Are you invested in coins? Nada, none. Even if so desired, lethal extremes happen so fast that governments have to step in to parent the unruly cool kids (foreigners especially) on everything. Superabundant bureaucratic toil = never looking into “current thing”.

Residents of (The) Bahamas must apply for special permission from the country’s central bank to invest in cryptocurrency, and the government levies a percentage fee for the privilege.

As some of you know, I loathe places like YouTube, Reddit, or any other sufficient equivalent. The misinformation is too abundant for my poor, weak mind. I recently discovered this and whoever made it is a legend. Luckily, it’s still a mostly free world but for how long? People should be able to intimately learn whatever lesson they want ;)

So, the other day I learned that the cool lingo is coins. I’ve rummaged through the depths for a bit and came across the most plain and straightforward breakdown of the cryptocurrency ecosystem ever written. Impossible! Most everything else is like deciphering a marketing slate.

The analysis on economies of scale within peer–to–peer networks and this answer on merkle trees vs blockchains are worth the read too.

It’s hard to “peek into” other knowledge domains successfully. The reason; marketing fuzz.

TL;DR: Blockchain data–structure is designed only for Bitcoin’s rules. Large deviations from Bitcoin go nowhere. Ethereum appears to be the only protocol with minor deviations from Bitcoin.

Cryptocurrencies are blockchain protocols — laws (protocols) on permanent appendable excel sheets (blockchains). Bitcoin is not the only protocol. Various cryptocurrencies have differing rules but..

Blockchain’s implicit permanency favours Bitcoin’s rules and use cases. Economically, that’d suggest noncompatible use–cases/cryptocurrencies/forks become irrelevant.

Or more specifically, the difference between a merkle tree and a blockchain. So, no plausible technical predictions on coinage–but perhaps the government’s broken clock is right twice a day? Bahamians need permission to “officially invest” in crypto–stock “currency”.

Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.

Many suns ago, local events “piqued” my curiosity into cryptocurrency hype. Praise be to the king–no really! Anyway, reading the leaves and decrypting the crypto–babble made bits of sense.. at least superficially.

The point: there’s plausibility that one or many powerful democratic government(s) designed/orchestrated the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Yes, hard to prove but.. the architecture is an uncanny 1:1 copy of government communication. Even abuse/failure modes are 1:1 (see sybil, a 51% attack: similar to democracy’s extra fun “limbo” mode).

..if it wasn’t for this guy visiting my country. I am now “enlightened”. Spoiler: Blockchain protocols computationally formalize/describe a government’s high power restraints within democracy. In civics (social studies), democracy is decentralized power (no/many kings) and therefore implicitly inefficient.

Democratic governments (in perfect world) communicate/act/bank;

1. In public (freedom of information)
2. With immutability (no deleting things)
3. With consensus (majority vote)
4. With inefficiency (to weaken bad actors)

Citizens and other low power (centralized) entities can do some of the above (federation), but mostly (wisely) communicate/act/bank;

5. In private (freedom of association)
6. With mutability (to protect privacy)
7. Without consensus (freedom of expression)
8. With efficiency (to build–up fast actors)

Individually, (5-8 > 1-4) no? But (1-4 > 5-8) in dictatorships (5-8)? Blockchain governments for maximal oversight? Not happening :)

Yes yes, reading is old school and for losers (according to the Internet), but these are the words of cryptocurrency’s based god! Jokes aside, read the first sentence of that abstract. The developers of cryptocurrency are smart but has their creation increased/decreased centralization into entrenched financial institutions? Think about it, stably. In my country institutional power has increased, imo.

Enriching influencers, pundits, companies, and politicians online is counterproductive — instead prioritize your local community. Online authenticity is a facade.

I’m not even that old yet, and think I’ve seen people owned by every scam in the book, it’s brutal. “The” Yellow Kid would be proud of this money/fame/status “scarcity games” obsessed generation.

Text (book or screen) has an allure that allows otherwise intelligent people to throw away their deductive and dialectical skills. Faulty information online drives decision making for many influencers/politicians. And so the question remains; who influences the influencers?

FTX, a cryptocurrency company headquartered in my country (The Bahamas) has fallen. This was the obvious outcome… but convincing people beforehand was an impossibility. Authority and influence always beat reason and sanity.

Everything cryptocurrency purports to solve has been “technically” solved, but it’ll become indispensable because of the elusive idea of post scarcity.

The perceived ownership of this message and the surrounding content (my blog) can be trivially duplicated a million times over at little to no cost by anyone.

I don’t care about that, but I guarantee you that a lot of other people do. Cryptocurrency brings scarcity to a post scarcity (digital) world. This is something that people desperately want.