Bitcoin, The Fairway Brief, the Innovation Bank and the Rho Calculus
According to Engineering Best Practice, Bitcoin is lying in a grave of its own creation
'I like thy wit well, in good faith. The gallows does well. But how does it well? It does well to those that do ill. Now, thou dost ill to say the gallows is built stronger than the church. Argal, the 50 gallows may do well to thee. To ’t again, come.'
— Hamlet Act V Scene 1
It has been a rather eventful month with respect to material risk, variance and moral hazard in the world of Bitcoin. Events circle around a few points raised in my previous post.
Bitcoin: Legacy Architecture
The problem with Bitcoin is largely threefold:
Bitcoin blocks are created sequentially, one after the other, this means that either
Transaction throughput is throttled to around 8 transactions per second as with BTC or
Ever more centralized node architectures are required to increase transaction throughput and complexity, such a ‘big blocks’ or multiple layers as with BCH and BSV.
What constitutes both a Bitcoin and a Bitcoin network simultaneously is not formally defined by the Bitcoin White Paper, therefore
BTC doesn’t have to be a chain of signatures as described in Section 2 of the Bitcoin White Paper
BCH and BSV required what is both essentially a pre-mine and a re-structuring of network architecture to re-align Sections 4 and 11 of the Bitcoin White Paper with both the title and Section 2 and 5 of the Bitcoin White Paper.
Bitcoin cannot both be a Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System as defined in the title of the White Paper and a UTXO model smart contracting platform according to the network rules in Section 5, without invoking a central authority: such as Craig Wright’s vision for Bitcoin as a CBDC platform. This is the main reason why why Bitcoin Cash split from BitcoinSV, and is described by Brendan Lee on Twitter here.
Eric Bloodaxe vs The Yankie Doodle Randroids
On the 29th of September, it was announced that Christen Ager Hanssen had departed from his role as CEO of nChain Global, the intellectual property and technology consulting company associated with BSV. Ager Hanssen cited problems with governance at nChain as his reason for leaving.
What followed immediately afterwards was precisely what’s hypocritical and toxic about Craig Wright’s followers. Ty Everett at Project Babbage, an incredibly clever young man, made a Youtube response video entitled Ager Hanssen’s ‘Unacceptable and Unprofessional Behaviour’. This is the same young man who uses governance, law arguments to justify why BSV is the ‘real Bitcoin’, but then finds actual laws, actual governance, the material risk management enshrined in UK law to be ‘unacceptable and unprofessional’. What I also take issue with is being lectured to about standards of ‘behavior’ and ‘professionalism’ expected in my country under my laws condescendingly by people who live in a country where hundreds of thousands of people die every year from drug overdoses and where entire cities don’t even have basic sanitation. It might help Americans to understand the world better through the lens of their own problems first, not the perceived problems that they believe that we have with our own laws and our own expectations, here in the UK, of ‘behavior’ and ‘professionalism’ in view of them.
Ty and I used to have a lot in common with respect to a vision for BSV as a ‘Cyberspace Time Machine’ but the last 15 months or so have revealed to me that character and integrity underpin leadership, and that products can only ever have utility for users in so much as those building them care about users, their laws, their culture and so forth. Otherwise it’s better to just keep it traditional and old school.
Don’t get sarcastic with me son, we burnt this tight arsed city to the ground in 1814 and I’m all for doing it again… you get sarcastic with me again I’ll shove so much cotton wool down your throat it’ll stick out of your arse like the wee tail on a Playboy Bunny.’
— Malcolm Tucker (In the Loop)
Laws don’t just exist so Americans get to be right about everything everywhere, laws exist to protect nations, their people and their culture from hypocrites, predators, snake oil salesmen, thieves, megalomaniacs and every other stripe of miscreant who makes life worse, not better, for those around.
I discussed the law and the material risks of the Bitcoin UTXO set in my previous post. In terms of engineering law and best practice in blockchain for engineering technology, for national infrastructure, for national defence and security, material risk and variance are the primary consideration over and above market price. For engineers, blockchain is a time function for data that builds intelligence and wisdom in order to manage risks, the market price of the tokens is largely irrelevant with respect to this.
None of the Yankie Doodle Randroid contingent have since commented on their preferred Presidential candidate, Aaron Day’s, sense of humor with respect to racketeering, corruption, fentanyl trafficking, bank robbery and murder. No comment from them about how political leaders such as this reflect upon the values enshrined in the London Blockchain Conference at all. Laughing about it is apparently normal and acceptable behavior for them. I would strongly suggest, however, that most normal governments in most normal countries, where issues such as opioid crises and urban decay are frowned upon, do not see the funny side at all.
To prove the point, the Yankie Doodle Randroids even posted pictures of themselves all hanging out together, perhaps even cracking jokes about murder and selling fentanyl to kids in between business discussions about how to sell blockchain technology to governments.
