Bitcoin isn't a bubble - it's the pin!
Life’s meaning
I thought I’d start with the easy subject first and work backwards. The answer(s) to that are/is obvious, and are universal! There are some differences here and there, but generally we live for love, connection and understanding with and to others, personal and collective achievement and down-right hedonistic fun.
The answers that other people come up with are their own or others rationalisations and dogmatic teachings as to the right balance of each of these human (also animal) needs and desires. But ultimately I believe that a good way to summarise, is that if you look at universal forces and nature itself, the true “meaning” of life, is to participate in the balance of co-operation and competition.
Conspiracy Theories and Capitalism
A strange pairing I know. But like a splinter in our minds we are drawn back to examine what might be the truth. We can see that unearned opulent wealth, contrasted by extreme war and poverty does not necessarily have to be the case but we are afraid of opening the Pandora’s box in case it leaves us guilty of benefiting from this system. But open it we must, or the future shape of our planet and our species may be in for a correction, not of our own doing and out of our control.
I am both one of the biggest defenders and harshest critics of capitalism. There are many that point out that the most prominent school of thought against capitalism (Marxism) was created as a placating mechanism and they pointed out that even Marx himself made money from the stock market in his later years. But even the dimmest amongst us can see that stocks/shares that don’t pay dividends are ponzi schemes — pumped by their own profits that should go to the workers, speculators and by new cheap debt.
Back to my own personal conclusions, I hold both opinions to be true. That capitalism if both the best thing since sliced bread and also our potential downfall. I also do not believe in a single grand cartel or Illuminate that controls everything… there are far too many competing forces, cartels, societies, individuals and countries, all vying for control.
That is not to say that some are not more powerful than others. Most conspiracy theories are misinformation that spread the “divide and conquer” power vector which the elites really do use and benefit from the volatility and boom-busts cycles (interests within weapons industry especially).
From a clinically rational perspective, competition, to some extent is a good thing. So, obviously, is co-operation a good thing. This can be seen through a limiting lens of left vs right but that stops the good bits from each side from prevailing.
From the micro, to the macro scale this is true. And money, a medium of exchange which is divisible and exchangeable for an agreed upon amount of someone's time, resources and ideas, is one of the best inventions, which has allowed “society” as we know it to flourish. Far from being evil, it is the lifeblood of human connections. It is why we do things for each other.
The fall of civilisations is when they begin to debase their currency from gold and live in debt. This is exactly what happened to the Romans. Marx’s biggest criticism of capitalism is that the worker ultimately feels disconnected from the product of his labour and realising the slave nature of the worker/boss structure, will ultimately overthrow the bourgeois.
I think this Marxist argument is incorrect and is a flawed opposition to capitalism in it’s current form. Competition drives innovation. Innovation makes us feel good. Like an extension to our own selves, technology has allowed us to connect to each other in ways like never before.
However hidden within these conspiracies are truths, wrapped in madness to obfuscate the truth. I have ridden the waves of the net from back in the wild west days where information websites were more decentralised. When Wikileaks and Alex Jones were seemingly playing for different agendas. I am not the only one who is seeing this — there is a real lack of opposition and questioning at a time when it is needed more than ever.
There are other rational observers and economists such as Nomi Prins, Ann Pettifor, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Mason and others who have come to the same ultimate conclusion — that the largest and most destructive cartel is the banking one. Along with the oil and energy ones like OPEC.
Strange that currently in the UK we are seeing Jeremy Corbyn smeared as racist because of any connection to those conspiracies which have conveniently been hijacked and distorted out of all recognition by madmed, racists, radical Islamists and xenophobes — as being anti-Semitic to question the international banking dynasties and cartel — which demonstrably can control resource flows, and therefore human activity.
Human Collective Consciousness
I have been a life long student of psychology and neuroscience. I have learnt the power of corporate manipulation through advertising and the media using NLP and “psy-ops”. I have also matured as a person and become more resilient to the more obvious distractions.
I would like to introduce you to two excellent books that have had profound impacts on my worldview.
In fact, reading the first book when I was on holiday in Ibiza, I felt such a profound connection to another puzzle piece which I believe will help the human species survive and flourish in this paradigm of finite and dwindling resources.
First I want to take you back even further, to when I was reading a book by James Surowiecki The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business. Its central thesis, that a diverse collection of independently deciding individuals is likely to make certain types of decisions and predictions better than individuals or even experts. Guessing the weight of a cow or how many sweets in a jar (ones that can be averaged out) work best.
