The following 120 Excerpts are my (slightly polished) notes from George Gilder’s new book.
There are lots of books on the Blockchain phenomenon, but George Gilder brings a lifetime of political, economic, and philosophical thought leadership to what has been a largely technological discussion to date. Here are 120 excerpts from his recently published (September 2018) book, which provides a comprehensive analysis for anyone looking to understand this inspiring albeit complex and multifaceted progression in the state of our world, and indeed, humanity. My hope is that readers will be inspired to take a deeper dive into the subject matter, hopefully by purchasing and reading the book, which I’ve come to refer to as my “blockchain bible”.
First, here’s a clip from a great interview of Gilder with Uncommon Knowledge (Hoover Institute) in promoting Life After Google:
“Like the earth, the Universe is not flat. Meager and deterministic theories that see the universe as shear matter, ruled by physics and chemistry alone, leave no room for human consciousness and creativity.” (p. xiii)
“As Harvard mathematician-philosopher C.S. Peirce explained early in the last century, all symbols and their objects, whether in software, language, or art, require the mediation of an interpretative mind.” (p.xiv)
[As Gilder declared in scores of speeches in the 1990s] “The most common digital computer of the next decade will be a digital cellular phone with an IP address… connecting to thousands of databases of all kinds… it will be as portable as your watch and as personal as your wallet; it will recognize speech and navigate streets; it will collect your mail, your news and your paycheck” Pregnant pause. “It just may not do Windows. But it will do doors - your front door and your car door and doors of perception.” (p.xiv)
“Instead of putting power in the hands of individuals, [The Internet, under Google’s influence] has become a porous cloud where all the money and power rise to the top.” (p.xv)
“They hold that human beings have nothing more to discover and may as well retire on a guaranteed pension, while Larry Page and Sergey brin fly off with Elon Musk and live forever in galactic walled gardens on their own private planets in a winner-take-all cosmos… Your DeLorean says no. The walls can come down, and a world of many new dimensions can be ours to enrich and explore. Get in and ride.” (p.xv)
“‘The economy has arrived at a point where it produces enough in principle for everyone… So this new period we are entering is not so much about production anymore - how much is produced; it is about distribution - how people get a share in what is produced.’ - W. Brian Arthur, Santa Fe Institute, 2017” (p.1)
“In the dystopian sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica, the key rule shielding civilization from cyborg invaders is “never link the computers”. Back in our galaxy, how many more breaches and false promises of repair will it take before the very idea of the network will become suspect?” (p.5)
“The security system has broken down just as a computer elite have begun indulging the most fevered fantasies about the capabilities of their machines and issuing arrogant inanities about the comparative limits of their human customers.” (p.5)
“Amazon has largely succeeded in isolating its own domains and linking to outside third parties such as credit card companies. But these centralized fortresses violated the Coase Theorem of corporate reach. In a famous paper, the Nobel-laureate economist Ronald Coase calculated that a business should internalize transactions only to the point that the cost of finding and contracting with the outside parties exceed the inefficiencies incurred by the absence of real prices, internal markets, and economies of scale. The concentration of data in walled gardens increases the cost of security. The industry sought safety in centralization. But centralization is not safe… The company store was not a great davance of capitalism during the era of so-called “robber barons,” and it is no better today when it is dispersed through the cloud, funded through advertising, and combined with the spurious sharing of free goods. Marxism was historically hyperbolic the first time round, and the new Marxism is delusional today. It is time for a new information architecture for a globally distributed economy… Fortunately, it is on its way.” (p.9)
“All wealth is the product of knowledge.” (p.13)
“The failure of [Newton’s] alchemy gave him - and the world - previous knowledge that no rival state or private bank, wielding whatever philosopher’s stone, would succeed in making a better money [than gold].” (p.13)
“Under Newton’s gold standard, the horizons of economic activity expanded. Scores of thousands of miles of railway lines spread across Britain and the empire, and the sun never set on the expanding circles of trust that underlay British finance and commerce. Perhaps the most important result of free commerce was the end of slavery. Reliable money and free and efficient labor markets made ownership of human laborers unprofitable. Commerce eclipsed physical power.” (p.13)
“And what was mathematics founded on? Responding to the Latin maxim ignoramus et ignorabimus (“we do not know and we will not know”), Hilbert declared: “For us [mathematicians] there is no ignorabimus, and in my opinion none whatever in natural science. In opposition to the foolish ignorabimus our slogan shall be: “We must know, we will know” - Wir mussen wissen - a declaration that was inscribed on his tombstone.” (p.15)
“Chaitin proved that physical laws alone, for example, could not explain chemistry or biology, because the laws of physics contain drastically less information than do chemical or biological phenomena. The universe is a hierarchy of information tiers, a universal “stack,” governed from the top down.” (p.18)
“A system of the world necessarily combines science and commerce, religion and philosophy, economics and epistemology.” (p.19)
“Google may talk a good game about privacy, but private data are the mortal enemy of its system of the world.” (p.22)
“Of all Google’s foundational principles, the zero price, is apparently its most benign. Yet it will prove to be not only its most pernicious principle but the fatal flaw that dooms Google itself. Google will likely be an important company ten years from now. Search is a valuable service, and search it will continue to provide. On search it may prosper, even at a price of zero. But Google’s system of the world will be swept away.” (p.23)
