NCMT 500-314 -- Bitcoin and Philosophy (5 of 8)

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Hello everyone, welcome to Bitcoin and Philosophy's fifth session. It's actually the first session of the second module and I'm going to pass it on to Nick to begin the seminar. Hello Nick. Hi, thanks Mark. Go ahead. Welcome everybody and great to see you all. So there is in theory a set of rules that are central…

• 00:26:55

  They want to treat this as the model. If you can understand what's happening here, they think you're really understanding what signs are about. And the wasp and the orchid, they say, is also an example of surplus value of code. How is it working in that case? Well. It's working because a flower has a certain…

• 00:51:11

  But it's on another axis to the wheelbarrow full of money, isn't it? Because every Deutschmark in your wheelbarrow is completely redundant in terms of significance, isn't it? It's like whatever you agree is the sort of function of a Deutschmark as a signifier, if you've got a million of them in a wheelbarrow, you're…

• 01:13:27

  Some are just to do with a certain kind of database economization, because when you use a hash function, you basically take an X number of units and put them into a more restrained field... And you can think of it as a codec would be another... ...and pressure. Sure. So when I said that this aspect of the code, that…

• 01:34:17

  He says... Enthusiast demand. We understand Bitcoin is a welcome political... political intervention. But when pressed for details about the political intervention, its advocates are failingly turned back to technical and engineering matters. Now, this isn't exactly... This isn't the perfect quote for this point…

• 01:56:40

  I mean, you know, just example, like we now have Bitcoin. I mean, okay, I don't honestly know exactly what it's doing, but I mean, it's the fact it exists, it's the fact that it exists, is this fact that what a coin is is now radically being reopened? Well, it's equity, isn't it? I mean, as long as, like…

• 02:19:26

  You wouldn't... you wouldn't store that machinic potential in a form that was open to being raided by these various other parties. Yeah. And... now if you then want to try and move that back, you know, through monetary history and down into these more archaic semiotic systems, I think it would be... you know, I don't…

• 02:42:53

  Yep. Bye. Super exciting. Bye. Bye. Thank you, Eric. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.