Original author: Tang Han
Image source: Bitcoin Magazine
"With POW as time, UTXO/Cell as space, and energy as the drive, we can get a world. ”
The Bitcoin Renaissance is a topic that everyone is talking about. Many project parties have placed themselves under this banner to explain their current behavior. At present, this wave refers more to the gathering of funds, consensus, and developers to the Bitcoin ecosystem. But perhaps we can think more deeply about this wave: what exactly is it, and what does it leave behind?
I think the Bitcoin Renaissance is a revival of two fundamental value propositions, one is POW and the other is UTXO. The former is opposite to POS, the latter is opposite to the account model, and the representative of the POS+Account model is Ethereum. This Bitcoin renaissance will mean that after fifteen years of development, the blockchain industry is returning from the POS+Account route led by Ethereum to the POW+UTXO route led by Bitcoin.
But why? What are people tired of? How is a potentially imagined world different from Ethereum when people are returning like Bitcoin?? ）
1
Skeuomorphic tendencies and retroism
If you look closely at the whitepapers of Bitcoin and Ethereum, you will be able to feel how different these two systems are.
Image source: Bitcoin Whitepaper
In Bitcoin's whitepaper summary, Satoshi Nakamoto defines Bitcoin as "a fully peer-to-peer electronic currency." We were able to find Bitcoin's real-world reference: cash. The peculiarity of cash is that it allows online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. This constitutes a kind of skeuomorphism. In Ethereum's whitepaper, there is no such reference. We'll talk about that later in the article.
One of the reasons Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin is because this peer-to-peer electronic currency does not exist in the digital world, but is needed. It was the 2008 financial crisis that swept the world, and many banks failed, and people couldn't withdraw their money in the bank. So, while bank transfers provide a digital means of payment, relying on a third party makes everyone realize: it's not actually my money, I'm just holding the state balance in the bank's ledger. There is no such thing as "electronic cash", let alone the fact that I have "electronic cash".
Satoshi Nakamoto did one thing: he succeeded in achieving a digital skeuomorphism of real-life cash. How does this skeuomorphism come about? He uses POW, or Proof of Work, as a base to provide security for electronic cash (in fact, POW may be much more than that). POW ultimately attributes the security of the system to real-world computing power and energy. He also used UTXO as a carrier to simulate the body of gold, and deposited the money belonging to the user in the UTXO. The attribution relationship is solved through the "lock" of the private key.
Bitcoin's skeuomorphism of electronic cash has been very successful. POW unifies the security foundation of the digital world and the security of the real world, both built on energy, while UTXO provides a digital body that is independent and does not interfere with each other. Combined, the two create a deep skeuomorphic tendency to emulate reality in the digital world. If you call Ethereum radicalism, you might call this digital world skeuomorphism a kind of retroism.
2
Why retro to reality?
Implicit in this retroism is the insight that there is some deeper wisdom behind the real world that the digital world can learn from. This insight is often forgotten because people create digital worlds precisely to transcend reality. But we can understand this idea by a few examples:
· You hold an item in a game, such as a golden sword. However, due to a lack of funds for the game developers, they shut down the server a year later, and the golden sword disappeared as a result. Imagine that in life, the golden sword you hold may suddenly disappear?
· Vitalik used to love the Warlock character in Blizzard games. One day, Blizzard suddenly decides to cancel the Life Siphon skill, which causes him to cry bitterly and goes down the path of rebellion against centralized internet platforms. Imagine in real life, a group of gifted people could suddenly be drained of skills by another company executive?
· A blog site you love has been ordered to close. Even the entire website can no longer find traces of him, and two years later there is not even a trace of this person on the Internet. In real life, does a book say that it can disappear if it disappears?
……
We can imagine the digital world that is frantically distant, away from skeuomorphic tendencies: news sites that can be 404 at any time. A water cup that cannot be held. A game character whose abilities can be canceled at any time. You feel like something is wrong, but what's wrong?
