I am not unaware of the fact that 99% of the public that approached the cryptosphere in the last 5 years did so because the mainstream convinced them that this was a "good investment" and that in a short time they were going to become a millionaire without working and achieving “passive income”.

Notwithstanding this situation, those who are understanding the philosophical potential posed by this new technology and its implications for "civilization" have discovered the Grail. I understand that we are in the presence of a dramatic change for civilization that has little to do with the economy and wealth, as understood under the capitalist system.

Partly because my friend Teodor asked me to expand a little more on this article that I had published here at Publish0x, and partly because this very good article by CoinGecko inspired me to do so, here I present from another point of view the fabulous and dramatic transformation that it represents Bitcoin and its blockchain technology for what are considered today the irrefutable truths of the economy.

In the same way that Windows took over the world market and became the most used operating system in computing, capitalism took over the minds of many generations of humans in recent centuries. As much as many claim that capitalism was born in the French Revolution, the truth is that since the origins of humanity there has been the idea of control of resources by elites, and that this took many forms and was called by several different names. What has happened in the last 200 years is that the "operating system" has been changed so that all of humanity works on the basis of accepting without discussing too much that there has to be someone who owns the resources, someone who transforms those resources., and a series of (political) charlatans who make half the population believe that the subsystems that operate under that operating system are the correct ones and that "we are on the right track."

An operating system provides a hardware and software infrastructure that makes possible the operation of certain processes or protocols. We have a world operating system called capitalism that allows the construction of a layer that sits on top of that infrastructure and that transforms the resources that no one doubts belong as private property to those who took possession of them, and that ends up feeding an infernal consumer machine, which not only never stops, but, thanks to the money created by the banks (protocols that run on the same operating system), it grows more every day, because the money created goes to consumption, which causes the construction of more resource transformation protocols to allocate to consumption, and so on, and economists call this "growth."

Let's bring the analysis to the blockchain world using the above CoinGecko article.

Layer 0, refers to a protocol that enables layer 1 (L1) solutions to interact on the same network. Layer 0 is the foundation of L1 blockchains, allowing the entire blockchain to be built on top of it. The Polkadot network is an example of a layer 0 protocol.

Layer 1, refers to the underlying main blockchain network in a decentralized blockchain ecosystem. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana are examples of layer-1 blockchains.

Layer 2/Sidechains, refers to a third-party integration that works on top of a layer-1 blockchain to help scale an application by processing transactions off of the main blockchain (L1) while maintaining the same security and decentralization. Arbitrum is an example of an Ethereum L2 scaling solution. For its part, a sidechain is a separate blockchain that works independently parallel to the main L1 chain, e.g. ethereum. The primary distinction between sidechains and most layer 2 solutions is that sidechains are different blockchains linked to the mainchain, and have their own consensus algorithm features. In contrast, layer 2 solutions are built as mainchains extensions and rely on their security structure. Examples of sidechains are Polygon for Ethereum, and DeFi Chain for Bitcoin.

But the problem does not end here, since the crypto ecosystem obviously required the formation of the so-called "altchains" on which the so-called altcoins are usually coined. Most altcoins do not have their own blockchain and are usually minted on altchains. Altchains is an abbreviation for “alternative blockchains,” which refers to any blockchain other than Bitcoin or Ethereum. Examples are Avalanche, Solana, and BNB chain.

Making a simple analogy and saving the errors that any analogy may have, we can suggest that the functioning of the planet, not only economic, but also social, political, corporate, scientific, educational, etc., is mounted on a Layer 0 called capitalism that basically consists of allowing ownership of the resources that are going to be processed by the layers that are mounted on it, resources that belong to "the first to arrive and appropriate them", no matter how. It may even be with the invasion methods that the Vikings used. Precisely, one of the main resources of this system is fiat money, which constitutes the fundamental basis of the power that is going to be exercised. And the first to come along and take it over are the L1 corporations that run the world economy.

A Layer 1 infrastructure is mounted on top of the Layer 0 operating system, which basically consists of entities that transform resources, commonly called factories in the case of products, and offices in the case of services. Few dispute that this is the only way to organize societies of people. And it is logical, since that is what is studied in colleges and universities and in hundreds of books written by capitalism advocates. What will change according to which side of the line they are on is who should own the L 1, not whether or not they should exist.

An L 1, the so-called "left" will defend that the State must be the owner of the means of production, that the collective is more important than the individual, and that the result of production must be distributed equitably.

The other L1, called "right", will defend that the means of production should be in private hands, that the State should not intervene in the economy because it acts following the invisible hand of the "free market", and that the distribution of wealth must be done based on individual effort, which they call meritocracy, based on the belief that "all" people have the same opportunities. Under this incredible belief, the son of a millionaire from Paris has the same opportunities as an illiterate from Somalia. If the latter is not rich, it is because he is a lazy person who does not make an effort.

