 My name is Waseem Al-Sindhi and I'm the janitor of an organisation called the Zero X Salon and today Eugenio and the SolarPunk RC3 crowd have kindly invited me to talk a little bit about the latest state of some work in progress research around the new topic for the Salon that we're calling the indifference engine. And the purpose of this is to work towards an ecological characterisation of Bitcoin. So we will, without any further ado, roll straight in. And so this is what we're going to talk about today and you know hopefully some of these things will make a bit more sense as we go on. So to phrase coin we all know about the difference engine right, Babbage, Lovelace and so on. But why indifference? And so to exemplify this I've taken a quotation from a recent poem by a collective offshoot of the Zero X Salon called the Cryptographic Poetic Researchers Union, the CBRU. And I'll read it to you now. So fractals don't care about your feelings. Systems disregard their externalities and formalisms cannot reason about the real. And so here's the kicker. Aside from a single very coarse feedback mechanism that's called the difficulty adjustment algorithm, Bitcoin is essentially insensate. It cannot care about what happens outside of its borders, outside of its environs. Only that the piper is paid. And it's paid in this way that we call thermoeconomics, which we'll get to a bit later. And so here's the TLDR that Bitcoin pits capital ecology against each other in a prisoner's dilemma style paradox that could tip the balance in favour of a hot house earth. And so this is very hard for me to say because I was one of the people banging the drum for Bitcoin for many years, seven years or so. And I will explain to you and hopefully impress upon you that there is a value and worth to Bitcoin. And there is a need for unsensurable, ungoverned means of digital value transfer. But the cost that we might have to pay to keep Bitcoin running is arguably too great for this planet to bear. Okay, so let's talk a bit about motivations. And so as I said, I'm a janitor of this loose collective organisation called the Zero X Salon. We don't really know what it is yet, but we're thinking of it as this tentacular, post disciplinary assemblage of entangled concepts and methodologies. So we are an informal research collective approaching unusual topics and trying to break down epistemic boundaries, bringing people from all kinds of different places and creating informal space for unstructured discussions to explore unusual topics. And we are holding discourse events, the salons themselves. Oh, we are writing, we're producing artistic outputs. And one of the interesting things of being the salons based trust is a multidisciplinary workspace in Berlin. And the interesting thing is that many of our salon and trust colleagues have actually worked very closely with Bitcoin cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology for many years. And there are quite a few tales to tell. And so there's a magic car, there's an art piece behind me on the screen. And let me read you a little bit more from one of these poems. Accumulationism as a mode of being the decentralized death drive is indifferent to your plight. Nagasaki sunrise for all eternity. Now those are pretty strong words. So let's see if there's some sound has got something to back them up with. So there's this thing called Bitcoin, you might have heard of it. It's cryptocurrency. It's a network of computers that speak the same language, a protocol, and through the implementation of this protocol, a series of machinic and algorithmic processes take place, which lead to the creation and redistribution of these cryptographic abstractions of value that people call tokens or coins. Excuse me. And so the graph that we see on the screen is what's called the hash rate. This is an indirect proxy of the measurement of the amount of energy going into Bitcoin to defend it, to keep the sanctity of the transaction history maintained. So Bitcoin is this extremely defensive network that requires this constant input of energy for security reasons, for coin distribution reasons, and also because it has no way of generating randomness internal to it. And so what should we make about all this Bitcoin stuff? So like we all heard about Bitcoin, you know, a few years ago, people will stop talking about it and it kind of went away. Now it seems to be back. So we're hitting all time highs in terms of the price. Last time I checked, the price is around $27,000, which gives Bitcoin a nominal value of the network as a nominal value all the tokens put together of approximately half a trillion dollars. So that is quite a lot of money. Okay. And so here is the first of a series of provocations around the indifference engine. And I'll read to you the quotation again from the cryptographic parietics researchers union on the card. The elephant in the room grows less restless as the air fills with soot. Some cheer it on as others choke and we ease the temperature rises again. And so this graph is we're watching the temperature rise just as you when you look at the price of Bitcoin that chart as every time you see a green candle and the price goes up, the beast gets thirstier once more energy to defend it because the honeypot that this network is defending get grows larger. This is actually the biggest computing honeypot and biggest monetary honeypot on the planet at half a trillion dollars. If you could hack this thing, say with a quantum computer on some pre quantum signature schemes, then, you know, this thing would lose all of its perceived value. Okay. So here's a provocation that we wrote over that we've drafted and we're in the middle of writing for Bitcoin. And you can see that Bitcoin here is pictured as a black hole as a naked singularity, something with the hard boundary beyond which we cannot reason beyond. And there's a reason why we've used that analogy and we'll come back to that bit later. In fact, even Bitcoin is quite proud of this analogy for other reasons. So let me read to you what's on the screen. As Bitcoin surpasses previous price records and reenters mainstream consciousness following several wilderness years, the 12 year cryptocurrency appears to have arrived in the eyes of the market. The value proposition of an ungoverned uncensurable digital means of value transfers