Following on from my previous post, here are some quick notes on reports from the Bitcoin meeting, based on the reporting from CoinDesk.
Many of the talks are certainly represent the “Bitcoin is the future of money” narrative.
Notable talks include the keynote by Patrick Byrne (Overstock.com), who is described by Roop Gil as a “Bitcoin philosopher”, who cites “great thinkers like Marx, Hegel and Kant, as well as modern-day academics like Francis Fukayama”, and expounds “Austrian Economics”.
The reporter editorializes, “Drawing on his business expertise, scholarly training and bitcoin enthusiasm, he set the right tone for rest of the conference.” Byren gives us a very clear performance of one of the Bitcoin narratives: “I’m a bold Internet pioneer and revolutionary”. (Also, “I have millions of dollars, so I must be smart.”)
reports that former lead developer Gavin Andresen made some interesting points, including less than enthusiastic remarks about the state of “mining”, and the effects of speculation. Specifically, market speculation is pushing up transaction costs, which could wipe out one of the supposed features of Bitcoin–accessibility for the “unbanked”.
Here Andresen is calling out a conflict between the pure market narrative and the social development narrative (“Enabling micro payments will end povery!”) that have been told about Bitcoin. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
I note that one of roles played by altcoins is to fill in where Bitcoin is too expensive, and to foster economic development in particular communities.
Finally for now, there was a very revealing presentation by “Circle”, which is a Bitcoin based “Internet-based consumer finance company”. I have commented several times about the importance of end-to-end engineering: Circle really important because they are paying attention to a bunch of critical issues outside the core protocol.
reports that one of their critical moves is “Rewriting bitcoin’s vocabulary”, away from speculation and trading, and into deposit and withdrawal.
In other words, this company is attempting to sell a new narrative for Bitcoin, one that is pretty much just like a bank or credit union, except denominated in Bitcoin. (“Bitcoin is useful for ordinary people.”)
This could work, though it can’t possibly be free. It also won’t be unregulated or invisible to the authorities. If successful, then many conventional banks will clone the service.
Why would anyone want this service? I dunno. I guess you have to think Bitcoins are better than conventional currencies.
So: to sum up. The invited speakers are telling and acting out the Bitcoin narratives about “the bold future of money”, and invite us to participate as “consumers” (rather than “traders”). Not much of the gun-running, drug-trading, tax-evading, Internet pirate vibe (at least not in CoinDesk).
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