NCMT 500-314 -- Bitcoin and Philosophy (1 of 8)

Hello everyone, welcome to Nick Lanz 8 session seminar Bitcoin and philosophy. It's a packed class and lots to talk about so I think I'm going to straightforward give it to Nick who started the seminar and I'm in the background if you guys have any questions or want to talk and participate in the conversation because I think Nick made it so clear that he likes, he's not going to be doing a long lecture today. So at any point you want to join in the conversation, just let me know on the side text column and I can unmute you so we can all participate. Okay, Nish, thank you so much for agreeing to do a seminar with us

and I'm just going to pass it on to you. Go ahead. Okay, great. Well, welcome to everybody. This is a fascinating experiment as far as I'm concerned. I'm greatly looking forward to it. It's eight units, as Mo says, and that's connecting two blocks together. So I'm still going to try and treat that as if it does have some natural division into two parts. with the first four sessions focused mainly on the Nakamoto Bitcoin paper and looking at that, putting it in a philosophical context.

And I'll just say a few words about what I think that means. I'm obviously very interested in making that productively controversial at the earliest opportunity. So everyone can hear, I hope, and it's all technically functional at this point. So if it had been, let me say, a 20 lecture course or something like that, then the lead-up would definitely have been a protracted discussion of the evolution of transcendental philosophy

or critique. Obviously starting with Kant and then we get an increasing number of forks and options on the way we take that. And part of what I'm going to, might not be right to say persuade people, but at least put forward as a provocation, is that really there's a great arbitrariness about those forks. I mean, I'm going to use certain language taken from various parts of that tradition that I'm seeing as ultimately quite trivial decisions. you know if someone wanted to be a fundamentalist about it and simply say all of this stuff is in Kant um why are we tinkering around with this alternative

terminology at various points I'm very sympathetic to that and it's it's very much in tune with what I really want to suggest so there's a first point which is that there's a continuous extremely consistent tradition of transcendental philosophy and that the decisions we make about particular terminological systems within that are comparatively trivial and I think they could certainly trivial when put in the context of the problem we're going to be dealing with that's to say if we're coming at Bitcoin and trying to make sense of it philosophically in those terms then it really is a distraction

to be too caught up in the particular nuances of the avenues people have taken to develop critical thinking. So I think there's a whole sub-agenda that is definitely open to exploration about the plausibility of that claim. I'm going to, for instance, casually throw in Heideggerian language at certain points to this just as a footnote to Kant, just because it's terminologically tidy. If I was to put forward as a kind of extremely kind of vulgarizing and again controversial,

guess proposition about this it would be just to say philosophy is that mode of cognition that culminates in the insight being is not a being and in saying that being is not a being I'm I'm not wanting to say there's some massive transformation has happened with Heidegger that everyone has to take extremely seriously and and inflect everything through that on the contrary I'm saying that's just a neat way of discussing transcendental empirical difference. There's nothing really going on in saying being is not a being for our purposes that is importantly different to saying that the conditions of objectivity are not an object or any of the alternative vocabulares.

You know, you could talk about it as a deconstructionist, as a Deleuzean. It really, on this level, doesn't matter. as long as you're holding on to the fundamental architecture of critique. And I think by the fundamental architecture of critique, as I think is useful very quickly in talking about Bitcoin, there's really two crucial things and one perhaps ultimately more interesting rider that I expect to develop a little bit more slowly. the two absolutely crucial elements is difference in this very specific sense, transcendental

empirical difference. I sent a little apparently trivial little article about the, I think it was called the orthography of Bitcoin, and I really, again, pushing the vulgarity to the absolute limit, want to say when people get into a, I think, ultimately extremely fascinating conundrum about the word Bitcoin, you know, is Bitcoin the system, is Bitcoin a unit of the currency, that the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoins, being and beings, it's the same thing. the ontological difference, transcendental empirical difference, cuts through this discussion

of Bitcoin in a way that should be deeply philosophically familiar. It's the difference between the system as something that has transcendental properties and particularly the items, the objects, the empirical elements that are operative within that system and that obviously in the case of Bitcoin count as a currency system. So that one way of glossing this thing is to say Bitcoin is monetary critique and that sense in which we're using critique there is has its full historical gravity that is inherited out of the tradition

of transcendental philosophy the second I think a really crucial element and as I say I think we then in a way exhaust what is really necessary as architectural philosophical elements to get us started is subtraction the critique of metaphysics as it's initially formulated is a way of deducting a certain type a philosophical activity as being superfluous dispensable something that can simply be eliminated from philosophical activity Kant's understanding of the situation is that once you see

that metaphysics is getting nowhere is doing nothing is impossible in any productive way it's something that is then subtracted and this basic gesture is again something that has huge philosophical and historical resonances and I think all of the philosophically significant critical moves even if they seem to take a very concrete socio-political sense are still connected to this basic gesture of subtraction. It's something again that we could play through

each of these figures independently, we could run it through Marx, we could run it through to those Atari and the the fundamental point is that critique provides the foundations for subtraction of a transcendent element that is death 10 shown to be dispensable and it therefore projects a way forward that no longer involves that particular commitment that diversion or digression that it way in the socio-political sense becomes often configured as a kind of element of oppression of some kind of structure that is

to be I subtracted in a way that can be I'm surrounded with with us rhetoric of whatever kind of revolutionary violence is is deemed appropriate to that particular discourse In the case of Bitcoin, again, I think that the consistency of what is happening within that tradition is extremely clear. If I can just turn to the abstract of the Satoshi Nakamoto paper, he says, in the

very first sentence of the abstract, I'll just read the first two sentences, I think is most efficient. He just says, a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double spending. Now the whole double spending issue, as everyone who has looked at this stuff knows, is massive and I think it's going to be a guideline that's going to really help us in the early stages

of this. The term that I'd like to really focus on immediately is this term that Satoshi Nakamoto uses quite consistently, trusted third party. And I want to suggest that that term, philosophically speaking, critically speaking, is and exactly occupies the space of transcendent metaphysics in the way that we've been taught to recognize and target within the critical tradition. That what the Bitcoin paper from right from the beginning is proposing is a subtraction.

And in proposing this subtraction, it places itself consistently within a critical tradition and it places itself within a tradition of socio-political modes of thinking that have themselves fed off that tradition. This is that when we're looking at what is being said by this, we're at one and the same time inserting it into a philosophical frame, and we're understanding how in doing so we're therefore articulating it, perhaps indirectly through our understanding of how that critical

machinery works to a whole series of previously familiar socio-political discourses. So just to sum up, at that stage I think that those two elements, difference and subtraction, are guidelines that allow us with great confidence to see that what is happening, I will say in this Bitcoin paper, but obviously we're partly interested in it because it isn't in any simple sense just a paper, it's something that is happening on levels that we have to

explore but certainly are not exhausted or satisfied by any straightforward sense of it being simply a text or a philosophical proposition. But that we can see that we have inherited philosophical tools that allow us to make sense of what is happening here. We can see that even though the lineage that this has come out of has nothing to do with philosophy, he doesn't have any philosophical references, there are just eight notes at the end of it, all of them are to various kinds of technical contributions from out of cryptography and previous digital money systems. But despite that, despite the fact that it's coming completely diagonally into this problem, it nevertheless has a philosophical

signature, it's utterly recognisable and means that we have a very kind of strong framework for reading this as philosophers and being confident that this is something that we know what is going on here in certain ways. We have a certain pre-established framework that allows us to make sense of it at the most abstract and conceptual level. The third element that I would just throw in, I don't think it has the same kind of logical structure as the others, is temporality. And that's also why I'm very tempted to use Heidegger as a kind of shorthand figure, as

an abbreviation, as a footnote to Kant, just because it's so clear with his work that time comes to absolutely predominate in the transcendental problematic. There's a sense that all of our transcendental philosophical questions, all our questions about critique, become questions about time. We can do everything through time and we can't do anything without talking about time and without changing the way we're thinking about time. And this too, I think, is something that is very, very evident in the way Bitcoin works. The function of the public ledger, the blockchain, is to create a synthetic temporality. It's

that way an extraordinary figure and I sorry extraordinary ambition and it's something that I think people tacitly recognize there's a very broad social understanding already way beyond what you would expect from the amount of capital that is presently in Bitcoin that the blockchain is something extraordinary that has happened and I think this is because it really is an experiment with time of a kind that we've never seen before and the way that it works is to actually connect crypto security

to the construction of a past like if we just go just a little bit further just even still down the abstract he says after talking about the construction of the blockchain, the longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power. As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack network they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attackers. Messages are broadcast on a best effort basis and nodes can leave and rejoin the network