clear for all to see, but can our planet afford the thermodynamic price tag? To maintain the integrity of the transaction record, the Bitcoin network creates a hard boundary to the outside through exacting validation requirements. There is no sensitivity to the consequences of the thermo economic challenges it issues. This inability of mined cryptocurrencies to differentiate the energy sources used to secure them has led to criticism as to their indifference to their ecological externalities. So this is where the indifference engine is coming from, like Bitcoin can't care about what happens outside. Just like a black hole can't care. It just wants to suck matter energy, let's say in the kind of Einsteinian sense, out of the external environment. And that's kind of what Bitcoin is doing. So we'll take a little break and we'll look at a meme on the screen. And so you may have heard about this movement called decentralized finance or DeFi. It's all the rage at the moment, particularly in some parts of the crypto blockchain space. And really what I see here is a great deal of the replication of the systemic fragilities and problems of the traditional financial system being built atop some very experimental and untested foundations. And so there's no surprise when I see these projects failing and collapsing on a daily basis. So this is a house of money cards territory, if you ask me. In the middle, we have the Internet of Value, which is a more kind of neutral platitude that's quite inclusive and welcoming of Bitcoin and all the other crypto currencies, thinking that we can make a kind of a network society of all these different coins. And that sounds great. But the problem is that all these things have for humans around them like tribes or ideologies. And you know, humans are like when they have ideologies. And so, but the apotheosis of this meme really is the black hole of money. And I think this is what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is quite proud of calling it the black hole of money because they see that as a way of stripping away the impure, the central banking and the fear from humanity and from earth. But as a card carrying a physicist who started a scientific career and the oldest research astronomical research observatory in the world, I would caution people at hoping that their thing is a black hole. You may not want what that entails in reality. And so we had this funny conversation at Trust and myself and a colleague Joanna Pope, where we're talking about systems that barely work. And we had the joke that we would like to set up the barely working systems working group. And so if anybody would like to join that, then let us know. And I guess we'll have to start it and figure out what we do. But the point I want to make here is that Bitcoin is kind of this cludgy solutions, highly suboptimal solution. And if you look at the component level, almost every piece of it from the kind of networking from the economics from the cryptography and from the distributed systems, these are all very suboptimizing the governance as well. These are all very suboptimal individual solutions. So it's a paradise for mousetrap designers. Like if you're an academic professor, which is called designer, you look at something in Bitcoin and think, that sucks, I can do it better. Here's my new mousetrap. And obviously, with everything outside of Bitcoin, people can make their own tokens and cryptocurrencies and networks, you can print your own money. And so if you can build a better mousetrap and you can print your own money, you can see that there might be some incentives for, you know, grifters and all the rest of it. But one of the points I wanted to make here that I skipped over earlier is that Bitcoin, even though it looks highly suboptimal, it's very resilient. Bitcoin is a cockroach. It's the cockroach of money, just as email is the cockroach of communication. And I think with quite a high degree of certainty, if there was a nuclear fallout and a kind of apocalyptic happening on this planet, Bitcoin would be one of the first global networks to get back up and running. At first in localised areas, this can be just start to connect to each other. And then as the linkages are made via whatever satellite, homing pigeon, a smoke signal, who knows, I think things would carry on. Anyway, moving on. And so some people describe Bitcoin as the impenetrable fortress of validation. And they mean that in a good way. That means it's very hard to cheat the system. There are no rulers, but there's a great deal of very stringent rules. And so transactions are checked to be valid before they enter the permanent record in a block. And then as a miner creates a block and attempts to claim the reward, the incentive, the American economics incentive, the lottery incentive, that is checked by all of the other participants on the network to make sure no rules have been broken, no shortcuts have been taken, and no impropriety has been occurring. Now, of course, when you have a set of rules, you can still do some finagling underneath the surface, whilst you pay heed and lip service to the rules. But one of the points I want to make here is that this very hard boundary creates hard delineation between the inside of Bitcoin and outside in a cryptographic and computing sense, in a networking sense, system sense. But I think I would posit that this also creates like an economic penumbra of this hard boundary and a sociopolitical one as well. And we end up with these scorched earth mindsets. We have scorched earth economics, this economic double jeopardy that we'll talk about a bit later. We have this, a scorched earth discourse, log on to Bitcoin Twitter, if you don't know what I mean. And we have this scorched earth governance and we'll get to all of these things in a moment. And they lead to this insularity of code and mind, which we're going to give a name to in a moment. And so we all can see the value of having a stateless currency with no rulers, you know, there's no Plutarch or oligarch or overlord telling you what you can and can't spend on like, you know, spending should be a form of speech, right? If you can say what you want, you should be able to spend how you want. But even though there's no rulers, we still end up with tolls and toll keepers, trolls and grifts, a lot, a lot. I mean, there's