You Live In A Bitmap
Welcome To The Desert Of The Real
If you’ve been in the culture for a while, you’re well aware that every narrative is just a narrative. It’s a story people tell each other. I’m about to tell you a story.
It isn’t true or false. It’s just an idea. A narrative.
You live in a Bitmap.
Allow me to explain.
Bitcoin: The Revolution Was Inevitable
First, let’s start with a prerequisite narrative: Bitcoin was inevitable.
And that narrative starts with an axiom: The strong have always exploited the weak.
First through violence; we called that prehistory. And then we became civilized. We invented institutions & philosophies; tools which enabled the strong to exploit the weak through coercion.
These institutions & philosophies have gone by many names. The Divine Right Of Kings. The Caliphate. The Catholic Church. Bretton Woods. The Comintern. Fascism, Democracy, Fractional Reserve Banking. The World Economic Forum.
Our institutions and philosophies all have a common weak point; human nature. This isn’t to say that most people are evil. But because our institutions empower certain humans to rule over other humans, the worst people always wind up on top.
Just Trust Me
Until recently, we lacked the means to overcome the central social coordination problem that begets all others. Although we continue to invent new systems of governance, they all eventually collapse at the same failure point.
The problem, quite simply, is trust.
Centralized power structures control the source of record, which means they control the truth. Your bank account balance. Your citizenship. Your freedom to travel. Your legal rights.
When those power structures are corrupted, so are the principles that uphold the function of our systems of governance and finance. By fiat, or by decree, your freedoms only exist at the whim of the state.
You wind up with a social credit system. You wind up with massive inflation that the government consistently understates.
Humanity only passes Go and collects $200 once it figures out how to take trust out of the equation entirely. This has been so since the first Oogie created the first Caveman Credit Union.
Bitcoin solves this. Put simply, there is no government, bank, church, or committee that can turn off your money. Which is huge. In any other Bitcoiner article, that would be the punchline.
But this article isn’t about money.
Closing The Memory Hole
This article is about truth, reality and how we define it.
“‘Do you remember,’ he went on, ‘writing in your diary, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four”?’
‘Yes,’ said Winston.
O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’
‘Four.’
‘And if the Party says that it is not four but five — then how many?’
‘Four.’
The word ended in a gasp of pain.
…
The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.
‘How many fingers, Winston?’
‘Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!’
‘How many fingers, Winston?’
‘Five! Five! Five!’
‘No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?’
‘Four! Five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!’”
— George Orwell, 1984
Bitcoin addresses the fundamental social coordination problem by providing an objective source of record.
Without an objective source of record like the immutable ledger Bitcoin provides, central authorities can redefine the past. The past of anything.
This means rewriting history, censoring media and faking videos, resetting bank accounts, redefining assets, you name it. It can all go down the memory hole.
A decentralized, tamper-proof ledger means that no single authority can alter historical data or manipulate transaction records.
Bitcoin is the first thing like it in human history. An immutable source of record that removes the need for trust in intermediaries and replaces it with cryptographic consensus. An objective, universally verifiable source of truth.
Tamper-proof truth.
The Desert Of The Real
“Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it.
It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.”
— Jean Baudillard, Simulacra & Simulation
What he was really talking about is memes. Narratives.
Liquidity accumulates around narratives. Like gravity, it sucks in liquid until the “new paradigm” stage of the hype cycle. Then it collapses like a neutron star becoming a black hole.
Bitmap is a meme too; perhaps the best one yet: A decentralized metaverse.
The bitmap white paper describes a new vision for what a metaverse might look like: Bitcoin blocks arranged in a structured digital map where each block represents a parcel of digital real estate.
Digital Matter Theory: Worlds from Code
Digital Matter Theory (DMT), as articulated in the bitmap white paper, says that physical matter is really just data, and based on that concept, any source of data can be used as the basis of digital matter.
For example, if the physical world contains a bowling ball, which is a certain size, shape, mass, composition etc — the digital world can contain a bowling ball too, which despite not existing in the physical world, can still have the attributes of a physical object, within the context of the digital world.
In this framework, every Bitcoin block is an individual “district,” and each transaction within a block acts as a “parcel” of digital land. The project’s core objective was to leverage Bitcoin’s decentralized and tamper-proof ledger to create a digital metaverse-like structure, where ownership is verifiable and permanent.
The data itself comes from the actual transaction data contained within each Bitcoin block. Data which resulted naturally from people mining bitcoin, sending it back and forth, consolidating UTXOs, and so forth. No one set out to create a metaverse with those first 800,000 blocks. They were just using Bitcoin as Bitcoin.
This is a key distinction to understand. The fact that the transaction history of Bitcoin was not orchestrated in order to build digital real estate. It’s just what naturally happened. It’s non-arbitrary.
The concept of non-arbitrary tokens is another philosophical nugget engendered by Bitmap — the realization that an asset based on something objective and true found natively in the environment is infinitely more valuable than one based on an arbitrary choice.
And what is more objective and true in a digital world than Bitcoin…
The Path To Blockout
The process of minting these digital assets involves “inscribing” them on individual Bitcoin satoshis, consistent with Ordinals Theory. By utilizing ordinal inscriptions, users can claim ownership of specific Bitcoin blocks by inscribing their unique IDs onto satoshis and associating them with the Bitmap protocol.
