In cryptocurrencies, you can’t rely on the Silverback

We had a family visit to Chessington Zoo this weekend, and for me, the most fascinating exhibit was the Western Lowland Gorillas. I’m a little uneasy about the ethics of caging animals for our entertainment but these gorillas are endangered in their natural Central African habitat and the zoo claims to participate in conservation schemes so hopefully, on balance, it’s doing more good than harm.

We watch the troop of female and young male gorillas, sifting through their straw-covered floor for sunflower seeds and chopped up celery, strewn about the enclosure by the zookeepers to elicit their natural foraging behaviours.

The Silverback sits proudly atop a fake waterfall structure, impressively huge in stature, surveying the band of primates within the enclosure, and the odd-looking primates outside the enclosure, gawping back at them with amusement.

The Silverback is the authority, the one who sorts out disputes, whom the others look to for protection. This leviathan hulk, at the top of the social dominance hierarchy, to be feared, respected and trusted.

Awareness of social dominance is part instinctual, part imprinted and partly learned. It’s an essential part of survival for gorillas in the wild, behavioural traits evolved from the harsh realities of life in the forests of Central Africa.

By Greg Hume — Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18290838

We gaze and laugh at these funny creatures without realising how closely our own behaviours tally with theirs. We symbolise our social dominance through behaviours more subtle and refined than chest-beating. We have fancy job titles and trinkets. We have flashy cars and fashion. But as anyone who has ever worked in an office environment can testify, sometimes our behaviours are not so subtle. Instead of throwing our excrement at each other we play clever Machiavellian games, carefully dishing out praise and blame to manoeuvre our way to the top.

Like the gorillas, we need someone to trust, someone to protect us, somewhere to go when we want answers. We look up to our leviathans, our governments for protection, for decision making and for settling our spats with one another. We look up to experts when we seek the truth. We respect the men and women in suits, those with the symbols of prosperity and trust-able job titles. We listen to the voices of journalists, the experts with the answers. Above all we trust the powerful institutions of government and banks to issue us with our ‘bio-survival tickets’, our money.

The term ‘bio-survival ticket’, coined by the late Robert Anton Wilson, perfectly captures the hold that money has over us. Money is an abstract concept but it is so crucial for anyone to make any progress in this life. Our bio survival depends on it. We don’t hunt or forage, we go shopping with our government-mandated and bank-issued bio-survival tickets. These tickets to life grip our attention. We are elevated when we have more of them, anxious and depressed when we have fewer. Getting hold of these tickets is imperative to clambering our way up the social dominance hierarchy.

No wonder some people hate Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, we are so emotionally and physically dependent on our little tickets, that any alternative threatens our bio-survival.

Bitcoin and other cryptoassets require us to abandon the models of centralised systems and trusted authorities we’ve relied upon throughout our evolution. In this new decentralised world, we have no-one to look up to, no strong institutions to protect us, the truth is not available from a centralised powerful body. Instead, we are asked to be self -responsible, we can be our own banks, we can create and issue our own currency, we can participate in the governance of the currencies we support, we can choose to carry and use the currencies which reflect our values, which give us utility, which gives us purpose. We can participate in this open and transparent world, but we have to trust in each other, trust in the code, trust in the networks rather than our central governments and banks, we can’t run to them if things go wrong, there is no Silverback to protect us.

The mainstream adoption of cryptoassets will require a change of mindset. We’ll need to act more like a colony of ants than a band of gorillas. Central government will be less of a ‘necessary evil’ and may be seen increasingly as an ‘unnecessary evil’. When people see how currencies can be issued and used in a decentralised way, they will begin to see how other centralised functions can do the same. We’ll see the rise of the ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organisation’ in many other areas of our lives.

There is a tribe of human primates who are quite comfortable with the idea of living in a world without the protection of Siverbacks. They call themselves anarchists, libertarians, voluntarists or supporters of laissez-faire who are advocates of freedom. Freedom from the coercive force of government which interferes in markets through taxes, tariffs, subsidies and regulation and controls the character and supply of our bio-survival tickets. They promote ideas and models for the peaceful co-existence of everyday people, even with the complete absence of central government, or to steal a phrase from self-proclaimed anarchist and prominent cryptocurrency advocate, Jeff Berwick, a “world of 7 billion governments”. Anyone who truly wants to understand Bitcoin and the appeal of cryptocurrencies would do well to soak up anarchist and libertarian thinking, to get a sense for why these people were the very early innovators of cryptocurrencies and why they hold on to them even when the markets dip and crash. One can only grasp the world-changing potential of Blockchain technologies by seeking out, with a critical mind, the writings broadcasts of the likes of Murray Rothbard, Ludwig Von Mises, Ayn Rand, Larken Rose, Stefan Molyneux (pre-Trump), Max Keiser and Jeff Berwick. And not forgetting to read Satoshi Nakomoto’s White Paper for Bitcoin.

Money underpins much of everyday human behaviour, it’s the transaction protocol upon which we build modern societies. The word ‘Anarchist’ is uncomfortable for some because it conjures images of lawless thugs in balaclavas hurling Molotov cocktails. But anarchism doesn’t imply ‘no rules’, it implies ‘no rulers’. It fosters self-governance through mutual consent. And the emergence of the current swathe of Blockchain based technologies is the enabler for this. Armed with the appropriate background knowledge, a currency not controlled by governments and banks seems fare more palatable.

Search the reader comments on any mainstream tabloid news website, and even in 2017 you’ll see the usual fear-mongering comments associating cryptoassets with crime, bubbles, and Ponzi schemes. People, understandably, fear the oncoming cryptoasset steam-roller because it threatens their established systems of establishing a position within the social dominance hierarchy. The ‘experts’ they are informed by are the journalists, the bankers, the government representatives who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, but where we’re going, there is no central authority…

Everyday Blockchain on Facebook

I’ve recently started a Facebook group called Everyday Blockchain to look at all aspects of Bitcoin, blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies. Feel free to join.