My most recent long-form interview. Thanks to uncommons
@fulihang2009 — it was a delightful conversation, with rich content and excellent editing. Condensed version https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/2ZQVRTshnxU7tlT5fCESYQ Full version https://blog.uncommons.cc/cryptoflight-v
Reporter’s note/访者记
If one were to name the thinkers in the Chinese-speaking crypto world and seasoned Bitcoin players, Hu Yilin, who once taught philosophy of technology at Tsinghua University, is a name one cannot avoid. I first met Teacher Hu at the Bitcoin conference in Singapore last March; afterward, on a sweltering afternoon, we arranged to walk around Geylang until our legs nearly gave out, then found a café and talked about everything under the sun for two hours. But Bitcoin and, more broadly, crypto are iterating by the day; after that interview missed its window for publication, it remained buried and unseen.
Later I learned that it was precisely that investigation in Singapore that solidified Teacher Hu’s decision to leave his teaching post at Tsinghua University and move here with his whole family. When word came last December that Teacher Hu had relocated to Nanyang, it sparked quite a bit of discussion in the circle. At a historical turning point, when the external environment for crypto was undergoing drastic change and opportunities and challenges were both coming into sharp relief, I and my community friend 935 decided it was time to fly to Singapore again for a visit. In mid-February, we conducted two in-depth interviews with Teacher Hu totaling six hours, shifting our gaze away from the then red-hot coin-price行情, starting with Teacher Hu’s life decision to go south to Nanyang, then talking about the path out for diasporic Chinese in a new era of (de)globalization, probing the ideal of Bitcoin nationalism, and tracing back to the philosophy of technology behind it. Teacher Hu’s insights into ordinary questions always give one a fresh sense of surprise. Before the first interview, we invited Teacher Hu to a meal of bak kut teh, a local Singaporean specialty; before the second interview, Teacher Hu treated us in return to a bowl of bullfrog congee in Chinese style. The gastronomic mingling of Chinese and Singaporean foods at the two meals, together with the intellectual sparks of the two interviews, left us with an aftertaste we will not soon forget.
More than a month later, the crypto market has once again become a world apart from what it was; many narratives have fallen from the sky, and industry leaders once worshipped as gods have been knocked back down to earth. But looking back at the transcribed interview, Teacher Hu’s thinking, grounded in the most fundamental logic, has helped us recover the power of faith.
About
胡翌霖
Former associate professor in the Department of the History of Science at Tsinghua University.
Now an independent scholar, founder of CNDAO, and founder of the TIANYU ARTech studio.
Flytoufu
Member of Uncommons.
Member of Uncommons.
935
A researcher of the crypto movement and philosophy of technology whose heart is in the 20th century, body in the 21st century, and thoughts in the 22nd century.
Mind in the 20th century, body in the 21st century, spirit in the 22nd century crypto movement and philosophy of technology researcher.
The local rhythm of Singapore
Flytofu:
Teacher Hu officially moved here last December. What is life like for you in Singapore now?
胡翌霖:
I’ve already found a rhythm that belongs to Singapore. Every morning I take the child to kindergarten; in the morning I relax a bit, in the afternoon I either do some proper work or take care of business, and in the evening I pick her up, eat with her, go to the playground, then bathe her and lull her to sleep. Thank heaven she’s adjusting fairly well. In truth, my days are too leisurely, but now I’m starting to get back onto a proper track, reopening reading groups, and every Sunday evening I do an in-person reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time, which is something I’m fairly good at explaining. I’ll also be leading an online reading of Stiegler’s Symbolic Misery; the first volume is about cinema, the second about art. The so-called symbolic misery means the proletarianization of work—not only material poverty, but also spiritual poverty. Stiegler is proletarianized in his thinking; it is a kind of proletarianization of the spiritual world within capitalist society, and in a sense a critique of capitalism.
Flytofu:
Why did you choose Singapore over Hong Kong at the time?
胡翌霖:
The Shanghai lockdown was a turning point that made one feel that the overall environment in the mainland had become more uncertain and insecure. Although I remain fairly optimistic about China’s overall development—I believe it can still weather all kinds of crises—once you have children, the angle from which you consider problems changes. I still wanted to provide my child with a more stable and predictable environment. Singapore has no other great advantage, just stability—much like how the climate here is evenly hot all year round. This kind of predictability may not be good for innovation, but when raising children, you really need this kind of “boring steadiness.”
