[P2P-F] Fwd: <nettime> Now also bankers know what bitcoins are

Michel Bauwens michelsub2004 at gmail.com
Sat Apr 9 16:26:23 CEST 2011 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 2:49 AM
Subject: Fwd: <nettime> Now also bankers know what bitcoins are
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>




---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jaromil <jaromil at dyne.org>
Date: Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 1:26 PM
Subject: <nettime> Now also bankers know what bitcoins are
To: nettime-l at kein.org



re all,

FYI: http://www.dyndy.net/2011/04/bitcoin-presented-to-the-old-world/


Bitcoin presented to the Old-world

  Posted on Wednesday, April 6, 2011

  Filed under Conference, Currency
  Tagged with cash, crypto, P2P, public

  Related articles:
    * [23]Action in London, Revolutionary Credit Cards
    * [24]Process Ecology: the lesson from Nature for assessing the
      Monetary System

  Just back from the 10th edition of the [25]EPCA conference held in
  Amsterdam, where I was a shoulder for my friend Genjix: bitcoin
  developers were invited to talk about [26]Bitcoin to a specialized
  audience of mostly >50 years old banker types in suits, with very few
  exceptions.

  Genjix presenting bitcoin in EPCA2011

  The incipit of the conference booklet recites: “Over 200 transaction
  services professionals from all over the world will attend, discuss and
  experience this leading platform. For the last 10 years we have been on
  top of trends and developments in payments. We focus in particular on
  strategic innovation and break-through developments in on-line
  transactions“. And in fact it looked pretty well populated for that
  kind of context: besides the white-male-with-suits first scary
  impression, especially for those who value variety, from the written
  documentation available (I haven’t attended talks) one can tell these
  people run quite some businesses – at least they did until now <g>- and
  quite successfully.

  The brochures of the conference talk about transaction systems,
  RFID/NFC payment devices and all flavors of bank related products along
  the names of “Mobile Money”, “Secure SD”, “ePassport” and “Automated
  Fare Collection”.

  Our guy Genjix is a colorful and open minded type, witty and messy, a
  good mix that entertained the people present despite it being the last
  presentation of the day; he did a good (unpaid) job presenting some
  quite impressive information on the growth and usage of Bitcoin, making
  people present progressively interested (or pissed, but then hard to
  notice behind the suits) at this crypto-cash system that seems to be
  there to stay or, one could argue, to multiply in different flavors in
  the near future.

    “Being shown an anonymous digital currency with its own laundering
    service. Used for selling drugs. Bit-coin, you have cheered me up.”
    Michael Price

  The presentation didn’t hide even the most controversial aspects of
  bitcoin, pointing out to some very extreme usage: something that seemed
  to relieve the audience, considering that banker types are pretty
  beaten up by corporate ethics evangelists nowadays. In such cases
  Bitcoin tends to show that anonymity is used in the “worst” way, which
  is still half of the story. We are still far from developing a positive
  narrative on anonymity and continuing on this track will likely move
  policy makers into massive identification campaigns, as it has been now
  since the 9/11 sad facts.

  Still on the good side for bitcoin is its working implementation of a
  distributed system relying on an “open source algorithmic contract”:
  something definitely inspiring that knocks off the hegemony of
  old-world currencies – and one can hardly imagine how they’ll ever
  recover from this manifest process ultimately due to the unstoppable,
  immanent influence of the digital dimension.

  Bitcoin is a messenger and the message it carries doesn’t originates
  even from a person, or a group of people, not even an organization or a
  company: it’s a Geist (or Zeitgeist, should we say) that impersonates
  the ultimate dissolution of centralized governance: everything that was
  solid melts into thin air, should we mourn once again, while all those
  who were on the deregulation train in 1984 have now to face their kids
  reminding them how their World is made of lies – and dreams,
  apparently, still alive.

