NCMT 500-314 -- Bitcoin and Philosophy (5 of 8)

Hello everyone, welcome to Bitcoin and Philosophy's fifth session. It's actually the first session of the second module, and I'm going to pass it on to Nick to begin the seminar. Hello Nick. Hi, thanks Mark. Go ahead. Welcome everybody, it's great to see you all. all. So there is in theory a central topic this week which is Bitcoin and signs and I'm sure that we'll have opportunity to talk about that. I'm going to only say a very few things

about that initially and see what the kind of lines people want to follow up. And in addition, we have, there's three posts from people on the classroom that are all I think extremely interesting. We were introduced to this rather strange innovation called BitchCoin by Dana. That was the first thing to arrive. It comes out of the art world. It's kind of humorous. But I think also it's serious in interesting ways.

And while I'm totally new to it, so I'm not going to put on some authoritative tiara or anything while talking about it, I certainly think there's stuff to be said about that. Then Laura has sent us a set of points about Bitcoin and science focusing on the question of zero. grow. And I think this is a mix of things that I strongly agree with and would perhaps want to even push a little further than Laura has done here in terms of backward. And other things that are really deep and complicated and I think aren't going to be resolved unless

by some stroke of cosmic fortune in this particular session, but we'll see how we go about that. And then the last one to come in, also a fascinating piece, is a connection to a text from... These people I recognize a lot, and they are obviously taking this topic seriously. It It comes out of this institution related to Gitt Lobinke. I think it's based in Amsterdam, but the writer of this is an American academic. And it's called, I don't know whether you'd say provocatively, for me in a stimulating way, it's called Bitcoin can be seen as a technical, oh no, sorry, hang on, the post,

thing is called Bitcoin as Politics Distributed Right-Wing Extremism. And it's also got a lot of interesting things going on in it. I think some of it to me is a little bit confused in the sense of trying to do several things at the same time that don't necessarily gel all that well but I'll see what people think about that. It certainly to me has a lot to recommend it as a discussion topic. So I think I'll just start off a little bit on science. I could say ironically but I don't know whether it would be better to say predictably, that

the whole discourse around signs is absolutely in my team massive terminological confusion uh... it it tends to be these different camps with their own specific vocabularies they don't mesh together very well uh... and it's very hard as i think we'll find trying to talk about it to really settle on an agreed set of definitions for some of this language. And I think that itself is an interesting issue. But I think it's worth starting off with some of the...

There's a tendency of all of these different schools of semiology to want to fix upon a particular aspect of the sign and to try to universalise it and to get every other aspect of similactic reality out of this particular characteristic. And so, for instance, in lots of the, what we might call continentalist type of discourses, the role of the sign as a signifier has been absolutely foregrounded and treated as the basic principle of the sign and everything has been sort of folded into that and and worked in that way and so you get these enormously complicated and and detailed semiotic

discourses that are all based on the life of the signifier and the way that the signifier operates. But if we go back to a point that I think is extremely helpful in articulating things that cross a lot of different traditions. The distinction that is made by Frege between significance and reference, to me, suggests that there are these functional axes of the sign that are usefully held apart. And in an absolute nutshell, in applying this to Bitcoin,

I really want to say the following thing, that money historically can be usefully approached by both of these dimensions, and I'll say a very, very little bit about them in a second, but that the monetary sign is not deducible or derivable either from sense or reference. That those two things are at work in the monetary sign, but they do not actually capture or isolate or explain the function of the monetary sign. and that Bitcoin is helping I think

to precipitate a some clarity on this subject and I think it necessarily involves the instruction of third dimension to the sign that is absolutely indispensable for understanding the sign as a currency unit as a monetary sign So very quickly the distinction between sense and reference as Frege, his famous example is obviously to do with Venus where he says you've got ways of talking about Venus where you can call it either the morning star or the evening star and these things have different

sense but in both cases the reference is to the same thing which is Venus so their that language operates on these two levels one is a level to do with significance an association and meaning and the other level is to do with designation and actually indexing some thing and as I say the first of these I think has been much more florid in its development within certainly European influence modes of philosophy the latter

it's seems to me is much more helpfully approached as a practical thing because indexing and referentiality in this in this sense is tied up with addresses where the address doesn't have to have any significance whatsoever it simply points you to something else reliably so for instance if you take if you take money as our example we try to stick with that you take an old coin and the coin has more than one sense two faces it has to

obviously two faces as a as a disk but it has two semiotic faces that you can isolate one of them is saturated with significance there's all kinds of there's all kinds of markings on the sign on the coin to do with dates and pictures of emperors and various words and associations that then follow from that coin all of those kind of things and it also has a reference that's initially to its own Janus faced existence that it tells you that this is a lump of metal of a certain weight and quality

and so with the coin it really is this Janus faced thing that those two things along together in the mint there is this semiotic fusion of sense and reference in the coin and it refers to itself but also in its circulation and in its social usage it has all these significances and associations some of which are just directly imprinted upon it. The the point where it becomes clear that these two things are different is obviously when we get to the stage paper money and going back as I always do to this to this fundamental form paper money as a warehouse receipt for a deposit of precious metal

now in that case again you can have whatever you like written on the front of this piece of paper and it will probably be extremely ornade and you could maybe have biblical quotes from Ed and all kinds of all kinds of statements kind brands and trademarks and all these kind of things but there'll be a certain element in it certain semiotic element which just points you to an account um and it will mean that this element this code need have no significance at all it doesn't mean anything or just be a string of identifying numbers but it means that it actually connects

the note to a lump of metal that is not being seen it is not being represented in any clear sense it's just being accessed by an address so this is like a primordial bank account number you know which is also on the same access of reference or and so the point here is just to say it's it's not at all to say we want to just love this sense ref friends language away I mean it's got a very rich involvement in the history of money it's very interesting in relation to money and reciprocally within the semiotic discourses there is constant illusion to a metaphorical implication money people say oh in

all kinds of ways language is like money socially circulates I'm it has certain characteristics that seem to be and the just to repeat this with the debt that allude to monetary circulation but when we sort of become a little bit more specific and here again I think a guy coming out a Bitcoin coming out of this whole project is is absolutely solidly the reliable threat is the top spending problem this is something nor is talking about in her points to that there are all kinds of ways that you can signify money and refer to money and use signs in these ways that seem

deeply involved with money and are not monetary signs you know anytime someone just speaks about money or in a journalistic article first a money or even in a journalistic way refers to particular council particular deposits other they're using signs obviously in some way to refer to or or to signify money but none if the signs have monet tree value and the reason that they don't have my machine I I think is not hard to see is because they are not scarce. That in talking about money,

one is not sacrificing the future potential to talk about money in exactly the same way. So in all of these types of sign systems, what you are always doing with signs is in fact duplication I mean to be super crude about it but I think not unhelpfully you know I have a message and in using signs you then also have the message you know I am duplicating the message the fundamental semiotic activity is proliferation duplication so now you also have the message but I still have the message I have not parted with the message I have not there's not been any

kind of commercial substitution such that you now have the message instead of me and neither neither of Frege's axes capture this phenomenon at all this This isn't, you can't get from the notion of sense or the notion of reference to the notion of semiotic scarcity or to the notion of the, what in Satoshi Nakamoto's sense is, the solution to the double spending problem. The solution to the double spending problem being the condition for the origin of the monetary sign. That even if that problem is still lurking away and there are still people

counterfeiting money and there are still people clipping coins, there always has to be a satisfactory solution that at least seems in the interim adequate, you know, hanging a few counterfeiters, having some kind of restraint on the abuse that can be subjected to coins that allows a society to say that it has a functional solution to the double spending problem. And it's only in the era of the digital side, digital money, that these kind of compromised solutions become completely inadequate and the double spending problem becomes such a crisis that it requires a formal solution of the kind that Bitcoin represents.

So there has to be a third dimension to the sign. And I'm extremely unsure about what is the best terminology for this. Personally I've been using the word that there is sense, reference and commutation. That the sign has to be commutative, which means not in the mathematical sense, but in in the sense of substitution, that if a monetary sign, when passed from one party to another party, ceases to be available to the first party, that there actually has to be an act of substitution, a trade-off. And this is something I think that is not implicit or,

as I say, derivable from these other philosophical and semiotic formulations of the nature of sign at all it's something else something absolutely needs to be added in order to have a functional monetary star I'm I think you can see this in the word that could be helpful except that it's still terminologically blurry of a token because I think when people use the word token colloquially they often mean exactly this you know if you have a token for a gambling machine or a token for a vending machine or some kind of token in some other system of exchange, it's implicit

in that idea of a token that if you pass over that token to somebody else, if you engage in a commercial transaction with that token or if you put it in the machine, you no longer have that token. It's not like a message that you still have even after passing it on to someone else. It's something else. have sacrificed that token in exchange for something else and that is why it works as money because it's scarce you only have a certain number of tokens and therefore you have to make trade-offs between the various ways that you could spend this token you could save it you could use it for the A B or C but you can only do one of those things you cannot do some multiple of those different things, unlike a word that if I use it in

one sentence I can, in the next breath, use it in another sentence. So a token, in this sense, is a scarce sign. Now, I don't think, unfortunately, that this is by any means the consensus or accepted or generalized meaning of the word token. I think if you look at the way it's used in a lot of discourse is it doesn't yet have that as an essential defining feature and I think it's only going to be useful to us if we can accept that when we call something a token we're saying it's commutative in this economic sense that it has to be spent to be to be used

