At the beginning of 2023, there was a big commotion among bitcoiners, especially the maximalists who were concerned about the appearance of the Ordinals protocol and mounted on it, the BRC-20 tokens. Bitcoin Ordinals allow each transaction that occurs on the Bitcoin blockchain to be assigned an ordinal number, based on the order in which the transaction was included in the blockchain, thus allowing a user to embed data unrelated to the transfer of Bitcoin, in a Bitcoin transaction. In other words, with the Ordinals protocol, NFT-type digital collectibles can be created on the Bitcoin blockchain, which can then be easily accessed and transferred, thus creating a very powerful tool for the operation of decentralized digital assets. We all know about the strength of the Bitcoin blockchain in terms of permissionless, trustless, and censorship resistance. For its part, the uses the Ordinals protocol to create standard fungible tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing a user to write JSON to each satoshi (sat) to create tokens that can be traded as usual. PEPE, very famous in recent times, was born as a BRC-20 token.
It?s true that the Ordinals protocol changes the main motivation of Satoshi Nakamoto's White Paper quite a bit, and that it also caused an increase in transaction fees that we were not used to, but I do not see cause for concern, rather, it seems that an incredible environment is being created for the mental decentralization of the planet. Firstly, I strongly reject any approach to conservatism, maximalism, and fear of change, and secondly, out of conviction, it seems to me that Ordinals and BRC-20 could be the starting point to achieve a "science" and an "education" for the new digital age called Web3 for the moment.
I do not understand the fear of the appearance of Ordinals, after all, Satoshi Nakamoto gave us the creation of a new vessel similar to a train (Bitcoin) and in turn, he also gave us the rails on which this train must move (blockchain). One would not do without the other. So Bitcoin can continue to operate with extreme strength and confidence, while we can, in turn, take advantage of the train rails to set up, among many other things, learning spaces without censorship, without structures determined by state educational authorities, and without guiding the careers that each individual should study to satisfy the meat grinder.
Humanity started a new era in 2009, the era towards decentralization. It all started with a seed that is serving to decentralize money. But it would be very myopic to think that only money is going to be decentralized.
previous post, I referred to the possibilities of having a decentralized “science”, and how that would break the current system of power that corporations have set up using science as a tool. In this post, I am going to refer to how a decentralized educational system could be achieved in perfect anarchy, which allows the individual to study for himself/herself and for the mutual in which he/she works, and not in a career that puts him/her at the service of the establishment.
But to understand the educational revolution that the cryptosphere and the Web3 can allow, let's first make a brief analysis of the current educational system, based on a structure that has not changed much in the last 1000 years. The need for education in the last 50 years has far exceeded the ignorance and ineffectiveness of the public and private bureaucrats who administer it.
We spend a lot of time criticizing inflation, the banking system, the hierarchical system that needs a State that distributes privileges among its feudal lords, and the international organizations in charge of indebting emerging countries so that they cannot compete in the theater of operations that they have come up with the name of “globalization”, and rarely do we think about where the people who are part of the staff of these capitalism’s monstrosities were trained.
It would not be possible to have genuflecting employees who blindly defend the system if they were not previously meticulously prepared in teaching plants, generically called colleges and universities, which act more as indoctrination centers than as forums for the transmission of knowledge and free thought development.
With great bombastic titles, the best-known universities attract their next sheep to train them in hierarchical pyramids, leadership, and empowerment, the blue ocean, the growth economy, globalization, the benefits of monetary control through a central authority, the development of professional careers in corporations (including the techniques of sawing the floor of the colleagues whose position we want), in the issuance of money as a "stimulus" to grow, and other delights that would take a whole year to analyze.
All rubbish.
It is no coincidence that a highly awarded professor in this system says that Bitcoin has an intrinsic value of zero. I'd love to see what he says next year, two years from now, and ten years from now. Let's hope that the corporations that pay him to say that keep depositing him into the account, because if they don't, he's going to have to find a decent job, and most likely he'll be paid in Bitcoin.
No school teaches happiness and well-being. They only teach to compete to be the best. Sure, teaching is one of the biggest businesses on the planet, and so incumbents compete on price, prestige, and supposedly excellent teachers. The reality is that schools are a den of corruption and transmission of codes that only serve those who go out to kill each other in a pitched battle called excessive richness. The more richness, the more successful the one who has it can demonstrate. The measure of success is an individual's richness. This is how the education of the capitalist system has transformed us, with the argument that we must grow patrimonially to be someone along the way.
The main schools that make meat grinder gears are very expensive, supposedly to demonstrate the value of the teaching that is imparted in their cloisters when in reality the price they charge their sheep is a simple marketing attribute that is used to attract the richest and get enough money from them before sending them to recover it in the corporations that are going to employ them for having obtained a diploma in that school.
