NCMT 500-314 -- Bitcoin and Philosophy (3 of 8)

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 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 instruction of Turing complete systems onto the blockchain sometimes people use this distinction which again may be something people want to come back to and and discussed question talking about first and second wave Bitcoin technologies with Ethereum classified as a second way technology and as everyone knows the Bitcoin system is deliberately averse to having Turing complete uh... software

on it for reasons that are at least superficial extremely sensible uh... 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 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 and sorry just one second and

I'm tying myself in knots for some reason. I expect that's probably inevitable on this thing. I thought we could just kick off on this. Yes, sorry, sorry, I'll go back to what I was saying, which is the other way that this comes in a lot for people I notice, and Amy's sort of long paragraph is one thing that talks about this very explicitly but it's not the only one. There's the 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. So coming in more from

our philosophical dimension of this course. So I thought one way to just start kind of very solidly with this is to look at two little texts. One of them, which is I think very remarkable and interesting, is the short little mail that Satoshi Nakamoto put up to announce Bitcoin in his own circle. The one that starts, it's very short, it just starts by saying, I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer with no trusted third party. All of 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 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 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, this time 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 2 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 will say poke me in the eye, but I think that might be a little bit over melodramatic with 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 and slowly undisintegrating itself and smearing back together until it became a solid egg even without the thing of it and lifting of the floor 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 things get complicated obviously because then early in the second half the 19th century But 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 processes 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 and diffuse non-complex and over the course of millions of years it becomes more complex more organized and 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 X 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 wave then having that egg in the first place a drop on the floor attests to a convergent I 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.

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 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 law of thermodynamics has holes in it that entropy is not the fundamental law that it had been taken as from very early in the 19th century that claim is not being made no one is saying 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. 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 that there is a found day show all basic framing 10 st directional time the is the the foundation platform

upon which any more 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 a 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 loopy, 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 that the Prichogenin 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. 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 I'm 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 we're used to in that in the I'm history of paper money banking most fundamentally is you cannot have anything other than a hundred percent reserves you know you what your the amount of bitcoins you own or are entitled to in terms of the system are simply those in your wallet. As soon as you move them out into someone else's account you've moved them. There's no credit process involved in that at all and there's no possibility for fractional reserve lending.

Now I can't 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? I mean, if I had 100 Bitcoins, I'm not talking about therefore being able to loan 1,000 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 block. No, I think you're totally right about that. I think 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 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. And I work in security and even in a general context what causes there to be more instances of trolling and bad behaviour online is the cheap cost of the new identity. Right. So it's often what prevents in society, what prevents people in society from behaving badly is the reputational cost.

Right. Is 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 behaviour that seems to happen in Bitcoin that doesn't happen in the world. Well, yeah, it's an interesting thing. Jake 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 of 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 almost entirely in terms of double spending

so rather than saying 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 by the in the paper already so if you look at the 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 who weren't trusting their coins to this institution. I guess that is kind of the problem 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 it was. And that happens, that happens often as well. Yes. Yes, that is a problem. 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 the police police systems systems of restitution all of these kind of mechanisms that will after something bad has happened, well either they will try externally to prevent something bad that happens through threat or deterrence or policing activity, or after something bad has happened they will

ensure some kind of restitution 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. Those, 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 the tools models I like this where you simply are unable initially

to have those forms bad behavior or cheating or I'm defection if you can put in games terms happening at all and they always involve some kind of mechanization I'm it's a formalization at the level of of 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 of a sorry, I forgot the name for those machines, you know, where you 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, there probably

I'm sure are ways of cheating those things, but the mechanism is supposed to, well then you you cheat your way into a soda and that and the cops a lot and and get you to put it back in the machine it just is impossible to get the site unless you actually go along with the mechanical procedure that is incarnated in them in the mechanism I'm I guess I would be interesting in in that paper if you don't present a classroom I guess cut that led some people because I've lazily say see this is why kids we need trusted third parties I know a friend who won twenty thousand dollars bit man gox and then it was just lazy 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 I'm how would when reputational costs are paramount and it's not just about doing as they mentioned you know a drug trade in Silk Road but actually that's transaction your 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 behavior would then be I'm minus enforcement and minus these reaction

