This is Alex Svitsky, author of “Non-Communist Manifesto ” (Aleks Svetski) critical editorial. Host of Bitcoin Times and The Svetski Wake Up Podcast.
If life can be described as some form of anti-entropic force, then human beings can be thought to be the most advanced and complex structures to emerge from (at least we can be sure).
This “life” force seems to turn chaos into order. It manifests as a fringe line of cosmic matter we call energy, like a “vibrant fingertip” that reaches a greater order. In this sense, we are the fingertips of life.
It’s an amazing thing to think about.
I know I’m taking a little risk “woo-woo” talking about all the energy here, but I mean it seriously, in the physical sense of the word.
We are made of matter, which exists in specific commands. Throughout our lives, we consume and transform energy, move in various directions in time and space, and do our best to locally fight entropy before passing the torch to the next incarnation of life.
why? Unfortunately, I can’t answer it for you. I believe we have to answer this question ourselves.
My closest approximation is that we are part of the cosmic balance between entropy and life. You can call it light and dark, yin and yang, positive and negative, or heaven and hell; but note that both will coexist. forever.
As human beings, we represent life aspects of the equation online. So whether we like it or not, we all have some inner, intelligent will to build, order, create, produce, and fight entropy in some way.
It doesn’t matter whether you want to call this will the command “God”, “Life”, “Consciousness”, “Randomness” or “Intelligence”. You can’t deny its existence, stop for a moment and you can’t help but marvel at its resistance.
Then why am I saying this?
Arts and Sciences
In The Non-Communist Manifesto, Mark Moss and I think capitalism is not A “political formation”, but an organic process that all complex biological species undertake.
In this sense, economics is the study of capitalism. This is an attempt to understand the process, measure it and use the data to make better value judgments and decisions in the future.
John Carvalho calls it “the game.” I call it life.
The goal of the game is to save. Conservation is actually maximizing the efficient use of scarce resources for a specific purpose; surviving or thriving.
Humans happen to be the best at this game, so we are the top species.
Engineering as “The Pursuit of the Holy”
We save costs through engineering.
Michael Thaler believes that humans are inherently engineers. I totally agree. It’s in our DNA. As the highest embodiment of life, we operate as vehicles for the same progressive, transformative forces.
We are like the link between chaos and order, always combining analysis and imagination
We are a combination of art and science. Incredible designs, emergent, biological and spiritual machines that are at the same time unique (no one is like you) and similar (we are all the same).
As engineers and artists, we have managed to combine math and intuition to construct the world around us. We use games to hone our skills and value-judgment processes in order to play better in the larger game of life.
Each accurate intuitive leap brings us to a new threshold of understanding, which, in turn, can transform our environment into reproducible new static, higher-order patterns.
This upward-ratcheting standardization—as long as it’s not based on fairy tales, but in reality—becomes the foundation upon which larger and larger social and material monuments are built.
Functional criteria come in two forms:
those that last longest. They are called lindy-compatible because the longer they last, the longer they last.
Those are empirically, energetically or mathematically sound.
First and second are usually the same, but not at all case. Some standards are more casual, like: QWERTY keyboards, the width of a railway gauge, or 21 million bitcoins. As long as its arbitrariness doesn’t conform to some laws of physics, it’s fine.
That said, the axle width could be a little more or a little less than 4 feet and 8.5 inches and it wouldn’t make a difference. This surrogate measurement will become our standard for railway gauges etc. It’s important to form consensus and become the standard over time.
The same goes for Bitcoin. I’m not sure we’ll ever know why 21 is that number. Maybe there is some hidden meaning (half the answer to the final question?), maybe not. Either way, the importance is that it is a fixed and verifiable standard.
The origin of this standard took place in 2009 and 13 years later, it not only still exists, but has grown exponentially socially, economically and thermodynamically.
This is an extraordinary feat and a foundation upon which we can build.
This is the best engineering.
Pretend to cause poverty
When functional criteria are ignored or when arbitrary criteria are simply specified, without regard to energy conservation or the natural order of things.
“You can’t pretend to be prosperous”
Politicians have been playing the worst pretense of their lives ; they use other people’s resources to do so.
So instead of impoverishing themselves like the free market, they impoverish all us. Worse yet, with the political machine, they actually enrich themselves in the process!
This is a big problem.
But I ask you. Is it entirely their fault? Of course, everyone is accountable for their actions and held accountable in a timely manner, but in a world where power, economic forces and macro-decisions are so concentrated, can these actors believe they can do it? solve all problems?
