Anarcho-Techno-Super-Capitalism Pt. 1
Examining the Current Things (The Hazards of Politics, Capitalism and Technology) in the Current Year
‘I never expected to find myself living in the future, but here I fucking well am’ - Kelly MacDonald, Hated in the Nation, Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 6
Bitcoin™: The World’s First Trustless Free Market Central Bank Digital Currency
Where I differ with Craig Wright, the Bitcoin Association and nChain was today made clear to me: I believe that neither White Papers nor computer code are law. Cypherpunks believe that code is law, the community around Craig Wright believe that the Bitcoin White Paper was issued as a unilateral contract. Both of these epistemological stances go against the basic premises of good governance and also just common sense in my view.
I will not go into the silliness of ‘Code is Law’ beyond Craig Wright’s interpretation of that, which I believe is correct. The law is the law, computer code is not.
But also secondary to that White Papers are also not contracts, nor should they be ex-post-facto revised as ‘unilateral contracts’ when the incentives set out within them work out differently for the participants who gave their time, effort and money to help grow any given engineering or business concept laid out in any White Paper.
Ought-ism
The word ‘ought’ is contained only once in the Bitcoin White Paper in the third person, as a speculative engineering proposal in section 6, the Incentive section:
‘He [The Greedy Attacker] ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.’
And within the context of ‘ought’ as contained within the Bitcoin White Paper, the situation, a cyber-security role play exercise in terms of securing the proposed network from a proposed attack, is itself is speculative and hypothetical. The ‘ought’ is not contractual, it is speculative and and forms part of a section of the White Paper designed to further explain the context outlined in the introduction:
‘an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust.’
Nowhere does the word ‘shall’ appear in the Bitcoin White Paper. The word ‘must’ appears once, in the Abstract: ‘Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need.’ and the word ‘must’ is framed as part of the problem statement for why Bitcoin was required as an engineering proposal, not as an direct instruction to anyone reading it.
In many ways, for me, the Bitcoin White Paper was the perfect White Paper, and also becomes the perfect case study in why Craig Wright’s actions, to turn the Bitcoin White Paper into unilateral contractual law, are wrong and damaging. Also given that Craig Wright has a supposed 19 university degrees in this stuff, and that he should know better than this, I’m going to take this opportunity to venture to say that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto and is, rather, an NSA contractor trying to play silly buggers with the British legal system in a game of global Anarcho-Techno-Super-Capital hop-scotch for the benefit of oligarchical interests about whom we know very little.
The Bitcoin White Paper exists today in two main different forks, in two main different forms each according to different incentives and mechanisms laid out in the original concept. I explained this in my previous post, but just to recap:
Bitcoin™, BTC, the Bitcoin most people know of as Bitcoin, the one that is currently priced at circa $21 000 per BTC as of the time of writing, its incentives are based upon the following sections of the Bitcoin White Paper:
4, the Proof of Work Section (BTC utilises the most hash power, by far, it doesn’t even makes coins as described by the Bitcoin White Paper, but hey, we’re all entitled to prove ourselves to be stupid, are we not?)
6, the Incentive Section (BTC is worth $21 000 per coin, so everyone plays by the rules of it)
11 (BTC is physically impossible to random walk attack as it commands 200 Exahashes per second of hash power at the time of writing this.)
Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, BSV, the Bitcoin that does lots of really cool utility stuff, the one that is currently priced at $50 per BSV as of the time of writing, its incentives are based on the following sections of the Bitcoin White Paper:
2, the Transactions Section, BSV actually makes coins as described in the Bitcoin White Paper
5, the Network Section, BSV implements the network as intended within the Bitcoin White Paper in a way that is fully understood by an expert competent engineer
8, the Simplified Payment Verification Section, BSV implements Simplified Payment Verification as described in the Bitcoin White Paper
9, the Combining and Splitting Value Section, BSV combines and splits value as described in the Bitcoin White Paper such there is no such thing as transactional ‘dust’
What happened in the implementation of the Bitcoin White Paper was a defined split, as Bitcoin mining changed from ‘One CPU, One Vote’ to ‘One Antminer S19j Pro, One Vote’. Between the basic impregnability of ASICS hash power at scale to prove work, as described in Section 4 of the Bitcoin White Paper, and the inability of of any ‘Greedy Attacker’ (as defined in Section 6 the Bitcoin White Paper) to change whatever it was that these ASICS hashers decided to do (as defined in Section 11 of the Bitcoin White Paper), these ASICS hashers decided, as rational market participants, that the rest of the Bitcoin White Paper beyond that was not in their collective interest.
More Ought-ism
Given that no safeguards against this were defined in the Bitcoin White Paper, and that Craig Wright claims that the Bitcoin White Paper is both set in stone and a unilateral contract concerns me.
Firstly, Monero implemented a hashing algorithm that was expressed designed to be able to enable hashing only on CPUs, no GPUs, no ASICs. This design was expressly encoded to continue the ethos of the Bitcoin White Paper and return to the original concept of ‘One CPU, One Vote’. When Craig Wright found his desire to implement sections of the Bitcoin White Paper that the commercial businesses of the BTC ASICS hashing community had thwarted, he never proposed to change the design from learned experience, as Monero did, in order to throttle the overburdening influence of ASICS on the Bitcoin concept, he didn’t change anything, in fact, as a normal engineer would do when new insights were gained into a proposed engineering concept. Craig Wright, instead, sought to sue those who helped make Bitcoin a household name: legitimate businesses taking advantage of the incentives encoded within the Bitcoin White Paper as they saw fit, according to their own business models.
