[tristanho]

This article makes pretty blatant errors:

> We thought the net would break the monopoly of top-down, corporate media. But as business interests took over it has become primarily a delivery system for streaming television to consumers, and consumer data to advertisers.

Weird thing to say about an era where traditional publishers and news networks have been entirely disrupted by random folks posting on twitter/facebook.

> At its core, bitcoin is just an extension of the old PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy encryption protocol.

I've never seen the word "just" do so much work. Bitcoin, notably, solved the Double Spending problem[0] seventeen years after PGP was created.

> In essence, bitcoin is money built and maintained by nerds, based on the premise that good nerds will outnumber the bad nerds.

This is patently false. The _entire_ point of bitcoin is that miners and node operators acting in _their own self-interest_ will secure the protocol, not "good nerds". You can argue if the system fails this will be the case, but not that this is the premise.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending

[brianpgordon]

Yeah I'm also pretty critical of their narrative of how centralized currency came about. Their timeline is wildly wrong. The author makes it seem like states started minting coinage in the middle ages, when the advantages of a standardized coin with a mandated-by-fiat face value (possibly different from the actual value) were well-known - and famously used to great effect by - even the early Roman Empire.

Then there's this sentence, which is just nonsense:

> All money was borrowed from the central treasury, at a rate of interest set by the king.

[eurleif]

> At its core, bitcoin is just an extension of the old PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy encryption protocol.

Grampa Simpson: "Oh, everything's stolen nowadays. Why, the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached!"