Any Random Thing
Early in the day I was attracted to a writing calling out blockchain as a semantic wasteland. I find this idea both agreeable and disagreeable for reasons I’ll expand.
The writing in question makes the point the technology behind Bitcoin is phrased in ways all too meaningless; and has been hijacked as a marketing buzzword and dubious basis for get rich quick schemes. The writing also makes the point that Satoshi never directly phrased blockchain:
“Most histories of ‘blockchain’ will mention that Satoshi Nakamoto created the first one. Except… he/she/it/they didn’t. Nakamoto never referred to bitcoin as a blockchain, calling it instead a ‘chain of hash-based proof-of-work,’ a ‘chain of blocks,’ and even ‘timechain’ (in an early comment within the original codebase). Imagine. We were so close to living in a world of enterprise timechains and strawberries-on-the-timechain.” ‘Blockchain is a Semantic Wasteland’, Nic Carter.
Analysing Satoshi
In interests of balance, it should be noted Satoshi didn’t directly reference decentralisation in the white paper either. It would be too much of a stretch to say decentralisation isn’t an essential feature of Bitcoin, but it doesn’t necessarily follow this is what Bitcoin is about.
In this light, I find it difficult to understand explicitly whether Bitcoin is actually about anything — and have previously blogged how Bitcoin is too nimble of movement to be afforded any kind of obvious or purposeful definition. The problem with this however, is that Bitcoin came from somewhere and for a reason.
A Satoshi observation can be shed here, which hopefully frames this in lighter form:
“As a thought experiment, imagine there was a base metal as scarce as gold but with the following properties: — boring grey in colour — not a good conductor of electricity — not particularly strong, but not ductile or easily malleable either — not useful for any practical or ornamental purpose and one special, magical property: — can be transported over a communications channel. If it somehow acquired any value at all for whatever reason, then anyone wanting to transfer wealth over a long distance could buy some, transmit it, and have the recipient sell it. Maybe it could get an initial value circularly as you’ve suggested, by people foreseeing its potential usefulness for exchange. (I would definitely want some) Maybe collectors, any random reason could spark it.” — Satoshi Nakamoto
The key insight presented is any random reason could spark it. It’s almost an admission Satoshi created Bitcoin without any specific purpose in mind, or if there was, adoption would be at the whim of randomness.
Bitcoin in Semantic Pregnancy
The consistently deepest, richest and best insights around Bitcoin generally originate from the writer found here, for which I have previously penned a translation.
Yet for even the comprehensive writings of how Bitcoin provides Nash Equilibrium for institutions as peers, the conclusions — or starting points — will sometimes place Bitcoin as enthymeme: that there is no explicit purpose at all.
Alongside this, the same writer will press Satoshi’s is a conjecture money arises out of its useful nature as money; and not out of an previously held value — so it doesn’t need to be, or has been — of utility, otherwise.
And that the path cannot be designed — it’s too complex to be predictable; to let go of the conception of a path, and to observe truth in the moment — for the mind not to be stuck on an image of what should be.
First Imaginings of Heaven
The previous blog offering spoke around the nature of targeting — and how inflation targeting is at the root of other [targeting] trends and psychologies by which we measure our lives.
Implicit in this, is how formal achievement based purpose could be at the root of all psychosis. In this regard, it can be seen how modern language is pejorative to any latency — rather it’s used to make a point. Perhaps I’d be happy to be pointless — it shouldn’t be too much of a squeeze to see.
And maybe the most sophisticated forms of liquidity will begin to absolve the language of their eristic forms and responsibilities? First, by imagining it.
In any random thing.
