Bitcoin and Philosophy (Session 3)

Hello, we're live. Hello and welcome to Nick Lanz Bitcoin and Philosophy session 3 of 8. Nick, you're on and you can take over. Okay, cool. So there's lots of treasure building up in our classroom thing, which I'm assuming people have seen. I've been trying to get a grip on what the most solid common themes coming out of that these various contributions people are making are and it seems to me

that one thing in different ways that lots of people want to talk about and I don't think there's any need to be self-denying about it, I think we can do that, is loops. It's a huge tangle that we get into when we do that because it immediately engages so many different issues and topics but people definitely are being carried there in different ways. One thing is obviously the interest in Ethereum which I notice is huge and part

of that of course is to do with the introduction of Turing complete systems onto the blockchain. Sometimes people use this distinction which again may be something people would want to come back to and discuss and question. Talking about first and second wave Bitcoin technologies with Ethereum classified as a second wave technology. As everyone knows, the Bitcoin system is deliberately averse to having Turing complete software on it for reasons that are

at least superficial extremely sensible so there's a one sort of wet way this question about loops comes in is to do with whether there is some kind of movement in that in the developing history of blockchain technology towards tolerating much more loopy reflexive recursive systems and then are and can be found in the early stage and then I'm sorry just one second and I it is I'm going to try myself in knots for some reason I expect that's

that's probably inevitable on this day I thought I thought we could a we could just kick off on this uh... yes sorry sorry i'll cut that's what i said which is which is the other way that this comes in a lot for people i noticed and amy's sort of long paragraph is one thing that talks about this very explicitly but it's not the only one this the young whole discussion about primer that came up a little bit last time and time travel movies and the way in which these issues to do with non-linearity arise in talking about time and what

so coming in more from our philosophical dimension of this of this course and so I thought one way to just start kind of a solidly with this is to look at two little tax one of them which is I think very remarkable interesting is there is the short little mail that and Satoshi Nakamoto put up to to announced Bitcoin in his own circle the one that starts is very short and it's just starts by saying I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer with no trusted

party all of it that the density that is already in those apparently very simple words something we've already looked at he then gives a URL which is the only other than the title is the only other time the word Bitcoin is actually used as part of that URL. And then he says the main properties, and there are five short sentences that outline his sense of what Bitcoin is about. And there's one way of looking at this that elicits a certain amount of sort of scepticism

or questioning. For instance, there's a question about whether there's a redundancy in this list, how even though it's very short, he starts off saying double spending is prevented with a peer-to-peer network, no MINT or other trusted parties. We already know that that second sentence is actually implicit in the first, if it's understood properly. Then he says participants can be anonymous, which is the most problematic of these sentences, and this is something we definitely will address clearly to do with the protection of anonymity within the system.

People say, I think very reasonably, that it's actually better described as being quasi-anonymous or pseudonymous rather than anonymous because anonymity is only protected by the fact that between the user and the wallet or account there is a gap that is actually something beyond the Bitcoin system itself. So Bitcoin itself does nothing at all to protect people's privacy other than allowing people not to declare their identities without wearing a mask. But I'm going to skip over that a little bit at this stage. Then he says new coins

are made from hash cash style proof of work. We know working through the Bitcoin paper that's a good description of the basic principles found in the first few sections of that paper. And then he says, the proof of work for new coin generation also powers the network to prevent double spending. And I think with this final sentence you can see that actually see that actually the way to read this whole thing is not as some kind of a logical table or set of categories, but as a loop. It actually begins and ends explicitly with the word,

the term double spending. So it closes upon itself like that. And the final sentence is itself a description of the loop inherent in the system in the sense that the network is itself powered by people's activity, their mining activity in particular, on the network. So it has a type of closure. So one of the issues that I think one termological access point into this whole question of loops is by probing notions of openness and closure in relation to Bitcoin.

I think they're both very suggestive terms that resonate very strongly with many different aspects of the Bitcoin system. So this short little note that when Bitcoin is being announced, it's announced actually as in the form of a loop, in the form of a circuit. This is also seen, perhaps not quite so clearly, in section 5 of the Bitcoin paper itself, which actually then runs through this set this time it has a slightly different direction because it's not talking about the properties of Bitcoin it's talking about the steps involved

in running the network and it gives six steps. And so this two is describing a loop. By the time that you run through this whole list, I think it's not necessary for me to do it, everyone has this text. But by the time you run through this loop you've completed a full cycle of the Bitcoin process. So what again is being described is a circuit. I'm just going to say at this point, if anyone wants to jump in at any point, don't be inhibited

about it. There's no, as befits a question of loops, there's no natural end point from my point of view. So I will tend to carry on rambling on this until people actually poke me. I'll say poke me in the eye, but I think that might be a little bit over melodramatic, my current appearance. So I think there's several lines that I'd like to sort of open up on this question about loops. And I think the first one, which I think people are...it picks up a little bit, especially

on what May was talking about last week, about how sophisticated is the notion of time that is implicit in the Bitcoin protocol. And as I say, one of the ways that people have responded to that question, and I think it's a very interesting way to do it, is again by introducing these notions to do with recursion and time looping and these kind of things. And I think So we have a very sort of helpful model in the history of science that allows us to put this on kind of much more solid ground than it otherwise might be.

Because obviously if we ask the question, well why were loops excluded from the Bitcoin protocol? it not encourage people in its script language to actually be able to have highly recursive software. There's a very sort of practical down to earth set of responses to that to do with viruses and non-terminating processes and then more exotic things to do with artificial intelligences with ambiguous motives cropping up on the Bitcoin and the sort of thing that I think everyone loves Vita Lick and the Ethereum thing precisely because he's so, from one perspective, so utterly reckless in respect to those sort of issues.

So there's that level. But there's another level that is to do with actually not scrambling time before it's even been introduced. The thing about if we look at these time travel movies, I think that Primer is a good example because it might be the greatest time travel movie ever made, is obviously strong non-linearity and time tends to be so utterly devastating of anything we could even mean by time that

to say we're going to set up an artificial temporality and its primary property will be strong non-linearity is a kind of self-defeating objective. It's certainly a kind of at least slightly insane objective. And as I say, I think that one very helpful way to think about this is by looking at the way temporal anomaly has actually been, has actually arisen concretely within the history of science. The sort of things that the time travel for eternity tend to like are not what I'm going to concentrate on. For instance, Gödel's very weird little

article defending the possibility of time travel based on his understanding of what was permitted by Einsteinian cosmology is interesting, but I think it isn't particularly germane to this thing. What I think is germane, and again, to be slightly repetitive, is a a very rich field, are notions to do with complexity and emergence and specifically with the notion of a convergent wave. Sorry, I'm just being slightly distracted by Jake's little thing. I think I'll have to look at that in a minute.

And the point about that stuff, which has actually really arisen in a solid way only in the era of computers, only in the second half of the 20th century, and more specifically towards the end, the final decades of the 20th century, is that it is stacked on a solid tradition that is based upon temporal linearity and particularly the arrow of time. It's when people try to understand how you could get a convergent wave, and let me just

say, I think it's an extremely helpful terminology. And a convergent wave is an anomalous temporal event. I think it's completely safe. People might want to slow me down on this, and there's definitely ways people could reasonably demand a certain level of pedantry about it. But I think it's extremely reasonable to say that a convergent wave is the scientific model of a teleological process, a process that seems to be goal-oriented.

And if we go and look at these very familiar descriptions about the arrow of time, and By the arrow of time, we're talking about a fork within the history of science where statistical mechanics peels away from classical mechanics. All classical equations are reversible. The Einsteinian notion of treating time as if it were a spatial dimension is very classical, despite the fact that obviously he's engaging with a warped geometry by classical standards.

But the notion that time is space-like, that it has no essential directionality, it has no arrow to that is something that you will obviously find in the earliest foundations of the physical sciences and all of Newton's equations are completely reversible. If you describe the motion of some body or have the exact mirror image description of the same set of physical equations you cannot tell what is the proper or natural way that that process should take place. They both seem equally plausible. So it's obviously only when driven partly by the technological requirements to deal

with steam engines and thermic technology, and this is obviously why we've inherited this original language of thermodynamics as being the basis of this tradition, that it It became necessary to seriously address the question of non-linearity. Not non-linearity, irreversibility, the arrow of time. And obviously this is sort of explained to people usually by these very simple models of a divergent wave. And the most simple one, and I think the most common one by far, is you're told about you

can drop an egg on the floor and it will shatter into pieces and splat over the floor and you can have a video of that event. And you have no doubt at all about whether you're running that video the right way around or not. That's to say for some reason you've got two versions of this video, they're both reversed with each other. As we've seen, for classical Newtonian mechanical systems, you would have no way to decide which of those videos was going backwards or forwards. They would both seem equally plausible. If all the planets were orbiting the Sun in the opposite direction, if you perfectly reversed

their trajectories and their courses through space there's no reason why one would look more natural or plausible than the other but if you have an egg coming together on the floor slowly undisintegrating itself smearing back together until it became a solid a even without the thing that lifting also sure into your hand you're completely clear about the fact that you're watching this thing the wrong way around so the arrow of time is something that is extremely intuitively obvious to people that sort of example now

the things get complicated obviously because then early in the second half the 19th century Biological science, even though it didn't begin with this language, or some question about this, but Darwin himself certainly was not attached to it, biology became fascinated by process that do look exactly like convergent waves. Sorry, if I didn't say, the smashing, splattering egg is a divergent wave. You want to say, well, what's a divergent wave? Splatter an egg.

