Deep Value Bitcoin
BitcoinSV: a Substrate for People-Centric, Synergetic Fundamental Material Value
I’m gonna be honest: Craig Wright and I don’t really get along. In trying to find out more about BitcoinSV and the people involved I took out a silver membership for Metanet ICU and was roundly shouted down for being a ‘noisy’ and ‘vapid’ Marxist sympathizer. In Craig Wright’s mind Karl Marx was wrong about absolutely everything, and thus cannot be right about anything. I largely ascribe to the socioeconomic views of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, Peter Thiel, Rene Girard, Joseph Schumpeter, John Kenneth Galbraith, George Akerlof, Diego Gambetta and Thorstein Veblen and take much inspiration from my views on technology and culture from Mark Fisher and Nick Land. I believe that Marx was correct in three important ways, which I explain in my Romeo-Juliet framework on YouTube:
Division of labor creates silos of knowledge and understanding, which gives the bourgeoisie an asymmetric knowledge advantage in trade, particularly for labor.
The bourgeoisie promote the ‘efficiency’ of rote learning where possible, because it’s cheaper than deep fundamental knowledge. This value system erodes traditional spirituality, values and culture and enforces a new value system and cultural framework that mostly benefits the bourgeoisie themselves and dis-empowers ordinary people.
Finance and insurance, if given the opportunity to do so, will limit the flow of salient and material information with respect to the pricing of risk if given the opportunity to do so for profit. Thus censorship becomes no longer just about religious dogma, but also about profit.
Marx correctly identified these problems with capitalism, however my view on Marx’ solutions is that they make the fundamental problems worse. This is corroborated on the whole by Schumpeter, Akerlof, Gambetta, Girard and Land.
There are three main examples of Marx’ Das Kapital being wrong about the solutions to the problem:
Max Stirner’s critique of Marx, written when he and Marx were part of the Young Hegelians. Marx’ response, whatever could be said of Stirner’s incoherence, was even more incoherent.
That capitalists and Marxist communist revolutionaries often share common aims in the face on monarchical and nationalist rulers and, despite ostensible differences, continue to do business afterwards. Stalin purged his deep thinking engineering base for ‘efficiency’ reasons that were ultimately about the ideology of power in the same way that Marx criticised the bourgeoisie for doing the same. Kuhn Loeb and Co. (which was bought buy Lehman Brothers and then Barclay’s Bank following Lehman’s bankruptcy in 2008) are an example of this as is Robert Maxwell’s media and intelligence empire which continued under Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. For the best insights on this I recommend Diego Gambetta’s Codes of the Underworld.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall global capitalism actively lobbied to support leaders and secret police agents from the former Soviet Bloc and East Germany. Boris Yeltsin was great was free flowing business was most profitable, Vladimir Putin when stability was more profitable, Angela Merkel is another possible example, although her background is unclear, but enough to incur jibes from other world leaders.
The result, I believe, is that the Power Capital bourgeoisie are not interested in following through on any ideology, per se, but rather are interested in sequestering all ideology for personal gain. Marx ended up becoming a puppet, willingly or unwillingly, in a game of Capital as Power. This was Max Stirner’s fundamental criticism of him, and Max Stirner is yet to be refuted 178 years following that original criticism. Therefore using Adam Smith as a tool to refute Marx, as Stirner also argued in my opinion, is like using a sword to cut itself with. Land might be easy to measure, as a result of the work of the Ordnance Survey, but labour and capital not so much in a world of pointless jobs and ubiquitous censorship. Rather than measure the same things from before, we need to find ways to measure innovation.
One of the key insights of Mark Fisher and Nick Land, of Warwick University’s long since defunct Cybernetic Cultural Research Institute, was that the social analytics of cybernetic capitalism tend towards using the language of socialism in order to sell consumer goods that only benefit prevailing Power Capital, or Siren Servers as described by Jaron Lanier.