Image source: "On the Mode of Existence of Technological Objects"
The answer is that it allows us to live in a fragile, flattering (a higher means of control) control system that is highly inconsistent with the ethics of reality. The digital objects in this system have simulacrums but do not have a solid existence, or they cannot be comfortable, and must rely on a third-party platform to exist. Yet, we project a great deal of emotion, time, and trust onto these simulacrums. The emotions we project eventually become chips controlled by the platform.
People love out of instinct, including loving and trusting even uncomfortable, human-designed digital objects. When love is exploited and manipulated in batches and systems, we lose the reality of life.
Reality implies a solidity that underpins the birth of ethics and morality (privacy, human rights, freedom, responsibility, nobility). This may be the reason why the digital world is retro to reality.
3
Characterization of Bitcoin's skeuomorphic tendencies
Image courtesy of Adobe Stock
Let's go back to Bitcoin. In the Bitcoin ecosystem, we can see a strong skeuomorphic tendency. Bitcoin is simulating electronic cash, and its developers are simulating different items that inspire them in the real world. Here are some examples for your reference:
Bitcoin: Electronic cash
Lock：锁，后面在Peter Todd那里延伸为一次性密封条
RGB协议：苏格兰地契（只在比特币上存放Commitment）
Ordinals协议：染色聪（序列号）
Atomic Protocol: Digital Theory of Matter
Runes: Think of Bitcoin as a slate
KeyChat:邮票、信封
CKB: Cells (the basic unit of data that exists in CKB) following the design idea of Bitcoin
Spore Dob protocol: DNA and interpreter can be built into the cell
Each of these cases can be brought up for a long time, so I am not going to expand on the details of each of them in this article. What I want to share is that while Bitcoin is very simple to construct, it seems that different developers can find different perspectives in this simple construction to construct their worlds. Just like a tree, some people like the leaves of the tree and use it to weave garlands because of their soft properties, some people like the branches of the tree and use it to build houses, and some people like the bark and use it to make fires for warmth. Others were inspired by trees and planted a forest.
This is because once a thing appears, the understanding is bound to be diverse. Different people looked at Bitcoin from different perspectives, and eventually got different Bitcoins, and different Bitcoins coincided on the chain called Bitcoin that we see today, forming the world's largest consensus.
However, it seems like we're having a hard time seeing this on Ethereum.
4
Ethereum is not skeuomorphic
If you look at Ethereum's whitepaper, you won't see a skeuomorphic tendency like Bitcoin. In the beginning, Ethereum was function-oriented, it did not have items to be simulated in reality, and it appeared to facilitate developers to develop on-chain applications. Ethereum has always been tied to the word smart contract.
图片来源：Ethereum Whitepaper
But I would say that in real life, a being can never be functionally oriented. The being must first exist and then be understood and mined in practice for different functions. It's like a tree. The tree never existed to be used as firewood for you, it just existed there silently. As long as the energy is not depleted and its life does not end, it can continue to exist. It's only in the process of interacting with it that you discover that it can have a variety of functions.
POS fails to give the energy base on Ethereum that assets and reality are isomorphic. Although there have been countless debates about who is safer, POS or POW, and the proponents of both sides have found their own perspectives to be comfortable with, POS and POW have gone to two worlds when it comes to skeuomorphism. The world of POS is a more human-governed world, and the world of POW attempts to achieve a unified cost structure between the digital world and the real world, that is, in order for the existent to exist, energy costs must be paid.
In reality, existence is never flattering or light-hearted, but laborious. Beings are confronted with an increase in entropy all the time. Think about it, if you don't clean your home for a week, it could be dusty. Maybe you don't want to sweep the floor yourself, but use a robot vacuum cleaner to clean the room, then you have to charge the robot vacuum. Another example: if you don't consume energy and don't eat, you will die as a living being. This is all very basic common sense.
Energy is needed for something to exist, to combat entropy increase. This has been inherited in the world built by POW. In order for the on-chain world to exist, the POW chain must consume a steady stream of energy. Proponents of POS argue that this is not environmentally friendly and unnecessary from a security perspective. However, energy consumption simulates a cost structure similar to that of reality, which forms the basis for extending ethics to the digital space and affirming digital physical reality. I will elaborate on this in another article.