That's what everything, you know, that is something following the trend of entropy looks like. When you then look at biological evolution, it seems to be concerned with convergent waves. You end up, you look at, you start off with something simple, diffuse, non-complex, and over the course of millions of years, it becomes more complex, more organized. obviously part of the whole thing is you get X I mean you know the egg that you drop on the floor has come from some there wasn't there were no eggs

at the beginning of the universe if you have an egg to drop on the floor that's come from somewhere and if splatching that egg is a mortal divergent way then having that egg in the first place a drop on the floor attests to a convergent wave, a wave that seems to go contrary to the basic trend of entropy as defined by obviously the second law of thermodynamics. And this is really already all the theories of complexity and emergence and all of these interests and the Santa Fe Institute is the place where this kind of research is most

focused. It is the study of convergent waves and obviously now this is where I'm trying to tie this back to these questions about time, time, time loops, the sophistication or crudity of models of time. Within the scientific tradition there is never any question that those convergent waves are embedded within more basic divergent waves. No one in the Santa Fe Institute or no scientist studying these processes is claiming that the second or then that then it dynamics has

holes in it that entropy is not the fundamental law that it had been taken as from very early in the nineteen century that claim is not being made no one is saying that time does not have an arrow it's rather that within certain local open systems the broader entropic tide tolerates regional anomalies. It tolerates a time process that seems to go against the basic grain of irreversible time.

time. Now I think the value of this is to say, well if we're looking at time in the context we're dealing with it here to do with the blockchain and to do with possible developments on the blockchain, I think that same stacking is absolutely crucial. That there is a foundational basic framing tensed directional time that is the foundation platform upon which anymore exotic looped anomalous time process

is going to be built you know just as when when you know looking at economies, other types of human social processes, forms of spontaneous order, biological systems, ecosystems, any of these complex self-organizing counter-entropic local phenomena no one is saying that we are dispensing with the foundation of irreversible entropic thermodynamic time it's quite the opposite that that that kind of temporality the arrow of time is the only thing that allows us to know that we're talking about time

at all in the first place and I think that that's the analogy is extremely strong in this case it's only because the fundamental architecture of the blockchain is not looping not anomalous is in some sense intolerant of convergent waves that it serves as a platform for any of these more weird and exotic time processes to emerge on top of it. Yes, I can see, I can see, the Trichogenes and Stengas thing of course is an

absolutely crucial landmark in this development for sure. I don't know, maybe I should just give people a moment if anyone wants to jump in because I don't want to totally get into monologue mode. So would you consider, in the sense that Bitcoin does not allow for fractional reserve banking or for that kind of futureward leveraging of assets for investment, for productive futurity over lending, is that something that you'd regard as a kind of destabilizing a causality, something that you wouldn't want, that it was a mistake to introduce into the basic

substrat of the currency and that Bitcoin that's an example of something Bitcoin doesn't do that would destabilize its linear causality in the sense that we thought a fractional reserve is another example or another modality of double spending right and yeah now that's an interesting question I have to think about what the terms of conversion are to this like obviously if I can just try to really simplify and then move up to your question on this. So section three of the Bitcoin paper, very short, I think it's just three sentences, which is where he introduces

a timestamp server. And obviously all of this actual machinery is coming together to do with hash functions, timestamps, the proof of work system is coming up in the next section. So this is the actual machinery that is producing the temporality of the Bitcoin protocol, of the implemented Bitcoin protocol. Now so if we're going to then talk about well what's the relationship between these complicated

possibilities of finance within the kind of advanced fiat system and we're going to then say those types of financial process have some kind of temporal implication for Bitcoin and there's lots of steps to that. I think it would be simply bizarre to say they don't have some complicated type of financial temporal implication, for sure, that would be crazy. But do they actually impinge at this level of the Bitcoin protocol? And it would have to be then we would think, well, what would the protocol have to be like

if it was going to allow uh... any i mean anything less than a hundred percent reserves i mean the reason we can't have even these basic financial mechanisms that we keep with me when you're still in that's in the m history of paper money banking most fundamentally is you cannot have anything other than a hundred percent stops you know you what your the amount of bitcoins you owner entitled to in terms of system are simply those in your wallet as soon as you move them out into someone else's account the youth move them that there's no credit process involved in that at all and there's no possibility for fractional fractional reserve

lending now icon off the top of my head imagine what type of what kind of modification we'd be talking if we were going to try to accommodate those processes. I mean, I'm just not really seeing yet what we're talking about in terms of the way the blockchain would function if it actually was to work as a credit system, as we understand it. Yeah, I mean, even before the issue of fractional reserves, is there even a mechanism to guarantee interest payments? Like, could you, I mean, if I had 100 bitcoins, I'm not talking about therefore being able to loan a thousand of them out, 900 or whatever, but even just to loan my 100 Bitcoins, I mean, am I wrong,

or would that just be a handshake contract? You've got no way that's as automatic as the network itself or as the blockchain. No, I think you're totally right about that. I think it's part of the sort of radicality of it, however people take this positively or negatively, is that it just simply is intolerant of credit in general it doesn't understand credit there's no space for credit at all in the system so anything involving that anything involving lending lending bitcoins has to be added as some extraneous element outside the blockchain and therefore sup I'm assuming you would just still be dependent upon traditional

third party guarantors and traditional financial institutions to organize and protect those kind of transactions. It's not something that the blockchain or the Bitcoin protocol will protect at all. As far as the protocol is concerned, if you said, lend me 100 bitcoins and I sent you hundred bitcoins you now have a hundred bitcoins I don't have those hundred bitcoins anything else like you say is a is a handshake around the back of the system it's outside the system it doesn't you know which is where a theory and comes in yes yes and obviously then all of those systems of which a theorem is

by far the most developed, conceptually at least, to do with treating the blockchain as something that's supporting contracts of any kind. So there's this higher level of abstraction involved where you have a contractual system based on the blockchain in which obviously a currency system would just be one particular species of contractual relationship that people would enter into. I also wanted to mention regarding the time thing and the linearity of time, it's not just a Bitcoin thing, it's throughout all of computation, even down to individual components,

and very linear time is an essential demarcator for any sort of operation of complex operations. So I like the idea that, yes, although it's sexy to speak of nonlinear processes and stuff, actually there is some need for some sort of background metronome to enable complex things to take place. So that's possibly why today few people can actually fully comprehend what's actually going on in very complex and exotic derivatives trading. And to be honest, no one quite fully understands what is happening. So it seems like a positive thing. Sorry, I missed the last sentence.

It seems like this limitation to linear time and non-recursion or very limited forms of recursion is a useful thing as a bedrock, by the way. Yes. And it's probably as good a bedrock as we'll get after gold to an extent. Yes. It's almost as if there's one thing we can all agree on, it's time. Yes, definitely. I mean, it's foundational, isn't it? So like you say, any kind of instantiation of a virtual Turing machine, a universal Turing

machine, must necessarily support any kind of recursive, non-linear program imaginable. but as you say the foundation of that is the fact that there is at the bottom level of the machine there's extremely rigid linearity of time. I mean obviously in Turing's own model it's literally a tape a single dimensional tape being moved backwards and forwards in the machine so there's the same pattern of there being the exotic has a foundation that if you try to build the exotic into the foundation it's not exotic anything it's just in a way you're

collapsing the possibility of actually buildings anything at all by simply I'm the VCR is going to eat your tape yes yeah I also posted on the classroom, it was in response to Laura's research topic and the problem with the operationalizing of Bitcoin and the Mt. Gox and various heists that have happened. Yeah. I work in security and even in a general context what causes there to be more instances of trolling and bad behavior online is the cheap cost of the new identity.

Right. It's often what prevents people in society from behaving badly is the reputational cost. All businesses formed off reputation. So it's very interesting to, that article out I posted on the possibility of a pseudonymous but nonetheless a pseudonymous identity that is almost impossible or has a very high cost of recreating another one is what would then limit the sort of behavior that seems to happen in Bitcoin that doesn't happen in the world. Well, yeah, it's an interesting thing. Nick Schabo has written a really interesting article that I'll put up on the board if people

haven't seen it. I must just recall which one it is. I think it's his one about smart contracts, where he actually enumerates a whole range these different virtual identities and their different functions and of course for some of them reputational accumulation is absolutely crucial and for others not but obviously the Bitcoin mechanism itself has a totally different way of dealing with these things which is to say rather than having some reputational identity that therefore on that basis will not behave badly it aims instead to make bad behavior

simply impossible now obviously defines bad behavior extremely narrowly and ok almost entirely in terms of double-spending so rather than say you know I won't cheat you because then I would be known as a cheat and that would have damaging repercussions the Bitcoin protocol at the bottom level simply says you cannot cheat. It's actually technically impossible for you to cheat. And the ways in which cheating might be possible are so, again, so exotic. They involve, you know, we're back to this 51% attack notions and even that obviously is something that is supposedly solved, at least in a game theoretical way, in the paper already. So if you look

examples you give about these bad behaviors, they all actually happen just beyond the edge of the Bitcoin protocol itself. In these exchanges, in various kind of mediating institutions that have appended themselves to the Bitcoin system, but are not themselves tightly controlled by the protocol and therefore are still capable of these things. You know, Mt. Gox and these places were basically telling people, we will look after your Bitcoin. It wasn't a credit system in a straightforward sense, but it was certainly people entrusting their coins to this institution. I guess that is one of the problems with Bitcoin is you have, it's not anonymous, so unlike

cash it's not anonymous. However, like cash, if you lose it there's no way to stake a claim of ownership to Bitcoins that were once was. And that happens, that happens often as well. Yes, yes that is a problem. There are all kinds of problems of this kind, it's definitely true. And they are the sort of problems that obviously if one broadens it and generalizes have been the motivation for the production of these trusted third party institutions in the first place. you know that the police police systems systems of restitution all of these kind of mechanisms uh... that uh... will after something bad has happened well either they will try externally to

prevent something that happens to you to shrapnel dd deterrence policing activity or after something bad has happened they will ensure some kind of restitution more or supplementary justice is applied to the system. And again, Nick Schabo is really helpful on this, where he says there are just two basic models for this. And he calls them proactive and reactive security. So that's reactive security. It's basically a set of institutions that will allow that something could go wrong and will then respond to it in order to try to remedy the situation. Proactive security is a system which is, Bitcoin is like this and all of