Now, I just, I won't, I won't spin this up a lot, but I'll just, I'll just introduce one more factor that I think is, is relevant to this, which I think brings us on to some of Laura's problems and some of the other, maybe even all the other issues in these other things that people have sent along. which is talking about codes and I think talking about codes is immediately much more nailed down I think that it's much easier to talk about codes in a way that is generally agreed and crosses across different discourses without entering into the same confusions and the same absence of of a satisfactory definition and

there are two aspects to a code that I think are really important and are universal characteristics. The first is it is or every code is a mapping between two different series. There is one series of signs that is acting as a code and there is another series signs that is being coded which ever code you look at always has that factor that is mapping two series on on to each other and whether you will just using it in a modern cryptographic sense whether you're meaning it in terms of genetic code whether you're meaning it in terms of machine code or in terms of this

the Bitcoin process, an absolutely classic code is a hash function. A hash function is absolutely specifically a set of mappings from one series of signs into another series of signs. So that when you hash something you just map it across from state A to state B according to this exact procedure and the second thing about a code that I think then brings us into a lot of these issues is that a code is if not

with this with the same universality as as a as being a mapping with a very high level of universality a code is a set of instructions or I think you need to put a bit more work and to take a sec marks so again I mean the two most I think important codes I'm in terms of their she at the core of everything that is happening on this planet is I think the genetic code is precisely wet DNA doctor just a series of signs that containers them quantity information

when you when that goes from simply a string of and science to be a code the genetic code it's when it actually becomes a set of instructions where it produces proteins so the genetic code it's not just that we then have a mapping one thing onto another in this case we have a mapping all from of DNA bases organized DNA bases onto proteins but we have a set of instructions for the production proteins similarly obviously with machine code and that what we have a machine code rather than just binary data at the point where we

actually are chunking that data in a way that will produce reliable instructions for a machine and of all the things that might be critical about this one that I think this really gets us onto the double spending problem and as I say the issues a lot of people bring up here is that as soon as you have a code you have a set of instructions you have the opportunity you first of all have a certain kind of elementary value and this is shown let's take the biological example in in the example of DNA

because there is a genetic code because just certain and length of DNA will actually instruct a cell to produce proteins then something else let us say non randomly because it's the most significant example a virus can hack into that code and use it chip in this case use the cell as a factory to produce bars this is obviously watch this man note out lots of different and discourse we could pursue this in the one I'm most familiar with this is is the is discussion surplus value code get into this what I'm the most elementary example is the virus and

as I've sort of mentioned a briefly before I think already with this state a discussion we have to stop spending we have to double spending problem because once we've got this very elementary coding and semiotic apparatus we have a machinery that is worse capturing that a virus does not need to produce a body for itself or true so much all it is is a little packet instructions because it can take a body from somewhere else and use that body to produce viruses and it can do that because a surplus value code because code is instructions because as soon as you have the genetic code I'm the

cell will obey someone feeding the right string of codons into it and telling it what to do. So if a virus tells it what to do rather than the cell nucleus telling it what to do it will still do that thing. It will still produce proteins in the order that have been requested. I take Deleuze and Quartel as my famous example of this which is this example of this, they say the wasp and the orchid. Now this is I think relevant because it's when they talk about signs this is the thing that they always really want to go back to. They want to treat this as the model. If you can understand what's happening here, they think you're really

understanding what signs are about. And the wasp and the orchid they say is also an example a surplus value of code. How is it working in that case? Well, it's working because a flower has a certain relationship to insects and like the virus, it wants to hijack a body. It wants to hijack the body of the insect in order to not have to waste resources on its own intrinsic reproductive organs. so rather the the flower finding some way itself to invest expensive resources in transmitting pollen from one flower to another

it uses the insect was a in this example was to do this for it and just like in the case of the virus the way it does that is it finds a code of a specific code in this case which is the code with the wash that tells that to respond in a certain way to a certain pat pattern that it will that will activate its sexual response to this flower think if you have a certain pattern on the flower the wasp will treat that flower as a wasp of the opposite sex and and goes through sexual behavior with the flower in such a way that it's covered in pollen and it flies to the next flower

spread up on an act as the flowers reproductive so so that too and the crucial thing is that is that there flower is operating it up the strategy at the fat reason that our flowers at all is because the flower has at parts environment this coding system belong to another species it can hack her and perfect produce a set of instructions for the wasp that the wasp will obey and therefore act as an organ for the flower. And so obviously just rushing through to the most recent stage of this, computers obviously also

are susceptible to viral attacks in exactly the same way because there is machine code. I'm there to it for if the computer receives a certain set of instructions it would do what those instructions are telling it to do and if those instructions have come from computer virus it will do what the computer virus does it to not other and what their operator or I don't know whatever the computer is is telling us to do I'll so the point of all of those examples is that I'm I is that they're all examples all she it's a key in the specific sense that this that the double spending problem is a dress I the code signs

actually activate this pro test I keep the behavior it is being activated is expensive and so you're getting that expensive behavior cheaply by rather that building up the entire system you simply produce the code to hijack the the coding function some other sister whether it is a cell a a wasp a computer it's the same thing it's in semiotic essentials that is happening in all of these in all of these cases and it's I think directly addressed by this question of the double spending problem because just to get back one more time to the origin of all

this in all of these cases the the original code is not securely tokenized whether in the cell whether whether in the wasp whether in the computer that it it accepts this code which is not tokenized that means it can be spent multiple times you know it's obviously most clearly exemplified again by the virus case where it can just massively replicate billions are such without any kind of limit and all of those viruses can then infect other cells and turn those other cells into are expected as much as you like because

because the code that the virus is reproducing doesn't have any I'm integrity as a token. The virus is not sacrificing anything or very little to reproduce that code. And so this is what any monetary system at a higher level obviously is its condition of possibility is that it excludes inadequately tokenized sign systems. if if it if a sign system isn't adequately tokenized it's it and vulnerable to exploitation by some other system

which will be able to exploit the surplus value of code that system in the monetary case it would obviously be catastrophic almost instantly like if a particular I use sign of a Bitcoin could access all the resources that money would normally be able to access without scarcity, without commutativity, so that it would see as a sign, you could just replicate the sign, and every time you replicate the sign you would access the resources appropriate to that sign, then the collapse of the monetary system is almost automatic and extremely high speed. So obviously

in this way, and this is as I say, this is why I think like Laura talks about I'm the double spending problem going back to the origin of paper money and perhaps before I think it goes back to the origin of replicating molecules I mean I think it's like the fundamental semi logical coding problem is all fast generality because wherever you have a problem surplus value of code you have a application for the double spending and so it's seems to me it's a foundational constituent of

any general semiotics that wants to include money as part of its topic But I will pause at that point at least and see, A, whether there's points that people want to go off, particularly on this question about Bitcoin and science, or B, whether one of these three topics that we've been sent by Dana, Laura and Alex is something that people want to wander into at this point. Nick, I have a question. Sure. My question has to do with, I'm just going to address the very last little bit you brought

up, which was about the problem of duplication and money going back to biology, right? Dr. Yeah. I wonder how does this map onto the question of crystalline and crystals? Because when, how does that work when a crystal is formed from basic, very, very big, much more basic than biology right right instead of instruction that causes causes crystals to come to shape or to existence yes it's obviously an interesting challenge I mean my sort of immediate

responses then to say well can we find any point of application for the surplus value of code in the case of a crystal? Yes. Like is it possible for one system to hijack instructions in some process of crystallization or is that not possible because it seems to me that is the threshold at which we can then you know once we can say that this system is simply consistent in the sense that the energy input required by the system is directly tied up to the product of that system and so there's no way that energy

input can be accessed externally and the code cheaply produced can just be translated across and access these energy resources in some other system So I'm not then dogmatic about the response to that question. I would really want to know a lot more about crystal chemistry to know whether that is something that imaginably can happen. Thank you. I have a couple questions. One of them is really, I'm trying to find, I wrote down exactly what you said, but it had to do with this, I believe you used the term scarcity, and I think it was with reference to the inverse of something I've been thinking about a lot.

So without getting lost, I'll just say I've been working with some people and doing some research on a certain trajectory, a continental trajectory of, I guess you could say, semiotic theory, for lack of a better way of putting it. That sort of begins with Levi-Strauss and the notion that there's an excess of signifiers to the signified. And so you get Levi-Strauss, you get Blanchot, you get Foucault. To some extent, some people might put Deleuze in this category. It's a certain trajectory of continental thinking which appeals to this, what has been called, empty square. this really this excess

that sort of perplexes and troubles writers like Foucault and Blanchot when they think about language and what I thought was really fascinating was I think you were saying the opposite which is rather than there being excess of signifiers to signifieds you have a scarcity of signifiers to the signified when we talk about the monetary unit. You certainly have to produce a scarcity for it to be money. Yes, that would be... I mean, look, one direction that I think we should go in at some point

because it goes directly into this, the paper that Alex sent us. it's by people probably haven't had a chance to read it so some of this it's by David Columbia and it is interesting and he particularly talks about deflation in this which is obviously an extremely closely related issue you know if we're talking monetary terms inflationary and deflationary dynamics directly address this. I mean it might be too one-dimensional for what you want to say about it, but one could certainly say that at least in the monetary sphere the phenomenon of the excess of the, I'll do some quote marks in the air here, the signifier

inflation, you know, and obviously dramatized maximally by hyperinflation where you've got a wheelbarrow full of monetary signs desperately searching for someone who will part with a loaf of bread or a packet of cigarettes in exchange for this psychotic profusion of signs. sign. So I mean maybe I should just ask you whether you think that that is I mean to what extent is that latching onto the same problem? Yeah I'm not sure I have to think about it so if I'm understanding you correctly the very notion of inflation itself when we're talking about money you're suggesting could

could latch on to this what I'm calling and I realize I haven't unpacked this or explained it at all but the empty square this excess of signifiers but it well it seems to me initially very close but I'm definitely open to correction if I'm jumping too quickly into this you know getting too concrete too fast about it then I can easily imagine that's that's happening obviously you know working on this this topic these these particularly monetary examples are the ones that come to mind for me first I mean do you are there any particular examples of this empty square phenomenon that yeah I helped it I wish I had

and people I've been working with with me because they're much more articulate about it but I don't know if it does only because it's really with the essence of it is the notion of a negativity that there's a net because when you talk about inflation, the excess still always refers to a token or maybe it doesn't because when you talk about, yeah, it does. I mean, there's always a token, but because of course I'm thinking about language now, not money, what I'm talking about. So this notion of an excess does not refer to a token. It is, in fact, the empty space, the pure symbolic, the purely negative. And it's so present if you look at sort of Foucault's philosophy of language or Blanchot or Lévi-Strauss.

