In the Math We Trust

Dimitrios K.-L.
Aug 24, 2017 · 2 min read

People try to give arguments about how great technology Bitcoin is. Well I don’t buy it. For a computer science professional, there’s very little interesting thing going on in bitcoin in terms of technology. Plain old databases, an ok solution to the Two-Generals problem, some Napster-style peer-to-peer networking and a few cryptographic signatures — the kind that Chrome uses every time you use https. You can get the bare essentials down with as much as 50 lines of Python.

There’s, though, one extra layer of software that makes Bitcoin work. All the “magic crypto-voodoo” that makes people say “I don’t understand Bitcoin”. They might not be essential in terms of making the coin work, but they are essential in building a currency. Because every currency has to have something that people don’t understand but respect in it. It might be God, it might be Government or Justice. Well, with Bitcoins, it’s Math. It’s “complex math no one could ever understand” and that we “trust” to keep the currency safe and sound. It’s the tributes of burning real electrical power from the grid, to solve math that prove that we’re to be trusted, with trust derived out of the etherial SHA-256 hash.

Math is to be trusted. Math flies our airplanes, gets our satellites in orbits and suggest irresistible things to buy on Amazon and Netflix. Math is to be trusted because they fail in a predictable way and they don’t have self-interest. Soon, with Proof of Stake, we won’t need that much math anymore. Coins will become self-reinforcing and people will derive trust to verify coin transactions out of the ownership of the coin itself.

This is what is revolutionary about Bitcoin. Nothing to do with technology. It’s the decision of humanity to abandon institutions that have long disappointed, working out of self-interest and with corrupt practices, and trust Math and eventually themselves with issuing the currency that they use to transact and store value. After 5000 years of debt (great read by the way), at last, something really revolutionary!

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