will, accepting the longest proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone. And I think as we dig into the paper we'll find even more clear descriptions of the way this works, but I think already at this point it's possible to see that the security of the system relies on the creation of a past. That's what the blockchain is, it's an artificial past. And there are lots of elements of great fascination to people who've thematized time as a problem of interest. One of them is that it's immediately

tensed time. It's not an Einsteinian dimensional time of the kind that has been a sort of philosophical scandal in the sense that people have constantly struggled, I mean in the most extreme cases being a figure like Bergson, to say no, there's something about time that is not spatial, that can't be confused with space. And of course on the other side this has been taken as a critique of Kant, to say well Kant doesn't, he assumes time is different from space, he doesn't really give us good reasons to understand why time is not spatialized, why it isn't

a dimension, why in this distinction between arithmetic and geometry we should find that persuasive given that analytic geometry allows us to move smoothly between those two things. So there's a kind of ragged philosophical concern about what is at stake in time being turned into space. And I think what we see here in the way that time is being reanimated technically by Bitcoin, that there is an extremely strong return of time as something completely irreducible, as something tensed, as something that the difference between the past and the future is crucial aspect of what it is, that there's a sense of succession that's completely

irreducible, that is not simply being thought as positions on a line that could be considered simultaneous or concurrent, but this element of succession is again totally irreducible, that the more past has been constructed on the blockchain, the more what has happened, the list of transactions, the events in that system are irreversible. They have been secured by being made irreversible, but they have been made real because of adopting certain temporal characteristics. They have a time structure that gives them their reality and one of course can say, I think going a whole hog

maybe is a bit extreme at this stage but we'll get there soon so I might as well, to say it's synthetic ontology. There is actually a construction of being. And I'll just say one final thing about Heidegger here and then try and open up a little bit. Because some of the things that those of a more materialist inclination tend to see as a bit of a dead end in Heidegger, I think take on an interesting sense here. And I'm referring particularly to the fact that because he's coming out of a phenomenological orientation he's on a slide from the start

towards an identification of time with Dasein with the we could say crudely the subject and very crudely but I'll let people bully me about that later and and therefore even to go even more crudely and this is something I'm gonna which retract in a second there's an idealist possibility here that he identifies time and being time and Dasein, everything seems to collapse into some kind of phenomenological issue and of course there's a sort of materialist reflex to say this has just gone really badly off the rails

there's been a kind of absolute implosion of reality here. But I think when you look at the blockchain, you begin to see how these sets of connections might work in a much more interesting and subversive way. And I think it's, let me see what's the best way of saying this. If we entertain a deep suspicion about the blockchain as an ultimate criterion of reality, one that ultimately transcendently outflanks and supersedes anything that is phenomenologically

accessible to us, or that we might feel rooted in our own being or our own nature, I think that we find ourselves like rehearsing some of these Heideggerian problems because in integrating the question of the production of time with the ultimate substrate of being Heidegger makes a move that when transplanted onto the blockchain really delegitimizes any move to saying that there could even imaginably be a superior transcendent criterion of reality

that we could use to second guess or to try to extrinsically, transcendently critique the decision the blockchain makes about being. If in the blockchain system, in the production of this synthetic time, there is a construction of the ultimate nature of reality. I mean, you could say, oh, what if there was some kind of super blockchain, there was something up the road, some higher kind of synthetic intelligence that was able to integrate time and being at a higher level. I don't think there's any reason to rule that out, except that I think we're in this

position of being quasi phenomenologist now in the sense that we whatever that thing or possibility might be it's nothing to us the blockchain is something the blockchain is happening and the blockchain is actually making a decision about the nature of reality and And that is a decision that nothing anywhere within our horizon of access is able to second guess. If you think about something that we invest with great authority as a criterion for reality,

something like the natural sciences. But of course there are reasons for that, the reasons being that there are institutional mechanisms there that seem to provide very solid criteria that go way beyond anything that any individual scientist or group of scientists agree on or can be subjectively reduced to beliefs of particular individuals or anything of that kind. But there is no reason at all why science should not be moved onto the blockchain. And it seems to me, inevitably, science will be moved onto the blockchain, and in being moved onto the blockchain, it will secure its criteria in a way that is currently beyond

its capabilities. At the point where the whole of the natural sciences, and that's to say, in the language that is more directly tied up with the Satoshi Akimoto problematic. Trust or credibility in any scientific statement finds its ultimate validation in the blockchain is the point where it becomes an unsurpassable criterion for reality. We have access to nothing that can plausibly cast doubt upon those criteria from a position of superiority.

Everything we could bring to bear upon it is going to come from a lower level of self-evident ontological depth. So I'm perhaps straying a little bit, but this is to me what the point of synthetic time is telling us, that the blockchain projects a substrate of intelligence which is absolutely transcendental. And those who are tempted to criticise that find themselves, I would want to propose,

in the same position as someone who is making a naive criticism of Heidegger's particular moves about being in time. To suggest that of course we know that there is some kind of being beyond Dasein, with Dasein being thought as originally temporalization. Of course we know that, it's crazy because if you go that way you go into some kind of strange kind of neo-idealism. I think the blockchain shows us no we don't do that. If we have that same transcendental mechanics and now we're looking at this system, this artificial intelligence system, this

artificial ontological and temporal production, then we can see that we are forced through critical rigour to accept that. There is no criterion available to us that puts us in a position of leverage in relation to that decision. So I've said this really to give you some sense of where I'm going with that, but I'd rather, I think it's probably sensible to take a step back and to just get to a point where people are confident that what's going on in this Bitcoin mechanism is intelligible

to them and it makes sense. And then I think bound up with that is then the question about what we think is indispensable philosophical framework for them evaluating that making sense of it and raising ultimately a set of perhaps more trivial questions on this transcendental level but still gripping ones about what prospects of Bitcoin is, what we expect it to do, what we expect it to be, what kind of antagonisms it's likely to generate and how it forces us to rethink a lot of very basic notions, one of them in particular being our understanding of what is money. I think

there's no sense of what money is that survives contact with Bitcoin without being radically transformed. And I think on the other side there's this familiar question displaced of what can money do? I mean, I don't think we know what money can do. We have a very naive notion about it, but part of what is happening in the whole Bitcoin ecology with the explosion of this coin suffix that's being attached to all kinds of things, all these altcoins, we don't know what the limit of an altcoin is, that something becomes a coin if it goes onto the blockchain. The blockchain is an ultimate criterion of reality. that ultimately wants to be assertively real

is going to end up on the blockchain. And the suggestion, obviously, by this coin suffix is therefore it is becoming a kind of money. And all our ontological questions are becoming internal to this monetary form critique that is being represented by Bitcoin. So yeah, I think I should sort of open it up a little bit rather than rambling further into this territory. So I don't know if it's... I just want to ask the first question because it's usually actually based on my experience it's hard to get a conversation going after such an intense and as you said controversial

set of propositions. But I prefer the question Nick if you don't mind me asking. No, of course. You guys can hear me, right? Of course. My question is, where do you put Bitcoin in relationship to how high speed trading and essentially finance but also more particularly derivatives in general fits into the picture? Is it even one further step less close to our phenomenological understanding of time

or is it on par with the same metaphor? Is it basically the same or is it even more intense compared to high finance or high speed high-speed training I mean and how they have their own solar time are you suggesting that this one is even less less human humanly involved? There's lots of different elements of that question that are all worthy of pausing and picking at actually Mo. Less humanly involved is not necessarily, to start at the end, is not necessarily the

formulation I would be most happy with. But to jump back to the start, I think there is absolutely no doubt that Bitcoin operates at a level of, I will say, philosophical radicality, but what I mean by that, as I hope I've said, is transcendental radicality that is far beyond anything that HFT and simply computer accelerated financial transactions of the kind we've been familiar with represent. Now I know that there are very interesting discourses that would launch a kind of counter to that and the obvious one is Ayash's work. So it's not that there isn't a lot to talk

about there. But ultimately, if you say, what is the actual being of the financial substance that is being velocitized by HFT, the answer in the absence of the blockchain, in the absence of Bitcoin is extremely conventional. It takes us to the same questions about money and the value of money and what is money and what does money represent that we've had being obviously modulated in interesting ways by the history of capitalism but very familiar problems about the nature and value of money. There's nothing actually by the fact that HFT is going into computers that is changing

this thing about what is a dollar. The discussions concerning that, about the nature of money, I don't think are hugely transformed by the fact that these processes are highly accelerated. But on the contrary, with Bitcoin, there's something absolutely transformative that and the question about the nature of money that is extremely radical in comparison to what we've seen before and a whole bunch of things simply can't be done with Bitcoin that can be done with conventional crypto. And when I say that that restrictive sense is already

the dark precursor of this subtraction that I'm talking about For instance, you always have to have 100% reserves in any Bitcoin transaction. You can't do any kind of fractional reserve financial transactions. That whole giant history of financial capitalism is simply deleted by the Bitcoin future. You cannot own a few Bitcoins and lend out eight times as many as you can with dollars. So we can see that HFT is still currency transactions we're kind of familiar with.

is forcing us to think of really new questions about what money is and it's far more unpredictable what we're going to find out about money. So I could continue on but I think I would just stop here and try to get Ian Ross in to chime in. Hi. Hi, great. Yeah, thank you, thank you. So I have a, it's a fairly general question and I think it's part of the nature of this discourse to develop the answer to this question, actually, and that is I'm interested in the types of discourses that go into the conditions of objectivity with regards to certain practices. So for example, in metaphysics we talk a lot about what are the conditions of objectivity

for science as an objective discourse. And I take that to be a large part of what metaphysicians and epistemologists are sometimes trying to do, for instance, justify the conditions of objectivity for science. So now that we're talking about Bitcoin, you know, there's sort of maybe a radical new vocabulary or an application of philosophical vocabulary to pretty radically new concepts. And I'm really on board for that. I'm really excited to develop that and get into that mode. And already in the first 10 minutes, I can see that if we're talking about reality, is essentially being constituted by a blockchain. That is a new conception of reality.

