Latest news about Bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies. Your daily crypto news habit.
CHAPTER EIGHT — CHANGING THE RULES
Altering the Bitcoin protocol is easy. The code is open source which means that anyone can download a copy of the code and make whatever changes they want to it. Altering what the participants of the Bitcoin network view as the real deal however, is hard. Really hard. It requires 95% of the participants in the network to agree that the suggested change is necessary, which in turn requires the proposed upgrade to be really good, and really bulletproof, in terms of not altering the game theoretical fundamentals that make following the rules beneficial to the miners. Upgrades to the protocol can be implemented via a soft- or a hard fork. A soft fork is a voluntary upgrade and a hard fork requires every node in the network that wants to stay active to upgrade its software. At this point in time, it is highly unlikely that Bitcoin will ever hard fork again. Even a soft fork can be very controversial, and a great debate between proponents of different paths to scaling up the Bitcoin network in 2017 led to a portion of the network “forking off” and creating a new chain all together, via a hard fork. Even though the proposed upgrade was implemented following the consensus rules, some participants weren’t very happy with it.
The internet is an ocean of misinformation and more often than not it is very difficult to navigate through it. In the wake of the success of Bitcoin, hordes of charlatans and snake-oil salesmen have been trying to rip-off the gullible masses, seeing the blockchain as a way to make a quick buck. The sheer amount of dishonesty in the so called crypto-space is really depressing and has very little, if anything, to do with sound money. The blockchain does one thing and one thing only. It solves the Byzantine Generals Problem. That’s it. A problem most people never even heard of. The problem describes how hard it is to construct a network, in which you can trust a sufficiently large portion of the participants to agree on a concise picture of the state of said network, without knowing the other participants or their intentions. In other words — how to construct a network in such a way that no trust in any third party is required to ensure that information sent via that network is true. A blockchain does not ensure decentralization. It is not the “underlying technology” behind Bitcoin in any way. Bitcoin is the underlying technology behind the blockchain hype, but saying that the blockchain is the key invention here is misguided at best. The anchor chain is not the underlying technology behind the anchor. Nor is the keychain the technology behind the key or the food chain the underlying, most interesting aspect of a human being. Be very skeptical of those promoting blockchains that do not see Bitcoin’s blockchain as the most important one. They are practically saying that masturbation is the most important aspect of sex.
At any point in time, any participant in the Bitcoin network can stop agreeing with the network’s way of framing scarcity. A participant can choose to follow a hard fork of Bitcoin, exchange all their bitcoin for another cryptocurrency, or abandon the idea of digital scarcity all together, if they so choose. What they can’t do is change Bitcoin, change what others perceive to be bitcoin, or change the nature of how Bitcoiners frame scarcity. Unlike what is the case for every government backed currency, no one is forcing anyone to agree with anything in Bitcoin. It is a completely voluntary system and it has no leaders. We humans aren’t used to leaderless systems and the idea of having no authority telling us how to think about it, is scary to a lot of people. As mentioned above, a lot of opportunists take advantage of this and a lot of people will lose a lot of money to scammers before Bitcoin finds its rightful place in our society.
Stay vigilant and be suspicious of any “cryptocurrency” that isn’t bitcoin. Every claim that an alternative currency has a new feature, is better for the environment, is faster or more anonymous than bitcoin or can be used to build decentralized applications upon, is really just a testament to that coin’s founders fundamental misunderstanding of what the invention of Bitcoin really was. It was not so much an invention at all but rather a discovery. The discovery of true digital absolute scarcity. Absolute scarcity whose most obvious use case was sound money. A discovery can not be replicated. Thousands of people fly from Europe to America every day but that doesn’t make those people as historically significant as Christopher Columbus. Neither will any altcoin ever be as significant as bitcoin.
While changing Bitcoin might be really hard, changing the current political state of the world is nearly impossible. Not because of the risk of having your voice drowned out, everyone on the internet faces that hurdle, but because the game is rigged. It’s rigged everywhere. Ignorant bloggers with hubris and a paycheck, often referred to as “journalists”, often parrot their unseen masters, the central bankers, and accuse Bitcoin of being the biggest pyramid scheme ever known to man. Our current monetary system is a pyramid scheme of such gargantuan proportions that almost everyone on earth fails to see it for what it is, since the bubble encapsulates the entire planet. Quantitative easing is counterfeiting and counterfeiting is theft. Wealth is stolen from everyone and given to those most cynical and evil among us. If we had sound money, the playing field would be levelled and those of us making the most responsible investments would be rewarded. Right now our system rewards ignorant demagogues and outright liars instead. A hierarchical system of power will always favor those who crave power above all else. A decentralized system will not. It can not. It’s fair.
According to a recent study in the journal Intelligence, highly intelligent people are more likely to be diagnosed with various mental disorders such as autism spectrum disorders (20% more likely), ADHD (80%), anxiety (83%) and they have a 182% higher likelihood of suffering from one or more mood disorders. The study compared data from the American Mensa Society to data from national surveys in general. According to another study published a couple of years back in the British Journal of Psychology, highly intelligent people are more likely to have fewer friends than those less fortunate in the cognitive department. In addition to this, many separate studies show that ADHD-brains are linked to higher performance in some measures of creativity than their “normal” counterparts.
