Gordon thinks big things.
I like taking things into the scientifically philosophical. Lately, I've been on a kick about two sides of a portal; let's keep it simple to say the person outside the metaverse, and their avatar inside. More commonly, our presence out here in the world, and our presence inside the digital realm, from social to platforms like Publish0x (thank you, Publish0x!), to central points of capture like Google and Facebook.
On the one side, we have the analog, and to the other, the digital.
On the analog side, we have the natural born, the air we breath, human sight, sound, hearing, touch, taste smell etc. In the digital, we have a skewed curve of man's highly-driven, scaling attempt to digitize the real and to merge it with the unreal.
I'll take this into a fun, relatable example before I go too much further.
Being an audio guy, I was fully immersed in the music industry and recording arts when the transformation into digital was first happening, from 2" analog reel to reel tape machines recorded to 1/2" master tape reel to reel machines, then transferred to compact disc for the first time.
While the industry spoke of the purity of digital, the mastering process that gets sound from A to B was being ranked by AAD, ADD, DDD, with the later being the goal; a purely digitized recording process from start to finish. Meanwhile we all heard the same thing, with some afraid to say it out loud; digital sucks, dude!
And, it didn't, really, but it was new, and the process of improving the actual fidelity of digital took a few years. Even in the early 90's the true scientists in the process knew what was necessary to translate analog into digital the best possible way, and that was through low-jitter crystal clocks. Don't worry, this isn't meant to be an entire lesson on the process.
But, because I learned to listen closely to what happened in audio, I gained a keen understanding of the limitations on both sides of the transfer, between analog and digital. With analog, time fades the pristine nature of the source, while digital has the theoretical capability of preserving the original quality captured indefinitely. That is to say, that you may get a far superior recording in analog, but every time you play it back, you lose a tiny bit of that great quality. At first, it's inaudible, but run those reels across the tape heads a few dozen times and things are getting scrubbed off that cannot be retrieved.
With digital, the problem was fully capturing the realism of analog, but once you got whatever you got, it can remain the same, again theoretically, from one copy to the next. In the end, the analog is closer to reality, but time is counting down against you in every way. Want to make transfers to preserve an aging master? Generational loss. More people added to the job chain to adjust the EQ on the analog generations for loss, and the story goes on.
There's the REALLY long version of this, where I can go on about what happened when better digital converters were made, when better digital files were invented, what has happened with MP3s and more. The short version, is that in so many ways, we've now mimicked the exact problems we had in analog, with a new form of digital loss, in order to save hard drive space and bandwidth, and what's worse, we spent 15 years reducing the quality of the average person's playback systems with total crap plastic computer speakers, consumer-grade audio cards, earbuds, and over the last several years a new crop of audiophiles have started really caring again about playback rising to a better standard.
So, how can I bring this back around to the title? Simple! From the day of the Satoshi white paper to now, we have a freedom movement. In the analog, it is paper money printed by the authority of government systems in power. In the digital, we have the ability to make this better, and in many ways those digital ones and zeros are doing remarkable things; both good and evil.
The same language that translates code, gives us digital sight, digital sound, digital fonts, digital connections to people, instant messages and instant mail, can be used to control the portals that we rely upon from the analog to the digital. OS acts as gatekeeper to our files and programs. Google acts as gatekeeper for our quest for knowledge and interaction. Social media acts as gatekeeper to our digital personas, character, relationships, interactions and how we are supposed to think and act.
Our real brick and mortar banks that provide an illusion of fiat in accounts, where there is an illusion through fractional reserves, can just as easily be blocked by the powers that be, and the more vulnerable people are, the more they find the boldness in their character to rise up, and leadership doubles down on tyranny. But, people are understanding that evil is amplifying the signal of a freedom movement.
It was never just rhetoric to say that Bitcoin is freedom money. It shouldn't be looked at as an antiquated thing despite the explosion of new coins, new ideas, DeFi, NFTs and all of the flavors of the crypto dessert line. Digital freedom, in the face of digital tyranny, may be the single most poignant thing for us to face in our time.
I am quite certain that the one thing truly separating our generation from the best and worst times of history, are the technology that we possess. In some ways it's like the alchemy that metalists never discovered, and in other ways it is like pure magic wielded through thousands of miles of cable-laden infrastructure, taking digits programmed into a perfect series, travelling from node to node across the entire world; good or bad, we are seeing the analog and the digital transforming one another. They are tools to be used as the operator wishes, but tyranny wants to take science and mold it into a form of wicked witchcraft. If freedom is on our side, then God is surely on our side. He won't be mocked.
In one sense, the political analog is the old world way of doing things; propaganda, shaming dissenters, fear mongering, flexing power and public disgrace of enemies. Facing towards the new, it is the invoking of social credit systems, monitoring speech, blocking the free movement of digital signals representing stored value, but also in the digital, finally a form of money that lives and breaths much like we do in real life; a network that is alive as long as someone is there to transact and verify.
The saying "fix the money, fix the world" is an ideal, a principle. It isn't perfection; not yet.
Just like the early days of digital audio; perhaps we weren't quite ready for the cold, harsh truth of precision. To the same degree, we are in a regulatory battle between their distorted form of analog and the potential of pure, un-defiled digital freedom. That looks like systems that cannot be seized, blocked, or mandated. That means the old regime doesn't hold the keys to the gates of freedom. Addresses were not designed to be blocked or frozen much like global networks were not designed to be centrally controlled.
It is true, this is a thought piece coming from the last conscious moments before the Crypto Superhero gets his rest, but I think before we rest, let us in consciousness dream, that one day soon, we see the true power of the nature of this freedom movement we should all be a part of. Let our signal be amplified, let it be preserved, let it be pristine, and let our values carry us forward so this digital movement of a better transactional system can help us to overcome the worst elements of the old regime.
And on that... I dunno... whatever note you think this was on... on that note, for now, Crypto Gordon Freeman, the free man... out.