reactive enforcement mechanisms if they were your private yeah tone total transparency I mean this is obviously something people have done have explored have a night and as being something that it's a quite separate line but I think you're taking right to say it sex this this topic definitely and obviously within the Bitcoin system itself uh... it is like that as zero there's zero secrecy there's zero privacy in terms of any account its behavior will be perfectly publicly transparent to everyone there's no way that an account once it's actually on the system

can do something that doesn't just then get registered on the blockchain and be exactly traced, you know, it sent money to this other account at this time and this was the sum involved and its previous behaviour has been XY and Z, all of that is totally transparent. I think it's really not dealt with in much depth in the Bitcoin paper, this issue. like there's a kind of it's not that it says anything that isn't right but it doesn't explore this because this is something that sort of is by definition right on the edge of the system and I think it is it's exactly

a question of masks you know like a masked just like a masked ball that within the system there are a set of masks and those masks their behavior is 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 owl head could no doubt develop a reputation it's not very relevant 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 says, well,

it's the system protects anonymity, meaning that you don't have to ever say that you are I'll head or who I'll help at really is is something completely extrinsic to the system and their and its only that that of to any secrecy or privacy at all and but the young but your mask is could he the public completely exposed completely and has no possibility of covert activity or even private activity car cut private deals with I'll power chat I mean everyone can see what I'll had him

power had a doing together in the system even though they don't know why just them actually are but by that but a very token I mean it's not just our head it's like one through and how its right and each owl had moment he had to be one transaction then you could throw that mask away and you can develop a new one as easily as multiplying two primes show the ability for covert action by an actual operator as opposed to an operators alias I mean is really is hardly even impinged upon you know right well I wanted to pull for the blockchain for about gox issue yeah that yeah absolutely and that's obviously what what you're saying now is exactly the assumption

that Satoshi Nakamoto has in the paper you know absolutely perfectly he he thinks it's so clear what that what you're saying is true that it doesn't really need a detailed discussion or detailed 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 the mechanization of so at least in the case of security maybe we get as a hypothesis we could say that mechanization is in general a kind of transcendental move yes okay I think so yes it at least as we're understanding it now in mechanization as 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 this second move is then we can bring in loops again quite naturally and say well look if we've got 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 okay 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 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? The 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 like 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 or canic 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 that 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 profound teleological aspect to it is is to me hard to imagine So sorry, just one more thing which is to say, 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 that origin, something that could

be called meccano-liberalization. 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. If you look at all the hero stories of kind of modernity in its I'm hero stories of kinda autumn modernity in its early phase it burning a your Donna Bruno the the persecution of Galileo all of these kind of things that did they are one at the same time about the obstruction of a mechanistic analysis through social control exercised upon

individual and so there's a as a as 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 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'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 Sam the left's aversion to any sort of libertarian discourse of 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 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 I mean I think this is you know I saying about a these open that language of openness and closure in 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 recognizable as a teleological trend of modernity from a very early stage so that said it it's in the immunization of of commercial I commonwealth to political intervention is something that Bitcoin actually I mechanizes and therefore again as the absolute twin of that it has a kind of

ultra liberal a aspect to them and but obviously from the left people say well And this project of depoliticization is 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. No, no, I was agreeing with you basically and well, like you 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 global 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, and 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. 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 and 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. I think it will be yes I think that will be I mean absolutely without question it's people there's a huge spectrum of this question and on one position

maybe it's a spectrum isn't going to work and it has to become more multidimensional But there are people, I would say quite naively, who simply are wanting to say there's no trade-off or difficulty here at all, and will at one and the same time say this is going to be the biggest redistribution of wealth in human history, and that 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. Okay, 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 and you know 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 and some of the responses it made were also quite interesting like 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 you know the balance of power is completely the opposite

and very recently people say well 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? 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 you know 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 bitcoins supply is worse a few billion dollars I think under five billion dollars I mean I lost track at the current value exactly what is I

it's like kinda peanuts I mean we know their individuals worse multiples of far who could if they seriously wanted to just by the whole world Bitcoin stock now why would they not do that because of course there's no charms if you buy 80 percent 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 theoretically I mean I'm not getting sort of this isn't as you can see is not a moral political point about about it call is just a it's just a cold game erratic thing that that you have to necessarily deal with this distributional issue

if you seriously want to optimize your chance getting insanely rich should be quite if you there's a point but 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 this 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 and I just say like I'm you know it's notable

that people with a lot of money I'm you know there's the Winklevoss twins, there's Andreessen Horowitz, Andreessen's business, there's venture capitalists interested. They're not stacking up massive troves of Bitcoins. I'm sure some of them are doing okay that way, but that just simply isn't a strategy that could make sense to them. And so 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 Bitcoin oriented world or some much more indirect path because, well

