Find the reference to qm somewhat problematic but this is an absolutely
stunning account - at least for me - I've learned a lot from it. Thank
you!
Wow! - Alan - hope there's a full essay/book emerging -
On Tue, 8 Jun 2021, rhea via NetBehaviour wrote:
Date: Tue, 08 Jun 2021 18:31:08 -0700
From: rhea via NetBehaviour <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org>
To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
<netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org>
Cc: rhea <r...@hey.com>
Subject: [NetBehaviour] Work in Progress: Blockchain Temporalities
Bitcoin secures itself by rewarding the people who run it with payments in
Bitcoin. To get the rewards for publishing new blocks of transactions to the
Internet every ten minutes (on average), Bitcoin miners compete to solve
simple but time-consuming cryptographic puzzles. When Bitcoin launched,
miners could use desktop computers. But as Bitcoin became more valuable it
became worthwhile to use more and more powerful hardware in larger and
larger amounts to continue competing for the block rewards. Bitcoin was
written to handle this. Its difficulty algorithm creates a new target schema
for the block reward puzzles This algorithm targets ten minute block times,
and it will make the block puzzles as easy or as difficult as is required to
do this.
That singular objective, pursued without concern for externalities, means
that Bitcoin's difficulty algorithm is a paperclipper. Its ever-increasing
energy usage, which has caused such moral panic, would boil the oceans if it
thought that the difficulty had to go that high - but then what wouldn't?
This is the purpose that it embodies in unbounded cryptoeconomic incentives.
For Bitcoin, securing the metronomic heartbeat/pulse/breath/throb of ten
minute blocks of transactions is all that matters. Bitcoin exists to secure
the value of those transactions over time. To nestle in that temporality is
to subject oneself to blockchain temporality as surely as Stelarc's "Ping
Body" was subjected to internet geometry.
Block height is a clock. I've met people who have timed meatspace events to
it. Block height has a calendar of "halvenings", block reward changes, that
are treated as festivals, along with scheduled protocol forks and
activations. It's more complex than that, though. Cyclical and linear time
interplay in the blockchain as they do in capitalism, which is hardly
surprising given Bitcoin's anarcho-capitalist roots. The different temporal
scales and intensities folded into the blockchain in order to produce it
make it a Deleuzean egg. Which, through a deliberate misreading, makes it a
world. We can call it a welt if it helps, which it doesn't.
The word "blockchain" does not appear in Satoshi Nakamoto's 2009 Bitcoin
Whitepaper. Instead the pseudonymous creator (or creators) of Bitcoin talk
about the creation of a timestamp server to ensure the succession of events
(transactions) within a system. Time, for Bitcoin, is pure succession just
as number is pure succession for XXXXXXXXX. It is in this sense that time on
the blockchain is non-relativistic (as per Nick Land). Worse, that time
occurs *in* time, breaking XXXXXX's argument that it cannot. We can recover
from this a little by pointing out that it does not occur within itself, but
in an outside temporality, and a reassuringly relativistic one. Still, it
occurs in time, and produces a time of pure succession.
Bitcoin is the technonomic instantiation of Deleueze?s fourth synthesis of
time. It is an empty repetition determined by the future. For Bitcoin that
future is the block height (not the date or the Unix timestamp) when all 21
million Bitcoin will have been minted, and the reality of that future
determines its present - a hyperstition secured with an increasing fraction
of the Earth's computing resources by the block difficulty targeting
algorithm.
This is a purely intensive world, an undialectical history within itself.
Step back and the onchain world and its history are shown to be incomplete -
the private keys that create its transactions are not part of that world.
This veil of ignorance, similar to the sub-quantum realm's role in
contemporary physics, also applies to on-chain time. The Unix timestamps
placed in each Bitcoin block leak the offchain time that each block occur
at, but they could be a lie. They must increase over time, but compared to
the block height (the block number), they do so in irregular leaps. Block
heights are certain, timestamps less so.
Like cybernetics, block formation is probabilistic, converging on certainty
over time as more and more blocks build on top of the chain. This process is
irreversible, not just due to probability but to the trapdoor function-based
proof-of-work system that secures the Bitcoin blockchain. Although it can be
walked via the chain of hash values between blocks.
Blockchain temporality comes into being with the blockchain, and vice versa,
at the same moment. This is similar to the reciprocal emergence of
capitalism with capitalist time as described by Anna Greenspan in
"Capitalism's Transcendent Time Machine". This is important because
different temporal orders afford different social orders. We can notice
this, or we can continue to stan or sulk at atomic clocks.
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