these models are like this, where you simply are unable initially to have those forms of bad behaviour or cheating or defection, if you're going to put it in game theoretic terms, happening at all. And they always involve some kind of mechanization. It's a formalization at the level of codes and signs, but it's a mechanization in terms of some infrastructure that simply will only permit certain types of things to happen. He even gives an example I'll all I am so if you want to make those machines you know we just put a coin in and

get a can of soda or get some chocolate or whatever it is that the actual mechanism is supposed to be proactively secure so yes they probably a sure ways cheating those things but the mechanism is supposed to well than you you cheat your way into a soda and and the cops a lot and get you to put it back in the machine it just is impossible to get the soda unless you actually go along with the mechanical procedure that is incarnated in the mechanism. I guess I would be interesting in in that paper if you didn't put in the classroom I guess that's led some people to sort of lazily say see this is why kids we need trusted third parties I know a friend who won

twenty thousand dollars bit Mt. Gox and then it was just lazily said see why you need trusted third parties and it also ties into the notion of privacy and if there was ever to be an imagined a sort of ultra high scale form of cooperation which does not involve trusted third parties. How would people behave if there was no real privacy on the network or no secrecy at all and how would when reputational costs are paramount and it's not just about doing as as they've mentioned, you know, a drug trade in Silk Road, but actually that transaction, your digital signature follows you across every dealing that you do in all sorts of security contexts online,

then it would be interesting to speculate on how behaviour would then be minus enforcement and minus these reactive enforcement mechanisms if there were zero private. Yeah. total transparency. I mean, this is obviously something people have explored, haven't they, as being something that it's a quite separate line, but I think you're totally right to say it intersects this topic definitely. And obviously within the Bitcoin system itself it is like that. There's zero secrecy.

there's zero privacy in terms of any account its behavior will be perfectly publicly I transparent to everyone there's no way that an account once it's actually in the system do something that doesn't just then get registered on the on the blockchain and be can exactly traced in it sent money to this other account at this time and this was the sum all done its previous behaviors been xy and said all of that is totally transparent and I think it's it's really a not dealt with it in much depth in in Bitcoin paper this issue it's like I'm as a kind of it's not that it says anything that isn't

isn't right but it doesn't explore this because this is something that sorta is by definition right on the edge the system and I think it is a it's exactly a question masks you know like a masked a just like a mosque or you know that that within the system there are a set of masks and those masks that behaviors totally public and the person with the owl head does X Y and Z and everyone can see that and within us kind of micro history that's taking place totally within that system, Owlhead could no doubt develop a reputation. It's not

very relevant in Bitcoin because Owlhead can't do anything bad but you can see exactly what Owlhead does and it's totally clear but who is Owlhead? Then this is when Satoshi Nakamoto then says, well, it's the system protects anonymity, meaning that you don't have to ever say that you are owlhead. Or who owlhead really is, is something completely extrinsic to the system. And it's only that that offers you any secrecy or privacy at all. and but the young but your mask is good

he the public completely exposed completely and has no possibility of covert activity or even private activity car car private deals with I'll our head I mean everyone can see what I'll had him our head are doing together in the system even though they don't know why just them actually are But by that very token, I mean, it's not just owl head, it's like 1 through N owl heads. And each owl head, the moment he can be one transaction, then you can throw that mask away and you can develop a new one as easily as multiplying two primes. Sure. So the ability for covert action by an actual operator as opposed to an operator's alias is hardly even impinged upon.

you know, to make that kind of the point of this whole sort of blockchain passport, the Mt. Gox issue. Yeah, absolutely. And that's obviously what you're saying now is exactly the assumption that Satoshi Nakamoto has in the paper. You know, absolutely perfectly. He thinks it's so clear that what you're saying is true that it doesn't really need a detailed discussion or detailed... Right, beyond the scope of blockchains, yeah. Yeah. I had a question. What you said before, like the proactive security sort of having the general character of turning an external intervention

into a mechanism that exists in situ, is do you regard that as in general as a kind of transcendentalization in the sense of moving from a system that identifies an empirical result, you know, the enforcement of security, and some sort of transcendent function like the police, the military, whatever, to a mechanism that imposes itself as the condition of a situation unfolding empirically in the first place without appealing to something outside of it? Yes, I think so. I think that's absolutely right, yes. definitely definitely so at least in the case of security maybe as a hypothesis at least we could say that mechanization is in general a kind of transcendental move

yes I think so at least as we're understanding it now in mechanization as actually implementing procedures that then serve as a platform for behavior so those procedures are then put beyond negotiation by any activity that is happening within the system so obviously then the second move is then we can bring in loops again quite naturally and say well look if we've got a sufficiently complicated machine then there will be some kind of non-linearity that is tying the

processes happening within that system back to the actual foundations of the system but first of all I think that's what you're saying is absolutely right ok so can I ask a question yes of course it seems like what's emerging out of your first part of today is especially like it became more concrete with the example of of the Coke machine and then this last bit of conversation between you and Jake is that Bitcoin kind of like has its own like built in guarantor. So it does not need like how banking depends on state and police to guarantee it to make

sure nobody breaks into the Coke machine, right? Bitcoin has the state built into it in a form of technology that kind of like basically is like we don't need you to sort of like make sure that nobody cheats. The system, the Coke machine itself is like, I mean, if you can break the Coke machine, you're going to get to Coke. But it's built in a way that it does not need like a police next to the, a police next to the Coke machine, right? Right, or in a completely, completely different example. You know, the airstrike versus going through the process of getting to know Kurtz and healing at the end of Apocalypse Now. The airstrike is, I mean, almighty, almighty. It's the example par excellence of a transcendent intervention.

Comes down, boom. You know, rebel camp is gone. Whereas, you know, gaining Kurtz's trust, like meeting him halfway in terms of slowly becoming something like him and then having to fight him on his own terms, that is precisely the example of having to absorb the transcendental condition, you know, to enter the security cord, effectively, which his men create. Sorry, that just occurred to me. I feel like it was kind of an interesting example. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, if people feel there's time, there's a little potted history of modernity that I think is kind of relevant to this paradoxical, extremely succinct

narrativisation of some of this, which is taking off from the notion of teleology. Because I think it's an extremely fascinating key to a lot of things, this notion. And obviously it's a word in extremely bad repute. And I think the main reason for that, I mean there might be more recent reasons for it, but I think that fundamentally we're still inhabiting the world that was kind of built at the origins of the modern epoch. and obviously they were inheriting a scholastic

culture Catholic scholastic Aristotelian cultural framework in which teleology was extremely important and so the impulses that are most associated with with modernization ref with Reformation Christianity Protestantism and the birth of modern science from the very beginning they had no flag of kind of cultural high cultural significance more important than the refusal teleology like in in refusing teleology they are declaring themselves modern

and it's really worth going back to this original stage just to think what exactly is going on here because I think for one thing this two elements to it that are normally and we have inherited a situation where they're seen as being so far apart that they produce these vast philosophical conundrums to do with the mechanical on the one hand and the libertarian in its philosophical sense and to do with agency and free will and human action on the other side these things you know as late moderns we

we say well how can these things possibly be brought together but for early moderns they were absolutely born in the same moment of defiance of teleology and obviously I'm going to be very crude about this and fast and crude but if you think of the situation of people in the very early enlightenment late Renaissance wanting to engage in scientific and technological innovations without social scrutiny then the again the flag that you you do you raise for that

is anti-teleological it's to say that that there are no consensus social goals or social processes that can be accepted as axiomatic over the activities that we want to engage in and that therefore the the turn to mechanism away from teleology to mechanism is a refusal of interference. It's a especially obviously in the early stages a refusal of the notion that the church

as the kind of incarnated conscience of society has any legitimate authority over scientific and technological experimentation and innovation and in that in that moment obviously there's a certain radical liberalism and a radical mechanistic philosophy that are absolutely united together under this common thing about the refusing the legitimacy of social, moral and ecclesiastical intervention over what is taking place or what people want to do.

But the thing that I think makes this particularly interesting is that this tendency, this refusal of teleology, actually itself incarnates a teleological process far more stark, far more dramatic, far more conspicuous than anything that we have previously seen in history. you know, modernity, for the purpose of this little story, and as I say of course, simplified, modernity initiated as a defiance of the teleological mode

initiates a teleological process of vastly greater power and directionality than anything that had ever been seen before. You know, if you kind of compare the 1500 years before 1500 to the 500 years after, there's absolutely no question about which of those two epochs forces upon us some sense of there being this strong directionality, these trend lines, these growth patterns, these curves, all of which seem to indicate the operation of convergent waves of extreme power. And make all social theorists ask, well, what What is happening here?

Where is this going? What is this basic natural tendency and orientation? So it's just to say that I think that there is a kind of absolutely inescapable question of teleology embedded in the very notion of modernity. and it's embedded in this utterly paradoxical fashion that is both something that's been kinda abominated at the origin and something that is then illustrated with extraordinary concreteness in the actual process that then takes place and

can it be said that theology was grounded but but in a process of its grounding it became more became more or prevalent as it came down from the heavens yes I mean its its very interesting how you would define teleology in a way that really would be unacceptable if pushed you know the arrest senior definition is already that things will tend to the realization of their own nature as a final course and obviously again if we go back to the

beginning of the modern period that seems like extremely conservative thing and it looks as if we can reject very easily these notions about what the true nature something is what the harmonious organic society obviously associated with all these forces a Protestant rebellion with the ends the old regime and the the the mode of scholastic philosophizing and that these forces conservatism that are being contested I'm but if you just take it and this abstracted sense of things tending to realize their nature then I find it very hard to see what it is that people are really saying is I'll no acceptable

I mean isn't that exactly what all these complex exterior is a day isn't it what any social theorist trying to work out what basic it harry trends of modernity are on all of these investigations of I'm complex dynamics the dealing with exactly this problem I mean that did only difference being and this I think has strong relevance to the question of Bitcoin is that you in a position of relative humility about what the true nature of your teleological object really is. Rather than saying that we know the church is telling us in a very reliable way what the

what the true telos of the social order is you're saying instead what actually is this thing becoming what is emerging what kind of system is is a happening here and so the telos the actual singularity that is organizing the convergent wave of that particular phenomenon is an object of scientific investigation rather than object of kind of ecclesiastical proclamation or some other confident mode of anticipation. But other than that, it seems to me that nothing has been changed.

