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348 sats \ 10 replies \ @ek 5 Oct 2023 \ parent \ on: Lyn Alden book club part I bitcoin
I believe it's hard to understand digital scarcity if you have grown up without ever witnessing such a thing in the 50+ years of internet history. The internet, a network of networks, built to share data. How can a thing which purpose was to share data make the complete opposite possible: to keep data scarce? Which introduced p2p file-sharing and thus the biggest enemy of copyright holders? Which made more information available than ever before, to so many people at their fingertips, wirelessly and globally? The internet is like a printing press on steroids. And that's an understatement.
So I think the problem is not that bitcoin is complex: the problem is that it's such a paradigm shift, you need to unlearn some things you thought are never possible to start to grasp it and the concept of digital scarcity. And some people will indeed never grasp it. They simply don't have enough time in their lifes left for unlearning or adapting.
I will always remember how my professor said that when he heard about public key cryptography for the first time, his first thought was that that's impossible: how can you share a key over an insecure communication channel and keep it secret? Surely there is no way!
That's when I witnessed myself how I take things for granted which were considered miracles when they were discovered (do we invent math or discover it?). The way he framed it, I realized what an astonishing discovery RSA and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange must have been. And now we take HTTPS and E2EE for granted and use it in our daily lifes to message friends in private, do online banking or... write on SN, knowing it's the real SN since TLS certificates authenticated the host.
I believe the same will happen with bitcoin. Future generations will grow up with it and just accept digital scarcity as something so natural, you won't question it at all.
So I think the problem is not that bitcoin is complex: the problem is that it's such a paradigm shift, you need to unlearn some things you thought are never possible to start to grasp it and the concept of digital scarcity.
This is a better way of saying it than 'complex', I agree.
That's when I witnessed myself how I take things for granted which were considered miracles when they were discovered.
You raise a good point about the analogues to digital-nativity, e.g., if you grow up w/ x then it's familiar to you and you don't have trouble with it, and in fact you'll hold onto it forever, even when you maybe shouldn't, as @SatsCats mentioned wrt his mom and the printer. Is btc within the realm of things that will work like that, and someone who's ten years old right now will find all of this intuitive?
I'm suspicious of this. As mentioned in another comment, if we think of theories of money rolling up at least two key aspects (credit, commodity) then we can see how deeply ingrained these things are in the human brain -- we have hardware dedicated to solving social coordination issues (credit) and we have hardware dedicated to thinking and reasoning about objects and the possession of them (commodity). Even though money is a symbolic construct, it has underpinnings that the earliest homo sapiens would feel in their flesh and bones.
It's an open question to me if btc can feel real in that way. But maybe it doesn't need to feel equivalently real? Obviously people work in these abstract worlds all the time and it doesn't feel like a big deal. Is money different somehow, though? I still don't know.
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Note from the future: this great article is a beautiful illustration of some of what you're talking about.
I didn't know about it at the time of posting or I would have referenced it!
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Your time + learning quote resonates with me:
They simply don't have enough time in their lives left for unlearning or adapting
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Yes. For the first 4 years of bitcoin, I didn’t think digital scarcity made sense. As a software engineer, I thought that software always goes out of date and gets replaced so I didn’t expect Bitcoin to remain dominant. What I had missed was that the network effect itself was the meta-sentient entity that came into existence and remains antifragile (using software as a substrate). It took examining the staying power of social networks for me to grok this and, having grown up mostly without the internet, that wasn’t native to my mindset.
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Almost the same for me -- first was to view btc as software. Applying a software (or tech) perspective leads you to certain assumptions, so I was not very interested in it, figured it would get upgraded a few times before I needed to pay attention. Thus why I am still a working stiff :/
Even the "network effect" frame isn't how it sits in my head now -- it's human coordination / belief, which I suppose is a function of network effects, though the dynamics are hard to untangle. That makes it a lot easier to reason about, and leads to quite different places than where the software / tech metaphor will take a person.
I still don't rest completely easy on the network effect / coordination distinction, though. Whether it even is a distinction.
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I also had to spend 10 years learning about economics in the context of a massive desire to retire early :)
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I feel the importance of this is overstated.
People use banking, credit and debit cards without understanding how they work. They don't care how, they just know they do work.
One day they will use Bitcoin without understanding how it works. The long history of use without security breaches, the amount of institutional money in it and the good reputation will be enough to convince them it's safe, and the improved UI will hide the technical details from them successfully.
They will use it, because they will have no choice.
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I can see that perspective. There's certainly no shortage of stuff that we use in almost total ignorance of how it works. Cars, computers, phones. We don't know how our bodies work, either, at least, most people don't.
What seems potentially different is that the whole thesis for btc is (to paraphrase Satoshi) the amount of sovereignty needed to make it work. It is not uncommon for people to talk about putting their life savings into it -- in fact, btc is often discussed not as a tool, but as a virtue, a philosophy. Can you adopt a philosophy like this without deeply internalizing it? Without having profound intuitions about its core actions?
Maybe you can. Maybe it's not necessary. Those are the issues that give me pause, though.
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Can you adopt a philosophy like this without deeply internalizing it?
I suspect much of technology could be characterized as once being difficult to internalize. To pick some more modern examples, being an early adopter of telephones and being asked to remember phone numbers or usernames and passwords.
I share the suspicion that we might be asking too much of our nature, but I also know I under-appreciate how adaptable we are. Why might public key cryptography be uniquely resistant to internalization?
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Yeah, it's funny, in a way, that I'm raising this objection, sitting here typing to you on this computer, which has such unfathomable layers of complexity that it's practically magic. (And we thought pencils were complicated!) And even though I understand the stack, at least in theory, down to the physical layer, my working schema is much simpler: I'm sending you a message.
If you handed a computer to someone from 1500 (after representational art and the printing press, among other things) and said to him: "Behold, I am magically sending a message to my friend through the ether!" they would get like 90% of the idea, don't you think? It might even be a little easier in 1500 than, say, 1900 -- you'd convince him you were some kind of magician, which might well be plausible according to his worldview, and he'd be sorted. The communicative act is fundamentally the same, even though the medium is not, the manner is not.
So:
Why might public key cryptography be uniquely resistant to internalization?
Knowing what I know of the math behind it, there's just so much spooky weirdness that defies intuition. And not just PKC, but all of these abstractions. The idea that the mere knowing of a thing makes it yours, for instance; or that your entire history of transactions can be revealed if you can guess a number, but that the number of guessable numbers is so large that guessing any of them is impossible --
I dunno. The more we talk about it the less convincing I find my own argument. But I'm also acutely aware of how long I've been thinking about this topic and how foreign it still seems.
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