in the same way traditional publishers of print news or books got eaten by software, banks will not disappear all of a sudden. 500 years is some huge momentum. it will take decades, but their fate is sealed already.
That statement may have been colourable (if arguable) decades ago. Similarly as for similar statements about the recording industry, the film industry, etc.
Now:
- Amazon has both a monopoly and a monopsony on e-books.
- A lawsuit by BigCorp book publishers may destroy archive.org. (This may take awhile.)
- DRM has corrupted the W3C standardization process. It is now impossible to build an independent, standards-compliant web browser without paying ridiculous licence fees for the privilege of shitting all over your users—if the DRM gatekeepers will even allow you such a privilege.
Summarizing our options
Ultimately there are two potential options: Widevine or PlayReady.
With Widevine we’ll be stuck waiting for an indefinite amount of time without certainty of whether they’ll agree to provide their solution.
With PlayReady we can expect to have to pay $10,000 upfront.
- Universities still pay obscene amounts of money for access to scholarly journals. The profit goes into the pockets of BigCorps, not to scholars and researchers. When last I checked, Alexandra Elbakyan (—who has nothing to do with America—) was in hiding, with tens of millions of dollars in American court judgments against her, and a ridiculous U.S. “Justice” Department investigation against her. Usage of Library Genesis and Sci-Hub is relatively marginal, whilst billions of dollars in value are extracted by parasitic middlemen.
Consider Elsevier, the largest scholarly publisher, whose 37% profit margin1 stands in sharp contrast to the rising fees, expanding student loan debt and poverty-level wages for adjunct faculty. Elsevier owns some of the largest databases of academic material, which are licensed at prices so scandalously high that even Harvard, the richest university of the global north, has complained that it cannot afford them any longer. Robert Darnton, the past director of Harvard Library, says "We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices."2 [...]
- Nowadays, hoi polloi watch movies on Netflix instead of torrenting.
- iTunes not only saved the “music” industry with a new business model: It was the precursor for the “app store” business model by which device makers control what software you can run on “your” device. This is an existential threat to the free availability of general-purpose computing.
- —This list could be much extended. I think that I have made my point.—
Do you suppose that the bankers be stupider than the publishing industry,
et al.?next time you are talking to a banker enjoy it as if you were able to watch some dinosaurs in rl. bitcoin is their asteroid.
Not if these “dinosaurs” exploit mass greed to seize control of Bitcoin.
As Bitcoin’s price “moons”, how many people do you know who will say
NO to ridiculous regulations and
“KYC”-enforcing, transaction-censoring mining pools?
For a quick index on the answer to that question: How many people do you know who say
NO to “KYC”?
Nobody will say it.Be vigilant.
If I could have Bitcoin keep its freedom and be worth exactly what I bought it for—no more, no less, forever—then I would be much happier than I will be to see my modest stash “moon” as I lose my tiny little sliver of financial freedom.