Blood and guts, pain and pleasure, creation and destruction.

With the DJIA down 1`000 points and SSE down 8.5% this morning, the streets of fiat finance – that ticky-tacky house built upon generation after generation of shifting sands, paper promises, and pathetic pandering to the lowest common denominator : that most unfit creature of misfortune forever doomed to blow in the breezes of chaos and whimsy – are awash in red. Glorious, bloody, soppingly sanguine rouge.i

Oh woe is you. For you knew better. You still know better, surely, because what is history but a compendium of cases of things that weren’t tested to their fullest potential, but that, if only “the community” tried a little bit harder,ii if only you leveraged the advances of modern technologyiii a little bit more, it just might ; rather than viewing history as a collection of approaches that actually worked in the past and, with a little updating, can work again today.

While you’re cherry-picking the failures of history, the survivors and thrivers of our blessed time are cherry-picking the successes. In doing so, we’re building a house on a foundation of chiseled bytes the likes of which have never been seen before for the simple reason that no one previously had an incentive to bother. Bitcoin has changed all that. It has given meaning and purpose to text, and in turn to code, and in turn again to computers, and in turn still furthermore to life itself.iv And so it begins. From V-Genesis onwards.v

With the wonder of a child, the fortune awarded by Bitcoin’s sovereignty, and a WoT of such depth that belief is simply beggared, I humbly submit my signature and seal to this momentous occasion, this vanguard of technical paradigms. Not enough can be said of the sense of joy that comes with participating in such a time and alongside such architects.

At last, indeed, faber est suae quisque fortunae.

But don’t just take my word for it. Quoth Mircea Popescu :

The V-genesis patch is a most important milestone in the evolution of computer programming, from its troglodyte state prior to the involvement of The Most Serene Republic, towards its civilised state as you enjoy it today.

For the first time in the century or so of history of this particular human endeavour, text was deliberately structured with due consideration given not only to its meaning, but also to its source, and to its context. Prior attempts at structuring software, at first consisting of a naive approach focused on meaning only, over time added a half-hearted consideration of context, very unequally and rather haphazardly. The change the V-genesis introduced is exactly like the move from understanding and controlling movement in terms of mass and somewhat velocity, such as it occurs in the mind of a monkey throwing rocks, to understanding and controlling movement in terms of mass, impulse and energy, such as it occurs in the launching of satellites. The proposition that there is still room for improvement in the endless march of human thought, on this topic as on any other, is absolutely indubitable. The proposition that the sum total of what came before can be compared with this particular advance is strictly ridiculous.

Used together with specialised scripts, V-genesis allows an agent to reconstruct a complete Bitcoin tree, verify its correctness, and manage his investment of trust at all junctures so that he is never required to implicitly trust either an unknown code author, or a code snippet of unknown provenance.

There remains after today no alternative manner to deploy Bitcoin software, or indeed any software that is not a toy intended to be used by children playing, outside of this paradigm. May the switchover be bloody and painful in all the right places.

And so Genesis 1:32 was chiseled into the scrolls of scripture. And it was good.

___ ___ ___

  1. Now I’m not naive enough to imagine that the crashing and dashing of fiat markets will instantly lead drive untold waves of Bitcoin adoption any more than buying falafels with Bitcoin is somehow going to make a difference, it’s more just Schadenfreude.

    Sure, I suppose I could be shorting the whole fiat mess and making a “buck,” but that would involve a lot more USD exposure than I have the stomach for. I seriously wonder how you guys do it ! In case you’re wondering, I’ll be sticking with my little trader’s delight instead.

  2. Students of history will surely note that “the community” always tries a little harder, rather than a little smarter. It would therefore appear that, at least in this one domain, they’re content to work from causes rather than towards wholly imagined purposes.
  3. Such as you see them, such as you could see them, be these iPads or iWatches or winbloze 10.
  4. This isn’t to say that artificial intelligence is around the corner. It isn’t. It’s actually a hell of a lot further away than you can possibly imagine. In fact, self-improving AI is so unfathomably, mind-warpingly, thought-meltingly far away that the dust you leave behind on this fair earth has a reasonable chance of being incorporated in some manner. I guess you really are making the future happen after all. Go figure that it had nothing to do with voting.
  5. Though he’ll never admit it, and we love him all the more for it, the world of computing owes a great debt of gratitude to Stanislav Datskovskiy, aka asciilifeform, aka ‘alf,’ that Russo-American Orthodox Bearjew for whom Goya is the artistic embodiment. V-Genesis is his brainchild.

7 thoughts on “Blood and guts, pain and pleasure, creation and destruction.

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  2. […] economically valuable chain will appreciate. So, BIP 100 triggers, but is it more valuable than therealbitcoin ? Well, no – categorically no, in […]

  3. […] up on, and it’s not quite “near as makes no difference” either, chiefly because that little sliver, that little tenuous tendril of functionality extant represents humanity’s greatest hope. And […]

  4. […] It’s been half a decade now and software is moving in one direction and one direction only : stability and predictability, which is to say, far, far away from “the community” and their several, varied, and […]

  5. […] YouTube and don’t crash when watching porn, no one is going to make a stink. That is, until Bitcoin. […]

  6. […] is the world of the truly sovereign individual, like it or not. It’s a world of toxically powerful new technologies, many of which will explode in your hands if you’re not careful, […]

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