And this excess somehow sort of drives or is the impetus for language itself as if there wouldn't be meaning if there wasn't this negativity. so this is I don't want to belabor this idea because it might be way too tangential but it's different because you're looking at language from crassly speaking the analytic perspective when you talk about Frege and the sort of history that's created and then but then there's sort of continental trend too in the philosophy of language which often times analytic thinkers don't contend with I think and whether that's good thing or bad thing I make no judgment but and so I just have that in mind and if I can be more articulate later or in

another session I certainly will show we can live in the yeah I mean I don't say on this analytic continental thing that I think you know I don't can correct me if you think this is not right but I think the continental aspect tends to be on the sense side of this sense reference distinction which is then vastly elaborated you know and obviously then cannot absolutely pillar role of caesurian linguistics in that and the whole that whole system about systemic production significance which I'm not trying to

it took to to show clothes out this whole I mean I think it is one I think predominantly one side what is now a three a three-side a three-sided kinda set semi-autic preoccupations and all of them are well man well for one thing again now should restrain myself from going too far down this particularly but if you say on the strictly securing grounds I'm that the meaning of the side is is based on this differential relation or which it is in relation to all the other

science in the whole so so so haunting any particular side is all the other signs in that determine it by their absence at any particular moment. Now obviously there is a sense where you could try and apply that sort of model to Bitcoin in a way, in that it is purely quantitative. It's not to do with significance in the same sort of way. It doesn't provide any meaning except that the total global production of Bitcoin ever, this magic 21 million is obviously absolutely crucial to what anyone Bitcoin me

like if you're saying strictly speaking what is the meaning of the Bitcoin on that access you're saying it's a 21 million of all the bitcoins that will exist you know that's what it yes and you can't get to own sort of more basic significant Bitcoin then that fact that it is this particular fraction of the whole entire stock of Bitcoins either now or that ever will exist. So it doesn't seem to me that there's some sort of cultural gulf that's preventing some kind of translation activity taking place between these two things.

Great. So possibly taking a slight step back, but I don't really think so. In terms of bridging the gap between, Ian, which you were talking about with the empty square, and this sort of hyperinflation in general as mapping to the excess of the signifier. I mean, I'm just spitballing here, but could we understand the loss of value in a currency as that kind of pure negativity you're talking about? if by pure negativity we mean something that's kind of, to some extent, of a different ontological regime than the signifier than that which there is an excess of. Because, you know, pure negativity is not a signifier, among other signifiers, right? If we understand that, because in, I mean, at least in traditional theory, is that inflation is what necessitates

the continued circulation of money rather than it just being saved or hoarded or whatever as gold might be, at least in principle. And so if we understood this proliferation of signifiers as dropping all of their value in the sense of ability to uniquely refer or substantively refer to some signified and by that means then drives production of new ways of referring to it and transformation therein, I mean, I don't know, maybe that's kind of a mapping where this continuous inflation of signifiers by just sort of invention of new ways of referring to things is what drives the exchange of those for new signifieds

understood as that which you can purchase with money, commodities, something like that. I guess I'll also take a step back. Let me also take a step back in relation to that because without wanting this to become some sort of dogmatic principle of everything here, if I can just stick with it a minute and just hypothetically say that we need minimally for all the things we're going to want to talk about in terms of science, these three different axes. And let's say, because the termological questions are so pressing, that we can talk about signifiers if we're talking about the phragian axis of cents, we talk about indices if we're talking about problems to do with reference, and we talk

about tokens if we're talking about monetary signs. So my question then is can we really deal with this hyperinflationary problem? Well let's do that rather than just inflation because it's nicer and more dramatic. Can we really talk about that helpfully in terms of signifiers? I mean, you know, it seems to me if we're talking about tokens, it all totally makes sense. Tokens should be scarce, and here you are with your wheelbarrow full of Deutschmarks. Clearly the scarcity constraint has completely collapsed. They are not scarce, and therefore they're ceasing to function as money, and it all is coherent.

you know whatever you then want to say about that makes sense but I'm not even really sure whether we can think about a wheelbarrow full of signifiers I mean I don't know whether that's just a metaphor or what really I would without again knowing really without pretending to any kind of full grasp of the topic that Ian is raising here, it seems to me that something different is going on. If one is talking about excess of the significant... Oh, sorry, you've gone silent, Jake. Wait, say again? What about what? Cyber. The prefix cyber.

And it's sort of enormous overusage right now. And there's been various articles written about it and there's a Twitter account that attaches cyber to everything, you know, a comedy account. And if that's understood, and I think to some extent it is, as driving a need for more and more specific, more, you know, finely differentiated or expressive, you know, prefixes and adjectives to describe these various things that we're using cyber for. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but that just occurred to me as an example. No, no, no, that's good. That's very helpful. That's very helpful. And it seems to me that that is, you know, because we're talking about significance. and and so there was a certain kind of proliferation that is about meaning and as you say you

you stick cyber in front of anything and there's no there's a kind of inflationary phenomenon at the level of significance or meaning definitely you can see happening but it but it's on another access to your bar full of money is that because the every George mark in in your wheelbarrow is completely redundant in terms of significance is on it's like they whatever you agree is the sort of functional but a torch might as a signifier if you've got a million often in a wheelbarrow you're not in any way actually augmenting that significance in the slight test you know that might be then new significations that come in because is a wheelbarrow all that these kind of extraneous factors

but there is a certain kind of semiotic replication and proliferation in the monetary sphere that doesn't seem to be tractable to this semiotic analysis at the level of the signifier that just seems to be operating so much on another dimension that it doesn't you don't get any purchase by taking that as primary yeah no for sure taking it as primary I was just kind of trying to work out a possible way of connecting them. But yeah, fair enough. I understand what you mean. Yeah, just all cards on the table. I think this idea of... First of all, the empty square for me, it doesn't identify with necessarily an excess.

Rather, it's a kind of zone of indistinction to use a kind of Agambenian type of language. and one could say for example in Derrida it's a zone where the signifier and the signified is just indistinct, that they're indistinguishable. But I just wanted to say in response to Nick that yes Nick I completely agree with you and this is what I mean by all cards on the table, that maybe this language, and this is what's so fascinating to me, that this trajectory, whether we're talking about Foucault or Derrida or Agamben, maybe doesn't map on to what we're talking about. And to me, that's really, for lack of a better word, profound. And I think the more we can look at the biological,

the more we can look at the computer as a kind of analogous biological mechanism, the more we may be able to push forward with the way in which actually we need to develop something else. Right. Yes. I mean, I think there is a particular, without wanting to localize this too much, we're obviously on one level talking about the academy as an institution, at least as being involved in this. And it has a certain position in relation to signs that is interestingly specific, you know. and is perhaps one where the sign as token is going to be systematically under-emphasized.

I mean, there's sort of really crass sociological things you could say about it, but there's a certain notion about the kind of the the constant ball it position of that up the intellectual or not the professional intellectual that post puts them in a certain relation to the token as well understanding you know that your usage of science in that in in that role is expected to in a certain sense be generous that these notions that it somehow a governed by hard rules of scarcity is a kind of implicit ethical issue is not I mean it's like people would not necessarily

have said anything specifically about it but I would guess that it is always actually tacitly their sense and there is a set of tacit comparisons being made between different social institutions in relation to their relations signs in which a either the lack of the the non-centrality of the token in the academic sphere is actually an extremely crucial symbolic factor and and form social identification and I mean, I don't know whether I'm being a bit too elusive and vague about that. But, you know, I mean, again, let me just for a minute just go totally crass and just say, you know,

to the sense that the professional intellectual doesn't think of themselves as a banker, which I think, and I'll go further and say, at every minute of their life, they are not thinking of themselves as a banker with a certain kind of positivity. It's not just that if asked they would say, well no actually I'm not a banker. They would say they would actually in their continuous function as a professional intellectual be not being a banker as something that's actually positive and in a way almost conspicuous. Precisely because they do not have the tokenistic in this particular sense relation to science.

that then there's a certain way that you could construct the figure of the back where every usage of signs was economized. Every word they every word they said, every document they produced every semiotics exchange is integrated into a into an economic fabric that was ultimately regulated by these token systems and and the Academy is kind of as I say I think sort of overtly not that and therefore it wouldn't it seems to be natural that it's the regime of the signifier and not some other semiotic dimension

Nick can I can I jump in In all of this conversation, one name is missing, and that is Pierre Bourgeuse and language and symbolic power, right? Because he also has an account of how symbolic economy functions. As most of the people here might be familiar, he's completely against a Sothorian type of understanding of language, right? Right. He emphasizes this institutional setting as an element that basically – you guys

are familiar with what I'm talking about, right? Just vaguely. Just vaguely. Pardon me? So continue. For Bourdieu, for Bourdieu, like these semiotic operations should not only be looked at from inside the language and should be looked at like how Nick was... Sorry, I've lost you there, Mo. Are you still... I've lost you as well. Can you hear me?

Yeah, now, yeah. You're back. I don't know how far could you guys hear me, but basically for Bourdieu also, like Nick, like the institution yeah that's most gone again has me no yeah that gives them there of how how fields of knowledge so I have this autonomous but related currency issuing power that they that they bestow upon those who hold certain, like, a whole certain position of, like, within the

field. Yeah. Actually, I'm... Go ahead. Yeah, sorry. Sorry to interrupt. No, go ahead. Well, I think it's a very good thing to introduce you, because I think Portillo is really, interestingly, liminal figure in this, actually. I think he's operating weirdly on this boundary between these two different I angles on on the side and if you take a notion of say symbolic capital you know you can see that it's really on this boundary in a really interesting way on one level it's you can you can incorporate it to to some extent into this, maybe you could very crassly say, language of the signifier.

And you get someone like Derrida, who's definitely on, I would say, that side of the fence, very happily using these sort of notions of symbolic capital, that somehow there are these processes of accumulation, there are certain forms of wealth and power that can be stocked up in science systems I'm so it it does operate in a way that I'm not entirely clear about sort of mechanically on that level and then on the other level on the other side it connects with things that I think a much more on ambiguous the economic

like credentials I mean credentials are tokenized if they work at all I mean if someone says I'm you know I am a per I'm then your in a set of questions to do with with trust and credibility and all of these things are made for the blockchain I mean it's a if people believe that someone is a professor it's not anything to do with a number of times they call themselves a professor it's not a proliferation of the signifier it's because of the fact that there is a

a system of scarcity tied up with credential and the credential which is just being indexed by the by the statement you say I am a professor but your actual credentials as professor are scarce you know you were only a issued your professorship on the basis of certain very specific social processes having been fulfilled and you know there's a limited set a professorships and they can't be minted or proliferated or it all subject to all these forms of semiotic inflation and it seems to me that Bordeaux is between these two these two sides as a Janus faced aspect though one level it lends itself to say what

is what you really saying terms a you know can we formalize it as an economic process and the other is more on this the level of significance and giving this new dimensions significance to do with a way that that produces social distinction and symbolic hierarchy and these forms often prestige Thank you. Not to belabor this, I'll make this quick, but it is interesting in the context of Lacan's whole university discourse, problematic, and his own method of punctuation in the analytic setting.

