Cryptocurrency Evolution
My father worked for Western Electric of AT&T. He was a public relations spokesperson and his job was to explain in Teflon terms why it was that the company’s acquisition of new machines and their accompanyingly new ways of working with the consequent laying off of employees was actually a good thing. This was before the rise of computer technology and the transitioning of society into our present digital age. One summer in the mid-70s he took me and my teenage brother to a telephone manufacturing plant in North Carolina, where I witnessed a quality control technician demonstrate the functional indestructibility of their phones by the repeated bashing of the thing onto the concrete floor. I was quite impressed. Shortly thereafter, TRS-80 computers became publicly available and while I continued to explore and spend my hours walking the woods, my brother increasingly spent the time designing games and writing programs for these new things that just looked like pieces of phones that had been run over by a truck rather than tossed to the floor. Instead, having heard on one of those AT&T telephony devices whose chord was pervertedly twisted through over-use, some ideas about biological evolution from my Grandfather, I decided that this whole digitization thing was not natural and I compulsively sought philosophical comfort in the idea that analogue computers could also be built. I imagined the creation of such devices that connected with the natural world of plants and animals rather than to quantizable mechanical billiard ball surfaces and refracting wave-particle light analogies that were motivating my bother to make software that appeared to have way too many right angles to me compared to what I was seeing in nature. This personal reminiscence encapsulates how I imagine the entire evolution of cryptocurrencies to play out during our present century. It is a story of information, of how we are moving from telephonic entropy measured, to program-size-randomized, through-quantumly physicalized into one meaning-informed set of informations. The evolution of cryptocurrencies into a mass adopted utility will move along this series.
The current state of cryptocurrency evolution is stuck between the first and second terms in the series. Two years ago, AvaLabs created a new form of blockchain architecture and positioned itself as the future of crypto and the financial infrastructure for Web 3.0 but in doing so, it has drawn some rather sharp historiographic lines through which this transmogrification of information must pass. Emin Gun Sirer, the CEO and master of master minds at Avalabs asserts that the goal/direction of Bitcoin is to be a store of value and competitor with fiat of any (form). He considers Ethereum as the next wrung on the (progressive) crypto-evolutionary ladder which sought to add Turing complete applications to the simple exchange of sovereign monetary equivalents. Sirer however since his first involvement with crypto (in 2003) sought to focus on the relation of the currency to the specific monetary asset that it would be put, rather than throwing any digital program at it unrestrictedly. So, he professed to establish an architecture with the goal of digitizing all assets and optimized the tech’s structure for this purpose. This includes the idea of arbitrary programmability but that is not the philosophically motivating core concept. Sirer saw that telelphony had progressed considerably from the simple telegraphic like telephone to the smart phone but now the question is how far will this inversion of the tech allow the user’s control to go? Bitcoiners have a vision, Ethereumites think otherwise, but Avalanching telephony is likely to show that Poincare was prescient not only, about chaotic dynamics but actually about how we are going to use that deterministic randomness (involved in the new avalanched consensus of AvalancheAVAX) as we move to establish meaning in an ever increasingly quantumized material world. I shall show that Avalanche will bring back the analogue rather than singularly prefer the digital, precisely as I imagined as a teenager, no matter the money made available by digitizing as many assets as possible.
Poincare is not well known for his attention to telegraphy and telephony and yet, he actually sketched out many details of the phone receiver. This rise of Shannon entropy off the signaling system 7 phone system has colored humanities’ ability to communicate. While this use of information pervades our social media and broadcast mass media and is working its way into the metaverse, an alternative as offered by Ethereum powered devices based foundationally on Turing completeness of any program-size-complexity in smart contracts is thought by some to likely dominate any predictive future. Bitcoin maximalists think however, that society will be revolved principally and decidedly by money rather than the digital thing-itself. Both of them however appear separated from those that are working to build quantum computers and that divided vision is what makes the entrance of AvalancheA-V-A-X all the more interesting.