The Fairway Brief
Enter at least one adult in the room, who isn’t American but rather Norwegian, a Viking, someone from a sensible country, with a sensible attitude towards governance, crime reduction and infrastructure: Christen Ager Hanssen.
Christen Ager Hansenn released the ‘Fairway Brief’ on October 11th, on the domain thefairwaybrief.com, which was subsequently taken town on October 13th. I have mirrored the content, including the tape recordings, on the Internet Archive. Arthur van Pelt has summarized the findings and the fallout on his Medium blog, MyLegacyKit. The Financial Times of Norway, Dagens Næringsliv, has made The Fairway Brief, and the intrigue surrounding it, into a front page cover story (English translation no pay wall).
Key takeaways:
It is Ager Hansen’s opinion that Craig Wright is deliberately forging documentation pertaining to his claims of being Satoshi Nakamoto, the author of the Bitcoin White Paper.
Craig Wright lied about his nChain holdings, not only to Ager Hansen and the public, but also under oath in court, his true holdings are 30%, owned via an offshore holding company.
Calvin Ayre’s shadow directorship of the companies in which he owns significant stake is non-compliant with company law in the UK and therefore illegal.
Stefan Matthews, the current CEO of nChain, is an individual of low character who views flouting company law as part and parcel of his role.
Calvin Ayre misrepresented a structured financing of nChain in such a way as to seize control of nChain’s IP portfolio should an adverse material event, such as Craig Wright losing the COPA case, come about.
nChain themselves market a variety of Bitcoin-based solutions directly to enterprise and national governments, it is therefore somewhat unsurprising that the Ager Hansen exposé in Dagens Næringsliv contains references to private intelligence contractors. While the potential material benefits to nChain of licensing this technology are clearly massive, the material risk of these licenses falling into the wrong hands for the wrong reasons are also something that enterprise and government are going to want to keep a keen eye on.
Also Bitcoin itself is a $trillion industry and in order to maintain profit margins and prevent block creation from stalling in future, BTC will either require a radical change in network and node architecture or for the price of BTC to keep rising exponentially. BSV, for all its flaws, still represents a sustainable model for miner revenue through transaction fees, which at the very least Bitcoin miners will be valuing it and its associated IP portfolio, held and administered via nChain, as a hedge against the risk of broken mining economics in the small block BTC Bitcoin model, in addition to BCH’s larger block, more centralized network model.
Craig Wright’s seemingly absurd hypocrisy and identity claims put him right in the middle of Bitcoin’s transition towards a more sustainable model of operation. He is fully aware of this, as is everyone around him whether they agree or disagree, friend or foe. Craig Wright’s games are a material risk to all, which again highlights the fragility and weakness of the Bitcoin concept itself. The vultures will continue to circle Craig Wright, and those he depends upon for financial and business support will keep undermining him, simply because Bitcoin is a $trillion industry and it doesn’t care about him, it cares about making money.
It’s known from the Fairway Brief that Calvin Ayre mines both BTC and BSV, as does Kurt Wuckert, Calvin’s ‘Chief Bitcoin Historian’ at Coingeek. This fundamental conflict of interest, in my opinion, takes the focus away from what the real engineering and technical problems are and creates an elaborate identity hoax in its place as a means to secure further Power Capital differential advantage; at the expense of the courts, the users and especially employees and followers being force fed these outright lies and distortions absent proper context.
The Satoshi Identity Shell Game
I fail to comprehend the logic of those standing by Craig Wright at this time, even if he is Satoshi and does perform the signing necessary to prove it, he is already a proven hypocrite, a liar, a perjurer and a fraud, just according to readily available public information. For a man who has made a name for himself harping on about the ‘LAWR’ as a ‘trained Christian pastor’ it makes absolutely no logic or moral sense to accept his contempt for both the law and basic Christian virtue. The support for Craig Wright at this time appears to me to be no more nor less than a cult of personality founded in the core principles of narcissistic abuse. He has done nothing to further the vision of Bitcoin developers and innovators such as Unwriter, whose tools paved the way for demand for Big Block Bitcoin architecture and replacement of the original Bitcoin Script Op Codes, and everything to aggrandize himself at the expense of those he claims to be championing.
Satoshi Twitter Account
Having left his role as ‘Chief Scientist’ at nChain following the fallout of the Fairway Brief, Craig Wright is trying to re-establish his personal brand via the ‘satoshi’ Twitter account. In reality this account is no more than an extension of the MetanetICU Slack subscription based channel operated by Joel Dalais. The identity question is clear, but Twitter has no avenue through which to challenge it.
Ian Grigg, who also appears to be part of this ploy, knows full well that identity is a hard problem to solve and he knows full well the dangers associated with mixing the Bitcoin architecture and the digital identity problem.
