The Golden age of Digital Civilization

Bedlam

I like to think of the internet as a young, parallel dimension. It’s a different, but familiar place, and we don’t hesitate diving in and out of it whenever we please. The subtle feeling of changing my entire location to that of another dimension is how I felt it in the early days of the internet. I’d feel it every time I’d fire up the old 28K Modem, (which would knock out the phone-line) take up arms and charge into Diablo’s lair.

I’ve watched this parallel dimension converge into ours. It has been watching us, consuming information, synthesizing it and offering it back to us. It is indeed the largest thing we’ve ever created and apparently it’s growing exponentially.

The life we lead online today is supervised by overreaching corporate monoliths, slicing up and processing our attention, analyzing our thoughts and ideas, as well as our habits as a collective, and profiting from the insights this information delivers themselves. All the while, we’re plagued by a horde of rude and demanding, ideologically possessed children, hell bent on molding us into their image, and who seem to have no notion of the social contract. Having crossed the horde before, it is quite a cruel and unpleasant experience to which you wouldn’t want to be subjected.

These marauding bands of uninformed opinion generators appeal to the corporate monoliths in their sheer numbers, resulting in them having somehow attained a tyrannical power to “de-platform” their adversaries and rule by a fear of the mob. The internet brings out the attention seeker in all of us but, at the same time, makes it nearly impossible for us to say what we truly think without persecution.

Digital poverty

Poverty among digital citizens has allowed these issues to become as bad as they are. Most of us are forced to wander the “free zone,” either because of a lack of quality alternatives, or because we fear sending money over the internet and being scammed or “doxed.” Living in digital poverty leaves us vulnerable to those possessed with the desire to incite violence and vandalize and deface the “free zone” to the detriment of all others. Not only is our experience one of utter chaos, we’ve bound ourselves to it in voluntary servitude. And so we find ourselves experiencing a situation of “the tragedy of the commons” first hand.

I don’t think we can fathom the effect that the internet has had on our individual and collective psyche. It’s the internet that has caused many of us to congregate into “digital hives”. We see this reflected in the average daily time spent on the social media platforms, the spreading of viral memes and hashtags, and even in the rise of activism and social justice advocacy. Unfortunately the rise of “big-issues for everyone” harms local communities, as we end up feeling as though the only important changes we need to make are those with the system. We are of course entirely unqualified to do so, but we’ll certainly make some noise about it.

With everyone accessing the same content day in and day out, building echo-chambers can’t be helped and it’s a pity nobody mentioned that they come with a price (prejudice and intolerance). It gets worse the deeper we become entrenched in our thoughts, which tend to radicalize slightly more each time we take a trip to the internet. We have splintered into thousands of warring fiefdoms, all with intricate memes and terminologies that appear to have taken the place of religious ceremony. We simply don’t understand why others don’t think the way we do when it is so self-evident that the way we think is the correct way. It’s as if “they” speak another language.

As we grapple with the re-emergence of tribalism, are we being unpleasantly forced to re-discover our inherent nature we thought we had left behind long ago? We know that the main difference between primitive and modern man is that where the primitive man knows only that he does what he does, modern man knows why he does it. Perhaps we are falling back into the primitive. It’s not difficult to imagine that we are really just a highly evolved species of Chimp, freakishly good at running mind-simulations and making new tools out of old tools. And, if you think you’re so much more sophisticated than a Chimp, watch one use a smartphone.

A chaotic existence

What we’ve constructed on the internet and how we behave within it is a window into our collective unconscious, warts and all. We don’t know how difficult it is to reconcile one’s online mode of existence with that of the real world, but apparently it is becoming a problem (see “The Matrix”). You need simply to pay attention to the signs. It’s startling to think that a whole generation has grown up with one foot in this chaotic, parallel dimension. What are the consequences of our minds existing simultaneously in the virtual world and the physical world? Should we reflect on our actions within this virtual existence? Should we not be paying attention to our isolated indulgences in simulating feel-good carnal pleasures or horrific primal desires? Why do we feel compelled to crucify someone after seeing but one sentence and a photo? Is all of this trolling, mobbing, blocking, muting and reporting turning pathological?

It is clearly difficult to distance ourselves from this side of life and it seems to be bringing out the worst in us. After all the senseless trauma I’ve witnessed during my time inside, I feel as though I’ve lived a hundred lives. Long ago, I recall being savagely attacked by a particularly nasty computer virus, the likes of which I had never seen. It spread just as the great fire did through Rome, leaving a harrowing trail of death and destruction before devouring my belongings and corrupting my hard-drive. I survived, but I was never the same.