I’ve been to Hong Kong several times, and my experience of the cityscape wasn’t very good. Walking down the street, I felt pressed to the point of not being able to breathe by the high-rises; around places like Central, if you turn a corner, you’re still facing glass curtain walls, and in broad daylight you can’t even see a whole patch of sky. Could such an environment affect a child’s growth? Growing up from an early age in cramped spaces, would one’s personality also become repressed? Singapore is different: the whole place is more open and spacious, more full of vitality and life. The reputation of the “garden city” is well deserved; greenery is everywhere, and in the city center you can see the horizon at a glance. Even in the busiest places there are tall trees, lawns and parks, nature reserves, and greenery planted in midair between buildings. When I was in Hong Kong, I always felt that the shop assistants had a stern look on their faces, as if everyone owed them money. Here in Singapore, even if I stammer a bit in English, the staff will take the initiative to switch to Chinese and greet me warmly. Of course, maybe I was just lucky; both of my trips to Singapore gave me a very good experience. But perhaps that is fate.
Flytofu:
This generation of overseas Chinese can, through Chinese apps, stay in contact with the mainland much more frequently, or use Xiaohongshu to look up guides. Do you think that is an advantage? Would it create a sense of estrangement from the local Singaporean environment as a result?
胡翌霖:
My wife uses them; I generally don’t need guides—I just go wherever I arrive, take a look around, and eat and have fun casually. In life, there’s no need to go too deliberately in search of anything. When I was a child in Shanghai, I also just looked around casually on the streets; here in Singapore, the hawker centers on the street are pretty good. If I really had to point to something I’m not used to, it would be that people here do indeed seem quite at ease. Singaporean service attitude is very good, but sometimes it’s a bit clumsy. Sometimes there’s a sort of dull, wooden feeling—not the sharp, shrewd kind you get from the harsh competition in China. There are more customers in China, and they’re demanding in all sorts of ways, so corresponding service tends to be more in place. Things like housekeeping service here, renovations, or scheduling someone to come by often get dragged out for several days. But as long as you yourself also blend into this atmosphere and don’t be too anxious, that’s fine.
Overall, it’s good. Estrangement itself is one of the conditions for maintaining diversity. Right now there is both connection and estrangement—you’re not completely connected with the mainland, there’s also a bit of distance; it’s the same with foreigners, and this can maintain a relatively distinctive cultural independence. Technical means are precisely the prerequisite. When we use WeChat or Xiaohongshu, it’s a bit like meeting a fellow townsman far from home. In our generation, when we said “fellow townsman,” we meant shared memories and experiences—for example, Shanghai people talking about Waibaidu Bridge, the Oriental Pearl, or alleyway life, all know that Suzhou Creek used to stink terribly. Now you grew up playing with WeChat, and I also grew up playing with WeChat; in a sense, we are fellow townsmen of the internet age. Nowadays society increasingly lacks the conditions for estrangement. New Shanghainese and new Beijingers live in exactly the same kind of housing, and communicate in the same way—how are we to distinguish our differences? So the wall is not entirely a bad thing either; it gives the mainland a fully independent ecosystem, allowing it to grow relatively independently from within before competing internationally. We need some restrictive things so that regional styles can take shape.
Flytofu:
How do you view this era’s trend of Chinese people becoming ever more mobile across the world? Many people say this is an era of the rise of diasporic Chinese.
胡翌霖:
I started Huawendao DAO with precisely this intention: to revive Chinese culture overseas, and even outside the material world—“when rites are lost, seek them among the countryside.” Chinese culture on the mainland has instead become closed and increasingly conservative. Culture is, in essence, always a matter of blending. What Western culture is now was formerly a hodgepodge: Greek and Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and also Arab and Indian cultures, including all kinds of technologies that were transmitted from China, and only then was what is now called Western civilization shaped. Embracing all rivers is a very important way to maintain cultural vitality. The revival of Chinese culture now does not mean the revival of traditional culture, but the regeneration of traditional culture, not a simple return. This requires an international perspective: first affirm Western culture, then absorb it—that is what revival really is. I’ve said before that Singapore is an ideal place, where cultures intermingle while still preserving Chinese cultural characteristics. Each beauty is appreciated for its own sake; there are all kinds of people here, with Western-style living and also traditional Chinese living.