And in this way, I think that Bitcoin is an extremely powerful example of a teleological manifestation. I mean, it's like, it's so, so many people when they see it, you know, say, ah, this is what we have been waiting for. You know, this is actually realizing this trend, this wave that has been kind of coming together for centuries. We can now see what it was, what it was tending to.

you know this this thing which is a true network decentralized peer-to-peer transactional system this isn't this is what the whole system was always trying to do at its most fundamental level of teleological process and now we can we can see it and there's of course to say you can take all of that story and you can your ideological polarity is completely open and you can say look this is the this is the horror story that has been happening and we have to resist it we're seeing that this horrible thing that has been happening since the origins of capitalism and you know now this is

it and it has to be stopped or you can celebrate this thing as obviously lots of kind of a narco cat libertarian type students say look yes finally ever since certainly since the internet was born people have already been talking about this assuming it was gonna happen you know because it's so clearly what the trend has been about and so you know there's that ambiguity that political ambiguity is left open but I think to deny that you are looking at something with this profound teleological aspect to it is is to me hard to imagine. So sorry, just one more thing, which is the reason I set off

on this level thing right now is just to say, in terms of this whole Coke machine discussion and all of this kind of thing, is that you're really talking about, for their origin, something that could be called meccano-liberalization. You know, for us those two seem weirdly separate, but I think when they look at them within this kind of potted history of modernity, they're not at all. They are the same thing. You know, if you look at all the I'm hero stories of kinda Arden modernity in its early phase the burning of Giordano Bruno the the persecution of Galileo all of these kind of things that they are

one at the same time about the obstruction of a mechanistic analysis through social control exercised upon the individual and so there's a as a there's a liberal impulse towards escape from an isolation from that system of social oversight which I think is exactly what we're still seeing in this whole question about the parties I as absolutely the same thing with the emergence of this mechanistic mode of problem-solving and that you know for us as I say with read it it's it's hard not see there's a somehow

radically opposed but I think that that's an and mistake and within this larger T logical scheme there they are deeply entangled together I wonder if that's tied to around that the left's aversion to any sort of libertarian discourse of resisting structures. So it seems to me often it's a bit like when you discuss Christianity and you point to the horrors of imposing an idea on the world, such as a religious one, then the most typical apologetic is, yes, but that was not the correct Christianity.

and that often then comes up when you speak of say left projects of the 20th century. The response is no, but that wasn't the correct interpretation of the writings of the prophet. And I'm wondering as well if, and often then it comes down to questions of governance. So how these structures, these transcend, however human created structures are then governed. Right. And perhaps mechanistic governance is the only way that they can't be usurped for powerful purposes. So I'm just wondering if that's a vector of re-examining our notions of the necessity or not of structures and trusted third parties.

Yeah, sure. Yes. And algorithmic governance is obviously something deeply at the heart of this whole issue. for sure, which is massively politically charged precisely because it is an attempt to actually close, it's an attempt to produce a self-protective anti-political system closed against political intervention. I think this is what I was saying about the language of openness and closure and the way

they cut across Bitcoin. There's a certain way it's not unproblematic and it's not something that doesn't need to be pulled out and tweaked and probed and whatever, but there's a certain sense that what Bitcoin is trying to do, I would say what it does to some extent, is it produces a system that is commercially open and politically closed. And that, again from all positions on the political spectrum, is something that is extremely recognisable as a teleological trend of modernity. from a very early stage.

So that the immunization of a commercial commonwealth to political intervention is something that Bitcoin actually mechanizes and therefore, again, as the absolute twin of that, it has a kind of ultra-liberal aspect to that. But obviously from the left people will say, well, this project of depoliticization, we want a wider sense of politics in which that itself is seen as a very specific political project, which is to be aboard. And it obviously is

very reasonably said to be anti-democratic or anti-social. It has an extremely strong ideological affinity to it because it's basically saying that social institutions are systematically disempowered in their relation to private transactional activity. And there's a certain sense within Bitcoin where that happens absolutely. There's a finality to it. There's simply no way that events within the Bitcoin commercium are answerable to any kind of social concerns

whatsoever. So some will celebrate that and some will absolutely be horrified by it. We certainly... Yeah. No, sorry, you can't. No, no, I was agreeing with you basically and well, like you have mentioned, it's just a transactional thing so it does not need to mean that Bitcoin needs to rule every aspect but it's a curious, it's more the very technology of the blockchain which needs to, I think, be seen with a bit more openness from both sides of the spectrum. Because tracing even, tracing, it's funny how it's tracing even the conception of the

state across the spectrum. I wanted to ask, if I may, just a fairly basic question, I think. I am wondering, this touches on some of the things you were just saying, Nick, about when you were talking about the anti-democratic nature of perhaps of Bitcoin. And I was thinking with the mining video that we watched last week, I believe it's in China that there's a few mines and I'm sure there are multiple people around the world now that are accumulating a mass quantity of Bitcoins. It seems to be starting out in a manner which is pretty anti, I don't know, egalitarian

for lack of a better word, that there's already a huge imbalance where once all 21 million bitcoins are mined, somebody's already going to be at the top. And that's fine. I realize bitcoin is not a proposal that we're going to eliminate poverty or social inequality, socioeconomic inequality that is, but that seems a huge issue. Yeah. And it's, our conversations, our philosophical conversations I think aren't necessarily touching on that yet. I'm wondering is there anything that needs to be said about that? I don't know how to answer people when they ask me about it. It will be a huge question.

Absolutely without question. There's a huge spectrum on this question. On one position, maybe the spectrum isn't going to work and it has to become more multidimensional. but there are people I would say quite naive who simply a wanted to say there's no trade-off or difficult here at all and well at the same one in the same time say this is going to be the biggest redistribution wealth in history and it will all come out okay in the wash because the current system is so unequal or because there's something inherently

I'm not even sure what would be meant by this, but there's something inherently democratic in Bitcoin in the sense that anyone can do it. I'm not sure. It's a position that's a kind of weird, kind of left libertarian position. But on the other side, as you say, it seems quite clear that... Now, there was an article, I know what it was, it was the one that someone shared. Now, I'm not... Let me see. Sorry, one second.

OK, sorry, I won't waste time looking for this, but maybe you all saw it was posted up in the classroom, this Business Insider article about, which was basically saying the distribution of wealth implicit in Bitcoin is like off the charts. It's like North Korea. Oh yes, that one, yeah, I'll find it. Yes, I thought it was a really interesting starting point for this whole thing.

some of the responses it made were also quite interesting. Part of it is that, of course, if Bitcoin spreads and grows, it's not because it can muster any forces of social coercion on its side. The balance of power is completely the opposite. And very recently people were saying, well look, governments just aren't going to allow this thing to happen. I think we're hearing much less of that now. It seems that there's a much more complicated negotiation going on between these developments and established systems of political and financial power. But it's certainly not the case, I think, unless someone... It would seem to me to be an odd, fascinating, but nevertheless odd conspiracy theory to

think that the current powers that be were actually driving Bitcoin promotion in any way. So insofar as people are buying into Bitcoin, they're doing it as an option with the status quo at their backs. You know what I mean? It's like they're not suddenly being plunged into this new massively unequal world where maybe Satoshi Nakamoto has two million Bitcoins that's right waiting for them to be worth a million bucks each or something like that. It's rather that it's incrementally that people are deciding that they want to migrate from the existing fiat currency regimes into Bitcoin to some extent.

And so there's obviously, because it has to actually sell itself to suspicious users who already have a default status quo, inert option, which is just to stick with what they've got now, these sort of extreme inequality issues are probably going to have to be dealt with in the process of adoption. I mean, unless Bitcoin... People simply are not going to jump into a system where they think five people own half the Bitcoins in existence. I mean, that's going to act as a break on...

And I suspect, if you look at the price now, the whole world Bitcoin supply is worth a few billion dollars. I think under five billion dollars. I mean, I've lost track of the current value of exactly what that is. It's like kind of peanuts. I mean we know there are individuals worth multiples of that who could if they seriously wanted to just buy the whole world Bitcoin stock. Now why would they not do that? Because of course there's no chance if you buy 80% of the world's Bitcoins then the chance that they're ever going to be worth anything is thereby reduced.

So there's a complicated game theoretic thing. I mean I'm not getting sort of, as you can see, it's not a moral political point about inequality. It's just a cold game erratic thing that you have to necessarily deal with this distributional issue if you seriously want to optimize your chance of getting insanely rich through Bitcoin. There's a point of diminishing returns where you just buy into it so much that you're deterring other people and and you gonna you know just drive yourself into a cul-de-sac now I think working out exactly what what those curves look like and what kind of figures we put on it and you know how those games more concretely play out

is a complicated technical thing I don't know whether anyone has has tried to do that but it seems to me that's the terrain that this is getting us onto can I just say like I'm you know it's notable that people with a lot of money I'm you know this the Winklevoss twins there's and Jason's Horowitz and recent business this venture capitalists interested then not stacking up massive troops pic I mean they I'm sure some of them at doing okay that way but that but that just simply isn't a strategy that could make sense to them

and so their their way of investing in the success of Bitcoin is much more complicated than that and maybe they're investing in companies that are going to be operators in a in a Bitcoin oriented world or some some much more indirect path because because well I won't go on about this is a fascinating so I'm tempted to keep going on about it but I just I just say the two crucial axes of money as a store of value and a means of payment are in dynamic tension about this you know as a store of value Bitcoin is only going to have long-term value if it also succeeds as a means of payment.

