“At the end of the day, knowing the identity of Satoshi is about as important as knowing who created HTTP or HTML,” a bitcoin entrepreneur named Jason Weinstein told Slate. “Every day people communicate, socialize, get information, move money, and transact business over the Internet using these protocols without knowing how they work or who created them.”
.. The search for Nakamoto, the argument goes, undermines the anti-authoritarian premise of bitcoin. Andreas Antonopoulos, a well-known bitcoin entrepreneur, laid out this argument in a post on Reddit explaining why he declined an offer to meet Wright:
Identity and authority are distractions from a system of mathematical proof that does not require trust. This is not a telenovela. Bitcoin is a neutral framework of trust that can bring financial empowerment to billions of people. It works because it doesn’t depend on any authority. Not even Satoshi’s.
.. The Economist pointed out, this latest saga unfolded during a heated “civil war” that has broken out among bitcoin developers over how to deal with an increase in transaction volume in the bitcoin network. The network processes transactions in batches known as “blocks.” As the number of blocks has increased, the network has become in danger of being overloaded. One side in the dispute wants to change the bitcoin code, increasing the block size to allow the system to process transactions more quickly. The other side sees this as a betrayal of the integrity of the original code, arguing that a change would lead to more centralization in the system (the greatest sin for a bitcoin believer) and consequent problems.
.. In this context, the fight over Nakamoto looks more like the jostling of courtiers to install a sympathetic heir to the throne than an objective analysis of the cryptographic proof.
.. Unlike HTML or HTTP, bitcoin was an ideological project from the start.
.. Turning away from the question of Nakamoto’s identity is a way to deny the fact that bitcoin, like all technology, is ultimately, imperfectly, human.
The Senate Must Deny Obama’s Bid to Transform the Supreme Court
I think very highly of Merrick Garland, whom President Obama has nominated to fill the Supreme Court seat of the late, legendary Justice Antonin Scalia. Merrick was a voice of reason and sound judgment as a top official in the Clinton Justice Department during the Nineties when I was prosecuting terrorists.
.. Consequently, even if Senate Republicans did not have solid constitutional authority to refuse to entertain Obama’s judicial appointments (they do), and even if there were not a rich record of Democratic Senate obstruction of outstanding Republican judicial nominees (there is), I would strenuously oppose the consideration of any Obama nominee for a lifetime appointment on the nation’s highest court, no matter how well I think of the nominee.
.. Obama is a lame duck who has already done lasting damage to the separation of powers that undergirds our constitutional system. He has already put his stamp on the federal judiciary: Besides two Supreme Court justices, he will have placed well over 300 like-minded, life-tenured appointees on the bench by the time he leaves office. He should not be permitted to further shape the ideological direction of the Supreme Court, especially with several cases on the horizon that challenge Obama policies implemented by unilateral, legally dubious executive action.
.. He knows that, as a campaign issue, the specter of Hillary Clinton’s choosing a “progressive” jurist who would dramatically shift the high court (imperiling free speech, Second Amendment, and privacy rights; upholding more central planning by Washington; empowering criminal defendants, terrorist combatants, and illegal aliens) will be a winning one, perhaps even a decisive one, for Republicans in November.
.. It is very simple: The next Supreme Court justice can be chosen by either President Obama or the American people.
The Incompetence Dogma: So Much for Obamacare Not Working
If you go back two decades, to the last great fight over health reform, conservatives seem to have been relatively clearheaded about the policy prospects, albeit deeply cynical. For example, William Kristol’s famous 1993 memo urging Republicans to kill the Clinton health plan warned explicitly that Clintoncare, if implemented, might well be perceived as successful, which would, in turn, “strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.” .. In effect, Mr. Kristol was telling insiders that tales of government incompetence are something you peddle to voters to get them to support tax cuts and deregulation, not something you necessarily believe yourself.
.. But that was before conservatives had fully retreated into their own intellectual universe. Fox News didn’t exist yet ..
The Left-Right Political Spectrum Is Bogus
The most common way that the left-right spectrum is conceived—and the basic way it is characterized in the Pew survey—is as state against capital.* Democrats insist that government makes many positive contributions to our lives, while Republicans argue that it is a barrier to the prosperity created by free markets. On the outer ends we might pit Chairman Mao against Ayn Rand in a cage match of state communism against laissez-faire capitalism.
The basic set of distinctions on both sides rests on the idea that state and corporation, or political and economic power, can be pulled apart and set against each other. This is, I propose, obviously false, because hierarchies tend to coincide. Let’s call that PHC, or Principle of Hierarchical Coincidence. A corollary of PHC is that resources flow toward political power, and political power flows toward resources; or, the power of state and of capital typically appear in conjunction and are mutually reinforcing.
.. Michel Beaud, in his History of Capitalism, is one of many historians who have found the state connection criterial: “What one in any case should remember is the importance of the state in the birth, the first beginnings of capitalism …. The primary transforming factor is the state. National unity, currency standardization, juridical coherence, military strength and the beginnings of a national economy: all these were created and developed by the state, or with the state as organizing principle.”
.. If you look at the actual procedures employed by a Vanderbilt, a Rockefeller, a Carnegie, you see that they depended fundamentally on state sponsorship and state violence, which such men were in a position to command in virtue of their wealth.
.. If one thought a bit, for example, about the way that government energy policies and private energy concerns are interlocked, one would see less and less sense of distinction. Regulators and corporate lobbyists and congressional staffers are all the same people.
.. The mainstream left is a technocratic elite, with a cult of science and expertise and an ear for the unanimous catchphrase. This is anything but a meritocracy; it an entrenched intergenerational class hierarchy.
.. There are alternatives, and the one I would suggest is this: We should arrange political positions according to whether they propose to increase hierarchy or to dismantle it. Instead of left and right, we should be thinking about vertical versus horizontal arrangements of power and wealth.