There Are No Private Blockchains in Nature

Reality is a distributed ledger.

When it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrency, we seem to have gotten ahead of ourselves. In the race to capture what we can of the stream of capital rushing into the space, we have failed to consider its greater implications, seeking to reconcile this radically new precedent to our current paradigm rather than enable it to realize its true potential.

It’s time to take a step back and come to grips with what this new technology really means for humanity.

Let’s start with the fundamentals.

The world is a finite place, easily transcribed by simple, albeit vast, math. There is only so much land, water, air, minerals, solar radiation, we could go on and on. We like to think of it as boundless, unfathomable, but it is not. It is limited and calculable.

This physical reality exists in a framework of space and time. In space, it can be organized and reorganized, moved hither and fro. In time, it moves linearly in one direction, as far as we can tell.

So does the blockchain.

It is frightening to think that there is only so much in the world to go around. Is there enough for me? It becomes daunting to consider, so we don’t. Instead, we assume it is infinite, and we devise schemes to try to obtain as much of it as possible for ourselves.

Fair enough. That is one way to go about it. And you could probably employ blockchain to help you accomplish that.

But that is not what blockchain is.

Blockchain is DNA.

Blockchain is a way to transcribe the composition and configuration of our known reality over time. Do with it as you like, at its most essential, that is what it is.

The question then becomes, who owns a map of the universe?

From the perspective of the purist, this question is again answered by the technology. Because it is decentralized, we each control our portion of that which makes up the whole. By the fact of our very existence, and our contribution to the collective same, we are all sovereign actors upon it. No greater authority conveys that legitimacy upon us, though many presume to do so. It exists a priori.

So if I am master of my own domain, assuming that to be a hash of my genetic sequence, my birth date, and my family tree, who is master of the commons?

Ah, there’s the rub.

Let us turn again to the fundamentals.

The commons, in our case the biosphere, exists, as does all that it contains. For these purposes, let’s separate those into two categories, life-seeking and non-life-seeking. Because we’re talking about humans, we’ll focus on the life-seeking.

Since the biosphere exists sans any predominance, each and every life-seeking entity has full right to the entirety of it. This gives rise to competition, which is the mode in which mankind has functioned up to this point.

Competition has created the framework of hierarchy, authority, legitimacy, and title that we understand to be the meta reality of today. Past competitions have set forth who controls the ledger and who does not. What gets written in it and what does not.

I suppose blockchain could be used to see this persist.

It would, however, be a poor use of its potential.

Even if we changed nothing else, placing the entirety of this record on the blockchain, and recording every transaction henceforth, would absolutely revolutionize the world. Gone would be the opportunity for duplicity, ambiguity, and manipulation, let alone the cost, associated with our current system of registry and transaction. In its place, transparency, self-sovereignty, and empowerment. 

This is the purpose of blockchain.

To progress the human enterprise from a reductive endeavor into a collaborative one. To shine a light into the dark areas where avarice has lived. To connect humanity through a single, common thread. To realize the ideal that is the world wide web.

Which, by the way, is how the world is actually organized in the first place.

The Human Race is Over

Bitcoin is dead, and has been ever since it was assigned a value relative to fiat currency, which has no inherent value beyond that as a medium of exchange. Really, Bitcoin was dead before that, because once all the coins are mined, how do you incentivize people to maintain the ledger, particularly when it becomes more resource intensive over time?

So what are we going to do with this knowledge? Sit back and wait for the crash?

The crash is not coming.

We cannot afford for it to, because the system is so complex that no one has any idea what is causal to what anymore. We’re simply protecting the downside, which is total implosion. The markets have been hacked by algorithms, so they can no longer be trusted. Big data is the new battlefront. Plan for infinite monetary growth, whether that is dollars or coin. Because it is meaningless.

This is the mentality already in employ in Russia and China. They care nothing about monetary policy, except in relation to USD. Within their own borders it is of no consequence — the state simply demands activity, initiates it, or creates money to motivate it as needed.