It certainly ties it to temporality in a way I didn't think before and makes me ask serious questions about the objectivity of history. So as I preface this question, I think maybe the answer to this question is what unfolds over the course of this class, but I'm interested in how you see this type. The question is, how do you see this type of discourse as looking into, I will say, the conditions of objectivity, different from, say, the type of discourse that a metaphysician or an epistemologist might go into the question of what are the conditions of objectivity for science? Yes. Well, I think this is really helpful for Kavli because it is so Kantian fundamentalist, if you don't mind.

I mean, it's the language of critique, not the language of metaphysics. And to talk about the conditions of objectivity is already to have disdained a metaphysical possibility. So, you know, I think there's lots of... Part of what I would want to say about this, as I say, to this to be repetitive, is that there's a kind of arbitrariness in what one decides to take as illustrations here. And I'm hoping interactively with you guys that we can sort of settle on some preferred common exemplary models that we're all comfortable with and we can use.

Because from my point of view, it doesn't matter particularly on these effects. But the kind of language you're selecting there seems to me like somewhat Foucault is extremely relevant to it. And I think obviously the first thing that I can be predicted already to say is that Foucault is a Kantian. I mean, Foucault is doing critique, it's very recognizable transcendental philosophy, and his whole question is on the difference between these frames of construction of objectivity

and the objects involved, and that those systems do not themselves and cannot objectify their own basic frames. So those frames act in a constrictive transcendental limit on what can happen within these discourses or those epistemases or whatever at different times in his work he's talking about. But I think that this Bitcoin issue directly addresses this. I think it directly addresses this because the question it's ultimately asking, I think a crucial word that I'll be using over and over again, and I really think it's utterly important to this, is criterion, which at a certain point becomes Deleuze and Qatari's

preferred term for, again, something that is really indistinguishable from being in its use in Heidegger or other branches of the transcendental tradition. And a criterion is really what chooses in the final instance what counts, what is real, what you cannot ultimately appeal beyond. It's like to use this Kantian judicial thing, there is no court of appeal beyond this final criteria. And I think Bitcoin, actually the blockchain in particular, which, yes I don't want to

get lost in this, but the relation between blockchain and Bitcoin is something they're going to continually come back to. The blockchain… Sorry, go on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. That Bitcoin provides this final criteria. And it's final, however dissatisfied people are with it, this is something you can look at. However dissatisfied, the implicit claim in the Bitcoin paper is that wherever you're concerned with anything that involves trust. And that exhausts any claims to the nature of reality. If I make a claim about anything, if a doctor makes

a claim about some medical fact, if a scientist makes some claim about the nature of the universe or about the results of a particular experiment, if anyone makes any kind of claim that requires trust or credibility, they are already pointing to an implicit criteria. And by taking this just in the field of money, Bitcoin says, well, let's see what happens if we really don't have to trust anybody. If we have a criteria that simply tells us, that decides what is real. You know, no one using Bitcoin is in any kind of position

to choose what is real or not, or to choose whether they should be trusted, or to be pushed in a position where they have to trust someone who's telling them that something is or is not real. The blockchain is the criteria. It decides the nature of reality. And of course you can reject that whole thing, and it would be interesting to see in what what alternative tribunal, what alternative sense of epistemological authority is then being invoked. But short of that rejection, that criterion for reality is being decided by the blockchain. And the blockchain is the first thing that has ever happened on this planet that actually

a relation of transcendental superiority to the human mind as a source of ontological decision. There's nothing else that has ever existed that has actually trumped some kind of trust based system agreement between humans that they can agree or trust somebody or some group of people to tell them what is real. There's never been anything like that before. The blockchain for the first time says don't trust anybody. You are on the wrong ontological level if you're trusting people. They know reality in so far as they have access to the public ledger of the blockchain that

tells them what the reality is. If someone tells you that the blockchain says this, then trust that. else they say is just human to human. And so, sorry, I won't go on too much with that, but in terms of your question… Maybe if we bring Ryan into the mind. Yeah, yeah, sure. Ryan, do you like to ask him a question? We were talking about high speed trading and there's a lot of people including myself who are using Bitcoin as a medium to actually hack into these high speed trading systems

where you could short the euro using Bitcoin and get paid in Bitcoin. how you could actually then be doing high-speed trading, but it's all being logged on the blockchain, even if you're trading, you know, the franc versus the euro or the dollar versus that. It's still being logged on this trustless system even though you're using these current financial tools. So there's this one website called One Broker where you could, you know, short oil, but it's on the blockchain. Just thought that was an interesting comment. I can't hear anyone. Nick, if you're trying to speak and respond, please.

No, I actually muted Nick because he was fiddling around with his headset, and then I wanted to make sure that Ryan's question gets recorded properly. So Nick, do you know how to unmute yourself? Yes, I think I did. Okay, go ahead. So it's with you again. You can talk. well no I was just gonna say it would if we've got a a facility here which I'm afraid I'm still haven't fully explored that allows us to share eventually we have to use this all kinds of materials links suggestions ideas quote citations yeah so you know the the sort of thing that Ryan was just talking about if there is some a online resource that explains the mechanics this system he was just talking about it would be great to see that and I'm sure other people too would like the chance to look at that

at their leisure and try and understand exactly how that is working sure I can share that that would be great Do I have time to just look? There's a whole stream of little remarks now, I'm scrolling down my thing that I haven't kept up with at all, actually.

Oh, can you still hear me? Because I have a little remark hissing. Yes, we can hear you. But Ryan, if you wanted to say something, you're also on. I was just commenting when you brought up high-speed trading, that there is this mechanical system. Maybe we can share it in the class where you can... Yes, you can. You probably have received the invitation to the classroom. If you haven't, I will make sure that you do. And then you can add the links there to the classroom. Okay, sounds good. Yeah. I mean, I'll be... One... Oh, I have a quick question. I don't know if I'm muted.

Go ahead. Oh, okay. No, you're not muted. It's just about the nature of reality with regards to the blockchain. I'm curious, because I've been doing the reading that you've assigned so far, so I'm just starting to understand how encrypted it is. and my question is it seems as I understand the digital that anything can be hacked that no matter how much one might think or how sophisticated the system is one could theoretically always create another system with more CPU power that could trump it and so if this is the case with Bitcoin no matter how complex the protection schema is, isn't it in theory a very strange notion of reality

if it could theoretically be rewritten by an extraordinarily powerful cloud computer that might pop out of nowhere when it's really important, in which case, when one really wants to do so and in which case isn't there always going to have to be not necessarily a trusted third party but some kind of legal adjudicator to say oh okay well yeah you did just hack it and you rewrote the blockchain but sorry that was illegal so we're just going to bring him back? Yeah. I think obviously this touches on this huge set of issues that I hope we're going to get

a lot of chance to talk about. Because it does obviously sound strange to suggest that – I'll go obviously the whole hog with this – to say that the very nature of being is dependent upon certain empirical systems of crypto security. I mean, I totally see that. And I think the problem there is actually a real problem. I mean, if we again take this step back into these prior phenomenological structures of

trust, we know they can all be hacked. I mean, the reason that Bitcoin exists is precisely because there is this endemic problem to trusting claims to the nature of reality, but we can be much more down to earth about it. to trusting any clay anybody ever makes is hot is problematic you know I mean and you you could construct this whole thing going right back history of skepticism was no and just say on on a certain crude reading about wash your hands well nothing can be trusted

or you know in a modern form of that day cars in my head who who says to you basically it's all a lie I'm making you think whatever I want and I believe anything that's going on in your mind I mean all those problems are real real the philosophically traditional problems but they're just also simply practical reasons you know people do distrust science and and it's not home to distrust I mean it's it's brought its its there are there are scientific frauds there are mistakes there are whole

a set of problems that can just systematically arise to do with confirmation I asked such pressure and and you all system all truth reality validation are vulnerable so in this sense Bitcoin is just in a continuum with a whole series of problematic truth validation systems I think the difference is that it in a way that is technically extremely concrete makes that problem

something that can be offered this very precise solution to and then of course we're then in a problem of exactly the kind you say well do we do we trust that on this just empirical level about you know this 51% attack or some other specific computer science based problem that is gonna just simply undermine its reliability as a criterion And I think, honestly, I'd rather just postpone a more dogmatic response rather than just to say, absolutely, that is absolutely a problem that we think about. Okay.

