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Published: 2017 Read: September 2020 |
Like me, David Gerard is a poster to the subreddit known as "Sneer Club," dedicated to dunking on Internet "rationalists," that weird subculture that believes in granting intellectual charity to all ideologies including Nazis and white nationalists but not feminists and "SJWs," though Gerard is much more prolific (and posts under his real name). Gerard's book is a guide to bitcoin, a thing I have never understood despite no matter how many explanations of it I have heard/read, and it sounded interesting enough to ask my local library to buy it. Well, I still don't entirely get it, but I don't know if I could come any closer to understanding than this given my level of technical know-how. Gerard is a tech guy himself and skewers a lot of the assumptions around bitcoin and the blockchain, pointing out it has immense technical and logistical challenges it will basically never overcome, thus preventing it from ever really taking off in the way its adherents claim. So anyone proselytizing it is either trying to dupe you, or is themself a dupe.
It's a fun book: a lot of the stuff here is pretty ridiculous, and he doesn't shy away from saying so. The bitcoin exchanges run by literal teenagers on security-free PHP was pretty mind-boggling! As a Tampa Bay resident, I of course was interested in the very short-lived Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl. The tales of how hard it is to actually spend bitcoin are interesting, and I was fascinating by the story of how when the Mozilla Foundation trialed putting a "donate in bitcoin" button their donations page, their total donations actually went down, so little do people trust bitcoin. A lot of ransomware folks take payment only in bitcoin, and so they actually have customer service teams dedicated to helping you acquire it, or they would never get paid. The mysterious inventor of bitcoin-- and those who have pretended to be him-- was also interesting, and so were all the tales of bitcoin hucksters, including the guy who kept a list of his crimes on his computer in a .txt file, and then later tried to claim it was someones else's work.
This is a quick read; if you're already skeptical of the technology (as I was), you will have your biases confirmed. I don't know if it would win over an adherent, but it seems pretty obvious to me that bitcoin can just not be what its proponents promise or hope for.
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