Re: <nettime> WTF happened In 1971?

On Sep 17, 2020, at 13:16 , Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 2:29 PM José María Mateos <chema@rinzewind.org> wrote:

> https://wtfhappenedin1971.com

Based on the page contents, what happened is that there was no Bitcoin.

As to what Bitcoin would've done about it, I'm in the dark!

Bitcoin would have made it all worse, if it affected things at all.

Bad actors would have escaped even more easily from the collapsing regulatory frameworks with their money. It would, if anything, have provided a hyper-Switzerland safe haven for tax avoidance, money laundering and illegal transactions for all the new money the corporations were siphoning out of national economies… while occasionally being manipulated to inflate and collapse by the most powerful bad actors, at their whims. And the lack of computer literacy among the masses would have made them a hundred times more susceptible to scams and theft in this totally unregulated (by design) marketplace.

Meanwhile, without a central government to manage the “currency” with even the flimsiest of accountability standards, the forces behind bitcoin would collectively manage it in their own naked self-interest as a class, in a best-case scenario creating the only currency in which the rich were totally unaccountable to any central authority. Sure this is only an acceleration of the way things went in reality, but as the Panama Papers taught us, unaccountable riches gonna unnaccount for themselves.

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