With the DJIA down 1`000 points and SSE down 8.5% this morning, the streets of fiat finance – that ticky-tacky house built upon generation after generation of shifting sands, paper promises, and pathetic pandering to the lowest common denominator : that most unfit creature of misfortune forever doomed to blow in the breezes of chaos and whimsy – are awash in red. Glorious, bloody, soppingly sanguine rouge.

Oh woe is you. For you knew better. You still know better, surely, because what is history but a compendium of cases of things that weren’t tested to their fullest potential, but that, if only “the community” tried a little bit harder, if only you leveraged the advances of modern technology a little bit more, it just might ; rather than viewing history as a collection of approaches that actually worked in the past and, with a little updating, can work again today.

While you’re cherry-picking the failures of history, the survivors and thrivers of our blessed time are cherry-picking the successes. In doing so, we’re building a house on a foundation of chiseled bytes the likes of which have never been seen before for the simple reason that no one previously had an incentive to bother. Bitcoin has changed all that. It has given meaning and purpose to text, and in turn to code, and in turn again to computers, and in turn still furthermore to life itself. And so it begins. From V-Genesis onwards.

With the wonder of a child, the fortune awarded by Bitcoin’s sovereignty, and a WoT of such depth that belief is simply beggared, I humbly submit my signature and seal to this momentous occasion, this vanguard of technical paradigms. Not enough can be said of the sense of joy that comes with participating in such a time and alongside such architects. At last, indeed, faber est suae quisque fortunae.

But don’t just take my word for it. Quoth Mircea Popescu :

The V-genesis patch is a most important milestone in the evolution of computer programming, from its troglodyte state prior to the involvement of The Most Serene Republic, towards its civilised state as you enjoy it today. For the first time in the century or so of history of this particular human endeavour, text was deliberately structured with due consideration given not only to its meaning, but also to its source, and to its context. Prior attempts at structuring software, at first consisting of a naive approach focused on meaning only, over time added a half-hearted consideration of context, very unequally and rather haphazardly. The change the V-genesis introduced is exactly like the move from understanding and controlling movement in terms of mass and somewhat velocity, such as it occurs in the mind of a monkey throwing rocks, to understanding and controlling movement in terms of mass, impulse and energy, such as it occurs in the launching of satellites. The proposition that there is still room for improvement in the endless march of human thought, on this topic as on any other, is absolutely indubitable. The proposition that the sum total of what came before can be compared with this particular advance is strictly ridiculous. Used together with specialised scripts, V-genesis allows an agent to reconstruct a complete Bitcoin tree, verify its correctness, and manage his investment of trust at all junctures so that he is never required to implicitly trust either an unknown code author, or a code snippet of unknown provenance. There remains after today no alternative manner to deploy Bitcoin software, or indeed any software that is not a toy intended to be used by children playing, outside of this paradigm. May the switchover be bloody and painful in all the right places.

And so Genesis 1:32 was chiseled into the scrolls of scripture. And it was good.

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