Alice Weidel is not listed on the site of the event. Nevertheless, she
was a trader or broker for some hedge fund or so, afair. Her 'expertise'
lies in finance, therefore the guardian article's claim is not totally
out of the blue. Since I am located in Hamburg, I will follow the news
on the event.
On a more general note around blockchains: I guess we all agree that
talking about "the internet" is not very informative, I hope we will
soon establish the same consensus on the topic of blockchains. There are
massive R efforts on the way, money flows in on a large scale and I
think it is okay to say that blockchains, open or closed, decentralized
or centralized, will help to further tighten the machine control
paradigm around our societies.
I recently made an effort to speculate a bit about the relation of
private property and the trajectories of blockchains, published on the
moneylab blog
http://networkcultures.org/moneylab/2018/02/07/the-blockchain-as-a-modulator-of-existence/
:
The Blockchain as a Modulator of Existence
By: Oliver Leistert
The advent of the blockchain as a protocological internet layer for
values corresponds to a continuing monetization pressure and ongoing
expansion of identification strategies. Notwithstanding these
trajectories, behind this prospected killer application resides first of
all a sovereign chronological regime that has the capacities to proof
and modulate the existence, identity and administration of data, assets,
goods and services from a distance on micrological scales.
“As far as agency is concerned, the law holds that things and media
are strictly passive.” Cornelia Vismann
Without doubt, one of the most common and important techniques since the
advent of massified networked computing has been the basic computational
operation to copy and paste. To copy the contents of an address space to
another in (networked) computers seems to be the one fundamental
operation a networked society is relying on – on the operational level
of computing itself and on the individual and societal level of swapping
clusters of large files. In the digital realm, scarcity up until today
proved too counter-intuitive and technically non-viable or too expensive
to implement on a general scope. This became manifest in fundamental
attacks endemic and systemic to digital cultures on property regimes,
whose operationability had formerly been intrinsically secured by the
simple fact that consumers did not have the means to copy goods as they
wished. If there is one single capturing method that blockchain
technologies are aiming at it is to limit ubiquitous copy and paste in a
broad sense, to migrate from copy to cut (if at all), to
insert a digital proof of identity for data that may then be linked with
appliances and other machines such as media player or access control via
interfaces. “The business of embedding artificial scarcity into the
digital asset is aligned with what appears to be an inevitable and
continued enclosure of the mythos of online commons within colonial
apparatus.”i The introduction of a time stamped proof of existence in a
presumably tamper-proof distributed ledger yields the late introduction
of scarcity on the protocol level, almost fifty years after the
introduction of TCP/IP.
In the blockchain era, prospected to be in full bloom in ten years,
goods and services – physical or digital, manual or automated – are
bound to a time stamp in the blockchain that is cryptographically
secured. This time stamp marks the beginning of what might be called the
post-digital, signified at its most basic function by remote,
blockchain-based controls of existence. Property regimes in a very
general sense then may be executed automatically by machines through
permissionless (open access), distributed, or permissioned, centralized
ledgers.
This text describes the very real possibility of this new kind of
sovereignty – the sovereignty of the post-digital that modulates
ownership and use of its commodities new from scratch, and as an
extension and update of the bourgeois operating system, designed by the
vectorialist class.ii At its most radical trajectory, control shifts
from external, non-digital, human-centered legal and administrative
procedures, such as contracts, to internal, machine centered and
executable qualities of the commodities, goods and services themselves.
Test cases and applications are already deployed in a variety of fields.
Even if they fail in their first testing phases, the stakes are too high
for fine grained monetization schemes and profits on new frontiers to
emerge to not continue intensive R
‘Smart’ ≈ blind, ‘Contract’ ≈ Code
The originality and limitation by design of blockchain-based distributed
databases is their append-only regime. All past elements are read-only
and only the current block is a write operation. And furthermore, since
the chain is secured in backward direction via hashes, its complete
verification (or falsification) is viable at any
