Supervenes

USD > BTC; QED

Bitcoin exchanges exist on servers that exist at physical locations in nation-states. Nation-states have monopolies on the use of legitimate force and have the power to tax. So any state that feels its currency threatened by BTC can punitively tax/seize servers in its territory and block access to servers outside its territory from outgoing traffic from ISPs within its territory.

So any BTC exchange that isn’t peer to peer hosted (would that even work?) will either never be a threat to any national currencies, or will not exist for long if it is. Thoughts?

If it takes you 600 words of throat-clearing to even approach the book you are ostensibly reviewing, maybe something has gone wrong. http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/38530-badiou-and-philosophy/

You are a feared reviewer of other technology pundits’ books … you demolished Jeff Jarvis’s book Public Parts, called Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography “pedestrian”, you regularly ridicule internet consultant Clay Shirky via Twitter – do you enjoy a fight?

They don’t like to fight, that’s the problem. They are ripe for ridiculing because they are ridiculous in many cases, and the only reason they are advancing is because they plug in the conceptual and theoretical holes in their theories with buzzwords that have no meaning – “openness” or “the sharing economy” – what on earth is the sharing economy?

What I’ve tried to do in my reviews is engage seriously with these bullshit concepts, as if they were serious – to see whether an idea such as “cognitive surplus”, of which Clay Shirky is very fond, has any meaning at all. I do close readings of things that aren’t meant to be read very closely. That is how our technology discourse works, there are lots of great bloggers, soundbites and memes, but once you start putting them together you realise that they don’t add up. And making people aware that they don’t add up is a useful public function.

Evgeny Morozov: “We are abandoning all the checks and balances”

“Even in sober neuroscience textbooks we are routinely told that bits of the brain “process information,” “send signals,” and “receive messages”—as if this were as uncontroversial as electrical and chemical processes occurring in the brain. We need to scrutinize such talk with care. Why exactly is it thought that the brain can be described in these ways? It is a collection of biological cells like any bodily organ, much like the liver or the heart, which are not apt to be described in informational terms. It can hardly be claimed that we have observed information transmission in the brain, as we have observed certain chemicals; this is a purely theoretical description of what is going on. So what is the basis for the theory?”

Colin McGinn, Homunculism

“Apart from vintage photographs in which scientists discerned the trails left by a positron or an Omega-minus particle on the move, most of the entities Bernstein writes about are best “depicted” as mathematical formulae.”

McLemee review of Bernstein, “A Palette of Particles”

Here are some terms in current analytic metaphysics. Each term or phrase refers to a view about what there is or the way in which some things exist:

• metaphysical indeterminacy
• ontic vagueness
• vague existence
• indeterminate existence
• vague identity

These are all meant to pick out distinct views, though sometimes “metaphysical indeterminacy” is treated as an umbrella term incorporating all of the others. Examples of views picked out by these sorts of terms include:

• There is some thing and it is indeterminate whether the thing exists.
• Determinately, there is some thing that is the sum of a and b.
• It is vague which things exist.
• It is indeterminate whether a = b.
• Object a determinately exists but it is vague what the boundaries of a are.

This literature is often confusing. Careful writing helps, and formalization helps even more, except that sometimes after you have made some progress in a formal logical capacity, when it comes time to translate the results back into ordinary English, confusion resumes.