The creator of Bitcoin seems to be succeeding where others have failed, at first. What did you do differently? He breaks records.
All revolutions have their dogmas, and the cryptocurrency/blockchain uprising is no different. It is an article of faith among crypto followers that decentralization will solve many of the ills of society, including the problem of governance.
Vili Lehdonvirta, an Oxford University social scientist, book author and former software developer, disagrees.
“The underlying technology will change and is already changing,” she told Cointelegraph last week. “It’s becoming less like a blockchain, less like the original idea of a trustless system,” especially after the Ethereum merger, where corporate-type “stake” entities are needed to “maintain the integrity of the chain”, in his opinion. .
In fact, crypto networks can usually move in the direction of centralized digital platforms, “maintained by a group of people you have to trust, but hopefully you can also take responsibility when they’re not trustworthy.”
Lehdonvirta’s new book, Cloud Empires, published by MIT Press, is in part a meditation on the transience of ideology and/or good intentions. Her themes are the massive digital platforms of the 21st century such as Amazon, Uber and eBay, among others.
Many follow a similar life cycle: charismatic founders who launch out into the world, guide their companies down a path of dazzling growth, but then hit the hard wall of reality. They survive this collision, but not always for the best.
Subtitled “How Digital Platforms Outperform the State and How We Can Take Back Control,” the book has an illuminating chapter on Satoshi Nakamoto and the blockchain technology he created: its origins, adoption, metamorphosis, and ultimate realization that cryptographically protected digital networks don’t. could. completely replacing “untrustworthy” human authorities in government affairs.
There’s Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, “once hailed as a hero who created an ideal business environment for an independent retailer,” but eventually morphed into a digital monopoly, bringing down the retailer, in effect, “extracting exorbitant fees and directly stealing lucrative businesses”. lines out of them”.
Also featured is Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, initially as an “ardent advocate of free-market solutions” but later seen setting fees and regulating the number of cars on the roads. There’s Pierre Omidyar, creator of the “world’s first online reputation system,” who realizes over time that a “bad reputation” alone doesn’t deter bad guys. His company, eBay, evolved “into a central authority that formally regulates its marketplace.”
A social order without institutions
Regarding Satoshi, the pseudonymous founder of blockchain, known to the world primarily through a nine-page white paper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” published in 2008: “Nakamoto was upset when people still have to rely on powerful and opaque financial institutions to manage their finances,” writes Lehdonvirta, professor of economic sociology and digital social research at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford.
He places Nakamoto in a line of digital-age libertarians, beginning with John Barlow, the cyberlibertarian “who dreamed of a virtual society in which order would arise independent of the authority of territorial states.” Nakamoto here is seen through the lens of a political scientist. Lehdonvirta writes:
“Nakamoto wasn’t interested in making institutions more democratic. Instead, he wanted to revive the Barlowian dream of a digital social order that wouldn’t need such institutions at all: no bureaucrats, no politicians who inevitably betrayed the trust of their constituents, no Elections Powered by corporations, no corporate overlords Nakamoto still thought such a social order could be created with technology, and especially crypto technology.
Satoshi was not the first to seek “political liberation” through cryptography. A subculture of “cypherpunks” and “crypto-anarchists” have been promoting this belief for decades, “but after years of work, they still failed to build viable payment platforms.”
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However, Satoshi seems to have succeeded where others have failed – at first, anyway. What did they do differently? The short answer: she rotates records.
This revelation can seem overwhelming, especially since it
