The Societal Stack – The Bitcoin Times
‘Shared Fictions’ as Yuval Harari, termed it in his seminal piece “Sapiens”.
In communicating about fantasies / imaginary concepts and fictions, we’re able to “hack” our biology and attain the trust required for us to cooperate in numbers that exceed our biological limits.
This unique ability has allowed us to build the complexity in society that we often take for granted today.
It has allowed us to cooperate in numbers that exceed what’s called “Dunbar’s number”.
As a result, we’ve evolved from some insignificant ape in the middle of the food chain, to the apex species, at the top of the food chain, who rule the world and have created what scientists now call the “anthroposphere”. The layer of the planetary ecosystem associated with us.
This is an extraordinary feat; made possible (at least as far as we understand) by our ability to hack trust as described above.
For those of you who think you might not be familiar with any of these shared fictions, here’s a few examples; that the world we live in today was built on, and that you buy into daily:
Money is the ultimate tool of human cooperation, and it’s how we’ve created everything we see around us. When people tell me that it’s “just money”, they truly don’t get it.
Money is your labour, in measurable form. Without our ability to objectively and collectively agree on something to represent value, the entire world stops.
This is why we need to take any reinvention of money seriously, and it’s also why Bitcoin is such a big deal.
The internet transformed the way we communicate and made information
+ data natively digital. The current monetary infrastructure has not yet taken that step. It’s a digital veneer upon an analogue system.
This transformation is going to happen — it’s no longer an if, but a when — and the best “stack” for a global monetary infrastructure is a digital one with a robust, secure foundation, and layers of abstraction + complexity built on top.
Remember:
You can’t build monuments on poor foundations.
Money is fundamental to the societal stack, and as a result it must be sound.
If you enjoyed this section and would like to learn more; the following will help give you more context and a better understanding of how we’ve evolved, the role money played and Bitcoin’s potential place in society:
This has been quite a journey — and a long few days for myself and the team at the time of writing, and almost a year since it was written that it’s now been published on Medium.
If you’ve come this far and read the entire paper — I just want to say thank you for the time you’ve dedicated to it.
Time is our most precious resource; and its absolute scarcity is a big part of why we value it so much.
I would argue that Bitcoin is the next most scarce resource and I hope that by now you appreciate its importance as well — if not as much as I do, at least a lot more than you did before.
Whilst this paper was not meant to be a scientifically detailed exposé on Bitcoin, it was meant to paint a picture, drive home a viewpoint, present a logical argument and help open your mind to what might be the true zeitgeist of our time.
I’ll leave you with some final quotes from one of my favourite books, written by someone I consider the quintessential contrarian, along with some final quote-related thoughts for you to take away.
Peter Thiel’s Zero to One:
- “Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”
- “Today’s ‘best practices’ lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.”
- “Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.”
When you think about those three quotes, I hope you too can relate them back to the essence of this paper, because:
- It’s the courageous who stand by Bitcoin and are willing to call it out as it is. They’re also known as the stubborn, dedicated minority.
- Today’s banking and financial infrastructure is a best practice that will lead to what we have now. Going somewhere new will require a new path.
- Bitcoin was the zero to one innovation. The moment already happened. Copying it and trying to make a “better blockchain” is pointless. The next wave of innovation will happen on top. That’s where we all must go.
Thank you,
The Bitcoin Times editorial team
Published at Mon, 16 Dec 2019 01:31:03 +0000
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