@ Bitcoin Infinity Media

This is a part of the Bitcoin Infinity Academy course on Knut Svanholm's book Bitcoin: Sovereignty Through Mathematics. For more information, check out our Geyser page!

Changing the Rules

Altering the Bitcoin protocol is easy. The code is open source, which means that anyone can download a copy of the code and make whatever changes they want to it. Altering what the participants of the Bitcoin network view as the real deal, however, is hard. Really hard. Gaining their acceptance requires the proposed upgrade to be really good and really bulletproof in terms of not altering the game-theoretical fundamentals that make following the rules beneficial to the miners. Upgrades to the protocol can be implemented via either a soft fork or a hard fork. A soft fork is a voluntary, backward-compatible upgrade. A hard fork requires every node in the network that wants to stay active to upgrade its software. Even a soft fork can be very controversial, and a great debate between proponents of different paths to scaling up the Bitcoin network in 2017 led to a portion of the network “forking off” and creating a new chain via a hard fork. Even though the proposed upgrade was implemented following the consensus rules, some participants weren’t very happy with it. At this point in time, it is unlikely that Bitcoin will ever hard fork again except to fix critical bugs.

The Internet is an ocean of misinformation, and more often than not, it is very difficult to navigate through it. The sheer amount of dishonesty in the so-called "crypto space" is really depressing and has very little, if anything, to do with sound money. Bitcoin does one thing and one thing only: it solves The Byzantine Generals Problem through its consensus rules. That’s it. A problem most people have never even heard of. The Byzantine Generals Problem describes how hard it is to construct a network where the participants can come to a consensus on the true state of the network without needing to know or trust any of the other participants. In other words — how to construct a network in such a way that no trust is required, while ensuring that information sent via the network is true. A blockchain by itself does not ensure decentralization. It is not the “underlying technology” behind Bitcoin in any way. Bitcoin is the underlying technology behind the blockchain hype, but saying that the blockchain is the key invention here is misguided at best. The anchor chain is not the underlying technology behind the anchor. Nor is the keychain the technology behind the key or the food chain the underlying, most interesting aspect of a human being. Be very skeptical of those promoting blockchains that do not see Bitcoin’s blockchain as the most important one. Even social networks with billions of users. They are practically saying that masturbation is the most important aspect of sex.

At any point in time, any participant in the Bitcoin network can stop agreeing with the network’s way of determining scarcity and coming to consensus. A participant can choose to follow a hard fork of Bitcoin, exchange all of their Bitcoin for another cryptocurrency, or abandon the idea of digital scarcity altogether if they so choose. What they can’t do is change Bitcoin, change what others perceive to be Bitcoin, or change the nature of how bitcoiners determine scarcity. Unlike every government-backed currency, no one is forcing anyone to agree with anything in Bitcoin. It is a completely voluntary system with no formal leaders. We humans aren’t used to leaderless systems, and the idea of having no authority telling us how to think about it is scary to a lot of people. As mentioned above, many opportunists take advantage of this, and many people will lose money to scammers before Bitcoin finds its rightful place in our society. Stay vigilant and be suspicious of any “cryptocurrency” that isn’t Bitcoin. Every claim that an alternative currency has a new feature, is better for the environment, is faster or more anonymous than Bitcoin, or can be used as a base layer for building decentralized applications, is a testament to misunderstanding what the invention of Bitcoin really was. It was not so much an invention at all but rather a discovery. The discovery of true digital absolute scarcity. Absolute scarcity, whose most obvious use case was sound money. A discovery is a one-way occurrence. Thousands of people fly from Europe to America every day, but that doesn’t make those people as historically significant as Christopher Columbus. Nor will any social network coin, petro-dollar, or altcoin ever be as significant as Bitcoin.

While changing Bitcoin might be really hard, changing the current political state of the world is nearly impossible. Not because of the risk of having your voice drowned out — everyone on the internet faces that hurdle — but because the game is rigged. It’s rigged everywhere. Ignorant bloggers with hubris and a paycheck, often referred to as “journalists,” often parrot their unseen masters, the central bankers, and accuse Bitcoin of being the biggest pyramid scheme ever known to man. Our current monetary system is a pyramid scheme of such gargantuan proportions that almost everyone on Earth fails to see it for what it is since the bubble encapsulates the entire planet. Quantitative easing is counterfeiting, and counterfeiting is theft. Wealth is stolen from everyone and given to those most cynical and evil among us. If we had sound money, the playing field would be leveled, and those of us making the most responsible investments would be rewarded. Right now, our system rewards ignorant demagogues and outright liars instead. A hierarchical system of power will always favor those who crave power above all else. A decentralized system will not. It cannot. It’s fair.

According to a recent study in the journal Intelligence, highly intelligent people are more likely to be diagnosed with various mental disorders such as autism spectrum disorders (20% more likely), ADHD (80%), anxiety (83%), and they have a 182% higher likelihood of suffering from one or more mood disorders. The study compared data from the American Mensa Society to data from national surveys in general. According to another study published a couple of years back in the British Journal of Psychology, highly intelligent people are more likely to have fewer friends than those less fortunate in the cognitive department. In addition to this, many separate studies show that ADHD brains are linked to higher performance in some measures of creativity than their “normal” counterparts.

