Image by Xavier Turpain from Pixabay
Walked out this morning, don't believe what I saw
Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore
Seems I'm not alone at being alone
Hundred billion castaways, looking for a homeMessage In A Bottle, The Police
Most "civilized" people live in crowded cities. The bigger the city, the further away the sources of origin of the things we buy and use to live. To the city dweller, a cow is a frozen piece of meat in a plastic tray, stored in a supermarket. And the electricity he/she consumes is produced far away from where he/she lives, and he/she has no idea how it was distributed. A piece of furniture was made “by a factory”, and the smartphone he/she uses to say nonsense on WhatsApp or to play Splinterland was made in Southeast Asia, far, far away.
Most middle-class people live in urban apartments of no more than 100 m2 on average (1,000 ft2), and their "life" is limited to that imposition. It is the price to pay for living in big cities. The housing units, which are getting smaller and smaller, have as their objective the scaled programming of consumption. Each new unit needs a refrigerator, a stove, a television, a washing machine, an air conditioner, furniture, sheets, and pillows. New units of all appliances can then be ordered from Chinese factories, so they can produce at scale, lowering costs and increasing profitability for shareholders throughout the value chain.
Even the upper classes who live in luxurious mansions in the big city live overcrowded since it is as if they were living on a super luxurious yacht sailing through a sea of shit. Getting out of there is extremely difficult.
And the bad news is that the trend toward urbanization is sustained and grows over time. People want to live this way.
That is normally called "civilization."
However, most people dream of living in the countryside, in the mountains, by the sea, far from the city. But, as we get further away from the city, we begin to understand that not only our GPS location has to change, but rather, our entire way of life. The price is a total break with the known and the slow but continuous birth of a new form of coordination with the members of the community in which we live.
Meanwhile, the corporate-controlled mass (mis)information media continue their brainwashing protocol, portraying anarchy as a series of criminals throwing Molotov cocktails at the police. Corporations, especially the banking corporation, would absolutely lose their power if people coordinated with each other through anarchy, as indeed the establishment's rejection of cryptocurrencies is showing. In reality, the entire corporate system would have no point in existing if people learned to coordinate their jobs, trade their products with each other and enjoy life, instead of living thinking about how to pay mortgages, credit cards, and bank loans, which are the basic tools of the planetary economy based on the debt issued by governments and central banks.
Anarchy is NOT a political system nor is it a system of social organization, although this is achieved by extension, but rather a lifestyle. One can leave the system a little bit every day and become more anarchic.
In fact, anarchic communities, “islands”, can be set up within centralized systems such as the current ones, and individuals can live their lives on their own islands, without depending on governments or regulators.
One of those islands is called Bitcoin.
When I was introduced to Bitcoin in 2011, it was as if I had received a message in a bottle.
Anarchy fits perfectly with Bitcoin because it has no hierarchies and miners work according to set rules, which cannot be altered, and have no regulator controlling them. The system controls itself, which in electronics is called negative feedback.
As the new generations understand what a decentralized consensus protocol is, in which no one has to be asked for permission and in which no one needs to be trusted, educated people will end up living in anarchy, and the States and their institutions will disappear under their own weight, without the need to overturn them, when the institutions they support have no meaning or no use.
The consensus protocols are going to be made by the community itself. Whoever does not accept them will not be able to live on that island and will be able to go live on another.
Although I recognize that many things have to be solved in Bitcoin and that at the moment it is in the hands of whales, I insist that Bitcoin is today the most decentralized network, as a concept. No developer can force changes onto the rest of the network. Anyone can run a Bitcoin node, even off of the most basic types of devices. To run a node there's no need for infrastructure providers at all. Bitcoin can continue to run no matter what governments and regulators do and will do.
I never considered Bitcoin as an investment. When I discovered it in 2011, a light went on at the bottom of the tunnel. A message in a bottle.
It is necessary to look at things in context. I am 65 years old and have lived in hyperinflation since the OPEC oil embargo in 1974, that is, 50 years. In Argentina, we never knew what a stable currency is. People save in dollars, but that was always nonsense to me. It's like entrusting your daughter's education to a rapist. For me, Bitcoin is a payment method. For more than 5 years now, I have transformed my economy. I only receive payments in cryptocurrency, and I use it to pay my bills. It is not an investment. What is left over, I invest in my company.
But what launched Bitcoin is a revolutionary concept, which can free us from the corporate trap. I see it as a philosophical concept that fully supports my anarchist ideas inherited from my early 20th-century European grandparents.
What would life on an “island” be like?