Chinese people today are the same way. Overseas Chinese do not necessarily have to integrate into local society; rather, they add another skin color to America’s spectrum of skin tones, but not to its cultural spectrum. If you don’t bring more diverse cultures into America, then you are not contributing anything to America either. True diversity, inclusiveness, distinctiveness, and so on should be cultural; they are not about human diversity as animals.
A beginning and a continuation of philosophy
Flytofu:
Teacher Hu should write something like a reader’s guide to Heidegger. I used to hear many people say that Singapore is a cultural desert. For a philosophical classic as difficult as Being and Time, how has the audience’s reception been on the Singapore side?
Hu Yilin:
Reader’s editions are not all that meaningful; philosophy books are meant to be read in the original. A reader’s edition is like someone handing you chewed-up gum—there’s no flavor left. When you read philosophy, the pleasure comes from chewing it yourself. Working your way through an originally daunting-looking book and truly getting it is tremendously satisfying, and it also gives you courage to enter philosophy. Many people shrink from difficulty and, because philosophy books seem abstruse, go after introductory books instead. This completely misses the process of thinking; it is like eating sugarcane and only swallowing the dregs. I think that is putting the cart before the horse. The conclusions of a philosophy book are the most boring part of the whole book. For me, the first book that truly awakened me to philosophy was Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Once you have read it through and your breath flows smoothly, you will know why it had to be so obscure; after reading into it, you finally understand what it is really concerned with.
The actual readers who participate in my reading club are not the native Singaporeans; they are basically still international students, or people who came over from China to make their way. And philosophical books like these are in fact zero-threshold; they do not require much prerequisite knowledge. The classic philosophical books all begin from the most basic human predicament, from the lived experience of life, and respond to your own questions. So long as a person has perplexities about life and death, has experiences of life, has experience of living, he or she should be able to enter into philosophical thought. Heidegger’s Being and Time is relatively pure; it directly discusses the question of “being,” which is actually easier for beginners to enter.
The difficulty lies first in having to throw off some of the fixed patterns of thinking you have been solidified into. Modern people have already been rationalized and reshaped by technology or the environment, and they unconsciously think in terms of instrumentalism and discipline. This kind of mental set has a very strong directive force. When one says, “You should be free,” “You should be authentic,” many people do not understand, because their mode of thinking is threaded and linear: they must be able to see and touch things before they can understand them. But in life the most important things—such as life and death—are precisely non-threaded. You can point at someone drawing his last breath and say that this is death, but that is not the same thing as the death you yourself fear—the externally objectified death is different from the death you truly face. Your lived experience of life—for example, living with an inward sense of feeling—is closer and more immediate than external objects. Because ordinary discourse systems are all organized around external things, one cannot switch over to introspective thought, and so it feels obscure.
The second difficulty is linguistic. In order to help readers break out of fixed patterns of thinking, philosophers have to play language games anew. Traditional vocabulary will pull you into established ways of thinking, so you have to invent new expressions and give you a new tool. When you first get your hands on a smartphone, you have no idea where to begin, but once you become used to it, you find it much easier to use. The new linguistic tools of philosophy are the same.
Flytofu:
I always used to think that Professor Hu focused on philosophy of science, but it seems you have a very broad range of interests and very deep research across philosophy as a whole.
Hu Yilin:
I have always believed that philosophy has no subdivisions, and should not have subdivisions. The questions philosophy faces—the questions of life and death, the questions of being that I mentioned earlier—your existence is always “one.” Because we are an integral whole, philosophy is “know yourself,” and the “self” is not like a machine that can be broken down into assembly-line parts: the first stage produces wheels, the second produces the frame, the third makes the steering wheel, the fourth assembles the engine, the fifth installs the seats… and in the end it is assembled into a car. But people are not like that—when you say you want to reflect on technological problems or political problems in society, perhaps you can objectify and subdivide them, like letting one group study technological issues, another group political issues, yet another ethical issues… as if in the end you could piece together a complete philosophy. But the final product of philosophy is not an assembled product; it is yourself. Do you think you can assemble yourself together?
