Thread by Gigi

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Want to Understand Bitcoin? Understand Peace.

🧵👇
"producing kinetic brute-force physical power for strategic defense is something nations already do..."—@JasonPLowery

Yes, they do that. They do so via a show of force, implying "do as we say, or else..."

archive.ph/zwXfm
Bitcoin is very different. It's not about "I have the longer stick"; it's about producing a real, costly signal. A signal that can't be argued with and happens to protect everyone else that participates in the system.
Why produce this signal?

Three reasons:
1) Unforgeable costliness (read Szabo)
2) Timing (read dergigi.com/time)
3) Cryptanalytic stability (read dergigi.com/idea)
The above three are technical and monetary answers.

There is also a "political" answer, which is censorship resistance. If you can't find a miner to bribe you'll have to mine yourself. You can focus on that, sure, but this doesn't make it a sword or war-like.
You are stuck in the paradigm of war, which is indeed the continuation of policy by other—violent—means. However, Bitcoin is not "war" in any traditional sense. Bitcoin is non-violent. It is like a game of correspondence chess. So: why call it war?
My detailed response is contained in dergigi.com/speech and goes like this: bitcoin is non-violent play, a game of message passing that makes the threat of violence impotent.


To quote Wei Dai: "the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations."

In #Bitcoin, True Names are not required.
Conflict resolution implies violence, but only in the physical realm. In the informational realm, conflict resolution needs to be done differently because information can never be scarce—it can only be secret.

This is why we have to hash it out, pun intended.
We probably agree on more things than we disagree on, I just heavily disagree with the framing of violence and war as I have said multiple times in the past.

It boils down to what Applebaum has said: "No amount of violence will ever solve a math problem."
It truly is apples and oranges, and since this is Bitcoin, oranges are ideas.

I don't "own" the number 3; you can't violate this "property" of mine. Thoughts and things are different, and Bitcoin ultimately operates in the realm of thoughts. It is substrate-independent.
Once any dispute is settled—via what Adam Gibson called the "reification of information"—we move permanently from the physical to the informational. That's why you can have 12 words in your head; 12 words that represent value *directly.*
Yes, Bitcoin settles disputes extra-legally, i.e., outside of the law. But it does so non-violently. Further, it doesn't do it because of any deliberate property violation. It does so out of necessity.

dergigi.com/law
The need to settle disputes arises naturally through the physical limitations of information propagation. It is impossible to have a globally synchronized state at a single time. Our universe forbids it. That's why we will always have orphan blocks.


The probabilistic nature of this dispute settlement is also what makes "attacks" via pure hash-force not very meaningful, and the economic nature of PoW makes disruption not very sustainable long-term, as @adam3us pointed out.


In conclusion: if you're hell-bent on using the language of war because it is the only way to convince the US military to start mining, so be it.

That doesn't make hashing violent, though, or Nakamoto Consensus a massacre, or the timechain a battlefield.
Let's reserve all these war terms for meatspace, where actual bullets and actual bombs kill actual people, shall we? Words are not violence, and Bitcoin is just that: all text, all the time.

Peace & Love.
Not violence & war.

🙏🧡
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