The invention of a new currency is a highly political act; claiming it isn't is a political statement in itself. The discussion of any disruptive technology should quickly focus on politics and ethics, or risk being abused. You can't both claim to invent technology that seriously affects society, and at the same time dismiss talk of politics as irrelevant. A technology can either be irrelevant or be political (if you ever wish to understand technology, I suggest you read some of the many discussions of the politics of the washing machine; or the fork).

What I find most fascinating about some of the less ideological BTC discussions is the belief that a neutral technology (a cryptographic algorithm) can replace social contracts. I'm not claiming it necessarily can't, I'm just saying that this belief shows not only disdain for government, but an Aspergerish rejection of social structures. It's like saying, I don't want to put people in charge because I don't trust them, and I don't want even to talk to others in order to resolve disagreement; instead, I choose to take all decision-making agency out the hands of humans and place it in the hands of an algorithm that can provably never be swayed, because that is the only thing I can trust.

Regardless, there is nothing technical about a story of a small group attaining concentrated power over a decentralized currency.

You are wrong, I totally trust the government, I'm one of the few that still trust the NSA (and I'm not even a US citizen).

It's not a question of trust, it's a question of choice. With a simple and universal way to transfer money, we no longer have to care about the currency we use, if we can easily do an international transfer with our bank, if our Paypal account is still fine, etc...

The only politic is how governments will be able to tax Bitcoin transaction and I believe it's a big issue but I believe we will be able to fix that when it will become a problem.

I don't really understands what's wrong with: "It's like saying, I don't want to put people in charge because I don't trust them, and I don't want even to talk to others in order to resolve disagreement; instead, I choose to take all decision-making agency out the hands of humans and place it in the hands of an algorithm that can provably never be swayed, because that is the only thing I can trust."

There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it certainly says a lot about our society, or at least about how some people view it or think it should govern itself. I find it interesting.

> Regardless, there is nothing technical about a story of a small group attaining concentrated power over a decentralized currency.

It is completely technical. The incentives and disincentives to centralization are encoded in the protocol.

> The incentives and disincentives to centralization are encoded in the protocol.

I am not sure I catch your meaning (about incentives being encoded etc.), but suppose they are. Isn't that a very political statement to design a system that entrusts "the last word" with an abstract algorithm rather than humans? Why is it that way?

And again, whenever engineers build something that they want people to use to change the world, they can no longer hide behind "technical". This isn't a discussion about using one hash function over another. It's a discussion about how quickly concentrated power arose in what was meant to be a system free of concentrated power.

It is both very technical and very political.

Encryption itself is a highly political technology - the right for two parties to communicate securely and covertly is controversial in many parts of the world, even today.

The economics of centralization are a dependent on the technical choices of the protocol -- PPCoin and scrypt-based crypto-currencies are specifically designed to avoid the scenario that is happening right now, by not relying solely on sha256^2 hashing power. Of course they are not perfect and have their own issues.

Politics is about taking things from people without actually shooting at them. I think your definition of politics so broad that in encompasses apolitical things.

Politics (New Oxford American Dictionary): "the assumptions or principles relating to or inherent in a sphere, theory, or thing, esp. when concerned with power and status in a society".

So politics is everything concerning the managing of power in a society.

"People often re-invent cigarettes as a currency in prison." <-- oops, political statement

That's an interesting variant on, "The personal is political" - "The technical isn't political".

Some technologies are by their nature effectively neutral - the knife can be used to cut food, shave your face, kill your enemy.

In a more recent example, the microprocessor is a neutral technology.

But many technologies are inherently political - the Pill, for example, or ICBMs.

I would argue that Bitcoin may be more of a technology than a currency, but it is an inherently political technology, designed as it is to provide an abstract, somewhat anonymized general ledger technology.

Every technology is political. The only time it stops being political in an overt sense is when it no longer provides an advantage over other technologies which can do its job.

Taking the knife. It's invention was somewhere around the dawn of time for our species so the distinction between political and evolutionary event is blurry. But it's impossible to deny that it empowered the group of our ancestors who could build knifes, their advantage was so overwhelming over those who couldn't that today there isn't any human who isn't a tool user of some sort.

The micro-chip is very much more recent and still clearly political. The societies which can produce them control those who can't utterly. The NSA spying is only the latest in a long string of such events, the use of microchips to cripple weapons used against their creators is another. This technology favors very complex societies that can spend billions of dollars on building fabs, designing chips, training engineers etc.

Now for a thought experiment why a complex society like ours isn't predestined to be the state of humanity. Imagine that tomorrow some scientist somewhere finds out you can create a small stable anti-matter bomb by shaking a tomato on a stick at the sky during a storm. All of the advantages of all weapons since the bronze age are annihilated in a second. Large cities just mean a whole society can be destroyed quicker. Everyone from Amazonian Indians to San Fransisco's tech elite have exactly the same destructive ability, to a very good approximation. In a world like that you'd very quickly end up with a population that lives no closer to each other than the maximum blast radius of said tomato. The majority of technology will more than likely disappear since it gives no immediate advantage to those who posses it and population would plummet since one person can now take on a whole army.

For a further exploration of the impact of technology on the politics of a society see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_%28short_sto...

Robert Moses's Bridges are a technology as well.

But his bridges were a political tool to segregate New York City. Since his bridges and tunnels were shorter than certain busses, he made it impossible for African Americans to commute to certain areas of NYC in the early 20th Century.

Politicians can use anything they want as a weapon for their viewpoints.

You have made the fallacy of presuming that technology is neutral.

Correct me if I'm wrong but this only solves the problem if the miners aren't purposefully coordinating the take over of the system. It is merely that a pool of otherwise benign miners can't be used by the pool operator to rewrite the transaction history.

This doesn't stop an organized attack of someone who has rented lets say half of amazon's cloud infrastructure for a 10 minute attack to take over the transaction history. Something that becomes more and more profitable with the reduction of bitcoin income from mining and increase of the total number and price of bitcoins.