'Bitcoin 2023' Student Essay entry [sent 3/31/23]

Before I reoriented so as to include Bitcoin into my worldview, my time preference was so low 'I didn’t care' about money. I’d heard of Bitcoin years prior, but didn’t go down the* *rabbit hole because I just couldn’t imagine how a new form of money might be of service to my desire to live in a more just and loving world.

I was coming from a concern that despite our modern infrastructure, communication between hostile superpowers felt like the risk and suspicion of the prisoner’s dilemma. And all of this in the context of exponential technology becoming a ‘multipolar trap’ where the incentives are to do quickly and unilaterally what ought to be approached carefully and cooperatively.

In the legacy broadcast paradigm that’s presided over us and brought us to this point, communication was tantamount to authoritative messaging. Meanwhile, down my own rabbit hole, the communication 'best practices' I found showed me that ‘conflict only exists at the level of strategy, meanwhile we all have the same human needs’1. This underlying shared reality is a basis for new conversations that create a world that can work for everyone, just as in hyperbitcoinization we share a common denominator across which to trade.

Humanity hasn't dealt with the unworkability of its communication. This is the original (and persisting) *human *alignment problem. I see this clearly in the history of tragedies in politics and war.

Bitcoin can fix this. Specifically, development of an additional layer which serves as a new realm of digitally native publishing. The World Wide Web is a shitcoin compared to the original vision for hypertext2, which has at its core ‘transclusion’, a mechanism by which a quote cannot be taken out of its original context. Ted Nelson demos this UX in Werner Herzog’s “Lo and Behold” - watch it to see a nascent form of this side by side display of visually connected documents.

We can begin to see in this the playing field for a new game theory of communication (& hence Bitcoin adoption) - an environment in which one cannot avoid feedback. If I publish a false claim, anyone can quote it with their own response to it. When you’re reading my assertion, their comment will be right there. I can add feedback to their feedback, and perhaps I was correct after all - now we’ve got a clarification that deepens my point. Such ongoing recontextualization is the warp and woof powerful articulations - if only I was publishing this into such an integrous platform, I would learn how to make it clear to you!

Thankfully, the elements are falling into place. Jack Dorsey’s bounty for a permissionless alternative to GutHub brings it a step closer. Git’s version control process seems analogous to what’s under the hood of Xanadu.3 In fact, since hypertext was originally meant to be a way of monetizing content, I would say Bitcoin (specifically Lightning) is actually the micropayment system Xanadu has been waiting for.

The key specific element I don't see represented in the Git process is an issue Nelson didn’t have to face: in a permissionless system, how do you deal with the potential incoming spam of others quoting your writing? Having to lock up sats to maintain a transclusion? I believe such a mechanism is possible without resorting to some trusted moderator or reputation system. This is how I see Hyperbitcoinization being realized, as the outcome of best practices being practiced.

1 This is the core insight of Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication

2 Project Xanadu is unavoidably the original vision for hypertext since Ted coined the term, “hypertext”

3 https://cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/60.html

continued/subsequent thoughts

Should you imagine I'm defending bitcoin, I would say that I'm still trying to distinguish 'bitcoin'. Besides, given its design parameters, attack is what it's shaped to evade, and the idea is what it is because of the mindset that puts it forward: this (bitcoin) is the best candidate for the Schelling point of the fungible (empty of significance), decentralized/permissionless network that 'naturalizes' (in a world assuming network connectivity) 'money' in an advantages way for the utility of its adopters…