The inscriptions themselves are incredibly simple: <block number>.bitmap
A simple text inscription, claiming ownership of the right to develop the digital real estate of each Bitcoin block. First is first. Blockout wasn’t immediate. It took a minute to catch on.
The Bitmap project eventually caught the imagination of the crypto community, leading to a hype wave about the “Bitcoin metaverse”.
Of course, no one has the first clue how to build a metaverse on Bitcoin blocks yet. Heck, no one has any idea how to build any sort of metaverse yet. Mark Zuckerberg is still working off The Lawnmower Man.
If a multibillion dollar company that literally changed it’s name to Meta hasn’t rolled out anything remotely close to a metaverse yet, a decentralized community of ordinals JSON flippooors has a long way to go.
This realization led to a massive selloff.
So when we talk about bitmaps, let’s simply realize we are talking about the right to build a future metaverse on that data, not a tangible metaverse that we believe is being built anytime remotely soon.
Why a Decentralized Metaverse Matters
Any metaverse based on a centralized source of record is like the Ready Player One reality. Exploitable for profit at the whim of the centralized owners. (Which is literally how the “real” world works too…)
Centralization brings gatekeepers, and gatekeepers bring the very human flaws Bitcoin seeks to obviate. A decentralized metaverse ensures that no single party can alter the fundamental truths of this digital universe or monopolize its potential.
The real value of a metaverse is defined by the network effect. In other words, the only valuable metaverse in the long term is the one with the most users.
Social networks like Facebook have no choice but to try to make this pivot. But in the long term, nothing they build will have any value.
Only a decentralized metaverse is worth building at all.
So it stands to reason that
- not only was Bitcoin, or something like it, an inevitable invention, because it addresses the core social coordination problems of humanity
- but Bitmaps are also the inevitable basis of any metaverse we may one day build
But What If They Already Built It
In 2003, Nick Bostrom published “Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?”
In a nutshell:
- If we manage not to destroy ourselves first, we’ll eventually reach the technology level needed to run hyperrealistic simulations, undistinguishable from “base reality”
- Such a society would be able to create countless simulations, practically an infinite number of them
- Which makes it far more probable that we are living in a simulated reality rather than the base reality itself
This is called the “simulation hypothesis”.
What he calls “substrate-independence” is another way of saying that physical matter need not be physical. Everything is data, whether it’s our brains and eyes interpreting light waves, or petabytes of data flowing into our heads from The Matrix.
What Bostrom is talking about, decades ahead of time, is Digital Matter Theory.
So a metaverse and a simulation are basically the same damn thing.
A Quantum Conundrum
In 1999, theoretical physicists Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum introduced a revolutionary idea in physics: braneworld theory. They aimed to address the longstanding “hierarchy problem,” which asks why gravity is much weaker than the other fundamental forces like electromagnetism.
Their models, known as Randall-Sundrum I and II, proposed that our universe is a three-dimensional brane embedded in a higher-dimensional space called “the bulk.” They theorized that gravity is diluted because it can travel through extra dimensions, while other forces remain confined to our brane.
In English, they’re saying that what we perceive as “the observable universe” could be just one slice within a multi-dimensional structure and that other parallel universes might exist alongside us, each on its own brane.
String theory says there may be 10 or 11 dimensions. We’re like flat-earthers trying to understand dimensions we can’t see, only perceiving that slice of reality which fits within our perceptual range.
The mysteries of quantum mechanics hint at dimensions and realities beyond our comprehension — where particles exist in multiple states simultaneously, and actions on one affect the other, despite vast distances.
Could our universe, governed by these strange laws, be akin to a grand, cosmic ledger — a blockchain of unimaginable scale?
Bitmaps Are A Tesseract
In Interstellar, Matthew McConaghey’s character must rescue a future Earth from extinction with the help of fifth-dimensional beings. He needs to convey information to his daughter, back on Earth, in the past. How can you do that — traverse time and space in one step?
A tesseract — a physical construct which allows space and time to be manipulated like thumbing through the pages of a phone book.
He moves about the tesseract, selecting the right place, the right moment, the right frequency. He plucks the cosmic strings and his daughter gets the memo.
Consider this: what if our universe operates like a tesseract, with each moment, each event, each interaction inscribed upon the cosmic blockchain? What if our entire existence is the unfolding of a grand, interdimensional Bitmap?
Grand Unification Theory
What if braneworld theory and the simulation theory are saying exactly the same thing?
It would imply that the layers of reality described by braneworld theory are effectively nested simulations created by an advanced posthuman civilization.
According to the simulation hypothesis, we might live in a digital construct, a simulation whose intricacies mimic the physical world so convincingly that its inhabitants — us — believe it to be the base reality.
What substrate would they have built this digital construct upon?
You Live In A Bitmap
We’ve come full circle. As I said in the beginning, this is just a narrative.
I have no clue what’s real. Whether the fabric of reality is just zeroes and ones. I’m not telling you we live in a simulation.
But if:
- Bitcoin, or something like it, was inevitable
- and Bitcoin is the premier decentralized source of record
- and Simulations are based on Digital Matter Theory
- and quantum physics tells us we only perceive a slice of the universe
…doesn’t it follow that if we DO live in a simulation, it’s probably based on some sort of Bitmap?
Welcome to the desert of the real.
Thank you for reading. All artistic images created by Elevated Dabber with the assistance of GPT 4 / DALL-E 3.
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