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[Ché Biko]

I figured some of you might find this an interesting read.
Especially Saede Riordan and friends.

[Jace]

Long website titles make me go wince.

[Louella Dougans]

Bitcoins, lol.

[Jace]

Bitcoins, lol.

Aren't those things like, over? It makes me go "herp" every time they are written into an Almost Human episode.

[Louella Dougans]

Bitcoins, lol.

Aren't those things like, over? It makes me go "herp" every time they are written into an Almost Human episode.

Possibly. Difficult to make sense of what is actually going on with bitcoins. But apparently they're central to the whole concept laid out in the link in the OP.

Bitcoin mining currently consumes more than half of the entire computing capability of human civilisation. The concept linked in the OP proposes expanding this. And a whole lot more besides.

All that computing capability, doing absolutely hee-haw productive, just consuming resources, causing pollution, with absolutely nothing worthwhile to show for it.

Not to mention the inherent oppression that the concepts linked in the OP represent. Take for example the notions of "innocent until proven guilty", and criminal convictions for minor crimes expiring after several years. Those no longer apply. The things linked in the OP, would mean someone that was e.g. charged but not prosecuted for an alleged offence, would have to expect people, all people, to treat them as if they were guilty. Because people think "no smoke without fire". For the rest of that person's life.

So, lol bitcoins, lol humans.

:humans:

[Jace]

I had heard something about a lot of recent issues with massive amounts of bitcoins being stolen and in some cases just straight up disappearing.

[orange]

Bitcoins, lol.

Aren't those things like, over? It makes me go "herp" every time they are written into an Almost Human episode.

To go down that rabbit-hole.  Bitcoin is in a rough spot until there is a sufficiently large user-base that services and goods can be bought and sold using Bitcoins without converting back to your local government backed currency.  Until then it is a faux-commodity.

I do not intend to buy Bitcoins, but I would probably accept Bitcoins in trade for a service/good. 

I can easily replace Bitcoin in the above sentence with Euros or Yen since I live in California and do not currently plan to travel to Europe or Japan.

The future of crypto-currency is open to plenty of speculation.

[Esna Pitoojee]

I had heard something about a lot of recent issues with massive amounts of bitcoins being stolen and in some cases just straight up disappearing.

tl;dr - one of the bigger trading centers for Bitcoins 'lost' about 850,000 (~450m USD at the time) bitcoins. People promptly called foul, as that would suggest either complicity or massive incompetence on the part of the trading center. The guy who was running it turned out to be rather shady, and recently hackers have published documents that they claim show the operator simply transferred the bitcoins to a private account and cried theft.

[PracticalTechnicality]

To be honest, as much as i find bitcoin interesting, I cannot wait for the crypto-currency bubble to burst for good.  Think of it, all that 'wasted' processing power could be turned to distributed processing projects, possibly even monetised in it's own right. 

Thinking on it, repurposing crypto-currencies to reflect a unit of real work instead of an arbitrary hashing process could be a good way to monetise research that involves the public.  Cancer research simulations, brute force testing of encryption algorithms and more besides could be reflected as a unit or partial unit of currency based on the current philosophy, using the bitcoin, litecoin, doge coin or whatever algorithms as a baseline for what a 'unit of work' is worth to allow a relative worth to be attached to such work. 

Just a half baked early morning thought, but companies could even mass purchase crashed crypto-currencies to get a bank of recognised tokens to use in such a process. 

Tl;Dr: when the bubble on speculation and generation bursts, crypto-currency could be put to better use as a new set of fiat currencies reflecting the perceived worth of conducting a real-world specific distributed processing activity.  Until then it is yet another Libertarian fantasy generating profit for a few under the weight of dwindling public-interest fuelled momentum, and the bad choices of those who do not break even (fuelling the former profiteers). 

[Shiori]

I've heard William Gibson dubbed them "Dunning-Krugerrands," which I find hilarious.

[Jace]

I've heard William Gibson dubbed them "Dunning-Krugerrands," which I find hilarious.

Gibson has surprisingly amusing and acute commentary on current cultural happenings.

And overall, despite my lack of general knowledge of bitcoins, I'm essentially with PracticalTech - I do not see much future or communal value in proto-currency.

[Ché Biko]

[..]bitcoins[..] apparently they're central to the whole concept laid out in the link in the OP.

As far as I've understood it, it's not so much Bitcoin itself but the protocol that it uses. From the author:

By this point I’d gained a much better understanding of the revolutionary “block chain” technology underpinning the Bitcoin protocol[..]
This new knowledge enabled me to envision exactly how the “Open Network” proposed in my manifesto would function- every individual would be represented as a “coin” and the “block chain” would be a Decentralized record of all human action in the public sphere!

I think that Lachance is more interested to see what Ethereum is going to be like:

In late January, after many further revisions, including the addition of a revolutionary new “Decentralized Application Platform” known only as “Ethereum“, Privacy Is The Enemy was finally released[..]