Having suspected that having a brain “on the spectrum” runs in my family, both up and down the generations, I dug a little deeper into the subject. I did this mainly because I’m curious about myself and why I function the way I function, but also because of the fact that these “diseases” were almost unheard of when I grew up. I’ve done a couple of tests online. They all say I’m quite likely to suffer from one of these conditions, mainly ADD. I’ve heard preschool teachers voice suspicions about spectrum disorders in one of my kids, and even though I suspect that some teachers look a little harder for these things than they probably should, I wouldn’t be surprised if the child’s behavior matched more than one of the spectrum-condition criteria. A thing that did surprise me, though, was that the Swedish Ministry of Education recently decided to pay extra attention to extraordinarily gifted children. Very un-social-democratic indeed and probably a sound thought. I became curious and looked at the paper on what behaviors teachers should look for in these children. They were remarkably similar to those who could label another child with ADHD or ADD. So, one child gets to skip a class, and another is given amphetamine to be more like the rest of the flock, all depending on the judgment of that particular child’s teacher.

Ritalin and other amphetamine-like drugs have for a long time been prescribed en masse to children with suspected ADHD and ADD in Western societies. Some countries are more restrictive than others, but these practices are present to some extent almost everywhere. People are being given anti-depressants all over the world, and there’s an opioid epidemic in the United States. Could it be that we’re seeing this from the wrong perspective? What do the institutions and schools have to do with our recent love for mental medication? Here’s a scary thought: Are we medicating the wrong segment of the population? Could it be that the less intelligent are unable to understand the behavior of the more intelligent? I’m not saying that everyone “on the spectrum” is hyper-intelligent, but maybe there’s a grain of truth here. Not being able to properly adjust to groups may just be a side effect of preferring to be alone. Not being good at submitting to the will of authorities may be a sign of independence rather than simple disobedience. Imagine if Nikola Tesla or Albert Einstein had been given Ritalin at an early age. Would they ever have come up with the amazing innovations and insights that they did if they’d been medicated into being docile sheep instead? Without the crazy ideas of Tesla, who allegedly was considered a weird loner by his peers, we might not have alternating current, without which the world would be a very different and darker place than it is today. Good ideas propel humanity forward, and we have no idea what we’re missing out on by turning our would-be future inventors and scientists into zombies instead. Keeping the ducks in line might seem beneficial to the collective, but it is only the individual that can spawn an original idea.

Our societies are built upon institutions, and institutions, once in place, have a tendency to act in their own best interest. The people in them have much to lose by not giving in to the will of the machine, so to speak. This includes our schools in which the children are lumped together for many years with potentially nothing in common but their age. They are then forced to imbibe a curriculum adapted to the median, neatly packed into different subjects, and are then graded by the person most likely to be biased against their talent that exists — the teacher. The Internet has long since rendered this system obsolete, but it seems only free thinkers understand that. If anyone should be medicated, it is not the children “on the spectrum.” Instead of giving these kids mind-numbing drugs, maybe we should try giving everyone else mind-enhancing drugs instead? The sad story about dumbing down the gifted for the sake of the collective is nothing new. The Arab world, for instance, thrived scientifically between the 8th and the 14th century until the collective interest of religion effectively killed that. Socialist states keep collapsing, Venezuela being the latest tragic addition to this collective madness. Russia threw one of their best thinkers ever, Garry Kasparov, in jail. In short, any society that puts the collective before the individual is on a very dangerous path. Thanks to Keynesian economic theory and central bank counterfeiting, or quantitative easing, all countries are on this path right now. What are the odds that Satoshi was on Ritalin when he wrote the Bitcoin whitepaper?

Changing the rules of any game is always hard when you’re a participant rather than a game designer. The game you’re in is rigged, and you’re a pawn on someone else's chess board. A pawn whose main purpose is to be sacrificed in order to protect the king. Now, look at how the artificial intelligence algorithm AlphaZero plays chess. The newly crowned ultimate chess player does one specific move a lot more often than any of its predecessors. It sacrifices pawns. Ask yourself, are you happy with being a pawn? Does your government’s promise of a social safety net seem legitimate to you? Will your current job even exist in twenty years? In ten? You don’t need to be a pawn. More importantly, you don’t need to leave the game entirely. Even a very small investment in Bitcoin has an enormous potential upside. The Lightning Network is a technology that changes the rules of what money is and what money can be. Once you have a Lightning Network wallet installed and topped up with some Bitcoin on your phone, you quickly realize that it’s even easier to use the Lightning Network than it is to use the basic Bitcoin Network. You scan a QR code and press send. That’s it. Transactions on the Lightning Network are instant, free, and anonymous. Even though it’s still in beta at the time of writing, it works like a dream. Imagine what you can build when money can flow through pipes like water or even energy. Circuits that run on value instead of electricity. Logic gates made electronics possible rather than mere electrics. “Value gates” would open up a whole new spectrum of invention, where human interaction would act as fuel for human ingenuity directly.

About the Bitcoin Infinity Academy

The Bitcoin Infinity Academy is an educational project built around Knut Svanholm’s books about Bitcoin and Austrian Economics. Each week, a whole chapter from one of the books is released for free on Highlighter, accompanied by a video in which Knut and Luke de Wolf discuss that chapter’s ideas. You can join the discussions by signing up for one of the courses on our Geyser page. Signed books, monthly calls, and lots of other benefits are also available.