The Rise of Whatever

Summary

This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit. Back in the 00’s, if you wanted to move money between arbitrary people over the Internet, you realistically had one option: PayPal. Either that, or live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal. The thing about PayPal is that it holds onto your money, but it isn’t a bank? I do not fully appreciate the architecture or its implications here, but PayPal’s point of view seems to have always been that they can do whatever they want. They’ve always been pretty fussy about the use of PayPal to facilitate commissioning artists for drawings of unicorn wieners, for example, so if they thought you were doing that, they would just lock your account and also keep all your money for six months. For safekeeping, I guess. And interest. Yet PayPal was the only option for many rinky-dink individuals selling one-off goods and services, so there was some amount of frustration that the only available middleman had exclusive right to say how you were allowed to spend your money, or what kind of indie business you were allowed to run. And if they caught you ignoring the rules then they got to keep your money for half a year. And then in 2010 or so, I heard about Bitcoin. And it sounded like the wave of the future. Finally, a way to just send money to someone. What a fucking concept. And imagine what you could build with such a system! Websites could have real tip jars. Browsers could have tipping built right in that transfer only a few cents, since transactions would be so effortless. I downloaded a miner (well, the miner at the time, I think) and ran it f...