Bloktopia

I remember visiting the font where my father was baptised in Dublin, not far form the Guinness brewery. The small alcove where he would have waved his arms and legs and wailed his fresh lungs was my first bookend of his life, a life that started in a local tenement, the passion of poverty, the frailty of humans, moving within the wild waves of other people’s wishes.

I have long been fascinated, by the way differing cultures attempt to pass on their ideas about how the carpet of life is woven. Some literally do make rugs, a visual representation of the passion that starts our fire burning. Mosque walls describe the building blocks that become us, Sufi dances are physical tales, I have slept on the floor of a shiva temple, walked the tale of the Ramayana, learned lessons because there are lessons in these places to be learned.

There are old ways of describing life that I have grown to believe are very accurate. If we sit and look at the wonderful designs on the wall of a mosque, we can see a visualisation of the movement of our cells, or the way we move through life. We are a collection of iterations that we share with all things, but somehow, we create ourselves within these things, moving within the waves of something else’s wishes.  

It wouldn’t be hard to fathom that we have a new life when we think of the internet. Some people suggest that the nature of storage resembles a neural network, but this new life was missing something. Permanence. Not so long ago this was corrected when Nakamoto sent 10 Bitcoins to Hal Finney. The Blockchain created a sense of permanence that didn’t exist in the world wide web, not because we can’t store the web in a similar way that we can store the blockchain, but because the very idea of the Blockchain IS permanence and in this sense, ideas do matter.

There are, however, many types of structure that can be built on the blockchain. I would suggest that we have all the parts of an animal being mapped out, the bits and pieces that mean something can function. The blockchain gives all this permanence and perhaps it will be the role of humans to help give it sentience.

The question is where do we, us weak and feeble bodied people, fit into this.

Personally, I have been through quite a process when it comes to The Blockchain because there are many lessons to be learned, lessons about how we conduct ourselves, how patience can be a virtue, how we can be undone whilst sailing our ship on digital waves. But one thing I do believe is that we are on the edge of a massive voyage, the question being do we stay on the ship, or not.

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