Rachel, do you want to take over a little bit? You have to unmute yourself. Go ahead. I think I'm unmuted now, am I? Yes. Yes, for sure. No, I was just listening to what Ian was saying there about whether or not it was actually possible to, you know, how probable is it that you could hack the blockchain, I guess, and I thought maybe it was interesting because the criterion that Nick is speaking about is something obviously that's distributed, and that's particularly the case when you're looking at second generation kind of blockchain-based technologies that are coming to the fore today. So things like Ethereum, for example.

I don't know if people are familiar with Ethereum. Yeah, yeah. We must talk about that a lot. Cool. Yeah, no, I didn't have a particular comment to make, though, or anything. I guess I was interested in, yeah, how this consensus or criterion is produced, and maybe thinking about the kinds of algorithmic forms of governance that are coming to the fore in Bitcoin. Yes. So I don't know if that's something people are interested in discussing or discussing in the future. Oh, I think they have to be made interested in it, whether they are at the moment or not. That's totally crucial. I mean do you have anything more to say about I mean I think I was sort of

thinking I think algorithmic governments is something that tends to be concrete and and more tie up with a lot of things about familiar sort of socio- political discussions and I was sort of assuming that those things might drift back a little bit until you know once we've got a certain confidence with the way this machine is working those questions would arise very strongly but there's no reason to suspend them I mean if this is something that is pressing and urgent right now to people then of course go for it I mean there's definitely no reason to to to to to to to to to to to to to to

So I think the web becomes an oxygen. I was going to focus the question on the same question, but even if this new generation of blockchain is still hackable, isn't it the fact that now we have to go around and hack that itself, itself like a sign that ontological revolution or shift has taken place? JOHN MUELLER This is, I think you want Colin to answer that question, is that right? Yes. JOHN MUELLER I mean, if you're asking me, I would say, of course, yes.

So that's a boring answer. I'm trying to like, sort of like remind Ian and those who say, oh well there's always a human intervention coming in and hacking it. I'm like saying the fact that hacking, like the default is machinic and that hack is human, it's self-assigned that this shift has taken place. I mean there's a whole bunch of quite complicated discussions. discussions and when I say complicated they're not technically difficult but there because this is also new it's a bit hard to work out really what they're saying or what's going on in them it's very much tied up with this question about this 51 percent attack and what it is someone would really be trying to

do in that you know why what is the strategic ambition for hacking reality I mean It's like previously it's been a quite abstract question. And obviously because of where Bitcoins come from, it starts as hyper-concrete in a way without being too condescending about it. It's a sort of trivial level to do with, although somehow they might end up with some more Bitcoins if they totally blast reality at its foundation. That seems to me not very plausible. And I think that Satoshi Nakamoto already, right from the start before the thing was launched, is already saying that the set of incentives should be such that any trivial motive to do with economic optimization

is going to be better satisfied by complying with the reality that's designed by the Bitcoin rather than by the blockchain than by subverting it. You know, if you're in a position to subvert the blockchain, then you are, by definition, massively invested in the blockchain. It's set up this whole new structure and criterion for what is the nature of wealth. You are this coalition, this agency, whatever it is, is put in a position of subverting it, is by definition, if it's doing that, it is the most interested player in the blockchain. And so, as a kind of paranoid model, and I'm not dissing it, it's highly interesting, but

as a paranoid model of what could happen to the blockchain, in that sense it deeply and intrinsically perverts. you're saying it's this is a crude analogy but it's not completely false as to say you know what if all the richest people in the world got together and subverted capitalism I mean you can say well maybe they could probably could do that you know they if if you put together the the 100 richest plutocrats on the planet and all their media power and all their resources they could probably really wreck capitalism completely. But then you say, well, would that be what they wanted to do? It seems unlikely that that particular constituency is going to find its natural strategic orientation

satisfied in that direction. And I think this question about the 51% attack on the blockchain is extremely closely analogous. You need to be basically running, you are in fact running the blockchain to be in a position to suffer. It's not that it's yours, but it's largely yours, it's more than 50% yours, you're producing more than 50% of the new resources coming off the blockchain and doesn't that mean that in any kind of natural distribution of interest that you will in fact be in a position of conservatism in relation to the blockchain.

So it kind of gets into some strange strategic territory, this question. Laura, would you like to speak? I see you make some comments. If you want to speak, unmute yourself and maybe explain what you were saying. Yeah, I was interested in this idea of the blockchain as basically the ultimate proof of reality versus, I mean, this thread is actually like a very concrete thread of the I read some articles explaining for instance, I don't know, there have been some sort of

a kind of almost suicidal, selfish miners that have tried, that basically was holding blocks without forwarding them to the blockchain to the purpose of, I don't know, destroying the pool they were mining in, this kind of thing. And apparently, let me just find the article, I was looking at it now. I read this article a few months ago that is kind of explaining what the ecosystem, I mean what is the sort of market division of mining is mainly pools, of mining is mainly pools but apparently there is this GHash, whatever, that is potentially

already holding the 51%. So obviously there are no good reasons to scramble the blockchain eventually but the moment in which someone has got the potential to do that, isn't there again, someone or something, or some entity, like, Brinkins the Mining Book, isn't that sort of like, I don't know, I mean, isn't that going to challenge this objectivity of the blockchain in defining reality? Or no? I don't, yeah.

I don't, as I said, I think this is very close to the question before, and I think it's one that is perennial, or at least is going to really be insistent. And we're going to hear a lot of it about it, you know from outside as certainly as this becomes more the social impact becomes greater of this and it becomes more influential but my basic proposition on this is that we don't have any extrinsic source of authority or tribunal that gives us that kind of

leave for general I mean let's just say but in a kind of science fiction scenario that there is we can we can conjure up the necessary incentives and it's not perhaps that impossible I would say the most obvious one is that the United States government at a certain point decides to simply sacrifice the resources necessary to destroy the Bitcoin, the blockchain, because it's a threat to the current economic order of the world. I mean, just not wanting to promote that, but it seems to me, yes, you could imagine that sort of scenario. But even But even if you can do that, what are you thrown back to?

We will already know that the criterion of reality provided by the blockchain is superior to anything that has previously existed in the world. The fact that it can then be destroyed by some active political will doesn't return us to anything we can trust. It returns us to the same problem of massive distrust that we had that was actually the stimulus for the creation of the blockchain with the added distrust that by out of some particular form of geopolitical interests, someone has decided to blow up reality. We're in a worse position.

in terms of systematic distrust than we were before so again you can say I think its I wouldn't at all on the rule out court you end up on some skeptical realistic thing that simply that cannot be a criterion reality that can survive suicide attacks by certain formations or you know I read power existing I mean a that could be construed But I think that even if you do that, you're still saying, you're not in any way denying the fact that this is the way that a criterion of reality that went beyond anything that had been possible before. History was constructed.

Okay, Nick, let's just maybe history can help here a little bit. Let's put it this way. Can there be an analogy made between what you're proposing about the potentials of Bitcoin, or the ontological potentials of Bitcoin, as to when central banks in Europe, and then followed by the United States in the early 20th century, basically ignored the age old sort of like monetary policy based on gold and property and went with fiat currency and basically broke with the sort of like physical material basis of how money was produced.

