Non-Bitcoinian Geometry
Remember back in high school when, just to mess with you, your math teacher would wander off into a clearly pre-meditated discourse on Imaginary Numbers or Non-Euclidian Geometry?
(http://www.mercurynie.com.au/mathguys/articles/1998/980311g1.jpg)
If so, you may vaguely remember that wantonly violating Euclid’s Fifth Postulate led to discovery of two new geometric universes that were off-limits to those unwilling to think outside Euclid’s box. “What? Parallel lines can intersect? Behead him at the stake!”
(https://i.gyazo.com/ae4511ed4c755e01c937ab5a7205da58.png)
Being a natural rebel, and not having anything better to do one lazy Sunday afternoon, I stopped to ponder whether there were any similar postulates worth violating in Unified Bitcoin Theory. You know, something that would make me famous and hated and rich!
It seemed reasonable. After all, like geometry, Orthodox Bitcoin Doctrine has its own foundational Axioms. These are assertions that we don’t even try to prove. They are obviously true! In many cases, these axiomatic beliefs are what drew us to Bitcoin in the first place. Therefore, very few of us are willing to give them up without a fight!
This might work just like Flat Earth Theory stopped most of mankind from discovering the New World. With any luck, I might find another undiscovered hemisphere or two where the competition would not even dare to tread until long after I had captured First Mover Advantage there all for myself. Yeeeess, heh, heh!
So what were the key Bitcoin Doctrines that I could deliberately, even gleefully, seek to violate in pursuit of new opportunities? I’ll share a few, but don’t expect me to connect all the dots for you. Innovation, like revenge, is best served cold.
If we sacrifice mining, we can divert those resources to industry development and achieve otherwise impossible scalability and transaction speeds.
Unfortunately, BitShares has already done this, exploiting its utter disregard for tradition to achieve 100,000 transactions per second and ability to self-fund its developers. Rats.
If we sacrifice anonymity, we can gain adoption by large institutions that are constrained by KYC/AML regulations.
Those of us who are out to tame tyranny aren’t likely to budge on this one. Still, if your only interest is in making money, then why not offer a blockchain that The System can adopt? I’d rather have The System put all its information out on a public blockchain where smart contracts on other Sovereign block chains can watch them, trigger transactions on them, and otherwise do business quietly on the side. Why would I want to stop The System from doing that? We need to think bigger, Pinky!
I wonder what we could achieve if a chain’s public ledger was, um, private?
I’m sure there are lots of banks and other financial institutions whose first instinct would be to keep everything private. (After all, that’s what we all assume banks have been doing for us all this time, right?) Can’t do that in cryptoland, can we? Everything we own has to be right out there for inspection by our competitors, ex-spouses, and local war lords. Could a block chain be engineered to be private but auditable so we can enjoy transparent privacy? What does that even mean?
If we sacrifice broad token distributions, we can gain support from powerful investors and partners who are motivated by owning a bigger than average stake.
I know, I know. “To be a valid currency, you need to have a wide distribution with no central concentrations of wealth or power.” But not every block chain has to be an unbacked currency. We seem to be OK with stadium builders having the rights to sell tickets to every seat. If you are going to back a ticket with a seat, why can’t you back a token with an asset? And why should you have to give those token-based rights to your assets away for free?
If we compromise (shudder) and make reasonable system engineering trades we might achieve all kinds of new products the purists might disdain, but that are uniquely fit for Darwinian survival in some unclaimed ecological niche.
In the latest NullStreet Journal, I opined “If you want some balanced combination of [ease of use, trustlessness, and privacy], you have to engineer it that way. You have to make compromises and trade-offs and employ a mix of techniques. You can’t just throw first-generation-conventional-wisdom (FGCW) at it. What we learned in Bitcoin School was merely Trustworthiness 101, not mathematical axioms or religious dogma. Yet many people still evaluate next-generation systems using FGCW like it was one of Newton’s Laws. Einstein and Hawking demonstrated that such “laws” are only approximations to the true Way Things Work. It’s the same with block chains.”
If we sacrifice total decentralization we save money and gain performance.
I see passionate arguments all over bitcointalk about whose coin is the “most decentralized.” BitShares DPOS designers said, “as long as no one can sign more than a few percent of the blocks, we’re decentralized enough.” More decentralization yields diminishing returns in security with penalties in profitability and performance and ease of use. And it is these things that make a coin fit for survival. Not philosophical purity.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a philosophically pure coin. We ought to have them. We ought to demand them! Even BitShares is philosophically pure ... if you wisely share our philosophy!
But that still leaves a lot of other markets and lots of other chain designs that purists like us won’t touch. :D Every one of those markets is an opportunity to earn resources with which to pursue our nefarious Real Goals. Every one is an opportunity to reach other groups of people with other priorities. Every one is a way to attract multitudes out of the Old System where, free at last, they can see and perhaps understand our Philosophically Pure Systems for the first time.
And that could make all the difference.