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@ p2p fiat
2023-09-06 11:44:08[originally posted on Substack in December 2022]
Knowledge is like fire - when you spread it, it becomes stronger. When something has been invented it most often cannot be disinvented or uninvented - historians may know a few exceptions - innovations that were lost when societies disappeared.
The leading protocols for digital information exchange are TCP and UDP over IP. Since their inventions in 1974 and 1980, these protocols have become the basis for the internet. The internet protocols are maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), founded in 1986, the standards development organization (SDO) for the Internet - on the basis of the RFC process.
To participate in the IP world, one needs an IP address. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocates IP addresses. The IP, TCP and UDP protocols are a public infrastructure. Governments do not dictate the construction of the protocol - although they may regulate its use, for example internet neutrality - non-discrimination of IP packets by internet providers - is a typical element that has been debated in terms of regulation. That regulation applies to internet service providers.
The (only?) decentralised p2p currency protocol has been published as open source code in 2009. The protocol is public infrastructure for the digital transfer of value without trusted intermediaries. The p2p currency protocol is maintained by a decentralised group of developers who interact through the bitcoin-dev mailing list and contribute code to a GitHub repository on the basis of Bitcoin Improvement Proposals - BIPs.
Similar to requiring an IP address and an HTML page to be able to participate to the internet TCP/IP protocol, one needs the ability to sign transactions with the value equalling the value one looks to transfer. That implies that there is some digital asset that represents the value that is transferred.
In the ideal world, that asset can be easily converted on both sides of the value transfer - in the same way as a browser or printer can reproduce the information that was transferred over TCP/IP.
Beyond acting as “transfer value” - solely used for transferring value - the digital asset has also obtained value in itself, based on consensus of many users. Not everyone recognises the value of that digital asset, and that is fine.
The bitcoin protocol is indeed what it is - a protocol - public infrastructure for the digital transfer of value, like the TCP/IP protocol is public infrastructure for the digital transfer of information. Both protocols are public infrastructure at the service of humanity.
In that context, it is maybe time to change the narrative from “blockchain not bitcoin” to “the protocol not the asset”.
[addition September 6, 2023] Adding to the point on "bitcoin not blockchain" - blockchain is the worst part of the bitcoin protocol - and active efforts are being made to take blockchain out of the bitcoin protocol, as Maxim Orlovsky explained at the Baltic Honeybadger conference - video here.