Because I think in a sense, you know, when someone said something that he thought resonated with whatever gulf was in their ego and then he just walked out the door and slammed it. In a sense, they were giving out a token that he did not return, and he got paid. Right. So in a funny sense, that's I think one way the token manifested itself in the whole signifier chain or its breaks. we are I mean that is a its extremely interesting holes 7 that obviously people have them delved into to some extent before is the fact that psychoanalysis

is in this zone of intersection as and someone like not actually extreme because he's got both such intensity on the one hand its its paid services that there's a flow of money going to the analyst in return for some service and you're totally in an economic register you know I expect as a certain amount of time or attention or I mean it's an interest exactly painful but I mean it's an economic transaction is taking place and then on the other side obviously lack always being one that fast you know masters of the signifier and and entering into these kind of public philosophical languages.

So, yeah, hugely, hugely important. But if I could just add to that, I have a friend who's a rather, a Lacanian expert, I'll say, and he once said to me, he goes, you know, it's absolutely crucial that you take your patient's money and not only that, you charge them absolutely as much as you can. so the reason I'm mentioning that is because you pitch them as being separate and like but in not according to my friend it's it they're totally tied it's absolutely a prerequisite of the therapy it costs more pretty much as much if not more than you can actually afford yes no I was I was a clear with value yeah yeah totally no no I was definitely

It's the junction that I definitely am trying to point to. And the fact that you do have this over-coding in this way that is open to all kinds of readings. I mean, obviously, there's a super-cynical reading that is too obvious to even lay out. And then, on the other hand, there's a reading that is a sophisticated theoretical reading, or however everyone wants to say that, where, exactly as you say, I'm accepting money money but only because symbolically and at the level of the signifier parting with your money is is is part of this therapeutic exchange it's part of the transference and all of these you know so there's a kind of layering of the process at the level of the signifier over the process

at the level of the token mmm right that is open to this kind of multiple interpretation yeah I don't mean to derail, but it's just fascinating. You know, someone talking and stumbling upon, insecurity is the wrong word, but the issue and to have him just terminate the session and leave them with that signifier. Like, he got it, they had it, so I guess that exchange happened, but he leaves the money and they get stuck with the signifier. But anyway. Yeah, no, it is totally fascinating. But what is fraudulent at the heart of that transaction is the fact that the money paid

money paid by the patient to the analyst is sort of like a reverse engineering way of substantiating the value of the doubling that happens by the analyst, right? That is built into it as a way of sort of delaying the question of blockchain and the actual transfer, right? So that's what's fraudulent at the heart of that monetary transaction at the end, right?

Right. I just think it's funny. Yes. I mean, I think the thing is that the language of fraudulence belongs specifically to the tokenistic side of exchange. I mean, there's this interesting asymmetry to it that obviously if we look, this is crude, but sometimes crudity is necessary. I can just divide the whole world into bankers and academics. And Lacknell is in this role of the intersection. Let's say he is fortunate enough to have a banker as his analysand.

And at any point he can say, oh, you're not getting what's happening here. You're just being a banker. I'm going to dramatize that to such an extent that I'm just going to walk out of the room after two seconds and prove what a hopeless banker you are. Because I'm on the academic side and I know it's all about signifiers and the fact that I'm only spending two seconds of my time rather than an hour of my time is not at all an economic issue for me. It's totally to do with significance. My analytical process with you is all hopping hopping at the level of the signifier there's no echo economy to and I'm doing this I'm leaving after after two seconds in order to

in order to break you from your bank renaissance and and and it juice you into the superior order the signifier now obviously that's at that point at the bank is likely to say that's fraudulent you know I mean but but but because of the fact that the language is is doubled in these two different registers if there's no resolution possible there's not a common I'm black all just refuses to stick to to credit the tokenistic language of the bankers having any kind of authority in this situation tool and and will always translate it back into saying oh you're not understanding the significance up what is happening here if you're gonna use this

language and I and and in fact there's a sense of the interesting kind of sadomasochistic aspect like where he's just wanting to actually say I will break you know I will break you out of this bank mentality you have and force you into the rapture of the signifier and if that means you pay me for a full session and get two seconds then that is fine that's a sacrifice I as Jack will make relatively in order to help you to escape your bankery limitation not he was meant to be Zen but I'm not so sure it is and

anyway I'm I had a question Nick about the aspects of the code or of a code that you were talking about. Specifically, the second one, the algorithm or set of commands, as so understanding that set of commands to be either the first series understood as a set of commands that produces the second series, or the set of commands that defines the encoding and decoding, so that operates between them. Like, how do I get ciphertext from plaintext or plaintext from ciphertext? You know, that set of instructions, you know, take your A's and replace them with this and then multiply by that, is a different set of instructions, concretely speaking, than the ciphertext as literally each sign of that ciphertext being a set of instructions for producing, you know, from which you get the plaintext.

And sort of what I'm trying to do is to understand this set of commands that determines the mapping and its decomposability from, you know, one command, this plain text means this cipher text or vice versa, into several commands that then have, you know, a functional access as being the basis for the surplus value of code. And so I guess, I don't know, what I'm asking is where you see what set of instructions you were talking about. Yes, I think that this is the relation between cryptography, which is also the relation of these hash functions in general. Some hash functions are obviously cryptographic, but some are not. Some are just to do with a certain kind of database economization, because when you use a hash function, you basically take an X number of units and put them into a more restrained field on the other side.

side yeah there is a codec would be pressure sure so so when I said that a this aspect of the code that it is instructional is actually have a lower universality then the instruction some mapping is precisely I think because a yes I mean is it gonna be a non-linearity in this obviously there will be a set of instructions all of these operations hash functions cryptograph punches all of these these will require computer instructions. But the mapping itself is not something that is giving you a surplus value of code until it is actually giving you control of a machine.

I think I can say with confidence that any example of surplus value of code, there must be machine control whether it's the pot the cell being controlled by the virus the wasps being controlled by the flower the computer be controlled by the computer bars and less unless you're actually operating at the level way actually have effective control over machine this that effective control over the machine that is the value in the surplus value cut and so in principle with him in a monetary system and a system values you could have any number of displacements, any number of codings and decodings and encryptions that just simply displaced the signs between various levels of plaintext and ciphertext. But until

you get the level that is actually machine control, you don't have the level that is actually generating value that can be hijacked by some external system. Right. And so, I mean, I used plain text and ciphertext just to start at, I don't know, what I thought of as the simplest or what to me is the most straightforward level. But so I guess a better example for what we're talking with surplus value would be viruses. So with viruses, your subdivisions of the instructions for encoding are proteins, right, or the transcription of proteins. So I guess what you're saying is that the, you know, the base pairs that the virus is able to, I misused transcription, is able to transcribe into the genome, only gain surplus value of

code to the extent that there are decomposable protein translation instructions in that encoding, which have a functional value, which can then become the surplus value of the RNA or the DNA. Yeah, totally. Yeah. The payout is in protein. so the code it's only it's only at that point you actually get the economics of it yeah and it's the same obviously with money like even though Bitcoin is a self-enclosed semi-autistic system in a way and that as we've been to over and over again you go through the Bitcoin paper and it's purely about the scarcity of bitcoins without specific reference their commercial application but once

Because again, a Bitcoin fraud, or if anyone was able to in any way hijack Bitcoins, the payout would be in what Bitcoins are actually able to perform as instructions in some, let's crudely say, energetic medium. It's what you would actually get in terms of drugs or the Silk Road or whatever it would be. That's the payout. Can I ask you a question just to clarify this point? So basically you're saying that the blockchain or bitcoin as a machine prevents the formation

of a surplus value, right? Yes. Okay, cool. And another question. I mean, can I sort of just say this? I'm not sure it might be that you would want to rephrase that, because the potential surplus value of code is huge. So it prevents it definitely being hacked, yes. The hacked would be the double spending, and that would be an exploitation of the surplus value of code that, you're right, is being blocked by the protocol. Yeah. is the solution to the double spending problem. Right. Okay, thank you. Because I had another kind of question.

Because you said before that the double spending basically goes back to the duplication of cells, so the origins of biological systems, right? Yes. I just had this thought, like it's perhaps, I don't know, quite silly. But I was just thinking because, so basically, right, economy, if economy is effectively modeled upon physics, right, and like, I don't know, like, well, yeah, physical systems. So the question that's occurred to me was like, why would we eventually want to abolish the double spending instead of perhaps harnessing in different ways than, I don't know, the

system of the single cell that duplicates the cell. I don't know, I'm thinking about the selfish gene and this sort of like, I don't know, accounts of biological evolution and these kind of things. Because obviously, I don't know, in the system, right, like composed but a wasp and the orchid, this system, I mean the surplus, right, the orchid hijacks the wasp but at the end of the day no one really loses anything, right? Right. I don't know. So, yeah, it's just, I don't know. No, to be honest, I mean this I think is like, he opens some doors on this question

definitely becomes really deep and complicated I totally agree with you about that I mean like am there's a there's a crass level like if you just go back to a viral example which is just war exploitation it seems you know but then you actually go into these bacterial systems and they use viruses to communicate with each other and I mean you know that it's very hard to get to a point and I would say probably naive to say that you just can so isolate something as a phenomenon raw unambiguous exploitation in the system and I agree when you get to the stage of like the wasp and orchid it's extremely it's extremely difficult to do that you know and then we're in my I mean all

modern biotechnology is just pure surplus likely of code ransacking of of the natural world and I'm not meaning that moralistically I mean you know it's like up up at least potentially a hucks incredibly positive thing but that's what it hits you know there's always sets of instructions and machine capabilities you lodged in these in these biological systems that and biotechnology is systematically trying to hack and get cells to produce motor fuels or to produce useful drugs or this kind of thing it's also set this time your car and but yes

and then in there good on the other side I think that your question connects up a lot with this other side that you know we get in with high intensity in this paper that Alex sent us because its for instance let me just try and very quickly just onto this because it ties back to this question inflation or deflation like Alex actually quote some of this paper and it says and the most dangerous kind of value fluctuations the deflationary spiral you know which world currency is currently experiencing the most dramatic deflationary spirals anyone has ever seen Bitcoin itself the existential threat to the liberal nation state so it's basically saying quite rightly that