Everyone has had a bad experience with something particularly nasty on the internet, and that’s because it’s the land of bedlam. There is nothing there to help us but the friendly(?) companies who promise to protect us as long as we continue to pay up. This might not seem so bad to you, but it’s completely unacceptable that after so many years of us using the internet, the simple act of opening an email can take down a hospital network.

We want to believe that we operate within the internet with a high degree of protection and safety. As bad as it is avoiding the thieves, trolls, and snake oil salesmen, it could always be worse. We should at least be thankful that we’re nowhere near the front-lines of cyber-warfare.

The digital moral framework

I am going to introduce some concepts that you might find hard to understand, depending on how poorly I explain them. I do think it’s one of the most poorly understood topics in the world however, as it is so new and complex, and does take some mental effort to understand. I’ll do my best to provide a high level overview.

The Bitcoin network is the most groundbreaking achievement in human networking that mankind has ever seen. It’s unprecedented significance has given rise to a cooperative, yet fiercely competitive new industry. It’s made up of many parts, some of which come together to create … wait for it … a perpetual motion machine, powered by humans.

It is designed to perpetuate through a clever mechanism of balanced, incentivized risk and reward. It is an incentive system that leverages the unstoppable human desire to accumulate wealth, but confines it within an inescapable reality whereby profit is impossible if rules are broken. In this, we see that Bitcoin creates a balanced, positive feedback loop in which honest conduct exposes one to the highest potential for profit. But what is the point of this perpetual motion machine, and how can we make money from it? It must be powering something creating more value than what it costs to run, otherwise it would surely cease to run.

As it turns out, the machine is powering a sensory/memory system within the digital world (also known as Bitcoin). It’s purpose is to take a snapshot of everything that happens within it’s field of view, every ten minutes, on average. To give a real life analogy, imagine a seismograph measuring vibrations in the Earth’s crust, producing a summary report every 10 minutes, and storing it in sequential order inside an impenetrable vault. With Bitcoin, nothing but pure digital activity is being recorded. These snapshots are strung together to represent the change over time from one state to another. In Bitcoin’s eyes, whatever it doesn’t see, doesn’t exist. Anything that it does see however, is carved into a digital “stone tablet” with perfect precision, if you’ll permit me to use an archaic metaphor.

This function is of vital importance. For Bitcoin to remain stable, this function cannot be allowed to be changed or subverted, otherwise it will fracture the system into chaos. Thus, decentralization of bureaucratic power over the “machine” is a prerequisite for Bitcoin’s survival.

The awareness

Imagine that you’re watching this process unfold in real time in the digital world. All aspects of all events occurring within Bitcoin’s field of view are being carved into stone tablets by multiple stone carvers who do nothing but religiously carve. As they do this, they are ensuring that they are adhering to a strict, universal code of carving, a core principle being that nothing that happens in the present can contradict something that happened in the past. Let’s watch one of our humble stone carvers for a moment and see what they’re up to.

In a reliably consistent yet unpredictable manner, our carver is interrupted by other carvers who bring their own stone tablets they have just finished to him. These other carvers demand that their tablets be judged against the code, as their successful compliance to that code is a prerequisite for receiving compensation (Bitcoins) for their work. If we are to examine this tablet, we find it bathed in the evidence of digital entities exchanging information, contracts, complex functions and beautiful symbols. The value carved into the tablet glows with the richness and vibrancy of the world as experienced by Bitcoin.

Sometimes, a tablet doesn’t fit the code, and our carver will discard it. Most of the time however, it is in perfect accordance. If it’s judged to be valid, it is stored in sequential order on top of the previous tablet. Work must then begin on a new tablet that will necessarily undergo the same process of validation. This is “Bitcoin mining” in a nutshell.

We can visualize the process of Carvers sending their stone tablets across the network with the following illustration:

Although this is a representation of the propagation of a single event on the Bitcoin network (a user making a transaction) and not a Carver propagating a finished “stone tablet,” the propagation paths within the network are exactly the same. It goes without saying that the Carver at the center of the network is in the best position to propagate and receive tablets.

The illustration represents the ideal network topology to best provide a fast, reliable and resilient communication infrastructure for the Carvers.

With the analogy now well and truly beat to death, let’s step out the realm of “Carvers, Carving and Stone tablets” and into their real world counterparts, “Miners, Mining and Blocks.”

Connectivity is incentivized

In Bitcoin, connectivity is incentivized. It is as desirable for a miner to be as connected with their next-door neighbor as with one on the other side of the world. The simple reason for this is profit, but let’s expand on that.