Ethereum's account model is also beneficial for more developers to develop applications, however, this model naturally determines that Ethereum cannot be skeuomorphic. It is more akin to a relational existence, i.e., the existence of all things is state-based, and it needs to find its own state and position in the world state tree. It doesn't have the solidity and solidity of a UTXO. It's hard to imagine that an apple in the real world could be affected by a cup thousands of miles away, but in the world of Ethereum, there are no separate apples and cups at all, there are just one state after another, but this state is not controlled by a third party alone. Attacks on contracts and theft of assets are common events on Ethereum.
In other words, there is nothing in Ethereum.
To some extent, the existence of nothing limits the innovation of the Ethereum ecosystem to the updating of the narrative by the leadership. If something exists, people can dig into its function from different perspectives based on the observation of the object and make it into something different. For example, Peter Todd found disposable seals on Bitcoin, and Casey found a tablet of history engraved on Bitcoin. Although Satoshi Nakamoto really just wanted to build e-cash in the beginning, you see, once something exists, different perspectives can create something different. A tree can be used to make a house, as firewood, and as a root carving......
Because nothing exists, Ethereum's leadership must give a definition of what Ethereum is, and in particular, constantly give directions to its functions. Since it is functional, it needs to be continuously optimized, and with it comes more and more radical parameter improvement and function integration...... But it's easy to lose direction in doing so.
5
Back to NFTs:
Can I replace you with a digital object?
Let's answer the initial question of the article: what happens when we go back to Bitcoin from Ethereum? What will be left behind by the Bitcoin Renaissance?
A natural trend is to build a truly full-chain digital world, or autonomous world, based on POW and UTXO.
Although there are also people in the Ethereum community who discuss omni-chain games, under the two completely different world technical architectures, omni-chain games point to different worlds. What strikes me the most from Jan, the architect of the CKB, is: "With POW as time, UTXO/Cell as space, and energy as the drive, we can get a world." "POW+UTXO itself constitutes an analog of the real world, which has its own inner time and creates independent, non-interdependent bodies for the digital objects in the world. In the "Ghost in the Shell" mode, you can build digital objects by writing content into an existing space body. The POS chain does not have its own internal time, and there is no concept of independent things like UTXO in the chain, and the "things" in it are more similar to a relational existence, which is essentially a state recorded on the global ledger.
On the POW+UTXO chain (not just Bitcoin), we can imagine a digital thing that needs the same energy and consumes the same energy in order to sustain its existence. It is also possible to conceive of such a relationship between the world and things: construct a digital object, and when the world (i.e., the blockchain) exists, the digital object exists from the material structure. Its existence is not subject to anyone's will. No one can break it, or change it. In this sense, the existence of digital things is equivalent to the existence of the blockchain in terms of security and effectiveness.
We can't imagine that the solidity of an NFT existence on Ethereum is equivalent to Ethereum itself. Normally, NFT images exist off-chain, and on Ethereum there is only one contract state, and programming is allowed, not the thing itself. Allowing developers to be as flexible as possible in programming used to be a very proud feature of Ethereum. However, in the construction of autonomous worlds, this anthropocentric tendency makes the relational existence in the world fragile and unsolid.
NFT is the core of the last round of the bull market metaverse concept explosion, and it is also a key factor in the explosion of the Ethereum ecosystem, which runs through the entire bull market. Whether it is crypto art, PFP small pictures, or the metaverse, GameFi, including the DAOs and SBTs behind, they are actually inseparable from NFTs. Unfortunately, developers on Ethereum tried to build chain games around NFTs, but in the end, they could only converge on GameFi, and developers with ideals tried to develop full-chain games, which eventually evolved into a set of design concepts called AW, but it was difficult to implement.
I believe that all of this will be done all over again in the Bitcoin ecosystem, but the path to implementation, people's understanding, and the final presentation will be very different. Bitcoin's skeuomorphic tendencies and retroism will accompany developers. Good developers should not think about how to quickly move the existing world on Ethereum, but how to build new rules and new worlds on this solid ground. This will perhaps be the biggest innovation of this bull run.