  Following a materialist point of view (and crypto-agnostic, we’ll
  argue) bitcoin can surely be interpreted as a [27]Rube-Goldberg machine
  for buying electricity – and this was even our very first reaction at
  DYNDY when we got to know it the first time. Surely these are times
  when materialism is needed, as opposed to more abstract financial
  blabbering, but then consider that the processing power in bitcoin
  serves to strengthen the network authentication: all that electricity
  is energy invested by participants to enforce the integrity of the
  network. Now consider how old monetary systems keep their integrity: a
  huge government building with armed guards along the perimeter, to not
  even mention the huge investment of resources and infrastructure to
  distribute this money (street level access) and authenticate it at
  transaction time. Remember prof. Greco? we’ve been talking about this…

    Bitcoin is a “disruptive technology”, but disruptive for whom? as a
    human creation, it inherits human problems that are also present in
    older systems; still P2P currencies as bitcoin let us save energy
    rather than consume more, also substituting the violence of armed
    guards with agile and cryptographic communications.

  Ultimately, the positive message that bitcoin also carries is that of
  more possibilities in engineering currencies, that of a future in which
  complementary currencies can make economic systems more resilient to
  the the disruption of capitalist behaviors, while closely relating
  people to their community values and maybe even revolutionize the way
  we contribute to the common good – paying taxes for what we really
  care, rather than not paying them, let me add.

  Quoting Wei Dai in [28]one of bitcoin’s founding texts: “It’s a
  community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is
  impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot
  be linked to their true names or physical locations. Until now it’s not
  clear, even theoretically, how such a community could operate. A
  community is defined by the cooperation of its participants, and
  efficient cooperation requires a medium of exchange (money) and a way
  to enforce contracts.”

  Now I’m wondering how people present at the EPCA 2011 conference feel,
  threatened or pleased by this epiphany? in either case it might be
  interesting to watch reactions. The transaction products I read of are
  stacking on technological complexity and seamless design that is
  ultimately undermining the very possibility for people to trust them.
  On top of that now there are on-line grass-root communities actively
  building new systems in a decentralized fashion. Will the monopoly of
  violence enter this game to defend the old-system, despite the
  squeaking sounds of its carcass, the diffused lack of trust for old
  hierarchies and the lack for collective agency within its cheated
  rules? We will see where this ends up: after all today it felt like one
  of those historical days marked by such a talk made by a little
  provocative guy wearing a t-shirt and nail polish speaking in front of
  a old and well dressed audience – but then no-one was really scared.

  IRC excerpt from #bitcoin-dev during the conference:

<jaromil> sirius-m: i'd expect some more fashion happening
<topi`> jaro: they just don't know how :)
<sirius-m> thanks for being there, it's a new important audience for bitcoin
<sirius-m> people who otherwise might not hear about the project
<jaromil> true but knowing the types i think they are thinking how to fork
it in
 their own advantage
<jaromil> prolly wasted effort
<topi`> at least they start talking about it:)
<topi`> good luck finding ways to exploit the system
<krytzz> hopefully they cant fork the network
<krytzz> only could start a seperate one :(
<sirius-m> nah, it's good that you're spreading the word :)
<topi`> if there *will* be some threat coming from corporate sector, then
we'll
       finally find out how resilient the whole architecture is :)

    Like this article? Donate BTC :^D

    1GJehYZs5BZfL4RTCBFUpTVrjX6XRhDWdq

    * Comments open on the DYNDY article website
      http://www.dyndy.net/2011/04/bitcoin-presented-to-the-old-world/

    * Copyleft
      © 2010-2011 GNU FDL
      dyne.org foundation


References

  Visible links
 23.
http://www.dyndy.net/2011/03/action-in-london-revolutionary-credit-cards/
 24.
http://www.dyndy.net/2011/03/the-analogy-with-process-ecology-for-assessing-the-monetary-system/
 25. http://www.epcaconference.com/
 26. http://bitcoin.org/
 27.
http://trustcurrency.blogspot.com/2011/03/bitcoin-rube-goldberg-machine-for.html
 28. http://weidai.com/bmoney.txt

  Hidden links:
 88.
http://www.dyndy.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/genjix_bitcoin_epca11.jpg
 89. http://www.dyndy.net/wp-content/pdf/newspaper.pdf



--
jaromil,  dyne.org developer,  http://jaromil.dyne.org
GPG: B2D9 9376 BFB2 60B7 601F 5B62 F6D3 FBD9 C2B6 8E39



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