no permission to start any of these things. So a lot of people have ended up in this space doing that kind of stuff. It's quite unpalatable. And so one of the things I would like to posit is that Bitcoin is a form, possibly the first form of an algorithmic materialism. So it's using the algorithmics of the thermo economics as the incentive and the algorithmics of the proof of work of the cryptocurrency mining and combining these things together, the real and the virtual to create this synthetic abstraction that straddles the real and the virtual, which is the currency, the cryptocurrency itself. So I would argue that it's algorithmic materialism. And we'll go even further with that in a moment. So here's another poetic interlude. And I will just take a water break before we start. Again, from the CPRU, a black hole greater than the sum of its parts, the ultraviolet catastrophe of money, rugged individuality meets naked singularity, thermo economic double jeopardy, a game of Russian roulette with Alice, Bob, Sybil and sock puppets. And that's also by the alias Satoshi wet. And so thermo economics, let's talk a bit about that. What does that word even mean? Well, here's a recent usage of it by a couple of salon colleagues in a recent explainer for cryptocurrency mining, quite relevant today. Cryptocurrency mining is a thermo economic process employing proof of work and parameterizable feedback mechanism, the difficulty adjustment we mentioned earlier, with direct incentives provided by block rewards from a net algorithmically regulated network level issuance schedule alongside transaction fees. And the picture here is from my political and these are engines, natural gas powered engines that are fueling Bitcoin miners. And they sit above fracking wells in places like Alberta, Saskatchewan, Alaska. So Bitcoin doesn't care about where the energy comes from, it just wants energy, doesn't care how dirty it is, it doesn't care if it's helping, it doesn't care if it's harming. In these cases, it might actually be helping, believe it or not, because a lot of the gas comes with this fracked oil, and a lot of it is just flared off, just burn it and let it into the sky. And methane going into the atmosphere, that's not good from an ecological perspective. So maybe burning some of it in this horrifically inefficient carbon engines, combustion engines, is a net game. But because I just want to illustrate the point that Bitcoin doesn't care where the energy comes from. To Bitcoin, this could be coming from solar plant, could be coming from nuclear power, could be coming from space space harvesting, a Dyson sphere, it doesn't care. And so this is what we were promised by all these cryptocurrencies, we'll get rid of the rulers, we'll be able to transact in freedom, we'll have this P2P egalitarian one CPU one vote utopia. But I think we're actually a bit closer to this where we started the bosses of the Senate, the oligarchies and the plutarchies. I think we're probably a bit closer to that than we think. And we have these several kind of principal constituents in the Bitcoin network. And one of them is this developer technocracy, which we'll get to in a moment. And one of them is this mining oligopoly, the thermoeconomic cartel. And both of these things, I don't think they're necessarily anticipated by the creators and projectors of Bitcoin, but those are the reality that we have to deal with now. And so here's a pyramid, we've all seen pyramids before. I think that most human organizations seem to play out in this way by accident or by design. So you could argue that at the top of this thing are the people that found Bitcoin very early. And then, you know, there's other people that set up companies that do mining, the developers and so on. And there is kind of your media personalities, then you've got kind of people like me talking heads, kind of bro, whatever Bitcoin bros, X Bitcoin bros. And then you've got the kind of followers and the people that watch Bloomberg tell them which coin to buy and the people that casually log on to Twitter and have like, you know, five followers and things like that. So there is some kind of hierarchy here. And I'm, you know, speaking of it, because I've moved through this hierarchy over the years, and I've also swept floors at some of the very highest levels. And so when you sweep a floor, you hear interesting things. And so one of the most interesting things about all this Bitcoin and blockchain stuff is that some people see Bitcoin and blockchains and so on as a new instantiation, a new exemplification of a synthetic time or even a synthetic space time. And for people that are interested in the philosophical work of Emmanuel Kant and everything that came beyond that. And this is extremely interesting. So this is giving you a some kind of like a new yardstick, a new kind of time that is divorced from the outside time. And so this is, many people think that this proved Kant right. And this is very beautiful picture of a moto from Anna Sings book mushroom at the end of the world called conjuring time. So we will probably litigate the time thing another time. But some of us in the in the cryptocurrency space have been using these spatio temporal thermodynamic and astral lenses for a number of years. Here's some old tweets by this janitor talking about blockchains as time machine's a couple of years ago. All right, mean break. So here's a very controversial philosopher on the screen and somebody that is very interested in Bitcoin and the blockchain and space line. I suppose you could describe Bitcoin as a dark crystal if you were so inclined. And so unfortunately, the nice animated image of cellular automata going around the screen here did not translate. But I will just leave you to imagine a conways game of life unfolding in front of us. And I will say that, you know, we are at the salon, we have spoken a little bit about moving beyond the natural and towards the synthetic. You know, what does a synthetic life form look like? What can it do? What can it be? How can we tell if something is alive or not? And the search Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg has done quite a lot of work on this. And this is an interesting speculative epistemology of how new, you know, taxonomic kingdom might exist and kind of like a meta state above and across transcending