Hyperinflation is a chimera in this new reality, both because the total quantity of money is at once inconsequential and unable to be known, and because it leads to an impossible situation, which is the barter of goods at real value. It will never be allowed to happen, or more to the point, we should hope that it does.

The American Dream is defunct.

Now there is only hegemony. But rather than the dominance of one nation state over another, it is now a global dominion over each individual’s own state of being.

So what is to be done? Buy gold and guns and wait for the collapse? Certainly not, because that is never coming. Buy Bitcoin futures? To what end?

The value of Bitcoin was in its immutable nature, just as the value of stock was in minimizing the risk to any one person for a venture that many deemed necessary and important, just as the value of a bond was that it allowed a multitude to fund a common benefit that none alone could bring to fruition. Any derivative of this value is worthless, because it fails to provide any realizable motivation.

The trouble that the world faces today is that it fails to accept that we have moved beyond these primitive tools. In fact, a majority have forgotten that they are indeed tools, thinking them certainties. But they are not, able to be changed or abandoned altogether.

Thus we see Bitcoin reverted into something more familiar, rather than investigated for its potential as an entirely novel approach. People are buying it, but no one is employing it.

So what’s the point?

One point is that it is motivating the investment of our best intelligence into making it useful and deployable at scale. Blockchain based on proof of useful work will be one outcome — a distributed accounting of quantity, ownership, and allocation of everything known to man, secured by the need to collectively harness and effectively deploy the computing power of the world.

But again, to what end? Because the only thing that really matters is what we are doing, not the tools we are using to do it. Blockchain itself doesn’t contain value. The fact that it engenders trust without the need for a central authority does. The coins themselves don’t hold a thing, except perhaps the confidence in ourselves and others to achieve outcomes.

We have arrived at a point beyond scarcity, a circumstance for which none of our current systems are prepared. In an attempt to resolve this reality to our legacy construct, we are creating artificial scarcity. Bitcoin is an example of this. It is both scarce and consumptive by design. Stripped of any real value, at best all it can hope for is to reach its designed limit and inevitable demise.

What is required, more than any technology or organizational solution, is that we unshackle ourselves from the notion that there is anything left for us to fear.

America is no longer in competition with Russia or China, nor any other nation or people on Earth.

There is no difference between any of them. Every country in the world runs the same operating system. There are no Macs, and certainly no Linux. Bitcoin was Linux, until it became Red Hat.

Our goal, as a species, ist to ensure the well being of every single member therein, as well as the machinery and framework that serves to sustain them. It is with that in mind that we design the operating system, create the tools, and employ the same. The entirety of their value is found in what leverage they provide toward actually achieving that goal.

Before money, there was not this need to motivate a member of the tribe to act justly and contribute their full effort for the benefit of the group. That motivation came from the internal and external dynamic between the biological imperative toward personal survival and the beneficial network effect of broad collaboration. Those motivations have value, because they serve both the individual and the common good. Money is an abstraction of that value and, without the trust that it can engender similar motivation, utterly worthless.

Before blockchain, there was trust.

Bitcoin was an attempt to outsource trust to the cloud. As a tool for documenting the existence, title, and transfer of property by way of an interconnected, instantaneous, and transparent distributed ledger, it is beyond compare. In its current form, as an energy squandering substitute for an already outmoded construct, it is no better, and many ways worse, than money.

We do not live in the same world as before, and we cannot apply the same thinking, the systems of organization, motivation, production, and exchange. We have completely terraformed the Earth, forever altered its physical, chemical, and biological makeup. We have eliminated scarcity and constructed a global nervous system linking every human actor, and many non-human ones, into a single, gigantic brain. While people scramble to develop AI, they fail to recognize it is already in existence. Who knows what it is thinking?

It is time to free ourselves from the past and move boldly into our collective future.

We are all members of the same tribe, and accountable to one another. Give freely. The human race is over. We have emerged victorious.

