coins & ideology
so bitcoin is gold 2.0 (even though the fees are reasonable again, yay!) but it’s also an ideology and a network. (a network based on that ideology, populated by its believers.)
so what was the ideology of gold 1.0, back in the 1850s? interesting question, right? self-determination, right? carpe diem, make your own luck. manifest destiny to a certain extent. and a distrust of banks/gov’t/paper money, sure. but not a distrust in society per se. gold prospectors certainly had an ideology of hope. i can picture people biting gold coins. gold was, back then, perhaps closer to cash than paper money was. less 3rd party interference. and what was the network of gold 1.0 in 1880s? pirates, americans, and everyone else basically. i mean in the 1500s, gold as a network was also around. since ancient egypt. but in the 1500s i reckon it was a similar ideology of entitlement, exploration and, again, self-determination. it wasn’t a different *currency* than the one used by monarchs and oligarchs. (and in a sense, the monarchs also represented the ideology of entitlement—not sure if in the same way, though.) but bitcoin’s existence as a currency i think is basically irrelevant once you fully weigh its significances as ideology and network.
and the ideology is now approximately: fuck big banks, fuck stocks, fuck bailouts, fuck 2008, fuck visa, fuck rich people, fuck inflation, fuck the fact that having money is the best way to make money, and go go internet, go go unbanked & refugees, go go computers, go go privacy, go go open source, go go libertarianism, go go wikileaks, etc., etc.
even if bitcoin devolves into a provably-unique message delivery system, that still has utility and value and interest to me as more and more of the world becomes digital and thus erasable and mutable.
the question is how badly will scams and banks and FUD tamp down price and participation until we get to the internet 3.0? i can picture a post-apoc world where the only ppl with quality-of-life are the ones who bought bitcoin but those ppl would have had to virtually renounce the entire concept of their entitlement to their own savings as they watched its value go almost all the way to zero but still stayed in the system because it was “right.” because of ideology.