In The State Machine of Nature, Nothing Will Be Lost
In The State Machine Of Nature, Nothing Will Be Lost ::: Wassim Z.
Alsindi
{#nezfn5qtpo1}
Looking around today at carbon market shock-waves being caused by minor
disruptions to fossil fuel flows on account of conflict in former Soviet
states, it is uncontroversial to note that we---as humans, on Earth, in
2022 CE---continue to exist under a paradigm of energy scarcity. We rely
on indirect and direct sources of Solar-mediated energy to power our own
metabolisms as well as to drive the machinery of modern human society.
In the position of Homo Sapiens as global apex predator, we have taken
the logics of extraction and exploitation to their grotesque apotheoses.
Photosynthetic plants, which can fix atmospheric carbon dioxide into
carbohydrates using solar photons in the visible domain of the
electromagnetic spectrum, are both burnt (for warmth) and consumed (for
sustenance) by animals, which in turn are eaten by humans. The anaerobic
decomposition of ancient life gives rise, over geological timescales, to
the 'fossil fuels' of gas, oil, and coal which continue to power the
majority of Earth's power generation and transportation, despite it
becoming abundantly clear that the environmental costs are mounting up:
in terms of air quality, ecosystem degradation and water pollution in
addition to increasing the quantities of carbon being emitted into the
atmosphere.
"The Bitcoin ledger is a collective technofinancial hallucination,
where capital and energy, deployed over time, create reality." W. Z.
Alsindi,
Bitcointingency,
Weird Economies, 2022.
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Having set the scene in this planetary moment, enter Bitcoin and
proof-of-work in early 2009. Proof-of-work is primarily a
Sybil-resistance mechanism: preventing malicious actors from flooding
the network with spam by making block creation costly. Bitcoin is an
event-ordering system above all else, proof-of-work is the mechanism
with instantiates this new kind of clock, and the timechain is the
verifiable record of the history of the network (also referred to as
blockchain). In producing its own temporal regime, it makes a clean
break from the outside cycles of calendar and clock. In order to conduct
its business in an 'orderly manner' without authorities endogenous to
the network, Bitcoin relies on proof-of-work to leaderlessly distribute
the right to create the next block in the timechain, via a
lottery-mediated process which requires enormous (and increasing)
quantities of energy and specialised equipment to participate in,
incentivising participants with a mixture of protocol-determined
subsidies / rewards as well as user-paid transaction fees. Due to the
periodic difficulty adjustment of proof-of-work success probabilities,
which keeps the rhythm of confirmed blocks steady as the network's
overall computational resource scales up and down, Bitcoin's thirst for
computational resources is insatiable by design.
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It's time to take the Cold War Hot Again with ThermodynamicCoin's
Proof-of-Waste technogology. It's a race to the bottom. Of the ocean.
Permissionless mandatory invitation for all. Byzantine Business
School, 2018.
"The mechano-vampiric paradigm of proof-of-work is a growing threat
to planetary ecology. The Faustian reality of proof-of-work is that
Bitcoin exists in competition with natural life for the harvestable
energy this side of the Sun, and it will continue to outbid nature as
time and capital accumulate in its ledger." W. Z. Alsindi,
Bitcointingency,
Weird Economies, 2022.
Furthermore, the protocol is insensitive to the environmental
consequences of the externalities arising from the undesirable
by-products of proof-of-work, principally heat and e-waste. As such,
Bitcoin is not (e-)waste per se, but rather incentivises its
proliferation. A e-waste attractor? The same incentives, under our
current paradigm of energy scarcity, lead to Bitcoin mediating a
zero-sum game between capital and ecology, in a race to the bottom to
secure consistent energy flows. Nothing has made this more clear than
the recent geopolitical instability in Eurasia -- without a steady
supply of baseload power (coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear) to maintain
reliable and consistent power generation, load-shedding plans are being
made for periods of peak European energy demand in the coming winter.
This will lead to brownouts and blackouts as continual power delivery no
longer becomes possible. Is Bitcoin the next Gazprom?
"There is no a priori nature. Nature is a construct. Nature is
degenerate bourgeois luxury. Nature is death. If nature is unjust,
destroy nature." Cryptographic Poetics Researchers' Union, The
Necroprimitivist Manifesto
Pt.1, 2022.
Bitcoin's arrow of time will maintain its inexorable continuation,
monetary black hole that it is, sucking capital and energy into its
ever-accreting centre of thermoeconomic gravity. Bitcoin is vulnerable
at its margins, as technological paradigms and energy sources shift.
Whether this is by means of ascendant modes of computation or
incremental upgrades to hardware matters less than the fact that a shift
occurs, in an inevitably heterogeneous manner. Entrenched polities will
continue to exercise temporal privilege in various ways in the Bitcoin
network, mostly by way of miners' affordances in deciding the possible
futures of the network's ledger. Cryptocurrencies employing
Bitcoin-style proof-of-work are eternally contingent systems, as network
participants can always expend more effort to rewrite the priorly
canonical history. This is, in essence, determinacy-as-a-service:
certainty comes at a price that only few can truly pay, as it must be
paid in perpetuity.
Finally, speculations around teleological termination points for
Bitcoin's thermocapital singularity, both of which presuppose the
subordination of natural life to Bitcoin. One is a 'blessed' timeline
where proof-of-work provides the necessary economic incentives to
bootstrap Earth's clean energy generation into a boundless---but
incredibly unequal---post-scarcity future. One might think of this as a
Childhood's End timeline. The other is less rosy, insofar as Bitcoin
would lock capital and ecology into a zero-sum game where resource
scarcity tips the balance in favour of competition as opposed to
cooperation, and machines become direct antagonists of nature. Perhaps
this might be the Stalker/Roadside Picnic timeline, or a Bitlerian
Jihad invoking Frank Herbert's prehistory of Dune. In such a case,
rather than being a new form of artificial life as zealots proclaim,
Bitcoin appears more akin to anti-life, or even a form of 'artificial
death'. Bitcoin's proof-of-work does not---and cannot---care about
life, other than in its need for intelligent agents to continue to
provide it with energy. For now, Bitcoin's useful idiots are
necroprimitivist humans, but someday non-human agents may meet all its
needs and render humans superfluous: or as adversaries in need of
destruction. Is Bitcoin a Nakamoto's Basilisk, an Immaculate
Misconception which is destined to kill all planetary life, or die
trying? To paraphrase Hobbes: in the state machine of Nature, nothing
will be lost.
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Conveniently enough, a theatre
production on this exact
topic exists...