They must have drank their Kool-Aid, sat high in Davos, Brussels or Washington, and they saw the world’s problems as a lack of oversight and participation.
“If only they could guide us better.” If only they, ordered like the Almighty, then all problems would disappear.
Unfortunately, the reality is not like that, every time we go down this road, every time we play together and pretend to the empty promise of prosperity, every time we build on lies or false premises, our structure collapses.
Time to change this. The biggest leverage point in modern times is money .
Engineered Energy Money
We never had One area of perfection standards — and now it’s time for us to do it — is money. Humans are social, and money is the most important social invention, which necessitates devising a standard closely related to what it measures.
This is necessary for us to move forward as a species.
Vaclav Smil called energy the “universal currency”.
I would argue that, like Saylor and many others who understand it intuitively and instinctively, Bitcoin is an “energy currency” and therefore the perfect universal currency to use on Earth .
We’ve created a zero-to-one moment for this invention. Everything before that is a necessary experiment. Everything after that will be a structure built on top of this bedrock discovery/invention.
I call it that because it does both. As a species, we must discover energy currency. It is a critical part of the passage of sentient species through the Great Filter.
Bitcoin is the human version, and although we invented it, it is something we have to discover, just like electricity, the internet, or the speed of light. It lives in those areas. It is the first “information element”, as Knut Svanholm put it.
The convexity of what happens next is unlike anything we’ve seen before.
“Money” is the divine celestial ledger representing all energy, action, time and resources. It is the ultimate scorecard, not only important for society to function, but a cornerstone. If this is compromised, the whole structure fails.
Achieving the actual perfection of such a deep (if not the deepest) layer of the social stack has far-reaching implications, farther than any eye or mind can imagine. It changed the course of humanity – I wouldn’t say it lightly.
The speed of light changed everything in physics and engineering.
As “life engineers” working in overlapping fields of material, economic and social, we have never had a tool like Bitcoin. Alchemists have been looking for it for hundreds of years, long before it was a technological possibility.
They lay the philosophical foundation for what it means and what it stands for.
“There is some pure substance in nature, which is discovered and brought by art Come to perfection and transform into itself all the imperfect objects it touches.” — Aaron Villanova, 13th Century Alchemy Warlock
John Wallis discusses this in more detail in his excellent article , “Money Messiah”.
Now that we have this substance, everything is changing.
Physics is how we discover universal scientific truths that can be applied to engineering.
Economics is an important factor in how we examine actions, motivate and make value judgments and decisions.
With Bitcoin, we have something that bridges the gap between the metaphysical nature of money and its physical, energy-conservative reality.
Bitcoin is a combination of economics and physics.
Thus, we can apply physics-like methods to local engineer civilizations and provide accurate feedback within a value framework with real consequences.
For the first time in human history, we have real money.
I know I sound like a crazy lunatic, but this is definitely a milestone in the grand scheme of things.
I’m referring to the graph in the “Fire, Bitcoin, Teleport” article I wrote for Bitcoin Times last year:
Until all the pessimistic keyboard warriors come out and condemn my utopianism, what I say doesn’t Presupposing some unicorn utopia, we’re all just “happy and peaceful.”
We will have as many questions, but they will be better, higher quality questions.
In fact, this may be where the real definition of evolution lies, at least in a social, “intelligent” or “conscious” sense. What we’re trying to do is not to eliminate the problem (that’s a pile of Marxist junk), but to improve the quality of our problem.
Similar to the life force I described earlier, we seek to go further, or, perhaps better: life seeks to go further through us. As I said, we are nothing but a car, the fingertips of life.
Currency (B) and Physical (c) Constant
So back to the speed of light, and how it relates to Bitcoin.
We have a common standard that we can now use as the basis for functional civilization-level engineering. I hate to use the term “social engineering” because it carries a lot of bad connotations, but the truth is that we always go through a process of engineering our society. The problem is simple:
What are our engineering goals?
What tools do we use?
How do we solve this problem?
Who is involved and who is affected?
In the absence of good tools and an agile, decentralized approach to markets, we succumb to the entropy of centralization. Over time, this tendency to concentrate on a larger scale has and will always form an empire of lies to give the illusion of being held together.
We live in it today, just as we were in the past. It’s just that this time the lie is more vicious and the spread is more subtle.
With Bitcoin, we finally have a financial constant and we can build an accurate set of financial, cyber and physical infrastructure.