Avalancheavax is placed to suggest that indeed it is money that will drive world-wide adoption but in an asset specific, not an application-in-general way. What is crucial here I feel is the return of workers and consumers using the technology not the replacement of workers or consumers by the tech…adaptation not adoption — really. I will attempt to establish below that the evolution of cryptocurrency information transcommunication is going to reverse the trend that digitization has been having on the workforce and instead of replacing workers, will give and create more jobs for an increasingly ever larger human population turning the trend otherwise around. This is my thesis and I assert that Avalabs’ Avalancheavax is leading us towards this goal in a very foundational way.
Poincare was spot on, when he explained the perception of distance will ‘’ let us imagine innumerable telegraph wires, some centripetal and others centrifugal. The centripetal wires warn us of accidents that occur outside, the centrifugal wires have to provide the remedy. Connections are established in such a way that when one of the centripetal wires is traversed by a current, this current acts on a central exchange, and so excites a current in one of the centrifugal wires, and matters are so arranged that several centripetal wires can act on the same centrifugal wire, if the same remedy is applicable to several evils, and that one centripetal wire can disturb several centrifugal wires, either simultaneously or one in default of the other, every time that the same evil can be cured by several remedies”
The evolution of cryptocurrencies is sensically about how globalizing this notion of distance in practice is being represented in computers. This supervenience of the situation is a bit meaningfully removed from our day to day reality but as the series of information formats steps through our everyday future serially, I contend that what is distance is nothing other than a topology we already have in our perceptions and bodily responses to our environments that may be softened by extendable “straight-line” software, software that is extensible and programmable as Kevin Sekniqi outline here:
Furthermore I hypothesize that the design of Avalanche is actually a generalization of Poincare’s curved vision of how instinctively geometry is physiologized. This is a much more involved conversation I will flesh out topologically but basically I will hold that the creation of analogue computation ecosystems based on these distances with Avalanche subnets builds off any angles ]physically[ that human behavior supports and thus will… asset-wise arise, from, human action rather than philosophical prescription and thus, even when it comes to relations with quantum computation will be more desirable I contend , in the long (human) run, than anything that will come of Bitcoin use cases, Ethereum application eventualities or other parallel crypto development(s).
“It is this complex system of associations, it is this distribution board, so to speak, that is our whole geometry, or, if you will, all that is distinctive in our geometry. What we call our intuition of a straight line or of distance is the consciousness we have of these associations and of their imperious character.” Poincare
To understand the pace of blockchain instantiation evolution as a new primitive in the sense that Kevin sought to differentiate Avalanche as programmable from,
https://twitter.com/kevinsekniqi/status/1449502909306183686
is at least in part to invert of the meaning of information out of Signaling System 7 conductions beyond geometries of Chaitin-Kolomogorov program-size-complexities topologically connected to a basic Shannon entropy measure by provisioning a subnet relative definition of horizontal scaling under low fees sustaining a denotable data storage blockchain specific connotation in terms of a to be defined cohesion amongst the so defined geometries and topology of the probabilistically supported temporality associated with the changes of state of those particular virtual machines involved. This is what I meant by the term avalanching telephony.
https://twitter.com/McfallBrad/status/1454225308324974593
The fact that this can not in the end be separated from the total monetization of the Avalanche virtual machine itself has mislead many commentators but in so doing they have failed to fully appreciate the devolution from programmable DEFI that revolutions in crypto $AVAX paces manifestations already supported, ported and purported.
I do realize that my own ability to express an understanding of this issue may seem somewhat still overly narrated, nevertheless I am getting fairly close to being able to address the subject fully objectively.
I think the primary new primitive that programmable capital will bring as a object independent of time is the ability to have emergent virtual behavior become payable labor of the consumer.
I have been surprisingly capable (given a very intricate analysis of evolutionary theory as background) of uniting the viewpoints of Veblen
https://twitter.com/McfallBrad/status/1297593484048818176
and Poincare in such a way that justifies the official @Avalabsofficial story in the history of distributive systems theory. The very first sketch of this synthesis is provided here:
This is a highly personal thought experiment I am evolving on the practical development of an @avalancheAVAX subnet input-output device I originally described with respect to gaming.
My point of view, is wholly mine, and is what I was getting out when phylogentizing the avlancheavax subnet ecosystem here . To make this view appear as compelling as possible I have been able to understand Veblen’s evolutionary economics directly out of the use of specific input out put device I first suggested for use in gaming. I shall try to draw in this projection below.
