2021: the year of Bitcoin, Covid, and when origins stopped mattering
Source: Ebay
You likely rang in 2021 constrained by some form of isolation.
After a year of quarantine, personal disquiet, and social unrest, a foreboding sense of unsteadiness permeated the first day of the Covid New Year. Then, just 6 days after the clock struck midnight, US democracy was tested in unimaginable fashion, setting the tone for the rest of 2021.
In December, Gizmodo comically apprised what the Covid New Year wrought: Trump activists tried to take down the government; Robinhood traders tried to take down Wall Street; JPEGs are now worth millions; A billionaire wore cowboy boots to space.
2021 is a story of uprising and quests for value — but to a surreal degree. Perhaps because we have lost our sense of where things come from and how they started. Or at least we accept that reality-altering events collectively command us while their origins remain a mystery.
CV-19 and Bitcoin are two such events. No day passes when you do not engage with either, through media, conversation, or as a matter of health.
CV-19
A few journalists have produced excellent reporting on the origins of CV-19 but no article, essay, or book of definitive cultural certainty has surfaced. Put another way, the ALL CAPS New York Times headline unveiling CV-19’s origin is not yet “fit to print.”
If you have not read Nicholas Wade’s mesmerizing “ Where COVID Came From,” you really should. The severity of the criticisms against his reporting should alone pique your interest.
For the sake of all the misery and death rooted in CV-19, every informed citizen should familiarize with the contest of “natural emergence” vs “lab escape,” which remains unsettled for CV-19/ SARS-CoV-2.
CV-19 is not humanity’s first brush with a deadly coronavirus. In 2002, SARS originated in China but soon passed and became a punchline. In 2012, MERS, first identified in Saudi Arabia, also came and went.
There are critical differences between the public understanding of these previous disease events and CV-19. To further highlight these differences, I have used Wade’s reporting to produce the below chart.
(Keep in mind, humans spend as little time with bats as you would imagine. In the natural-emergence scenarios, there is an intermediary species that infects humans, not bats.)
Chart detailing coronavirus outbreaks and their trails; Research: Nicholas Wade
Any observer viewing the above chart may arrive at one of two conclusions about CV-19: a) That the scientific community’s disease tracking capacity has greatly diminished over the past two decades or b) there is no origin species, putting lab escape ahead as the more rational of the options.
Throughout 2021, CV-19 continued its assault on humanity through two variants, called Delta and Omicron. What separates Delta and Omicron from genesis CV-19 is that we know their origin species: us.
Delta was first detected in a human, in India, in late 2020. Omicron originated in a human, in South Africa, in late 2021. So it appears the scientific community’s capacity to track and detect disease is in good order.
Bitcoin
Since its inception, described in a famous 2008 white paper, Bitcoin has evolved from a utopian-finance dream to a Silicon Valley curio, to a countercultural movement, before finally achieving its current status: a new backend for global finance and perhaps the 119th known element.
The 2008 paper, which described a solution to the “double-spending problem” — a problem that had rendered previous digital currency useless — is near breathtaking in its ingenuity. Through the potent combination of blockchain functionality and Proof of Work protocols, humans could digitally manufacture a portable store of value and transact with it in a peer-to-peer, trustless environment.
Who thinks of something like this? Unfortunately, we don’t know.
To draw the contrast, the below chart examines the basic tasks of an average person, on an average morning, showcasing how we benefit from helpful inventions and their spectrum of utility.
Inventions typically have inventors
Like the Big Bang, the entity that set Bitcoin into motion is unknown. The Elves of Silicon Valley predict Satoshi, through his or her possession of Bitcoin, to inevitably be the richest person of all time, while full-well knowing there is no person.
The parallel narratives of the “disappearing founder” or “the great mystery of the digital age” has even been reinforced by the New York Times.
If there is a “great mystery” of the digital age, should there not be lesser mysteries that make it great, by contrast? Yet, every invention, physical or digital, has an inventor.
In fact, we are surrounded by definitive archives of invention. Crunchbase serves as a directory of software inventors. Anyone can scroll through patent filings in the U.S., at any time.
As a thought experiment, look around your current surroundings. Can you identify an item that has no inventor or was not derived from a previously invented work, including any software you use?
(By the way, the identities of the current raft of pseudonymous crypto founders are largely known to their VC sponsors.)
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Bitcoin will inevitably surpass the market capitalization of gold and already commands 20% share of the store-of-value market. All that growth in little more than a decade. Gold, on the other hand, is one of the first elements known to man, has been utilized for 5,000 years, and is at least 4.5 billion years old. A slow starter, by comparison!
The West has embraced Bitcoin while China has effectively banned it. It makes sense, as the construction of the name Satoshi Nakamoto gives Bitcoin all the safety and trappings of a Japanese export, for which the West has an insatiable appetite.
So the question remains: with so much value created by this software invention, why the disappeared, pseudonymous inventor?
Theories abound. The pugnacious billionaire Don Peña surmises Bitcoin was created by Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. This assertion certainly activates the mind. For one, it would be the greatest hack, ever. Second, would the West have wrapped its arms around a digital currency brought to market by a founder named, say, Sergey Ianovov?
The other threat to the Bitcoin blockchain is the 51% attack, where an adversarial actor overtakes the hashing power of the network. This actor may then accomplish two things: control all new blocks added to the chain and also double spend.
Blockchain prognosticators often cite this occurrence as infeasible, as there is no accessible power source that can overtake the computational hashing power of the Bitcoin blockchain.
In theory, a 51% attack should even be out of the reach of nations. A single $15,000 Antminer S17 can compute 53 trillion SHA-256 hashes per second. That only represents a fraction of a decimal of the network’s computational power.
So we’re out of the woods, right?
Hold on — not so fast. 51% attacks are deemed infeasible when contemplating accessible power.
What about a different power source? Like one that can cause aerial objects to “appear to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion”? All while emitting detectable radio-frequency energy?
For all the surreality of 2021, it’s as if its surrealist moment of all has been buried in a case of collective amnesia. Recall that, in June of 2021, by way of a 9-page paper, the US government announced 143 instances of observed but unidentified aerial phenomena the military cannot explain.
The report, thankfully, has nothing to do with aliens. The Pentagon points out the phenomena could be both classified US technology or technology developed by foreign adversaries.
The report is unique as an open-ended admission that sources of engineering capacity may exist in the world of which the public knows nothing. This admission, against the backdrop of Bitcoin blockchain, its rapid adoption, and its lack of origin, is comically unsettling.
What Next?
Roughly 50 million people in the United Sates own Bitcoin, in some form.
In November of 2020, 160 million people voted to elect the next US president. Neither candidate had made a campaign promise to unearth the origin of the disease that had ravaged its people and shuttered its economy.
I suppose, in some perverse way, these are unification points. We’re all building a mystery, Sarah McLachlan-style.
For CV-19, if the lab escape scenario is truly its cause, then it will require a Tank Man type of CCP defector to break through the redacted wall of information surrounding the disease’s origin. For the United States, such a character would be a reverse Edward Snowden.
Perhaps the true origin of Bitcoin may not be revealed until its last coin is mined in 2140 and it ushers in some kind of financial Ragnarök. We’ll all be dead, anyway.
When contemplating these two encompassing mysteries, remember: someone knows. Until that knowledge is public domain, we remain dominated by a 26-month-old virus with no reported origin, and a 13-year-old invention with no inventor.
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Originally published at https://medium.com on January 19, 2022.
