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Imagine Superman absorbed the energy not of the sun, but of people’s gratitude and belief in his powers. And kryptonite was people’s disbelief, discouragement, and hate.I just described Bitcoin.
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Imagine Superman absorbed the energy not of the sun, but of people’s gratitude and belief in his powers. And kryptonite was people’s disbelief, discouragement, and hate.
I just described Bitcoin.
You have heard it said that technology is a double-edged sword. Recently, ChatGPT.
It can harm as well as uplift a student. Or humanity in general.
But after some thought, I posit that some technologies, like Bitcoin, are a net-good technology.
Much less harmful than useful and instead, very vulnerable to being attacked, stained, ridiculed, and greatly misunderstood.
My idea could be taken with a pinch of salt.
Because of its vulnerabilities, Bitcoin is one technology that quite early on, many famous people have said is a scam, a Ponzi scheme, money used by criminals, ‘stupid’ and ‘evil’.
To be fair, though, others have praised it. “It is a technological tour de force”, said Bill Gates, while the billionaire investor Michael Saylor quit his CEO job last year to focus on singing Bitcoin’s praises. And buying more Bitcoin.
The trouble is, Bitcoin is sometimes complicated, like an action novel - Fast paced action featuring Japanese, Chinese, and American corporations, financial mind games with people spending billions of dollars of money that ‘does not exist’, innocent victims who get ‘rekt’.
Other times, it is mundane and in a little corner of the world for my neighbors right now hardly know it exists. Or that it is a real thing with real power.
In other places, it is high philosophy dealing with human action (praxeology), divine conceptions, and so on.
But it is good. Only good. The fastest good on Earth. And this might be appreciated if we ponder, as we shall do today, how people would react to its gradual disappearance, its relation to Facebook or Nuclear power, and the core architecture built mostly on cooperation and not competition.
The Last Bitcoin
Currently, there are 19.6 million bitcoins in existence, and they will soon reach the hard cap limit of 21 million.
To get a feel for where Bitcoin stands in the eyes of the world, imagine this.
Imagine Bitcoins’ greatest weakness - the ability of keys to get lost - has affected all the coins except one.
Of the 21,000,000 Bitcoin that can exist, 20,999,999 get lost, and only 1 Bitcoin is left in the entire world.
Would this be a good thing or a bad thing?
Some people would say it would be a bad thing but for different reasons.
A Bitcoiner today would definitely say this would be a bad thing to happen, as Bitcoin would be one thread away from being lost forever.
Though, chances are high that Bitcoiners in that world with only one coin left would be very humble people. True believers in a lost technology especially if lost coins had never been salvaged before.
A no-coiner (non-Bitcoiner) today who has brushed against some very toxic maximalists, would likely say it is bad because it would lead to wars. “People would wring each other’s throats for this worthless single thing”, they would argue. With rage-fuelled toxic humans in their mind’s eye.
A no-coiner in that world with 1 coin would likely be somebody who doesn’t lose any sleep over “Bitcoin”. Hard to think they would even know what it is, as lost technology is usually sought out by archaeological types.
But one thing I believe is nobody who learns of this one bitcoin would be outraged that only 1 exists. That would be absurd. They would be saddened at learning of the history of this great technology, now reduced to a single event in space and time.
Aside: Definitely, all altcoins would be goners. Not even one would be left
However, instead, this tragic event might then become the most uplifting event in the world. After moping around over lost bitcoins, this one coin could quickly become a beacon of hope.
A unifier to put ahead of us, as we remember all the likenesses that went before it into the deep dark void of cyberspace. Preserved with the collective will of everybody on Earth like Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
And maybe, if quantum computing is mature by then, there might be a way to actually map and treasure hunt for these lost coins in the depths of cyberspace.
“How about having a World War 3 because of this coin” today’s no-coiner insists. Zapping me back to reality.
“Frankly, it would be much easier for a few people to destroy the last few nodes holding up this last Bitcoin than to bother waging a world war over it at all”.
