Bitcoin
It’s weird reading the bitcoin founding document and seeing what problem these guys were trying to solve. Basically: for thousands of years money (and then credit) was fine, but now that people are trying to move money to people they’ve never met or don’t intend to meet at more-or-less instantaneous speeds some of the issues with money are becoming apparent. It’s hard to send cash to Tokyo, and if you want to wire money you have to trust somebody—a bank, Western Union, whoever. The bitcoin idea is that you shouldn’t have to do any trusting, because trust both (1) creates vulnerability to fraud when trusted agents become untrustworthy and (2) creates institutional dependence on things like banks, which we agree are icky for reasons not related to trust.
Anyways, the basic idea of bitcoin (as I very vaguely and probably incorrectly understand it) is that all the parties involved will replace trust with hard (but not too hard) math. When any bitcoin transaction takes place, basically both parties involved do some hard (but not too hard) math and then upload the results of that math to a central datalog. Everyone else who’s bitcoining then checks the math, which is again hbnth. If a majority of the math that’s done agrees that the original math you’ve done is right, your transaction goes through. If not, then not. In a way that’s hard to understand without getting way crunchier, somehow this means that it’s almost impossible to do fake transactions (the big risk is someone paying for many things with the same bitcoin, apparently) unless you have a faster computer than everyone else on bitcoin put together.
You can use bitcoin for lots of transactions, but the first transaction is an exchange of trust for math. It's hard to know if that's a good trade or not. From a tragic perspective it makes it look like trust isn’t a virtue but the least-bad solution to a really basic issue with the dialectic. From a humanist perspective it feels vacant, tyrannical: the attitude here is that we trust people in proportion to the power of their CPUs, and that if someone has a faster computer than everyone else put together maybe he deserves all that money. [It seems like the stereotypical techno-libertarian bitcoin crowd will probably eventually be disappointed when it turns out to be worth Goldman’s money to put together a computer that’ll all the mining math the fastest.] And then from a comic perspective: even if you replace trust with math, human individuals tend to still run on the trust model rather than the math model, and so they do things like give control of all their bitcoins to some guys in Japan who have a website where you used to trade magic cards and who are apparently totally incompetent, and then all the future-math-money is gone. To fanatics all failings are cases of human, rather than programmatic, inadequacy.
There’s two lessons. One is about the displacement of trust. We’ve always understood trust as something almost totally unquantifiable: it’s a lack of gleaming eyes, an intuited solidity in those we think we know. Bitcoin isn’t interested in that—it would like us to trust one another because we all show our work, and more specifically because our computers show our work. The most terrifying thing in the entire conversation is how quickly and brightly the CPU becomes part of the ‘I’ or the ‘we.’ The other is about the stickiness of human models. You can invent a system where you don’t need a bank, or any trusted third party, but then your users will want to have a bank, and the bank will be robbable.