• Home
  • Blog EN
  • Blog DE
  • 4M
  • Homegrown
  • About
  • Home
  • Blog EN
  • Blog DE
  • 4M
  • Homegrown
  • About
The Future of Work & Education

Will Greed Save America?

2/19/2018

Comments

 
Why Bitcoin Is Both A Risk For Doom And An Opportunity For Transformation: Reporting On The Chinese Manufacturing Industry Behind The Cryptocurrency

… when advancing science and technology alter man’s long-established relationship with the planet on which he lives, revolutionize his societies, and at the same time equip his rulers with new and immensely more powerful instruments of domination, what ought we to do? What can we do? [Aldous Huxley]
 
Shenzhen, 18. January, 2018. As I enter the arrival hall in Baoan Airport my eyes search for Vasily in vain. He is not here. I give him a call and he picks up the phone. “I am on my way. You told me that you would arrive a quarter to eight.” I sit down in a Costa Coffee next to the arrival exit and wait for him. Vasily shows up ten minutes later and sits down opposite of me. I notice that he is taller than in my memory; probably 1.90, slim, dressed in black jeans and a black denim shirt, a grey scarf tied around his neck. If there weren’t teenager bracelets on his teeth, he would go through a Russian spy in a James Bond movie.
 
Vasily is actually from the Ukraine and I met him only two weeks earlier on a Shanghai event, where I spoke about the future of work and the impact of robotics and AI. He approached me after the event and explained that he owns a trading company, which buys mining rigs in Shenzhen and sells them to Eastern Europe, Russia and the US. As the conversation unfolds, he provides incredible numbers about the hardware industry behind the Bitcoin hype, and I am hooked. Mining rigs | 挖矿机. What in God’s name is he talking about? Aren’t rigs infrastructure to drill for oil?
 
I had a few years ago, when I first heard about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, opened a mental drawer and put the entire subject ad acta: pyramid scheme. Those who come first earn massive profits, those who come last bear the risk. Recently, the blockchain technology behind Bitcoin has attracted my interest after reading Heinz von Förster and Bernhard Pörksen’s conversation on Understanding Systems. Förster, who had the nickname Socrates of Cybernetics, explains therein the concept of circularity and I immediately understood that blockchain indeed is the technology to put in reality what the participants of the Macy Conferences have probably envisioned for humanity back in the 1950s: meritocracy.

Want to read more? Download below PDF.
First published Jan 24, 2018 on mycountryandmypeople.org
180124_reporting_on_the_180124_chinese_manufacturing_industry_behind_the_cryptocurrency.pdf
File Size: 2985 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

Comments

    Archives

    January 2023
    October 2022
    May 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    January 2020
    October 2019
    February 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    February 2016

    Categories

    All
    AI
    Alienation
    Anthropocence
    Artisanship
    Automation
    Basic Income
    Brotherhood
    Capitalism
    Circular Economy
    Cities
    Compassion
    Compulsive Hoarding
    Consumerism
    Countryside
    CSR
    Education
    German Elections
    Gratitude
    Human Development
    Identity
    Information
    Language
    Learning
    Materialism
    Meditation
    Metamorphosis
    Migration
    Mindful Consumption
    Parenting
    Purpose
    Purpose And Midlife Crisis
    School
    Transformation
    Travel Industry
    Wildness
    Work
    World Order

© 2015