Types of Technologies
Physical Technology
As already posited, most technology is a double-edged sword. That means, it could benefit you, but it could hurt you.
Fire was the first example of highly-destructive, highly-beneficial tech. Thousands of years later, circa 1938, Nuclear power became the best example.
In a few hours, the nuclear weapons we humans have created could totally destroy the planet, ushering all surviving creatures back to the Stone Age. Or rather, back to a post-CT-extinction world.
But wielded with care and the will to create a great civilization, together, the energy abundance that our nuclear fission and fusion resources can unleash would solve world hunger, climate change, desertification, and global electrification, with enough to spare for space exploration.
Physical technologies like nuclear power thus depend on humanity having enough heart to care about the common good for us all, more than the clouding squabbles over race, gender, religious affiliation, cultural predispositions, or economic interests.
To use nuclear power for good means sacrificing the chance to exploit or step over others, for the opportunity to sit on the round table and work together.
Social Technology
Another type of technology is social technology. It is a way of using human, intellectual, and digital resources in order to influence social processes - Wikipedia. Social technologies like telephones, the internet, and social media, have exponentially multiplied our capability to harness physical technologies like nuclear power, and we would be severely limited as a species without them.
Knowledge would travel at a snail’s pace, and some places would be dramatically better and worse, in many ways, than others because of the highly difficult flow of technological progress and the unique cultural situations and environments of each place.
Now unlike physical technologies like fire, nuclear power or knives, social technologies are mostly a force for good, but there is a caveat. Being information-collecting entities, they can easily decouple from their place of serving people to making people serve them. The power shifts to reside not with the users anymore but with the central authorities i.e. the corporations owning the IP of these websites. Plus the websites themselves when the AIs get sentient!
And because human habits are mathematically predictable (lunch is between 11 am and 2 pm everywhere), these sites e.g. Google or Facebook, have amassed so much data on their users that they can send targeted ads with precision, making money from us before we know we want to buy a product.
This is no problem until data breaches happen, or until artificial intelligence sitting on top of this technology acquires the capability to undermine the efforts of us, the people, who trained it in the first place (by competing with us for pennies). As is happening today which is fuelling online rage and clickbait.
Fiat currencies are another form of social technology with a central authority called the Central Bank, and altcoin cryptocurrencies are a form of social technology with a central authority called the ICO company.
Synergistic social technology
The third technology I know is Bitcoin. A synergistic social technology.
A synergistic social technology works unlike any other social technology.
First, it does not harvest people’s data so it then becomes even more powerful than the individual person. It grows only if people believe in it, protect it, and use it consistently. Any slight disinterest, distrust or dissatisfaction, and its value collapses in real-time (these are all those spiky swings of the Bitcoin price. It is frantically trying to satisfy everybody). Not like Google stock which is rock solid and stable. And goes up relatively predictably.
When BTC grows in value, the people get stronger because the users are the owners. When data breaches happen, it suffers because people jump ship like *snap* that. They are very picky when it comes to their monetary self-sovereignty.
So it can only be a force for good because bad people creeping in will scare away the good people who actually do the hard work of loving, sharing, building, maintaining, and innovating around the technology.
This is easy to see with the Silk Road incident of 2013. Negative connotations of Bitcoin with criminal activity crashed the price faster than a meteorite. From $266 to $50.
Did any illegal trade in drugs and whatnot proliferate with this crash? No. It quickly dried up.
If anything, the US government greatly profited after the seizure of Bitcoin worth billions of dollars while US citizens were lost in FUD, faithless and not sure whether the dream of monetary sovereignty was over this quickly.
Interestingly, some people tried creating Silk Road 2.0, but the FBI got them so fast that they hardly made headlines.
Fraudsters look for Thriving Environments
Every Bitcoiner got on board this global social ecosystem by listening to a few sound rules of money and making the bold choice to live unapologetically truthfully.
Bitcoin is good because fixed rules of money, including the ultimate rule on quantity, mean a simple order everyone can follow and make wealth.
