I heard a Bitcoiner say this recently and found it bizarre. Obviously wars from WW1 to the Ukraine war have proven this false, but for a Bitcoiner it is clearly ridiculous.
Proof of work is the root of all cooperation. There is no social system that generates the consensus necessary for cooperation that is not a form of proof of work, and since you don't need money to cooperate, nor is cooperation necessarily a trade, you cannot say that trade is at the root of cooperation.
If someone fulfils some recognised form of PoW then groups just give them rewards, spontaneously, because they deserve it, not because of a coincidence of wants. That's how human creativity and adventure and achievement and hierarchy works.
Of course sometimes a gift is also a trade, even if the desired return is access and proximity, association. But the act of giving in view of the crowd is how people cooperate to put their energy into things and people they want to support, because they are good.
another perspective: all cooperation starts with trust; trust can be implied, spoken, written, transmitted thru thot (telepathy) or symbolic messages; often, trust requires proof of work to be demonstrated first, but sometimes it's enough to know that someone belongs to a specific tribe or group of people who are known to be proper hard workers;
the mantra "don't trust, verify" has come about because trust in society is at an all-time low (specifically, trust has been codified thru fiat rules, rather than exercised thru common sense); traditionally, "trust and verify" is a more cooperative approach to problem-solving; that's how any apprentice gets taught a new skill;
You cannot foster trust without repeat interactions. It's impossible to get a foot on that ladder without first having a shared PoW system that two or more parties can orient their attention. Trust is derivative of PoW.
part of human enslavement dynamics is making them think mostly in series rather than in parallel or holistically (i.e. by activating both left and right brain hemispheres in unison); the result is usually a broken mental model that creates even more chaos in society;
#1244802
is it really good to keep on diluting the meaning of "Proof of Work"?
it is a concept which has very specific meaning in the context of Bitcoin, and has already been eroded terribly by various "Proof of XYZ" variations, without us also labelling various other activities as "proof of work".
I agree that you often still have the property of efficient verification costing much less than performance of the work; however, it's not cryptographic, and the cryptographic quality of Bitcoin's consensus mechanism is qualitatively different than "your gains look really impressive".
It's not a dilution. Bitcoins proof of work is an abstraction of what all consensus is built on. If there are not other forms of proof of work then bitcoin comes from nothing, and nothing comes from nothing. That's magical thinking.
Proof of work is used in all selection games, anywhere that it needs to be determined whose opinion matters more, or how to divide up resources, or settle conflicts.
It's not qualitatively different, because it all comes back to a sacrifice of energy, whether it be peacock feathers or spending energy finding a sufficiently small number amongst large numbers. The difference is the degree to which systems fulfill the criteria of proof of work:
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.
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. ↩
Fair point. Would you agree that trade scales cooperation? Is trade relevant to cooperation?
Yes, I think so. Above the Dunbar number. As neighbouring tribes interbreed they carry cultural references and converge on the same monetary medium. I'm not sure that this started as trade though, it's more likely an extension of the internal patronage system employed to settle conflicts. If one tribe continuously defeats neighbouring tribes there comes a time when taking territory isn't practical, because the victor cannot defend it or harvest it's resources. It's better to take a commodity that can be stored, like cows or salt or gold.
Tribes that are subject to the violence of some local thug, who keeps taking our their fighting males, end up giving a ransom. This ransom needs to be something that doesn't degrade before it can be used, and it also has to be portable. At a certain point it's recognised by the thug that the ransom need not be used at all, it's better to keep it as a social signal to other tribes ("I'm the daddy in this region, don't fuck with me").
That's the point where the utility value competes with the monetary value, and there is always a reason to accumulate this commodity because:
Because it's always worth accumulating it solves the coincidence of wants, and that's the point you get trade and can really scale up cooperation.
To be clear, I'm not arguing for MMT. The local thug may choose between a subset of local commodities. Maybe it's boggy in their region and storage capabilities are different. Or maybe it's some legacy from before a migration that determines which commodity is preferable, or the preference of the thug he just defeated. But the monetary medium is always ultimately subject to physics. Is it hard to get, easy to verify, universal, and sovereign (SoV). And is it portable, divisible, fungible, durable (MoE).
This is probably why our species scaled up and defeated the Neanderthals. By orienting a much larger group of people towards the accumulation of the same subset of durable commodities we could efficiently avoid violence on first contact. It was not worth fighting until a group knows what they are going to gain in wealth, so I one tribe knows what the other has it's important to show up with some desirable good of their own to entice them into combat. Eventually the violence becomes ceremonial, what we know as sport, and the goods are traded directly.
Then the tribes agree on specific dates to settle disputes and disagreements, and they invent giant clocks, sundials, at the top of hills in the boundary points between tribes. These become henges, ceremonial burial mounds, temples, and eventually cathedrals, all oriented towards the sun to mark a specific gathering day when multi-polar inter-tribal competition and trade takes place.
Repeat interactions increases trust and you get a ratcheting effect towards peaceful cooperation. But if a bigger society comes in a destroys your temple, as the Romans did to the Jewish tribes, you lose your centre of gravity and consensus breaks down, and that's the point at which societies became oriented around books instead of temples.