“Burning Man’s website, like Google’s, presents a decalogue of communal principles. Authored by the founder Larry Harvey in 2004, the “10 Principles of Burning Man” would seem on the surface incompatible with the ethos of a giant corporation raking in money and headed by two of the world’s richest men:
[Link to The Ten Principles of Burning Man: https://medium.com/@briansolis/the-10-principles-of-burning-man-and-the-new-p-s-of-culture-and-community-be7e15d188ba]
But Brin and Page see no contradiction between Burning Man’s ethos and Google’s. They attend Burning Man often, as does Eric Schmidt, whose hiring was allegedly eased by the knowledge that he was a fellow devotee. Google’s headquarters, Building 43 in Mountain View, is often decorated with photographs of the desert rites. The first Google logo bore a burning man stick figure.” (p.33)
[Link to The Duality of The 10 Principles of Burning Man: https://medium.com/@roymarvelous/the-duality-of-the-ten-principles-of-burning-man-ae80b2a1f899]
“But you are not random; you are a unique genetic entity that cannot be factored back into an egg and sperm. You are unbreakably encrypted by biology. These asymmetrical natural codes are the ruling model and metaphor for enduring security. You start by defining not the goal but the ground state. Before you build the function or the structure, you build the foundation. It is the ultimate non-random reality. The ground state is you.” (p.46)
“Utterly different from Google’s rule of communications first is the law of the cryptocosm. The first rule is the barn-door law: “Security first.” Security is not a procedure or a mechanism; it is an architecture.” (p.46)
[Link to The Ten Laws of the Cryptocosm: https://medium.com/@joseph_70330/10-laws-for-blockchain-in-a-cryptocosm-era-4878ee1f1347
“Google is hierarchical. Life after Google will be heterarchical, Google is top-down. Life after Google will be bottom-up. Google rules by the insecurity of all the lower layers in the stack. A porous stack enables the money and power to be sucked up to the top. In life after Google, a secure ground state in the individual human being, registered and timestamped in a digital ledger, will prevent this suction of hierarchical power… Whereas Google now controls your information and uses it free of charge, you will be master of your own information and charge for it freely. Try the brave Browser of Brendan Eich, formerly of Mozilla and the author of Javascript. It gives you power over your data and enables you to charge for them.” (p.48)
“Money is not a magic wand but a measuring stick, not wealth but a gauge of it. Whereas money in the Google era is fodder for five-trillion-dollar-a-day currency - that’s seventy-five times the amount of the world’s trade in goods and services - you will command unmediated money that measures value rather than manipulates it.” (p.49)
“Does the promise that human dignity will once again take its place on the Internet and that human beings will be masters of the cryptocosm sound too good to be true?.. If these principles are enigmatic today, to explain their sources and ultimate success, we must, as Caltech’s Carver Mead tells us, “listen to the technology and find out what it is telling us.” (p.50)
In a joint appearance in 2012 in Aspen, Peter Thiel chided Eric Schmidt: “You don’t have the slightest idea of what you are doing.” He pointed out that the company had amassed some $50 billion in cash at the time and was allowing it to sit in the bank at near-zero interest rates while its vast data centers still could not identify cats as well as a three-year-old could.” (p.66)
[Link to 2012 debate between Thiel and Schmidt: ]
“Dally points out that it is always possible to make huge temporary gains by putting entire systems onto single slivers of ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) silicon, special-purpose chips hard-wired to perform one comlex function. As Dally tells me, in performing parallel operations, graphics processors are ten times more cost-effective than general-purpose central processing units (CPUS), and ASICS are ten to a hundred times more cost-effective than ordinary GPUS. But with ASICS, your market is reduced to just your chosen special purposes, and your data centers are no longer all-purpose Turing machines. They are ossifying into special-purpose factories like the aluminum plants they succeeded in The Dalles (Google’s most cutting edge data center, located in Oregon).” (p.69)
“Still, in operations per watt, the prevailing champion is made not of silicon but of carbon. It is the original neural network, the human brain and its fourteen watts, which is not enough to illuminate a lightbulb over a character’s head in a cartoon strip. In the future, computers will pursue the energy ergonomics of brains rather than the megawattage of Big Blue or even the giant air-conditioned expanses of data centers. All computers will have to use the power-savings techniques that have been developed in the battery-powered smartphone industry and then move on to explore the energy economics of real carbon brains.” (p.72)
“The test of the new global ganglia of computers and cables, worldwide Webs of glass and light and air, is how readily they take advantage of unexpected contributions from free human minds in all their creativity and diversity, which cannot even be measured y the metrics of computer science.” (p.72)
“The current generation in Silicon Valley has yet to come to terms with the findings of von Neumann and Godel early in the last century of with the breakthroughs in information theory of Claude Shannon, Gregory Chaitin, Anton Kolmogorov, and John R. Pierce.” (p.73)
“Chaitin’s “mathematics of creativity” suggest that in order to push the technology forward it will be necessary to transcend the deterministic mathematical logic that pervades existing computers. Anything deterministic prohibits the very surprises that define information and reflect real creation. Godel dictates a mathematics of creativity… This mathematics will first encounter a major obstacle in the stunning successes of the prevailing system of the world not only in Silicon Valley but also in finance.” (p.74)
“All the titans of the cloud from Amazon to Google to Facebook have made heuristic use of Markov models to decide what customers are saying and to predict what they will do next. But the most impressive Markov warriors and Siren Servers are not at Google or Amazon or Facebook. They reside at a little-known but astonishingly successful company transforming the world of finance. The real Markovian masters of the universe run a venture in Setauket, Long Island, called Renaissance Technologies. It is the Google-era titan of finance and investment.” (p.80)
[Renaissance is the most successful hedge fund in history.]