this project of the production of a science system that is immune to the surplus value of code can be translated without too much difficulty into this question of inflation and deflation and in that question of inflation deflation is an extremely tractable although complicated and extremely ambiguous political economic dilemma. very what you're staying about the cells all the wasps is actually formally and theoretically extremely close in its sort of abstract principles to these questions about deflation getting raised in this political economic sphere where

people would say isn't the political task actually to finesse the social social control over inflation, deflation, rather than to try to exterminate it through this algorithmic mechanism. I think this is what this guy ultimately would say. I mean, I need to look at it more carefully, but I think it's a position that not many people are thinking about this yet, not enough in my opinion, but when they do, the dominant left of center widespread critique of Bitcoin will be that it will be on these lines. It will be that inflation is being in some sense intrinsically, algorithmically demonized and

instead it's a social potential that we need to maybe adjust our relationship to even in fundamental ways, but not to disempower. OK. Thank you. Yeah, I haven't read the paper yet, the Columbia paper. Thank you. So could we understand biotech and Bitcoin both, and then some various other examples? And I just sort of typed this up real briefly in the group chat. as systems learning to integrate or exploit, like in the sense of taking out of the surplus and into their own pool, the surplus value of code. So in the sense that, you know, I mean, over the history of infiltration by viruses, organisms have, I mean,

at least there's a lot of research and speculation lately in this regard, learned various techniques for securing against mutation and also redistributing and sort of directing the effect of mutations and manipulating the translation process of their own genetic code in ways that produce more novelty or more conservation over deep time. Similarly, biotech is a learning to take advantage of the surplus value of this genetic code by living things themselves, us, and then the things that we create as well. And then in the case of the blockchain, Nakamoto or whoever, we've learned all of this we've learned all this about the problems

created by trusted third parties and then by the ways that people exploited earlier hash cash to pay themselves and pay somebody else at the same time and then this taught this led to the creation of the blockchain paradigm as a way to eliminate those problems and to reintegrate I don't know, to reintegrate the surplus value into a new encoding mechanism or set of them? Sorry, it's kind of rambling there. Does that make sense? Yeah, well, I'm intrigued by this line of talking about it. I mean, my initial structure of understanding here would be different,

that just because the most straightforward way of construct is that Bitcoin systematically eliminates its own vulnerability to hijacking by some other entity extracting surplus value of code or in other words it's impossible that Bitcoin is constructed in such a way that it is not it does not produce surplus value of code to extrinsic parties but having said that I'm again not wanting to just dogmatically exclude or deny what you're saying about this and you know there is obviously a question well if you're thinking about

Bitcoin as a new code system Is it extracting surplus value of code and from what? I mean, I'm not at all eliminating that possibility. It's something I'm not yet seeing, but I mean, it's something I'm open to. Well, what about exactly what we started out talking about, which is to say ontological functions of monetarization? So we think of Keynesian economics as an exploitation of the surplus value of monetary code in order to, I guess, like impose temporal trends or to execute temporal operations on the economy, that the way Bitcoin establishes a history for itself and a new code for constructing consensus or consistent paths for the economy,

reintegration of that function that, I mean, not just Keynesian economics, that was just an example, but the various manipulations of the currency that we're able to accomplish in terms of an ontological effect. Yeah. No, I'm definitely open to persuasion about this. I think if you pan out to the most abstract level, if you've got any system that is accessing energy inputs purely through the production of signs, you have to suspect that there is surplus value of code. I mean, Deleuze and Qatari would probably poke you with a sharp stick and so you have to be actually confident that you have surplus value of code. And so obviously set out on that level of abstraction, it's hard to deny Bitcoin is doing that. You know, when you see these Bitcoin factories,

they obviously have massive energy inputs that were not going into this thing before. It didn't exist. And now, you know, human and energy and technical resources are being pumped into this thing of producing and maintaining and running the Bitcoin system. So what has and in what way has this energetic, pre-existing, coded, energetic structure been hijacked by Bitcoin? And so I'm saying, without wanting to answer this, because I'm not able to answer it yet, I'm just saying I'm extremely open to that being a productive question. And it seems that there has to be a way of going down that road and answering it.

Otherwise, how could Bitcoin exist? How could there be a Bitcoin mining industry? Something has been... Without closing that gap, the abstract and the concrete, yeah. And it works in kind of the political as well as thermodynamic area as well because it closes the gap between... Let's see. What am I looking for? Verification in voting? I guess you know what there's all this sort of talk about using the blockchain for digital democracy and you know consensus about data IP rights and so forth and you could you know maybe in this vein start to see that as a consequence of the narrowing of gap between economic and political activity which is also been exploited

by various monetary authorities in the past right okay yeah yes I mean this this a is again really close to this this and it's I keep forgetting the guy's name this a Columbia paper and as and the whole way we think about the relationship between the political and economic is obviously being thrown into really potentially productive crisis productive on a theoretical level people could lament or be appalled by it, but in terms of actually forcing us to think about how these things are articulated, it's definitely extremely productive.

And he is appalled, and the way he's appalled is really interesting, because what he's appalled about is something that goes so much to the core of what modernity is about, the very notion. I don't think he uses this phrase, I'd have to see, but it seems to me what he's about is the politics of depoliticization. So he's saying, and this is the fundamental cognitive orientation of the left, I think, in general, it's the most abstract thing, is to say depoliticization is itself a political strategy.

and and when he says a is talking about term the extreme right I think that that's what it means is by the extreme right it means a actually concerted politics of depoliticization for putting it from his side also the at its most extreme and ink it pitomized by the notion of algorithmic government the notion of a complete extermination of the political and which of course from this other side the side left critique set course that is intrinsic massively political you know you don't

you can't you can't tell us that you want to exterminate politics and then say that isn't itself political gesture and is there actually that you know the algorithmic governance people argue with or find problematic? I mean, at least, like, I don't know, what exactly is the argument against that being, you know, a politics or a political choice, even if it's the very last one? Right. I would expect there would be some diversity about it, but I think part, to me it's interesting, the term extreme right, you know, what is being said there? and I think if we sort of have our draw us a political spectrum

but again super crude we've got extreme left left right extreme right and how do you pass in both of these a directions to the extreme you know and I think the extreme is the place where certain things would be explicitly said I'm on both sides that would not be said on when you're in the middle in the middle style like on this six on Paul I'll he he complains about when he says for instance can be just give a quick spikers I a enthusiast tomorrow we understand because as well complete intervention

but when pressed for details about the political intervention its advocates up failing the turn back to technical and engineering matters now this isn't exactly this isn't the perfect way this this point but it's related is to say that I'm this response evasion of the issue seems to me to be a non extremist I mean that the extremist is the position which is to say yes the goal is algorithmic government and the death of the political that's the extreme position surely and the the the moderate position going in that direction is one that is encouraged by those trends and supportive of those trends but is

for purpose of realistic political compromise not making when I a firm statement and then as you my great left to that its a tendency to oppose those those same processes but a willingness to compromise with them that then passes out on the other edge into the extreme left by a a absolutely uncompromising denunciation in the name of the political of anything that would compromise with the tendency to algorithmic governments or depoliticization and I think Bitcoin Sorry I don't know what people can hear at this point

Sorry Yeah Bitcoin compels a crisis, this is what is interesting about it. I mean, there's absolutely no doubt about what it's doing, which is to eliminate politics from its own commercial sphere entirely. People can then in a supplement you say, well it's got all kinds of political potentials that are missed by that. And of course this Bitcoin thing, I don't know again whether people have seen that,

would be an extremely interesting place to look to for that kind of thing. But in terms of the intrinsic Bitcoin protocol itself, it's straightforwardly, simply, unambiguously depoliticized money. And of course, I agree that to say that, you know, to pretend that there isn't a politics of depoliticization is utterly evasive, of course. did anyone get to see this

strange bitch coin paper I'll I followed it I'm kinda like looking at it purely from the from the are from the are from the art side of the Right. Yeah. I mean, I thought it was extremely interesting. I mean, one thing is that there is a... it's not a very developed argument, but if you're trying to split up people's positions on this, I've already done this kind of ultra mainstreamers distinction and

it adds an angle to that, it's not quite orthogonal and it's certainly not perfectly aligned, it's at a slight angle to it, is a distinction that's tied up with this question of these altcoins and I say it's at an angle because the mainstreamers tend to be sort of sympathetic, I mean they're trying to invest in a Bitcoin infrastructure, they like all kinds of economic activity in the area of Bitcoin, they tend to play down the centrality of Bitcoin itself as a currency to the development of Bitcoin. So all of these things place them in a certain position of implicit sympathy with altcoins, Whereas the ultras are more inclined to say Bitcoin is so revolutionary that anything

that just distracts from it or interferes with its accumulation of network effects and delays the point where it goes head to head with these fiat currencies and wipes them out. And I've already used this, I think, fantastically interesting term, hyper-Bitcoinization, which which I think I'm attributing correctly to Daniel Kravitz, and he says that this is hyperinflation as it affects fiat currencies in the face of Bitcoin. And he glosses it as saying, your money is not wanted anymore. So it's just like the guy with the wheelbarrow full of money. He's got as many Deutschmarks as you could conceivably want to throw at anything,

people are just saying we just don't want that stuff anymore. It's over. That absolute which hype inflation is tending to, where there's simply no amount of the currency that has any value anymore. It's becoming absolutely worthless. And so Kravitz is anticipating is anticipating this in this Bitcoin world. He says there's a certain point where simply the notion that you're going to accept US dollars in exchange for Bitcoins will be absurd. You will simply be exchanging real money for useless, fake money that everyone is trying

useless fake money that everyone is trying to bail out of as quickly as possible. No, I'm not arguing for the credibility of that, or certainly not the timescale of that pronouncement. But it's just to say that because of that position, he hates altcoins. He thinks that they're just delaying this, they're just distracting people, that Bitcoin is the story and anything distracting from that is getting in the way. but then there's another trend that's obviously very pro-altcoin and sees this as this ecological efflorescence coming off blockchain technology that should be welcomed and all these interesting things could happen and maybe if the bitcoin model

is that it's just being driven by network effects to this position of being like a singularity where it's the only global currency then the opposite extreme is an all coin economy where everyone has there an all coin or maybe several you know and that all coins are just something that you that get massively proliferated and we're in this strange monetary world where there are you know countless money systems so rather than being concentrated onto this Bitcoin Bitcoin catastrophe where instead being pushed into this strange new world all these currencies being produced