the boundaries of other living kingdoms and families. Some people are starting to work on trying to characterize the behavior of machines in the similar sense that we do with human and non human living things. And so this is like some of my colleagues and yours writing this machine behavior paper in nature. And I'm going too much into this, we've discussed it at salons before. So this is building on work by Tim Bergen a couple of generations ago, where we're looking from the individual to the collective terms of behavior, and then hybrids of individual collective behavior and also hybrid of machine or human and non human or natural and non natural forms of life or whatever they may be. And so let's now look at an interesting example of somebody trying to ascribe the agency of life to Bitcoin. And so this is some work by a fellow called Ralph Merkel. And he is actually immortalized in the Bitcoin protocol, because every block of the Bitcoin blockchain contains this thing called Merkle Tree, which is this hierarchical space saving cryptographic construction, which proves in a quite efficient way how transactions are related to each other. And we need to do that for validation. As I said, the Bitcoin is a very strong validation engine. And this is one of the components of that engine. So Ralph Merkel started off as a cryptographer, he's now chemist and the chemists are kind of sitting at the limit of life between physics and biology. And I say that with a little bit of experience. So having spent a number of years as a PhD chemistry. So let's read what Ralph Merkel says here. So Bitcoin is the first example of a new form of life. It lives and breathes on the internet. It lives because it can pay people to keep it alive. It lives because it performs a useful service that people will pay it to perform. It lives because anyone anywhere can run a copy of its code. It lives because all the running copies are constantly talking to each other. It lives because if anyone copies corrupted, it is discarded quickly and without any fuss or loss. And it lives because it's radically transparent. Anyone can see its code and see exactly what it does. Now, I think there's plenty of food for thought in there. But one of the things I will say going back to our point about Bitcoin's very poor sensitivity, this feedback mechanism that it contains, you could argue that this is kind of an adaptive mechanism, but without a more sophisticated sensing, I don't think it would meet the bar for any kind of meaningful definition of life. One of the other things to say is the point that was brought up in a salon by our colleague, Sarah Friend, is that Bitcoin has already reproduced itself through forks and some of us have written papers about the forks of Bitcoin and what we might learn from those. But I would say that this network partitioning that creates these blockchain forks, there's no opportunity for mutation, evolution, naturally speaking, to improve the fitness in this progeny. And so this is what I would call a degenerate reproduction. This is not the reproduction of life. At best, it is a kind of prokaryotic cell division of naive, asexual reproduction at best. So there are some paradoxes within Bitcoin and with all of this stuff. And I just hope that we can spend a little bit of time unpacking some of those now. And hopefully they'll bring up some questions that we can discuss either at the end of this talk or at a Zirex salon event in the future. And so I'll read to you another stanza from one of the CPRU poems. Being at once, anthropodescented hypercapital and subordinated machine socialism, where the abstract labor itself becomes the means of production, mindlessly grinding as the commons burn, for what? To fortify a barren walled garden, a moat without a castle, let alone a citadel. And that's a courtesy of Satoshi Wett. And so we've said the first part here that this is like, you know, hypercapital and transcendent machine socialism. So like, how can those two things mesh together in some kind of meaningful way? And others have written, you know, over the years, quite a lot about different philosophical angles within Bitcoin. So, you know, for example, Colombia has written on politics of Bitcoin as, you know, a vector for right wing extremism. And I was more recently written about crypto communism and the kind of mass emancipatory potential for mostly other blockchains and revolutionary practices and so on. So here's the kicker for me, I think, you know, we can leave left and right politics out of this. 99% of the planet hates Bitcoin and for good reason, Bitcoin requires constant import of export and export of randomness to find blocks. This gigantic entropic generalization is the output of mining farms, which soak up underutilized resources around Earth. The global consensus that Bitcoin desires and strives for every 10 minutes on average is the most expensive luxury in the universe. So there's a mic drop and I will leave this on the screen while I take a walk to break. So necroprimitivism is time to go back to school. And today's lesson is introduction to necroprimitivism. So what the hell is necroprimitivism? So we've been talking about this resistance to change inside the Bitcoin network through these validation requirements, through the difficulty of getting consensus to upgrade networks. And this is giving rise to what I call a necroprimitivist class inside Bitcoin, and it informs some of the behaviors of the social, political and economic aspects of the network. So let me read to you a little provocation on this necroprimitivist priest card on the screen. For now, there is only thermotechnics to centralize cosmic horror, a zero sum machine of fire, sand and pressure synthesizing scorched Earth realities. The heat death of the universe passes us by as we languish in Plato's cave. So here's a PSA. Is someone you know a necroprimitivist? Is somebody you know hiding a dark secret? Does the person you know exhibit a lack of imagination? Some Bitcoins believe it's easier to imagine the end of the world than a new proving mechanism to replace the mining. Scorched Earth economics is another tell-tale sign. Bitcoins hate central banking and fiat currency so much that the heat death of the universe is a preferable outcome. Scorched Earth politics, worshiping a developer priesthood and foretelling futures