As we see, both L 1 need a State. In the case of the left, the State takes the figure of the king who distributed privileges among his feudal lords, in exchange for protecting them in case of war. In the case of the right, too. The difference is that in the case of the left, the feudal lords are a series of bureaucrats, governors, mayors and associated colleagues, and in the case of the right, the feudal lords are the corporations, which in this way receive legal protection for pillaging the planet's resources, throwing away waste, polluting in a "legal" way, and exterminating thousands of species, to "generate" wealth and buy loyalties from governors, mayors and colleagues. In other words, it is the same, both on the right and on the left. There is no difference, since everything is built on the same L 0, and so, there is not much room for creation. Everything is built with the APIs provided by the L 0 operating system. In the same way that the common person is unaware of everything that is happening in the central processor of the computer he/she is using, that same person is totally unaware of the fundamentals of capitalism that lead him/her to act as he/she acts. The functioning is unconscious, at the level of depth psychology. You act in a certain way, without knowing why. But why is simple: it was programmed by someone to make the system work the way it does.

The distinction that acts at the unconscious level between right and left is also worthy of analysis. It seems that the origin is at the beginning of the French Revolution, at the end of the 18th century, when the French people began to question the absolute power of the monarchy and the feudal order. In 1789 they met in a kind of Parliament called the General States. They met to vote on a very important issue: whether or not the king could veto the laws and decisions that were made in this parliament. As they voted by raising their hands to better order the count, they were divided according to the decision they made. Those to the right of the room voted for the king's veto, which meant they wanted him to continue to have absolute power. And those who stood to the left voted against the king and also called for a republic to rule. From that moment until now, the right has been associated with everything reactionary, with maintaining order, with conservatism. And the left to everything progressive, to social change.

In practice, both positions, no matter how many promises of well-being they sell, end up in corruption, contempt for human beings and the environment, and the search for power through the accumulation of money, which is the basis of global L 0 called capitalism.

So, we see that both L 1, right and left, need a State, factories and offices that produce goods and services with economies of scale so that consumption is ever greater (growth economy as the only possibility), and issued money by a centralized entity that is distributed according to the designs of the feudal lords who keep the king (the State) in power.

This is a model that no one disputes. What other possibility is there? What would people work for if not in factories and offices? The root of this type of thinking is that people tend to live in big cities, as programmed in L 0. The capitalist system can "grow" if it is capable of accumulating, and to accumulate more and more, it is necessary to produce and consume more and more. Does not matter how. That is to say, it does not matter what degree of lies are designed from the marketing and mass advertising regarding the new milk for babies fortified with tungsten iodine, which food corporations force to buy, under the penalty of not understanding the progress and scientific investigations that they developed with so much effort. The only thing that counts is to produce more and more, consume more and more, accumulate more and more, with the sole objective of increasing shareholder profitability. That is the core code of the operating system L 0 called capitalism.

Since nobody disputes this model, the only thing left is to build the applications that are mounted on the L 1. That is, the L 2. The L 2 are of the most varied type, but the only objective they have is to attract customers playing with the model, while preserving it because they cannot modify it, in the same way that a sidechain, an L 2 or an altchain cannot modify the Bitcoin blockchain or Polkadot's L 0.

L 2 developers are very creative with their business proposals. They range from the revolutionary left at one end of the L 1 “left”, through various types of social democracy as they try to find their way to the center. In the case of the “right” L 1, L 2 are mounted on it, ranging from the extreme right or fascism, going through various types of neoliberalism while trying a path towards the center.

But it should be clear that all L 2 are part of the same L 0 operating system that they cannot modify. They can only build on top of it and with the APIs that are included in the same package with which the product is distributed.

So Bitcoin.

Although Bitcoin is not an operating system itself, a decentralized, transparent, and more equal society should be built and run on a Bitcoin-like operating system. An operating system is a vital component of any computing system, and also in any type of social architecture. An operating system establishes a layer of abstraction acting as an interface between an user and the hardware that operates the infrastructure, and also lubricates the system's actions, solving problems “unconsciously” for the user.

The revolution proposed by blockchain technology based on Bitcoin may be creating a new layer of abstraction for humanity, freeing it from the political problems of the left and right that are so convenient for the current capitalism system L 0, both for socialism as for liberalism. But the new L 0 should work with PoW and not PoS or its nPoS variant that governs Polkadot.

I do not deny the usefulness of PoS and its variants to decentralize finance. In fact, it is proving to be very useful. But humanity is not just finance. That is the point. PoS, no matter how many arguments its defenders use, is a protocol that allows the formation of elites. In fact, validators are very powerful. They risk their own capital, but they say how things should be. This ends up being a mere variant of the current capitalist system. In other words, what we would be doing with an L 0 governed by a PoS would be a mere digitization of capitalism. Everything would remain the same, but now under a chain of blocks. It is somewhat what governments intend with their macabre CBDCs, taking advantage of the power of blockchain technology, in this case, for the opposite of what Bitcoin proposes, that is, to control even more than they currently control. The famous apothegm: nuclear energy can be used to generate energy or to destroy humanity. It all depends on which politicians own it.