Technology and politics exist because each of us carries these elements within us. To understand yourself, you must ask: what kind of person am I? Where do my fixed patterns of thinking come from? What are my way of life and my manner of living? These questions inevitably touch the era you inhabit—is it the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Industrial Age, the Electrical Age, or the Information Age? Technology itself is part of what defines us; it is an inescapable environment, not a set of constituent parts. Ethics, aesthetics, and other fields ultimately converge in the unified personality that is “yourself.” You do not feel that you are divided into pieces. Philosophy of technology, political philosophy, social issues, philosophy of art, philosophy of language… in the end all flow into this “one” that is you.
What philosophy seeks is precisely this kind of unity. Its object has always been the single question of “being qua being.” “Philosophy of technology” is merely an external disciplinary label. Before, I had to find a seat in the academic industrial system, had to write papers, be evaluated for promotion, apply for grants, like occupying a station on an assembly line, so I put on the label “history of science and philosophy of technology.” But as a free person I have no label; what I face are only the most general philosophical questions.
Flytofu:
It seems we are back to the original question: why give up a Tsinghua faculty position, such an enviable job, a brave leap in the eyes of many people? Is it because you want to pursue a more complete and self-consistent kind of life?
Hu Yilin:
First of all, this is a rather personal life choice; there is not so much grand meaning in it. In the past I always emphasized the unity of knowledge and action; now it is also a kind of self-consistency. At the moment I do not have that many material demands. At my current level of desire, I do not have to worry about making a living. Then it becomes: when you are not thinking about livelihood and making money, what kind of work do you want to do?
In the AI era, this is a very important question. If the world develops as optimists imagine, with AI gradually replacing human labor and helping to reduce the burden of making a living, raising productivity to the point where everyone can be freed from heavy labor, then the next question is what humans are going to do. Will they turn into pigs, lying there waiting to be fed, muddling through life and that’s that? Or should they do something with their lives and choose a way of living that belongs to them? When money is no longer the concern, the Tsinghua faculty position helps me much less; it is just a title. With this title, others seem to respect me more, but if someone only respects me because of the title, then I would also no longer be worthy of respecting him—that counts as a kind of screening too. Without the title, the exchanges that need to happen can still happen, the reading club can still be run, and classes can still be taught. I am preparing to launch online courses and gradually re-record the classes I used to teach at Tsinghua.
Flytofu:
When you decided to leave Tsinghua, did Professor Wu Guosheng try to persuade you to stay?
Hu Yilin:
Professor Wu did not try to persuade me to stay. His principles have always been to respect our freedom very much, to treat students as individuals, and never to think of students as being there to toil for the teacher like oxen or horses. Other teachers assign you topics and tasks, make you do this or that for them, but Professor Wu is completely unlike that; there are not even any jointly authored papers with students—we each write our own. I told him, and he still did not try to hold me back, because he believed I must already have thought it through myself, so he respected that. Of course, he would also worry about who would step in to take care of philosophy of technology after I left.
935：
I want to know at what point you began to combine the things you truly wanted to accomplish, driven by your inner motivations, with philosophy of science and philosophy of technology?
Hu Yilin：
There were several key turning points. The first was in high school. I was in a national science track class then, and once you got into high school you were eligible for recommendation without entrance exams. So from freshman year I knew I would not have to take the gaokao, and as a result my whole high school life was rather carefree, which in turn let me develop many extracurricular interests. What influenced me most then was the Series of the First Pushing, such as A Brief History of Time, and then Kip Thorne’s thicker Black Holes and Time Warps, and all kinds of popular science books on quantum mechanics. The more I read these books, the more my interests shifted toward those big questions, like the ontological question just mentioned—what, after all, is science? At the time I was also a newborn calf not afraid of tigers, writing many philosophical essays and even calling them “papers” and the like. This sort of “neglect of one’s proper work” did indeed affect my competition results. At first I insisted on applying to math or physics, but the teachers said my competition level did not meet the requirements for physics. Then they said, what about philosophy? I thought about it and felt philosophy was also a possible path. By then I had already started turning toward the humanities, and through a twist of fate I ended up entering the Department of Philosophy at Peking University. That counts as the first turning point.