for minor semiotics. Now this might require a little bit of explanation. So when we talk about a developer priesthood, we're talking about the cathedral in the sense of open source software. So these are the wizards of Bitcoin, which are mostly white American males, who are trusted with the janitorial maintenance and assurance of the code and the network that is implemented from it. And I have some experience of speaking with these janitorial and primitivist types because until quite recently, part of my days were spent raising money to pay their salaries. So I was sweeping floors in the priesthood. And so when you sweep floors, you hear things and you notice things. So we're going to move on now to the discourse of how that is Scorched Earth. So as we said about Columbia's book, there is this ultra-libertarian bent going through Bitcoin. And I suppose that might be because the amount of coins that were distributed at the start before the first subsidy halving in the first four years of Bitcoin between 2010-2014, when nobody knew about Bitcoin, 10.5 of the 21 million coins were issued. And so the people that found Bitcoin very early had this enormous incentive to keep things the way they are, to not let things change too much. And so there's this hyper individualist bent going through Bitcoin. And again, I can speak to this because I was also there for many years. And these things result to this zero-sum community dynamics. And if you want to know what I mean, go take a trip to Bitcoin Twitter and see what a uncharitable, inhospitable place with low-quality discourse that is. They've literally been having the same conversations for the last seven years, as long as I've been paying attention. And so this all results in this overall resistance to change. So without the will to change on the social layer, like to convince the necroprimitivist priesthood developers, the minor oligopolists who control the resources, the hash rate, nothing is possible. Like you need the buy-in of these two stakeholders to make anything happen. And the economic side and the user side, well, apparently they're involved somehow, but that signaling is very coarse and very informal, I would say is just restricted to who shouts the loudest on Twitter. And so this kind of so-called intersubjective consensus between users and the developers and the miners is what's meant to reinforce the trajectory of Bitcoin. But I would argue that this is a new form of theater that has replaced decentralization theater. And the signaling ground of Twitter has become a new theater for battlegrounds. In fact, I think it's been like this for years. So what's a necroprimitivist? I think you might still be looking at one. So here's me 18 months ago, moderating a panel at one of the premier technical Bitcoin conferences on economic and social risks and standing sitting beside me was the technical editor of Bitcoin magazine, Aaron Franfield. And we were both calling out the cultish nature of the Bitcoin community to their faces, not just only to their community at large. We're talking about the kind of VIP community of Bitcoin, people that go to all the conferences that speak all these things that have 10 to a million, 10,000 to a million followers on Twitter, the thought leaders of Bitcoin. And they were laughing it up, laughing and probably you can find this talk online if you so choose. And more recently, you can see I'm, as a screenshot from another talk I gave a not so long ago where I was running and founded and edited a journal called the Crypto Economic Systems, which was based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory at the Digital Current Initiative. So I've been sweeping quite a few interesting flaws, meeting a lot of these interesting people that are very close to these networks that have a great deal of social, technical and economic gravitas within these networks of networks. So let's talk about swans. So people always like to talk about black swans. And I've heard people say that Bitcoin is a black swan generator, a black swan tractor. It's always spitting out these crazy event based externalities. And I would argue that you could think of Bitcoin as a black swan, but more like a thermodynamic one. But let's talk about this white spawn hypothesis, which a lot of people have spoken about, myself included. I had to go through some very embarrassing older talks to dredge out my arguments as to the incentives that Bitcoin might provide towards the development of cleaner and greener energy. And on the screen is another card. And there's a quotation there about like, who's skin is in the game? And so obviously the black swan is a is a Taleb aphorism and title of a book. And so skin in the game. So the idea of skin in the game being like incentives are correlated to disincentives. So like, you know, you have to have something at stake in order to reliably be signaling your truth of your intentions. And so we're talking a while ago in the trust discord about conspiracy theories and cults and movements and what the differences might be between these things. And this person will seem to have said the difference between a movement and a cult is whether the skin in the game is your own in others. And that's something I want to impress upon you, because some of the people in the stakeholder ecosystem of Bitcoin do have some skin in the game. And some of them don't. But that is not necessarily correlated with who holds sway, whether explicit or implicit. And that's something that's very important to note. So we spoke about thermodynamics and this incentive mechanism for the lottery and that this feedback mechanism that regulates the difficulty is the only sense of connection in Bitcoin. And because the subsidy, the amount of coins that a miner gets for finding the winning the lottery every block, it's halving on this predetermined schedule over four years. There is this incentive double jeopardy that as the a number of coins become scarcer and scarcer, the amount of energy required to defend the network becomes greater and greater and greater. And this, you know, it's no, it's just kind of like a game of chicken. And so we don't know who blinks first or, you know, what happens when these two things crash into each other. And so we used to talk about Bitcoin as being a way to make payments. And this was a form of a fast