I think it’s a puzzle where we need to figure out all the things that don’t work.
The big obvious problem is that it’s based around Bitcoin. Bitcoins aren’t really currency; they’re best seen as a rare collectible like baseball cards or old comic books. The price doesn’t have any real-world basis and can collapse the instant some hot new fad comes along. Some of the things in the story would work better if they were based around real money with some kind of low-overhead mechanism for microtransactions.
But there are also a bunch of smaller problems:
The unregulated AI lawnmower market seems like a bad idea. I don’t want compensation from an escrow account if an autonomous lawnmower cuts off my foot! I want my foot to not be at risk of being cut off to begin with!
Also, if I’m reading the last panels correctly, then if I yawn in front of the TV at the wrong time, I can be compelled to buy (and eat?) a pizza whether I want to or not.
Not that I’m much of a Bitcoin booster, but isn’t that essentially true of the US dollar as well? It’s not backed by gold anymore; it’s only worth what we collectively imagine it to be worth.
Certainly you can argue that Bitcoin’s global mindshare is a lot more precarious than the dollar’s, but that’s a quantitative difference, not qualitative.
Well, maybe. I can’t be too certain, not being an economist and all. But as far as I can tell. one big issue with bitcoins is that only a finite amount will ever be created and there is a known schedule for the discovery of new bitcoins. So, this means that all the traditional ways that national banks manage economies by creating and destroying money will be no more. Nations will have much less power to control their own economies (think Greece being bound by the Euro). Most countries will not willingly or easily give up this power.
Rand Paul and other gold standard bearers would be quite happy with this, though.
Wow. I wonder how many aliens we could have found and how many cancers we could have cured by now with all that distributed computing. I guess (literally) making money is the kind of goal that gets humans to really put in the effort.
Or (rather enlightened) marketing research. Some bitcoin fanboy tells a company that they should aim for collecting micropayments on every action and bodily function people take. So they post the idea to social media to see how people react. What arguments are made for and against it.
They didn’t explain where the sentient crocodile cane from though. Was it a result of a bitcoin-funded genetic engineering project? Or a bitcoin-funded portal to the Bojack Horseman universe?
Ignoring all the privacy implications, notice that the entire pleasantness of this setting is utterly dependent on the idea that the bitcoiner has infinite resources and so can do whatever he wants with it. What if Crowley is poor? Well if he ran his shower too hot in the morning, he doesn’t get to eat in the evening. He’s downbid on the reputation markets so everyone distrusts him. And then in the morning, his alarm clock doesn’t wake him up.
That’s the Bitcoin endgame. Robots stuffing pizza in the faces of the well to do, utter misery for everyone else. Too bad it won’t happen.
Oh, look. It’s the dystopia from Ubik! And apparently he’s managing to pay his daily alarm fee etc. with the ONE PERCENT commission on residential home sales, which in this case is 1.5 microbits per sale. Which is odd, because that’s only 150 Satoshis, meaning his alarm clock costs 15% of his gross per sale!
The whole notion of calling it “mining” makes it clear that it’s been goldbugs who have supported and defended BitCoin from it’s creation, and that the Venn Diagram between Silicon Valley technologists and frothing libertarians is very, very overlapping.
And they have the same libertarian “well what does it matter to me?” attitude about the environmental effects that BitCoin has. Each BitCoin already is responsible for over 1.5 tons of CO2. Four BitCoins is an entire household’s annual electrical consumption. And this will get worse the more are mined. (Amazing that they managed to find a way to make digital mining even worse than real gold mining.)
I’m all for alternative currencies – or, better, alternatives to money – but BitCoin is unsustainable.
'The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
…he found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.’
Okay, so I’m neutral on bitcoin and I don’t care who uses them, or what proportion of humanity uses them, or the next version of them, etc. Maybe someday I’ll be one of them. Who knows.
But I had to read this a few times just to make sure it wasn’t 100% pure anti-bitcoin satire. (I’m still not entirely sure!) So on the assumption that it is, here’s my problem with it: I don’t actually want to live in the world they describe. Or anything remotely like it. This sounds awful and if these guys are in fact the experts, then let’s burn blockchain technology to the ground and salt the earth so that nothing can ever grow there again. It’s not that I can’t understand what they’re describing. It’s that I do, and I’d never want to live my life that way, and I don’t think I’m alone.
I mean, if it’s 1975, and you’re describing to me ubiquitous fee-free debit cards, or online banking, or direct deposit, I love all those ideas and I can’t wait for them to happen, which probably explains why they did eventually happen. Reading this makes me want to run screaming back to the barter system. So either I’m a one-in-a-million outlier, or these guys are full of it, or bitcoin is doooooooooooomed. Probably the middle one, but we’ll see.
Isn’t the big problem with Blockchains that they have an incredibly crazy overhead in terms of data storage/retrieval since you’re having to pass all this information everywhere? It’s one of the major limiting factos in bitcoin growth and applying it to everything else seems to assume we solved that problem, unless I missed something.
You only have to see the comments to realize most of us feel the same.
This is your typical “now that I have the technology, my political revolution will happen!” screed by deluded technolibertarians that dont realize the fact that NOBODY ELSE wants to live in a world where they are in a market for their alarm clock service.
Long term inflation means micropayments will happen, though. Eventually a dollar will be worth a few pennies, adjusted for inflation relative to say 2000… 15 years ago.
Okay maybe a bit longer than I thought. 1917 for five cents.
You’re probably right. It just seems so on-the-nose, even for that kind of thing. Usually they’re a little more subtle these days after everyone developed antibodies to the raw ripped-from-USENET-circa-1996 versions. Even Chick tracts got a makeover at some point!
