Electric Sheep on Nostr: ...
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/26/trump-orange-pilled-by-three-bitcoiners-in-puerto-rico-100-million.html
"Hoyos-López added that many miners are former Wall Street executives."
That one sentence tells you everything you need to know about how mixed the motives are among people pushing blockchains.
Like YouTub and NetFix, the concept of "cryptocurrency" really only works if there's one platform used by everyone. With blockchains, everyone can embed that platform in a ring they wear, but whoever controls 51% of mining (or stake, or whatever comes after Proof of...) has the One Ring to rule them all.
Every Wall St banker and Vulture Capitalist wants to get control of that One Ring. Now the Orange Felon too wants to be the lord of the rings ( hmm, maybe there's a story idea there 😋).
This isn't unique to blockchains as payment systems, and it's not inherent to them. Online payment gateways (PayPal, Stripe, etc), credit card companies and banks have been fighting the same zero-sum war for decades. This war to control 'the payment system' is just financialisation at work.
There's a clue to a way out of this in the way we avoided AOL or CompuServe being 'the digital network', by adopting TCP/IP, and forming a network of networks. The right set of protocols could enable a peered network of payment systems, including but not limited to blockchains. So what could be the TCP of payments?
ILP (InterLedger Protocol) is one example, and I'm borrowing heavily from their elevator pitch here. But many protocol stacks were tested in early internetworking before TCP/IP emerged as the Mt Doom that prevented any one company holding the One Ring of networking. Are there any proposals competing with ILP to be the Mt Doom of payments? What are their pros and cons?
"Hoyos-López added that many miners are former Wall Street executives."
That one sentence tells you everything you need to know about how mixed the motives are among people pushing blockchains.
Like YouTub and NetFix, the concept of "cryptocurrency" really only works if there's one platform used by everyone. With blockchains, everyone can embed that platform in a ring they wear, but whoever controls 51% of mining (or stake, or whatever comes after Proof of...) has the One Ring to rule them all.
Every Wall St banker and Vulture Capitalist wants to get control of that One Ring. Now the Orange Felon too wants to be the lord of the rings ( hmm, maybe there's a story idea there 😋).
This isn't unique to blockchains as payment systems, and it's not inherent to them. Online payment gateways (PayPal, Stripe, etc), credit card companies and banks have been fighting the same zero-sum war for decades. This war to control 'the payment system' is just financialisation at work.
There's a clue to a way out of this in the way we avoided AOL or CompuServe being 'the digital network', by adopting TCP/IP, and forming a network of networks. The right set of protocols could enable a peered network of payment systems, including but not limited to blockchains. So what could be the TCP of payments?
ILP (InterLedger Protocol) is one example, and I'm borrowing heavily from their elevator pitch here. But many protocol stacks were tested in early internetworking before TCP/IP emerged as the Mt Doom that prevented any one company holding the One Ring of networking. Are there any proposals competing with ILP to be the Mt Doom of payments? What are their pros and cons?