Work hard and buy or mine some Bitcoin satoshis. Hold for at least 5 years. You’ll make a profit more than anything else. How hard is that?
How non-evil.
Good money is not controlled by anybody but is protected and used by everybody. Alas, whenever good people connect to the wisdom that is Bitcoin and join the party, the number goes up and fraudsters get on board as well.
Fraudsters are predators, and predators eat the meatiest prey in the Jungle. Despite being only a modest $600 billion net worth right now, because it is such a sound and positive force of good for people, the scammers are plentiful, and they want to take your cash and disappear.
And each time good people’s money is taken, they get rekt (financially ruined) and the price crashes. The scammers go into hiding, to wait for you and me to pick ourselves up again, so they can strike again.
Many of these scammers and fraudsters hide behind the thin veil of ‘cryptocurrencies’ so the next time you read a toxic maximalist calling an altcoin a “sh**coin”, understand they are frustrated and just want to protect you and themselves from the sweet words of scam artists.
Pumping and dumping of crypto, even bitcoin “investments”, is fraud and hurts both the naive people who opt into these scams, and the bitcoin community at large when the exit is made and people’s morale crashes into millions of tiny pieces.
Cooperation outshines Competition
What’s in it for poor people? - Anonymous
There are people who feel that Bitcoin has been an entirely useless innovation as far as getting poor people out of poverty is concerned, while billionaires like Michael Saylor keep buying all the bitcoins. They can make millions in profit in months when the price goes up, while a modest earning pleb can only Dollar Cost Average a few sats every month and hence needs to wait all 5 years to make a modest enough profit to cash out.
But here are some facts;
- Logically, nobody can own all bitcoins cause not everybody wants to sell at any moment in time.
- If the price of Bitcoin goes up you can’t buy more with the stock you already have.
- People have to spend bitcoins on food and other things no matter how ‘hodledor’ they would like to be.
Most importantly, Bitcoin is about the people.
The common man, woman, and child.
Cooperation outshines competition. Consensus and collective agreement is built into the nature of the protocol, not one-upmanship.
If Bitcoin gets too valuable and transaction fees balloon, I believe there will be another fork to break down satoshis into even smaller amounts. Or we shall find ways to make bigger and cheaper coinjoins. Because the most valuable Bitcoiner to the network is every Bitcoiner. Not only Mr. Saylor.
More important than competition, Bitcoin thrives on cooperation. Think of everybody; some work as miners, others run nodes, some code LN apps, others orange-pill. It is impossible for us to all stack as much as the other because different work earns differently in the Bitcoin ecosystem. In the world. And aside from the Bitcoin activities, some people are CEOs of big companies creating all the other wonderful stuff we want to buy with Bitcoin while some are students, still grappling with what they should learn to make it in this fast-changing world, et cetera.
Bottom line - Together is how it works. Thinking of how each Bitcoin node runs can show us the importance of sticking together. The one lesson we should steadfastly hold onto, as taught to us by Bitcoin itself, is using and running Bitcoin just like Bitcoin nodes.
Together. As a family.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nothing-stronger-than-family
Some nodes (people) are big miners with 10,000 ASICs minting entire bitcoins on a daily basis while others are laptop nodes. It does not matter. All need to DYOR (Do Their Own Research) and verify transactions themselves. If a transaction (a deal in the real world) is no good, they should do everyone else a favor and block it. Fast.
If Bitcoin goes to $1 million and Michael Saylor becomes the richest man in the history of our planet, I believe I will benefit because Mr. Saylor will spend his coins investing in pro-people companies all over the world.
Poor or financially desperate people in Africa, Asia, or anywhere right now should stack as a good habit for financial discipline, the way exercise is good for your body even when you are not preparing for a world-championship fighting match (like yours truly). When the price gears up, opportunities will open up. And Bitcoiners are hardly underpaid despite great work ‘cause honest payments flow best through Bitcoin as well.
One more thing, the halving is near. Get ready.
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