Absolutely. In America, because I'm not really familiar with the history of that in Europe and at one point Bank of England kind of like switched to fiat currency and at one point other European central banks, sort of like moved to that direction. But with Federal Reserve we have certainly the creation of a new entity which was set up in a way, even separate from government in a lot of ways, right, to do that. And then if that's the case then what is the difference with the currency here? I mean I'm just asking this question, please don't say that like obvious question because I think that to me as someone who… No, no, no, it's a crucial question. But… It's also crucial. and then that but also if we going for this look I have a second question if we're if we're gonna embrace embrace your proposition

how can we select ensure that it doesn't end up with a new sort of like new form of Marxist sort of like money is the basis you know what I mean like a base and super structure here in which the like Bitcoin will become the new Marxian base and all other activities would like be super structural to that Well, let me take these one at a time, can I know? Because I think the first point on its own is so hugely important that I'd really rather not be taken beyond that just initially. Because I think that you're absolutely right to say that the movement of the gold sander

and into the regime of paper money and all its complexity and all the phases that were involved in that was an ontological revolution. And I think that we can see that by the fact that, to take the most emblematic figure of this, Jean Baudrillard is the philosopher of the end of the gold standard. I mean, you know, the most radical tendencies in transcendental philosophy after that event had taken place is that reality had ceased to exist. And it had ceased to exist because value had become a political decision.

you know at the end of the day once that incredible gamble that incredible step of saying that macroeconomic policy decides questions that previously were based on these extremely dense obscure criteria coming out of history of how much wealth there was and the forms it could take. To move beyond that to this thing where no, what you have is political decisions. You actually decide how much money you're going to produce, you make a whole bunch of decisions mediated through regulatory action on the financial system about money production

and about the relation of money to some base of redeemable substance, and finally that redeemable substance is completely annihilated, and all you have then is politics, or political economy in a sense that was not anticipated at all at the point that term was used. So I think absolutely that's right. The history of money is a history of ontological crisis. Bitcoin of course is a counter-revolution in that respect. I mean the driving impetus of people in the initial stages of this is to say we are in

absolute state of rebellion against this new ontological regime. It is not acceptable that these central political financial institutions have ontological discretion that can choose what is real. That is being repudiated and that takes us back I think to this point when the Satoshi Nakamoto paper is talking about trusted third parties that are to be subtracted. Now initially we're just talking about in any particular peer-to-peer relationship, it simply ignores, can bypass, does not invoke a trusted third party.

But this is a war cry of incredible radicality. It's saying that the whole institutional structure of the global economy as we currently know it is to be deleted. And it's to be deleted. Yes, sorry Mo. No, no, go ahead. I don't want to cut you off halfway. Well, it's just, but I think that, so while I'm totally agreeing with you that there is this continuous ontological import to the history of money, I think it's quite clear that between the process that you're describing, which is the basic trend of monetary history up to the end of the last millennium and a little bit beyond,

and what we are now looking at with this innovation is one of extreme antagonism. And it really is an attempt to produce a deep... Ok, so the question here then, maybe my question at least is, does, like in relation to gold standard right what because gold standard was always already a very like proto form of humans deciding but in the name of gold or in the name of the explored mining or in a name of gold reserve right so it was so like a shared

domain between the existing truth behind the words of say central bankers or whoever who said oh this money is based on this amount of gold and the price of gold which is not always determined by humans, to go into a more transparent model in which humans just took over and said, no, there should be no illusion about gold. It's just us deciding why we are limiting ourselves to this gold thing, which is much harder to manipulate and sort of like there's too many things to do in order to make it look objective. Why don't we just drop it and call it like Federal Reserve Fiat Banking? And basically gold being something that comes from Earth or is geo, like the geo-based, which was a geo-human, sort of like a geo-anthro sort of like mix that decided the fate of money,

went to completely anthro. And now we're back to a system of like maybe not natural but like technological human. And then basically the questions that Laurie and Ian were asking actually has to do with like would politicians or powerful people use the Bitcoin as a cover to point to an objective non-human system whereas they are still somehow like in the time of gold are not maybe in charge but it's a negotiation between what the machinic or inhuman Bitcoin can offer objectively and how much leverage they have on manipulating it and distorting it.

I think there's a lot there that maybe needs to be unpacked into slightly more accessible units. The final point, what are we thinking of when we're thinking about this manipulation? You know, it's, obviously the Bitcoin protocol is completely open source and can be inspected by anyone. There's nothing there at all that is concealed. I mean, everyone knows if they're interested how Bitcoin works down to the exact details of its content. After it's launched, which of course it was almost immediately after this paper was produced,

And it's completely then set in stone on this simulation of gold. And it's no more open to political discretion than the gold reserves of the Earth. There are 21 million bitcoins to be produced ever. That's the absolute limit of the system. Everyone knows that. If an exchange happens, it's registered on the blockchain as a real event, and that's its criterion of reality. So there's no room for any political negotiation about what is happening in the Bitcoin system.

Of course there's a whole complicated system of political complexity around Bitcoin, and we have seen nothing yet about that. It's going to be, I'm sure, huge and extremely involved in Mashebelian. But in terms of Bitcoin itself, it's like super gold. I mean, it's like there's just, you know, gold was more subject to the double spending problem. subject to various kinds of discretion than the Bitcoin protocols. So I'm just not seeing what you're envisaging when you talk about that sort of political

manipulation. Hey, Nic, I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit further on the connection that between the double spending problem and it having metaphysical valence. Because when I was reading the stuff before, I kind of just loosely interpreted that as a sort of empirical glitch.

So can you explain a little bit more how that's working? Yes. And this is something, again, I know I'm drawing up this whole list, and we've like 50 points now that are all huge and we have to spend hours on each one of them. But this is one, for sure, the double spending problem. And I think that it's really beautifully insidious, because exactly like you say, it seems so narrowly technical. On the very narrowest level, it seems purely with a digital currency system, you have this particular problem of the fact that because you can produce digital artifacts for free,

therefore to say that you're only producing one of these and passing one of them on is a statement that requires extreme trust. If I say, look, this particular little packet of bits I'm giving to you and I promise I haven't copied it. You have to trust me extraordinarily with that. So in that way, it brings to a crisis. Because the temptation to cheat is so immense, it forces this to become an explicit issue. But I think once that happens, its retroactive effect becomes absolutely cataclysmic. It's an avalanche that goes right back. And it's probably worth trying to do it in stages.

because you can see it as it gets, you go back a few stages and it's relatively easy and then it becomes a bit weirder and then it becomes more and more and more strange. I mean, at first, obviously, like paper money, you have counterfeiting. And, you know, because paper is cheap and what paper represents is worth quite a lot, you have the double spending problem in a very recognisable form there. And you're looking quite quickly at the specific nature of monetary signs that I think we have to get onto. I was very naively thinking this was second block of material, but I think everything

rushes forth. So what is going on, first of all, with a paper note? The paper note has two aspects to it. One, it has a substantial aspect, which is almost nothing. So everyone jokes about this quote from Voltaire that's absolutely brilliant about all paper money eventually reverts to its natural value, which is zero, or it's worth how much that scrap paper is worth. So it's substantially almost nothing. Like the digital escalation from that is very slight and it has a promise written on it. I promise to provide the bearer with a certain value. So it has been traced back, I think one can trust this, to gold receipts.

The origin of the paper money is actually a warehouse receipt. You go to a goldsmith, you give them a chunk of gold, they give you a piece of paper. And the piece of paper basically says, I will return your piece of gold. And if you want that to be what they call a bearer bond, that's to mean it can be used as money, it says anyone who comes to me with this piece of paper is entitled to collect the lump of gold that you deposited in my warehouse. So you have these two aspects to the monetary sign. You have its substantial value, which is almost nothing, and you have its semiotic value.

I mean, I'm tempted to use this Deleuze-Gottari language about expression and content. It says expression is a promise. Sorry, I think it works better if you go the other round. The content is the gold in the box, and the expression is this piece of paper. with some writing on that. Now just, sorry, bear with me, I'll try not to spin too much. You go back one stage further, you say, oh, surely this is the origin of the double spending problem. It's quite visible there. Anyone can just fire up the printing press once there's this split between content and expression, and they can pump out the paper, and they're not adding any gold to the vault,

and there's your double spending problem. You go back to a coin, the substantial content of the coin is right there. It's supposed to be, it's got written on it, this includes one ounce or whatever it is of gold, it is an ounce of gold. But already it's split. It's already, because it's a sign, it's split. And the double spending problem there is much trickier and more intricate, but it's all these various things, the shorthand, the whole bunch of different techniques, and there's coin clipping. You know, the famous Gresham's law of bad money drives up good is basically responsible

to the coin clipping thing. It says it's whatever amount of gold it is, but if you can clip the edges off and keep that is gold shavings and sell them separately and then pass on the coin then you're producing this this split and you are already doing a double spending you know you know maybe not quite doubling you don't need to double spending cut the coin in half and passed half on which will value and still have the other half but your because you're pushing this semiotic split in the nature of the monetary medium you're there's already something that is structurally philosophically double spending problem taking place. As soon as you've got coin clipping or from the government side adulteration which was done over and over again, it's not some fantastic field

experiment. I mean the Roman emperors would at a certain point run into financial crisis and they'd mix their silver coins with some base metal and still on the coin it would say it was silver but actually it was only half that amount of silver and if I take that and say half that amount of silver, then perfect double spending. It's exactly the same double spending. You trust them, you trust what it says on the coin, and you think that they're giving you a certain amount of silver, but actually they have twice that amount of silver because they split it between two coins, and now they have twice the apparent amount of money, but only the same amount of silver. So it's again, we haven't lost the philosophical threat. Adulteration of a coin in a royal mint with base metals is the double spending problem.