you know as in this example as an art project I mean that I'm that people have the capability to do it the kind of software is there and you can just produce a whole cards as something and tied up with a particular project you're trying to take as a certain artwork in itself as a certain former sort of self economization I mean it's hard to kinda quite get a purchase on what the more you know what this kind of weird tropical feverish economy would be like but this is certainly an extreme example

fact you know whether rather than asking people for money, rather than engaging in art commerce in a traditional way, she just produces a whole new currency that is her artistic value monetized on this blockchain technology. So I thought definitely that was pretty interesting. This picture that you just painted then, the thing that I've been worrying about was something that I think Laura brought up before, this idea that there is a kind of rigidity to the blockchain as a signifying system, as a production of temporality. It's hard to see where novelty

can arrive if you can't have mutation. And it might work in terms of tokenization, but doesn't seem particularly interesting, philosophically, maybe. And the picture that you just painted then was interesting because you get this kind of, like you said, this sort of tropical, feverish patchwork of money ecology which makes you start to think of Bitcoin as collapsing back into a kind of centralization. And I wonder if that's, I mean, that just occurred to me then, but I wonder if there's anything in that, that it can then be returned to, I mean, if these kind of these hardcore Bitcoin ultras have their way,

you just end up with another kind of very rigid, limited money system. Well, I mean, it would be, if they had their way, it would be an almost perfect simulation of gold in an economic in an ultra hard money gold based system so you know whatever positive and negatives you want to put to that I don't think it's particularly unimaginable I think we can imagine it extreme with high fidelity because it is such a high fidelity simulation of gold

I mean it's like gold beyond gold really and so whatever gold looks like this is more than that but it seems to me hard to imagine in the short term that you could really realistically project this singularity where the only money accepted of value anywhere in the world is Bitcoin. I mean, this is what some people are seeing, for sure. And it's like... I mean, I don't...

Is it... it's a it's a cut obviously there's an haziness in this question about what one is asking for in terms of a mutation these kinds of things isn't it. I mean money even the most sloppy fiat type of money it kind of mutates in certain ways but it doesn't I mean unless I'm you should speak for yourself about that I mean do you think that the kind of mutations we're seeing within the fiat money system are attractive creative mutations because they would die yeah but I'm just concerned about where this

this kind of like theoretical vision the blockchain is going I mean not in terms of it being particularly positive or negative, but just that it shuts down a lot of possibilities. And it seems to kind of lead into a space where nothing much can happen. I mean, and then what happens when you mine your 21 million Bitcoins? This is actually something, I mean, maybe I should just go do some more reading and figure this out. but yeah when those 21 million bitcoins are mined how does the circulation keep going? Do people keep mining to get transaction costs for the transactions they're performing for the people who have the bitcoins?

and does that keep redistributing? It's supposed to be built in that a certain type of servicing, transaction servicing will then be routinized that will guarantee people enough bitcoins from that to maintain the incentives that the system requires and honestly I mean I couldn't say with confidence how much credibility I put in that I mean you know it's obviously a serious question what happens at this point I think it's the date is 2040 where they were cannot there's no more Bitcoin mining and so whether it's produced a new stable

incentive or because the one it's got is so beautiful to my mind maybe that's a kinda highly questionable aesthetic vision but to my mind this basic loop incentives between the miners and this and the system production is just absolutely exquisitely beautiful and That will end and something that I think is going to be more messy by necessity is going to have to replace it. So I don't know. We've got 25 years. As you mentioned in another class Nick, you said that essentially Bitcoin, I think you mentioned the term game, the framework of game theory.

basically it's not in anybody's favor to have the majority of Bitcoins, to use a really stupid analogy on my part, it's not like Monopoly, you don't want to get to the point where you own all the money otherwise the game is over and it's not in your interest to win the game Yes Yes, it's very complicated and obviously it's such a new world that people are just stabbing at it with these very speculative theoretical models but that does seem to be working out you know just by the sheer fact that it would be so like again going back to this article that I've been referring to that that I've sent, it's got this thing where it says

in December 2013 half of all Bitcoins are owned by approximately 927 people such as fight the power revolution is sarcastic obviously as the Vinkel Vos twins of Facebook infamy among them now obviously 927 people owning all the pic half all the bitcoins is a sort of small number but it's not that small enough its ho and it's 927 people and the whole Bitcoin economy is worth three billion dollars I mean I imagine there's any number of those 927 people who could arbitrarily increase their investment stock pick one you know what I mean

so I think this demonstrable self limitation happening here you know like this the game theory and then there's the historical fact and the historical fact seems really clear that people are not exercising an option to massively accumulate I mean if you've got 927 people I think half of the world's bitcoins so half the world's bitcoins worth 1.5 billion dollars that's say it divide that by hunter it's not it's a tiny stake yes nets we're talking like something like a 15 million dollars mmm as being a unit chunk or whatever and some of them maybe have a few more few

let's say at the max a few tens of millions of dollars you know in a world of 10 multi tens a billion dollars plutocratic fortunes with definitely on that social level not seeing anything at this kind in their in the Bitcoin college so that to me strongly sists suggests that this complicated type a economic game theory is is working well and is producing a kind of distributional ecology which whilst by no means radically egalitarian is nowhere near the kind of monopolistic

outcomes that would be easily envisaged given the scale of it. Yeah, I wanted to respond to the first point of Amy's couple points or questions about the notion of mutation. I don't know if there's much that I could add to the question but I do think it's interesting to think about another notion I've been thinking about is the notion of an epigenetic epigenetic yes and the idea that the DNA, so to speak, can be there,

but in the way in which there is growth from out of it, you can have unexpected potentialities realized which are not necessarily determined by the DNA. But with the blockchain, of course, we don't want mutations in this sense. We don't want epigenetic processes. We want it to do exactly what it's supposed to do, which is protect, right? To keep its traces perfect. But where we want mutation is in the non-linearity and the complexity of the economic system outside of the blockchain. I agree totally with what you're saying here. I think that one very useful analogy of this is to the Internet.

you know that the basic internet infrastructure is fairly simple and extremely consistent so these few basic protocols that govern all internet traffic are you know you could just put them on a few few sheets of code I mean they're not they're not elaborate they're hopefully not mutating you know know what HTML or IP or any of these things to sort of stop going on a random walk because then the system will fragment in a way that is like non-communicated it will just simply to go into isolated packets and you call build complexity on top so this notion that there being a few

very stable rules as a condition for this complication and elaboration I don't at another level I think is really crucial cool things but on that no analogy that that could be the like the blockchain as a as a system and then a complete economic ecology different alternative coins okay yeah for sure I'm like it a show yeah I mean that's why this calling thing has become the suffix has now I mean that's what is one other things actually I wanted to sort of introducing this whole signs questioning

the word calling that the world calling has been thrown back into instability as a sign is itself extraordinary thanks it is old apparently extremely determinate word everyone thought they knew what a coin was you know what I mean it's almost the kind of example of a banal, unproblematic word. And now, literally, what is a coin? In this blockchain sense, it's become a complete boundary of the unknown, what a coin is and can be and it can and this is this is where all this proliferation variation experimentation

all of this happens in the fact that these no one knows what the limits of a coin are or what it can do all the different things I mean you know just example like we now have bitch coin I mean okay I don't honestly know exactly what it's doing but I mean it's the fact it exists is this is this fact that this the what a coin is is now radically been reopened it's all well it's equity isn't it I mean as long as like you add the fact that in principle you can exchange 25 square inches of print for equivalent money whatever it's worth yeah I mean you're buying equity in her future production so it kind of circumvents the whole you know no credit

functionality in Bitcoin problem by narrowing the field of exchange down to one person that you can evaluate trust with without going through third parties and then for that gives you temporal extension. Yeah. Well, from the position of the art, I think Bitcoin is even more problematic than what you were describing Jake. I think it's a way of gesturing towards like it's like one of those like desperate attempts by a contemporary artist to make the production

sort of like legitimize it and make it relevant to larger social economic political happenings yeah you I know this isn't necessarily the level to respond to that but it but just out of curiosity you you've saying that in a critical mode no just or just descriptive I mean descriptive I mean I'm in critical mode of course descriptive can can be interpreted as critical right but really there's nothing to to critique because because the because the the Bitcoin mode of artistic

production is does not even have the ambition to take over like it doesn't proposes itself as an alternative to the way art is sold or bought or symbolic value is produced in the art world. It just offers itself as another way of an artist's career being evaluated in this whole art world symbolic economy. Right. Yeah. Well, right. But I mean, it also, in principle, extends far beyond just the art world. I mean, unless, you know, that's not necessarily true, depending on how we define the breadth of the term art world, obviously. But, you know, as we move, as a lot of people think, and I am one of them, think that we will, you know,

away from this idea of careers and professions that most people have, you know, at least in sort of the educated, technologically enabled sectors of society, to more, you know, multidisciplinary project and contract or contract work oriented. you are a personal corporation that acquires capabilities and does various things and has a value this could apply to anyone what is the value of an hour of my time on an average over a year or ten years yeah I mean there was a trend that got a lot of attention at one point of people they tended to be kind of already established celebrities releasing bonds based on their own

career potential. Oh yeah, maybe Bowie did that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. There was at least him, yeah, for sure. So you could buy a Bowie bomb, yeah. Already in that, but I think this is going to be much more, again, to use the same word, a word, a kind of feverish process because it's so much more dynamic. It's following a certain trend in the world of art, isn't it? Where the artist and the boundaries become very uncertain. And, like, what is the art in Bitcoin?

