Should intellectual property have a role in bitcoin?

in #opensource6 years ago

Jeffrey Tucker and Gene Epstein talk open source and intellectual property rights in this week's episode of "The Utopian and the Curmudgeon"!

Sort:  

The rule is simple; caveat emptor. Check what you are buying before you buy it.

For me, patents/copyright do not add value to society. Most people would create their inventions/artistic works without benefiting financially. In fact most people who actually do the creation never see the benefit, nowdays its a corporation that holds the IP and makes all the money, the creative individual gets a salary (and eventually fired or leaves).

The point is opensource is the way to do things. Let anyone create a new Bitcoin, if its better than the old one, we can use that.

There it is! I was looking all over for this video on SteemIt.

Bravo!

pairee2.jpg

Right... don't ask. They followed me here. 😋

#LlamaProblems

"Curmudgeon". Currmuddgeeon.... Curmudgeon. Interesting new word I just learned from you. Language (and its variances, in this case English) never seizes to intrigue me.

I agree the most with Jeffrey on this one, even though I'm more on the Objectivist side of preferring objective rules as to what is fraud and what is not. Many and indeed most nuances are best worked out by a process of small and tolerable losses leading to social awareness about an issue, rather than by a central decree that everyone has to follow.

As it comes to Bitcoin Cash, this is something I've said many times before. The BCH (in Asia sometimes BCC) supporters tend to be of the opinion that Bitcoin has some set of objective defining criteria and characteristics, but that these which can be numerous and prone to varying interpretation need to be upheld through a market process.

Not everyone of course, but many, on the BTC side of things clearly instead think that either PoW alone or even merely popular opinion is what makes Bitcoin, but that this has to be enforced by some supersocial, more "objective", legal means such as a minimal state entity. In other words, "everyone/the public in general knows what "Bitcoin" means and it is therefore fair to enforce this view, period."

It's easy to sympathize with either perspective, but I ultimately side with letting people go their own way and use whatever language they want. If a couple of exchanges want to form a pact over what terminology they use with their users, let them. If others disagree, let these form their own social setting aka "society" in which they communicate with their users and business partners.

As I see it, there is no reason to fear this fragmentation. Especially not if one set of business practices and their associated technical innovation is better than the other. Then just let them compete and see which actually proves more "anti-fragile" and which combination is more efficient than the other.