Getting Back to Normal is the Last Thing We Need

When I think about the coronavirus pandemic, my mind often wanders to what I would be doing did it not exist. Going about my business. Continuing to be a cog in the machine. Perpetuating the status quo.

Is that what we want?

In our rush to get back to “normal”, are we perhaps overlooking the possibility that normal is precisely the problem?

Personally, I don’t want normal. I never have. And I certainly don’t want to get back to it.

Have you ever considered the impetus behind the massive appeal of the troves of aspirational media on the internet – photo blogs, Tumblr, Instagram? These microcosms of alternative reality – cosplay, virtual reality, van life, nostalgia. Could the source of their allure be because we find the real world, the one we have literally constructed around us, completely unfulfilling?

Ever since we ceased having to constantly struggle to merely survive, there has existed the opportunity to create, with intention, a built environment that doesn’t only meet our basest needs, but actually serves to evoke within us positive emotions – inspiration, creativity, courage, joy.

I have long considered what might result from the following experiment: ask everyone to render, in whatever medium they chose, their ideal landscape. The image they see when they look out their window, gaze upon their home or neighborhood, walk out their front door.

I suspect the vast majority of them would appear strikingly similar.

In my mind, there exists an image of a perfect world. I often think about what keeps me from realizing it.

When I watch scenes on the news or video clips captured on smartphones on the internet, I am struck by how unnatural and uninspiring the settings I see featured in them appear to me. Gray. Monochrome. Uniform. Concrete.

Contrast this with the image that we imagined above. Or any image from your favorite influencer or visual artist on Instagram. 

Do the two images evoke similar emotions in you? I doubt it. 

So why not? And, more importantly, what can we do about it?

The coronavirus has brought the “all stop” to the economic juggernaut that my wife and climate scientist Dr. Steven Running told me was utterly impossible and potentially disastrous. With that achieved, getting “back to normal” is the very last thing I want to do.

Gitmo

Some time ago, I was contacted by Montana Senator Steve Daines with an email entitled “Keep Guantanamo Open”. I was so appalled by the worldview presented in this letter that I felt compelled to share some thoughts and clearly communicate my position on the matter of Guantanamo Bay in particular and national security in general.

Ethics, honor, and human decency demand that we close this facility immediately and return those detained therein to their respective nations, for trial there, if their countries deem it appropriate, or for extradition to the United States if they face criminal charges in this country, as provided by international law.

Furthermore, while I have your ear, please allow me the opportunity to clear up a misunderstanding in regards to some “values” Senator Daines and others have ascribed to me and purportedly uphold.

I, for one, do not spend my life in fear of any nation or ideology on earth, and therefore do not need to be made secure from them. To echo Eisenhower, the advent of the nuclear option ensures there can never again be a conflict of any scale on this planet, and these wasted efforts on the part of Senator Daines and others in the maintenance of a military state are rooted in a worldview that has long since passed being relevant.

To illustrate my point, let us consider for a moment the world that such people imagine and contrast it with reality. Where again do they find this overt military threat? It simply does not exist. At best there is a cultural threat, a poli-economic threat, but there is no military threat, and, I would argue, no real threat at all. No power in the world today is going to march against another, intent on commandeering the rest by force. Such talk is preposterous.

Let us take our thought experiment even further. What if the United States was to abandon its military position completely? What is the worst that would happen? Every country on earth aspires to emulate our success. Are they going to attack us? Enslave us? We buy their goods, we innovate advances that improve their lives, we are a model of freedom for the world. What nation is going to march against and supplant us?

Who could? So what if they did? Is there something so different about Chinese or Russian life that would fundamentally change how we live? Are there people in the developed world who actually believe there are sovereign nations bent on foreign conquest? To even ask the question is to appear ridiculous.

Imagine now the alternative. What if we were to eliminate all borders and allow people to freely move about the earth? What if we were to train every single person in their own defense and limit the use of military force to the protection of human and legal rights? What if we were to work in concert rather than discord? How would such a world differ from that of today?

To move forward, we must accept that, ultimately, the peoples of the earth will live in peaceful coexistence. This is an absolute inevitability. The sooner we can align ourselves with this reality, the better off we all shall be. 

