The Bitcoin Brain with Tomer Strolight

 
 

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“Everything in the system is self-regulating and self-adjusting, and it’s decentralised and autonomous, and we can see these phenomena much better in nature than we can in human-made entities; Bitcoin is a lot more like an organism than it is like a company or like a government.”
— Tomer Strolight

SHOW DESCRIPTION

Location: Remote
Date: Sunday 28th November
Project: tomerstrolight.medium.com
Role: Writer

The modern capitalist system is based on centralised and hierarchical structures of control. Bitcoin is a divergent innovation, structured to be decentralised. Progress is made through consensus, which forgoes the need to know or trust any of the parties involved.

This can be an anathema to some people who are introduced to Bitcoin. They can not conceptualise how such a system can operate. This is partly because there has not been a great history of decentralised governance systems in modern societies. 

Part of the issue may also be how people conceptualise Bitcoin. Trying to frame it around man-made systems may be a fool's errand.

Is it better to compare it to less understood yet ubiquitous biological systems, specifically the human brain?

In this interview, I talk to Bitcoin writer Tomer Strolight. We discuss how Bitcoin is analogous to the human brain, the organisation of decentralised systems, and the emergent nature of consciousness.

TIMESTAMPS

00:03:35: Introductions
00:06:32: The Brain and the Bitcoin ecosystem
00:10:50: The evolution of consciousness
00:19:45: How the brain works
00:28:32: Myelination and feedback loops
00:31:50: Neural networks
00:34:41: Background to Tomer's thesis
00:38:51: How Bitcoin functions align with brain functions
00:58:36: Explaining decentralisation
01:01:50: Discovering macro-organisms
01:06:10: Bitcoin is Generational Wealth, film by Tomer
01:07:59: Final comments

 

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SHOW NOTES

PodcastPeter McCormack