I'm probably slightly late on the bandwagon with this one, but recently I've been reading and hearing a lot about Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the first successful version of a digital currency, a materially intangible form of money that is unsupervised by the massive oversight of government and banking institutions. It was founded by the mysterious character Satoshi Nakamoto, who's slippery identity has been conspired as being everything from an obscure digital genius to a pseudonym for a CIA experiment, and whose presence from the Bitcoin community eventually vanished from the face of the cloud just as it began to gain momentum as a substantial player in the digital world.
Bitcoin has undergone a massive flux in popularity and value since its inception in 2009, and at one point exploded to the point that the value of a single Bitcoin (which was originally around 14 cents) had inflated to about $27. At this point, there were a few early users of the technology that had accumulated enough Bitcoins to be virtual millionaires in a very real sense. Obviously people started using it for all kinds of illegal manners, as Bitcoin soon became the currency of illegal drugs, firearms and hit men on Deepweb sites like Silk Road. And then all of a sudden it crashed, people lost faith in the system, and by then a whole industry of 3rd party economic regulators and service providers had come into the picture in an ironic twist to the Bitcoin's original idealism of independence.
It's a really intriguing story that draws into question a lot of our preconceived notions about value, security, trust in authorities and the snowball effect of emerging technologies. And the enigmatic Satoshi character and his unexplained abandonment of the utopian world he had set out to create gives the whole thing a poetic and slightly creepy element. There's a great article that outlines the story from the its beginnings on Wired and more on How Stuff Works.
The thing that really gets me about Bitcoin though, is the way the system is structured. Positioned outside of external authorities and the whim of the global economy, the way the Bitcoin is validated is through an open-sourced ledger, to which every member has access and through which every member is held accountable for using the currency correctly. More Bitcoins are generated by sending out complex algorithmic computer codes that must be cracked, and the power system that cracks it receives 50 Bitcoins (which halves in increments until it's capped at 21 million, which would happen at some point around 2140). Of course the code that gets sent out gets increasingly complex as Bitcoins are released, and it results in users buying huge amounts of computing power and running up insane electricity bills, or coming together to combine forces and split the winnings.
But I find a real beauty in this system, where the production of the Bitcoin is so tightly interlocked with the safety and validity of it, as well as controlling the growth rate through a completely transparent peer-to-peer system. The order and symbiosis of this relationship is truly genius.
Not sure what to do with this information yet but I feel there's something brewing in this. Perhaps there's way of implementing this type of system in a real world, community-driven context? Maybe it has potential to be embodied in some kind of synbio driven ecosystem? I don't know, but I want to find out.
Bitcoin has undergone a massive flux in popularity and value since its inception in 2009, and at one point exploded to the point that the value of a single Bitcoin (which was originally around 14 cents) had inflated to about $27. At this point, there were a few early users of the technology that had accumulated enough Bitcoins to be virtual millionaires in a very real sense. Obviously people started using it for all kinds of illegal manners, as Bitcoin soon became the currency of illegal drugs, firearms and hit men on Deepweb sites like Silk Road. And then all of a sudden it crashed, people lost faith in the system, and by then a whole industry of 3rd party economic regulators and service providers had come into the picture in an ironic twist to the Bitcoin's original idealism of independence.
It's a really intriguing story that draws into question a lot of our preconceived notions about value, security, trust in authorities and the snowball effect of emerging technologies. And the enigmatic Satoshi character and his unexplained abandonment of the utopian world he had set out to create gives the whole thing a poetic and slightly creepy element. There's a great article that outlines the story from the its beginnings on Wired and more on How Stuff Works.
The thing that really gets me about Bitcoin though, is the way the system is structured. Positioned outside of external authorities and the whim of the global economy, the way the Bitcoin is validated is through an open-sourced ledger, to which every member has access and through which every member is held accountable for using the currency correctly. More Bitcoins are generated by sending out complex algorithmic computer codes that must be cracked, and the power system that cracks it receives 50 Bitcoins (which halves in increments until it's capped at 21 million, which would happen at some point around 2140). Of course the code that gets sent out gets increasingly complex as Bitcoins are released, and it results in users buying huge amounts of computing power and running up insane electricity bills, or coming together to combine forces and split the winnings.
But I find a real beauty in this system, where the production of the Bitcoin is so tightly interlocked with the safety and validity of it, as well as controlling the growth rate through a completely transparent peer-to-peer system. The order and symbiosis of this relationship is truly genius.
Not sure what to do with this information yet but I feel there's something brewing in this. Perhaps there's way of implementing this type of system in a real world, community-driven context? Maybe it has potential to be embodied in some kind of synbio driven ecosystem? I don't know, but I want to find out.
