"Technology embodies values. Satoshi had values."

I thought Peter Todd summarized it quite nicely during the radio discussion
in Austin a couple weeks ago. Bitcoin as a technology does not have
political values, but its qualities are such that to value Bitcoin to any
degree (including not at all) is voicing a political opinion. If Satoshi
valued anything but individual freedom of speech and association, he was
really bad at voicing that by creating a protocol like Bitcoin.

I have argued here that as it stands, valuing Bitcoin is valuing anarchism,
regardless of how you want to label or rationalize it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPY-5SR-jPQ


On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 1:34 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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