International education systems set a time to “get a diploma”. In other words, one must go at the pace set by a bureaucrat on duty in an obscure ministry, which is encouraged by external powers to produce "professionals" as soon as possible, to replace the existing ones as they become obsolete in their positions. Once discarded, they will be incorporated by another lower-level company as scrap. This scheme is based on the fact that all people learn in the same way, at the same time, and with the same results. In other words, it is the standardization of education, just as the manufacture of a car or a refrigerator is standardized. All engineers must "pass" about 50 tests to obtain their diploma, that is, we fall into the absurdity that everyone must learn in the same way. Later, depending on the corporation that employs them, they will develop different capacities, but they will always be cogs in a machine, designed to increase the consumption of goods and services.
For more than 100 years, the ability to get rich has been directly related to the ability to study. This occurs because the concept of “studying” has been totally misrepresented. Studying, in the capitalist system, means buying a tool to be able to insert yourself inside a machine that provides the possibility of paying a mortgage, buying a car and fashion clothes, and traveling the world. Unfortunately, capitalism has also managed to standardize people's tastes, thanks to a very efficient mass media campaign that shows “successful” people in luxury hotels, driving sports cars, and living in spectacular houses. Those who study at very expensive universities also receive personalized information on luxury yachts, diamond necklaces, and astronomically priced perfumes.
Parents believe that their children are going to be someone if they are to obtain a diploma at a university. For the establishment, knowledge is power.
With these premises, colleges and universities are factories of serial professionals, who have taken their exams and are then prepared to compete. Taylor and Fayol's economy of scale scheme is reproduced in education. Someone prepares a "study program" with who knows what criteria, and on one side students enter and on the other, qualified professionals leave, after taking their exams, before the same juries that made the program. It sounds like a joke, but it's true. And worst of all, is that graduates believe they are graduates. Now they are available to corporations that want to use them for their work teams, and some of them will be professors at the universities where they studied.
Many universities disguise this process through research programs, post-doctoral fellowships, and supposed brainstorming events. The truth is that to be a professor at a university today it is necessary to have a PhD degree, which relatively few can access, either due to availability of time or money. In this way, there is a kind of business feedback between the universities and the corporations, forcing the individual to study for several years, paying large fees to the universities, so that later they can be employed by them or by the corporations. Knowledge loses value in this whole process. What is really important is to preserve the establishment, endorsing it through the supposed transmission of university knowledge.
It is ridiculous to observe that, in economic, financial, and business matters, the techniques of several centuries ago are still being taught. Today's students are told about classical economics, Keynesianism, or the need for a central entity to control the monetary issue. The most advanced can receive more modern theories such as that of the Austrian school (which wrote its assumptions with a world operating on the gold standard, something that no longer exists and will never exist). Passing on this knowledge is almost an insult in the digital age. That's why I say that, in the last 50 years, technology has passed over the bureaucrats who arrogate the right to design curricula. It's like teaching electronics students how to make candles to light up. Of course, these economics students then produce a "research paper" that is qualified as "excellent" by the same professors who educated them, and they receive a very prestigious award, granted by institutions that receive money from corporations interested in maintaining their status. Laureates become stars of wisdom and knowledge, and then it is logical that they say that the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is zero, because the reality is that they have no idea what a digital asset or a concept like decentralization is. They were educated with other codes, and cannot understand the new ones. Technology also passed over these gentlemen who boast the pride of knowledge from previous centuries.
I do not want to refer only to the universities as producers of sausages in series. Of course, the process begins much earlier, from primary and high school education. It’s implicitly understood that all children and adolescents are equal, therefore, they are all taught the same, at the same pace, and with the same books. They take the same exams regularly, and once the time that the bureaucrat on duty devised as optimal for them to finish their education has expired, they are thrown out into the street to function. Another sausage was produced. Another brick in the wall. Capitalism, socialism, and the planet, in general, have managed to standardize everything, including the education of their children, indoctrinated from their earliest childhood to serve the system.
How is this going to change?
Well, it's going to take decades, and why not centuries?
I believe that the generation that can set a course for decentralized humanity is being born these days.
What would a decentralized education look like?
Education must focus on the individual. Education must be based on health, well-being, and happiness, and must not be given in indoctrination centers such as universities. Education must be of the Master-Disciple type after the individual has received the necessary information to know how to read and write. Each master in a community may have several disciples, but not ideally many. A mutual learning relationship should be formed between them on the subject in question. Shoe manufacturers should strive to be efficient and excellent at making shoes for the community. The teacher looms large in this scheme as he/she strives to avoid competition and foster efficiency among his/her disciples. The concept of competing, in any case, is between industries or between the resources necessary to manufacture a product, but not between individuals because this would mean a return to capitalism, a secular scheme from which they are trying to get out with the concept of decentralization.
