FourSidedFight

People often mistake our global situation as being a zero sum game: rich vs. poor, black vs. white and so on.

If that were true, we would indeed be fucked. But it's not, it's ALWAYS four sides.

• Side A
• side B
• entropy, and
• The Unknown.

There is no dualism in. nature, not really

Let's talk about entropy first. About 50% of the food grown is wasted. It just rots.

That's entropy. Nobody benefits from this. It's the result of bad accounting practices. Or laziness. Or uneducated markets that won't eat green tangerines. It's just manifestly stupid.

The unknown is also simple: nobody knew you could bake sand and the sun would give you electricity until recently.

They didn't know that filtering water stopped illness. They didn't know doctors had to wash their hands.

Dualistic fights are fights to the death.

But in a four way fight, "good", "evil" (terms may be applied interchangeably), entropy and The Unknown strange alliances can abound.

Good and evil can gang up on The Unknown and redraw the map. The sides shift. Entropy can stop the fight because the battlefield becomes mudlakes

Conversely, entropy, The Unknown, and The Enemy can all gang up on you. The Axis in WW2 gets clobbered incredibly hard by The Unknown (Hiroshima, Nagasaki) and Entropy (the muddy road to and from Stalingrad). There is simply no resisting those kinds of odds.

So here are crypto people. A few hundred paper billionaires embedded in fragile fiat gateways. Maybe 50,000 High Net Worth hangers-on. Perhaps 10,000 skilled builders.

2013 https://t.co/ZO1qYZvPwF "for the first time in my life, the people doing radical politics are rich"

Are we going to make it?

Well... not if us making it destroys everybody else. Hyperbitcoinization - BTC $1m USD and stable or rising, countries in permanent hyperinflation unless they adopt bitcoin? This is a nightmare vision.

Winning on those terms is worse than losing bro.

So the phase of the bitcoin story which was "scrappy upstarts fight the system with their underground money" is over.

Now it's "which government is going to adopt it as legal tender next?"

But it's also 1% of global CO2 emissions on a boiling planet. The times have changed.

So that story has a ways further to go, but even in a 12% inflation environment, bitcoin has to stay in balance with other forces or it is going to become a monster. A lot of lefties think it is already that monster.

On the other hand we have a forest of proof of stake systems, led by Avalanche and ETH2, and with XX and Algorand and all the rest kicking around in the background. NEAR on the rise.

There's little to choose between them in the long run. 10 years out it won't matter which wins.

Now I'm here to tell you these things can save the world.

"What?" you say?

No, really. I'm the @hexayurt guy. I'm a former nuclear terrorism response planner. I called a million US dead on covid in early 2020. I am not a scammer, or an optimist, or a cheery chappie. I'm bleak.

So here's how they save the world. It's not the old "tax starvation argument."

Governments will not starve to death because of bitcoin: they'll tax real estate and cars and dentistry if they have to. You are not getting rid of civilisation's oldest parasites that easily.

No, the angle is entropy. The blockchain could let us cut our "civilisational entropy" by 20%. Maybe it could cut our entropy in half.

Look, we have a billion people starving right now. 122F in waterless cities.

There is no point in solving first world problems, my friends.

Our solutions for first world problems cause all the third world problems. It's not a coincidence that the English occupation of India and the Industrial Revolution happened at about the same time: a river of stolen gold paid for England's development.

Now put the blockchain into the world we are really in not the capitalist fantasy-land of its proponents.

A bitcoin party. A column of marching refugees. One world. Our world.

The blockchain saved me from cheap, shitty dentistry. That's what it did for me. That's what counts

Oh there was all that shit about banking the unbanked. Remittances. All of it.

Too early, or directly in the line of fire from telcos and governments. There were notional blockchain aid projects, where only one entity was writing to the database.

Endless stuff. Fumbling around.

Why, given all of that shit, do I still believe in the transformative power of this technology?

Because economic transparency is absolutely the key to breaking through the veil that entropy has cast over human affairs.

It's how we get cybernetic control.

But this ability to assemble a 360° vision of a physical object - to see into its past supply chain and its former owners, to see inside of components, to see possible future buyers and their price offers?

You can't do that without a blockchain. The data belongs to the object.

The ability for lots of people to write data durably to an object's data records - without winding up with a Wikipedia-style cartel which can be captured by corporate interest - is key

You need an open, decentralised place to describe objects accurately.

A FREE PRESS FOR THINGS

Now this is not some theoretical thing here. We're just getting towards the first year of issuing physical assets with these kinds of digital identities.

• here's a gold bar
• here's Timmy Trumpet's trumpet - sold for $100,000 (33 ETH)

So are we going to make it?

Yes, and here's why: the blockchain is the world's best technology for buying and selling physical stuff, if you use it right.

It's a matter of time until Amazon and eBay catch on, and odds-are they'll do as well as newspapers did in the web era.

But the blockchain natives will thrive.

We've pioneered the way: we'll do the first real estate deal relatively soon.

Much bigger gold bars. More fine art.

The fashion project, with magic digital ID tags, is coming soon. I've got the tags sitting on my desk, right now.

Our plan is to be the DNS for physical stuff, the base layer. For reasons I won't go into now (but see Mattereum.com/LP) we'll also do a ton of legal infrastructure creation and management or none of this works at all.

We have that part fixed. You can build on it!

To get a fuller understanding of how all of this transformation is going to effect the future of the blockchain, read today's big blog post.

This is where it's at. Everything up to physical assets was just building capacity, as bubbles tend to do!

If you want to understand the deep structure of this work, how it plugs into consumerism and designed obsolescence and all the rest of the core mechanisms of our markets, this is the long read for that: https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/engineering-consumption-ac3bd74b1a21

And here's the biggest, most zoomed-out version of the story. https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1527454071669641230

We struggle with generating a meaningful narrative that fits inside of people's existing world models, while running around trying to save the world. That deck is patchy, but complete. Worthy.

Finally: sign up for the Mattereum Waitlist if you're interested in buying, selling, and the Mattereum Discount Token https://membership.mattereum.com/

we're hiring

And we're eager to connect with VCs that are capable of seeing and supporting vision at this scale.

Remember: we've been live for a year on OpenSea. Gold, fine art, collectibles, going from a few thousand bucks a year ago to $100k.

This is not vapourware. We're open for business: we can turn your stuff into NFTs, and when they're sold, the legal ownership of the asset changes.