Science and technology by Bill Bain

The Herald:

THE BITCOIN DELUSION

IN quantum physics, everything we see can simultaneously exist and not exist. The building blocks of reality are held together by collective belief and lose any meaning without the input of you – the observer. Your brain making sense of random molecule congregations is the only thing that lends anything worth. Money works in a similar way.

Even the most Gordon Gecko-esque of capitalist speculators will agree that the world’s present trade system is a deeply peculiar and wildly complex societal mass delusion. The rocketing value of digital “currency” Bitcoin is just the latest evidence of money’s phantom essence, where perception creates truth.

To clarify, Bitcoin is a terrible currency. Online transactions currently take up to 15 minutes. In comparison, Apple Pay takes just half a second for Face ID to identify that big conk as yours and suck beer tokens out of your bank account. It’s certainly not an entity used widely for sharing funds.

At present, Bitcoin hoarders are simply investors. Just like the owners of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia, they wait for value to accrue – often sparked by media interest, which speculators then use as an arbiter of future worth. At least if you have Marilyn’s “Happy Birthday Mr President” dress it can be worn down the bingo. Bitcoin doesn’t exist physically, just in the minds of those who have it and those who want it.

The recent insane surge of Bitcoin – now 1,000 times its 2013 worth – is also almost certainly a nod towards the currency’s most dubious applications in cash laundering, Dark Web purchases and tax evasion. Righteousness is not “trending” at the moment.

Bitcoin doesn’t discriminate between ethical and immoral activities, but the people who put most faith in its worth often fail to recognise the difference. Speculators and financiers inflate bubbles like Bitcoin by fearfully encouraging its purchase – thus granting it false worth due to newfound scarcity. They then set the prices and continue to feed vampirically on the expended energy of the rest of us.

There’s certainly historical “previous” supporting this assumption. For nearly 3,000 years, the twin illusions of wealth and ownership have undoubtedly served to establish unshakable, unjust hierarchies of control across all the continents. They have also weighted one side of equality’s see-saw lower than a snake’s genitals. Lines have been drawn on maps, and these artificial territories then divided, bought, sold and rented out by people who “own” land which existed billions of years before they existed. Do they own it? Well, a piece of paper says they do.

This fractured, seething, paranoid planet is testament to the blinkered power of such faith – where ghosts like Bitcoin can be granted flesh by the power of an aggregated mindset. Another Frankenstein’s monster dreamed into existence by this form of hive-think is the world’s financial market itself, ruled by indices like the FTSE and Dow.

Picture global firms and corporations as bubbles in a kitchen sink, an expanding mass of growth, shrinkage and popping - with the blind trust between nations over currency values acting as the Fairy liquid. The hot water? Our collective belief that any of this actually exists.

This soapy mass, however, doesn’t keep peoples’ hands clean – far from it. These bubbles simply echo a warped funfair mirror version of “he said, she said”. The entire system is a chancer’s playground fuelled by suspicion, paranoia and fear.

If we then assume currency is a consensual delusion, it seems Bitcoin possesses the hypnotic dream-weaving moxie of Adolf Hitler. It’s clearly nothing but a balloon filled with the hot air of speculators and media hype – and you don’t need a degree in physics to know the inevitable consequences of full balloons. You’ll remember 2008 well – when the backside almost fell out of the planet’s entire economic system.

Perhaps its no coincidence that was the same year a mysterious – and still anonymous – figure called Satoshi Nakamoto, the Keyser Soze of the internet – birthed Bitcoin, proclaiming it as a new way to trade. Only 21 million Bitcoins would ever exist, he said – leaving it impermeable to boom and bust like the capitalist free market.

So fancy a piece of that easy money yourself? There are two main ways to get your grubby mitts on Bitcoin – the first is buying a ridiculously expensive industrial super-computer that could print out the entire universe in an half an hour. These machines are used to “mine” Bitcoins, which is the process of solving the incomprehensibly complex cryptography that validates transactions – stopping any possibility of theft or Bitcoin duplication. The “miner” is then paid in the crypto-currency, depending on how many transactions they authenticated. They are the only working miners left in Britain.

The second way is to simply buy some from a trader. Once you’ve set up your online wallet, you’re ready to add some Bitcoins. Right now, a single Bitcoin costs £1,500, but wait before cutting out your spare kidney. Bitcoins are infinitely divisible, so you can lay off the bevvy for a day and buy £10 worth, which is about 0.005 Bitcoins.

Although Bitcoin is not yet a viable form of currency, its existence is built on top of a potentially transformative – and ingeniously simple – philosophy which allows a democracy of administrative workers to police the entire system for reward. Perhaps, in the end, these “miners” will have the last laugh as the collective illusion of Thatcher’s free market inevitably shatters.

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LAST MINER IN WALES DIGS FOR £74m

THINK you’ve had a rubbish week? Not compared to IT footer-abouterer James Howells from the Welsh town of Newport.

The IT worker’s plight is a delicious slice of schadenfreude for anyone who has ever been ordered to switch their work machine off and on to fix it.

A few years ago, Howells chucked away an old laptop after spending his ill-gotten gains on the latest shiny-shiny fool’s gold from Apple. Or not. What actually happened is shrouded in speculation, but what we do know is that his computer ended up in the bin. Along with a hard-drive worth £74 million.

It seems Howells had been snapping up Bitcoin years before anyone pretended they knew what it was – buying it with pocket change that wouldn’t even have got you a Highland toffee or chocolate banana back in the day.

True to his Welsh working-class heritage, this computer whizz had also been “mining” for Bitcoin. This means he had a lot of the currency – but his problem was that it can only be verified on the particular hard-drive used to mine it.

So, when the price of Bitcoin rocketed this week, Howells should really have been worth enough cash to afford the new iPhone X. “Doh!” doesn’t quite cover it. Perhaps throwing oneself off the Severn is the only way to silence that kind of pain.

But unless it involves a crashed computer program, Howells is not one for quitting.

Historically, the powers that be have been unsympathetic towards the plight of miners and things still haven’t changed in 2017. Newport council refused permission for Howells to pull on his old jeans and snorkel down into their mountainous landfill’s depths. This is despite his – somewhat dubious – claim that he could mathematically pinpoint the laptop’s exact depth based on the date it was thrown away. If his calculation works, it’s an equation that could also solve all the mysteries of physics, so perhaps he should share it.

Using my own super-equation to estimate the biodegradable qualities of Newport’s waste output over the past five years, I can confirm all Howells has to do is wait 3,158 years for the dump to rot away and expose his old laptop like a diamond in coal.

His Bitcoin might be worth billions by then. It’s a shame the AI machines that will soon inherit the Earth may be the ones to recover that laptop. Without any financial impetus, perhaps they’ll bestow it with pride of place in a museum dedicated to the ruinous, wasteful folly of their long-extinct makers.