Peter Van Valkenburgh expressed: What I find fascinating is that the “physics constant” could actually be changed (swapped out for some other consensus mech in protocol or the arbitrary 21m could be changed) but the network resists making that change. As Vitalik Buterin has said, all consensus is “social.”

For centuries power imbalances and lack of transparency between the governed and the governing classes has meant that every attempt at stable money supply inevitable fails as the group in power realizes they can temporarily enrich themselves at the expense of the majority.

Bitcoin doesn’t actually solve this by replacing corruptible people with “math” or something but, instead, by creating radical transparency over the supply and an unforgeable measuring stick (that’s the energy constant of POW) by which anyone can measure that supply.

Bitcoin is therefore optimistic about human behavior rather than pessimistic. We don’t need to replace people in decision making, just need to align incentives and ensure symmetric information across interested groups. Under those conditions humans cooperate rather than defect.

This is another way to think of Peter Thiel’s insight: “AI is communist and crypto is libertarian” AI advocates believe they can replace corrupt human systems w/ algorithms, crypto folks believe human decisions are best IF the individual is on an equal footing with fellow humans.  You could riff on this and say that Bitcoin is long on the goodness of individual human action and AI is short.

Satoshi and Vitalik Buterin are not only significant innovators, but also the two most important monetary economists of our time. All that said, normalization — of crypto theory as well as value — is on its way.

In case you’re wondering what kind of maximalist I am:  I’m most excited for proof of human systems but am also fairly certain they’ll only ever be built robustly on top of proof of work or proof of stake networks with sufficient privacy to stop validators from discriminating.

Peer response to these ideals:  The 96.7% of humankind that gets the short end won’t play along. It’s nice to talk about how nice people are in a system that will make one rich as God, but the people who became less rich will be more misanthropic and there’s no physics limiting the number of guillotines.

“Proof of human systems” is not in the Google. Curious sort do you mean? Non-regional systems built for humanity is a good goal vs. regional systems with tiered services and restricted access.

That is reason, I believe “stable proof of collaboration” makes sense. Forcing humans to collaborate is the way.