Bitcoins utopian geek community

Rather, it is globally accessible to any Internet-connected device and its entries are verified and secured by volunteers in a peer-to-peer network. Essentially, whenever you trade away a Bitcoin, you openly announce to the entire Internet that this trade has occurred, effectively bypassing the need for a middleman like a bank. The miners are not purely altruistic, of course—the reason they spend exorbitant amounts of money on electricity and graphics processors to solve these problems is that they are rewarded with Bitcoins every time they solve and append one transaction.

Why should anyone but a miner be involved in this scheme? Economists often speak of the network effect, wherein systems gain more value as they gain participants. Uber, for example, is only valuable to consumers if lots of drivers use it, and only useful to drivers if lots of consumers use it. It might have another, subtler, source of value, though: it sends a signal marking its owners as members of a community with a common vision for the future.

But it might never have taken off as a currency if not for its more abstract role as a novelty or badge of honor for those who took part in the project early on. Those early tech-savvy participants were excited by the prospect of a currency outside the control of banks and governments. In this way, Bitcoin is often touted as an anarcho-capitalist project.

Just as the marketplace of ideas is diverse, so too is the marketplace of cryptocurrencies. There are over 1, different cryptocurrencies now in circulation, and each one has its own associated vision and set of values to justify its existence. Take, for example, Dogecoin, a currency based on the Doge meme, and… nothing else, really.

Another example is Monero, which was developed because of privacy concerns with Bitcoin. Those who seek almost entirely private and untraceable transactions would therefore prefer to use Monero. Monero, therefore, is intrinsically worthless. Cryptocurrencies, however, may have an additional and even more interesting source of value. Cryptocurrencies themselves can have a big impact on our society, but even if we ultimately just keep using our credit and debit cards for most everything, blockchain technology might be where the real value lies.

He notes that perhaps the most important implication is the ability to send information out to the entire Internet as opposed to single corporate-owned servers. An app developer could then build software, which interprets the contents of that blockchain and uses it to provide new and innovative services.

Because Uber was the first large-scale company to take advantage of peer-to-peer transport, it has the first-mover advantage over potential competitors. This leads to monopolistic market conditions and stifles innovation; think of how much time it took Uber to simply add a tipping system. With a blockchain protocol, though, you would not be submitting your location and travel plans to Uber. You might receive transport offers from Uber, Lyft, your local cab company, or even your municipal bus system, at which point you can choose whichever is cheapest or makes the most sense to you.

You can also imagine such a system being applied in other areas such as electricity distribution, social media, and research databases. There are already some systems in early development, which aim to take advantage of such peer-distributed services, like Golem. Cryptocurrencies are necessarily linked to these decentralized ledger-based services. Public blockchains are difficult and expensive to maintain, so miners will always need a monetary incentive to help keep them running. So for now, these technologies rely on cryptocurrencies with a set monetary supply to give them value.

The aforementioned five factors are frequently mentioned in the same breath by many third party reputable sources. Freedom of information and protests regarding Wikileaks smears by PBS not mere vandalism are very much a utopian thrust. At least one representative of Anonymous has previously been quoted in CNN news stating their goal is utopia. Lulz are very clearly trying to bring about utopian ideals, as is Wikileaks and The Pirate Party etc. Ultimately, since you've always failed and continue to fail to find consensus, stop wasting your time here and focus on improving the Hacktivism article where your edit suggestions would be far more relevant.

The actions of Lulz seem to be clear example of utopian idealology: fun. See what the BBC states: Humour forms part of the group's agenda, as outlined on its website. The humour references seem to be intended to separate the group from others that hack for money. But not everything LulzSec does is for the fun of it. The group also hacked the website of America's Public Broadcasting Service because it made a documentary critical of Wikileaks.

You're grasping at straws and you need to stop obsessing over ways to mention hacktivist groups in this article. You need to find reliable sources that explicitly state that an individual, group, movement or project is notable for its promotion of, or being motivated by, techno-utopianism. If you can't, stay quiet until you do.