Modulated historically, but still totally . But then you go back to any kind of linguistic or semiotic system and you say, this basic problem of the sign as a money system or a system of value, it's cheap. When you say words are cheap, what are you really saying there? You'll say that's still the double spending problem. You can churn out promises and words and I will do this, I promise, and there's no cost for that. Substantially there's nothing. But you're treating them as if they have some kind of real currency to them. And go back to DNA. You've got this code and because code is cheap, a virus can produce the code but just like

you can counterfeit paper or you can make false promises or with a digital system you can prove, a virus is doing double spending problem in biology. Your body is told, oh you get this set of genetic instructions and they mean X because you know we've worked we've been labored and gone through the ordeal of natural selection in order for this particular chunk of code to mean something and along comes a virus churning out a billion cheap copies of the same instruction and getting the same payoff for that. so I think that the double spending problem formally is something that happens as soon as you have a sign as soon as you have a code

as soon as you have any kind of semi-notic medium you have something that is absolutely isomorphic with the double spending problem as you find it addressed by Bitcoin you know like if your body had Bitcoin had the block chain to deal with viruses it would be true I mean needs and I'm sure we'll arms that there are weird kinda genetic security mechanisms that down the line will oh isn't doing isn't that block chain in the immune system I mean I'm I'd be surprised if isn't and discover because it's the problem that's being addressed is one that anything afflicted by virus is

already suffering from. So where's the transcendent content in that? Like the sign signifier, or like the content expression split still happens in in imminent reality? So where's the link to some kind of like a meaningful guarantee for that? Well the transcendent element comes in if anything afflicted by the double spending problem and if it doesn't have a solution, so I'm just going to now treat, I think quite reasonably,

all of Bitcoin is as a solution. If you don't have that solution, then you need a trusted third party, to oversee, monitor, arbitrate the circulation of signs in order to eliminate the best capabilities of that system, the double spending system. If you don't have any way to stop people counterfeiting, as soon as you've got paper money and people can just get a printing press and produce paper money, you need some kind of security apparatus that hangs forges and makes counterfeiting illegal and checks to see whether it's been

forged or not, and that obviously is this transcendent element. And again, I mean, I know this is pushing the whole thing to an extreme, but it's pushing it to an extreme in order to try and really hold on to how philosophically radical this notion of the substance being on the moon. body has some kind of element that will be this trusted third party to deal with these viral problems. And I think we can see that it's these particular, you know, everyone said about HIV, the most extraordinarily insidious element of this virus is that it attacks the T cells that are supposed to be the trusted party that decides whether you're virally infected.

It's like you have a whole transcendent apparatus of control, of immunity that's deciding what is and is not an acceptable code transmission within your body and they obviously let you, because they are as you say, everything is in it. So of course they can be hacked and subverted and you can virally infect the immune system that is supposed to be protected against that, but you still have what is functionally a trusted third party between the transactions that are even happening between your cells. You have to because if you just... Sorry. No, well it's just if you don't have that you get double spending to death even as an

that even before language. As soon as you've got a code, if it can just be replicated for free and therefore exploit the benefits, this is the surface value of code for all of the learners. It's like as soon as you've got DNA, something can just ride on that code because code is cheap and what the code is doing is expensive. Cool, yeah I'll let you know. So the invocation of a trusted third party to mediate in these manners is the transcendent of context and Bitcoin is the best thing that completely present. Definitely, I mean that's an absolute anchor point in this. The trusted third party, I mean the great thing about this paper is that it's so consistent with this, you know it's

absolutely clear, it's just as consistent as the Kantian usage of metaphysics, the Satoshi Nakamoto usage of trusted third party is an absolutely clear vision of what this element to be subtracted by Bitcoin as monetary fatigue. Any other questions? I have... Okay, go ahead.

Me? Okay. Yes. Yeah, I had another question. I guess it relates to what we were talking about before and to the problem that I was spending. So, does it come down to, I don't know, perhaps the relation between trust and belief because, Because Bitcoin started to acquire value and became a currency after Netomotos paper, but because people started to use it. The moment Bitcoin started to acquire value is when someone sent 10,000 Bitcoin to the the ocean or the Atlantic to buy a pizza to someone or something like that.

So the fact that Bitcoin doesn't require trust implies some sort of underlying belief in the system? I don't know, is this some sort of theological almost? I mean, I guess, I don't know, I'm still thinking about, for instance, the Bitcoin and also the double spending problem is EVA transaction doesn't appear on the blockchain it means that it doesn't exist, right? So you have to believe that that is true. No, well I'm not sure about this. I don't know. I would be reluctant to make this move because I think the issue you're getting to definitely

is something very real if you come at it from the other side. But if you come at it directly from the side at stake here, I don't think it's right. Because the point is, what Bitcoin tells you is beyond any... Belief and trust are on the same side of the equation, and Bitcoin is on the other side. It's like all the solution to the double spending problem tells you is that this Bitcoin or part of a Bitcoin has not been spent twice. If I give you a Bitcoin, you have one of the world's 21 million Bitcoin.

It's immediately taken from my Bitcoin account, put into your Bitcoin account. of that requires any belief or trust. It's simply that's what the blockchain does. It makes it impossible for you, for me to give you a Bitcoin and then also give the same Bitcoin to someone else or in some way to devalue the fact that you now have a 1 21 millionth part of the world Bitcoin stock or whatever it happens to me. I think we're on 14 million or something. So I think there's no belief needed or no trust. Now, of course, if you then say, well, what in the hell is the point of a 21 millionth of this completely virtual, abstract,

zero-trust currency system worth? Why should I believe it has any value? Then, of course, you're right. I mean, you know, Bitcoin doesn't tell you any reason. What it tells you absolutely stops at the point when it says you have one bitcoin and it's worth a bitcoin because there's not another one being copied of it. That's it. That's the complete limit of its message. So I think the point is we have to separate these two issues out and the one that you're now bringing to the table about what is a Bitcoin actually worth, what is it worth to have this thing that we know has not been double spent and that's all we know about

it. It's left completely open, there's nothing in the system that's going to tell you that or pretends to tell you. But for instance, I don't know, say the value of Bitcoin against the dollar or any other fiat currency, there is some kind of underlying belief in there, which obviously depends on the market and whatever. I'm sure there are, totally there are beliefs brought to bear, all kinds of beliefs, but They are not imminent to the Bitcoin system. They are being brought in from outside.

Bitcoin makes no promises about what it's worth in relation to the dollar or two. The market will then play that out and everyone has their own beliefs and expectations and forecasts and everything that will come into play. Thanks. So the point being, Bitcoin is not representational at all? No, I think that's fair. I mean, I think all this semiotic language needs to be processed in the course of this, because I think it is an absolute revolutionary event in the history of signs, and it's deeply unsettling for everything that we think we know about the way signs work, what a sign is or all of this stuff.

So I'm continuously drawn into a kind of language of semiotics, and at the same time, I'm aware that all of these terms have been unsettled fundamentally and need to be really resettled within this new ecology. But I would certainly, in first instance, be totally happy with what you say. I don't think Bitcoin, all that Bitcoin represents is simply what is completely this open secret of the Bitcoin protocol that this thing is a secure 21 millionth of the total stockpile of Bitcoins that will ever exist on the planet. And that is the content.

There's no other intrinsic meaning to it whatsoever. How do we, I mean we're basically over reviewing I guess the entire other seven sessions because all the questions kind of like will at some point be taken up or deemed unnecessary or something right? But the limit to Bitcoin and then its own reference to the old pricing system which is funny because as you know Bitcoin has its own, Bitcoin is a pricing system but itself has a price in the old human-based phenomenological, like I'm using phenomenological, but I'm using your metaphor, right? So the fact that Bitcoin is limited, what kind of relationship Bitcoin has with this

loop, there's a loop there. Sure. Yes. Totally. I mean, this is something, this is another one of these big 50-point list, several-hour things that we need to talk about. But obviously as a cybernetic phenomenon, Bitcoin is absolutely fascinating. And I'm going to add a link for people to look at for next time, which I think is very suggestive and interesting. In fact, maybe I could just read one little, tiny little quote from there. It's a kind of, one of the things I like about this whole area is lots of kind of slight pieces that have no philosophical pretension, and in some ways are even quite almost deliberately superficial but actually latch onto something at real gravity.

