Bit & Coin
Merging Digitality and Physicality
Volume I
Digital Humanity’s Truth Layer Blockchain
The New Internet, its Authenticity Layer, and Applications
Order on Amazon
Volume II
Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Beyond
Essays of Science, Economics, Law, Ethics, and Controversies
(coming soon)
ZeMing M. Gao
Introduction
This book is both a diagnosis and prescription for the prevention and cure of the growing digital cancer that threatens humanity.
Humanity is already submerged in the digitalization of information. This massive change brings many conveniences, but also generates many significant problems, including:
(1) The management of digital information is increasingly under control by a strong aggregating force of the ‘centralized database gravitational field,’ leading to extreme centralization of information. As a result, information becomes an object of exploitation and manipulation by oligarchs. People are exploited and used without their knowledge, which is both sad and pitiful.
(2) The global economy has begun to gradually degenerate from a relatively free form of capitalism into a digital feudal system (typified by ‘digital landlords’ at the Valley), and may even further degenerate into an information slavery system.
(3) Although human cognition is becoming more and more closely connected with an increasingly large number of information sources, it is ironically becoming increasingly isolated from factual truth. This has progressed so badly that it starts to create confusion, challenges, and destruction in people’s understanding of the most basic truth and facts. If one day all information can be falsified, the consequence will be that, even if only a minority of information is actually falsified, people lose confidence in all information because they are forced to assume that nothing can be trusted.
But this is only one side of the coin, or one blade of a pair of scissors. When nothing can be trusted as objective reality, people will start to believe and act upon anything they want to believe based on subjective imaginations. Humanity will not only lack truth but will no longer believe in truth. This will be full-blown digital cancer that kills true humanity.
(4) The real blockchain technology is an epoch-making technology to solve these significant problems. Unfortunately, in the past decade or so, the world has suffered pervert developments in the disguise of a brave ‘monetary rebellion’. The real blockchain technology has been overshadowed and replaced by a large-scale cryptocurrency speculation campaign. This outright corruption has introduced much harm and no benefit to society. It has brought no technological progress, no economic growth, and no productivity improvement. It has polluted the market, the media, public opinion, and even the government.
The world needs a real solution
The world needs the truth. The world also needs solutions. Facing the threat of cancerous digital deterioration, real solutions are not nice-to-have options, but existential.
And solutions are what the real Bitcoin of Satoshi provides.
Satoshi may have died, but he may rise again with his creation. It is not about symbolism but real solutions. It is in the solutions that the seemingly tragic irony of Satoshi defeating himself turns into an allegorical path from suffering to glory.
The solution is a New Internet integrating IPv6 with a scalable universal blockchain according to Satoshi’s vision. The New Internet has a Truth Layer anchored on reality to provide Universal Single Source of Truth (USSoT) and define a sustainable atmosphere of digital humanity.
The solution is automated micropayments that enable decentralized human-capitalism (DHC) to resist the death of both centralized socialism and oligarchized capitalism. It optimizes human capital participation, incentivizes creativity and productivity, and ensures natural and fair distribution.
My book describes such a future. It introduces technological, economic, business, and legal solutions. It extends a calling to all honest entrepreneurs, investors, developers, business people, economists, and other professionals to find real solutions and devote at least a part of your effort to making them a reality.
Meanwhile, the book aims to cast down the superstition and idolatry in the cryptoverse, to persuade readers away from pure financial speculations, and to guide them towards ideas and development directions that are productive and have sound technological and economic foundations.
The book may cause some readers displeasure or even antagonism. I plead for a more open-minded reading without regard to pre-existing vested interests. But I am willing to pay a price. To gain an informed reader, I reckon it is worth making myself unpopular to a few others.