“Unlike its West Coast counterpart Google, the Renaissance group completely escaped the perils of the Great Recession, which humbled so many hedge funds and big banks. During the crash of 2008, after extracting the industry’s highest fees - a vertiginous 5 percent of money under management and 44 percent of the profits - the Madallion Fund was said to be up 80 percent. Other hedge funds were down an average of 17 percent, and the S&P was down 40 percent.” (p.83)
“As Peter Drucker said, “It is less important to do things right than to do the right things” Effectiveness is more important than efficiency. Renaissance’s improvement in market efficiency is small compared to the yield. As a result, too much American capital is migrating to Siren Servers and shunning “Zero to One” creative investments. Computerized index funds that “buy the market” thrive while IPOs languish. No net wealth is created but money is arbitrarily siphoned off and redistributed in a zero-sum game.” (p.86)
“Correcting for leverage, I contend that profits that merely reflect borrowing power do not usually contribute to the learning process. They reveal willingness to accept a level of calculable risk rather than singularities of creative learning. Such profits are predictable and thus low-entropy.” (p.87)
“Bagehot’s Britain operated under newton’s gold standard and system of the world. The currencies that central banks manage today have no anchor in gold and thus suffer from the self-referential circularity of all logical systems not moored to reality outside of themselves. In the United States, unmoored Markovian money can be manipulated at will by the Federal Reserve in the interests of its sponsors in government and their pseudo-private cronies.” (p.88)
“Unmoored money changes the culture of capitalism. Wall Street banks relish volatile currencies, their downside protected by government. Main Street and Silicon Valley want stable money for long-term investments, the upside guaranteed by the rule of law. The governments of the world, their money unmoored, favor finance over enterprise, shortening the time horizons of economic activity. Among fast traders the rhythms are reduced to seconds and the economy endures a hypertrophy of short-term finance.” (p.88)
“The role of finance is to transform savers’ quests for security and liquidity into the entrepreneur’s necessarily long-term illiquidity and acceptance of risk. If banks and other institutions don’t perform this role, economic growth flags and stagnation sets in.” (p.91)
“All wealth is ultimately a product of long-term investment based on knowledge and discovery. There is no way to escape the inexorable conflict between savers who want liquidity and investors who constantly destroy it with enduring investments.” (p.91)
“With learning prohibited, the current algorithms make almost no investments and generate no enduring wealth. Instead, by accelerating trades in the oceans of currencies and short-term securities - the $280 trillion of global debt - hedge funds contribute liquidity and feed on its turbulence.” (p.92)
“Renaissance (hedge fund) is a supreme arbitrageur of the constant market distortions caused by capricious government.” (p.92)
“Midas’s error was to mistake gold, wealth’s monetary measure, for wealth itself. But wealth is not a thing or a random sequence. It is inextricably rooted in hard won knowledge over extended time.” (p.92)
“Speed of iteration is not the same as intelligence.” (p.98)
“The blind spot of AI is that consciousness does not emerge from thought; it is the source of it.” (p.101)
“How a software programmer can miss the essence of his own trade is a mystery, but Chesterton understood the myopia of an expert: “The… argument of the expert, that the man who is trained should be the man who is trusted, would be absolutely unanswerable if it were really true that the man who studied a thing and practiced it every day went on seeing more and more of its significance. But he does not. He goes on seeing less and less of its significance.” (p.101-102)
“Within a decade, so the attendees [of the 1975 Asilomar conference on genetic engineering] prophesied, “scientists will be able to create a new species and carry out the equivalent of 10 billion years of evolution in one year… More than four decades later, the hopes and fears of the 1975 Asilomar conference are nowhere near to coming true.” (p.105)
“All that the first Asilomar conference managed to achieve was triggering an obtuse paranoia about “genetically modified organisms” that hinders agricultural progress around the world… The danger of paranoid politics is the chief peril that all the Deep Learners at the new Asilomar should have recognized.” (p.106)
“The fund’s name [“The 1517 Fund”] alludes to another historic decentralization, launched on October 31, 1517. That was the day Martin Luther posted in Ninety-five Theses on the church door at Wittenberg. Among the abuses Luther was protesting was the selling of indulgences. The remission of the temporal penalty due to sins, an indulgence, like other spiritual goods, must not be sold. The pardoners who perpetrated this abuse would issue a document memorializing the transaction. The 1517 Fund explains the parallel: “Likewise, universities today are selling a piece of paper at great cost and telling people that buying it is the only way they can save their souls. Universities call it a diploma, and they’re making a future doing it. Call us heretical if you like, but the 1517 Fund is dedicated to dispelling that paper illusion.” (p.111)
“Above all they [The 1517 Fund] denounce the horrendous debt load of the more than $1.5 trillion - roughly 7 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product - heaped on the hapless American student to pay for a bloated academic establishment, debt that has driven whole generations out of the entrepreneurial economy that enriched their forebears and endowed the universities themselves.” (p.112)
“The hardware for self-driving cars has hardly improved in twelve years since the original DARPA competition that launched the industry. These approaches still entail a “pain-can” on the roof with sixty-four lasers and photo-detectors in rows. Velodyne’s idea of how to improve performance is to double the number of lasers to 128 and add more software. It all strikes Russell as a kludge - a system too complex and cumbersome to work... Governing this challenge is Clayton Christensen’s model of “integration and modularity.” When a product fundamentally underperforms the market’s requirements, integration is essential.” (p.114)