The problem that Craig Wright describes with respect to Bitcoin as infrastructure is that for the most people to gain the most benefit from Bitcoin, as described in the Bitcoin Whitepaper, the nodes must accept big blocks and perform to strict hardware specifications. To run a full BitcoinSV node costs tens of thousands of dollars, but this put the node within the heart of a ‘Small World Network’ which maintains both unbounded scaling in transaction volume and the structural integrity of the network ‘as infrastructure’. The BTC and BCH narratives ostensibly advocate low cost nodes, ostensibly in order to ‘decentralize’ but then scaling as infrastructure and meaningful decentralization breaks down according to the convergence effects of pooling hash power and a fundamental mathematical barrier of ‘discrete logarithms’, upon which cryptography itself depends. Craig Wright makes this claim, which is backed up by both the empirically proven performance of BitcoinSV and the mathematics of Graph Theory itself. But rather than validating these engineering and scientific claims apriori, capitalism values money, and the most value from money comes from rents, as described by Henry George. The most rent that can be extracted from any system comes from controlling the supply of money, taxation, regulation and the politics around it. Tax lawyers exist precisely because large enterprises asymmetrically gear the tax system in their favour, such that it requires experts to level the playing field with small business. Craig Wright is using lawyers to take on the prevailing cryptocurrency industry. But this industry has many powerful allies, as shown at the 2022 Bitcoin Miami conference.
People resort to using lawyers when material facts cannot be agreed between opposing parties. Invocation of state law is an expression of meta-violence in society. The current method by which capitalism enforces the concept of material engineering facts is split between Professional Engineering Law and the Intellectual Property, or patenting, process. The process of Professional Engineering Law has largely been captured by Power Capital and accumulated into a small number of large suppliers of services, such as Wood, Bechtel, Arup et cetera. This makes it largely un-affordable to but only the bigger companies, with bigger margins, that compose their clients. The process of patenting is is also subject to abuse and over-application to the detriment of the mutual benefit between market participants.
Thus the decisions about material facts in society boil down to what might as well be cartel power brokers engaging to law-fare and lobbying between each other, well out of the sphere of influence and understanding of ordinary people.
Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir and Paypal, first Venture Capitalist to invest in Facebook, business and technology educator and political lobbyist says this:
And how does anyone parse these valuations in any rational market with respect to Craig Wright’s rebuttals which are currently the subject of a £500 billion lawsuit?
When the general population, who do not run businesses, who cannot engage in law-fare with an expected positive monetary return and therefore gain from ‘no win no fee’ deals, who cannot afford the services of engineering companies to determine material facts for them, are systemically deprived of truth and justice by the bourgeoisie in this way, when ‘zero is closing in’, as Nick Land frames it, it opens the door to what Mark Fisher calls the ‘Marxist Supernanny’ and what Adam Curtis terms technocratic ‘Hypernormalisation’, whereby the fear and precarity of their situation is normalised and managed by media. Mark Fisher’s insight into the main function of this ‘Supernanny’ was that it was and continues to act as an emotionally regulating force in the absence of ordinary men being able to resolve material facts between themselves at the community level, because to allow them to do is too expensive to prevailing Power Capital. The extreme social Darwinism of late capitalism renders the father function as supernumerary, and in this way Slavoj Žižek would thus argue that it shares many similarities with North Korean culture.
A better way to describe it, in my opinion, is a ‘Cartel Culture’, whereby market participants are told what to buy and why, how to feel about it, what the price is going to be, and what their role in the market is backed up my enormous hierarchical and social pressure. If Metanet ICU are going to create a new free and fair internet, I don’t feel I should be censored, censured, mobbed and belittled as a diamond buyer might be for complaining about the quality of the box I was issued. That’s a sign of a cartel market, a lemon market, not a free market.
In my opinion, the real economic solution that BitcoinSV can bring to market is not ‘perfect competition’, especially if Craig Wright cannot tell anyone what perfect competition is or what it means within the context of what he has built, but rather in using Bitcoin as tool whereby people can collaborate and compete in order to claim and validate material facts before they give rise to what happened to Terra/Luna this week, before the law is called upon, right at the point of genesis at which the facts are claimed and verified. And, in this way, we can start to think about the Genesis Problem in Bitcoin not within realms of an intractable engineering problem related to technological history, but rather re-frame it as an eminently solvable problem within the near term real world future. Ty Everett’s Project Babbage leaves me in no doubt that this is already possible, if we collaborate together in order to overcome our real competition, which is not each other. We are all unique enough such that we don’t need to compete to belong in society, to belong on planet Earth and the real deep value to be undercovered by Bitcoin is that which makes us unique and creates synergy, which is free.
Daniel Robles, PE has released his latest White Paper for the Ingenesist Project, following from his ASME Paper in 2020. I’ll leave you with a picture from it until next time.
