This article makes pretty blatant errors:<p>> We thought the net would break the monopoly of top-down, corporate media. But as business interests took over it has become primarily a delivery system for streaming television to consumers, and consumer data to advertisers.<p>Weird thing to say about an era where traditional publishers and news networks have been entirely disrupted by random folks posting on twitter/facebook.<p>> At its core, bitcoin is just an extension of the old PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy encryption protocol.<p>I've never seen the word "just" do so much work. Bitcoin, notably, solved the Double Spending problem[0] seventeen years after PGP was created.<p>> In essence, bitcoin is money built and maintained by nerds, based on the premise that good nerds will outnumber the bad nerds.<p>This is patently false. The _entire_ point of bitcoin is that miners and node operators acting in _their own self-interest_ will secure the protocol, not "good nerds". You can argue if the system fails this will be the case, but not that this is the premise.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending</a>