“Aim at performance, and low cost will follow. Aim at low cost, and you will not achieve sufficient performance to have an enduring business. After a sufficient system is devised, demand will foster economies of scale and learning curves that bring the price down over time.” (p.115)
“All of them shared and re-enforced each other’s frustration with Silicon Valley’s software obsession and abandonment of manufacturing… And all of them soon came to see this abandonment as a gigantic opportunity.” (p.118)
“‘I think, says [Marc Andreessen] the ursine entrepreneur, with a sneer evocative of his early days as a Silicon Valley wiseacre at Netscape, ‘rich old white men crapping on technology that they don’t understand can be counted on to be wrong roughly 100 percent of the time.’” (p.126)
“At the 2014 Bitcoin Summit, joining the fray of Satashistas is Chamath Palihapitiya, a ferociously smart near-billionaire from Sri Lanka, a former force and friend of Mark (Zuckerberg) at Facebook… owns some $50 million worth of Bitcoins. Tall, dark, and lean, the physical opposite of the Nordic bear Andreessen, the Sri Lankan warns against “hyperbolic bullshit” from others. But as for himself, “When I buy bitcoin, I am using capital to support a way of ripping apart the financial system.” Two years later Palihapitiya was able to purchase a share of the Golden State Warriors NBA franchise.” (p.126)
“Finally I gave up on this accessible circle and resolved to find and interview the Genesis man himself. Why not? Satoshi Nakamoto was the architect of bitcoin, investor of the blockchain, and the price mover of the plot. True, he did not mention the blockchain in his paper, though he specified it, and true, no one seemed to know who he was or where he had gone. No one could depict his fleshy contours or countenance. He was the John Galt of this saga, the source and symbol of the new Galt’s Gulch of bitcoin.” (p.130)
“Never reportedly pinned in the flesh, he was an accessible avatar until December 11, 2010. Then - poof - he disappeared. On March 7, 2014, he suddenly returned, issuing on the P2P Foundation site a post of four words, which reduced the universe of possible Satoshis by one man. “I am not Dorian Nakamoto,” he declared, almost palpably cringing, dismissing from contention an elderly former CIA coder in Fortran named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, who lives at Temple City in Los Angeles. Then he withdrew even his Internet persona.” (p.130)
“I closed my eyes and drifted among dreams of exquisite Asian angels, muses for a tale of bitcoin and Satoshi… and then - Shazam! - in a cascade of excited neurons, he popped into my mind… There before me, more vivid than life, was a dapper, articulate Nipponese nerd with an English accent, a libertarian bent, and an epigrammatic style. He conveyed a certain oblique sagacity that reminded me of John P. Marquand’s Mr. Moto, that abbreviated Nakamoto who punctiliously solved a number of almost equally intriguing mysteries in the 1950s, both in novels and on screen… “Satoshi at your service,” the man announced with a crisp bow. I was so taken aback that I could scarcely muster words.” (p.131)
“If anyone is in control of bitcoin, its distributed security model fails. Satoshi would become just another dreaded “Trusted Third Party,” subject to subpoena by repressive governments or hacked by determined nerds or pirates.” (p.132)
“Recorded in a public distributed ledger, the transactions are mathematically “hashed” into chains of blocks that form an immutable database published across the Internet. Unchangeable records of transactions constitute a form of money. But governments do not like private money creation. So Satoshi carefully preserved his anonymity.”
“I asked, ‘Aren’t the properties of bitcoin - its uncontrollable peer-to-peer and distributed architecture - incompatible with all modern money systems? Moneys are established and maintained to do precisely what can’t be done in bitcoins - adjusting money supplies and exchange rates to changing economic conditions. Aren’t you a threat to the entire monetary world, to central banks and G8 summits and International Monetary Fund mandates, to five-point-one trillion dollars a day of oceanic currency trading, to preening financial strategists in Washington and New York, London and Davos, Tokyo and San Francisco, of tax collectors and financial regulators around the world?’
[to which an imagined Satoshi replies]
‘We do not want to lead with ‘anonymous currency’ or ‘currency outside the reach of any government.’ Satoshi said. “I am definitely not making such a taunt of assertion. Some people say, ‘Bring it on, WikiLeaks.’ I say, ‘No, don’t bring it on, WikiLeaks!’ The bitcoin project needs to grow gradually, so the software can be strengthened along the way.” (p.133)
[in response to criticisms by Krugman and other ‘fusty establishment elites’] “‘These people know nothing about bitcoin,’ he said, with a curt wave of his hand. ‘The utility of the exchanges made possible by bitcoin will far exceed the cost of the electricity used, about a dollar a day per miner. Therefore not having bitcoin would be the net waste.’” (p.136)
“‘Well, money has to be related to valuable things in the world. Gold is intrinsically scarce and valuable. It makes beautiful jewelry. It is compact and ductile. It is a superb conductor of electricity - and love. Dollars are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government and by the world’s largest economy. Bitcoin is backed by what? Aimless computer cycles producing additional numbers of zeroes?’”
[to which an imagined Satoshi replies]
“Satoshi waved his hand and asked me to listen. ‘I will explain this only once,’ he said. ‘As a thought experiment, imagine there was a base metal as scarce as gold but with the following properties: boring grey in color, not a good conductor of electricity, not particularly strong but not ductile or easily malleable either, not useful for any practical or ornamental purpose. And - this is key - one special magical property: it can be transported over a communications channel. If it somehow acquired any value at all for whatever reason, then anyone wanting to transfer wealth over a long distance could buy some, transmit it, and have the recipient sell it. Maybe it could get an initial value circularly as you’ve suggested, by people’s foreseeing its usefulness for exchange. I would definitely want some.’...”
