This is a followup to yesterday’s post: https://medium.com/@coop__soup/00000000000000000021e800c1e8df51b22c1588e5a624bea17e9faa34b2dc4a-cd4b67d446be
The post had a much bigger reaction than I anticipated. In it, I wasn’t really trying give a definitive analysis so much as outline different theories strewn about twitter. I was given a ton of feedback, so I’m going to lay out a few corrections here. I also dove a little deeper into the part of this that is quite possibly real. No, not time travel or quantum computing, but the idea behind an information sharing network that is being built atop the Bitcoin protocol. This is the bigger picture that probably wasn’t easy to infer from my post.
The two main critiques I wanted to highlight are:
- That this hash (#21e800) is nothing more than simple numerology. It’s inevitable that it’d come up in a block, just as it has once before. Here’s the block it happened in previously, albeit only with one trailing zero:
https://blockchain.info/block/00000000000000000021e80ba4f8836fd8a78060076a6c35fdaa31cc76404bfb
Emin Gun Sirer concisely pointed out why is likely not significant at all.
- That this couldn’t possibly be quantum computing.
A. If it were, all private keys would most likely have been broken by now, rendering Bitcoin insecure.
B. “Quantum computing is irrelevant to hashing. So that leaves time travel or… ‘luck’”. See: https://cr.yp.to/hash/collisioncost-20090517.pdf
So I do apologize for the misinformation there. In no way shape or form, was this anything other than imaginative theorizing! Regardless of these technical shortcomings, there is more going on here than first meets the eye. Yes, this is most likely simply random, with network users pointing it out to fit a narrative. The narrative itself is what’s important here. Something is clearly happening, whether it’s also a figment of our imaginations, or an ongoing shift in Bitcoin that we can’t fully understand presently.
From Adam Taché’s article, The Many Faces of Bitcoin:
“This group (speaking of Mark Wilcox & Andrew DeSantis) believes Bitcoin is a breakthrough in information theory because it allows anyone to conduct verifiable, timestamped, tamper-proof and transparent transactions without any third parties. Information theory says creativity requires a stable medium to experience fractal growth, and these individuals view Bitcoin as an extremely stable medium for doing so…
[They also] view one use case of Bitcoin as an oracle machine to prove that a specific piece of data existed at a given point in time, and the bitcoin scripting language as much more capable than Ethereum in the long run due to the parallel nature of Bitcoin in comparison to the current serial execution forced by contracts on the Ethereum platform. They also believe Bitcoin will “wake up” in the future as a superintelligent AI and allow intelligence augmentation for humans.
This group views Bitcoin as a platform to re-build computer software and the web upon. For example, they are interested in the parallels between Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu, the first hypertext project, and Bitcoin. Project Xanadu was envisioned to bring about a highly interconnected, parallel universe of documents for reading, writing, learning, and earning through hypertext, “non-sequential writing — text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen.” Xanadu was to operate through worldwide distributed servers and facilitate micro-transactions across the web.”
This is the basis of #DeOS, the “decentralized quantum computer” that Desantis’ has been working on. If there’s anything significant about yesterday’s block hash, it’s that he’s clearly made some sort of breakthrough with his project. Again, I can’t fully wrap my mind around what he’s trying to accomplish, but I’ll write out my thoughts and maybe together we can deduce what’s really going on here. If you couldn’t have guessed, when you go to the project’s website, it’s just a simulated 3d visualization. So as per usual, we have to do our best to decipher Desantis’ and others in his circle’s cryptic tweets. (Side note: Have any of you ever read House of Leaves? The similarities are striking. If you’ve been enjoying working through this mystery, I highly suggest that book!)
One of his sayings I stumbled across mention how the two most important inventions to humankind were:
1. Money
2. Language
While Bitcoin obviously tackles the former, the latter is just as important to decentralize. When the internet first arose, everyone presumed that it would be a bastion of freedom for all of us. They didn’t hypothesize what ended up happening to the internet, it ended up centralized, hence up for censorship. You can tell through reading DeSantis’ blog posts how important language is to him. It seems like he was already working on a decentralized communication* protocol, and later pieced together that Bitcoin was needed as the underlying network to actualize this idea. (I also can’t find this tweet! I’ll look for it. There’s just so damn many to sort through.) From what I gather & as indicated here, this system is currently being put into place, or very well may already be completed.
There’s still so much to figure out here. I can’t fully wrap my mind around the implications this system would have, but it doesn’t feel (to me) that there are nefarious intentions at play. I hate to not really wrap this up with any clear cut theory, but if I were to do so A. it’d be critiqued heavily, and B. it’d take some fun out of this whole mystery.
What is clear is that this enigma is enamoring the whole community, and whether or not this project comes to fruition, it’s a genius endeavor enabling us all to dive deeper down the rabbit hole of our imaginations.
*Not sure if that’s the accurate terminology here.
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