Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin's Rise May Reflect a Monumental Transfer of Trust From Human Institutions Backed By Gov't To Systems Reliant on Well-Tested Code, Says Tim Wu (nytimes.com)
Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia, writing for the New York Times: Yet as Bitcoin continues to grow, there's reason to think something deeper and more important is going on. Bitcoin's rise may reflect, for better or worse, a monumental transfer of social trust: away from human institutions backed by government and to systems reliant on well-tested computer code. It is a trend that transcends finance: In our fear of human error, we are putting an increasingly deep faith in technology (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled). What gives the Bitcoin bubble significance is that, like '90s tech, it is part of something much larger than itself. More and more we are losing faith in humans and depending instead on machines. The transformation is more obvious outside of finance. We trust in computers to fly airplanes, help surgeons cut into our bodies and simplify daily tasks, like finding our way home. In this respect, finance is actually behind: Where we no longer feel we can trust people, we let computer code take over. Bitcoin is part of this trend. It was, after all, a carnival of human errors and misfeasance that inspired the invention of Bitcoin in 2009, namely, the financial crisis. Banks backed by economically powerful nations had been the symbol of financial trustworthiness, the gold standard in the post-gold era. But they revealed themselves as reckless, drunk on other people's money, holding extraordinarily complex assets premised on a web of promises that were often mutually incompatible. To a computer programmer, the financial system still looks a lot like untested code with weak debugging that puts way too much faith in the idea that humans will behave properly. As with any bad software, it can be expected to crash when conditions change.
Funny how the rise in value of Bitcon has suddenly taken on so many social meanings when it fact it's just another speculative rush, in a long list of speculative rushes throughout human history.
That bullshit again? There was never a balanced budget. There was one budget that was projected to balance. That went away with the .com bubble.
We're still waiting on the spending cuts the Ds promised Bush 1 to get him to agree to tax increases. The deal was taxes now, spending cuts later. Cuts never happened.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Its not "ponzi", its "greater fool".
"The greater fool theory states that the price of an object is determined not by its intrinsic value, but rather by irrational beliefs and expectations of market participants. A price can be justified by a rational buyer under the belief that another party is willing to pay an even higher price. In other words, one may pay a price that seems "foolishly" high because one may rationally have the expectation that the item can be resold to a "greater fool" later." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is not a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme is a specific type of investment fraud, it is not a generic term for highly speculative investment bubbles that will likely lead to huge losses for whomever gets caught holding the bag when the bubble explodes. In fact this is not even a crime. People are knowingly speculating on cryptocurrencies despite the warnings from nearly everyone outside the bubble both from government and private institutions including the FED chairwoman, the SEC, practically all economists, nearly all financial advisors, CEO's, and CFO's, etc,etc. That's the nature of bubbles, the fear of missing out on the frenzy drowns out peoples natural instinct of loss-aversion
And bitcoin actually has built in deflation. Which is a fucking horrible idea.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?