I mean, is the art simply, if we're going to use this signified, signified language, which falls apart at some point but has some mileage, I mean, is the art the signified and the Bitcoin just the signifier for that, or the Switchaxe is just index for it? Or has the art, you know, crept out into this whole thing? So it's monetization has become the art. That it's kind of auto-monetization is now the art. and actually the kind of initial material, the initial artistic material is just a pretext for a certain kind of weird economic commercial performance art that Bitcoin itself instantiates much more highly than the actual original inches of artistic material

that I supposedly backing at. Well, then we are kind of at the distinguish between... Sorry, go ahead, Mel. No, I was going to say there's this, but what you're saying, Nick, is from the point of view of the outside of the art world, like literally and figuratively, right? You're outside of the art world. but from the inside of the art world what and that there's another operations happening that it's equal if not actually from that standpoint of the inside of the art world is make probably more more operational or more important which is this artist is the first one or among the first group of people who's actually monetizing Bitcoin in the symbolic order of the art world itself

so she's the one or he's the one who's bringing this into the art world and therefore extracting value for being the one who's bringing the whole discussion or like a practice a bit going into the art world yeah yeah I mean that's a good that crosses a whole bunch of things we've been talking about today sure like if we work gonna look at those would you categories in this term yes extremely complicated as matter what's what's happening here I there's a certain as you say symbolic prestige originality that is somehow then built into this yeah I can start with back to scarcity again right

we're back to scarcity again in the sense that not everyone can be first yet because Because in the art world, when I talk about art world, we're talking about the kind of like virtues and practices that inform the world of art's worldview today, right? In today's art world, it's only the first person or the first group of people who do these practices that count as art. If this actually becomes a prevalent mode of artistic production, then it's not art, it's craft, it's kitsch. It's just like, you know what I mean? It's like all the other people who copied Banksy, they're not going to get shows.

Banksy will get shows because he was the first person who kind of like, or he was among the first group of people who basically thought about like street art as a medium of intellectual, serious intellectual exchange or something. Yeah. The rest of the people are just copying Banksy. Yeah. They're like, we're back in the same stuff that we talked about, right? They're just like making doubles. Yeah. No, totally. In fact, there's a very nice systematic progression from the basic Bitcoin protocol where only the first transaction is real and the blockchain is a machine for systematically selecting out all non original transactions

as not being recorded on the blockchain and therefore being exempted from reality as defined by the blockchain so there's that first of all absolutely fundamental orientation to originality at the heart of the Bitcoin protocol to then Bitcoin as a currency having as its only claim to superiority over all these other altcoins is its primary again. Bitcoin was the first blockchain currency and that's why it's Bitcoin and this whole discussions about Bitcoin and philosophy and not Dogecoin and philosophy or Litecoin or philosophy or any of these other things. Just by being first

it's in this extremely critical position and it's really hard to overemphasize how important that simple priority is in a world that is totally in this structure of war with double spending because anyone can just clone the protocol and set up a cryptocurrency. There's nothing about it that it has other than its path dependency, its originality, its primarity, the fact that it's dated first and therefore has these network effects and is able to build initially this power of incumbency is all it has against these competitors. And then

and then third as you say and missed artistic appropriation that exactly on the same you know replication at the same pattern as to do with originality whether the only the original has has value and so it's in that way extraordinarily suitable project act you know that that sort of that issue with the of the primal on the original is just then cuts through on these different levels right right back thank you so that seems to kind of

connect to Laura's, your comment, you know, about Brian Rotman and the function of zero as enabling, but I guess also kind of in this case, preventing double spending. I mean, okay, that's actually too much. But so this establishment of a firstness which is independent of cardinality, because, like, double spending isn't just two, right? It's really to the end. So it's the ability of something to proliferate and duplicate endlessly, and this firstness function preserves something that's independent of all of that and gives it priority over the whole quantitative proliferation of what it otherwise is to begin with. I'm not sure how that relates to the function of zero,

because I also haven't read the Rotman book, and the comments were kind of attenuated. But Laura, do you see those as being related? What I, I mean, yeah, actually, I think, as you say, it's true, like the zero sort of establishes a firstness that pre-exists any material sort of foundation. But on the other side, the way that I saw it is kind of the opposite, is that the zero itself kind of produces this doubling of the subject. Rotman refers to obviously mathematics, but also to arts and aesthetics, so starting from the like, this, I don't know, this development of perspective, I don't know.

Yes, it's really good actually, isn't it? The vanishing point. Yeah, exactly. Start from the vanishing point and then with the evolution of mathematics, of algebra and also of paper money in fact. Paper money that is by itself not backed by basically already, I think in the late Renaissance, I guess, so late 17th century or something like that, I think he was recording too. So basically even in like, Rodman was sort

of like mapping this parallelism in between the development of, for instance, a perspective in which at the beginning you have the vanishing point which is external to the painting and And then you have the vanishing point becomes internalized, so the perspective becomes internalized and that's when you have paper money which reproduces itself and then you get to the last stage that Rodman analyzes which is the sort of, I guess that book was written in the late 80s, so he was talking about like Euro dollars and basically financial currency, how this money creates its own value by the possibilities of its own future. So in itself, I guess, what I think the book is pointing towards from my understanding,

my interpretation of it, is this idea of double spending or doubling becomes more and more radicalized, like the doubling of identity, the doubling of, it's an identity and a doubling of a subject that in a way, it sort of works by itself, it's automated really in a way. So I don't know whether, I don't know whether this really answers your question because I guess what it's pointing towards really, to me, is this kind of automation of a doubling process. But I don't know. No, that definitely makes sense because that's exactly what happens in the construction of digital numeric representations.

Right? Is that having zero allows you to double count all the other numerals. And that's a form of compression versus Roman numerals, for example, which is what allows algebra to work I'm trying to take this further and like related to first miss and I'm not quite there yet mean yeah I need also to do some multi can I really enjoy rockman's zero book a lot and but this whole said no money discussion is something that is not that met right so I definitely need to spend and a week having that some I just really get that's well yeah

we have about are 15 minutes left from the session if you want to be exact with time and not double it no I'm kidding and yeah I actually had a question but I guess I'll wait for Lord do you mind if I ask it quickly now yet okay so this relates to like much earlier on right and you know like the way make you were talking about language it totally it totally undermines and destabilizes the first order of cybernetic thought of information exchange.

And because we moved away from the conversation, it's hard to remember what part of it I'm referring to, so I have to make a little reference. So if by communicating with you I pass on the way First Order of Cybernetic theorized what is the nature of information, the ontology of unit of information. It's totally not like the way we are talking about it in terms of money. Because of how communication and I read accounts of it that people who were discussing how

this should be theorized, they did not agree with each other, right? But Norbert Wiener's account was the one that adopted, which basically separates the body less immaterial information about something and that thing as being the sort of like a prior or some kind of a given. And that way, they kind of like basically by adopting this, they did not have to deal with the issue of proliferation because if communication is just sort of like a reference to like a thermo that if an electromagnetic signal is just a reference to a thermodynamic reality I'm just like using like then it's okay because it's not doubling.

Right. Because that thermodynamic reality always stays outside of this information network and it's always kind of like out there and this sign can go around and everybody in the world can update themselves about this thermodynamic reality through this electromagnetic signal and then everything's gonna be fine but we are learning now that it's not gonna be fine because this doubling has ramifications ramifications that like the first order of cybernetic did not really comprehend or like or like adopt if I'm reading it right no I think that's totally right I think that's totally right I think that the Deleuze-Quattari critique would just be about organicism don't you think Mo that like for Veena the the objects of study whether organism or machine is treated as this organic unit that is

involved in some kind of semiotic nonlinear process for its own stabilization but the notion that it's within some hybrid system in which code is being hijacked and redirected and overcoded is completely outside that framework. Yes, totally. So Laura, sorry I stole the mic from you. But you can go ahead. No, don't worry. I just had a very simple question. I actually went back to have a look at the Columbia paper, and I realized that I was starting with it. But I think I got up to page three, and then he gives his definition of money that to me was totally, I don't know, not correct.

So I kind of left it. But anyway, so basically, okay, Goldumia defines money as a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a measure of value. Okay, I don't think that as far as I understand it and as far as I don't know how even Wikipedia goes, money is not a measure of value properly, but a unit of account, right? So this is why the open ledger is like a great innovation because it allows with this system of accounting that is in fact open and transparent. But I was wondering about, like, I don't know, how does the function of money as a store of value that could also be questioned eventually

relate to the surplus, I don't know, is there any relationship with the surplus of value that we were talking about before and the function of money as a store of value? Or perhaps it's not like, I don't know. Yes, it's an interesting question. I think if you come at it backwards from the most monetized contemporary forms of money it's easier to answer and then the question is how systematically we'd move that back because I think from the in the recent form it's precisely immunization against these forms of hijacking that allow it to function as store and that's there you know that's the way the logic guys you know

and it were it possible that that you know because in a way there's this virtual store of actual machine it value if you if you have a store of value it's because you can make a certain number of things happen in the world if it's just people giving you food and services or simply or you know through with large stocks of money to vast industrial products projects that the world can actually be subject to a system of machinic commands by your wealth and so if that can be extracted by some external party then of course you've got a bad store or a value you know you wouldn't store that

machinic potential in a form that was open to being rated by these various other parties and now if you then want to try and move that back you know through monetary history and down into these more archaic semiotic systems I think it would be you know I don't have a kind of formula that will allow that to happen straightforwardly but but just to say it relation I think is is clearly there because the fact that it works so clearly in the final stage yeah kids have been thinking about I don't know in

in the Nakamoto paper for instance never really a with a big value in terms of like you know economic value refers to value in terms of the hashing value, algorithmic kind of value. And I know that there are some critiques, for instance, of this definition of money as a store of value as well. There's this Italian economist, Massimo Amato, but also Rex Scott who writes at Sweet Possum, he had a little post not long ago about one of these myths about money that needs to be banked, in fact that money needs to bank another store of value. So I was kind of, I don't know, I'm just trying to understand if there is

any relationship. Right. Could you just like very briefly give me a sense of how this critique of the idea of money as a store of value proceeds? I mean is it to simply say that you can do everything you need just with the notion of it as a medium of exchange or what's the... I guess, I don't know, yeah I guess this kind of critique works in the direction of, yeah money is a medium of exchange and a unit of account in the sense that obviously if I give something, if I give you something, we have a transaction, you know, it needs to be recorded summer, we need both to have a token eventually that says, but especially Brett Scott critique

I think is related to the fact that value anyway, is like a socially constructed, and it resides not in the object that is exchanged, but in this belief eventually that this object has a certain value that the stocking is able to equate it. Yeah, sure. I don't know, I just find it interesting, but yeah, I don't even know. I mean, obviously, like, to get back to the kind of hyperinflation question, the easiest way of understanding what's happening there is that money collapses as a store of value. So that when money loses that function,

you simply want to move it out as quickly as possible because holding onto it is a form of extreme economic sacrifice so I mean I'm open to the possibility that you can run that another way but it it certainly seems intuitively plausible that the fact that money has a value to store value is the only thing that would ever incentivize people to hold on to money rather than get eliminated. Well, time preference just like wanting to have the ability to exchange in the future you know, just like taking it as a given

that your point present ability to produce value to exchange varies over time, it is not certain. it just seems as if there's no intrinsic problem with projection into the future of the medium of exchange as a grounding function. But isn't... if money has the reliable future function as a medium of exchange, is that not a store of value? Dependent on a store of value. I mean, I can't... it seems to be simply... I'll be interested I I'd be if you've got links to this star nor are definitely interested to have a look I'm not getting it at the moment

because it just seems I can't imagine money not with needing to be a store value but be interested there is this really interesting talk that is Italian economy not so much been working on this and for money critical eutopic money with the EU topic. Well, he's into local currencies. But I've been thinking about the possibility of extending like his, I don't know, his logic to perhaps something like global universe, like a blockchain system. And he has this really great talk. He's in French. I don't think there's that much material in English. It's obviously like things in Italian. But I post it. I don't know.

