On Responsibility

Can’t see the blockchain for Bitcoin

A blockchain: a distributed, append-only ledger of provably signed, sequentially linked and cryptographically secured transactions replicated across a network of computer nodes with ongoing updates determined by a software-driven consensus.*

All companies die

Remember QXL? You were meant to pronounce it Quick Sell but the Silicon valley translation got lost somewhere over the pond and so in London in the late 1990’s we all said Queue Excel. It was an online auction site. One of many. In the end only AuctionBay survived, changing its name to eBay along the way. 

Jennicam. Boo.com Webvan???

You could order hot muffins at MuffinTheMail or fresh lobster from one of my clients in Battersea in 1999 who ran RedLobster.com. I still have a collection of rare business cards from the dot com boom. 

If you lived in London at the time it seemed that the world wide web, when it finally jumped off the information superhighway of unilateral non-hyperlinked crude text, began to take shape as a creative extension of dial-a-take-out. For yuppies. And you had to live in London Zone 6 at the outside. The supply chain system couldn’t cope with anything beyond that. 

Four years earlier I was working in the ad sales team at the Tottenham Court Road offices of The Financial Times, selling ads into Financial Advisor and Pensions Management. We all had a phone and a box of A-Z index cards, pens and paper. Ninety-five. Nineteen not eighteen.

You wanted a letter typing up you hand wrote it or yelled it out from the top of your head to Kay – the department’s secretary and I mean secretary in the take a letter Miss Jones sense. 9 to 5. Dolly Parton. Lily Tomlin. Jane Fonda.

I was faxing handwritten orders to clients in Riyadh and Redhill. Kinda cool. Cutting edge. When my colleague Dan and I both bought Dancall DC1 mobile phones on Orange we’d sit with our teams in winebars on Charlotte Street and get laughed at because we had nobody to call. We could leave voicemail on landlines for our friends and family to collect in the evenings but no one else had a mobile. Pre-network effect. 

Right about now I feel the need to declare that I am forty-seven not one-hundred and forty-seven. 

One day a line of what looked like removal men marched through the office, each with a large square brown cardboard box over his shoulder. We were getting computers. It was still to be a good while before we got online and even then it was 56K copperline wires. No broadband for many years. That was OK because hardly anyone could type and many of my fellow workers had gotten through school and college without using MS DOS or as much as a microfiche. 

Are You Ready For Windows 95? shouted the adverts all down the Northern line from Warren Street to Balham. My daily commute.

Turns out we were not.

About ten of us crowded around Emily’s desk when she clicked her mouse with the cursor on the big blue lower-case letter e that was supposed to show us what the fuss was all about. Nothing happened. e-world just sat there – a spinning globe icon full of empty promise. This was Internet Explorer. Everyone bangs on about the outrageous Bill Gates scooping up Marc Andreeson’s free-for-all (open source) Netscape Navigator only to shut it down so you had to bag a desktop (no laptops yet) with a Microsoft operating system to get a browser worthy of the name but in media in London at that time it didn’t really matter. None of us were even up to taking advantage. We didn’t even know we didn’t know.

But some of my leftfield clients knew. Financial service consultants and their investors, turned out, were quite geeky. Mainly men and wealthy men at that with money to buy PC’s and an intellectual curiosity to see what they could do, my ad sales pitches over the office landline would degenerate into my listening to some guy at least ten years my senior working a financial advisor’s desk in a mock Tudor office above a bookshop in Tonbridge or Guildford or Leatherhead, banging on about the net. I could have killed myself. I was understanding just about every other word of the junk coming out of his mouth and worst of all, when I finally got onto the internet there was nothing but text lists and code. It was like a literature version of Citizens Band radio. Even AOL newsgroups (the very first social media I came across) were years off not to mention chatrooms. ASL if you don’t mind. (age, sex, location).

Give it a year, we all thought. It’ll never last. 

We tend to misread the signs of things to come and form premature negative conclusions based more on our lack of understanding than our prescience or any penchant for realising accurate predictions. We are predictably rubbish at predicting stuff. You can bank on it. 

Boo.com and Webvan were not the message coming off the world wide web. They were just the signals of another wider message. We couldn’t hear it. 

Windows and Hotmail and Javascript and XML and Linux and Nanotech and API’s and mobile data and an oceans worth of fibre cables later, turns out the smartest thing to have gotten known back in the day was that we couldn’t possibly have known where this was going. Just that it was going somewhere. That the journey would be riddled with massive mistakes and crashes to steepen the learning curve. And that the effects would be life-changingly transformative. Not necessarily just good. Good and bad for sure. But definitely palpable. 