In doing so, we must become open and accepting of other modes of living and realize that violence alone is our enemy. We can no more expect the other peoples of the world to bend to our will than we should bend to theirs. Surely there may be conflict and resolution as competing forms of poli-social-economic systems vie for primacy, but there need not be violence. Violence assumes resistance, and nature does not allow resistance to prevail. It is, in fact, futile. It will be overcome.

Recently I posed this question to a dear friend: “How do we move from where we are today to Star Trek?” I was disappointed by his response.

“How do we get there? Through competition. Nations competing against each other to be the first to gain advantage.”

That doesn’t sound like something Captain Kirk or Picard would say. It sounds more like the type of rhetoric I would expect to hear from Hitler, or perhaps Steve Daines.

Addendum:

The United States has occupied Guantanamo Bay Naval Base continuously since 1898. If that doesn’t put the artifice of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis into perspective, I don’t know what will.

A reasonable argument for competition from Robin Hanson – Long Views Are Competitive. However, I still believe what makes humans unique is inscribed in our ability to act contrary to our interests, and our further evolution contingent upon transcending this apparent need for competition.

Unified Theory

Like any true philosopher, my goal is a unifying theory.

Currently, I have only disparate thoughts. This website is an effort toward assembling them in a place accessible to others.

Generally, I believe the universe is itself the unifying theory. As far as I can tell, the universe, meaning “all that there is,” experiences itself as consciousness, and the two are mutually exclusive. The universe can be universal, or it can be conscious, but not both at the same time. Beyond that, most things seem up for grabs.

There are a number of delightfully interesting threads worth exploring. I’ll add more as I come to them, but here are a few to start:

  • Being* – what does it mean to be, particularly without consciousness
  • Language* – does anything precede it

*an acknowledgement to Dr. Robert Walsh for leading me to these investigations

WordPress vs Pico CMS vs static HTML

I have been agonizing over the decision whether to use WordPress to manage my website or go with a flat-file approach. WordPress is clearly the easier route – it comes ready to install via cPanel with my web host, is essentially plug and play, and boasts a huge library of widgets and plug-ins to help get the site published, relatable, and SEO-friendly.

Despite all that, I still don’t like it.

Pico is a flat-file CMS that I find really appealing. If I knew just a little more about the basics of web hosting – how to install Pico on my server, for example – I would likely go this route. Obviously, the only way to learn a new skill is through doing it, so I intend to launch a dev site based in Pico. I’m excited to begin building my web skills with this stupidly simple, blazing fast flat-file CMS.

When making decisions, I try to make use of every available resource, those that I would call “high value” resources in particular. Derek Sivers is an example of such a resource. Despite being an extremely successful and relatively private person, I know him to be quite approachable. He also places a ton of value in autonomy, simplicity and self-determination – principles I cherish as well – and applies these axioms to his third most polished skill – after music and writing – programming. After Jem Bendell’s, Derek’s site is most akin to the vision I have for my own, and I have Derek’s email address from his interview with Tim Ferriss, so I sent him a note asking how he maintains his site.

His response?

For making a new site?  Don’t let anyone sell you on some complex solution.  They’re saying you need a jumbo jet when really you need a bicycle.  Do your HTML by hand like this, and then you’ll know when your site has become so big that you need a little more automation to help manage changes or links to the hundreds of pages inside.  But until then, no no no.  Just do HTML by hand.

After that, I was really in a bind. How could I use something like WordPress with advice like that?

Enter the power of rationalization.

One of the great things about WordPress is that it is based upon a relational database. That means that different parts of the site content – namely the posts – can be related to other parts. So you can use queries to batch and display content based on various criteria, date or category for instance. This is the major advantage that WordPress offers over static HTML.

Not that it can’t be done by hand in HTML. Derek is one hundred percent correct, HTML is all that you need. In fact, it is the only way that your site can be viewed over the Internet in the first place.

I’m just lazy.