Like it's really interesting in the sense It draws on the system of exchange of the fares in the Renaissance or something like that. I don't remember well. But it's based on this idea of a form of money as a medium of exchange and a unit of account that doesn't necessarily need to be a store of value. And again, I don't know how that could eventually be implemented in practical terms, but I just find it a really interesting concept because again, the moment that money doesn't need to represent the value, an economic or store value, we wouldn't have problems such as inflation

again, right? And we wouldn't have, like, issues of, well, obviously, I don't know, accumulation, because why do you need to keep it? Right? I don't know, I'm just... Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, I just find it interesting, like, this possibility out there. Yeah. I don't know if it's... It sounds fascinating, but I can't pretend to have got to first base... I pulled something, yeah. ...with getting it yet. Yeah, so... Nick, going back to a term used from the very beginning, but we haven't really hit much, which is transcendence. Right. So would you understand the value that is stored in money, which is also the surplus value of everything that people might have that anybody else wants as exchange value, as a surplus value of objects, as commodities?

Would that be a kind of imminence of all these things to each other? Is that which constitutes, or could we describe, the surplus value of things, which becomes the value of money as imminence, or money as a transcendent representation of the actual imminence or radical imminence of all the things that enter the economy to each other? Well, now, what's the best way of approaching this thing? I mean, okay. I think in deciding how to apply this language,

obviously one is applying a whole machine of critique to a certain problem. So if you were to say, if you were to formulate it in the sense that you've just done, then that would be a critique of money. struck you know structurally and formally speaking so it is so if I can sort of translate what you're saying would be to say wouldn't a critique of money go like this you know that there is this field of eminence represented by these by these a stores energy and all of this kind of thing a money is the transcendent element in that

arrangement because as soon as you say that you're saying that you're already configuring it that so the bypassing of money is in that way implicit now therefore I think it's of course that is something that could be explored and I will I'm sure there must be people who are explored you know and their good that a kind of a program based upon the abolition of money there must be those things must exist and some of them at least must try to construct themselves as a rigorous critique and so I'm sure things both I didn't mean really

as I guess I kinda misuse the language a little bit I didn't really mean in terms of attempting to bypass money I mean certainly not practically not really even theoretically either but to understand what Bitcoin is doing as a purification of transcendence and moving from trusted third parties as identifying transcendence with these particular parties that are not transcendent, they don't execute perfect trusted behavior, they're entities in the world, to Bitcoin, which is a more purely concrete existence-less, both in terms of decision-making and reliance on concrete decision-makers over its transaction function and so forth, and that this corresponds to that transcendence

as Bitcoin's transcendence as, I guess, like more direct isomorphy to the imminence of things to each other, of things that we might want to exchange? Well, I think that the most straightforward way of doing this with the paper is to say, you could certainly say, Bitcoin is transcendental in the sense that it's the actual formal system for this whole projected commercial. But what is transcendent in this model are the third parties. In calling something transcendent within the whole tradition of critique, you're saying

it can be subtracted. Those two things are exactly the same. You're already implicitly projecting its subtraction. So I should have been saying transcendental instead of transcendent. Yeah, I think so. So, but then, so prior to the monetary critique of Bitcoin, then we would describe the trusted third parties as transcendental, right? Which is kind of what I've been assuming all along. Transcendent, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess my main question was about just, I guess, the imminence term, because that hadn't come up yet. But would you agree that sort of function does, I don't know, I guess, non-problematically can be slotted in to this framework we've been using, this terminology?

Yes, totally. I mean, imminence is the complement of the transcendent in that it's defined by survival after the subtraction of the transcendent. so in the in the Bitcoin paper the plane of imminence is defined by these peer-to-peer fabric of peer-to-peer relations obviously whose monetary code is now Bitcoin and and those peer-to-peer relations is everything that remains after at least in theory the subtraction of all of these third-party institutions

so if you want to you know that actually is a definition of sort of practical definition of the imminent economic field as it as it is a planned out in this in this paper it's what it's what survives the subtraction transcendence so everything that is left after all of these intermediary third party institutions as swept aside at least shelved in theory is is your imminent well wouldn't just is that transcendental or imminent and that's also sort of another question with the differentiation between the field of people engaging in transactions

and the network of people yeah well the trans the trip the the transcendental is is how extensive for the imminent and is that and it's that hot imminence that is I'm is always already present and at in and I'm using language that various stage the transcendental tradition has discarded but it but it's the in a limitable element of the a of the imminent field so say for instance like am what's transcendental in in the peer-to-peer relation all those things that are are essential to the peer-to-peer relation

universally unnecessarily under any under any circumstances transaction announcement block mining you yes I mean it will be interesting to exactly define it obviously in the Bitcoin terms in the future it's projecting it's basically the Bitcoin protocol with with the elements that it necessarily needs to introduce the notion that there are agents there are Bitcoin accounts you know elements that whatever the particular transaction would always be involved and as I say a breathing out to the Bitcoin protocol itself is basically fine so the Bitcoin protocol itself is the transcendental element that is therefore always operative in any

particular relation. But then any particular agent is part of this, operates on this eminent plane, but it's empirical rather than transcendental because it can be deducted without problems. Like any particular node can be gone, any particular account can be shut down, any bitcoins can actually just be vaporized into hyperspace. So any of these particular elements that are flat, peer-to-peer elements, they're not transcendent elements, they're not third-party elements, but they're deductible just because they're empirical. It's like if you go back to the Internet and take this crude, but it's not unreliable, basic thing, coming out of this military technology

designed to survive a nuclear war, So you have this original ARPANET and DARPANET sort of security infrastructure for military communications under conditions of extreme military stress, nuclear attacks. Now, the transcendental element of that is the whole system itself. It will be protocols, transmission protocols, and the fundamental specifications of the network as such, which would apply universally and necessary to all the nodes of the network. But any particular command center or node on the Internet is empirical, because it can be taken out by a nuclear strike, and the system will still carry on functioning.

So this is the material construction of transcendental philosophy that you get in all of these networks. Any sort of true, flat network system is a critical system in a philosophically recognizable sense. So, just one last thing is just to say that Bitcoin is very much like this internet for money in that you can nuke any nodes out of Bitcoin. It's designed, like he says, it's loosely organized. There are no components of the network that are indispensable. You can obliterate a whole bunch of accounts and the Bitcoin system will still keep functioning

just like the Internet after a whole bunch of military command centers have been nuked will still keep functioning. So that's how the transcendental and empirical side of the plane of imminence are distinguishable from each other. Okay, that was a really useful explanation. And it also had kind of a surplus usefulness. because does that imply that the invention of ARPANET and the origin of the internet was a form of critique itself within communication and that it was sort of spurred by the subtraction of reliable physical means or non-digital means of communication by nuclear extinction,

sort of the virtual reality or the threat of nuclear extinction? Yes, I'm absolutely sure that there are elements of the pre-internet system that strictly are isomorphic with the metaphysical, as defined as Kant, or these transcendent elements that are deducted. and they would take the form of indispensable control notes anything positioned as an indispensable control I wonder if removed from the system will prevent the system functioning is now defile I does a metaphysical element that has to be deducted from the system

for the system to take on the kind of robustness that is required by this military imperative and that's why the Internet is obviously decentralized and why that you know it poses at the very least problems to central centralized control however much people say well that's been over emphasized at least when when you get this famous comment she I'm the internet interprets censorship as damage and roots around it that is nuclear war speaking you know that's it's like that statement is purely rooted in the same logic that the military application

the internet was rooted in and and it's to say that these these it bypasses any element that presents itself metaphysically as an indispensable transcendent authority because from the military point of view that's an unaffordable vulnerability okay and this is another just like slight left turn but are you familiar with Singularity Sky by Charles Strauss with the festival yes yes I I am yeah so that takes it a step further where it's Not just censorship, not even just extinction, but is like the void of space or the non-contact of things itself the festival views as a metaphysical element that has to be routed through or routed around.

Yeah. Stross is always, I mean, I wouldn't say I have no problems with him, but he's always very interesting, that's for sure. You've read, obviously, Accelerando. Oh, of course. Yeah. like changed 13 year old me's life okay so we're we're well above the seminar time 10 minute overtime which is perfectly fine the conversation seems to be sort of like flowing but if you guys have last questions or if Nick has last remarks maybe we can kind of like wrap up. Also, I have a request to make,

and that's for someone who's been in the room or in the Hangout from the very beginning because I had to leave and come back a few times because I had internet problems, and every time I do that, I lose the sidebar text. So if someone has been in the room consistently, maybe they can select, copy, and paste the whole thing. Yeah, I got you, though. I'll post it. If you can do that, that would be lovely because I usually do it but I didn't get a chance I can do it because I left I left sure thanks Jake that's great sure yeah so I mean is everyone is everyone okay with the trajectory we're on here I mean if I treat it that we're going

some weird diagonal line between our preset agenda and the stuff people put up on the classroom in time to me to see next week I'm everyone's cool with that or let me just put it this other way if anyone has course suggestions time course in the navigational sense just stick them on the on the classroom you know took things that you think we need to talk more about or that being neglected or come true too fast or any such such things yeah sounds great thanks every day that was great this was a great class man yeah extremely I have to go back and listen to it several times

yeah yeah like same yeah but I'm okay thanks everybody that was I enjoyed awesome thanks I so nice for copy-pasting the notes and see you guys next week Sunday same time Yep. Bye. Super exciting. Bye. Bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.