

Predicting the Future - aristus
http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/10/predicting-the-future.html

======
kiba
If you believe in crypto-anarchism, you will invent political technologies or
be part of a community that revolves around such inventions.

Such is the case called bitcoins, a cryptocurrency. In two years or so, we
will find if my fellow hackers and ciphergeeks and me will find ourselves
fools or fricking rich pioneers.

Moreover, we believed that money and free market can be a positive social
order. If we do not believe it is so, bitcoins wouldn't have a thriving
community, much less an entrepeneural one.

It also raise and illustrate issues about such a voluntary market economy
where there is no police and courts to enforce order. For example, we found
out that paypal dollars are _bad money_. They lack the crucial aspect of
irreversibility. It even cause a bank run, a rush to bitcoins. We found out
that bitcoins doesn't have that negative aspect and can expect bitcoins to
hold value. Unpredictable regime like Paypal cause risk-aversion and effort to
find much more predictable ability to transfer from one currencies to another.

Bitcoin offer us unique insight of how a new emerging economy might deal with
thieves, cheaters, with no guns and no police. Bitcoin show us how a group of
political radicals think about problems, and the future at large. It is out of
the box, and at time foolish, but sometime brilliance emerge.

All of these things wouldn't be possible without the culmination of
technolibertarianism and anarchism. All of these wouldn't be happening if
hackerdom didn't emerge as it has.

Where do you get progress in our society in the conventional sphere of
democractic government, parliamentary politics, and such? If you believe power
and violence are necessary to achieve goals in society, would you have come up
with and invent bitcoins?

~~~
mike_esspe
Do you know what happened to e-gold (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold#2008_court_trial> ) and e-bullion (
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Bullion#2008_murder_of_e-
Bull...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Bullion#2008_murder_of_e-
Bullion_principal_and_federal_felony_charges) ) owners?

Unfortunately, US government doesn't like private currencies.

~~~
kiba
Yes, I am well aware of such thing. Bitcoin is decentralized so there is no
one company to shut down that will definitely destroy bitcoin. So it may be
resilient to such an attack. However, I don't know if it is possible to
survive.

------
tdoggette
"A story about AI which concludes that they are utterly and forever alien" is
Charles Stross' Accelerando. It's a novel made of sequential stories that
follow a family through the Singularity and well beyond, and the AI in it
becomes something utterly inhuman in terms of thought.

I enjoyed it a lot, and it's a free ebook in addition to something you can get
at the library.

Many ebook formats: [http://manybooks.net/titles/strosscother05accelerando-
txt.ht...](http://manybooks.net/titles/strosscother05accelerando-txt.html)

HTML:
[http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/accelerando.charles_stross/toc.ht...](http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/accelerando.charles_stross/toc.html)

~~~
aristus
Hey, awesome. Thank you. I figured there were some stories like that, but
couldn't think of any right off.