The two stages when I truly felt the charm of philosophy were, first, taking classes from teachers of Chinese philosophy, like Yang Lihua and Zhang Xianglong. Those gentlemen were practically living contemporary Confucians, with the bearing of people who had stepped out of the classical texts. Although I completely did not agree with their views—I am, at heart, rather a Westernized liberal—their charm lay in the steadfastness of their personalities. You could feel that they sincerely believed in what they were saying, and that they really could make their arguments cohere. They did not “kidnap” me into their camp; I still lean more toward liberalism now, but I began to understand how to sympathize with Confucianism. Many people spend their whole lives without ever encountering anyone they can “disagree with but respect.” Those classes taught me that differences in thought can themselves be precious. Isn’t that precisely what the so-called “public intellectual,” now stigmatized, ought to do? One should express views that are different, not go along with the crowd. This made me genuinely feel the value of the scholar’s identity.
Another important turning point was reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The teachers at school were all towering figures, but compared with the top philosophers in history they still had a gap. Kant made me experience for the first time what depth human thought can reach—my feeling when reading him at the time was like the scene in One Piece where Roger says, “I put all the treasure there,” and he is telling you: “The Grand Line is right there, go find it!” A philosopher’s treasure of thought cannot directly become your answer, but it proves that it is possible for life to attain the highest self-understanding. He showed the possibility of such thought’s completeness, even if I did not fully agree with his system. Heidegger was a transitional stage. Before that, I greatly respected those teachers but did not agree with them, whereas Heidegger’s approach suited my taste better and allowed me to continue thinking along his framework; it was, in a sense, where I found my own philosophical style.
Later still, it was during my graduate studies. I was then writing a doctoral dissertation on media philosophy, and just happened to see news of Bitcoin’s crash. So I wanted to use media philosophy to understand what money actually is. The mainstream view criticizes virtual currency for lacking material backing and endorsement. But money itself is a virtual medium, and the transactional acts carried by the medium are what is real; I think that is where the true meaning of money lies. Although Bitcoin is virtual and has no physical entity, as a medium of exchange it is completely real. In a sense, Bitcoin is more definite than the dollar. At the time I was thinking about a basic question: what is virtual currency? The dollar is what is truly virtual currency, because the total amount of fiat money—how many dollars there actually are in total—is impossible to pin down; it is created through the money multiplier, stacked layer upon layer. When the Federal Reserve needs money, it can print and issue money at any time, and the money it issues can evaporate and vanish at any time, like a dream, like bubbles and shadows. Seen this way, isn’t the dollar the truly virtual one? The Federal Reserve opens and closes its mouth, changes a decimal point in interest rates, adds one place to the decimal, and the amount of dollars in the entire market changes—that is the virtual dreamlike bubble, isn’t it?
This line of thought became the starting point for my deeper study of Bitcoin and blockchain. Later I gradually combined the cryptography movement with a critique of modernity—for example, the problem of human alienation in modern society, and the predicament of technological domination, all of which can find responses in cryptographic technology. This became the main thread of my subsequent research.
Yet another turning point came when I finished my postdoctoral term and looked for a job. I was preparing to go teach at Shanghai Normal University, but then my advisor, Professor Wu Guosheng, moved from Peking University to Tsinghua, and he directly called me over. By such a chance, I ended up in Tsinghua’s Department of History of Science. Although nominally I switched into the field of history of science, in essence I was still continuing philosophy of technology. In fact, doing history of science is in the same lineage as Heidegger’s philosophy; Heidegger emphasized human “facticity,” and knowing oneself inevitably requires returning to the historical context. As he put it, human beings are not abstract existences floating in a vacuum, but are rooted in concrete historical soil. So studying history of science instead brought me closer to the authentic core of philosophy: if you want to understand technology, you first have to understand how it is generated in history.
The Politicization of Crypto Reality
935:
Speaking of technology in history, let’s talk about cryptography. If we shift our gaze back to the early days of technology, when civilian cryptography was born and began to develop in the 1970s and 80s, it was in fact something very pragmatic and purely technical. But did it become politicized at some stage?
