Tag: #around

Blockchain Spectrum

The Blockchain Spectrum

Now, even if someone does not have the drawbacks of decades-long experience and mental models with a specific asset class, it is still very hard to understand Bitcoin.

Why? Because Bitcoin is the intersection of many, many different fields.

To truly understand Bitcoin, there is no other way than being a polymath.

Even if one has made it as far to (a) realize Bitcoin is something completely new and solely using existing heuristics and mental models will not work and (b) with Bitcoin, more than anything else, we do not know what we do not know — understanding still requires a very broad set of competences.

The correct approach to understand when one starts going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole is therefore to assume one knows nothing and any experience and insight one has from previous aspects of life brings
very little to the table.

First principles thinking is required.
We can, however, try to define a little deeper what Bitcoin is. Below is listed some different ways of wrapping one’s head around Bitcoin.

Not an exhaustive list.

A living organism

Bitcoin is Free and Open Source software. It is not a piece of IP owned by a centralized joint-stock company that needs to optimize for the bottom line of the next quarter and is incapable of cannibalizing itself. Since the Bitcoin whitepaper was released and the
genesis block was mined, we have seen an explosion of experiments, ideas and creative geniuses get involved in Bitcoin and crypto as a whole. To think of Bitcoin as a living, technological organism that adjusts, develops and constantly changes to survive can be useful.

A religion.

Money, as many have learned and realized in recent decade, is just a social
construction we are all part of. The value therefore comes from the amount of true believers.

Continuing this line of thinking, one could describe the religion as consisting of:

  • Prophet: Satoshi. No longer present. Impossible to ask questions.
  • Convictions: Decentralization.
  • Rituals: Running nodes. Mining. Hodling.
  • Holy scriptures: Bitcoin whitepaper. As with all holy scriptures, people interpret them in their own way.
  • Sacred objects: Genesis block, lowercase bitcoin
  • Sects: Different interpretations resulting in different factions/sects: small blockers, big blockers, etc.

An emerging economy

  • The consensus protocol can be thought of as the constitution
  • The society as the constituency (users on the demand-side; miners on the supply-side)
  • Core developers as the executive department who write the code and execute on the strategy, but amendments to the protocol (i.e., constitution) require approval from the constituency)
  • The native token is the internal currency
  • The investors underwrite the currency

Additionally, many one-liners and memes exist to describe Bitcoin. Not an exhaustive list.

  • Sound money
  • Digital gold
  • “An insurance policy against an Orwellian future”
  • “A tool for freeing humanity from oligarchs and tyrants, dressed up as a get-rich-quick scheme”
  • Censorship- judgment & seizure-resistant money
  • Peer to peer digital cash
  • Swiss Bank account in your pocket
  • Unstoppable and uncensorable hard money

Source: https://backed.ai/

Sapere Aude

Etymology

It is from the epithet of a parable, explaining that a fool waits for the stream to stop before crossing, while a wise man forgoes comfort and crosses anyway.

The original use seems to be in Epistle II  of  Horace‘s Epistularum liber primus:

“Dimidium facti qui coepit habet: sapere aude” (“He who has begun is half done: dare to know!”).

Phrase

sapere audē

  1. “Have the courage to think for yourself“
  2. “Have courage to use your own reason“, in the context of committing to tasks that need to be embarked upon, however unpleasant or awkward.
  3. “Dare to be wise”, the motto of the Enlightenment.

Usage notes

Kant answers the question in the first sentence of the essay: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity (Unmündigkeit).”

He argues that the immaturity is self-inflicted not from a lack of understanding, but from the lack of courage to use one’s reason, intellect, and wisdom without the guidance of another.

Kant argued that using one’s reason is considered dangerous by most men and all women.

He exclaims that the motto of the Enlightenment is “Sapere aude“! – Dare to be wise!

“Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage.

Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another.

Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another.

Sapere Aude!

‘Have courage to use your own reason!’- that is the motto of enlightenment.”

Immanuel Kant

Source:

https://wikipedia.org/

Merry X-Mass – Crypto Style

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Arise…

Timothy C. May

Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wired fences!

Timothy C. May

Wonder In Peace bright mind!

Thanks for the guidance and wisdom!

The world will never know how much they owe you!

✌ & 💚

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Vires In Numeris

Vires In Numeris

” It isn’t obvious that the world had to work this way.

But somehow the universe smiles on encryption.”

Julian Assange

Nobody yet knows for sure if the universe’s smile is genuine or not.

It is possible that our assumption of mathematical asymmetries is wrong and we find that P actually equals NP, or we find surprisingly quick solutions to specific problems which we currently assume to be hard.

If that should be the case, cryptography as we know it will cease to exist, and the implications would most likely change the world beyond recognition.

“Vires in Numeris”

=

“Strength in Numbers”

epii

Vires in numeris is not only a catchy motto used by bitcoiners.

The realization that there is an unfathomable strength to be found in numbers is a profound one.

Understanding this, and the inversion of existing power balances which it enables changed my view of the world and the future which lies ahead of us.

One direct result of this is the fact that you don’t have to ask anyone for permission to participate in Bitcoin.

There is no page to sign up, no company in charge, no government agency to send application forms to.

Simply generate a large number and you are pretty much good to go.

The central authority of account creation is mathematics.

And God only knows who is in charge of that.

Elliptic curve examples (cc-by-sa Emmanuel Boutet)

Bitcoin is built upon our best understanding of reality.

While there are still many open problems in physics, computer science, and mathematics, we are pretty sure about some things.

That there is an asymmetry between finding solutions and validating the correctness of these solutions is one such thing.

That computation needs energy is another one.

In other words: finding a needle in a haystack is harder than checking if the pointy thing in your hand is indeed a needle or not.

And finding the needle takes work.

The vastness of Bitcoin’s address space is truly mind-boggling.

The number of private keys even more so. It is fascinating how much of our modern world boils down to the improbability of finding a needle in an unfathomably large haystack.

I am now more aware of this fact than ever.

Bitcoin taught me that there is strength in numbers.

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