I won't go on about this, it's a fascinating thing so I'm tempted to keep going on about 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. 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. We want it to be flowing around, circulating in order to actually develop critical mass such that it then becomes worth holding on to 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. Stabilizes the value. So it seems like, at least for the initial stages, there being a sort of 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, I mean, what do you see a distributional crisis looking like? You know, I mean, 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 Andreessen. You could summon the capital to buy every Bitcoin in the world. That would be a distributional crisis. I mean, 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 to what what is an optimum big coin holding and you know if they've got faith in the currency the they no doubt want to have a stockpile often that they don't want to you mean raise that stake to the point

that it actually becomes you know to use your language take a distribution crisis that people actually say this is this is show maldistributed that its simply not an attractive proposition as a as a as a circulatory medium a it seems that the common thread between these different fail to global failure mode is for Bitcoin are all based upon the ability to wield asymmetric resources from outside the system so what you have a 51 percent attack and the deep states, in principle, ability to carry that out. You've got something that doesn't currently exist, which is computational asymmetry. If you've just got the processing power to run faster

than everybody else's ability to calculate the blockchain, like the peripheral, I don't know if you've read that one yet. And then you've got capital asymmetry. So it's kind of an interesting case of a general failure mode for this transcendental security, where it's like sort of a materialized symmetry in capital and processing power and network access. So, yeah, that's the foundation. 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 raise here. The second one we've already talked about in the sense that is it really a failure mode? And 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.

I mean, just shelve that for the moment and just simply look at it as a game involving self-interested economic agents. even with that completely amoral, cynical, profit maximizing type of 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 the system. and there is a related to the currency itself yes in the sense that well did what we've already talked about fifty-one percent attack is the same

I say it's very explicit already in there in the paper that such a she met not going to use you 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 who commands 51 percent of the 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 of 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 position 51% on to just someone who just has a again a transcendent extrinsic motivation to destroy our legal yes or you know as we were talking about last time made 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 political and financial interests in America say, what, it's only going to cost us $2 billion to totally wreck Bitcoin? That's a bargain, you know, in terms of the threat this poses to us. And so those agents then would be operating

in the system without economic optimization within the system being an issue. Of course, it would still be economic optimization 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 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 economic incentives would play in supporting and maintaining equilibrium in the system. It's really just one aspect of a 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 car on its week you can't abstract out the commercial

aspect and really see what it is that's being connected did you see those 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 of 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 a certain position on this, I think, which is to say

Bitcoin is the only thing that is actually building a blockchain, and it's serious. And the whole thing is a technological and economic loop. and if you think that you can therefore pull it apart and like 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 and economic incentives and that entanglement is what Bitcoin is about and 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 day is this you in structural unstoppable revolution happening that we're calling blockchain and it just happens to be carried by Bitcoin in the same way Adam ballpoint pens were carried by byro

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 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 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 Bitchland 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 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'd only say about that that I don't think that by widening the discussion in that you're moving beyond game theory. I think you're just in more complex, tangled games. I mean, the state is a player of games just the same, and all the agents in the state.

I mean, we have to get into complicated public choice type discussions about really who are the agents in the state, what are their interests. It would be naive in the extreme to think think that the public pronouncements of the interests and identity of the state as whatever as a servant of the people or the representation of the people, these kind of convenient notions for PR purposes are very accurate descriptions about the real structures of agency that we're dealing with it. So I would definitely totally support the relevance of all of those questions, absolutely yes. And I like what you mentioned, that last paper you posted, it is absolutely true,

you cannot separate Bitcoin from the blockchain due to the incentives and the way it's actually built in. 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. So the interesting thing is 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 and we know that we know that the biggest exit nerds are actually run by secret service agencies so yeah 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, you know, even like the comparison of Silk Road, in the traditional world you go to your street dealer, you do the transaction.

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've 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,

Now, 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 nor gold standard, but it's something new that is inspired by Bitcoin that will then be, you know, 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 sort of like replace fiat currency rather than just direct Bitcoin replacing it. Right. 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, So what is it that would be changed, do you think, Mo, that would make it a superior model?