Hu Yilin:
What happened was actually not the politicization of technology, but the politicization of the real world, along with digital currency—not the digital currency envisioned by cryptographers, but things like Alipay, digital banking, electronic credit cards: the politicization that began with the broad trend toward the digitization of money. In the 1990s, stock exchanges were not yet digital; everyone still had to watch the market. By the end of the 1990s, the digitization of trading accelerated continuously, and in the process a trend that had originally been a worry became reality. In the 1980s this really was not a political movement; there were only ideals and concerns, the foresight that as information technology developed, people’s privacy might be stripped away, so one needed to prepare in advance so that information technology could be compatible with individual privacy. If society becomes digital in the future, and we still want to insist on safeguards for personal privacy, then we should be able to adopt tools that have already been prepared; in a certain sense, one could say this serves politics.
935:
In this stage, wasn’t the aim perhaps more simply to solve a technical problem?
Hu Yilin:
The reason one wants to solve a technical problem is precisely because there is a political ideal. If one believes society should be subject to panopticon-style surveillance, with state guarantees and centralized oversight, then one would not feel that there is any technical problem needing to be solved. That is a political stance. Later, the political ideal came to nothing, and the real-world political tide moved in the opposite direction, but their ideals did not change: they still wanted decentralized, free, private transactions. So the ideal turned into a real political demand.
935:
But in that process there seem to have been some points of abrupt mutation, where their political attitude suddenly became much more radical. The cryptographers who first researched asymmetric encryption in the 1960s and 70s were more pragmatic engineers, studying how cryptography could be used commercially by ordinary people. By the late 1980s, civilian cryptography had been elevated to the level of defending the right to freedom of speech, and even evolved into a strong hostility toward any large centralized collective.
Hu Yilin:
The entire history of the internet has always been political. ARPANET arose in the context of the Cold War, with state-supported research carried out to counter Soviet technology, but the early makers of the internet were precisely liberals: they took military money, but opposed control and emphasized the free circulation of information. In terms of their ideas, they saw themselves as capitalist rather than socialist, as technological romantics rather than authoritarians and controllers. So the technological environment was bound to be decentralized and oriented toward knowledge sharing.
Later Bill Gates stood up and said programmers should be paid for their programs, which ran against the entire hacker culture of the time. To say that at that time was in fact rather heroic, because the mainstream stressed that information ought to be free, free of charge, shared, not monopolized; large numbers of developers, engineers, and participants all opposed Bill Gates. Treating programs not as a shared human intellectual wealth, but as one’s private property to be sold, made the early internet hackers and practitioners erupt in outrage: why should information be regarded as one’s own private property? From the beginning, the internet has been in constant struggle. The spread of the internet TCP/IP protocol standard also relied on the open-source movement. At the time there were also some competing protocols proposed under different banners, basically all pushed by companies: for example, the British protocol was backed by the postal company, the French by a state-supported institution, and in the Soviet Union it was centrally controlled, whereas TCP/IP was open. Because it was directly open source, and everyone could use it, it became mainstream. The conception of ARPANET came from “galactic networks” written in a memo by one former president of the Institute for Advanced Study: in the future, information would be transmitted through computers, achieving a shared, transnational society. The ideal was there from the start: the internet has no borders, no center, and is a space where everyone equally enjoys knowledge. This current of thought in the history of the internet is absolutely a political ideal.
935:
In the crypto movement, the interaction between technical structures and human thoughts and desires formed the technological imagination we have now. I think today’s information-cryptography technologies are attached to the whole of information technology, just as the cypherpunk movement is also attached to the internet cultural movement. In the earliest centralized computers of the Cold War era, people’s impression of them was wholly negative: they were symbols of large-scale bureaucratic suppression of individuality. That too was what counterculture wanted to oppose. Later, microprocessors made personal computers possible, and only then did computers suddenly become tools that could empower individuals and advocate for individual rights and freedom.
The structure of the internet also has a dual nature. On the one hand, it can be idealized as a flat, decentralized medium of equality among nodes; on the other hand, a distributed network structure is also the best carrier for the infiltration of power, and may become a “panopticon” that penetrates the capillaries of power. So does the technical architecture itself necessarily lead to a particular form of power?
