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upwardbound

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upwardbound
·vor 4 Jahren·discuss
That seems like a waste of headcount if you have middle men just to "do the translation" between different people. It sounds like the marketing person needs to understand their audience better and make a better-crafted presentation for the audience.
upwardbound
·vor 4 Jahren·discuss
My understanding is that it originally came out of the cyberpunk & anarchist subcultures (e.g. the use of the Japanese nom de plume Satoshi Nakamoto is in my view a call-out to the glamorization of Japan in cyberpunk and cypherpunk culture). I believe Bitcoin really was indeed meant as an anarchist or libertarian way to have something like gold but digital - something that could be used to buy & sell anything forbidden by governments. Illegal online activity has been highly glamorized since before the start of the tech boom in culturally-foundational novels like Neuromancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer - where the main hero is a suicidal amphetamine-addicted criminal hacker and his frenemies / semi-allies are an arms dealer and an assassin.

To be honest, I think this glamorization of digital crime is rather naive. Even if someone takes the very niche position that drugs should be fully decriminalized, Bitcoin is also used for truly fucked up things like human slavery.

In this thread, you can see an example by golergka, who uses bitcoin as I believe it was originally intended:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31132987 "Drug trade, tax avoidance, banking for the unbanked and sanctioned. I'm currently living from airbnb to airbnb, with all my Russian banks banned from SWIFT, and crypto is the only way I'm abe to access my money."

What is strange and I think you are rightly confused about is why did a very niche crypto-anarchist technology enter mainstream society in a big way? I think it's primarily a speculative bubble BUT there's a chance that it could be a bubble that never pops. Think of diamonds - we now have the technology to very affordably make beautiful synthetic diamonds, so from a first principles standpoint the price of diamonds should collapse any day now but it hasn't, and probably won't. Diamonds being expensive is too deeply baked into our culture, and it is possible that cryptocurrency could similarly become a bubble that never pops if it becomes a point of cultural agreement that crypto "should be" valuable, not for fundamental reasons but because of mass belief that is strong enough that it persists indefinitely, even across centuries.