Bitcoin is a Great Filter
Bitcoin is a Great Filter
Brace yourselves. Woo woo incoming.
If I had to guess, I think there's a diverse galactic alien civilization that can surveil us but generally chooses not to interfere. I think one individual from that community of aliens took pity on us. They might have a way to conduct their society that seems proven to work for just about any sapient civilization, and there was a period for about 5-10 years where we had most, if not all, the technology to start building it, but didn't. And so, SN got impatient, and published the whitepaper to a cryptography mailing list on 10/31/2008, about a year into the aftermath of the global financial crisis. It was timely, and appropriate. And it could be just the thing we need to get our act together.
I know it seems far-fetched, but... From the incentives it puts into place, it looks like Bitcoin could connect the planet using a money issued by no single nation state. If people can eventually agree that this sound, neutral money is good money, then ordinary people can do business with using the same rules that nation states and big corporations do, in a way that levels the playing field for ordinary people all around the world. It also incentivizes the complete expansion of internet access everywhere on Earth to facilitate commerce, breaks down trade barriers so wealth can distribute more evenly around the world to those who work hard, doing things that are needed. It promotes free speech and strong property rights, which are the cornerstone of a free and productive civilization; corruption is a productivity-killer, and the ability to speak truth to power unhindered is one of the most powerful forms of accountability.
Bitcoin also incentivizes us to produce more power than we need, so it might just accelerate decarbonization and electrification and puts us on track towards abundant energy. If the cost of producing fossil fuels rises with the cost of extraction, and clean energy eventually gets used in more affordable ways, especially through demand response programs, this could prime the grid for expansion of intermittent sources. Industry will gather in places with cheap energy, and clean energy is some of the cheapest— in fact, prices can go negative depending upon the time of day. Bitcoin helps to pick up the tab in what would otherwise be uneconomical, creating a chicken and egg situation; if sources are intermittent, or in the case of nuclear power, difficult to scale up and down in response to demand, more energy is needed (or produced) than is used. The situation is completely reversed if the cost of turning on a light switch was the same amount as the miner would have earned in sats (the timechain’s smallest unit of account, 100 million ṩatoshis to the ₿itcoin). The link between energy and money grows firmer with mass adoption.
And here's the clincher: Satoshi's coins, the way they were mined, is kind of an incredible "capture the flag" that can drive innovation into quantum computing. There's a lot of skepticism, and our best QCs just aren't very good. What if alien technology requires QCs to be very good? What if we can't "hear" the aliens because they talk using entangled photons? What if what physicists think is impossible, branding it a problem of no-communication, is actually just a protocol engineering problem? And would a civilization— after inventing a technology that enables instantaneous perfectly private communication across vast distances unimpeded by matter and entities inbetween— would that civilization at that point not stop producing radio signals at all after at most, a decade? (How many phones with number pads are still made?) It's just, so unequivocally superior. Besides, if some of the light from other stars is entangled... It's not like telescope CMOS sensors or optics would be all that helpful in telling us that. It'd probably take significant advancements to get there, and what better incentive than a million+ bitcoins in full, unhashed, unambiguous 65-byte public keys sitting on a digital ledger, waiting for someone to break EC DLP? The Elliptic Curve Discrete Log Problem is considered impossible to solve with modern-day computers while still being compact and efficient, but QCs might just solve for it in a realistic way someday, maybe as soon as 10 years from now.
Everything is good for Bitcoin. Everything hardens the protocol, every attack, every existential threat. Even the threat of having the elliptic curve itself broken will be a protocol-hardening moment. There are quantum-resistant signature algorithms that might possibly be efficient enough, and perhaps some sort of P2QR address (pay to quantum-resistant) support could be a soft fork, much as Schnorr signature support was added with Taproot. Do the risks of another soft fork outweigh the risks of lack of quantum resistance? This is unclear, but it’s possible we may have enough forewarning to organize an answer to this existential threat within Bitcoin Core. And while some have trivialized the threat QCs might one day pose to Bitcoin, it’s important to take all criticisms of Bitcoin seriously, because often there’s a kernel of truth to them.
In the near future, as humanity develops more powerful technology and expands out into the solar system, mathematically sound money will be essential. The Starship rocket currently under development aims to reduce the cost of getting payload to orbit by a factor of 100x. A kilogram lofted into space that once cost thousands of dollars will soon cost tens. Commodity money like gold presently costs about $60,000/kg. Would bringing thousands of tons of gold in from a metallic asteroid like 16 Psyche (to which NASA is preparing a mission to send a prospecting probe just this year) crash the gold market? Of course it would, but they could also make the market for a decade, and put everyone else out of the gold business... Including central banks, some of the largest holders of commodity money, and gold miners, some of the world’s largest polluters, poisoning the oceans. 35% of the mercury in your cans of tuna is thanks to them. Just something to bear in mind. After all, gold will still be needed to make Bitcoin miners, in the very least. Gold will always have intrinsic value, right?
Expansion into the solar system incentivized by precious metals and tourism could also compliment Bitcoin mining. Lunar miners with selenothermal heat rejection could use crustal rock as a heat reservoir, perhaps to be used in in-situ resource utilization techniques to blanket the surface in locally-produced solar panels. Automated by necessity, and unconstrained by the impact of weather, lunar factories could help offworld dirty industry. Equatorial mass drivers could deliver payloads that are caught by spacecraft that aerobrake with inflatable heat shields over several days, and land in water, like cargo freighters from the sky, to supply inexpensive downmass for orbital imports.
Finally, it's been postulated that the end state of Proof of Work is a Dyson sphere around the Sun. What if the aliens use their own version of Bitcoin, but it operates at the level of the energy produced by an entire star, and connects that energy to the rest of the galactic network? Remember, information and energy are closely related concepts, think Maxwell's Daemon. The concepts behind Bitcoin could drive us to harness the energy of our planet, our star, and join the galactic community, who transact using their energy across solar systems. By closely tying the concepts of energy and value by creating a money that can only be made through the consumption of vast amounts of it, they might just have bootstrapped us to join their Kardashev Type 3 galactic-scale civilization. And every civilization they've encountered so far either adopts an energy-money system, figuring out their version of Bitcoin, or they wind up destroying themselves. Bitcoinization is the Great Filter.
Not to diminish all that humanity put into all the things needed to build Bitcoin, and then subsequently adopt it into our way of life, but it’s hard to imagine any human being that knew the scope of what Bitcoin would become, which Satoshi undoubtedly did, would be so selfless as to put it out there and then just walk away, not once selling His early coins for profit, for they were practically worthless when He left, so long ago.
Or maybe all this is entirely implausible. Adherents to Occam’s Razor are surely sweating their hairless bodies on this point. Maybe so. Maybe Satoshi wasn't an alien, but what if we wind up doing all this anyway? That's, well, I think that's something I'd like to dedicate my life working towards.
But maybe, just maybe, someday 120 years from now, some internet archivist will discover this piece and I'll earn my footnote in history for being one of many I'm sure who predicted what might one day come to be. Wouldn't that be something?
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Foreword
The Exophiles
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