Having suspected that having a brain “on the spectrum” runs in my family, both up and down the generations, I dug a little deeper into the subject.. I did this mainly because I’m curious about myself and why I function the way I function, but also because of the fact that these “diseases” were almost unheard of when I grew up. I’ve done a couple of tests online. They all say I’m quite likely to suffer from one of these conditions, mainly ADHD. I’ve heard pre-school teachers voice suspicions about spectrum disorders in one of my kids and, even though I suspect that some teachers look a little harder for these things than they probably should, I wouldn’t be surprised if the child’s behaviour matched more than one of the spectrum-condition criteria. A thing that did surprise me though, was that the Swedish Ministry of Education recently decided to pay extra attention to extraordinarily gifted children. Very un-social-democratic indeed and probably a sound thought. I got curious and looked at the paper on what behaviours teachers should look for in these children. They were remarkably similar to those who could label another child with ADHD or ADD. So, one child gets to skip a class and another is given amphetamine to be more like the rest of the flock, all depending on the judgement of that particular child’s teacher.
Ritalin and other amphetamine like drugs have for a long time been prescribed en masse to children with suspected ADHD and ADD across all western societies. Some countries are more restrictive than others, but these practices are present to some extent almost everywhere. People are being given anti-depressants all over the world and there’s an opioid epidemic in the U.S. Could it be that we’re seeing this from the wrong perspective? What does society’s institutions and schools have to do with our recent love for mental medication? Here’s a scary thought — maybe we’re medicating the wrong segment of the population? Could it be that the less intelligent are unable to understand the behaviours of the more intelligent. I’m not saying that everyone “on the spectrum” is hyper intelligent but maybe there’s a grain of truth here. Not being able to properly adjust to groups might just be a side effect of rather being alone. Not being good at submitting to the will of a mentor may be a sign of independence rather than simple disobedience. Imagine if Nikola Tesla or Albert Einstein had been given Ritalin at an early age. Would they ever have come up with the amazing innovations and insights that they did if they’d been medicated into being good sheep instead? Without the crazy ideas of Tesla, who allegedly was considered little more than a weird loner by his peers, we wouldn’t have had alternating current and without that invention the world would be a very different, much, much darker place than it is today. Good ideas are about the only thing that propel humanity forward and we have no idea what we’re missing out on by turning our would be future mad scientists into mindless zombies instead. Keeping the ducks in line might seem beneficial to the collective, but it is only the individual that can spawn an original idea.
Our societies are built upon institutions and institutions, once in place, have a tendency to act in their own best interest. The people in them have a lot to lose by not giving in to the will of the machine, so to speak. This includes our schools in which the children are lumped together for many years with virtually nothing in common but their age. They are then forced to imbibe a flow of information adapted for the tiredest minds among them, neatly packed into different subjects and are then graded by the person most likely to be biased toward their talent that exists — the teacher. The internet has long since obsoleted this system but it seems like only those with free thinking minds are able to see that. If anyone should be medicated, it is not the kids “on the spectrum”. Instead of giving them mind-numbing drugs, maybe we should try giving everyone else mind-enhancing drugs instead? The sad story about dumbing down the gifted for the sake of the collective is nothing new. The Arab world for instance, thrived scientifically between the 8th and the 14th century until the collective interest of religion effectively killed that. Socialist states keep collapsing, Venezuela being the latest tragic addition to this collective madness. Russia threw one of their best thinkers ever, Garry Kasparov, in jail. In short, any society that puts the collective before the individual is on a very dangerous path. Thanks to Keynesian economic theory and central bank counterfeiting, or quantitative easing, all countries are on this path right now. What are the odds that Satoshi was on Ritalin when he wrote the Bitcoin whitepaper?
Changing the rules of any game is always hard when you’re a participant rather than a game designer. The game your in is rigged and you’re a pawn on someone else’s chess board. A pawn whose main purpose is to be sacrificed in order to protect the king. Now look at how the artificial intelligence algorithm AlphaZero plays chess. The newly crowned ultimate chess player does one specific move a lot more often than any of its predecessors. It sacrifices pawns. Ask yourself, are you happy with being a pawn? Does your government’s promise of a social safety net sound legit to you? Will your current job even exist in twenty years? In ten? You don’t need to be a pawn. More importantly, you don’t need to leave the game entirely. Even a very small investment in bitcoin has an enormous potential upside. The Lightning Network is a technology that changes the rules of what money is and what money can be. Once you have a Lightning Network wallet installed and topped up with some bitcoins on your phone, you quickly realize that it’s even easier to use the Lightning Network than it is to use the basic Bitcoin Network. you just scan a QR-code and press send, that’s it. Transactions on the Lightning Network are instant, free and anonymous. Even though it’s still in beta at the time of writing, it works like a dream. Lightning Payments are not only programmable, they’re streamable. Imagine what you can build when money can flow through pipes like water, or even energy. Circuits who run on value instead of electricity. Logic gates made electronics possible rather than mere electrics. “Value gates” would open up a whole new spectrum of invention, where human interaction would act as fuel for human ingenuity directly.
Paperback book version available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1090109911
Sovereignty through mathematics CHAPTER EIGHT was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not reflect the views of Bitcoin Insider. Every investment and trading move involves risk - this is especially true for cryptocurrencies given their volatility. We strongly advise our readers to conduct their own research when making a decision.