As you know, there's like a huge desire by libertarians, at least in the US, 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. Is it just coincidence that 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 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 tax you know we all 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 this 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 non-linear in the sense that it's based entirely upon how acceptable it is to other people. There's just no getting beyond that absolutely fundamental circuit. I want it, I will find it useful as a medium of exchange if I think lots of other people also will find it useful as a system of exchange and so it's open, it's fundamentally shaped

by these virtuous and vicious circles. If I thought it was becoming unacceptable as a medium of exchange then that would undergo, it would enter into a positive loop in a negative direction and it would become self-obliterating. And if I think that gradually more and more people are finding it a value, then its value to me increases and its value to everybody increases. And so these are just absolutely classic network effects. We have to, 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 phenomena of these kinds. It just is the one that got there first and has spread and has people know about and people have accumulated and has a certain amount of investment in it. So any other replacement of Bitcoin now has that as the threshold obstacle. 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. Any replacement has none of that. It's starting from zero. It would have to have some massive advantage that made people leave Bitcoin for this new currency. So that's why I'm asking, 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 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 has to extract no advantage from doing that using the existing side chain or Bitcoin apparatus. Yeah. It's a pretty high barbed jump. Yeah, it's exactly, it's saying, you know, in abstract the blockchain is a good idea, but we want another blockchain. Anyone could do that. I mean, the example that I was giving, I really do think we'll do this to some extent, at some point down the line, is a Chinese blockchain, because as they say, they absolutely have form on this. clone any of these things. They've got their own version of YouTube, their own version

of Twitter, their own version of eBay. I mean, every single one of these kind of American Internet giants that have all themselves grown through exactly the same kind of network effects have a Chinese clone. 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 emergent Western alternative to Bitcoin say hey use our blockchain blockchain we got now and like I it would have to have some unbelievably

powerful promotional on and and I think like on egos point this is kind of getting in 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 is a suspicious lack of vehement public political denunciation of bit quite into me that suggests that like the tour examples absolutely cut to that

I also I'm not very very helpful you know it's an obviously useful to to us and very powerful and interests in the current global system that its it would be strange it if that happen been developed and people had not understood that it was now possible landscape that could be very very tiny leave rich by them

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're 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 the 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, 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 is 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? Dr. Yeah. Dr. 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 the 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 eggs 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 a Terminator we all know what's different about Terminator, right? And the way time bending unfold in Terminator. Right, so is it transmission of information back to the past, actual causality violation happens in Terminator,

whereas in 12 Monkeys, you're going to, I just 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. OK. Yes. I mean, yeah, this is fascinating. It's obviously difficult to push into without getting deep into time travel mechanics. I mean, obviously on the other side of these extreme science fiction-esque models, there's real, well, I will say real time travel, I mean, in the sense that there are convergent waves, I think that's beyond any doubt. And a convergent

wave is equivalent to an action of the future upon the past. The two descriptions are absolutely identical. And so as soon as you have a convergent wave, you have a time anomaly. But as we were as we were seeing if you if you build that step by step out of the history of statistical mechanics or thermodynamics you could see that those time anomalies are like contained vortices within this entropic current so you know the river of time is going down but within that river there are these vortical sub patterns of convergence where complexity is being assembled rather than

destroyed and is actually feeding off the kind of wider enveloping current now those type of time anomalies are 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 and just allow interesting stuff to happen within that at Fortex you know that at the sun I guess is the kind giant egg smashing machine and downstream of the Sun we can have these these eddies and loops and and coils that

that provide us with these time noblins 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 anomalies that are actually pasted over something else and something that is much better understood.

The reason I brought them up was not to suggest that they're the dominant model or something look at but like as 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 thermodynamically like the whole Bitcoin system whatever it becomes even if it takes over the earth is is embedded within these deeper thermodynamic processes and and so we have a certain amount of latitude and we can certainly imagine a situation

in which the Bitcoin the the blockchain construction history is established in a transcendental relation to anything that is operational in a human nervous system you know that that are human understanding time not human construction time is something that is downstream of an advanced block chain synthetic temporality and that that synthetic temporality which would be more real at than anything that we have intuitive access to this stage as a as a model construction time could obviously be

subjects of forms of extreme nonlinear subversion so I mean it's not at all that I will say we can't explore this Avenue I think I think we we except car 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 foundational sense of tense irreversible temporality then we just lose time entirely. If we win time anomaly by losing time we're not really getting where we want to be.

