The beauty of Bitcoin is not that it is libertarian or anarchist. The
beautiful thing about Bitcoin is that it can unite together democrats,
republicans, socialists, anarchists, libertarians, entrepreneurs, venture
capitalists, people in Botswana <http://youtu.be/HmtDsvO407Y>, and people
all over the world. The most important thing about Bitcoin is not the speed
of transactions or even inexpensive payments - these are great features but
the critical thing is that Bitcoin is decentralised. An entrepreneur
running a VC backed firm (like myself) can create a proprietary, closed,
walled-garden type system and try to get regulators to do certain things -
but Bitcoin simply will press onwards. A programmer can try to change the
protocol to enable infinite amounts of coins to be created, but Bitcoin
will simply press onwards. If government regulators, VC-backed
entrepreneurs and closed systems being involved in Bitcoin and trying to
further the community and adoption is a bad thing - then we clearly are
afraid that Bitcoin is not decentralised. If Bitcoin really is what we
believe it is - then we have nothing to fear from anyone joining the
community. If that is the case then we should welcome involvement from as
wide and as diverse an audience as possible and not worry about the
potentially.

Unless these "suited men" and "false doctrines" can somehow push changes
into the core bitcoin software that can get past all the core developers,
let us welcome their efforts. Unless they can fool the minds of the
brilliant and diligent people here on this list and elsewhere, let us
welcome their efforts. Unless they can successfully sneak a change in which
is accepted by the majority of nodes and miners, let us welcome their
efforts. Let's not seek to find enemies where none exist. Jeremy Allaire
may speak different words than you Amir, but you might find that he is
working towards the same goal (furthering Bitcoin), albeit through
different means.

If Bitcoin is truly decentralised - we have nothing to fear and everything
to be excited about.


On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 7:34 PM, Amir Taaki <genjix@???> wrote:

> Luke, I also respect your contributions and have advocated your work
> because I believe you come from the heart and your ideals.
>
> Our ideals are not this political affiliation or that ideological dogma.
> Our ideals are a shared set of values around openness, fairness,
> empowerment of the common user and freedom of information. These values
> are the basis for the internet and why it's a success story. They are
> also the reasons why the printing press was able to reform Europe taking
> power away from corrupt catholic churches who had institutionalised
> their religion and turned it into a tool against actual followers of god
> who were being misled into following fake rules that were added in by men.
>
> Today we now follow suited men who sell us false doctrine and have
> elevated themselves up as beyond mortal men with the mirage that they
> hold a secret knowledge or power that we as people don't possess. When
> Christ kicked the money changers from the temple and washed the feet of
> the poor, it was a statement about who we as people should stand with.
> They are thieving from us, the people, everyday and now Bitcoin as tool
> is going to bring back technology into our hands. And I'm glad for that.
>
> So tell me, why should I embrace these white knights coming to
> legitimise Bitcoin with their surveillance and censorship palming it off
> with their gibberish newspeak. These people are real motherfuckers and
> what motivates them primarily is greed at your expense.
>
> They don't see Bitcoin as empowerment. They see Bitcoin as convenience,
> and are willing to compromise the empowerment aspect for more
> convenience. Bitcoin will grow, but the question is in which direction.
>
> I'm confident that Bitcoin will play an established and central role in
> our future financial infrastructure. My objective now is to maintain the
> integrity long enough for Bitcoin's empowerment aspect to play out, and
> grow it in the right directions that give us the power. Just like the
> struggles now to keep the internet uncensored and neutral, so too must
> we struggle to keep Bitcoin uncensored and neutral.
>
> And it's funny because all this talk of Bitcoin as being
> politically-neutral is a way of downplaying the values I've been talking
> about above. You can never be politically neutral. That's a fantasy.
> Technology embodies values. Satoshi had values.
>
> On 26/04/14 13:11, Luke-Jr wrote:
> > Amir, I think you contribute much to bitcoin, and I value that. But
> Bitcoin is
> > *not* libertarianism. Bitcoin is *not* anarchism. Bitcoin is *not*
> > "volunteerism". Bitcoin is *not* a movement for financial freedom - or
> any
> > political movement at all. Bitcoin is a technology, which can and should
> be
> > embraced by people of any political affiliation. Adoption by people with
> views
> > contrary to your own is not an attack on Bitcoin, it is growth.
> >
> > On Saturday, April 26, 2014 5:33:48 PM Amir Taaki wrote:
> >> I get what you're doing, but we both know that really isn't the case.
> >> Allaire speaks from his heart, and they hired Mike Hearn.
> >> I don't think we'll ever know the whole truth as that's not how these
> >> proprietary cultures work.
> >> Check this quote by him:
> >>
> >> "A lot of the safeguards that businesses and consumers take for granted
> >> in their everyday interactions and payments don’t exist in bitcoin
> [...]"
> >>
> >> or
> >>
> >> "if your goal is to ensure widespread adoption of bitcoin, there needs
> >> to be rules around its use, he says, arguing that it’s not good enough
> >> to imagine bitcoin can exist above society."
> >>
> >> This doesn't sound like descriptions of systems that empower users to
> >> self-regulate. This is the exact speech used behind many surveillance
> >> and censorship tools to push them on us. Things like "anti-fraud"
> >> blacklists or researching correlation techniques on consumer activity.
> >>
> >> If this tech is developed it will be deployed or pushed upon places like
> >> Coinbase. Coinbase is the only business (or US?) in the valley with a
> >> banking relationship which they have due to a special relationship with
> >> JP Morgan and one of their bankers on their board.
> >> And that's where these products that work against their users will come
> >> into play. Maybe the industry doesn't have enough balls, and big Bitcoin
> >> businesses with a large following (CoinBase, BitPay, ... whoever) start
> >> "self-regulating" by spying, tracking and censoring their users.
> >>
> >> On 26/04/14 06:31, Peter Todd wrote:
> >>> On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 10:37:11AM +0100, Amir Taaki wrote:
> >>>> reducing the risk is newspeak for censorship
> >>>>
> >>>> protection against fraud is codeword for surveillance.
> >>>
> >>> Maybe it is; maybe it isn't.
> >>>
> >>> I hope Circle is just implementing all the decentralized technologies
> >>> we've been talking about for ages that let people chose on their own
> >>> terms how to reduce the risks involved in their transactions; best case
> >>> is all this talk about moving Bitcoin away from its libertarian roots
> is
> >>> just PR material. After all, Dark Market is an example of that
> approach,
> >>> yet could also be marketted as "bringing Bitcoin into the mainstream
> >>> with anti-fraud, lower costs, greater privacy safeguard, and protection
> >>> against identity theft".
> >>>
> >>> I'm not very hopeful that's the case, but lets hold off on the torches
> >>> and tar until they publish hard details on what exactly they are doing.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
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