And as a means of payment, you want wide distribution. You want lots of people to be using it. You want it to be flowing around, circulating, in order to actually develop critical mass such that it then becomes worth holding onto as a store of value. Right. And then by the same token, in order for it to be a good medium of exchange, you want it to have some kind of stable value, either in exchange for other currencies or for goods, and that is aided by people holding on to them. It stabilizes the value. And so it seems like, at least for the initial stages, there being a spillover adoption advantage. I've got a friend who bought Bitcoins, I guess it's like eight years ago now or something.

and as of 18 months ago, all of a sudden, he could buy a house. So there's an adoption advantage in terms of distribution and then also an incentive to hold on to them once you start seeing a value take off at all, and that stabilizes. I mean, well, putatively stabilizes, not during that $1,000 a coin period or whatever, but stabilizes the origins of the system. So you do have it working both ways. but what do you see a distributional crisis looking like? So say we're closer to 21 million now. I mean, is it a relatively political or a technical solution? I mean, I don't even know what a distributional dialogue would look like.

Well, I'm just being game theoretic about it. Like, say you are Mark Andresa. you could summon the capital to buy every Bitcoin in the world. That would be a distributional crisis. Bitcoin would then become Andreessen coin. It's like if you're promoting or in any way buying into this currency, all you're doing is helping Marc Andreessen become God Emperor of the Earth. That's not an attractive proposition, I guess, to most people. So you can see these big players who potentially have a lot of capital at their fingertips are engaging in very complicated calculations, I think, about what is an optimum Bitcoin holding for them.

you know if they've got faith in the currency they no doubt want to have a stockpile of them but they don't want to raise that stake to the point that it actually becomes you know to use your language take a distributional crisis that people actually say this is this is so maldistributed that it's simply not an attractive proposition as a circulatory medium. It seems that the common thread between these different global failure modes for Bitcoin are all based upon the ability to wield asymmetric resources from outside the system. So whether you have a 51% attack

and the deep states in principle going to carry that out, you've got something that doesn't currently exist which is computational asymmetry. You know, if you've just got the processing power to run faster than everybody else's, you know, ability to calculate the blockchain. Like the peripheral, I don't know if you've read that one yet. And then you've got, you know, capital asymmetry. So it's kind of an interesting case of, like, a general failure mode for this transcendental security where it's like sort of a material asymmetry in capital and processing power and network access. Yes, it is. But I think we then have to be careful about when we talk about it as a failure mode, how

hypothetical is that? Because as we've seen, like ultimately, what is so unique about Bitcoin is the fact that it is really technological and economic in such a state of absolute fusion. That this economic thinking in terms of incentives is built totally into it from the start. And so let's take these failure modes that you raised here. The second one we've already talked about in the sense that is it really a failure mode? Again leave aside the sort of more fundamental or more agonizing or however you want to put

it, moral political questions about Gini coefficients and inequality and concentrations of economic power. just shelf that for the moment and just simply look at it as a game involving self-interested economic agent already even with that completely amoral cynical profit maximizing type agency we can see that there are these counterbalancing tendencies in the sense that they themselves are restrained purely just by economic rationality from over-accumulating in in the system.

They have a tendency to relate to the currency itself. Yes, in the sense that what we've already talked about, the 51% attack is the same. It's very explicit already in the paper that Satoshi Nakamoto says, you know, this is a is a technological loophole is a technological frame we can see just in terms of computer science how it could be completely messed up by someone commands 51 percent of right computing power in the system but as an economic problem as a problem to do with games and incentives and rational self-interest it's not a failure mode at all because if you come on 51 percent the computing power in the system, you're producing more than half of all Bitcoins and

therefore you have the strongest incentives of anyone in the system to protect the integrity of the Bitcoin system. If you, the only agent that would be interested in sabotaging Bitcoin from that position of 51% advantage is someone who just has a, again, a transcendent, extrinsic motivation to destroy this. Diabolical evil? Yes, or you know, as we were talking about last time, you can imagine a state, you could imagine on a certain scenario that, let's just say, without wanting to pick on America, but just because it's the most powerful country in the world, that the political and financial interests in America say, what, it only is going to cost us two billion dollars to totally

wreck Bitcoin, that's a bargain in terms of the threat this poses to us. So those agents then would be operating in the system without economic optimisation within the system being an issue. Of course it would still be economic optimisation in a wider sense, but in terms of the system itself they would say, okay we're producing more than 0.1% of Bitcoins, but we are here just to wreck this thing because Bitcoin is going to destroy our whole social position and our established economic infrastructure. So what I'm saying here is just like when we say a failure mode, it's a failure mode from a certain technological optic. And of

technological optic and of course we're dealing with nerds here, we're dealing with computer people, I mean they're not taking that trivially or lightly in any way, it's very serious for them but it's a very incomplete or impartial sense of what a failure mode really looks like if it totally ignores the role that economic incentives would play in supporting and maintaining equilibrium in in the system it's really just one aspect to the series of transcendental conditions or criteria conditions but also manifest as incentives or incentive problems yeah yes I mean I think the real transcendental structure is not just a

technological structure its techno commercial structure and you it you can't its week you can't abstract out the commercial aspect and really see what it is that's being implemented. So do you see that as playing into this whole you know is it the blockchain or is it Bitcoin, what's the real innovation, can you separate the blockchain from the currency and then use it for other implementations, that whole sort of argument seems to be really big in the community right now? Absolutely, I think totally it is, totally yeah. And the article I recommend on this that of course is just coming from one side that by this character I'm assuming of course it must be a pseudonym who calls himself Joe Coyne

but he has the clearest response from from a certain position on this I think which is which is to say Bitcoin is the only thing that is actually building a blockchain and the whole that the whole thing is a technological and economic loop and if you think that you can therefore pull it apart and likes throw Bitcoin on the trash and keep the Bitcoin keep the blockchain you're not seeing that fundamental non-linearity you're not seeing the fact that this weaves together technological process economic incentives and that that entanglement is what Bitcoin is about.

So I think that's a crucial thing and absolutely I think it ties in with this debate, which is a fascinating debate and I'm not at all wanting to suggest that the other side of the debate lacks interesting points, although I suspect that some of their most interesting points are strategic. You know, I think there's a lot of reason. If you want to mainstream Bitcoin, it makes a lot of sense to make those arguments even insincerely. You know, the argument that there is this new infrastructural, unstoppable revolution happening that we're calling blockchain, and it just happens to be carried by Bitcoin in the same way

that ballpoint pens were carried by biro at a certain point. making that argument is a very good mainstreaming rhetorical strategy whether you really however sincere you are about it because I think that it diffuses a certain amount of resistance at an early stage. I guess I can't help thinking as well, back to that Delanda paper that Jason reminded me of and there is this real linking of yes, technological concerns to game theory and

optimization of incentives. However then there's many sort of newer or even not so new say Veblen and Bitstine and Nitzer which actually state that there is the ideal of the market as conceived by the libertarians is very different to what actually happens and the way it's happens and the way it's manipulated and the way price itself is a power, is a dynamic of power. So like you mentioned, the possibility of the US purchasing all the bitcoins, that would not at all seem something improbable if it would be gaining traction. I mean there is even a case to say that they bombed Libya because Libya was refusing to accept US dollars

for its oil. So while in the pure world of game theory all of those arguments stand, there is this really interesting notion of how actually markets operate and that very incestuous and perverse relationship that the state has to them, whether it is explicitly pro-market or not. yeah I mean I don't say about that I don't think that by widening that discussion in that way you're moving beyond game there I think you're just a more complex tangled yeah games you know I mean the state is a is a player games just the same and I know that agents in the state

and we have to get into complicated public choice type discuss about really who are the agents in the state what other their interest is a it would be naive in the extreme to think that the public pronouncements of the interests and identity the state as whatever servant the people the representation the people these these kind of convenient notions for PR purposes are very accurate descriptions at the real structures agency that dealing you know and so I would definitely totally support the I'm relevance of all those questions absolute yes

and I like what you mentioned that last paper you posted it is absolutely true you cannot separate Bitcoin from the blockchain a due to the incentives and the way it's actually built in I'm and it leads me to think of actually Tor the Tor anonymizing software and the way actually the US Navy was heavily involved in it and even how Snowden was involved in it and while you remove and the reasons for doing that was because they wanted secure communications but didn't want to be the only ones using it because the network signatures would be too obvious and yeah so the interest is how however back to algorithmic governance is the blockchain is a completely transparent and peer-to-peer mode of operation.

And it's very possible, hopefully, that people will take that very concept and repurpose something. For example, with Tor, there is manipulation of exit nodes. We know that. We know that the biggest exit nodes are actually run by secret service agencies. So yeah, while you can't just split out the blockchain from Bitcoin, I really hope that it will lead to new forms of absolutely transparent forms of paranoia never ends to an extent. Geeks are paranoid and they rightly so should be paranoid because even like the comparison of Silk Road, in the traditional world you go to your street dealer, you do the transaction

And if you do the transaction fine, you're probably in the clear. If you go down the Silk Road path, the paranoia, the speculative paranoia of this scenario never ends because has your computer been compromised? Has the address you used been compromised? Has the dealer you've used been compromised? So those levels of paranoia enter wholly new sort of cybernetic, nested layers. I wanted to ask something also or maybe make a comment which is even if Bitcoin does not become dominant monetary form. Is it possible to suggest that just with the kind of philosophical

shift it does in the way not only we understand what money is but how we understand the entire process of doubling and tripling and this loop that it will somehow if we end up with the explosion of fiat currency it would help us establish something else that is neither Bitcoin and nor gold standard but it's something new that is inspired by Bitcoin that will then be. That's where you will get to see the potentials of Bitcoin, not necessarily in the Bitcoin

itself, but what Bitcoin philosophically does to the idea of value, money, but also how we conceive of systems that will then replace fiat currency rather than just direct Bitcoin replacing it. yeah I mean I would need to really see what concretely was being suggested in terms of the you know if we're saying that this something beyond Bitcoin Bitcoin 2.0 what is it that the changed do you think that would would make it a superior Well, as you know, there's like a huge desire by libertarians, at least in U.S., if not elsewhere, to return to some form of solid gold standard in the economy.