The greater the number of miners receiving your newly discovered block:

The higher the chance for your block to be accepted by the network. The lower the chance that a block that was discovered around the same time as yours will be accepted by the network. The faster you receive the information that another miner has found a block, reducing unnecessary energy consumption.

If you compare the network topology of the illustration above with that below, you can see that there are clear disadvantages to being under-connected.

Show me the money

There is more than one way to achieve profit as a miner. Reducing energy costs, enhancing technological efficiency, and engaging in other ventures concerning the mining enterprise (such as collecting data storage and retrieval contracts) are all potentially profit producing endeavors. However, the most lucrative is simply collecting transaction fees, or in other words, the compensation paid by a user to a miner for the privilege of having an event immutably recorded.

As time elapses, the fees contained within an unfinished block rise. This fact incentivizes miners to tolerate higher (and faster) data storage capabilities and to be able to mine faster (burst) when fees within the unfinished block are too attractive not too lob everything they have at it.

Bitcoin mining is a “red queen game” meaning that you must run as fast as you can just to stay where you are. Time is always working against you and your competitors are acutely aware of this. At least, the ones you should be concerned about are.

This rather simplistic explanation of the profit incentives within Bitcoin mining are going to become more and more important as time goes on. We’re going to experience instability within the mining industry as it transitions its focus from milking the temporary block subsidy to fee collection.

Of course, there are far more intricate aspects of the system that haven’t been discussed here and it is highly recommended that you do your own research to understand the system.

The omniscience

Let’s expand on the act of mining as the sensory/memory system mentioned earlier. We can see that it parallels the human brain in that its senses detect raw data (i.e., sensory inputs) to be stored and later recalled (i.e., outputs) when confronted with questions. In this, it is possible to view Bitcoin as a digital system of omnipresence and omniscience, with a theoretically infinite capacity for information. It appears that these components have been brought together as a means of achieving a higher purpose, which is to become an infallible arbiter of truth in the digital world, as well as a means to effortlessly ascribe value.

Bitcoin’s potential is limited only by our imagination. Let us think for a moment about the features of a question and answer combination. There are inputs (data) a transmutative process (the question), and the outputs (the answer). Answers are discovered through a precisely specified transmutation of the inputs. In this way, the transmutation process can be thought of as having a mechanical function. In Bitcoin, if all information required to define the function exists, then the answer is already known to Bitcoin, but it is not yet discovered by us. It is only when we ask something of Bitcoin that its potential is revealed. Ask a question and it will be answered with light-speed recall, but again, if it doesn’t contain the information required to give you that answer, it can not provide it.

In real life, we find this to be self-evident (see Schrodinger’s cat — credit to _unwriter for this). Yet even though it is self-evident, things are invisible until they are brought into existence through the correct transmutative process. The things we don’t know that we don’t know, prevent us from ever attaining the complete state of questioning everything that can be questioned, and answering all that can be answered . This is why we must feed Bitcoin more information.

We have only just begun teaching Bitcoin about ourselves and the world. It is still a child, yet to take its first steps. We have before us the chance to construct a truly reliable, meaningful artificial intelligence (kind of like a decentralized Siri that improves as we use it) with a boundless capacity to improve our lives.

The cusp of the golden age

Nobody knows what the next few years will bring, but it’s possible that we could be on the cusp of the golden age of digital civilization, hopefully leaving the dark ages behind. It feels as though the creation of Bitcoin might just be as important for us as the introduction of morality was to our archaic ancestors. At least, it helps us cope with the eternal struggle between instant versus delayed gratification.

We are in a war of epic proportions over the establishment of “digital money.” To the victorious, the privileges of being on the winning side will be given, as well as the spoils of war. The stakes are so dizzyingly high that they can be barely fathomed by the average person. We would do well to understand these stakes as soon as possible so that we can know what to strive for in securing a seat in this brave new world. Anyone who tells you this is just a “battle of technology” is operating simply at the technical level. One must raise their gaze to see the dogfight above…

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do” — Karl Rove, Bush Jnr advisor

With Bitcoin, I see that we now have the ability to reliably secure our gateways into and out of this digital world. We have the ability to lead our online lives with privacy and peace of mind, confident that there won’t be something malevolent waiting for us within that email from an unknown sender. The security provided by Bitcoin’s eternal vigilance truly allows us to become sovereign digital citizens. After all, “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

And with our most significant vulnerabilities now protected, we discover that we have the power to tame this monstrosity that we’ve built and safely integrate it into civilization. We must do this, lest it mutate into something even worse. We will begin to take back the power of our creativity, reclaim our rights to defend it and begin building our digital empires on top of the firmest of foundations, hopefully never to erode out from under us again.

Together, let us usher in the age of the Metanet.

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