Hu Yilin:
On the one hand, technology is not neutral; on the other hand, people may use different choices to determine the direction of technological development. If the internet had developed in the Soviet Union rather than in the United States, it might have become a central nervous system, a real-time control system better suited to implementing a planned economy. We are fortunate that the internet was initially driven by relatively free people.
935:
Just like the cyber-socialism Salvador Allende wanted to implement in Chile. So the network itself is a structure with two sides: it can be highly centralized, or it can be a symbol of extreme freedom; it mainly depends on what kind of people choose it, and what kind of culture they help bring about?
Hu Yilin:
Technology has different possibilities. The earliest computer products all looked huge, exclusive, hard to personalize, and dispersed in form, but their technical implications still tended toward freedom. Turing’s most fundamental contribution was to propose the idea of general computation. A computer is an abstract simulation of human calculation: however humans compute, the computer computes that way too. And the computer’s computation can be standardized and defined; all Turing machines are the same, differing only in computing power, but in principle they do the same thing. A computing machine designed from this idea has no secrets. The secret of the atomic bomb is closed off, but the papers on Turing’s and von Neumann’s early computers, including Wiener’s, were all public. From the outset, they emphasized non-monopoly: those who had conditions could build them first, and others could build them at any time once they had the conditions. The technology itself had a decentralized tendency. Even as a massive behemoth, the computer is still a technology with decentralized and democratizing tendencies.
Many computers before the 1950s were specialized, custom-built designs. If computers had continued developing along that path, the future might have become one in which the U.S. government had one computer whose technical specifications were not public, while everyone else only needed to connect terminals into the services provided by the U.S. government to supply information. But you could not build your own computer. Fortunately, American culture itself had a liberal bent. It cannot be said that the early period was necessarily liberal, but the whole of information technology and liberalism supported each other and complemented each other.
The New Continent of Cryptography: Multiple Solutions to Blockchain
935:
Looking only at the history of information technology’s development and liberalism’s choices about technology, one can feel that this spirit of open, fully free market competition indeed allowed us to enjoy the benefits of the universality of technology under liberal leadership. But from the perspective of the pure commodity-economy market, it also feels as though a world chosen by pure neoliberalism has distorted many aspects of our lives. For example, although we are now in a historical stage of great technological and economic prosperity, it is also a period relatively barren in spirit and culture. So how should we understand the relationship between liberalism and modernity?
Hu Yilin:
Cultural desertification, flattening, and superficialization are not liberalism’s fault; they are a problem of modernity as a whole, and both liberalism and authoritarianism will cause this problem. Right now in the West, liberalism and the right are basically equated, and the right is in turn equated with conservatism. But what conservatism wants to emphasize is precisely the protection of traditional culture. Liberalism does not necessarily hope for cultural flatness, atomization, or universality. The emergence of cultural flattening means liberalism is still not enough, because not only must the market be free, thought must be free as well. Both intellectual freedom and market freedom assume that the market should be rich and diverse. The precondition for a market is that we have different things; only then can circulation occur, otherwise there is no possibility of exchange. Cultural pluralism, the independence of local markets—these are all part of the liberal ideal; the question is how we resist the trend toward flattening. Liberalism ought to be a market with multiple dimensions.
935:
So the phenomenon of flattening today is not because we are too market-oriented, but because we are not market-oriented enough? But perhaps the market itself can only have one dimension, such as maximizing profit and efficiency, and that logic leads to flattening.
Hu Yilin:
We need to distinguish between the narrow sense of market and the broad sense. In the narrow sense, the market is the commodity market anchored by money. In the broad sense, there are other markets too, such as the market of ideas and the market of concepts. What Western classical liberalism emphasizes is not the market, but freedom of speech, thought, and belief; what this actually produces is also cultural diversity. The Protestant movement, for example, broke the single narrative: each person could believe in their own god, so churches could have different beliefs and compete in the overall market of belief. The free circulation of commodities is only one part of these freedoms.
The problem of convergence lies mainly in the Matthew effect of capitalism. The goal of pursuing capital appreciation causes the strong to grow ever stronger: the more concentrated production is, the higher the efficiency; the higher the efficiency, the faster scale can expand, and the more resources it can gather. In the end, only standardized production remains capable of producing the same things. We need to find ways, under the broad trend, to reshape diverse styles; that is also what I want to do, regarding why blockchain can become a multiple solution.