Not only does it solve the problem of sound money, but, as a known scam stant or baseline, it allows all economists, financial engineers, bankers and anyone else who chooses to do so people, building models not derived from the ever-changing “animal spirits” theorem.
Also, it raises the bar of engineering in bits and bytes as costs and consequences become real in cyberspace. This has two subsequent benefits:
It makes the software more realistic, significant and meaningful. We don’t need another gambling platform or dumb social media app full of bots and censorship. We need real products.
It pushes innovation back into the atomic world, as less software people can whip up to sell to VCs with less talent of engineers start looking elsewhere for problems to solve.
This kind of application of cost to the world of bits is a fascinating rabbit hole that I will discuss later This issue is discussed in the article. But suffice it to say that the world is far behind in atomic innovation. Now is the time for us to solve this problem, not by fiat, but by chance and localized economic calculation.
The discovery of the speed of light continues to revolutionize physics and engineering. It affects measurements and enhances our view of the universe. For example, we can now measure it very accurately because a meter is the path length that light travels in a vacuum over a time interval of 1/299792458 second.
We all now know that matter (or mass) is related to energy via the famous “c” constant in E=mc2.
These physical and mathematical constants allow us to build models that more accurately represent reality, in contrast to modern financial and political sophistry built on numbers that people neither understand nor believe to be true In sharp contrast.
Bitcoin solves this problem.
Want to create crazy financial models? Go for it. But remember, mistakes have consequences, and the system won’t bail you out. You won’t break or compromise anything for the rest of us.
Want to trick people with some complicated financial abstraction? Of course, do it anyway. But don’t be surprised when those with the time and skills call it crap. Unfettered Ponzi schemes have a hard time surviving when the underlying assumptions are guaranteed, as in Bitcoin.
Sunlight, like the transparency of money, is an antidote to mold.
Today, no one can check or bullshit unless you’re Kyle Bass with billions of dollars in research, and even then, due to some politician’s decision to change the rules or juggle Some numbers on the wrong side.
You can’t build any kind of complex functional system like that. Abstraction on top of false assumptions is doomed to fail.
I said before that one cannot build a monument on a poor foundation.
At the end
Many things have been created, built and produced in the last 3500 years of human civilization. The past 500 years have brought tremendous technological progress, accelerated further with the advent and use of things like steel, oil, electricity, and most recently the Internet.
Matter, energy and information.
The last big thing to wait – can and should be: fixed, steady and constant – is money. It’s probably the most important.
We must go beyond the current state.
Imagine trying to do physics, let alone any kind of useful modern engineering, without constants or laws of thermodynamics like “c”. Nothing works. In fact, imagine using 200 different units of length measurement! In short, this is the global economy.
The biggest problem we have in the world today is money. No one really knows what it is, how much or what actually happens, but we continue to build complex models on top of this quicksand, using whimsical assumptions and approximations.
Central planners attempt to treat economics as a science, but key variables are unknown and constantly manipulated, completely ignoring the effects of tampering on complex, dynamic systems.
This is where Bitcoin really shines.
A very clear set of rules and constants that is almost impossible to change (requires very broad agreement) that anyone can immediately verify and voluntarily choose to adopt or not.
This is a better and stronger foundation for playing economic games.
Same as the Internet. It is a better foundation for building technologies based on communication and collaboration. That’s why it won.
Bitcoin has all the key attributes of a more powerful, efficient, open and high-performance economic network. Clear, precise, robust, conservative, Lindy, antifragile, voluntary.
And because of its recursive nature, it’s a runaway train.
No one has caught up with this.
One last thing…
It’s okay not to find bitcoin. You also didn’t discover the wheel, which I’m sure you’ve used and benefited from.
Seems hesitant to trust or adopt Bitcoin because Apple, A16Z, Google or the government didn’t create it.
“Someone anonymous.”
But that’s the point. Bitcoin is not a company, government, security or application.
Neither Apple, A16Z, Google, or the government created oil, gold, water, or the internet for this. Thank goodness not.
These commodities are used by a group of people, companies and/or governments, and the Internet is an emerging communication network that consists of all of us.
Bitcoin is like these two things, two in one. Bitcoin is all nodes; it’s a network run by no one, made up of everyone, and functions like something you’d find underground.
Bitcoin is digital energy. Bitcoin is digital matter. Bitcoin is currency constant. Bitcoin is All this and more.
This is a guest post by Aleks Svetski, “ Author)Non-Communist Manifesto,”,Bitcoin Times Founder and host of The Wake Up Podcast. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
