Re: great interview with amir

On 6/28/15 12:59 AM, Timothy Holborn wrote:
> Great video...
>

Agreed. Thanks Pindar.

And IMO, 'great' is understating it. Perhaps Harari is a genius? I 
hadn't encountered him before, and several things in my life seemed 
different this morning, after watching that video last night.

His sweep is so broad that it could be relevant to anyone, but 
particularly because what's happening in this group involves an 
attempt to co-ordinate several silo'd payment systems, what he says 
about homo sapiens' traits of cooperation and flexibility seems 
directly relevant.

He apparently believes that the large-scale societal power stemming 
from these traits is being used for systems of destruction as much as 
it is for systems of creation. That the mere act of forming a group 
and acting in concert in no way guarantees a healthy outcome, since a 
group is defined as separate from those who are not in the group, and 
it's easy to use the group power to manipulate, enslave, abuse, or at 
best ignore those who are outside.

I'm reminded of the wonderful line by Groucho Marx, "I don’t care to 
belong to any club that will have me as a member".  ;-)


Steven



> On 09:33, Sun, 28/06/2015 Pindar Wong <pindar.wong@gmail.com
> <mailto:pindar.wong@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On dreaming a different dream ...the importance of the
>     meta-narratives in human evolution from Yuval Noah Harari
>
>     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vllgib842g
>
>     p.





>     On Sat, Jun 27, 2015 at 6:34 PM, Melvin Carvalho
>     <melvincarvalho@gmail.com <mailto:melvincarvalho@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>         (also a member of this group)
>
>         https://bitcoinmagazine.com/17005/bitcoin-technology-worth-nothing-interview-dark-wallet-front-man-amir-taaki/
>
>         [snippet]
>
>         *You don’t really see Bitcoin as a payments-innovation, do you?*
>
>         No, it’s not very good for that. The Bitcoin-network is
>         currently subsidized through inflation, meaning transactions
>         cost about thirty dollars each. This vision of Bitcoin as a
>         faster, cheaper and better payments-network is simply not tied
>         to any technological grounding of what Bitcoin is really
>         about. If we want to make Bitcoin a competitor to Visa or
>         MasterCard, we would need to increase the blocksize and
>         centralize mining so much that it is basically the same as
>         existing payments networks. And even then, at some point,
>         we’ll reach a limit where Bitcoin is just not cost-efficient.
>         We don’t need to have all these miners crunching numbers just
>         so people can buy a coffee. That’s insane.
>
>
>

Received on Sunday, 28 June 2015 22:58:24 UTC