Ledgers

Similarly, Bitcoin is not the message of Bitcoin. It is a signal of a wider message. Digital cryptocurrency is not it. The Singularity – the narrative that computers take over from humans running the human world is not it. Too many Hollywood movies, huh? Too often the eponymous star of the show and its accompanying hyperbole are not messages nor are they signals. They are noise. But take a closer look.

Two things have already happened: 

1. With a market value of over $160B, Bitcoin has never been hacked. It has no firewalls or security mechanisms plugged into it. Everyone has tried. It wasn’t born yesterday it is ten years old already.
2. Last year £1.5B was raised in a matter of weeks for this platform’s wave of start-ups without any venture capitalist firms, angel investors or investment banks having been courted or pitched. No band of cool new silicon kids went cap in hand to the men in suits. 

It has not been hacked because there is nothing to hack. There is no central depository of value anywhere. A secondary point is that the thief, in successfully breaching, would devalue the loot they pocketed. But it is secondary.

The way Bitcoin’s successors raise money to get a slice of the action is in itself a massive signal containing a message of what potential lay ahead. These are called ICO’s or Initial Coin Offerings. No more on ICO’s here. Suffice to say that in entirely bypassing the gatekeepers of the investment community (VC’s, equity firms, friends & family and angels) and signalling up ahead to stockmarkets of their forthcoming obsolescence when the need to scale-up arises, to even get funding to play while first movers were desperately trying to persuade the wider public of the magic of Bitcoin and failing majestically, unbeknown to them their very own behaviour, their body languages – if you like – were delivering the best advertisement for the thing in question. Poetry in motion.

The signal was never Bitcoin. The signal is the blockchain. The core message is decentralised verified records with no human control and no central computer leadership. Incentivised consensus. Torrents of bits. No nations. No centre. No manifest identifiable infrastructure. No thing. So nothing to attack. Append-only, so no rewriting history. Global replication so unanimous transparent bookkeeping devoid of human agendas. Replace fibre with quantum entanglement and replication won’t even be just speed-of-light fast. It will be simultaneous. Everything will happen all at once. Literally. The alleged weakness of the internet is that it can be turned off, built as it was on a military-based circuit of connections. But what happens when blockchain runs internet-free on quanta? Try turning that off, Einstein.

The cryptography is something else. Think Alan Turing and the German Enigma code. The code scrambling is a method of ensuring transactional security while protecting personal identity but it is much more than that. In the blockchain, cracking codes is also a method of mining the currencies that incentivises the miners to behave well. It is known as proof of work and ensures protocol obedience. You can kinda tell that crypto rebels or cypherpunks ran blockchain from the off because every solution to every infrastructural or baseline conceptual problem involves cracking a code. I think this bamboozles tourists.

Off-chain

Bitcoin, it is estimated, will finish mining from its blockchain in the year 2140**. Ethereum mines its currency Ether and Tezos mines the Tez but already these models of incentivizing computers to record the truth and organise without humans and without a leading computer at the head of the project is being updated so fast as to make bit mining per se look – well – not so much obsolete but at least a little puriticanal and naive in terms of the grand design total solution. Ethereum encourages decentralised apps (Dapps) and smart contracts whose veracity is underwritten by the blockchain to drive commercial behaviour on top of the ledger but not inside it, bypassing time restrictions and money taxes that feed off limited block memory.

Bit mining and blocks and dapps and ether? I’m not high. I sound like a web geek in the late nineties. My earlier point still stands. Don’t let the noise of the terminology let you lose sight of the signal harbingers.

Ethereum is a blockchain of blockchains and the Ether being mined may be getting bought in Bitcoin and dollars and pounds, but the essence of Ethereum is that the tokens and the mined currency are not for spending anywhere – in contrast to the eponymous bell-weather cryptocurrency – but rather are coded uniquely for the Dapps stakeholders on any given project – making it more likely that we can incentivise good things that currently are not happening. ***Read on.

The native global reserve currencies – US Dollars, gold, British Sterling and the Euro may never be replaced. But that was never the boast or the hope or the message of Bitcoin. It never had or has this goal. It is finding its way in the dark, fully aware that the first guys through the door always get shot. It is getting shot but the door is now open. 

Bitcoin is just Jennicam for the blockchain gang 

Security, cutting out the middleman (banks, agents, stock and commodity exchanges, parents, registrars, governments, lawyers, auditors, clubs, utility providers) and delivering a closer record of the truth than any human bookkeeper or accountant ever did or ever could. Privacy – currently pseudonymity but working toward anonymity. Transactional freedom.