This reverberates in all sorts of libertarian circles, all the way from New World Orderists, conspiracy theorists, Ron Paulers, and all sorts of people. right? I'm saying like, isn't it like, is it just coincidence that like Bitcoin will arrive right when this awareness of the problem of fiat money is kind of like popularizing in sort of like the layman terms and then I'm thinking of these two together, the combination of these two might produce something like if fiat currency really gets into like a huge trouble worldwide.

Right. Yes. yeah I mean I can definitely see see everything that you're saying there although and what I'm not seeing is what it is that wouldn't make Bitcoin the refuge that people would run to I mean just because one thing that comes up a lot in this we haven't said much about it I'm but is this whole notion network acts you know we or we could talk about first mover advantage or various various things like this that that the value that as you say Bitcoin changes our understanding of money and we've got a lot more to dig into that's for sure here. One of the things is that

as a medium of exchange as currency as a circulatory medium the value of a currency is completely nonlinear in the sense that it's based entirely upon how acceptable is to other people there's just no getting beyond that absolutely fundamental circuit I want it I will find it useful as the as a as a as a medium of exchange if I think lots other people also will find it useful as a system exchange and so it's open is fundamentally shaped by these virtuous and vicious circles if I thought it was becoming unacceptable as a medium of exchange and that would it undergo

I'll it would you and change a positive loop in it in a in a negative direction and and and it would become self-obliterating and and if I think that gradually more more people are finding a value then its value to me increases in its value to everybody increases and so these are just absolutely classic network effects. That is the fundamental starting point if we're talking about some other system because Bitcoin is open source, everything about it is publicly accessible, it has no secrets at this level at all. All it has is history. All it has is path dependency, network

effects cybernetic and phenomena these kind it just is the one that got my first and has red and has people know about and people accumulated and has a certain amount of investment in it so and any other replacement Bitcoin is now has that as the threshold obstacle you know why people when they do exhibit hostility to these altcoins, they say it's just nonsense. How could something, unless it was by an order of magnitude superior to Bitcoin replace Bitcoin, when what it is that's actually installed Bitcoin are these network effects. We know it's there, everyone has it already,

it's popular. You know, any replacement has none of that it's starting from zero has it would have to have some massive advantage that make people leave Bitcoin for this new currency so that's why I'm asking you know what is the special source that could be called upon by some post Bitcoin blockchain cryptocurrency that is going to actually make it succeed where Bitcoin doesn't. And can't be accomplished by some available means that you know either directly uses or is compatible with Bitcoin like side

chaining so it's not only provides some sort of new advantage or functionality but it's got it has to extract no advantage from doing that using the existing side chain or Bitcoin apparatus yeah do you get pretty high bar job yeah yeah it's exactly it's saying I'm you know in abstract the big the blockchain is a good idea but we want another blockchain and anyone could do that I mean the example that I was good I really do think will do this to some extent at some point on the line is is that is a Chinese a Chinese blockchain because as I say day it they absolutely have formal less you know they clone anything to go there and version of you cheap their own

the version of Twitter their own version of I ebay I mean every single one of these up kind of America and internet giants have all themselves ground through exactly the same kind of that work effects get half a Chinese clark and and so I do expect a Chinese alternative to Bitcoin just on the basis of that record but in general I certainly don't think that this possibility of some spontaneously in large on Western alternative to Bitcoin say hey use our blockchain lock blockchain we got now and I carried it would have to have some unbelievably

powerful promotional on and And I think like on Igor's point, this is kind of getting into sort of slightly dark territory, but I think there clearly is reason to believe that influential parts of the covert establishment have made their peace with Bitcoin. I think that there was a suspicious lack of vehement public political denunciation of Bitcoin and to me that suggests that like I think the Tor example is absolutely pertinent

I also find that very very helpful you know it's so obviously useful to to some very powerful interests in the current global system that it's it would be strange if hadn't been developed and people had not understood that it was now part of the landscape that could be very very valuably leveraged by then.

We have about half an hour or maybe 35 minutes left of the seminar. So since nobody is asking questions, I want to go back to the very beginning of the seminar

and talk about two different times of like time binding that you often see in science fiction that are kind of related but they are different. And I want to see if we can work them into the way we think of the arrow of time and the way you describe them, you describe arrow of time and what it means when we are trying to reconstitute it in terms of Bitcoin. And these two are, one example would be the example of like classic time machine situations

like say a movie like 12 Monkeys in which it's not that you reverse the splattering of the egg, but you reverse your own witnessing of it. Whereas you witness twice and three times the same egg being splattered without being able to intervene to stop it. Because the arrow of time is still going forward, right? But then it's you who are able to shift backward and see it one more time or two more times or three more times, right? It's still the same arrow of time going one direction, but it's you who are able to go back and see it again without being able to intervene.

The other one is sort of like the science fiction time bending, which is more sort of like a terminator effect, where you come from the future to the past to in fact rewrite the past for a particular future that you are desiring. So the future needs to pass to change the past and it is successful in doing so, which is similar to the first one I explained, but completely different in its outcome, right? So in a way, in the second example, not only you go back to see the egg, not only you go back before the egg is splattered. So rather than, again, the time is, like the mechanics

of how egg splatters does not change, but you're able to actually stop the egg from breaking in the first place or splattering in the first place. Yeah. Wait, so in the Angry Monkeys example, are you able to stop the egg from splattering or is that terminator only? Just so I clarify the distinction you're drawing, Mo. Like is the 12 monkeys, is that just you can say again? In the 12 monkey example, you're not able to stop the egg from splattering. But you learn about how egg got to the edge of the table for it to fall and break. So you're able to maybe clean the egg better.

the bits left over from the egg on the ground, by going back and seeing how the breaking of the egg unfolded, it can help you to try to clean up the mess on the floor or somehow like yeah, clean it all up, right? That's the whole 12-monkey thing, right? The way time travel and backwardness is working to that model of science fiction. Whereas in Terminator, we all know what's different about Terminator, right? And the way time bending unfolds in Terminator. Right. So, I mean, it's transmission of information back to the past, actual causality violation happens in Terminator, whereas in 12 Monkeys, I haven't seen that movie in a long time.

We're just talking about using iteration or looping to increase the efficiency of information extraction from the past. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. okay yes I mean yeah this is fascinating it's obviously difficult to push into without getting deep into time travel mechanics I mean yeah obviously on the other side these extreme science fiction ask models there's and real or I was a real time travel I mean all that in the sense that there are convergent white I think that's beyond any any doubt and the real convergent wave I'm

is equivalent to an action of the future upon the past I'm the two descriptions are absolutely identical and so as soon as you have a convergent way you have a time anomaly but as we were seeing if you if you build that step by step out of the history of statistical mechanics or thermodynamics you could you see that those time anomalies are like contained vortices within this entropic current so the river of time is going down but within that river there are these portico sup patterns of convergence

where complexity is being assembled rock and destroyed and is actually feeding off the kinda wider in Philippine current now those type of time anomalies not only possible I would say they are manifestly taking place and so the question is what what are the steps by which we get from those across to these science fiction-esque models. Like, if I can just, you know, more specifically address the figures that you were using here, Mois, is like, if you say, we could stop the egg splatting, well, if the egg splatting is our

model, our figure or image of entropy, then that isn't at all what is possible in this scientific story you know you cannot reduce entropy by through some kind of anomalous time process it's rather that within the current of entropic process there are these vortical swirling anomalous processes all entropy driven all driven by smashed egg power and just allow interesting stuff to happen within that that vortex you know that at the sun I guess is the kind of giant egg smashing machine and downstream of the Sun we can have these

these eddies and loops and and coils that provide us with these time anomalies so I guess I'm just it's like I wouldn't I don't want to be dogmatic about how what kind of time anomaly is actually imaginable but I am cautious about moving about normalizing these extreme science fiction models as the actual as the actual diagram or description of a time anomaly rather than being theatrical dramatic images of time you that are actually pasted over something else and something that is its

much better understood the reason I brought I'm up was not to suggest that they're there that dominant model or something look at but like I extreme they have something to teach us about how time-bending works and how we can think of Bitcoin otherwise I completely agree with you I mean I think if we are going to be in the Bitcoin system at this of course we're already embedded said like a key like the whole Bitcoin system whatever it becomes even it takes a the earth is is embedded within these deep in the dynamic processes and and so we have a certain amount of latitude

and we can certainly imagine a situation in which the Bitcoin, the blockchain construction of history is established in a transcendental relation to anything that is operational in a human nervous system that our human understanding of time and our human construction of time is something that is downstream of an advanced blockchain synthetic temporality and that that synthetic temporality which would be more real than anything that we have intuitive access to this stage as a model or construction of time

could obviously be subjects of forms of extreme nonlinear subversion so I mean it's not at all that I want to say we can't explore this avenue I think I think we we certainly can but the point that I wanted to make right at the start with this is that if we're talking about time anomaly we want to be talking about time and unless we have some kind of found foundational sense of tense irreversible temporality then we just lose time entirely you know if we win time anomaly by losing time we're not really we're not getting where we

you want to pay and so it seems to me that those crude directional intolerant non-linear non-linearity intolerant aspects of the blockchain actually are a foundation for exotic time phenomena rather than something that is obstructing them or which is one would reasonably want to see dissolved into something more strange. I don't know if you saw my comment about the Terminator movies and the way there's a sense in which there's a cybernetic loop happening

