But she does have a new post at her personal blog, Dizzynomics:
Animal Farm V.2
Some people are perplexed by my obsession with Bitcoin and don’t understand why I keep going on about it.
I think, perhaps, this is due to the fact that nothing annoys me more than absolutist thinking, or people who evangelise about having the ultimate solution to everything and refuse to accept that the truth is never that concrete (unless it’s empirically tested).
I also happen to think the whole phenomenon provides an excellent example of cyclical repetition and generational myopia — a core interest of mine — since it perfectly reflects how and why we end up making the same mistakes over and over again (mainly due to the stubbornness of those who think they have discovered a wisdom that nobody has seen before them, without realising plenty of people have many times before).
When I was a Reuters trainee many years ago they trained us using a pretend emerging republic called Manchukistan. This was a great model because it allowed us to really understand the processes by which modern states emerge. As an ancient historian I see the same processes that influence the formation of emerging states repeated everywhere. i.e. We think that as modern individuals we are hugely sophisticated, but in reality our core human tendencies remain the same. What has happened before will happen again, and again, and we are always doomed to repeat history.
In fact, for me, bitcoin is mainly a reenactment of the story of Animal Farm. That is to say, it is the story of communism and how it all went wrong due to an overestimation of our ability to change our selfish human nature. And how it then ended up serving the interests of a small minority of “early adopters” who lived off the exploitation of others, and drove the system into bankruptcy because of the wealth they disproportionately gobbled up and never replaced.
Common to both is the idealistic belief that if everyone works together the decentralised collective can free itself from the tyranny of the incumbent system. Unfortunately, it’s a vision that fails to account for the fact that some will always do more than others and vice versa.
Either way, stage one in implementing this vision is all about creating and instigating a revolution. This involves rejecting the standing system and creating a new set of values for people to believe in.
To succeed, campaigns, evangelism and even the sacrifice of a few “true believers” is needed to gather the recruits needed to make an impact. In the modern internet age this mostly means rejecting the tax system, the standing rules/laws, and seeking refuge in an isolationist community that depends only on itself and the recruits it can persuade to join them. (Luckily, it rarely involves taking to the streets).
The second stage is about ensuring that the system can prosper in line with the directives and values outlined. That involves enforcing compliance with the extreme ideology which has been decided on, and sticking to it rigidly whether it creates wealth or not.
In animal farm those ideological protocols consisted of:
Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.In the world of Bitcoin those ideological “protocols” consist of:
Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
No animal shall wear clothes.
No animal shall sleep in a bed.
No animal shall drink alcohol.
No animal shall kill any other animal.
All animals are equal.
Whatever uses inflationary fiat currency is an enemy.In Animal Farm, however, it soon became obvious that those rules were a farce, and were mainly intended for the masses, not the powerful minority....MORE
Whatever rejects inflationary fiat currency is a friend.
No Bitcoiner shall endorse flexible supply.
No Bitcoiner shall view things in dollar terms.
No Bitcoiner shall replicate the old system.
No Bitcoiner shall sabotage the system with a 51% attack.
All Bitcoiners are equal.