Land deed titles. Births. Deaths. Marriages. Passports. Sales without a central processor. Imagine selling the power from your solar panels to your neighbour without having to first sell it to EON or Iberdrola (Scottish Power) for them to slice off their fee. Imagine transacting without VISA and AMEX fees and commissions. Imagine truthful media. Accommodating refugees without gangs stealing their food coupons. How about food supply chain systems without TESCO. Undistorted crime figures where domestic violence incidence, child safety and drug use per locality are not politically swayed pre-publication to massage estate land values. Minus Scotland yard.

An education system without everyone scoring A’s just so the staff and politicians grab performance bonuses. Minus centralised curricular and examination boards. Real education without the corrupt government bottleneck. You know, not free training for wealthy corporate employers disguised as education so, just as my parents ran from their excuse of a school in the 1950’s to the factory chorus of sewing machines and cotton bobbins like good little Lemmings, it’s 2019 and hoards of college grads “learn” web coding so they can be good little php programmers for some entrepreneurial guy who can afford to feed his or her family. Education does not mean training up the working classes for white slavery “careers” at the behest of the upper middles. Education is an end in itself and as such has been stolen entirely from generations of pre-programmed children and young adults for at least thirty years in the UK. Like banks, law, media, politics and the corporate free market, education is trashed. Let’s go get it back then.

How about medicines for rare diseases for a small population that doesn’t seem commercially viable to sink R&D funds into?

All companies die

Filecoin raised $252M at a crowd-sale in August 2017. Filecoins incentivise all of us to contribute our computer’s unused hard drives to the Interplanetary File System or IPFS. Thus, decentralising the world wide web and emasculating the server farm kings. I personally see this as a white paper or test run before we decentralise cloud computing. How glorious! Pulling the rug from under The Gaffer (GAFA – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) by simply changing the game. All companies die. But with the blockchain, I’d wager that some will die faster than others. 

And my favourite to date, which is still very Bitcoin-informed and probably says something about my inability to fully grasp the magnitude of the new trust medium: working immigrants sending remissions home to their families. Here in Manchester, England that means all of my lovely Polish, Portuguese, Nigerian, Italian, Pakistani, Iranian, Syrian, Baltic, Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian, South African, US and German friends catching a break. One global currency with no central bank means people get a leg up. For once. Blockchain is for the people precisely because it is not by the people. It re-localises and changes shape so you can’t catch it.

Imagine just beyond your own generation-bound constricted imagination. Just out of personal reach, perhaps. A glimpse of a future that will always pan out different to how we foresee it now. Imagine that. 

Get a life

Personal data. Money. Food. Oil. Water. Knowledge. Many other such means of communication. All are centralised and the gatekeepers run your life. Entertainment. Travel. Bodily consumption. Many other such means of chilling out and being leisurely. (think petrol, alcohol and your TV license). Even such recreational things are licensed and the licensor runs your life.

You are just points on a social graph. A little ball of energy to be objectified, commoditised and monetised. For now….

Blockchain is currently mining

Here comes the truth machine. The lawyers, the bankers, the FBI, all government agencies the planet over, all guardians of the nation-state model and holders of centralised power: all such robber-baron gang leaders are quaking in their boots. But blockchain is currently mining and it cannot be stopped because nobody, computer or human, is in charge, it is not run from any central servers, it cannot be place-located and it replicates faster than the web-spun lies of power-drunk human beings.

Q What is blockchain? A I can’t quite put my finger on it. 

Fifty years on, let’s finally get this net thing started. The world wide web and apps are schoolboy errors. 

Blockchain. Coming to a spaceport town near you. Move along. Move along. These really ARE the droids we’re looking for.

Thanks for reading.

We are one

……

Footnotes;

*The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and The Future of Everything by Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna

** The ten-minute pay-outs to miners has halved, denominationally, every four years since Bitcoin’s inception. It is the exponential calculation of this pattern which predicts mine closure in the year 2140. Yet this does not guarantee the 2140 date.

***Off-chain incentives supporting the blockchain truth machine include SAFT’s or Special Agreements for Future Tokens. Firms raise cash by selling behavioural and missionary promissory contracts and then use the funds raised to carry such promises out. Buyers have to be accredited investors, thereby warding off SEC regulations which activate when investors originate from public, not exclusive pools.

Recommended viewing;

Banking on Bitcoin: an eighty minute documentary now showing on Netflix UK.

The Search for Satoshi: Christopher Cannucciari’s documentary.

