20 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury OP 6 Oct 2023 \ parent \ on: Lyn Alden book club part I bitcoin
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.
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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