Paul Ford on Bitcoin
Lovely piece by Paul Ford on Bitcoin for Bloomberg:
What Bitcoin actually accomplished is the financialization of a few genuinely joyous ideas. Shrug away the exchange rate, and you have a set of technologies that, for one, allows you to create scarcity. At least of a kind, because you can encode data and information into the blockchain in a way that lets you say, “This is the first one of these particular digital things.” It’s been applied to digital art, and you can see applications for patents, stock photos, things like that. With copies all over the place. […]
People feel compelled to make predictions about blockchains. Here’s mine: The current wave of coins will eventually ebb, because it’s a big, inefficient, unholy mess. It’s more ideology than financial instrument, and ideology is rarely a sustainable store of value. Plus, transactions are slow (everyone says they’re fixing that), and you shouldn’t have to use an aluminum smelter’s worth of power to make new currency.
For what it’s worth I don’t understand the Bitcoin backlash we’re currently in. The creation of a decentralized currency out of computer algorithms seems like a pretty amazing achievement. Whether it ends up having a positive impact, it’s far too early to tell. But technology is the canonical genie you can’t put back in the bottle – its influence will be felt either way.