[Abstract] The price of Bitcoin has experienced many major crashes, but every time someone declares Bitcoin dead, it is only to see it reborn and go further. Bitcoin is like those fire poppies in the California woodlands, sprouting and thriving in wildfire.
Author: Ming Guo
Translated by: Claire Wu
The author of this article, Ming Guo, is the co-founder of the block chain star project Soteria.
Soteria is developing a holistic solution to solve some of the pressing problems of the current generation of blockchains, such as performance bottlenecks, while providing an adequate feature set for the decentralized economy it envisions, such as BlockDAG-based Scalable throughput and chain data storage, equal mining through memory, private computing and highly expressive non-Turing-complete, non-GAS light chain heavy application smart contracts.
The transformation from a centralized world to a decentralized world requires a catalytic force at the binary level, which is a silent but explosively powerful catalytic force. In fact, for the emergence of alien technology such as Bitcoin, there is a third category of people besides the two camps we mentioned and discussed earlier. They are gold diggers: speculators, miners and opportunists. In the fog of history, most of them are silently hidden in the vast sea of people. However, their panic stepping on each other often makes history. They occupied the castle of cryptocurrency, settled down and lived in the land of cryptocurrency for a long time. They are a force of necessity that forges history and the future. They are the catalytic force we seek to destroy.
Bitcoin has laid out a big picture to call them on.
The radiant and unfathomable Bitcoin seems to be a masterpiece of God. It embeds a genie in a bottle and makes the silent group move mountains like a fool. It is like a magic piper, playing a series of beautiful notes with CPU/GPU/ASIC cooling fans, calling on the army of miners and speculators in the entire cryptocurrency field to bid one after another.
Bitcoin is invincible and powerful, and we can learn a lot of truth from it.
People from the other two camps are also eager to woo this silent group, and they both instinctively know the power of this group. Regarding cryptocurrency mining, the dynamic development of miners and speculators over the years, I will not repeat them here, you can Google it yourself. There are many articles in Google that record, explain and analyze major events that have occurred over the years.
We all know that miners need to cash out their mined cryptocurrencies through frequent transactions by speculators on cryptocurrency exchanges. This entire ecology is a system in which Bitcoin anchors the "alien world" for feeding - this "alien world" is our centralized world, (for us, Bitcoin is an alien technology, and our world It is the "alien world" of Bitcoin, and they each get what they want.) And the dual forces are constantly exerting their power and intersecting in various fields.
Those speculators are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, overheated cryptocurrency market speculation has stifled many interesting ideas in the field of cryptography, making them just like meteors across the sky, shining but only staying for a short time. On the other hand, the speculative purges that regularly occur in the cryptocurrency space are also a Darwinian innovation driver.
Bitcoin should have disappeared in the bubble burst a long time ago (many so-called altcoins did go extinct), but it didn't. In fact, the price of Bitcoin has experienced many major crashes, but every time someone declares Bitcoin dead, it is only to see it reborn again and go further. Anything that doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Bitcoin is like those fire poppies in the California woodlands, sprouting and thriving in wildfire.
At the same time, due to the overheated speculation, other institutions are also growing, and that is the centralized cryptocurrency exchange, and they thrive on being fed by hot speculation. They are Bitcoin's evil twin. They are a rogue counter force diverting Bitcoin's growing alien influence. Centralized cryptocurrency exchanges are becoming the unexpected accomplices of traditional financial institutions.
Why do they need to cooperate with each other? Traditional financial institutions need allies to control Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Centralized cryptocurrency exchanges need help curbing the extreme volatility that characterizes the cryptocurrency market for long-term survival and legitimacy. These days, they are speeding up their conspiracy. If we compare extreme volatility in the crypto market to a swollen cyst that is about to burst, the day a healthy crypto market is reborn is the day it is saved in the ICU. Otherwise, the only gambling game available in the casino is Russian Roulette. No wonder centralized cryptocurrency exchanges want to get rid of this dirty family business and move towards legitimacy. No wonder traditional financial institutions are eager to jump in and replace these illegitimate exchanges. This is why you see reports about STOs, Bitcoin ETFs, and Nasdaq shareholders setting up centralized cryptocurrency exchanges in news (/rumor) segments from time to time.
Please don't let such cajoling bother you. The fusion of traditional financial institutions and centralized cryptocurrency exchanges can only mean one thing - Bitcoin's core alien virtues: decentralization, censorship resistance, trustless consensus, will all be annihilated and reinterpreted. Still, taming Bitcoin and real cryptocurrencies is doomed to futility. After all, Bitcoin is alien technology, which means it's time for the next phase of the cryptocurrency revolution that Bitcoin started. Let's build a new decentralized world together. No matter how centralized cryptocurrency exchanges develop, we have to build such a new world. (But centralized cryptocurrency exchanges also have a homegrown origin story like bitcoin, and they haven’t been part of the system yet after all.)
However, whatever the original sin of centralized cryptocurrency exchanges, it did help spread the word Bitcoin in its early days. Fears aroused by the problems with these cryptocurrency exchanges reflect our lack of mastery over alien technologies (Bitcoin and the decentralized world), a cunning teenage “Cargo Cult” parody Games, we should say goodbye to them.
So, centralized cryptocurrency exchanges, please hear my prayer: You have had your fill of pleasure, it is time to leave, a glorious death awaits you, and you may rise again from the ashes. However, please remember to abandon your original sin and change yourself, we will show you a new world in an alternative way:
A new world of true decentralization.
(full text)
This article is translated from Ming Guo's:『Bitcoin is Alien Technology (part 3)』