The Keys Still Hold the Key
Despite all of this it is still possible that Craig wright possesses the keys necessary to sign the message to prove that he is Satoshi Nakamoto. What’s more likely is that he and people like Ian Grigg have material information pertaining to the real whereabouts of these keys that others do not have, enough material asymmetric information, to continue an elaborate shell game. It is also possible that COPA materially benefit from this shell game too, by turning the story of Bitcoin into a story about Satoshi Nakamoto and not about what BTC, or the other Bitcoin protocol forks, really mean in relation to the Bitcoin White Paper today.
Bitcoin Rent Seekers
And while BTC people have a healthy skepticism for Craig Wright, BTC people are often just as if not more weird than BSV people. None of them appear to be willing to learn the lessons of the FTX debacle, much less the history prior to that as explained previously. They are resistant to any Web3 concept unless it falls within their neat little set of Blockstream endorsed second layers, and they say things like ‘in a truly free market there is only one global currency’ as a justification for what they believe in much the same vein as the ‘One Ring’ or the World Economic Forum or something. Total baseless and megalomaniacal neckbeard tier chat, but they still say it, shamelessly, just like Craig Wright lecturing the classroom on Bitcoin based Central Bank Digital Currencies, patenting the technology and then lying about his ownership of the patents while also forging documents pertaining to his identity.
The BTC block stalling problem still hasn’t been resolved, and it will need to be unless the price can keep pace with block reward declines. The Lighting Network is also still a mess. Bitcoin Cash seems to be the better compromise, but still every Satoshi comes with UTXOs, a history, which is very dark and disturbing history.
Nobody wants a single global digital currency, nobody wants CBDCs, nobody wants megalomaniacs, liars and frauds, people living in denial who can’t face facts, can’t deal with real material risks, telling them how they should live their life. Bitcoin is becoming all of those things at the same time in all its forms. Instead of only stating preferences and engineered product in terms of the Bitcoin White Paper, the compromises, the benefits, the drawbacks, the conversation never seems to be about that any more, it’s about who the scapegoat is, it’s about shills spinning yarns, groupthink and herd behaviour and mob violence.
The Rho-Calculus and Rholang Solves This
Rholang based blockchains can achieve the same effect as Bitcoin and other Proof of Work based blockchains, decentralized and leaderless block creation, without the cumbersome hardware, energy use, identity shell games and Power Capital industry concerns that continually arise from proof of Work architectures. Also with Rholang based solutions, scaling is linear, more CPUs equals more processing power in the network, and data can easily be stored on the chain. Big Block and Layer 2 architectures are unnecessary. Sharding can also take place according to defined names and defined processes, according to security concerns, with multi-signature DAOs, domain and folder structures, using the best available security model: the object capability security model.
The Rho-Calculus solves all the problems of not just Bitcoin, but also Proof of Stake systems where block creation is delegated, not leaderless. It’s time to start solving hardware and people problems in software, it’s time to start solving the real problem, the problem of genuine decentralization and building genuine mutual trust, with identities founded in proven competence and proven character, not social media shouting matches, court cases, forgeries, slander, and other various forms of misrepresentation and obfuscation.
Conclusion
Last year I believed that Bitcoin, having been in production since 2009, having three separate defined forks each seeking to fulfill the White Paper each in their own way, had turned over a new leaf, and that users and the demands of users could at last become a primary concern. Today I see that Bitcoin is essentially unfit for that purpose. I value what my foray into BSV taught me, I still respect some people in the space, but overall I do not believe that Bitcoin is a technology where builders can succeed or are set up to succeed. Bitcoin is a system that rewards those at the center, not those at the edge, who are the real people who add real value in the work that they do. Those are the people I wake up every day to find better questions and answers for, the people that the ‘decentralization’ narrative spinners promise to deliver for but never do.
Bitcoin proved an important concept and it demonstrated that important aspects of finance and accounting can be both automated and taken out of one mode of centralized control. However the new form of centralized control that has emerged around Bitcoin feels and smells very much like the old one: denial of history, whitewashing and censoring the truth, ostracizing and shaming those who speak the truth, twisting engineering problems into political and tribal problems, denial of competence, denial of experience, denial of context and of basic human knowledge and nature. That’s just what Jaron Lanier termed ‘Digital Maoism’ and again it’s coming from the same sorts of Libertarian tech types that created the original Siren Server problem before Bitcoin even existed. The Vampire Castle, as Mark Fisher termed it, has just gotten a new set of clothes, Bitcoin clothes.
I’m still looking for the best way to just do immutable engineering record keeping and competency maps using blockchain, I’m sure I’m closer than I was before, but the solution might still be more distant than I expect. I hope, at least, my readers can learn from my mistakes if not what I try to do right.
Until next time, TTFN
OK, Golem.