This article is not an article regarding usage of the word "utopia" or "utopian" regarding technology. If you want to change the description to something such as: "Techno-utopianism is usage of the word "utopia" or "utopian" to describe highly beneficial sociopolitical technological improvement. The ideology is the important thing not the superficial mentioning of the word utopia.

To avoid original research , it is better that we find reliable sources that explicitly state that an individual, group, movement or project is notable for its promotion of, or being motivated by, techno-utopianism to avoid any mistake. Do you understand? The Gawker article is about how you can buy any drug imaginable online and it states to do so you need Bitcoins and it describes many users of Silk Road as being from "Bitcoin's utopian geek community", which seems to be a clear description of Bitcoin being utopian at least partially.

Would you say the Gawker quote is a third party source? I shall do some more research into this "utopian geek community" at Bitcoin. Loremaster, please note this a discussion thus don't expect results instantly; via debate and discussion we could find a possible way to improve this article. It is not unreasonable to suggest a reference to Bitcoin or Lulz in the article.

Try not to immediately shoot down any possible new ideas. If you so interested in this techno-topianism article it could be helpful if you also did some research. Since it launched this February, Silk Road has represented the most complete implementation of the Bitcoin vision.

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A widely used estimate by Digiconomist suggests that the Bitcoin network currently uses around 30 terawatt-hours TWh a year, or 0. The cost of electricity is around 5c per kilowatt-hour for industrial-scale users. Miners with higher costs have mostly gone out of business.

As a first approximation, Bitcoin miners will spend resources nearly all electricity equal to the price of a new Bitcoin. Under current rules, the settings for Bitcoin allow the mining of 1, Bitcoins a day, implying daily use of 24,MWh or an annual rate of nearly TWh — about 0. So much energy, so few users An obvious comparison is with the existing financial system. Digiconomics estimated that Visa is massively more efficient in processing transactions.

A supporter of Bitcoin, Carlos Domingo, hit back with a calculation suggesting that the entire global financial system uses about TWh per year, or three times as much as the Diginconomics estimate for Bitcoin. As a defence, this is far from impressive. Read more: The bitcoin and blockchain: energy hogs More importantly, the global financial system serves the entire world. By contrast, the number of active Bitcoin investors has been estimated at 3 million. Almost all of these people are pure speculators, holding Bitcoin as an asset while using the standard financial system for all of their private and business transactions.

Another group is believed to use Bitcoin for illicit purposes such as drug dealing or money laundering , before converting these funds into their own national currency. The number of people who routinely use Bitcoin as a currency for legitimate transactions might be in the low thousands or perhaps even fewer. With the current threat of climate change looming large globally - this constitutes an unthinkably large amount of energy consumption.

Projects such as Gridcoin are based on calculations that are actually useful to science. But these ideas are in their infancy. Postal Service delivered an ordinary envelope to Mark's door. Inside was a tiny plastic bag containing 10 tabs of LSD. Mark, a software developer, had ordered the micrograms of acid through a listing on the online marketplace Silk Road.

He found a seller with lots of good feedback who seemed to know what they were talking about, added the acid to his digital shopping cart and hit "check out. Four days later, the drugs sent from Canada arrived at his house.

Silk Road, a digital black market that sits just below most internet users' purview, does resemble something from a cyberpunk novel. Through a combination of anonymity technology and a sophisticated user-feedback system, Silk Road makes buying and selling illegal drugs as easy as buying used electronics -- and seemingly as safe.

It's Amazon -- if Amazon sold mind-altering chemicals. A listing for "Avatar" LSD includes a picture of blotter paper with big blue faces from the James Cameron movie on it. The sellers are located all over the world, a large portion from the United States and Canada. But even Silk Road has limits: You won't find any weapons-grade plutonium, for example. Its terms of service ban the sale of "anything who's purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction.

The URL seems made to be forgotten. But don't point your browser there yet. It's only accessible through the anonymizing network, TOR , which requires a bit of technical skill to configure.