as well as some grossly over-dramatized science fictional a-causality in the sense that every intervention into the past by this future technology from either quote-unquote side, but the human side thinks of itself as a side, speeds up Skynet's emergence timeline. So instead of bootstrapping just from the raw computer science, now human engineers in Skynet's prehistory have an example of its future technological development that speeds it up. So is there a sense in which that's what's going on in teleological convergent waves, at least in science and in maybe financial speculation and in speculation about the future of blockchains

and of Bitcoin and so forth where a model of how it's going to turn out improves the efficiency of design and optimization processes and usage in the present and so sort of like brings about that future theory that you were looking for, assuming your criteria for speculating about it had some bearing on reality. And that's something that this technology, the blockchain paradigm, could then be used or expected to speed up. to find a way or tightening that teleological yes all show I mean the example people often cares as a really down to earth example this is more small which obviously you know what kind of law is that the point is assumed it was described it

it became a road map became a program and it became self-confirming you know infotech companies began deliberately to organize their activities and schedule development processes in terms of this curve and so it became something that you can say again it's a perfectly equivalent vocabulary that you can say Moore's law teleologically descended back in time into to realize itself as a kind of acceleration of infotech development I mean if you just ran through it as a set of equations there's no difference between those two descriptions they're perfectly interchangeable so I I would

definitely subscribe to that to that Jake that was really good thank you so much much yeah absolutely what Nick what I mean I can think of various partial examples of this but what is what is the equation language in which you would describe that kind of retrojection? I mean, does cybernetics, like I guess second order cybernetics as it exists now, sort of provide the formal means of doing that? Um... Yes. I don't know, actually, this is an interesting question.

I mean, I would... I don't think it's a second order. No, it would be first order? I think when Jake says second order cybernetics, he's meaning positive feedback oriented cybernetics. Is that right, Jake? Well, so there's that, and then there's also second order cybernetics is used to describe those in which you have an observer, you know, in the loop. and so that's another relay for transmitting, another loop relay for transmitting information, and so if we thought of the scientist or the technologist or whatever is standing in for that second-order observer, I know that there's, I don't know, I've got a couple of papers saved to read about third-order cybernetics,

and I'm not even sure what that's supposed to entail. Right. But something like that, you know, I mean, if it's all relatively formalized, then, I don't know, is that what you need to represent? I think it's definitely the case that the Santa Fe Institute is explicitly focused on this problem, and their sense of adequate formalization is the one that I would probably accept as being authoritative. And I don't know how much consensus there is there on this question. I think it is something that is very concretely being developed. Because as I say, I think, you know, thematized as a consistent attention to the phenomenon of convergent waves,

it's something that has extraordinary consistency as a kind of research objective. Even people will continually transform the vocabulary and articulate it in different senses. And of course, for reasons that we've at least slightly touched upon, teleological language tends to be extremely unpopular because there's something offensive to the modern spirit in that vocabulary. But however it's articulated, the actual positive research program is inextrable. you know has is itself a kind of core manifestation this this teleological price assets I have a

question on quite a quite a tangent but I am going back to a couple things you said, Nick, about how Bitcoin could be anti-democratic. And I took you to be associating democracy with necessary social institutions. And what I'm wondering, I guess from the point of view of political theory, what kind of democracy might be relevant to a technology like Bitcoin, a digital currency which is still anti-institutional, anti-third party but nonetheless democratic. And I'm even thinking to what extent could a kind of democratic principle be built into

the technology as a second kind of question. I think there's a lot there's a lot in that I mean obviously democracy is a if we're within modernity democracy and teleology it seems suddenly to occur to me have sort of opposite polarity I mean teleology is always going to be stigmatized and democracy is always going to be valorized you know what I mean so almost any program is can be expected to kind of cash itself out as having some kind of democratic legitimacy or democratic whoomph behind it in all kinds of ways.

And I've certainly seen hardcore Bitcoin advocates couching their program in this language very enthusiastically. So there's a necessity for a certain kind of caution about this. But when I'm sort of talking about it being offensive to certain kind of democratic a agenda it's because of the very notion all here on non interference on it relations you know it's the notion that there is no social answerability in a private contract within a within a pure pete in that so so democracy is standing in for

social answerability in the sense that whatever the broad consensus of feeling in society is, whatever dominant and majority opinion is whatever has been even processed through even more any kind of social process of opinion formation is all strictly excluded from consideration by we could say the notion of algorithmic governance that it is just politically closed and once you've got the protocol there's no longer any openness at all to there's no political sensitivity by design

in the system so this also ties to the two dimension of money a store of value medium of exchange that on the level of the medium exchange, commercially Bitcoin is totally open. It must be the case that every time our Bitcoin's moved around within the system, it corresponds to some latching or attachment of that system onto the wider social field. Otherwise why am I giving you Bitcoins? You've done something for me on the outside you know you've given me some commodity provide top service nation whatever it is it's something

beyond the Bitcoin circulation that has taken place that's and that is being reflected by the fact that there's a Bitcoin transaction registered on the on the blockchain says commercially open it's a synthesizer commercially that's constantly it can only develop by constantly synthesizing itself with transactions on the outside but it politically closed in the sense that there is no the selling point of it and why people if insofar as they do trust it as a store of value is there cannot be any political decision

to devalue your book coins to change their value to redistribute them to to engage in any political discussion whatsoever and about your Bitcoin stash the system precludes that being even possible I'm you know and less of you can get back to this whole 51 percent attacked but then what's Even the 51% attack is a 51% attack of computing power that has completely displaced any conventional democratic notion of the equal human individual as a unit of democratic decision making.

Right. So am I, maybe I'm just sort of naive here, but isn't the very notion of a peer-to-peer system in some minimal sense a kind of democratic principle in and of itself? I mean, yes, if it only remains at the level of peer-to-peer. But with Bitcoin you have this blockchain building a history, building pyramids of wealth and value in which the more these pyramids are built, the more asserting they are in terms of determining the peer-to-peer relationship, right? So it's really like the democracy of the survival of the fittest.

Well, it's the democracy of the marketplace. Quite literally it's the democracy. yes and and the cusp on this is exactly it you I think every spot on it's because the cost is the principle all a formal equality now you can say formal equality is a democratic principle and you can say as obviously the whole history of left criticism is that it's substantially a deeply anti anti-democratic you know Marx is obviously just a take miss all this example extremely explicit about season you of course all money did the the the factory owner and the worker all equal and they they and they have a

here to pay a contract where the factory workers yes I mean that they're both legal subjects they both have right to credit contract with court of law they to be judged on the same criteria all this kind of thing and marks I think you know it has to be respected on the face and forget about you really try and shelve these issues about you know the system being corrupt or the the judge being in the pocket of the capitalist or all of these issues that's all distraction you know you don't have to move beyond this basic point of the peer-to-peer relation is itself due to its pure formality already the problem from his point of view from the point

you left so yet I think this is why you can have a a kind of discourse up positive promotional discourse on Bitcoin couched in them in the language see exact exactly the reasons because they everyone is equal everyone's a node everyone's wearing a mask we don't know anybody is there's no discrimination you know anyone can be our head a you know in that level if that's what you mean it's totally democratic but unit on the other side as most saying as the whole history of left criticism of this modernist capitalist technology has always said that here is a relation

as something that wants to abstract itself saw algorithmically preclude social intervention is the problem you know that is the target that they have in their sites. I mean maybe maybe maybe maybe the example of the history of campaign funding can kind of like shed some light on that you know what I mean at least in the last 15 years because there were some reforms prior to the first Bush term or right after the first Bush term, I don't know, that tried for the last time, that tried to put some kind of limit on wealthy people intervening in the democratic process failed.

And now we're at the stage where blatantly, the more money you have, the more controlling you become of the outcome of the election through campaign funding. the argument put forth for it is precisely that those who have more money should have more say in politics. That is a form of market democracy itself. Why shouldn't the Koch brothers or Sheldon Anderson or whoever it is not determine the fate of American politics more than some welfare recipient who doesn't even put $1 into campaign funding. Without even requiring them to make that argument explicitly, just the general comment, what John Roberts wrote in that Supreme Court opinion,

essentially was that there is a formal identity between money and speech, or at least that money is a species of speech. And that actually, I think, Nick, that really does have an interesting correspondence with Bitcoin with the monetary incentive to generate consensus. Yeah, totally. And obviously a lot of these altcoins are information systems that have just accepted this coin suffix because of the way it works as a system for the distribution and validation of information. It's not a currency, it's an abstraction beyond a currency. So I think that's totally right.

You can't distinguish between money and speech at this level of abstraction of the system. They both are particular forms of information distribution. Now speaking about money and speech, there was also this other totally diversionary, versionary totally like I shouldn't be asking this but bringing this into the picture but because I'm like a bad student I love to like waste the class time but like like but we all know how important graphic cards are to sort of like the Bitcoin mining right and and you know what I mean there's this other equivalency between sort of like the digital image economy and then Bitcoin

right because it's like it's like if it's more profitable to run Photoshop this is this is a graphic card will run Photoshop but then at some point you actually make more money not running Photoshop but you actually make more money like this this this what do you call a graphic card running like mining Bitcoin so it's like it's like there's also another another tension there between sort of like, and how if speech is money, then basically image processing is money too. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, Bitcoin mining makes image processing fungible with money. That, so.

And like the leap my mind made and the theory of it may have nothing to do with it, but was through, you know, Szilardzian picturing that Rosenegger Astani was talking about in the last seminar that I audited. Is this the sort of the fungibility of image processing, if we could generalize that at all to datification and sort of the registration and verification of scientific data, is that sort of a model for coinage on production and verification of scientific data? so putting science in the blockchain, being able to incentivize that and distribute incentives for verifying and repeating scientific observations, that sort of thing, like maybe under sort of like digital micro-intellectual property, or intellectual property micropayment kind of regime.

