YOUR IDEAS DON’T MATTER TO BITCOIN

Peter Todd went on the Let’s Talk Bitcoin show yesterday and said something that hit home: Satoshi was wrong about some things.
Now, Satoshi was a technologist, that is, a sort of scientist. He’d love to have been wrong, it would give him an opportunity to find something new. Specifically, they were discussing block size limits. Todd, the outspoken Bitcoin developer, spoke directly to the issue of raising the block size limits, and said at one point that the whole debate had become more philosophical than technical. In essence, Todd feels that raising the block size limit to 20 megabytes, as Gavin Andresen suggests, does not solve the central issue, but rather ‘kicks the can down the road,’ thereby making it an issue we’ll only be dealing with again in the future.
Todd could be right about that part. It’s not even what I’m actually here to write about. I’m here to address the ‘libertarian’ and ‘anarcho-capitalist’ contigent of Bitcoiners. I’m here to deliver a simple message: your ideas don’t matter. Bitcoin is a digital cash, difficult to censor, and resistant to regulation. It is an implementation of cryptographic principals which people have dreamed about since the 80s if not sooner: the ability to transmit value without a trusted third-party to mess things up. Bitcoin does not answer to your ideals, it does not care about your stance on this or that issue. Bitcoin is not a person, in effect it is not even a community. Bitcoin is a technology.
There is a large group of people running around on the Internet, corporatist apologetics firmly in hand, completely forgiving of all the evils that capitalism perpetuates worldwide. Oh, Chevron murdered protestors in Nigeria? Coca-Cola killed Colombian peasants? Well, was it done in the name of profit?

This post was published at Crypto Coins News on 31/05/2015.