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5 sats \ 1 reply \ @adlai 24 Feb \ parent \ on: Trade is no the root of all cooperation econ

It's not a dilution. Bitcoins proof of work is an abstraction of what all consensus is built on.

Nakamoto Consensus^[1] is fundamentally different from social consensus about who leads a tribe, or whether some kind of shell necklace is prettier than jewelry crafted from different material.

If there are not other forms of proof of work then bitcoin comes from nothing, and nothing comes from nothing. That's magical thinking.

You're attacking a strawman. I never said Bitcoin was "fiat lux". However as far as things go, any purely mathematical concept comes comes about as close to "something from nothing" as an idea can get before its relevance to the real world becomes a subjective matter of coincidence and sentiment, and I strongly believe that the heartless abstract mathematical purity of Nakamoto Consensus is worth distinguishing as something special.

I do however think I understand better the kind of story you're trying to tell, where Bitcoin is an evolution of human systems, rather than some revealed wisdom... I guess we agree to disagree, as ultimately we both have better things to do than argue about this.

... note that the abstract idea of nakamoto consensus doesn't even depend on the details of the hash function, as long as all members of the swarm agree on which one to use. in this regard you could have nakamoto consensus in a huge number of wildly different physical worlds, basically as long as fundamental thermodynamics remained unchanged. meanwhile social systems that emerged throughout human history depend a lot more on specific properties of the ecosystems where they emerged. ↩

40 sats \ 0 replies \ @fourrules OP 24 Feb

fundamentally different

I agree that Nakamoto Consensus is special, but only because it abstracts the process that life has been engaged in since there emerged selection mechanisms.

And I agree that all other forms of proof of work are contingent on their environment and context, where as Nakamoto Consensus not, being mathematical and computational.

It's the difference of analogue and digital, or Plato's Nous vs Soma.

But we've been aiming towards and purifying our consensus mechanisms for millennia. The Rei Stones of Yap, the megaliths, sport, democracy, the education system, these are all proof of work systems with a clear and unreliable trend towards attraction, from the physical to the digital.