So it seems to me that those crude directional intolerant, 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 sign, 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 brings about that future theory that you were looking for, assuming your criteria for speculating about it had some bearing on reality. And is that something that this technology or the blockchain paradigm could then be used or expected to speed up to find a way of tightening that teleological loop? Yeah, sure. Sure. I mean, the example people often give as a really down-to-earth example of this is Moore's law, which obviously, you know, what kind of law is that? But the point is, as soon as it was described, it became a roadmap, it became a program, and it became self-confirming.

You know, infotech companies began deliberately to organize their activities and schedule their 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 he logically descended back in time into to realize itself as a kind of acceleration of the infotech development I mean if you just ran for it as a set of equations there's no difference between those two descriptions that perfectly interchangeable. So I would definitely subscribe to that.

Jake, that was really good. Thank you so much. Yeah, absolutely. What, Nick, what, I mean I can think of various partial examples of this, but 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? 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, and for 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 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 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 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 as store of value medium exchange that on the level of the medium exchange commercially Bitcoin is totally open like this it's must be the case that every time there is a bitcoins moved around within the system it corresponds to some latching or attachment 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 you provided some service information 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 blockchain so it's 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's politically closed in the sense that there is no... The selling point of it and why people, in so far as they do, trust it as a store of value is that cannot be any political decision to devalue your bitcoins to change their value to redistribute them

to to engage in any political discussion whatsoever about your Bitcoin stash the system precludes that being even possible and you know unless obviously get back to this whole 51 percent attack But then what's even a 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 of the marketplace. And the cusp on this is exactly it.

Both of you, I think, are spot on on this. because the cusp is the principle of 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-democratic principle. I mean, Marx is obviously, just to take this obvious example, extremely explicit about this. He says, you know, of course, formally, the factory owner and the worker are equal, and they have a peer-to-peer contract where the factory worker says, yes, I mean, they're both as legal subjects, they both have right to kind of take the contract to a court of

law, to be judged on the same criteria, all of this kind of thing. And Marx, I think, is to be respected on the face. He says, forget about, really try and shelve these issues about the system being corrupt or the judge being in the pocket of the capitalist or all of these issues. That's all distraction. You don't have to move beyond this basic point of the peer-to-peer relation as itself, due to its pure formality, already the problem from his point of view and from the point of view of the left. So I think this is why you can have a kind of discourse, a positive promotional discourse

on Bitcoin couched in the language of democracy, for exactly the reason you said it. Because everyone is equal, everyone's a node, everyone's wearing a mask, we don't know who anybody is, there's no discrimination, anyone can be owlhead, in that level, if that's what you mean, it's totally democratic. But on the other side, as Mo is saying, as the whole history of left criticism of this modernist capitalist technology has always said the that you know that here is a relation and as something that wants to abstract itself saw and algorithmic include social intervention is the problem you know that

is the target that they have it science I mean it's maybe maybe maybe the maybe the example love the history of campaign funding can college 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 like tried, like for the last time, that tried to put some kind of like 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.

And 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 one dollar into campaign funding? Without even requiring them to make that argument explicitly, just the general comment, what John Roberts wrote in what John Roberts wrote in that Supreme Court opinion you know 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 yeah really an interesting correspondence with Bitcoin with the idea of the monetary incentive to you know generate consensus yeah totally totally and obviously a lot of these altcoins are informations test that have just accepted this calling suffix because of the way works as a I'm system for that distribution and validation information that's not it's not a currency it's a is not traction beyond the currency so I think that's totally why you can't and 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 like diversionary, 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 waste the class time but like like but we all know how important graphic cards are to so like the the Bitcoin mining right and and up you know what I mean there's this other equivalency between so 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 this a graphic card will run Photoshop but at some point you actually make more money not running Photoshop but you actually make more money like this, what do you call it, a graphic card running like mining Bitcoin. So it's like there's also 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 price the same fungible with money from that so

and like the week my mind made in that theory that may have nothing to to do with it but was through you know, Szilardzian picturing that Rosenegger-Eastani 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 online 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 dip 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 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 now I can you know that I should would go beyond I think it would just purely have to be called for the rest in war they take this is what came out of this particular a experimental device this is actually just the information content from this particular sense or 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 of Bitcoins from account A to account B happened at this point in time, timestamp. That's it. It's something that is so lacking in narrative overlay that it can have this hard mechanical consensus behind it. And 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 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. No, it's kind of 2.30 here in Sydney, so I guess I lost that bit of lucidity that I had. Yeah. No, I was interested in the issue of, like, what were you saying about Bitcoin being politically closed closed and Ian's question about Bitcoin being anti-democratic and peer-to-peer. So I guess my one question was that Bitcoin is politically closed, although he's got politics, right, which is what, because no technology is natural, right?

