largely left uncriticized.
I would say the author of this article is clearly biased against the Austrian view that make Bitcoin attractive to the libertarian types so the criticism is largely unsurprising.
What we do see is that the author of the critique and the author of the book can't be both right, especially about history. The success of Bitcoin does seem to favor the Austrian interpretation, though I'm sure many will disagree. Whatever the case, the experiment that is Bitcoin will continue and give us more data to make the case ourselves.
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