The idea of creating a digital financial system or virtual currency was not Satoshi Nakamoto's idea. However, Satoshi Nakamoto achieved something that others had not done before: Create a decentralized payment platform, without trust, without permission, without borders, without intermediaries of any kind. The idea of PoW is what supports this possibility. The mining network is what ensures the power of the system. The PoW protocol is the true core of the revolution, and the work and energy it uses (which is far less than the amount of energy used by the current global banking system) is the price paid to cut out the middlemen and trust the mathematics to secure the network. This is the result of having solved the problem of the Byzantine generals.

Some other attempts at digital money preceded Bitcoin, eCash, DigiCash, hashcash, b-money, and bit gold, developed by Nick Szabo, and considered a direct precursor to the Bitcoin architecture. The origin of bitcoin dates back to November 2008, when, in an email chain sharing information about cryptography, someone, under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, distributed an article titled: Bitcoin: “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. On January 4, 2009, Bitcoin was created when Satoshi Nakamoto launched the first open source Bitcoin client and records the first block of the bitcoin blockchain, called the genesis block.

In January 2016, Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum and one of the most notable people in the crypto universe, decided to leave the Ethereum project he was working on and create his own blockchain: a blockchain that would improve scalability and enable interoperability between blockchains. Thus, in October 2016, Wood presented the Polkadot White Paper.

I mean, Bitcoin predates Polkadot, the blockchain naturally recognized as L 0. Polkadot connects to L 1 chains and makes them compatible and capable of exchanging information. In this way, chains such as Ethereum, Bitcoin, Cardano and Solana are connected to each other. That's why it was established “ex post” as L 0. Instead of competing with other chains, Polkadot wants to connect them, in the same way that the Internet connects different computers around the world.

The truth is that there is still no cryptoecosystem as a whole. L 1 solutions (blockchains and major cryptocurrencies) cannot connect to each other efficiently. They have the same problem as computers before the advent of the Internet, which had a lot of information, but were isolated and couldn't come together to become the fabulous tool they are today. Polkadot aims to solve this problem as a network that connects all L 1 solutions. It's great that it's being considered as the possible heart of Web 3 and Internet money.

But hopefully it isn't.

I see Polkadot as getting under other protocols to control them. And I rely on their operating protocol based on PoS.

In the same way that capitalism got under previous feudal and monarchical organizations to own resources (either privately or publicly), Polkadot and PoS could work in that way too.

The result is an industrial society that homogenized products, homogenized consumption, and homogenized lifestyles, both in the East and in the West. Everything is shaped like a factory, everything is shaped like a supermarket, everything is shaped like a Shopping Mall, in the East and in the West. Medical “science” produces homogenized mass cures. Universities produce "gears" for their machines in a homogeneous way. In the same way that Henry Ford said that anyone could choose the color of his/her car, as long as it was black, today an engineer, a doctor or a PhD is produced, using the same factory tooling. The result is a society that "unconsciously" has generated the greatest state of inequality in the entire history of civilization. Both in the East and in the West. Both on the left and on the right. All based on an L 0 called capitalist system.

In short, the capitalist system "unconsciously validates" the public or private appropriation of resources with the argument of common welfare, the assembly of transformation structures such as factories or service offices, with the argument of producing the same products on a scale to homogenize the consumption of the population, and allows building on these structures a series of hallucinations called political ideas that are the ones that go to the front of the war, without any expectation of change in the prevailing conditions. These ideas are basically right or left. People spend long hours discussing these applications of L 2, without managing to change anything at all about the functioning of the planet, neither in the social, nor in the cultural, nor in the economic. They are ideas that only serve for barricades and political stands. In reality, they have the same root, the same operating system, and it is not logical that they can produce any change.

There can be no change in L 1 and L 2 if L 0 is not changed. Simple as that.

Conclusion

How could this change be made? This is a recurring question that I am asked by those who are very concerned about the short term, which is not my case.

In the 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci stood out for his oversized brain. Probably most people remember him for the Mona Lisa. But Leonardo was an accomplished astronomer who solved an inexplicable riddle that was the brightness of the Earth. No one had ever been on the Moon looking "at" the Earth. Most people would not even know that the Earth orbited the Sun, because Copernicus's heliocentric theory was not published until 1543, twenty-four years after Leonardo's death. Some 500 years passed before "civilization" could prove this. All it took was a trip to the Moon. Leonardo is the author of a lot of sketches of flying machines, military tanks, scubas and other fantastic robot-like devices, which must have made a high impact on the common people who saw them. At that time, there was not enough mathematics, nor the materials, nor the physical and chemical knowledge to prove the brightness of the Earth. But what was fundamentally lacking was a widespread awareness that knowing that Earthshine existed would do some good. There's still a long way to go to get to a type of anarchy-based operating system that will do away with the current operating system for good. Probably 500 years.

Today the superpowers are embarking on gigantic military expenditures to see who gets the resources of Mars first. This happens because we are mounted on an operational interface that allows “legal” work on these undeniable rights that have the powerfull nations to maintain democracy and the stability of the planet…

Someone is going to change all this in a few centuries.

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!

Never forget:

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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