On 12/15/2013 03:27 AM, Luke-Jr wrote:
> On Sunday, December 15, 2013 12:58:33 AM Cody R Wilson wrote:
>> Dark Wallet in The New York Times:
>> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/sunday-review/the-bitcoin-ideology.htm
>>
>>
l
>>
>> It is as many of us planned back in August in Berlin. If the
>> division could be made visible, there would be room for another
>> faction to speak for Bitcoin instead of the Foundation and the
>> financiers.
>>
>> I think this recognition alone represents a sizable achievement
>> for unSYSTEM.
>
> I don't see it as an achievement to hijack Bitcoin, which really is
> JUST a technology and NOT a movement.
>
> Luke _______________________________________________ unSYSTEM
> mailing list: http://unsystem.net
> https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unsystem
>
It could more easily be argued that those who try to frame Bitcoin as
a purely technical innovation are the real hijackers. The NYT piece,
for all its flaws, has to be congratulated as the first mainstream
article to actually quote the whitepaper directly. Satoshi was
criticising the centralised control of the money supply. If people
think that that can be divorced from politics, let me quote
Rothschild: "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not
who writes the laws".
All those startups and VCs frothing at the mouth about how much they
can make off BTC are the ones twisting the original vision, not
intentionally, but because at the drop of a hat they will cede the
"no-third-party" principle (as evidenced by the endless talk of
"compliance" and all the rainbow coloured lists we have been treated
to recently).

Even if Bitcoin were not about money, it would still be political. A
distributed timestamp server is a direct challenge to pre-existing
power structures because it creates an objective version of history
which cannot be retroactively edited. You only have to read 1984 to
see how "dangerous" that invention would be seen by some.