[to which Gilder replies]
“‘I get it,’ I said. ‘That substance would be the most valuable element in the world. It would be bits and atoms at once. It would link value and its measurement. It would spur an information revolution.’” (p.138)
“[Craig Wright] explains that the bitcoin’s resistance to attack is measured not by the number of nodes but by the number of edges - that is, links between the nodes. He shows that bitcoin nodes, compared with any other blockchain, are interconnected with nearly biological neuronal density as every node propagates new blocks back and forth to all the other through so-called randomized gossip protocol.” (p.149)
“Bitcoin gains momentum with every governmental campaign against cash, which is the alternative peer-to-peer vessel for anonymous private transactions. Bitcoin appreciates every time a central bank promotes spurious growth with negative interest rates and inflation targets, raiding the retirement savings of pensioners.” (p.155)
"The seven-layer [Blockstack] model consists of a hierarchical stack in which lower functions are controlled by higher functions. At the bottom is the physical layer; the fiber-optic lines, microwave oscillators, mixers, 1550- and 900-nanometer lasers, photodetectors, silicon routers, erbium-doped amplifiers, and twisted-pair telephone wires, antennas coaxial cables - the list is endless - that carry the data packets across the network at the behest of the layers above it.” (p.162)
“The Netscape IPO in 1995 also meant distribution of the rewards of the Internet. On the very first day, the shares almost tripled to a valuation of more than $3 billion, benefitting the public while inspiring and funding entrepreneurs to challenge the computing establishment. In the following five years, a spate of IPOs, from companies such as Google, Amazon, and a thousand dot-coms, fueled a boom of distributed Internet applications. Under what I called the Law of the Microcosm, innovation moved decisively to the edges of the network.” (p.166)
“It was a high point for technological entrepreneurship. After the year 2000, however, the number of startups would stagnate and IPOs nearly disappear for all but the biggest tech companies. In the wake of the Enron debacle, regulations under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act exacted a toll of some two million dollars for reaching public markets and imposed a rigid accounting regime high on paperwork and low on trust. It was entirely inimical to startup culture and finance.” (p.167)
“If you have to pass it by the lawyers, you probably won’t say anything of interest. All but the largest corporations became realms of nearly zero-entropy communications - all retro-numbers and no inside detail to make them significant.” (p.167)
“The IPO dearth continued for more than a decade. For nine months in 2016, there were no US IPSs at all. Instead, VCs kept hundreds of “unicorns” - private companies valued at more than a billion dollars - in their corrals… Unlike the appreciation of earlier Internet companies such as Microsoft and Netscape, the appreciation of unicorns would not chiefly benefit the public. The returns (and urn rates) flowed mostly to the venture capitalists who held them and the leviathans that bought some of the best of them.” (p.167)
“[In 2012] Ali and his friend Ryan Shea joined the Entrepreneurship Club at Princeton and together plunged into an effort to launch new Internet apps. By the spring of 2013, they found themselves strangely stymied. The Internet roads they were traveling now converged in giant data center hubs that offered scant security or privacy and little economic yield for any but a few Internet giants… It was an enclosure movement with a critical flaw. An insecure net could not protect property rights, defend privacy, host safe and efficient transactions, permit micropayments to halt spam, or establish sure identities. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and others responded with proprietary “safe spaces” of their own. There they could accommodate commerce among their mostly locked-in users.” (p.168)
“These [data] silos, or “walled gardens” were what depressed Berners-Lee. They worked well for their proprietors but destroyed the global coherence of the Net and caused increasing segmentation. Within the segments, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, et al. collected more and more private data and protected them with firewalls and encryption. But as time passed, they discovered that centralization is not safe. Putting data in central repositories solved hackers’ hardest problem for them: It told them which data were important and where it was, putting the entire Internet at risk.” (p.168)
“Nelson and Ali felt a surge of excitement about blockchain technology. Ali described it as ‘the most sophisticated and complex and yet elegant and beautiful program I ever came across. And the main thing it does is it gives power back to the people.’” (p.172)
“Ali and Shea wanted to address the problem at a more fundamental level by developing a new secure protocol layer for the Internet by which the identification, money, power, and property could stay with their owner rather than be sucked up to the apps at the top. “I was impressed with Peter Thiel’s perspective,” says Shea. “Why would you want to compete with some existing company, be incrementally more efficient, and make the world only a slightly better place?” (p.172)
“Deciding that virtually all tokens are securities and thus indeed under its jurisdiction, the SEC threatens drastically to increase the legal cost of cryptographic innovation in the United States. The danger is that it will extend the doldrums into which it has led the entrepreneurial economy and drive the industry out of the country.” (p.181)
“When information becomes abundant, time remains scarce. What Herbert Simon, Esther Dyson, Tim Wu, and their many disciples call attention is essentially just another word for time. As I explain in The Scandal of Money, time translates into the economy as money.” (p.183)
“As Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One, “every great entrepreneur is first and foremost a designer…” But the designs do not always work on the first try.” (p.189)
“Balaban, however, decided to quit AWS cold Turkey. He spent sixty thousand dollars to build his own servers from scratch, influenced, perhaps, by Thomas Sohmers’s insight that present-day servers are kludges that waste 98 percent of their energy running data over wires to and from memory or sitting around in “wait states.” Balaban decided he had spect enough time and money on wait states. There had to be a better way than sending off terabytes of learning data over the Internet to a queue at the Amazon GPU farm. “It would be cheaper and faster,” he calculated, “to put them on disks and call Fedex.” (p.195)