I think that in the open society descibed in the manifesto, there would be much more certainty wether or not the suspect committed the crime. Most innocents would be able to provide proof of their innocence.
I think it would be hard for one bad rumour/accusation to ruin someone's reputation if the rest of his record is fine.

But yeah, for those of you being pessimistic about the feasability of all this (which I can understand better than Ethereum), here's a piece of proza from one of Lachance's critical friends you might enjoy:

. . .we started a fully decentralized, open-source community and, aside from following the harm principle, instituted a fully anarchic society on a remote, previously uninhabited island (featured on BoingBoing and by invite only on reddit.com). We installed fiberoptic Internet and created a wiki. We had high hopes as this was the first time such a thing had been done since the existence of the Internet and Computers (aka the first time humans have been capable of doing anything / have ever had ideas). We video taped every interaction and discarded the idea of intellectual property, spending our days rating the most trivial and commonplace activities of others, throwing privacy out the window in the name of progress and utopia, and uploading everything to the big data on THE SERVER. We ate ghee from cows who roamed freely on land that had not been fracked, cows who exclusively ate quickly-growing grasses. We neglected to take Niacin. Everything was absolutely perfect and Bitcoin ended all of society's woes. Having invested in both gold and Bitcoin we were very rich, however, we had nothing to spend our money on except self-help central-metaphor business organizational books from the Mainland. One night out of sheer boredom, we initiated a massive Bitcoin transaction to purchase every physical and digital copy of every central metaphor business/self help book that had ever been written, with the intent to create a fecal ziggurat out of the books and our own waste (since we had no sewers) in the center of our island and ignite it after having a weeklong party in which any member could join a special "coterie" and MOD THE SHIT out of anything: we called it The Fecal Ziggurat: pure anarchy and humanity! That transaction may or may not have done harm to a transgender-aligned-however-not-actually-transgender member of our society who had invested heavily in "wearable technology" as well as "health apps". As the technological industry fell apart on the Mainland due to the lack of any guiding business principles and career development based on sports metaphor, the member of society fell into destitution and began to sell their body to children. Their rating settled on an exact 2.5 out of 5 stars, and no one was sure whether or not to transact with them. It was unclear whether the harm principle was being violated, or the violated were being harmed? We hadn't actually thought about that . . . huh. Anyway, the entire community began watching the video feed of this individual and forgot to rate other transactions. Our whole rating system fell to shit, as we realized an Account Manager from Yelp.com had moved in and had rigged the system in exchange for counterfeit Bitcoin credits. An angry Bitcoin miner, who had spent his entire physical life setting up powerful supercomputers to mine Bitcoins but had not found any, killed the Account Manager from yelp.com and although according to the harm principle it should not have, his rating mysteriously spiked. It didn't feel right. We had lost our belief in the silver bullet to cure society's failings through the Internet by abstracting and depersonalizing human interactions, making ideas worthless, and ignoring a human being's need for privacy out of wrongly applying our own personality traits to every single human being on the planet! as well as decentralized open source anarchy founded on a paleolithic diet allowed only by great advances in technology. We tried to go into THE SOURCE CODE, which was open and we thought SOMEONE would have fixed by then, but realized only 2 of us knew what it said or actually did. We got into a fight over how to edit the source code in the comments of the revision history - a real FLAMEWAR that made it onto the front page of reddit.com (which was so cool), it was unclear if the harm principle was really being violated as one of the dudes was a pretty big doucher, and eventually both of ours "DEVS" lost interest and started to masturbate in their units instead of looking at the SOURCE CODE. Everyone knew what had happened but the actual act was occurring in a corner where the camera could not capture the "deed" IYKWIM, LOL, thus there was no proof. Things crumbled quickly after that. Eventually our beautiful, first-ever group of "people who had the Internet" needed a scapegoat for not being able to "make everything in the world perfect according to one person's point of view of how things should be". Our ratings went down quickly and before long we had been ostracized from our own society, not even able to buy a can of sardines as disgusted vendors saw our low rating on their Google Glasses just as we were trying to email them some Bitcoins. As Proudhonian Mutualists, collective action against us was called for. Gary Lachance was executed by a dispute resolution organization (or DRO, for short - not to be mistaken for the police) that mediates disputes / issues. We were banished from the island. We arrived on the Mainland, which was in FUCKING DISARRAY. The governments were trampling on people's rights and freedoms (LIKE ALWAYS LOL), we were mortified at the harms done to us driving on the roads, drinking the (fluoridated!) water, and seeing the children in schools. One Reddit AMA later, our Bitcoin account was hacked by some fucking dweeb from Romania, FUCK him, and all our money was gone. We decided to go back to the only thing that works in this life.[..]

[Samira Kernher]

I figured some of you might find this an interesting read.
Especially Saede Riordan and friends.

Not particularly thrilled with what's being suggested in that.