The Bitcoin White Paper was framed as a set of broad incentives, the Bitcoin White Paper never told anyone what to do, that’s why it was and is, in my opinion, the greatest White Paper of all time. The Bitcoin White Paper framed an engineering concept and a vision that attracted thousands of people to help turn it into what it is today, for better or worse, without telling anyone to do anything. Given Project Management concerns, the unforeseen effects of future innovations, and how the incentives of market participants in any endeavor naturally shift and change over over time as new, as more well defined truths, about original concepts are revealed over time, to set a precedent now that nothing about Bitcoin was optional in retrospect is both damaging and deeply corrosive to the basic incentives that drive meaningful entrepreneurialism and innovation as a whole.
Even More Ought-ism
That Craig Wright, ostensibly on the current balance of probabilities henceforth, chose Github as a means via which to manage a project of immense importance to future innovation and growth shows that: for engineering to be fully expressed we need hard coded mechanisms of trust in the competence of people and their intentions. That Craig Wright made a mess of that according to his own admission is his own fault, and it’s not the job of the state and the courts to bail out the failures of founders and incompetent project managers. Many strongly conservative and libertarian people flocked to Bitcoin precisely for that reason alone: because the result of it is encoded within the Satoshi Genesis Block.
Being a bad engineer or a stupid engineer with a bad boss or a stupid boss isn’t a crime, it’s actually a very common occurrence in the world today, and we all need to find ways of dealing with that that move innovation forward and don’t pander to the hissy fits of NSA contractors and their billionaire playboy sidekicks, in my view.
Extreme Ought-ism vs Blood Drinking Agenda Driven Surveillance Capitalist
And in this way, having taken both Craig Wright and Peter Thiel’s views into full consideration I can’t say that I’m particularly impressed with either:
Peter Thiel probably knows that Bitcoin™ is a shit-show dumpster fire from an engineering implementation perspective with respect to the Bitcoin White Paper, but he doesn’t care. Peter Thiel doesn’t care because he doesn’t have to care because the banking system and technology in general are both probably at least 10 times worse than Bitcoin™ ever could be, and given that he is a very large shareholder in both Meta and Palantir, and is probably used to seeing shit-show dumpster fires a lot as par for the course in his daily routine, this should worry us all a lot too, in my view.
Craig Wright, even if we accept that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, which I do not believe, made a pig’s ear of managing his own Github Repo, never responded to the cultural nuances driving Bitcoin adoption, never responded to how ASICS and the culture wars influenced Bitcoin adoption and Bitcoin implementation both in software and hardware and then, facing defeat on all these fronts, forked Bitcoin Cash to make Bitcoin work more like the White Paper. This does not justify any more of his claims, that the Bitcoin White Paper is a ‘unilateral contract’, it only justifies one thing: that innovation is difficult. Craig doesn’t even justify how BitcoinSV™ is supposed to be implemented ‘as infrastructure’ in his own online training courses given that BTC has 400x the hash power of BSV. Maybe he should start there and then work his way up before consuming the precious time and resources of the British legal system.
The Unexpected Valuable Result
But what I can say with full confidence is that Bitcoin™ is the world’s first ‘trustless’ (as defined in the Bitcoin White Paper) digital currency fully understood:
It has no interest greater than the minimally viable interest that works to accumulate capital to itself, within its own minimally viable network architecture.
Through a mixture of incompetence, incoherent management structures, that value gate-keeping over basic competence, and pursuit of pure profit and growth, it will define the terms that everyone else abides by sheer power of scale, in much the same way that the raw violence of 200 Exahashes per second of ASICS does today in terms of Section 11 of the Bitcoin White Paper.
Craig Wright is not guilty of proving the counterfactual to his own views about Central Bank Digital Currencies beyond reasonable doubt, because he can only ever be Satoshi Nakamoto ‘On Balance of Probabilities’. He only needs to be this in order to pursue his civil law-fare agenda, which is being pursued in an even more cynical mindset as to the broader consequences than those whom he is attempting to drag through the courts. The man is useful to have around as an insurance policy and as a token gesture to all sorts of activist causes and broader technocratic agendas.
Bitcoin was supposed to have solved all these things, that was the intention in the Bitcoin White Paper, but rather than allowing us to truly solve them, it allows us to now measure them as a broad tendency, which is something that we couldn’t do before Bitcoin.
Thus Bitcoin™ proves the inherent stagflationary tendencies of Power Capital to accumulate towards itself and to deterritorialize competence when it is no longer deemed reliable. Bitcoin™ is infinitely plastic, it sells itself as all things to all people, it only needs to be what it is, the bare minimum, in order order to collect all the drips falling from the QE Infinity, the Bidenflation, the ‘Renegade’ bankers opening the faucets like Max Keiser, Arie Levy Cohen and Caitlin Long, to pay all the speakers and lobbyists: Jordan Peterson, Anthony Pompliano, Kathy Wood and Kevin O’Leary. No one in capitalism, much less in the early stages of innovation, is obliged to be honest about where their money comes from, much less are they even obliged to have basic competence in the raw material in which they are dealing, if we didn’t learn this from the 2008 mortgage crisis, we didn’t learn very much at all.
See you again soon for part 2.