Bitcoin, the Barrow Scale, and a Great Future

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. – Bitcoin Genesis block

Today, we humans have the internet, smartphones, the passenger jet plane, ocean liners, and rockets. We have tremendously automated manufacturing and logistics processes leveraging the economics of scale, and insightful data analytics with artificial intelligence tools e.g. bots for targeted ads.

We have the nuclear, mineral, and technological resources to end world hunger with an abundance of healthy food, fight malaria while dishing out free mosquito nets and a worthwhile education, and provide quality health care to everyone in all corners of the planet.

But we don’t do that.

Image: Bitcoin will one day finance most rocket launches

There are many things to blame, but right now, everyone should urgently point a finger at the money. The money we use is frequently corrupted by the ability of very few people to manipulate its supply and this has been made worse by fads like “cryptocurrency.” Now the entire world economy is turning into one big, lying speculative money bubble. Instead of this mass oppression, we could have a free market – a way to provide nascent needs to all market players with minimum resources.

Racketeering is the order of the day, and human life is fast becoming nasty, brutish, and short a la Thomas Hobbs. Then there is bitcoin, brought to us through a visionary stranger called Satoshi Nakamoto. The first digitally scarce good on the planet and the only scarce monetary good.

With its arrival, something changed. For the first time in human history, there was a thing, money that nobody could control individually to their benefit. Not even the President of the United States.

This excites many people, especially pro-human-flourishing liberals. Hurray!, they proclaim. But some people are made uneasy because deep down, they alone want to control everything. What our planet dearly lacks today is not more science, more energy sources, more mineral resources, more stuff. Stuff will not cure the civil wars going on across racial, gender, national, historical, or cultural grounds. Stuff will not stop us from continuously succumbing to destructive groupthink and media propaganda.

Stuff will not save us when a super-intelligent AI (maybe hacks the Federal Reserve) obsoletes our jobs and forces us to look at the ‘I’ in individualism closer than ever. Despite virtue signaling galore, the loss of a job means suffering alone to many, in one’s room, risking depression. Yet our ancestors from many thousands of years ago faced such troubles as loss together in a loving, caring collective.

The Barrow Scale

The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it – ‘Snow Crash’ by Neal Stephenson.

What’s the amount of power locked up in true human collaboration through collective individual participation in the bitcoin revolution?

In a word, gargantuan.

Consider all the untapped nuclear power resources under the ground, stuck there because human beings on the surface are more concerned about nuking each other than they are with building a world that produces the next Fertile Crescent.

We remain stuck because of currency wars, with one group’s fiat currency fighting with millions in ad spending (and with scare tactics) to not relegate their comfy alpha positions to others. And indeed, why should they? They have the superior currency don’t they, why let another’s currency trump your own?

Bitcoin is not “just another currency.” It is for anybody and everybody. Calling us to redefine what it means to have a global reserve currency, what it means to regulate financial activity without coercion, and currency gymnastics. That’s difficult and lazy people don’t like it.

All of us humans are lazy, granted. But some people are too darn lazy. I see them everywhere on social media.

They’d rather burn part of their excruciating 8-hour workdays arguing and fighting for cheap superiority over nonsense like “whose worldwide cryptocurrency should be global reserve currency and whose shouldn’t.”

Bitcoin lets the world unite under one monetary standard, individually hedged, so everyone is responsible. So that 8 billion people’s 64 billion work hours per day are then transformed by democratic and synergistic use of transformative technology like nuclear power, into 640,000 billion work hours per day.

A 10,000x increase in human potential!

Like magic, people will have more time to think and invent the next cutting-edge quantum mechanical devices such as the transistors that power CPUs, and GPUs in ASIC Bitcoin miners. Maybe even unleash the alien (but all so natural) power of Quantum Computers as ASIC miners (call them QSICs). Better bitcoin miners mean they consume less power for even faster bitcoin mining.

This will be the start of true mastery of the Barrow scale and expertly controlling nano-scale devices makes us even better at being Type 1-minus, Type-2 minus, Type 3-minus, and Type 4-minus than we are right now on this scale.

Then as nuclear power frees us from having to work 8 hours a day for food to essentially working only a few minutes for food, the remaining hours will be spent eating, celebrating, and dating (we’ll need more humans 🙂 in the great future) and thinking.

And this directly enables us to climb the Kardashev scale because to go up this scale requires that we master the technology of trapping and making use of lower entropy energy or even extremely high entropy energy like an Asteroid impact. Thus, we will be orders of magnitude more efficient and better hedged against disasters than we are today.

All this will eventually enable us to be an outer-space-faring civilization because outer space is a harsh environment that is a colossal void, dark, and extremely cold. It is full of dangerous cosmic rays, and yet it is where Kardashevian technologies like satellites, telescopes, and mega solar collectors need to be parked. A human, then, has to go there to carry out maintenance upgrades, which is very dangerous.

But right now, it is the ultimate frontier. Before conquering Mars, we need to conquer outer space. For only in outer space can we have global control over the planet below, a hallmark of a Type 1 status civilization on the Kardashev scale.

Only by conquering outer space can we stop and even reverse catastrophic global warming if it ever manifested, or stop an extinction-level asteroid from making us all extinct.

The Great Future

With great power comes great responsibility – Uncle Ben in ‘Spider-Man’.

The power of money is too great to leave in the hands of a few people (Central Banks). Letting go of the gold standard led to two World Wars, financed on pure credit to involve otherwise sensible people who wouldn’t have put their savings behind such destructive forces. We know what destruction followed. Eventually, people let inflation be normalized with the Nixon Shock.

The power to make money and defend it from inflation is so great that it should be everybody’s responsibility and not a select few.

This great power moves the world economy, literally. So what would anyone prefer? To be moved by the pressing of a button, or to be a part of the forces of control with everybody else and help move the world? A free market would allow for this.

With money like bitcoin, we have sharpened our focus. Keys can be lost, so we have skin in the game. If a billion people run bitcoin we have a billion people with skin in the game.

Because they own the game and care if it works well or not, people will be mindful to give the best whenever they want the best. They will be mindful to not engage in worthless warmongering because it is their skin at stake here. But if somebody else owns the game, who cares. Bai lan, tang ping.

We cannot see this technological revolution because it is so momentous it is being fought by everyone attached to the way of life now. Which is a lot of people. This is not like replacing a few factory workers with AI, this is replacing the way people think about money. It will take a while, which is OK. Good things take a while.

Meanwhile, it will sharpen our tools for manipulating value through space and time while the devices we use to do this manipulation get ever sophisticated. Our love and togetherness will grow, and we shall need it because AI terminators await us if we slack off as surely as darkness follows daytime.