I mean, it doesn't even have to be, I mean, obviously it could be, I know it's bound to intersect with intellectual property issues, but it doesn't have to in any narrow sense be an intellectual property issue. because it's just about validation informational valid show so at the point where there isn't out from an experimental results there is no reason in principle why there shouldn't be some kind of call you you know science calling nature coin I don't know what you know that that simply block chains information and time stamps it and and hashes it in that system and and that becomes your public archive of scientific

all bottom line experimental scientific reality you know that is nature as as it is accessible to us up and there's no getting beyond that I mean it's already the case that you know in principle we say what is nature that the absolute ultimate step if that is it is dead outcome from the hadron super collider and honestly rip or did you know there's this fight there's this trust issue that is not a crisis normally at level a physics but in principle it's a it's exactly the same kind of trust issue like you know we believe you when you tell us that when these two

particles was collided together that this was the output from that experiment and so as soon as you've got that trust issue you've got a a coin way to tap we've got climate denialism for example yeah for sure so so a highly conflicted science like climate science would be a really natural candidate for block chaining a scientific enterprise for sure because all the statements in that field are so contested and so subject to ideological difficulty

and in the sense that that contestation And so that contestation is pretty much all external to the discipline itself. I mean, 98% of climate scientists are in the consensus about climate disruption and disaster and so forth. And that the rest of it is something that emerges from capital's incentives to certain researchers to dispute the conclusions, or it comes from religious ideology and so forth. does that kind of indicate a sense in which the science of the community or the climate science community is acting like a blockchain already? That there's something, yeah, there's already an equivalence to base formalization on because the way in which they sort of validate the interpretation and interrelationship of past results is based on this majority consensus?

Am I kind of reaching there? I don't know. I think it's complicated. I think scientists are amphibious. On one hand, they're in some kind of direct contact with raw experimental data. And on the other hand, they are socially accredited as interpreters of that data. And when the science becomes controversial, that second role then becomes caught up in the controversy. see and obviously scientists are people and they have their own visions and they want to interpret the data and they can't live in a world of raw data so I mean climate science is an absolute classic example of that seems to me where

on the one hand there's a sense of like what what the bottom line raw facts that we're faced with here and then alongside that one of the big narratives the pictures that that makes sense in terms of that the nation and it seems to me that the the daughter is what goes on to the blockchain and that the interpretation is in the role of a Bitcoin exchange or one of these ancillary peripheral institutions that you know make sense of something do something with this raw information latch onto something so like

kinda the exchange rate for science coins is like as a vote for confidence in the in the data or in the interpretation yeah I think the interpretation would go beyond I think it would just purely have to be confident in raw data this is what came out of this particular experimental device this is actually just the information content this particular sense 0 this particular device and as soon as you move into interpretation then I think you're in a different type consensus I don't know easy if we looking at this thing about mechanization

could you mechanize narrative consensus I'm not I'm not sure you look at what Bitcoin is doing all the consensus concerns is this transaction this exchange because from count a to count be happened this time time stamps that's a I'm you know its it's something that is so lacking in narrative overlay it can have this hard mechanical consensus behind it. But as soon as you're saying something like, you know, this level of shrinkage of Antarctic ice tells us this story about what is happening, I think

you're moving beyond something that could be readily mechanized. So if there aren't any questions, we're sort of like at the end of the seminar session. If there aren't any, Nick, do you have any kind of like final remarks about like any kind of like requirement stuff or any other thing or Laura or anybody else who want to to ask a question? Because I saw your camera come on Laura, so I thought maybe you wanted to talk or something. Unmute yourself if you want.

Yeah, I'm freaking out of it. No, it's kind of 2.30 here in Sydney, so I guess I lost that bit of the city that I had. Yeah. I was interested in the issue of what were you saying about Bitcoin being politically closed and Ian's question about Bitcoin being anti-democratic and peer-to-peer. So, I guess My one question was that I had become politically close, although he's got a politics, right? Which is what, because no technology is natural, right?

Like, to my understanding. Yeah, sure. So I was kind of thinking, is it, what I'm, I guess, what I understood, this idea of this techno-commercial structure is kind of trying to do better what neoliberalism has been trying to do for the past, I don't know, 70, 50, 70 years or something, by getting getting read all of the state right completely you brought the end of trying to do with a in in way yeah but it anyway is that is this time kind of make a lot to link the police and

they were talking about it might be kind and so I think the only thing you show it's so neutral that it doesn't need to have a stop on some because because its agents its nodes up us we were saying masks you know that totally abstract nodes they could be anything you know they could be they could be a collective group it could be an individual person they could be a non-species that could be an alien I mean it's just absolutely abstract soon its individual in the sense that council here within the network its an account I'm that when it's making a transaction it counts as a as one party to a transaction but but if you then try to add some deeper

sort of sociological or psychological content to that node then you're stepping beyond what the system allows you know I mean you're into a sort of interpretive activity that is exceeding the terms of the Bitcoin protocol itself well yeah but then what would be for instance like a political scenario at the moment in which Bitcoin becomes, I don't know, adopted in, I don't know, perhaps in a wider term, knowing that, again, we have people like, obviously, I don't know, the Winkaboth twins or Mark Hunter things that own already, like, you know, a large part of the market capitalization and stuff.

Yeah. I don't know. yeah I mean we we had we had a was there okay discussion this I think very close at least to this question which is that if you want to get if you want to optimize your position in Bitcoin what do you do like was really saying it only takes net and this figure isn't quite random is roughly right maybe a bit of an exaggeration $5 billion you could buy every Bitcoin on the planet. So why don't people do that? They don't do it because they're playing a complicated game where they know if they did that they would actually destroy entirely the value of their Bitcoin holding.

It would be a suicidal move. So I think the system itself only has that as a control on the kind of issues that you're talking about. I mean, obviously for some people it's a totally weak and inadequate control, but that's the control that is there, these game theoretic controls that you cannot optimize your wealth within Bitcoin by simply buying up the whole of Bitcoin. It will not circulate, it cannot function as a circulating medium and therefore propagate develop unless it is at least distributed to the extent that people are using it and have a confidence that they're not simply buying into the plutocratic dreams of some

small numbers of individuals. So that's the sense in which it does sort of posit or project at least a model of an agent in the sense that it put whatever you know the AI, the person, the network of people, behind it has to obey the constraints of being a certain kind of partial agent. Yeah. It assumes economic rationality on the part of its nodes. I mean you can see that already in the paper. I think it would be, you couldn't predict how these nodes were going to behave or how miners were going to behave or how any of the agents in the system

what can they behave, unless you assumed that they were engaged in economic maximization as a basic imperative. And that is what Satoshi Nakamoto assumes about that. Because the question would be, is there a way to not assume that, or to vary those assumptions and then see a different kind of protocol? Not necessarily one that was viable but could you construct in a relatively formal way variations on the protocol that reflected different sets of assumptions about economic actors or network actors well it would be an interesting undertaking I mean it certainly the counts that in all kinds of places in there

in the paper it's clear that Satoshi Nakamoto is basically Austrian in economic us as I will dig out these clue things and but it's completely clear I think that that's the fundamental background and same and so I think it's no great leap to assume that his position is praxeological that's just you can simply she'll that any economic agents has to have a certain set a I'm rational restrictions on on that hate and that you can't

you whatever you're trying to do you know even if even if or even everything you're trying to do is simply in order to accumulate resources for some charitable a personal to build some so collective social and enterprise or whatever you want to do its it's still the case that the only way that you can realize those goals are by these fundamental axiological structures and you know and that to assume that someone would actually want to behave in such a way that they dissipate their holding bitcoins for no reason is something that can be safely I'll safe

be dismissed that I think is the position a but but as we've already seen that that doesn't exclude other kinds of complex social games for instance you could have completely rational reasons want to destroy the whole it called call and that would even in not quite narrow sense be could lash but would not be registered fully within the Bitcoin system itself. I see I've got two little just methodical questions or points. One's a question. The point is just to thank everybody for their contributions in the classroom

down and I hope that people keep up I found it really interesting I haven't a competent I process everything and lots of the things people have said it is complicated and thought-provoking and is not something to be digested immediately but I'm greatly appreciate it everything people Aaron and I'm definitely promised to to to tend to catch any and another thing is the sidebar group chat are I known that is somehow reflected in this thing but I sort of feel do we get the full do we get the full site are on in the classroom is that some on only if only if I copy and paste it I'll cut the post which I do

like I just made a post I sidebar so far in the in the classroom and then last week yeah I was afraid that I might lose it so I did it in two sections okay okay so I appreciate it yeah excellent thanks so much for doing that you know it's just that obviously I don't really have time to follow the sidebar discussion while we're talking yeah just a native I can see tantalizingly interesting and I just hope I I'm gonna get a chance to pick it up later yeah I'll try to preserve as much as I can I mean it's 100% preserved so far from three sessions we had. Okay thanks so much for doing that. It's its own blockchain

I'm sorry. Okay that's great thanks. Okay so it so if there aren't any more questions we can leave the rest of the discussion to the our classroom and let me go and rest it's been we've kinda went 20 minutes maybe not 20 but like definitely 50 minutes overtime with you Nick so thanks again yeah I was everybody yeah right I think I all the participants particularly I appreciate Jake's kinda like I'm thinking with me about like that the science fiction and temporality thing I'm going to go back and... That was a little over my head, but I'm really excited to watch some of the movies. Again, you guys are talking about...

Yeah, and the books also, Jake's referencing. Yeah, Glass House and the Peripheral Key. You should really read them, because they're both also just awesome. Really good. What were the names? Are they on the sidebar? Right now. Cool. Yeah, I definitely will. Okay, I'm going to post that too. Okay, thank you everyone. I want to start the broadcast and say goodbye. Yes, have a great week everybody. Bye. Bye Laura. Thank you. Bye everyone. Bye. Later.