There is no spoon
My only conclusion can be that neither price nor hash rate matters. Interest in the currency to transact with and hold as savings is what matters. Like other social networks (religion, language, government, Facebook) the network is given power through initial rules that many people agree on. This is why it always comes back to "the technology". Because ultimately that's all there is to it - the rules we agree to transact by.
All things must be derived from that singular principle: these are mathematical rules that (if adopted) would suit a large number of intelligences - therefore
I (speaking of myself) will adopt them and encourage others to adopt them as well. These rules are not necessarily the best rules for every given situation, but they make great sense given our current circumstances. Additionally, if we can agree on a set of mathematical rules to
change these rules, that will make the entire 'system' all the more powerful.
Indeed, further abstraction actually creates a stronger product.
For example, US based representative democracy flourished not only because the laws themselves could be changed, but also the *process* to change the laws could be changed (constitutional amendments).
I would venture that a large percentage of the world would still be Christians if every tenant of that faith could be updated through consensus mechanisms, including such things as belief in the Bible or belief in any sort of divinity at all.
Wow....
a sort of epiphany here. A shared social protocol of any type is extremely valuable because it gives intelligences (and I use that to refer to inevitable co-existence of humans and AI) a way to meaningfully transact with each other. However the protocol always breaks down once new realities conflict with the unyielding
rigidity of the system. Monarchy collapsed because the people needed a system that defied the right of the King to rule... since the system could not keep up, it had to be destroyed and rebuilt. Similarly, representative democracy has been remarkably resilient over history (
even though it's only been a few hundred years, consider a logarithmic time scale and that those hundreds of years represented the equivalent to eons of development) specifically because it includes many consensus mechanisms to update itself to respond to the changing needs of the populace. English has done the same, despite the letters forming a rigid backbone. If there should ever come a time when society has need of more than 26 letters to represent complex concepts, English will be abandoned.
Gold is on its last legs by this reasoning because the rigidity of its need to exist as a physical quantity has forced other systems to overthrow it.
Bitcoin will meet the same fate unless it institutes protocols to change itself to meet different demands of both scale and populace, possibly radically. Monero too will meet this fate unless we commit that we will change the ledger as necessary to meet the changing needs of reality.
With all social systems, it's the network that's important, not the specific rules. Great expenditure is needed to break and reform an existing network, whether it be social, financial, or governmental. Far better that protocol includes mechanisms within that allow it to reshape itself without being broken and remade.
Eventually all such networks may combine into one network, of pure energy. This might take a long time to achieve though, as it would require total cooperation (
or is it total competition?) from all conceivable participants. Indeed, the universe itself may be a singularity of one such network that achieved perfect consensus, that consensus being the laws of physics themselves. Perhaps there is some truth after all to our entire universe being one big quantum 'blockchain' that is constantly trying to solve for the next acceptable 'solution'.
Or perhaps it's the opposite... matter and energy have agreed to these principals we find ourselves 'trapped' in and there will come a time when that consensus to the laws of physics (
to be bound by the speed of light, to equally abide by gravity, etc.) will no longer serve the needs of reality. At that point, it will come time to break that
even this consensus and update it. Perhaps this is the definition (
ultimate goal?) of an intelligence singularity: when the contents of a protocol become so aware of the protocol itself they learn to break the protocol itself. This would be the equivalent of a hyper-advanced AI discovering how to reverse entropy or break the speed of light. Once one set of protocols that you exist within can be broken, it logically follows that all others will be broken all the way up the chain of reality. That truly is an event horizon because there's no way to understand what might happen after that.
Anyway, back on topic: it is important that if we want Monero to be resilient that we not only launch with the best technology *now* but also include several layers (even if they are social, and not explicitly mathematical) that allow us to update that technology as needed, and even update the
way we agree to update the technology (sorry, a few social derivatives in play there).
Only now can I really see what the creator of this video truly meant:
https://youtu.be/QH2-TGUlwu4?t=3s