“The Nvidia representatives would try to frighten [Balaban] by explaining that the game chips “were not meant for a datacenter. They couldn’t be relied on for machine-learning tasks. We can’t stand behind them.” It was what Silicon Valley calls “FUD” - the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that established producers like IBM spread about cheap alternative devices, such as those produced a decade ago by Nvidia.” (p.195)
“[quoting Urbach announcement of OctaneRender - Render Token (RNDR) network - in 2017] A decentralized and open global rendering system is foundational for disruptive services and platforms to evolve from the post-mobile world of immersive computing, just as the open web was formed in the creation of Google, Amazon and Facebook.” (p.206)
“The cryptocosm can mobilize computer power in volumes that dwarf even the data centers of the leviathans. In this cause, the advances in computer science pioneered at Google serve to emancipate the world from Google’s silos.” (p.210)
“As the civil war worsened all around, the Universidad Francisco Marroquin opened in January 1972 with Ayau as its first president. In his inaugural address, he proclaimed UFM’s core convictions - individual rights, truth, justice, pluralism, and democracy - which dictators and terrorists were trampling just outside the door. Freedom, Ayau said, came first of all: “We firmly believe in the capacity of imperfect human beings to be better able to realize their destiny when free, and not when compelled by the collective entity personified by the state… Amid the heat and politics outside, Ayau took the long view:
[Quoting Ayau at the opening ceremony of Universidad Francisco Marroquin, in January 1972]
‘‘The commitment of universities everywhere is not to the passing aspect of human life, rather to the permanent. As such, universities need to place themselves beyond the conflicts of their time so that science and academic freedom - which humankind will need at all times - may be preserved. What we suggest here is that the traditional ivory tower not be abandoned by scholars seeking to join the heated discussions of the political arena, but that it be transformed into a new and transparent crystal tower that will allow scholars - professors and students - to watch, think about, and critically study present conditions in an effort to discover the probable shape of the future.’
At the university’s first graduation ceremony, Ayau again spoke of freedom, while wearing a bulletproof vest under his academic robes.” (p.214)
“The Los Angeles Times reported in 2008: ‘Whereas San Carlos University actively aided leftist guerrillas, [Universidad] Francisco Marroquin preached the sanctity of private property rights and the rule of law. The cheeky Ayau chose red as the school’s official color ‘on the theory that it had been expropriated by the communists and we shouldn’t cede them exclusivity.” (p.215)
“It was May 2014, early in my plunge into the international bitcoin hacker community. I was in Guatemala to receive an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Francisco Marroquin. There in a deep ravine that cleaves the volcanic “Zone Ten” in Guatemala City, I was feeling a system of the world quake under my feet… Gathered around me now were a gaggle of oracular coders, pioneering educators, technology venturers, gold-oriented value investors, Randian libertarianism, “free-zone” projectors, and cypherpunk bitcoiners - several playing all these roles at once - who conveyed a unified vision of changes in finance enabling a new efflorescence of freedom and economic opportunity.” (p.216)
“So there we were at UFM, talking across the globe with Tuur Demeester, back in the heart of the old world. Twenty-three years old, a buyer of bitcoins at five dollars in 2012, he had partly cashed out near five hundred dollars to fund two companies, an “exchange” called Kraken and a mining equipment firm called Cointerra. Kraken thrived, went on the Bloomberg Terminal, and formed a working bitcoin “bank.” Cointerra died in the bitcoin crash of 2014. Demeester told of the even grander self-funding exploits of Bitcoin Armory, now said to be among the best bitcoin digital “wallets”. Aiming to produce a secure bitcoin wallet, in software, it launched a $100,000 funding round in 2013. The dollars poured in, and in an upside surprise, they actually raised $500,000. They spent $100,000 on the business plan and stashed $400,000 in bitcoins. The $400,000 soared to a bitcoin value of $4 million. Filling their wallet without even writing code, they provided the model for a close to 1,500 blockchain companies over the subsequent five years.” (p.218)
“Feeding on their air of entitlement of fading upper-class institutions that accomplish “little with a lot” of other people’s funds, the Harvard initiative reflected the increasing inebriation of elite American education. Focusing on stopping progress, barring new power plants, dismantling chemical facilities, mobilizing against Israel, and other reactionary pursuits Ivy institutions are pursuing the fancies of a declining intellectual and business elite, full of chemophobic nags and luddite lame-ducks quacking away on their miasmic pools of old money as the world whirls past them.” (p.219)
“Demanding disinvestment from Israel, a similar majority of the same students had previously aligned themselves with the egregious “boycott, divest, and sabotage” movement (BDS). Thus they joined the globe’s anti-Semites, some of whom were also lavishing on Harvard their mostly oil-based fortunes.” (p.219)
“Yes, even still-despotic ‘communist’ China has grown its private economy so much that its government spending is now under 20 percent of GDP (compared with the United States’ 26 percent). China is in some ways proving more receptive to rebellious thinkers and entrepreneurs than is America. For all its flaws, China now dispenses as much venture capital as the United States does, and it holds three times more initial public offerings. We should not assume that Silicon Valley “has got it made” without China.” (p.220)
“The United States, however, is beginning a comeback, led in part by the new generation of entrepreneurs lured out of the university monolith by Peter Thiel. At the end of October 2017, the Thiel-inspired investment fund 1517 celebrated the five hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses, which triggered the Reformation, gather together hundreds of college-dropout entrepreneurs. Vitalik Buterin’s scheduled speech was canceled at the last moment. He turned out to be too busy - a good sign… A few weeks before the event, “The New 95” appeared on the 1517 fund’s blog, The Subversionist.” (p.220)
