I started this website at 2 AM on a Thursday just to see if I could do it. So the experiment begins.
I will basically charge a few sats for my daily scribblings. Let’s see if anyone likes anything I have to say.
The world needs more honest people, like Satoshi Nakamoto.
One of the hardest things for a public figure of any sort to prove in the 2020’s is their trustworthiness. The experts who rely on the bedrock of “appeal to authority” are no longer trusted, in part because their methods of presentation are outdated, outmoded, and outgunned by the general public, who is now armed with intellectual tools that none of the experts could have imagined 20 years ago. We are, as a society, in a battle with algorithms and each other for the moral foundation upon which to claim the mantel of trustworthiness. We cannot tell where the truth lies anymore, and the experts can no longer convince us they know better than we do. That is the tricky thing – truth and trust do not always go hand in hand together. You may have the truth on your side, but that doesn’t mean I will trust you, and vice versa.
There are certain truths that matter most in a social crisis of trust. One of those truths is the truth of value. What has value, who owns what types of value, and how is that value transferred, are three great truths that must be decidable for any society to function.
Until Satoshi invented bitcoin, we relied on the old “appeal to authority” system to keep track of the state of truths about value. But Satoshi’s invention shifted the way society decides the truth or falsity of truth claims about value from “appeal to authority” to verificationism and pragmatism. Verificationism, because a) we can see the record of the blockchain on a computer screen with our own two eyes – via sense perception, I can know what I own because I can see the number on the screen – and b) we can use scientific and engineering methods to verify the energy that proof of work uses to secure the blockchain. Pragmatism, because I can use that number on the screen to acquire other things of value, whether digital or physical, and I can use proof of work to protect that truth.
Verificationism feels unnatural to apply to the digital realm at first because the digital world, cyberspace, operates via an indirect, mediated empiricism; but Satoshi’s invention allows for verification to work digitally because it creates an object that, while abstract, is nonetheless real, and real in part because it is backed by physical energy and, therefore, empirical verification. How so?
Insofar as we can only access the world via the senses, we can detect the truth conditions and other properties of this abstract object in the same way that we can know other digital truths: via sense perception of a screen that displays information. But seeing a number on a screen simply brings us to the original question that satoshi wanted to solve: how can we trust the truth claim made by the number on the screen?
This is where b) comes in. The number on the screen is a direct expression of an expenditure of physical, measurable, verifiable energy, NOT the imagination of a programmer. Satoshi essentially wrote himself out of the system when he connected the number on the screen directly to the proof of work expenditure of energy, and not some intermediary that he controlled, like a foundation, or a money transfer service of some sort.
Pragmatic truth also underlies the bitcoin system, however, because truth value (ie, the truth or falsity as expressed on the ledger) of the three abstract value truths depends on the consumer trust developed via pragmatic use, and because value truths are economic truths and, therefore, social truths, whether bitcoin has value can only be decided via transaction (what Keynes called liquidity value). The senses are fallible, after all. What one thinks is real may turn out to be a mirage, hallucination, or simply a trick of the light. Digital truths are even more likely to be spurious than real truths because what backs reality is physics while what backs digital realms is our imaginations as expressed through the programs we write with code. But again, satoshi removed the imagination behind the code and replaced it with pure physical energy in the form of proof of work mining. The pragmatic application of physical energy to perpetuate the bitcoin system is a method of deciding digital truth claims. One could call bitcoin mining pragmatic verificationism.
In setting up this elegant system and then stepping aside to allow the verificationist and the pragmatist method of proof of work decide the three truth claims about value, he removed human trust, ie., appeal to authority, from the money system.
Counterintuitively, this act in itself proved Satoshi Nakamoto’s trustworthiness as an expert. Cincinnatus, Washington, Nakamoto.
If one were forced to appeal to authority for any ledger of truths, one would prefer to appeal to Satoshi Nakamoto. The radical fidelity to verificationism and pragmatic truths that Satoshi demonstrated gives him the moral grounding to claim expertise, and the moral ground he occupies is perhaps unique in that only Satoshi can ever occupy it, because it can only be claimed once, and it can only be claimed by excluding oneself from participation in the system itself. In that sense, Satoshi took a vow of poverty when he launched bitcoin.
We trust Satoshi Nakamoto because he ensured that we don’t need to trust him. By giving everything away for no personal gain (other than fame and securing his place in human history, which are grand rewards), he laid the foundation for truth in the digital age. It is a debt we can never repay.
I hope you found this post worth the sats you spent to read it.
Let me know your thoughts below or on Twitter at @SKCulleton
~Sean