Education must be completely free for all individuals on the planet. Of course, this in anarchy does not make sense, because in anarchy there is no money, so everything is "free." (I wrote quite a bit about anarchy, you can see it here
Education cannot have a time horizon. It is eternal. Every day you learn something. The issue of studying a certain number of years is an invention of the system to produce a "link" in a certain time horizon in order to plan economies of scale.
Education must be available to all, not to the elites. Luckily, intelligence is widely distributed among human beings, and it cannot be the property of a few. The Master-Disciple scheme solves this problem. No teacher should be required to have a Ph.D. in order to teach. He/she only has to know how to teach, a gift that makes him/her a Master. You don't need universities to learn. Universities are factories, like car factories.
The teacher must show opposing ideas to the disciples, and let them elaborate on what they think is appropriate given a certain scenario and a space-time coordinate. He/she should not give a lecture, he/she should make ideas available and help and learn in the debate.
There must not be any type of university degree, or diploma. Those are labels of hierarchy and power. The days when it was necessary to have a degree and a diploma are fast passing. Now comes a new era in which the important thing is to know and not have a title that is useless. In the coming decades, we will see the disappearance of graduations, diplomas, and exams. There will only be learning.
What use are Bitcoin, Ordinals, and BRC20 in this process?
It is time that those of us who love decentralization begin to see the Bitcoin concept more broadly and with more perspective. According to the Ordinals theory, each satoshi (sat) acquires a uniqueness that can be used to preserve unique documents, such as a scientific discovery, a class on some topic, or an investigation on some subject, PRODUCED BY ITS OWN AUTHORS, not by employees of corporations and/or governments. By Masters. Each of these pieces of knowledge will be forever registered in the most secure blockchain that exists at the moment, which is the Bitcoin blockchain, or the one that replaces it if this is necessary. Thanks to the PoW consensus protocol and the energy that goes into making it operate, we have an immutable network like no other. The security of the Bitcoin blockchain is indisputable, and it may become the greatest repository of wisdom humanity has ever known, safe from corporate counterfeiters who twist scientific knowledge in their favor to increase shareholder profits, and also safe from bureaucrats designing curricula to produce bricks for the establishment's wall.
Each class, each paper, and each theory could be recorded as an ordinal, immutable in the Bitcoin chain. The individual will build their own study career and will not need a diploma to practice their profession. He/she will only have to show that he/she knows, and not a diploma. His/her job will be the one he/she likes, without a degree, without a diploma, without an exam. Your work will make you happy, because you will have collected first-hand information from those who recorded their knowledge on the blockchain, without going through editorials that "correct" their work, through the media that provide false information, or through States that claim the right to say what is to be studied, nor by corporations that hire scientists to design the science that is convenient for shareholders.
The individual will have at his/her disposal a gigantic amount of documents to oppose ideas, without having to resort to a central organization that tells him/her that in order to "know" he/she must comply with this series of requirements and this series of exams and then receive this diploma.
The individual will only need a Master and an Internet connection.
I am not a maximalist at all. Well, frankly speaking, actually, I'm a decentralization maximalist. I am not against Ordinals, I do not want to be in that battle that seems to me that it does not add and that, on the contrary, can take away a lot, even though I myself am somehow suffering from the gigantic increase in transaction fees on the chain.
We have already achieved an important step by raising the awareness of a large number of people who now know how they are robbed by banks and by governments through their central banks that print debt papers called fiat money. Having installed this theme is already a great triumph in itself, and it will only take some time until the mass adoption of internet money, with its advantages and its problems, but without dependence on bureaucrats and politicians.
Now it's time to put decentralization in perspective and realize that we can build a more equal world if we decentralize everything, not just money. This involves so much work that it will be a problem for several generations until, little by little, the world will detach itself from a feudal system installed centuries ago and that continues to be taught in universities by professors awarded by juries of which they are part.
This is just getting started, and my feeling is that Ordinals and BRC-20 may be a disruptive element that will still be linked, for a while longer, as a mechanism to record monkeys and frogs on the Bitcoin blockchain, until someone takes the bull by the horns, as we say in Argentina, and start a new path at the crossroads of time.
Thank you for reading! Decentralize yourselves as much as you can, and much more! Work for yourselves, not for others. When you work for someone else, they pay you what YOUR POSITION is worth, when you work for yourself, they pay you what YOU are worth. No one achieves financial independence by working as an employee. Live long and prosper!
Never forget:
As usual, none of the things written in this post are financial advice and are not intended to replace personal research. My sole intention in writing this post is informative. Several of the things discussed here could be wrong, so in no way can this post be construed as financial advice, and in no way should it replace your own research.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them down below
You can also contact me at gerardo.saporosi@gmail.com
https://twitter.com/SirGerardThe1st
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerardosaporosi/
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