[Link to “The New 95 from the 1517 fund’s blog, The Subversionist: https://medium.com/1517/a-new-95-ec071200d98f]
“The academy, already a wealthy pillar of the American establishment, received with its ideology a sense of entitlement to government support. While tuition and other educational costs soared for decades at multiples faster than inflation and most graduates’ incomes languished, the universities blithely funded their enrichment on the backs of ever more indebted students. Loaded down with debt, young people eschew entrepreneurial activities and even marriage. As business starts stagnate in America, they drift toward socialist dependency.” (p.222)
“The blockchain transforms the architecture of the Internet from the bottom up, Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum transforms the network from an array of parochial hierarchies to a global heterarchy anchored in a new model of security. Austin Russell is bringing unique hardware innovations to a Valley full of vain software omnivores and centralized computing evangelists. Stephen Balaban is turning the cloud movement into “rainmaking,” bringing the supercomputer from centralized and subcontracted to distributed and personalized.” (p.224)
“If you are a venture capitalist with a desire to achieve large changes in the economy and society, a bold focus on youth is critical to success.” (p.224)
“Attracting tens of thousands of applicants each year, the Thiel Fellowship anoints only twenty. Russell in 2013 and Buterin in 2014 were members of the early cohorts. Buterin is already well on his way to becoming the Larry Page of the new generation by reversing Page’s top-down revolution.” (p.225)
“We hope [the Thiel Fellows] inspire people of all ages as they demonstrate that intellectual curiosity, grit, and determination are more important than credentials for improving civilization.” (p.225)
“As he worked on the contested borders between different networks - the then-unregulated Web and the pettifogged PSTN, “local” and “long distance” - the FCC hounded his every step. Launching ITXC out of Vocaltec with his AT&T colleague Tom Evslin, Berninger shok up the industry with the idea of long distance telephony as an Internet product. ITXC briefly spiked into an eight-billion-dollar market cap before the dotcom crash. Becoming a major supplier of VoIP, Berninger’s next venture, Vonage, reached a peak of 1.5 million customers in 2004. It was eventually palsied by the specious but exhausting Verizon patent claims that extracted close to $150 million from the company… It was his experience with Hello Digital, though that made him a libertarian litigant.” (p.229)
“Reliable HD voice requires an end-to-end link, like a phone call, rather than a best-efforts, heavily buffered Internet connection. As he put in his “Declaration of Daniel Berninger” before the FCC, “Because latency, jitter and packet loss… will threaten quality and destroy the value-proposition of HD service, it is imperative that network operators prioritize this traffic…,” and they will “reasonably expect and demand compensation…
[Link to article, “The Most Important First Amendment Case in the History of the Supreme Court”: http://vcxc.org/blog.html]
Berninger knew that, because of the FCC’s Open Internet Order of 2015, this new use of telephony on the Web would ring bells at the Commission. In that year, FCC chief Tom Wheeler
Declared the Internet part of the PSTN and regulated it as a public utility under Title II of the Telecom Act of 1996… Protecting an end-to-end link was illegal, said the FCC, under ‘Network Neutrality’ rules, which arguably prohibited favoring some bits - time sensitive voice bits, say - over other bits, more forgiving text or email transmissions, for instance. So good-bye to Hello Digital.” (p.230)
“If the FCC was in charge of phone numbers, went the argument, it was in charge of IP addresses also. And if it was in charge of IP addresses, it was in charge of the Internet. With IPV4’s limited address space now being rapidly converted into IPV6 to accommodate the galactic billions of items in the Internet of Things, why shouldn’t the FCC rule over all those billions of things - a bright ever-expanding horizon for bureaucracy. And, said the FCC in its order, if any new forms of address are developed, we own them too! Falling under its communications jurisdiction is any new address scheme that may be introduced by insidious non-neutral entrepreneurs.” (p.231)
“Adopted in principle by telecom companies around the globe, 5G is the fifth generation of wireless technology standards. Expanding the network into several new high-frequency and millimeter-wave domains of spectrum and vastly multiplying antenna coverage, it promises a hundredfold increase in wireless bandwidth over the next five years. It also makes most of the spectrum-hustling of the FCC obsolete.” (p.231)
“In 2002, Berninger identified ten “U.S. Telecom Policy Myths” that serve as rationales for increased government regulation. Sixteen years later, the most significant change is the enlistment of Google and its lobbyists behind this essential mythology.” (p.235)
[Berninger’s 2002 U.S. Telecom Policy Myths: http://www.danielberninger.com/10myths.html]
“Nonetheless, a widespread small-government libertarian myth, shared, oddly enough, by the big-government libertarians at Google, has enabled regulators massively to expand their intervention, seriously regarding telecom progress. That is the myth that the electromagnetic spectrum is a scarce natural resource resembling “beachfront property” and that the government owns it in the name of the people and can sell it off at will.” (pp.237)
“‘Commodity? Security? Currency? Property? What is it?’ Perianne asks. ‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ answers the Mad Hatter, observing Washington’s rule: “If it moves tax it. If it keeps moving regulate it. If graphic innovation is not going to stop moving, it faces a growing threat of taxation and regulation, as every regulatory faction seeks jurisdiction over it.” (p.240)
“In the halls of the cryptocosm, we all smiled and slapped hands when chorus of hoary establishment lions rose up on cue to condemn crypto. JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon (“It’s a fraud”), Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger (“It’s rat poison”), and Paul Krugman of Princeton and the New York Times (“It’s evil”) were just the kind of “aging white men” whom Marc Andreessen dissed as dependably wrong about technology “almost 100 percent of the time.” To our contrarian ears, those fusty guys were singing a contrapuntal chorus of affirmation.” (p.241)