And this, I think, is one of these examples. And it's from, there's actually a site called philosophyofbitcoin.com I found out today. And this is from a post called Bitcoin Store of Value Paradox. Now I just want to stop on one point because paradox immediately obviously gets me super excited because paradox in my mind is just a word for cybernetics. I mean, I think when people talk about paradoxes, they're talking about cybernetics in a sort of naive way, perhaps, or the opposite. So anyway, this piece says, ultimately, the only thing that matters in people's decision to use bitcoins as a medium of exchange is their expectations that enough other people

will accept it as payment in the future. That alone is enough basis for people to buy bitcoins now and invest in the bitcoin infrastructure The circularity involved in the argument is unmistakable, but unavoidable and, according to the Bitcoin enthusiast, unproblematic. That's just the thing about a good that is used as money or is expected to be used as money in the future. People value the good because they think that enough other people will value it. The circularity is just the network effect in action. Now obviously network effects which we all come across a lot, they're really important in this whole discussion. the discussion that we've just been having, you know, starting with Laura's point about why are Bitcoins actually worth anything?

You know, we can see why you can't be cheated, but why are you not being cheated about anything important? And then you're already in this question, exactly as this quote says, of his network effects. Because if money is of value as a medium of exchange, it's valuable precisely insofar as other people find it value. and if it's useful to other people's useful to you this is how network effects obviously work there's no foundation there's no there's no ground to it at all at this level except the fact that it has a particular cybernetic profile to it one in which of this spiraling sense the more people find it useful the more useful it is and the more people you find it useful obviously this can go in theory in either direction

You could have the same kind of cybernetic loop of disinvestment in a medium of exchange as you can have as a positive investment. Sorry Mo, I feel I've slightly lost your problem, but also this was meant to directly address. What I'm trying to say is that the next step after the more people use it is that the more valuable it gets based on its own price within the classic prices, right? Well, this is of the three really essential uses of money that will be conducting.

has to store a value, a medium of exchange and a unit of account. And this third thing is where we are now, isn't it? There's a unit of account, that's to say it's being used as a way of calibrating values between different value systems. And obviously because of the world we're in, the existing currencies have an overwhelming dominance in that area. I mean, if you're not trans... I mean, I'm sure I'm not untypical in that I just translate everything into US dollars all the time because it's just the global dominant unit of account. And this is obviously what Bitcoin is challenging in

an interesting way, in a historical processual way. It's not challenging instantly. Anyone who tells you why aren't you at this moment thinking of all values in terms of bitcoins rather than US dollars is even, I mean I'm an enthusiast but that is fanatical, it has to be said. But ultimately it's intrinsic in bitcoin that there's nothing to prevent it in theory being a substitute unit of account. And if you think it's better money, if you think that actually it captures the essence of what a monetary system should be better than the politicized fiat paper money system

that is currently dominant, then I think implicit in that is the notion that ultimately it will become the dominant unit of account. So I think that what you're pointing to there is this very turbulent transitional issue. You know, a transitional phase, no one can see how long it can last or whether we're just going even in one direction. But for sure there's an implicit question about if you're saying this amount of dollars equals this amount of bitcoins, you have these very different potentials being sort of mutually weighed against each other.

You know, and you can look at it both ways. You can say, oh, the US dollar hasn't yet collapsed to the point that I'm stopping to, that I've ceased to value it in bitcoins. I will still, I'm still prepared to part with bitcoins for a certain quantity of US So now people have clearly seen that as something that's a finite historical phase. There's this notion we'll definitely get to called hyper-Bitcoinization. That is the model of transition out of existing fiat currencies to a dominant Bitcoin system, which from the point of existing currencies looks like hyperinflation,

where looks like what sorry hyperinflation hyperinflation is a very specific form of hyperinflation and the guy who's done the most to promote this idea is a guy called Daniel Kravitz I don't know whether I'm sure he must be on my list of interesting guys to read if not I'll certainly make sure he is. Actually I was gonna suggest that if the number of Bitcoins are limited, people increasingly use Bitcoin and that will increase the price, the dollar price of Bitcoin. What we actually have in fact is that if you ever move away from dollar into Bitcoin economy,

things will increasingly become deeper in Bitcoin. But Bitcoin itself is becoming more... like value assertive right yes on that trend what happens is the value of Bitcoin against everything rises but against these currencies that are undergoing this catastrophic hyper Bitcoinization process it simply becomes it reaches a point when no one with bitcoins is even interested in considering exchanging them for these dying currencies. And at that point, that's what this hyper-Bitcoinization process is, is that you go back to Weimar Germany,

you've got your wheelbarrows of US dollars saying, please can someone give me a fraction of a Bitcoin for this stuff? And everyone is saying, what is that? No one's interested in that stuff anymore. It's useless. Tomorrow it will be worth half what it is now. You really think I want to take on the trouble of trying to dump a wheelbarrow of dying dollar bills onto someone else. It's more trouble than it's worth. Now I'm not at all saying that this is a model of the future that people should uncritically adopt as inevitable. But I think it's directly addressing your point there for sure.

Thank you very much, very interesting. I had a quick question, Nick. I could probably read a little more about this, but I was wondering if Bitcoin laundering is possible or going on, because it seems like a very transparent circuitry. you would think even if you created artificial accounts, you could trace it back to the original owner. Right. Yeah, yeah. Is that an issue? A huge, fascinating issue, yes, definitely. Because I think when it was launched, it was, and in fact this is one thing that I think is extremely, if I was going to find a point with this bitcoin paper that I'm honestly tempted to treat it as a kind of gospel thing, but if I really wanted to pick at it, you've

pointed to exactly the right place. Because the rhetoric is, even by Satoshi Nakamoto himself, in the early stages, was that this was, for all intents and purposes, a fully anonymous type of money. And of course he calls it cash, the title, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system and and and the meaning of cash is that it's absolutely anonymous you know you could take cash from one person to another completely untraceable if it is traceable it's not cash now as you say that's an extremely stretched claim given every transaction that happens is publicly recorded for inspection by anybody

on the ledger. Now of course, the response is that on its own, not going to catch Satoshi Nakamoto. He's going to say, well, I know that account A passed to account X a certain amount of bitcoins, but what account A and what account X are in real life are completely hidden. And then from there you get into quite complicated technical questions about how you actually then go to identify particular Bitcoin accounts and their transactions with real life economic agents. But it's certainly possible to go much further in that process

than a naive sort of crypto libertarian reading of this initial paper would suggest that once you're in Bitcoin everything you do is completely safe. The only thing that I'd say on the other side is that the fact that you have had things like the Silk Road and these online black markets using Bitcoin and engaging in absolutely standardised transactions in illegal substances and all of these other criminal activities shows that actually from the functional point of view it does an okay job generally. Maybe it's below a certain scale of economic activity, you're safe, but it certainly,

that historical record suggests that there's certainly nuance to this discussion. you can clearly treat it as cash to a considerable extent, but nothing like the extent that a naive take-up of the project will reject. Yeah, thank you. It's very interesting. I had a couple questions I had written on the side there. One was just with regards to Bruno Latour's actor network theory, when I think Mo suggested it's a non-representational currency, and it made me think about how in Ant's actor network theory, Latour talks about wanting to avoid using vocabulary of semiotics and to stop talking about meaning altogether in some sense.

I was wondering, active network theory, it's pretty easy to criticize, I think, and it's also very problematic if you think of it as a kind of grand narrative, everything is a network. But maybe with Bitcoin, it might be a particularly good model in some sense. So just as a question, is it worth looking at his work in relation to Bitcoin, and have you done so? No, I would have to say it's not something that I have looked at at all. So I will take that as a task, at least on some superficial level of scraping that I will try and undertake. Cool. I have another thing to ask which is similar but it's not in relation to Latour, but in

to sort of Latourians like Harman and the whole like SR or all claims of is Bitcoin like Harman's object is completely is redrawing the world? Is that a good model to, because to me the problem with SR is that in rejecting correlation is that? And in rejecting phenomenology the way it does, it actually embraces it and wears it again. So basically like Peter Walford, I think that O is an intense but closeted form of phenomenology. So I call it closeted. So how do we make sure that this doesn't

be, what is the difference here with Bitcoin? Well, I'm having more trouble seeing what the connection is honestly because I mean there's nothing withdrawn at all in Bitcoin as far as I can see. I mean it's like totally, it's totally public, it's open source, the public ledger, I mean there's no claim to any kind of withdrawal, you know ontological withdrawal in this harm and sense at all if I can see. I mean everything is completely exposed and its relation to ontology seems to me is going going the other way around, that it's like anything that is put onto the Bitcoin, sorry I keep confusing those terms but they are confusing, anything that's put onto the blockchain

is given a criterion of trustless validation. So it's in a way impossible to withdraw something onto the blockchain. I mean, I just don't even know how you'd start trying to articulate them. So maybe this is kind of probably connected to the previous question. But at this point, I'm not seeing how they articulate at all these two issues. It seems to me that... Fair enough. I don't know. So one thing else to consider is that this is the first class and maybe some procedural

stuff in terms of assignments. Yes. And research can also be talked about. We're kind of getting close to the end of the class. You basically have about 25 minutes. JOHN MUELLER, Yes. I think, as I say, we have a resource that I'm afraid I just am only slowly working my way through this stuff. And I think everyone has this thing. Sorry, just give me one second. Yes, OK.