First of all, you have to get the idea of the “big city” out of your head. This is not very easy, since we have all been educated in cities and we take for granted that there are streets, routes, means of transport, gas stations, supermarkets, electricity and water supplies, washing machines, movie theaters, magazine kiosks… We must make a great effort to think that we are not even going to be able to go to a hardware store to buy a meter of cable.
The youngest will violently reject this idea since they need contact, light, sound, fast food, and shows. We have all needed them at some point. But that happens, until the best stage of life arrives.
Moreover, many will say, especially the so-called libertarians who adore globalization and the unrestricted opening of economies (except, of course, those of developed countries), that this is a return to prehistory. Yes, it is true, in the countryside today something very similar to prehistory is lived. But for me, it is ridiculous to call an individual "civilized" for the sole fact of living in a city, with all the "comfort" that the corporations programmed to put together his/her hallucination.
Globalization is a child of corporate capitalism that needs to allocate production surpluses in order to continue producing on a scale in countries whose inhabitants still accept being paid miserable wages, thus achieving an increase in the sacrosanct profitability of shareholders.
On the other hand, the self-coordinated islands through a series of rules, although without regulators, that is, in anarchy, can mean in the coming decades a bridge of transition towards a general anti-corporate organization in which money is not needed, and, therefore, in which there is no possibility of accumulating power.
In anarchy, money is not needed. Bitcoin is not the end of the journey, but the beginning.
Quite simply, everything a person needs to live, including food, should always be available to anyone in need. The payment is not in money, it is in exchange for the work that he/she planned and carried out for the mutual.
What we call "rules" can also be called "smart contracts", to be more in accordance with the dominant jargon. And what we call "coordination" can also be called "consensus protocol" for the same reason.
Imagine an island the size of Jamaica, about 10,000 km2, in which a smart contract determines that no more than 10,000 people can live. Arbitrarily considering that each family group has 4 people, then we need about 2,500 plots to house them.
If each family group is given a plot of 50 ha (0.5 km2 or 123.5 acres) free of charge, the inhabited area will be about 125,000 ha (1,250 km2 or 308,800 acres). The rest of the surface of the island, some 8,750 km2, belongs to the mutual and can be used with the usual coordination to sustain life and the island.
Some time ago I wrote three posts about the founding fathers of anarchy, Proudhon, Kropotkin, and Bakunin, in which the theoretical concepts of anarchy and its variants were based on the search for free coordination of the members of a community to achieve its sustainability for centuries.
A mutual is based on the "professions" of its members. There are no college degrees that make a professional a professional. You just have to know how to exercise your profession and learn more and more throughout your life.
There is no chance on our island that any of the members do not work. Everyone has a role and must fulfill it to guarantee the efficient operation of the mutual. I have been working on this model for a few years. Now I show a reduced box to not make this post very long.
The minimum professions that I have identified for the model are the following:
- 1- Carpenter, processes wood and deals with reforestation
- 2- Builder, builds houses, roads, and infrastructure in general, and is in charge of getting the materials
- 3- Textile, manufactures yarns, fabrics, clothing, footwear
- 4- Rancher, breeding, hunting, and animal slaughter. Obtain and process dairy products, cheeses, and derivatives
- 5- Harvester, planting, and harvesting vegetables
- 6- Engineer, mechanic, electrician, chemical, hydraulic
- 7- Worker, works where needed
- 8- Doctor, cures, prevents, obtains, and administers medicines
- 9- Veterinarian, the same as the doctor, but with animals
- 10- Sailor, manufactures boats, fishes, and processes fish
- 11- Teacher, in charge of education
- 12- Artist, in charge of the mutual entertainment
The necessary number of people per profession depends on the number of inhabitants of the mutual.
The key to the operation of a model like this is the consensus protocol, based on the personal activity plan made by each of the individuals that make up the mutual, whom we could call miners in our analogy with Bitcoin.
How does the PoW consensus protocol work in Bitcoin?
Suppose a meeting of 10 miners. Miner 1 says that A bought 1 BTC. They all score. Miner 3 says that C sold 1 BTC. They all score. And so on until they run out of the sheet that holds 100 transactions. Then the process of finding a hash to seal the sheet begins. The one who finds it puts it at the disposal of the rest, everyone validates and the lucky one receives a prize. (Let me continue with the oversimplifications.)
How does the consensus protocol work on the island of anarchy?
It's a bit more complex.