Like, to my understanding. So I was kind of thinking, what I guess what I understood, please, correct me if I'm wrong, is that 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 rid of the state, right, completely, rather than just trying to do with it in ways, sort of anyway. Is that, is this some kind of methodological individualism

that we're talking about, we're talking about Bitcoin in these terms, or? I think the only thing is that it's so neutral that it doesn't need to have a star on because its agents, its nodes are as we were saying masks, you know, they're totally abstract nodes they could be anything, you know, they could be they could be a collective group, they could be an individual person, they could be another species, they could be an alien, I mean it's just absolutely abstract so its individual in the sense that council here within the network its an account that when it's making a transaction it counts as a as one party to a transaction but but if you didn't 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 Vinkerbos twins or mark-and-raising that own already like a large part of the market capitalization and stuff.

I don't know. We had obviously a discussion of 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 five billion dollars you could buy every Bitcoin on so why don't people will do that you know they don't do it because they're playing a complicated game where they know if they did that they would have actually destroy entirely the I'm you that

Bitcoin hold in it would be a suicidal then so I think the system itself only has that I say I as a control on the kind of issues that you're talking about I mean and so obviously for some people it's a token we can inadequate control but that's the control that is there at these game theoretic controls that you cannot you cannot optimize your wealth within Bitcoin by simply buying up whole pic it will not circulate cannot function as a circulating media and therefore propagate develop unless it is at least distributed to the extent that people are using it and have a confidence and 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 just she's economic rationality on on the part of its of this now it's I mean you can see that already in a I think it would be you you couldn't you couldn't predict how these nodes are gonna

behave or how miners were gonna behave or how any of the agents in the system okay unless you assume 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's certainly the case that in all kinds of places in the paper, it's clear that Satoshi Nakamoto is basically Austrian in economic philosophy. I will dig out these clue things, but it's completely clear, I think, that that's the fundamental background of the thing. And so I think it's no great leap to assume that his position is praxeological. It's just you can simply assume that any economic agent has to have a certain set of rational restrictions on their behavior.

and that you can skew 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 praxeological structures and that to assume that someone would actually want to behave in such a way that they dissipate their holding of Bitcoins for no reason is something that can be safely

safely dismissed that I think is the position the paper takes 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 for wanting to destroy the whole Bitcoin protocol and that would even in not quite narrow sense be economically rational but would not be registered fully within the Bitcoin system itself I see I've got two little just methodical question or points one's a question the point is just to thank everybody for their

for their contributions in the class 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 will 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 know 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 only if

only if I copy and paste it I got the post which I do like I just made a post I slide bar so far and the in the classroom and then last week yeah I was afraid that I might lose it so I did it in two sections. OK. OK. So I appreciate that. Yeah. Excellent. Thanks so much for doing that. You're welcome. It's just that obviously I don't really have time to follow the sidebar discussion while we're talking. Yeah, it just related. I can see it's tantalizingly interesting and I just hope I'm going to get a chance to pick it up later. Yeah, I'll try to preserve as much as I can.

It's 100% preserved so far from the three sessions we had. Okay, thanks so much for taking it. It's its own blockchain. Okay, that's great. Thanks. Okay, so if there aren't any more questions, we can leave the rest of the discussion to the classroom and let Nick go and rest. It's been, we kind of went 20 minutes, maybe not 20 but like definitely 15 minutes overtime with you Nick so thanks again thanks everybody thank you and thanks to all the participants particularly I appreciate Jake's kind of like 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 and the books also Jake's referencing a really good name. Yeah, Glasshouse 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'm going to start the broadcast and say goodbye. Yes, have a great week everybody. Bye. Bye Laura. Thank you. Bye everyone. Bye. Later.