This is in contrast to the notion of mob rule or the lowest common denominator because of the structured nature which is proactive, and less reactive.
Back to the other book, By one of the worlds leading neuroscientists; Christof Koch (Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist) the premise is that because consciousness appears to be everywhere and nowhere in the network of the brain, consciousness may in fact be an emergent property of organised information. He ponders the theory that some day consciousness may emerge from the internet.
And in fact there are other examples of the “Network Effect” when looking at technology that is enhanced further by the adoption by more diverse and broader groups. The first telephone was made multitudes more valuable the more others bought telephones to speak with them.
Before that we see print media and linguistics shape our reality which have so often been guided, for good or ill, by dogmatic religions or more recently corporations and governments.
But in other more nuanced forms of art media, the logical conclusions puncture through to our awareness and metaphorically wind us with their resonance. Think of The Matrix, The Watchmen, Fight Club and others. I believe this is our collective knowledge wanting to be better known.
The author of the watchmen makes a compelling case that the only real type of magic comes from art and media which changes the worlds perception of reality.
Collective Intelligence vs Artificial Intelligence
The platform that I propose should be based on the branching Bayesian thinking which is being adopted by artificial intelligence to mimic the way that ideas are branched and pruned when new information becomes available. Wikipedia is a great example of what could be achieved — but enhanced by a trustless blockchain.
The biggest challenge we have is getting a a diverse enough group to participate in an engaging way. Maybe that can be done through a reward system for ideas that are popular and well received.
This is version 1.0 of my ramblings and I don’t mind if like a good “Selfish meme” this project takes on a life of it’s own without me. And I know that there are other coins that are trying to bring voting to the block-chain. As long as the ideas isn’t used as an ICO to rip people off. :)
Maybe Steemit, some other platform, or even the collective of the rest of the internet is already leading to this harmonisation of ideas and memes at shelling points of knowledge (see Rupert Sheldrake) that our wealth is dependent upon others, not despite.
We learn to stand on the shoulders of giants, not on the backs of the poor.
Hybrid Capitalism / Hybrid Democracy
One thing is for sure is that a hybrid form of capitalism and/or democracy needs to address scarcity which rewards small groups of people. And one that truly understands the limits of financial growth on a finite planet.
The genie is out of the bottle. We are powerful because we have ideas that are disruptive in transformative ways. My suggested contribution to the progression of this movement is new global platforms for debate and decision making. The tools for web 365.999 are already at our fingertips. I’m pretty sure that any attempt by me or any individual alone to achieve this will fail, but others will succeed if the ideas survive. It seems to me to be the logical destination we are progressing towards anyway.
We can form new peer-to-peer nodes of understanding to connect new dots of information and make decisions based on as close to the facts as we can get. Global decision, voting and debating platforms using the security of block-chain perhaps. An enhanced collective consciousness.
At the very least, we should consider such projects to rival and balance against the artificial intelligence that may emerge as conscious or not. As Elon Must points out, the ultimate trading bot may decide that the best way to accumulate wealth would be to short consumer stocks, go long on military contractors and start a war.
A Global Currency
What is the biggest conspiracy and what do they want us to be afraid of the most? A new world order. Change. Why should one persons time or energy be worth less or more, depending on which side of a border he or she lives??
Central banks of the world are currently fighting for geopolitical control, with China asking for a new global reserve currency based on gold. Or they are asking for the risk to be shared through the system by using a basket of currencies. This seems like the most fair solution to begin with.
I fear that the global banking cartel have already pumped and are now suppressing Bitcoin with their biggest world export, the USD (AKA Shizer coin). But the laws of supply and demand mean they can only do this for so long. Gold is great for person to person transactions but who knows how much paper gold relates to the supply of real gold. Fake scarcity ruins capitalism and is devouring our planet based real scarcity.
Bitcoin shows the flaws in the current fiat money system. It turns into a run-away bull train when we HODL or only trade to get more. That is why I believe it is being suppressed along with precious metals.
It could however be built upon and upgraded to create a viable world reserve currency and incentivize innovation of efficient renewable energy and computational advances to CPU’s and GPU’s - all to the benefit of the world from innovations we can't yet imagine. Lasting revolutions are slow, and build upon the good bits of the old. Satoshi knew.