Before I describe the consensus protocol that I call PoPla (Proof of Planning), I want to make it clear that such a community should not measure time in days, months, or years. The idea of structuring time as we know it, time being a human creation in itself, responds more than anything to scheduling the work and vacations of employees in order, once again, to increase the profitability of the shareholders. I say this because on the island it will be necessary to establish a time measurement unit to make consensus decisions. But only one, not several. Let's take the "moons" as our ancestors did. Everything that exists, then, is measured in moons.
Then the consensus protocol is achieved as follows:
1) Every 3 moons, each member of the community must present to the community his/her work plan for the next 3 moons, based on:
a- the existing stock of products at that time.
b- the mutual needs for the next 3 moons.
2) The work plan consists of:
a- set the requirements of the family group for the next 3 moons.
b- set the production according to the mutual needs of the corresponding product during the next 3 moons.
c- The mutual needs are obtained by adding the requirements of all family groups and subtracting the existing stock.
3) At the same time, the production of each member during the last period of 3 moons is evaluated and its correspondence with what he/she planned. The evaluation and qualification are done by every member, without hierarchies and without anyone having more weight in their vote than another.
4) The slides are evaluated and sanctioned by all the members of the mutual. There is no such thing as someone who has more power than another, as happens in a PoS. They all have the same weight, which is one vote. Individuals who have major shifts from what they planned will have a new opportunity for several periods. If they persist in their lack of efficiency, they should withdraw from the community, which will have to find replacements and make them available to the mutual so that they can vote for their incorporation.
5) The growth of the population must be evaluated in each planning because it brings with it new needs, and, therefore, a new workload that will require new incorporations. This will continue until the maximum capacity of the island is reached, which is 10,000 people, with which each individual will be responsible for maintaining sustainability by controlling births, whether of people, animals, plants and infrastructure.
6) Consensus is achieved when slides, if they exist, are only due to external climatic factors. This requires iron self-discipline to:
a- plan exactly what is needed
b- anticipate climatic disasters
c- Know in depth the needs of each person and family group presented with the work plan, in order to reach the conclusion that it is necessary to incorporate people into the profession who cannot meet the requirements.
In this way, the blockchain is armed with the successive blocks that are obtained in each PoPla event that occurs every 3 moons.
In order to really speak of a “mutual”, absolutely all the members of the mutual must participate in the decisions, obviously excluding kids who have not reached the capacity to discern. This does not happen in the current democratic farces, where the vote is guided by the media of (dis)information banked by the corporations. In a mutual, there is absolutely no hierarchy, and therefore there is no need to misinform.
If there are no corporations, there is no accumulation of power.
Make an effort to extrapolate this model into your daily lives slowly. You're going to see how quickly you stop eating junk food or pre-cooked microwaveable food. BTW, have any of you read the fine print on candy or toothpaste? One has the right to kill oneself as one pleases, but one does not have the right to say that the sale for mass consumption of this filth has to do with a "civilization".
Conclusion
I don't have all the answers, although I do have all the questions, which are always related to the same topic: Why is there so much inequality on the planet? Why should we ask for money through the (dis)information mass media to feed malnourished children when there are international organizations dedicated to this issue? Why are there still wars in countries that have oil in their subsoils?
I don't think the reasons for these misfortunes are other than the authoritarian system imposed by centralized elites who pull all the strings. It's not the governments, it's their masters, the corporations.
To those who think of pigeonholing me with the term "Bitcoin maximalist", I repeat that I never considered Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency as an investment but as a means of payment. So I am not the typical “hodler” because I am not interested in investing in anything other than myself or my company. I only use the logic that my passion for chess taught me, and I try not to make any useless moves.
I firmly believe that society will move towards anarchy, that is, towards the coordination of activities through consensus protocols in which everyone votes under the same conditions. Unfortunately, the so-called DAOs in the cryptosphere, at the moment, are derived from the PoS consensus protocol, in which those who have the most are the ones who decide. It's the old Animal Farm story “all animals are equal, but there are some that are more equal than others”.
Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever he was, even if it was the CIA as some of my dear friends think, sent a message in a bottle, and found himself, like The Police, some millions of people so far who wanted to live up to his proposal.
Sending out an S.O.S !!!!!!!!!
Thank you for reading! Decentralize yourselves as much as you can, and much more! Work for yourselves, not for others. When you work for someone else, they pay you what YOUR POSITION is worth, when you work for yourself, they pay you what YOU are worth. No one achieves financial independence by working as an employee. Live long and prosper!
As usual, none of the things written in this post are financial advice and are not intended to replace personal research. My sole intention in writing this post is informative. Several of the things discussed here could be wrong, so in no way can this post be construed as financial advice, and in no way should it replace your own research.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them down below
You can also contact me at [email protected]
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