“The premise of the cryptocurrency movement is the recognition that the old bureaucracies of socialism and crony-capitalism have failed. That is the problem, not the solution.” (p.244)
“Mathematics is not a closed or bounded system. It opens up at every step to a universe of human imagination.” (p.245)
“The inevitable conclusion is that machines based on mathematical logic cannot exhaust the human domain; they can only expand it.” (p.245)
“As Ammous puts it, ‘Prosperity only happens when there is no easy way for people to produce money, and instead they have to produce useful things.” (p.254)
“No other basic unit of measure’, says Kendall - whether it’s the second, the meter, the ampere, or the kilogram - changes in value with demand. They are standards based on physical constants. If money is a measuring stick, it cannot respond to demand… If bitcoin cannot fulfill the required roles of a currency, its long-term utility as a currency is nil… Bitcoin would disappear into the ether from which it came… Because bitcoin has limited its supply to a fixed amount that is already mostly realized it will have a short shelf-life as a functional currency.” (p.255)
“Its [bitcoin’s] historical fate is to provide a haven from maniacal governments and central banks and a harbor for a great innovation, the blockchain.” (p.256)
“The International System of Units (abbreviated “SI” from the French Systeme Internationale) has established seven key metrics, each founded on a constant of physics: the second of time, the meter of length, the kilogram of weight, the degree Kelvin of thermodynamic temperature, the ampere or electrical current, the mole of molecular mass, and the candela of lumosity. These measures cannot float because their constancy underlies and interconnects all the worldwide welter of human industry that keeps us alive and prosperous… Throughout human history, people have understood that money plays a key role as a measuring stick. Contrary to Craig Wright’s fervent view, currencies are not commodities, part of what they measure. Measuring sticks cannot be part of what they they calibrate. They must have their roots in a grid of measurement beyond the reach of commerce. Self-referential loops - whether physicists measuring atoms with atoms, or philosophers gauging minds with minds, or economists measuring commodities with commodities - doom their users to Godelian futility.” (p.260)
“A global copying machine, the Internet founders in establishing origins, facts, truths, timestamps, ground states, and identities. Fake news and phishing expeditions are hardly differentiated from real events and edifying communications… Now it is time to move beyond the slippery slopes of the Internet and provide an immutable database on which to build new structures of trust and truth: low-entropy carriers for a high-entropy era of human creativity and accomplishment. The new era will move beyond Markov chains of disconnected probabilistic states to blockchain hashes of history and futurity, trust and truth… The opposite of memoryless Markov chains is blockchains. While Markov chains gain efficiency and speed by rigorously eclipsing the past, blockchains gain efficiency and speed by rigorously eclipsing the mathematical hash. Perhaps ten thousand times slower to compute than Markov chains, every hash contains an indelible signature of all the statistically likely future without knowing the past; blockchains enable the real-life future by indelibly recording the past.” (p.275)
“Bitcoin: A method of secure transactions based on wide publication and decentralization of a ledger across the Internet. Current credit card systems, by contrast, are based on secrecy and centralization and use protected networks and firewalled data centers filled with the person information of the transactors.” (p.277)
“Bitcoins are not coins, but metrics or measuring sticks for transactions that are permanently registered in the blockchain.” (p.277)
“Chaitin’s Law: Gregory Chaitin, inventor or algorithmic information theory, ordains that you cannot use static, eternal, perfect mathematics to model dynamic creative life. Determinist math traps the mathematician in a mechanical process that cannot yield innovation or surprise, learning or life. You need to transcend the Newtonian mathematics of physics and adopt post-modern mathematics - the mathematics that follows Godel (1931) and Turing (1936), the mathematics of creativity.” (p.278)
“Expansionary fiscal and monetary policy: The attempt by central banks to stimulate economic activity by selling government securities to pay for a governmental deficit…
Keynesians, mostly on the left, believe that central banks sell securities and impart a fiscal stimulus by enabling more government spending…
Monetarists, mostly on the right, believe that central banks stimulate economic activity by creating money to buy govern securities…
This new money goes to the previous owners of the purchased securities from the Treasury. Keynensianism and monetarism thus converge in expanding the government’s power to spend…
In an information economy, both measures attempt to use government power to force growth. But economic growth is learning (accumulating tested knowledge). Learning cannot be forced.” (Gilder’s Life After Google, p.279)
“Gold is a metric of valuation based on the time to extract an incremental ounce, which has changed little over the centuries, while gold has become more difficult to extract from deeper and more attenuated lodes. The gold metric is therefore not a function of technology and industrial process, part of what it measures, but a pure gauge of value.” (p.280)
“Hash: Conversion of a digital file of variable length into a string of characters of a specific length… Hashes are the enabling technology of blockchains and hashgraphs.” (p.280)
“Hypertrophy of finance: The growth of finance beyond the rate of growth of the commerce it measures and intermediates.” (p.281)
“Metcalf’s Law: The value and power of a network grows by the square of the number of compatible nodes it links… Metcalf’s Law may well apply to the promise of new digital currencies and ultimately assure the success of a new transactions layer for the Internet software stack.” (p.281)
“Moore’s Law: Cost-effectiveness in the computer industry doubles every two years.” (p.282)
“Thus we can have cash-like transactions (with no exposed secrets) together with robust and reliable and immutable records when demanded by the courts or the Internal Revenue Service. Identity and property can be concealed when appropriate and proved when required…
Contrast this system with the current system in which identity and property are constantly exposed to untrusted outsiders but cannot be proved without reliance on possibly corrupt or mendacious third parties or prosecutors.” (p.283)