A recent tweet:
"Crypto Billionaires' Vast Fortunes Are Destroyed in Weeks" - colour me #Schadenfreude! They got rich pumping a technology that has consumed vast material and human resources, and produced no services of value to humanity so far other than entertainment. [0]
Friend: Thoughts, @StJohn Piano ? More on the wider trajectory of crypto than a few billionaires that are now less-billionaires but still richer than God.
Hm. Let's see...
Here's what comes to mind:
0) Crypto fortunes - Personal Risk
- Regarding the crypto billionaires (or at least those who are public, and who are therefore targets of anger and malice)... I do not envy them. They are often recognisable, have to spend $x millions / year on personal security, and will be at risk of kidnapping-for-ransom and/or assassination for the rest of their lives.
1) Market price of crypto tokens - Scams vs Investment vs Bitcoin
- Most crypto projects (~99%) are scams or very incompetently run. There is arguably little difference between the two from an investment perspective. These have very volatile prices, and this draws in gamblers and people with FOMO.
- There are however a few projects that have been designed by brilliant people, who are doing their best to tackle important problems. These have a good chance of being the Microsofts / Amazons of the future. If they succeed, their current market price will seem laughably small in retrospect. Related: The explosion of new cryptocurrencies
- Bitcoin is special due to mining, which imposes an actual physical cost for making more of it. It is the most solid system of money that has ever been invented. (Money is a technology, although we usually don't think of it that way.) It may not be perfect, but it's the best available. The market panics every so often, as it is doing at the moment, but I am confident that the panic will not break the underlying system. If it does break (very very unlikely, but possible), a newer and tougher version of Bitcoin will lumber into action. Related: The intrinsic value of Bitcoin
2) Wider trajectory of crypto - Sane Internet
- The Internet is a noise generation machine.
- You can think of noisy information as spam. All of it. When using the Internet, we are confronted with an endless stream of simple, useless, sometimes-malicious information, which we have to sift through in order to get anything done. This is wasteful, distracting, exhausting, anxiety-inducing, and causes social fragmentation and paranoia. It is having a terrible effect on our psyches. Related: The Current Apocalypse
- The fundamental problem with the Internet (recognised at the beginning by quite a few people) is that it does not have a native payment mechanism. Without the ability to impose a cost-per-message, all communication devolves into spam. The most effective strategy is to generate ever-increasing amounts of noise, so that's what all the major players do.
- Even our ability to organise bureaucracies of moderators / fact-checkers is diminishing under the pressure of effectively-infinite information. [1]
- It's not hyperbole to suggest that this could be the thing that breaks our civilisation.
- Blockchain-based tokens are a truly computer-network-native payment mechanism. The tech has now been proven out. Fewer and fewer technical people are willing to argue this point anymore. It will allow the construction of spam protection across the entire Internet.
3) Even wider view of crypto - Civilisational Power
- Blockchain is really an approach to information management that uses an internal token to provide: cost-per-message (anti-spam), synchronised irreversible history, public identity, and secure broadcast. There's some other stuff as well. It feels very much as if we were previously using horses for everything and are now experimenting with internal combustion engines.
- It is quite likely that the countries that most effectively adopt blockchain for information management (contract signing, share ownership, passports, loans, military drone control systems) are going to steamroll the countries that don't. Related: Blockchain Companies
- People look at crypto and see the problems, which are highly visible. However, they usually don't look closely at the existing tech for banking and government, but it's bad (really, really, really bad) and is having enormous trouble coping with the modern weaponised internet.
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[1]
Effectively-infinite information imposes a Catch-22: Sorting and categorising become absolutely necessary and yet impossible to achieve. People begin to regress to extremely simple patterns of belief, and to discard any information that doesn't match their patterns. It's energetically cheaper and allows them to stay functional.
Infinite information encourages truly pathological levels of fantasy and illusion - You can simply check out of reality by only paying attention to a few smartphone-powered datafeeds that align with your pre-existing beliefs. There's nothing to stop you, except (eventually, perhaps) the consequences of ignoring reality. Even then, however... people will usually choose to find a scapegoat instead of restructuring their viewpoint in order to see reality more effectively.
Here are some relevant excerpts from The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi:
^ But if these pieces can be mass-produced and mass-broadcast, 24/7/365, and are often (mostly?) fake / misleading / malicious / lies-by-omission, how can you trust that just letting them click into place will work ? The picture that forms from such pieces is unlikely to correspond to reality...
Social networking changes the logistics of perception.
~ John Robb
Infinite information encourages truly pathological levels of fantasy and illusion - You can simply check out of reality by only paying attention to a few smartphone-powered datafeeds that align with your pre-existing beliefs. There's nothing to stop you, except (eventually, perhaps) the consequences of ignoring reality. Even then, however... people will usually choose to find a scapegoat instead of restructuring their viewpoint in order to see reality more effectively.
Here are some relevant excerpts from The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi:
"Countries..." Angel trailed off, thinking back on his own early life in Mexico, before the Cartel States. "They come and go."
"And mostly we don't see it when it's coming", Case said. "There's a theory that if we don't have the right words in our vocabularies, we can't even see the things that are right in front of our faces. If we can't describe our reality accurately, we can't see it. Not the other way around. So someone says a word like Mexico or the United States, and maybe that word keeps us from even seeing what's right in front of us. Our own words make us blind."
Angel had always liked the desert for its lack of illusions.
Catherine Case saw the world in terms of a mosaic. She spent her time trying to gather data, then shape that data into a picture that pleased her. But that wasn't Angel. He didn't need to shape a picture - he needed to see what was already there. Mosaics made you hope that you could push pieces around to create a picture that didn't exist, instead of letting all those little pieces click click click right into place. Instead of letting them tell you what was right in front of your face.
^ But if these pieces can be mass-produced and mass-broadcast, 24/7/365, and are often (mostly?) fake / misleading / malicious / lies-by-omission, how can you trust that just letting them click into place will work ? The picture that forms from such pieces is unlikely to correspond to reality...
Social networking changes the logistics of perception.
~ John Robb
"She thinks the world is supposed to be one way, but it's not. It's already changed. And she can't see it, 'cause she only sees how it used to be. Before. When things were old."
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