and cheap and facile value transfer. And we had to walk back on that one because the transaction has gone expensive. Turns out space in the blockchain to confirm the transaction is a precious resource and people were willing to pay quite a lot for that. And so they became this rise of this narrative shift. There's a lot of Schwartz and others have discussed since 2013 of digital metalism. You could think of Bitcoin as digital gold. You've probably heard about this analogy. And you could think of this as an ideology. This is like a computational ideology. And we mentioned Columbia earlier, going to read a little bit from a quote of his from the Cultural Logic of Computation on the card. Computationalism underwrites and reinforces a surprisingly traditionalist conception of human being society and politics. In other registers, we might imagine these views to have long been abandoned in large part because their faults as part of the total account of human being have long and go demonstrate been long ago demonstrated conclusively. And so because Bitcoin has this inability to mitigate or even have awareness of its externalities, and because there is no alternative, there is no other consensus mechanism that has been proven at scale computationally and economically is there no alternative to Margaret? We live in hope. I've been waiting for proof for Ethereum to move away from proof of work since it was first announced in 2014. Still waiting. So we often hear this and I've often said these things myself in times gone by. Solar energy and wind will save Bitcoin. The shattered aluminium plants next to three quarters dam hydro outlets will save Bitcoin. The green indexes say that most of the energy in Bitcoin is sustainable and renewable. Well, you know, I know the people that wrote these reports, people like Chris Bendingston and Michelle Rouse, and a lot of these reports are reliant on self-reporting. Self-reporting is susceptible to good heart's law, which means that, you know, people may not report honestly, they may report for their interests rather than to report altruistically. And then, you know, where do things like uranium and biomass come into all of this? Like we've been researching chemical industry externalities of trust in recent times. And a lot of the time people talk about biomass as a renewable energy. So one of my colleagues used to develop power management algorithms at the Drax family power stations in the UK. And one of the things that they do is they do lots of renewable energy, but one of their renewable energies is wood biomass. It's processed wood that they chop up, then burn, and they plant some more trees. Does that sound green to you? I think they just do it so they can burn, they can use coal plants to burn stuff. Excuse me. You also have to remember that there are embodied costs to all of these things, like solar panels. The silicon has to come from somewhere. The exotic materials, the photovoltaics have to come from somewhere. I have a PhD in photovoltaic technology. I watched the solar panel industry and technology develop at that same time that I was doing my research. We are still not there yet. There is only a marginal benefit of running solar panels that we have today when we do these life cycle analysis. Maybe one day we'll be making solar panels out of graphene, or some other kind of cheaper reproducible material that has minimal externalities. But until we get there, this is still problematic. And one of the worst things about Bitcoin, this is kind of like part of the very foundation of the House of cards that Bitcoin is built on, in terms of centralization anyway, is that there are only a handful of places you can actually fabricate semiconductors, silicon wafers to make computing chips. And so Bitcoin requires specialized computing chips. There is this enormous arms race due to these incentives to create a more efficient and, you know, more performant, more energy efficient and more performant efficient mining chips for these application specific integrated circuits, ASICs, the Bitcoin mining machines that create these gigantic farms next to these hydro plants and wherever. There's only a handful of these plants in the world. Making one is very hard. You require a great deal of capital and a great deal of know-how. I know people that used to work on silicon fabrication is extremely, as a business with extremely high barriers to entry. And so the problem here is, if you want to make Bitcoin mining chip, you need to have a friend at one of these places that will let you get your production batch in the queue among the Sony's and the apples of this world, Samsung's of this world. It's very difficult to do. So let's talk more about this white swan. So mining energy costs are mostly paid in fiat. The miners have to pay to win these Bitcoin rewards. It's mostly denominated in yuan or dollars or pounds or euros. So the token price, the price of Bitcoin, matters. Every time the price of Bitcoin goes up, the price on Bitcoin's head from this kind of bounty that we discussed earlier, and also the incentives to defend the network against the 51% attacks against honest attacks compliant in the protocol, must increase, must put more energy into this thing to keep it safe. It becomes more valuable, makes sense, right? And so here's a quote from an old paper which tries to describe the value of a Bitcoin solely internal to the system. Okay. Considering the functionality of the Bitcoin network, the current value of one Bitcoin may be understood implicitly as the value of 150 seconds of the computational resource directed at defending the network from thermodynamic attacks and providing a high probability of assurance that the integrity of the chronicle ledger will continue to be maintained. Okay. So and let's wrap up now by taking this to the kind of logical endpoint. So if Bitcoin is this black hole and it wants to suck all the energy out of, you know, where as far as it can see to its event horizon, where is that? So there are these things in the universe that we call kind of constants and natural laws, whether they're constant, whether the natural laws is another matter. In fact, the most interesting scientific talk I ever saw during my tenure as a physicist and chemist was by John A. Pope III, Nobel Prize winner, which was called is chemistry a branch of pure mathematics