Bitcoin 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0: Currency, Contracts, and Applications, beyond Financial Markets

Bitcoin 1.0 is currency - the deployment of cryptocurrencies in applications related to cash such as currency transfer, remittance, and digital payment systems. Bitcoin 2.0 is contracts - the whole slate of economic, market, and financial applications using the blockchain that are more extensive than simple cash transactions like stocks, bonds, futures, loans, mortgages, titles, smart property, and smart contracts. Bitcoin 3.0 is blockchain applications beyond currency, finance, and markets, particularly in the areas of government, health, science, literacy, culture, and art. 

Bitcoin and blockchain technology is much more than a digital currency, the blockchain is an information technology, potentially on the order of the Internet (‘the next Internet’), but even more pervasive and quickly-configuring. 

Prevalence of Decentralized Models 
Even if the currently developing models of Bitcoin and blockchain technology are not the final paradigm (there are many problematic flaws), the bigger trend, decentralized models as a class, could have a pronounced impact. If not the blockchain industry, there would probably be something else, and in fact there probably will be other complements to the blockchain industry anyway. It is just that the blockchain industry is one of the first identifiable large-scale implementations of decentralization models, conceived and executed at a new and more complex level of human activity.

Decentralized models have the potential to reorganize all manner of human activity, and quickly, because they are trustless, the friction of the search and trust-establishment process in previous models of human interaction is eliminated. This could mean greatly accelerated rates and levels of activity, on a much greater humanity-level scale. The blockchain (decentralized network coordination technology) could emerge as a fundamental infrastructure element in the model to scale humanity to its next levels of orders-of-magnitude-larger progress.

Inciting Brownian motion at the macro-scale

Entropy is the process of moving from order to disorder, for example one’s desk becoming cluttered after being cleaned. In many cases, lower entropy states are desirable as they connote greater order. Without doing work to decrease entropy, it generally increases at the macro level (the spacetime of objects that humans encounter on a daily basis). Entropy increases and time appears to move only forward.

At the micro scale of atoms, Brownian motion occurs (the constant jiggling of atoms), and creates an important case where the Second Law of Thermodynamics (heat eventually dissipates; systems move from being warm to cold) does not hold. Brownian motion at the micro scale also allows fluctuations in the arrow of time and in entropy, e.g.; time may flow forwards and backwards, and there may be fluctuations towards lower and higher states of entropy. This can be seen not just at the very-very small Planck scale and the atomic scale of statistical mechanics (for example, atoms jiggling in a gas), but also at the level of cells in the body, and in another example, pollen cells suspended just the right way in water.

That Brownian motion can occur at the comparatively larger scale of cells suggests that it may occur, or be induced to occur at even more macro levels too. For example, in complex adaptive systems, an economy has phases of Brownian motion, when rational agents are jiggling constantly to make the invisible hand of supply and demand meet. Perhaps incentive structures including policy may be used to facilitate the persistence of Brownian motion and devolution of entropy in macro-level systems.

Scale shift needed to understand physics

Even a cursory consideration of any sort of astronomical phenomenon immediately makes it clear that the scale of human life and the cosmos are completely different. The astronomical scale is dramatically more expansive, huge, some examples and comparisons are that winds from planetary nebulae can be 2,000-4,000 km/second vs. a bullet which travels at 1 km/second. The sun is many times larger than the earth but it is far more common to have suns that are significantly larger than our sun.

Not just the size or scale but the dramatic dynamism, for example, red dwarfs can lose weight at the rate of 600 trillion tons/second, suggests at phenomenon of which we have no understanding. The power and dynamism is extraordinary.

The astronomical scale is dramatically larger and probably exponential. (Is it just the large range of a scale that makes it logarithmic/exponential?)

The vastness of the astronomical scale suggests that the human scale, human experience and probably human thinking are too small and limited. How can we possibly discover the next laws of physics when we are thinking linearly and not exponentially?

Thinking must be at a larger scale and probably logarithmic or exponential. How can we adapt our thinking in this way? A. Naturally/forced thinking B. Via computer as external thinking enhancement, modeling/simulation tool C. Gene mod