……

What are you doing?

Relax. You are going to die.

Doing and waiting are layers we build on top of being. Oft they began as volitional. Eventually it came to pass that we couldn’t stop.

The thing about To Do Lists – clue in the name – is that they tend to contain things to do. On and on they go. Stacked up. That’s the thing about lists. They list stuff. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be. All things are that which they are. Nothing more. Nothing less.

The thing about all vehicles of anticipation; queues and waiting rooms, departure and arrival lounges, holding patterns, lines, unfulfilled orders, waiting your turn, first-come-first-serve attendance systems, check-ins, checkouts, track-your-order facilities, book early to avoid disappointment and your call is important to us, you are fifth in the queue, don’t hang up ways of living is that you are wasting your life. You have become an instrument of clock time and clock time doesn’t even exist. The dogs and the birds and the horses seem to be doing just fine without Sunday 21st July 2019 at 1815 hrs or whatever time you make it whenever you make it and for why. Even sillier than To Do Lists, here you are waiting To Do. You’re not even doing anything and you’ve turned it into a thing. Sit in a waiting room or jump into a line and see what happens. You’ll be waiting. If you were not, it wouldn‘t be that which it is. 

But it is. 

Just under waiting and doing, being shimmers. Inviolable and vast, she is constance. She contains all you ever need. 

Heartstone. Oasis in the water. 

More accurately, she contains all of you by removing the illusion of need. Only when you are truly with her will you know that she is all there is to be within. Everything else is without.

All of your life you have chosen to be without. Why are you doing this? 

Dial down the background noise. Strip everything back. 

You can’t see her as she is surrounded by things that blot her out. The emptiness of being and the humility of her silence drown in the grim kinetic cacophony of quotidian nonsense that is all of your own making. 

You are conducting the orchestra. You are filing complaints like the quiet neighbour invaded by nuisance.  

The secret is in being while you wait. The secret is in letting go of doing and being wider and deeper and being more often. Cut out the middle man. Most problems don’t get solved. They get un-existed by non-doing.

We live in a highly action-oriented society. You tend to be valued for what you do. You tend to value other people for what they do.*

When was the last time you valued someone for what they didn’t ?

The most disruptive form of doing and waiting is thinking. 

Your thoughts are just your thoughts.**

They are not your life. They are your thoughts. 

Make a room as big as the sky in your mind. Your thoughts can be clouds that float through. 

Some of your thoughts are clear. Some of your thoughts are muddy. Belief is just a thought. 

An open mind isn’t attached to thinking or belief. 

Thoughts can be a jail. 

Watching them coming and going lets you out to play in the universe. 

Please enjoy watching your thoughts come and go. 

Come out to play

You will learn this sitting quietly. 

In fact, sitting quietly and being yourself is the highest of arts. 

When you learn to sit quietly, this is the same thing as being Buddha.

Nothing more. Nothing less. 

Sitting quietly can teach you many ways to accept life, meet pain, age gracefully, care for your body, accept your feelings, give thoughts room, be who you are, live each moment well, be surprised, wonder, be grateful, do no harm, benefit life, contribute, heal, serve, devote, commune, accept change and grow. 

Cherish your life here. Now. 

You don’t have to be religious or take on new grave philosophical commitments. You don’t have to be traditional or conventional. Nor must you be cool and on-trend. There is nothing new to learn, intuit or understand.

You don’t have to be, get or do anything. You don’t have to begets the futility of doing anything. You are.

Get tar for the targets and feather them. Perforate the form of performance. Find the absolute (I didn’t say relative) gaping hole in every point of every goal. You wear your pursuit of them around your head like a blindfold, genius.

In the modern world with your phone and your high speed way of thinking and your non-stop behavioural tics. Even your hopelessness is hope. Even your loneliness is bliss. You don’t know it but you’re so beautiful. You can start here and end here. Just do it. You’ll see.

You are Buddha in blue jeans. 

Thanks for reading.

We are one

….

• *These three sentences are written in today’s Gospel Reflection. This is the Sixteenth Week of Ordinary Time in Year C of the Roman Catholic liturgy. When Martha complains that she is doing all the work while Mary is just sat listening to Jesus, it is pointed out that undoing, not doing, is often “the better part of us”. Stop! Is the message for my 1.2 billion Catholic brothers and sisters today. God bless you all.
• **This line and the following nine lines that fall away from it are a direct quote from Tai Sheridan: Buddha in Blue Jeans: An Extremely Short Simple Zen Guide To Sitting Quietly, copyright 2011.