where he took apart every single natural law and fundamental constant that people would shout out from the from the lecture theater armed with only a sharpie and a piece of transparent plastic on overhead projector. So the light from the sun takes eight and a half minutes to reach earth at the near enough the speed of light that is an upper limit or an asymptote at least in our side of the veil. And so that's kind of like a hard limit of how far Bitcoin can go, like to the sun, basically, like, imagine a circular radius from the earth, the sun and other side towards Mars. But because of the way the lottery works, every second you move away from the economic central gravity of Bitcoin, you're hamstringing yourself and this race against the other miners that are close to the central gravity. Think about how high frequency trading works. People built computer exchanges next to the Chicago mercantile exchange so that they could shave milliseconds off their trading times and jump in before other people. And so this is what would happen in this thermodynamic lottery. If you even went just a few seconds away to the moon, you would be at disadvantage compared to everybody else. It's usually on a matter of seconds, the winning block versus another one. And so unless so much hash power is deployed off earth that the center of economic gravity of Bitcoin moves also off earth, I don't see how the network is constrained by the current parameters, things like the 10-minute block time and so on. And so Bitcoin mining in space, maybe nearby, maybe we can make a death star, like maybe Bitcoin could be the death star. And so we all talk about Dyson spheres and cold fusion and all these kinds of things. Sounds great, but like the planet is burning now and Bitcoin is trying to suck all the air out of the room now. So even with all these things, it will still be a brute force thermodynamic arms race. Bitcoin requires a simple majority of all of the energy that it can see in order to know that it's in order to be secure, doesn't know that it's secure, but in order to be secure. And so it just wants to suck all the energy out of the room. And so the TLDR here is that Bitcoin as this, you know, putative form of artificial life, if you believe or agree with Ralph Merkle, Bitcoin is in competition with natural life for the harvestable energy this side of the sun. And that means that in effect, Bitcoin, it's not artificial life, it's artificial death. It's trying to suck all the oxygen out of the room or the photons out of the room or the energy out of the room so that it may prosper and survive. And it doesn't care, it can't care about you, it can't care about me, it can't care about us, it can't care about our planet. And so this is the where I'm going to wrap up this latest stage, the latest interim state of Zero X Salon topic number five, the indifference engine research. I hope it hasn't been too scatty and disorganized. I had very little time to prepare this. And I hope that you can join me for Q&A after the talk now. And so thanks very much for listening. This is a archive picture of me sweeping some floors. And I work at the Zero X Salon, which is an informal research collective approaching unusual topics with post-disciplinary activities involving discourse, art, and writing. If you'd like to know more about the Zero X Salon, please visit 0xsalon.pubub.org. And thanks very much for your time. Yeah, Wacim, that was an amazing talk. And really, really heartwarming to see how things are evolving for you in the last couple of months. You sure? You've been there with me on this journey, Eric. Yeah, like a year ago, when we had this discussion back at Trust, I was trying to poke through some ecological perspective, trying to address this relation between the ecological and the economical. And I really appreciate the trajectory that you're taking. I think I let my thermodynamic defences down between now and then. And it's lovely that it comes right after Christine's talk. I mean, Eugenio, my talk, I changed the topic. I adapted it so that it fits ecologically. Christine and Wacim's talk, but it's like what I'm going to present is kind of a very close resonance to what Wacim is discussing. So maybe we should get a few questions from the audience before I step in. Yeah, I think the audience had just a lot of comments. Maybe now some of them are coming. I felt like a lot of them were more kind of polemic comments rather than things that we can discuss in detail. But hey, there are new stuff. Okay, here's one that I think might be interesting. It says that actually making Bitcoin CO2 neutral would be very cheap. Half a percent of the value at a very conservative estimation. And I mean, that might be true, actually. It might be quite cheap to green Bitcoin. But the problem is because Bitcoin is not sensitive to the energy that's going into it, as we discussed. How would you know? And so like all it takes is another kind of a marginal step down of some other non-green form of energy. And that would re-enter the mix just because of this kind of rational energy market that we mostly find ourselves with. Bitcoin is seeking the cheapest energy and it doesn't really care what it is. Satoshi, you are still polluting the planet with heat. You are still responsible. Now, this is an interesting point that we came to at the salon when we talked about algorithmic realism, which is like, you're a developer, you write some code, you put it on the web or GitHub or whatever and then you disappear. You might die. You left the planet and somebody else implements your code or puts your code in somewhere at something else. You're still responsible for what people use it for. Like, so Satoshi writes some code and then Satoshi implemented a network and then disappeared. Are they still responsible? It's an interesting question. I think there's a Daniel S. Sounds familiar. Thanks for the talk, Crypto Will Hunting. Do you see a possibility of decoupling Bitcoin's value from its energy usage? This is actually a really interesting question. Thanks Daniel. And it actually seems to be a similar question to the one that goes around in the degrowth world, which Christine will be very familiar with on the decoupling of economic prosperity and energy consumption. And it's actually kind of almost the same thing that we're grappling with here. And the real question with Bitcoin, the way it works now, I don't think so. I don't think that's possible. I think the energy draining out of the system will be accompanied by a loss of confidence in the security of the system. And unless there's some other way of arranging or connecting the cryptographic and the economic aspect of Bitcoin together, I just don't see how we're going to do that. Yeah, Christine, what about decoupling? What's your official or unofficial take on decoupling? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, like I touched upon in the talk, we have achieved relative decoupling like we obviously energy has become more energy efficient. But the thing is, like we're still aiming towards like absolute GDP growth. So that means material throughput and often energy itself also labels simply consumption will continue to rise regardless of how efficient we're being because we're demanding like ever more energy. So yeah, then people are arguing that like sufficient absolute decoupling is possible. But many people in the ecological sector argue against that because simply because we don't have enough time and we need to act now on climate change mitigation. So the simplest way to do that would be to lower like energy usage itself. And because we're quite wasteful with it anyways. So I guess my personal opinion about Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies that use energy or it's maybe just like a bit of a challenge is like, I don't consider something innovative, unless it's ecological. So I don't consider proof of work innovative at all, like through the lens through my extremely biased lens. But I think that's just like maybe that's just a provocation. That's a good provocation, Christine. What I might counter with is say that if proof of work may not be ecologically valuable, as it is, but it may provide a way forward to something that does have an ecological value in a bit of sense. I just think it's like, it's pretty disappointing because when it was developed, like we were, you know, we were well aware of these environmental issues. So I just feel like at this at this in this day and age, like if you're going to call your your work innovative, like it has to be aligned with civilizational longevity, you know, and it's just and that's my like very strong opinion about it. But also like with Bitcoin, I don't know too much about it, but isn't like the majority of the wealth also held in very few hands, like it kind of is nearing the wealth disparity in society as is. And I also like, you know, propose people think on that metric and really, really think about whether or not this is going the direction we want it to go. If it's a response to 2008-2009 recession, it shouldn't be containing external, you know, ecological externalities. It's not radical then, right? Like, yeah, there's a big, there's a big difference between where we where the network was intended to go and do and achieve and the kind of grand vision of that and what it has achieved. So it's achieved more than its minimal promise, but it's fallen far short of its maximum promise. So this was meant to be something very egalitarian, one CPU, one vote, like a computer democracy, a machine democracy. What we ended up with is a machine, oligopoly, a machine cartel, that the industrialization of the mining wasn't foreseen originally. And so there weren't any fail sets put in to mitigate against centralization and, and the coalescence of power in that way. The developer priesthood, which we talked about, I think that Satoshi would have been blind to that because Satoshi was one. Like, so this is something that was created in the person's image to perpetuate, you know, small cadre of expert wizard people. And in terms of Agosh Babovi, in terms of the ecology, I mean, people always shift the boundaries, shift the goalposts as the expectations and the reality diverge more from the Bitcoin we wish we had and the Bitcoin we ended up with. And at some point, people have to kind of take stock of the situation. This is kind of what I'm doing with this talk. Like I was one of these people banging the drums saying that the cost was worth it. All of this energy was worth it to have a stateless value transfer system. But now I'm looking around and thinking, this is pretty high cost and it's increasing very rapidly. Look outside and the externalities seem to be piling up. And so at some point, you have to make that value judgment. And every person has to do that for themselves. I'm just trying to tell my story of how I did that and how it tips from one side to the other. But I can totally see, Christine, why this was never a contest for you, because you've probably had like some fairly rock solid values all the way through, whereas I was on the side of the machines before. So I'm coming over to Deep Human now. Plus she's Canadian. Yeah, cool. Do you have some other question here that you want to pick up? There was one, wasn't there? Where was it? If over here, we can do this one. If the whole Bitcoin mine community was listening to you right now, where was it? Yeah. Oh, what would you suggest to them to reduce the ecological impact of Bitcoin mining? Well, I mean, like again, like coming back to Christine's talk, discourse and discussion is the most important thing. So what happens now is a lot of kind of greenwashing where people in the Bitcoin mining industry are always saying, we use mostly green energy. It's mostly from dams and solar and blah, blah, blah. So I really, the first, we have to start with an honest debate about what's going on here. But it's kind of what we're trying to do with the salon and with this provocation. And the problem is most of the time when people bring this conversation to the Bitcoin community, they're coming from outside the community. So people are very skeptical of people coming from outside the Bitcoin community telling people how to fix Bitcoin, because that's been going on since the start. And so maybe it's possible if people from that have some statutes and familiarity and expertise with how Bitcoin works and what it does and the people around it might bring up these points that we might be able to have a more substantive discussion. And that's the starting point, I think, you know. Unfortunately, planet is burning while we wait to start these conversations. Yeah.