So it's this Google Classroom thing that I was talking to Tony about it. He says it's basically, I asked for a blog. I thought we could all just like basically use that as a forum for interchange. I can suggest a agenda for the class. And Tony says that this is fine. This thing will do all of that stuff. We can chat on it. We can post content. I want to finally get people to do their assignments in that format. So I will definitely, I promise everybody, get my head around that thing. And as we proceed, hopefully that will become a kind of efficient way of setting an agenda

for this thing. But I would say for next week, and in the absence of any fascinating eruptions taking place on that Google teacher or whatever it's called thing, that we should... there's stuff people can suggest now and there's actually working our way through this Satoshi Nakamoto thing. And I think if people are kind of reading this and just underlining where they think, starting from the beginning, the crucial points of discussion and the problems and the points of interest are in this paper.

I think that will provide some kind of framework of order because it does have a structure to it. As you get deeper into it, you will find that there are sections that look a little bit random and maybe only for computer scientists. Let me just, I think, starting with Section 7. It's only got, it's really short, it's only got a total of 12 sections including the conclusion. Section 7, reclaiming disk space. I mean, maybe there's a kind of level of nerdy computeriness here, which I would deeply appreciate, that will teach me why this section is one that we can dwell on philosophically for an hour. as I'm looking at it now probably that sort of section we can skip over quite fast but

the first few sections of the thing are just drenched saturated in absolutely fascinating philosophical depth and so I think if we aim to look at the first three or perhaps four sections of this paper next week that would be great. So let me just tell you the structure of it after the introduction, which is a fantastic bit of text. It's just two paragraphs, but it's very, very rich. And then the next three sections on transactions, this timestamp thing, which is incredibly short but extremely interesting. And then the section on proof of work takes you into the kind of nitty-gritty of the way

that Bitcoin works. So my inclination would be to try and get through that kind of material. I think if we got to the end of section three, we'd probably be doing okay, because as I said, it's been out. There's the course description in which you kind of like gave some sort of an idea of like what you expect people, like enrolled students to do. So if people want to take a quick look at the syllabus and the course description and ask questions from... that's got some sort of supplementary readings on and I'll definitely I'll

try I mean we've already sort of wandered off maybe we have or maybe we haven't I don't know whether how closely we stuck to the first one but but I will also treat this as a guideline that tries to restrict wild random digression So yeah, thanks for that. So I will make sure that everyone who's out of it, all the members who've shown interest to be in a class, and of course all the fully enrolled students are having access to the classroom, so everybody can participate. I will normally also copy and paste the sidebar conversation

here into the classroom. Every link in every conversation here can also be remembered that way. Great. And I'll look through this sidebar, which as I say, I haven't really been able to focus on. So I'll definitely take all these remarks seriously. I'll paste them there in the classroom, too, so you can look at them later there. I just lost another in the beginning, because I was kicked out of the room, and then I came back. So the first little part of it I don't have. If somebody has, maybe they can add it as a comment to my post to the classroom, which will be the rest of the conversation here on the sidebar. JOHN MUELLER Oh, sorry, am I rushing to...

No, no, that's okay. If there isn't a question, we always do this. We save the time for another session where there are conversations and questions. Yes, no, I apologize. I thought I was being gently nudged out of the room rather than fleeing the room prematurely. So I'm in no hurry to stop if people have anything to do. So guys, we basically have about 10, 15 minutes, 20 minutes maximum. If you have any questions for Nick, or we can save this time for later sessions. Up to you. If you have a question, unmute yourself and join the conversation. Yeah, as much as we can.

Oh, sorry. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Yeah, sorry, I had a quick question. Just maybe for next week. Is there any theory you'd suggest for adequate tools for looking at temporality in a blockchain that is sort of coming from outside of Nakamoto? Actually, I haven't yet come across this because I mean I'd be very happy to be proved wrong about this and as I say I only actually stumbled upon this website that is called

Bitcoin and Philosophy today but it's not philosophy in a particularly intense understanding of that word as I'm yet seeing. I mean, I've only had a chance to scratch the surface of it. So I don't think this stuff yet exists. But I would be thrilled to be proved wrong about that. I think we have to do that ourselves, because I think that the whole way that the Nakamoto paper articulates itself is very down to earth, it's very understated, it's very technical and is trying to just solve this problem in software.

So I think we're hanging out and doing it for us. My question is, in regards to this, anybody thinks that Sohail Malik's piece in Collapse 8 is useful or anything from collapse 8 could be brought into discussion or like as a sort of precursor text or because Sohail's piece particularly deals with the kind of temporality that derivatives bring with them into the picture. So I thought maybe that's a good response to Patrick's question.

Yes, I mean I think this is going back to what I think maybe was your first question Mo? Yes. And there is this constellation of discourses around there and I think that Eliyash is obviously really crucial to that whole discussion and I think it's going to, I'm not saying it's not worth making that connection, but it's going to be work to make that connection because The financial, the way that concretely Bitcoin works as a financial instrument is still so unclear to people. There's no one doing, I mean, okay we did have Ryan actually saying that he was doing

various types of currency trade, cross currency trading with it and I'm hoping we're going to see more about that. But I think everyone would agree it's vastly underdeveloped compared to these extremely hyper sophisticated financial tools that we're seeing in existing fiat currency systems. And so we already know that absolutely fundamental pillars of the existing financial system simply does not translate into Bitcoin. You cannot, you know, you need, the very fact that you need 100% currency reserves with Bitcoin to do anything, you know, you cannot, a whole system of debt based financial activity

is simply impossible. If I owe you Bitcoins, then that is something happening outside the Bitcoin system. As far as the Bitcoin system itself is concerned, either I have the Bitcoins in my account or I pass them to your account, end of story. So you can do weird financial manipulation on Bitcoin from outside, but what Bitcoin itself allows is extremely obscure at this point. Thank you. I'm sort of making hypothetical questions, also being the devil's advocate, but really trying to sort of like see maybe somebody wants as part of their project or research take up this work of comparing and contrasting these two different types of temporality that

come with derivatives which are fiat currency based and Bitcoin which is sort of like you said works in a fundamentally different place. Yes, yes, I mean after having some time to just, I really think that the issues people have brought up in this session are absolutely fantastic, you know, and I think if we could just hopefully we will be able to compile them when everything comes together and we will see maybe, you know, I'm not predicting, you know, eight absolutely core fundamental questions that people have brought up here and we really need to try and find the time to delve into.

So I'm looking forward to getting a chance to just do some digestion on that for sure. Rachel, do you want to come in and talk about what you're typing on the side? Sure, yeah. I was involved with a group you may have heard of called the Robinhood Asset Management cooperative I don't know if people have heard of them and it's quite an interesting project and that they're they're working with cryptocurrencies so Bitcoin but also crypto equity and a sort of a hack of financialization so using the tools of financialization basically against itself so they're developing parasitic algorithms but they're also they're We're also looking at different kind of blockchain ways of incentivising people to join the asset management cooperative.

I mean I can't go into all the technical details now, but it's quite an interesting structure in a number of different ways. Because they're basically trying to find a way of using financial instruments, financialisation to support precarious workers or to support some kind of common fair. But what might be interesting to this discussion as well is that the cooperative, I suppose, is made up of activists, but then there's also a lot of philosophical discussion around that. So there's quite interesting discussions in Dublin a couple of months ago when the group were over around this idea of algorithmic governance, for example, of the parasitic nature of finance, and then also quite technical discussions of cryptocurrency and crypto equity, and all of which might be quite relevant.

So I'm just thinking aloud and I was thinking maybe some of the documents, if I can root things out that people have published or I have some kind of notes from that that they might be interesting just to people. That was all. Okay Nick, I muted you because you were echoing. So if you want to have the final remarks, we can maybe wrap it up. Hello? Yeah, my only final remark is to just thank everybody, and I hope that there is some sense of direction, however complex and turbulent. And if anyone has online resources of any kind that they think they want to share with

people and are relevant and want to bring up in these discussions and encourage people to look at, then that would be fantastic. And we have this space that I still need to explore to share this material, so please feel free to use that. And we can obviously engage in communication beyond the confines of this particular period. So thanks everybody so much for this session. Thanks, Nick.