935:
When we are in the present moment, any new order or new idea cannot escape the reality of the world as it stands now. For technology to have real meaning at this time, it certainly has to face the problems of the present. Earlier we discussed how the problems now may not have been caused by the original intentions of liberals, but by the structure of technology itself. A thoroughly free atmosphere ought to foster diversity, but now at least in the commodity market we have fallen into a situation of very singular values, and it seems that this has also determined a singular culture. Can blockchain solve this technical-structural problem?
Hu Yilin:
It cannot be solved directly, but there can still be several layers of solutions that can resist it.
The first layer is shifting from overdrawing on the future to saving, which in itself is favorable to cultural diversity. Culture needs depth and accumulation before it can give birth to a certain kind of plurality; things that iterate too quickly have no way of forming plurality. If market competition is about who can overdraw more and does not look at the past or at accumulation, only at the ability to tell stories, then it is still an overdraft-oriented market. By contrast, if it is a savings-oriented market, you can only do as much as your capital allows; it is not so easy to borrow money on the strength of a new idea alone, and only by finding investors with some accumulated depth can things move forward. In that way, it will not be swiftly crushed.
The homogenization of the market now is, in a sense, caused by financing models. Once a new model gets off the ground, there is immediately an endless stream of investment; massive financing allows it to expand rapidly, and the speed is so fast that before competitors even react, it has already occupied an advantageous position in the market. If financing were not so fast, although it would slow the progress of the entire world a bit, on the other hand it would become more diversified. You would have to expand slowly, step by step, and then others would follow along. Of course, there still has to be patent protection; for others to catch up, they have to differentiate themselves and cannot simply copy everything. Under this model, the speed at which the market is occupied is not so fast, forming a kind of divided and diversified market. In the past everyone thought that slow expansion was a crime: if you can expand that fast and still not be allowed to expand, isn’t that holding back the pace of human progress? But if you do not overdraw, if you walk step by step, human progress does not change in level; the money you overdraw must ultimately be paid back anyway.
The second is to use blockchain’s diverse token system to constitute diversity. Originally, the world’s diversity was maintained through national borders; differences among countries and ethnic groups were not easy to overcome, and this sense of boundary was the traditional world’s way of blocking things off. Now many of those barriers in the internet world have been broken down. In the Web 2.0 era, online culture has turned into large public social platforms, and there are also Matthew effects there, such as internet celebrities. There is no terrain on the internet, no national borders, no barriers, and even fewer language barriers, because it is dominated by English. Things in the traditional world that could create barriers and diversified boundaries have disappeared on the internet, and so it has become this flat global village.
How, then, do we artificially create a sense of barrier in the global village? First, by promoting a relatively decentralized model. Right now all social media platforms are driven by capital, causing rapid expansion, and it is very difficult to have our own little patch of land. BBS forums were relatively local, but they have all slowly been eroded away; the economic model of traditional platforms cannot support them. This is also related to regulation: forums in China are basically impossible to sustain, while there may still be some in the United States. Another factor is the financial model. In the traffic economy and influencer economy driven by big capital, graduate students cannot compare with elementary school students, because the latter have stronger spending power, are more easily deceived, and click on ads more often; that makes them better traffic. Platforms built on this business model also tend toward flattening. It is not only information flow that gets flattened; people themselves are flattened too. To attract more traffic, you have to cater to the majority, not to a specific small group.
935:
Does this compulsion toward expansion come from technology itself, from its inertia? In order to maintain the operating costs of big machines and big factories, the machines must be switched on day and night, and people need to work day and night. The result of never stopping is large-scale production, and once large-scale production appears, it must be matched by large-scale consumption, constantly opening up new markets. After having machines and technology, are we also trapped in the inertia brought about by technology?
Hu Yilin:
This is efficiency supremacy: everything is for capital appreciation, for improved efficiency, for increased productive forces, as the main purpose of all productive activity. Why do I say blockchain offers a possibility? Conceptually, the definition of what Web3 is remains unclear, but the most basic thing is that it provides a permissionless, decentralized, individually fully controlled identity system. The most immediate experience is wallet login: there is no need to register an ID account; as long as you use a wallet, you can generate your own identity, and it can be controlled in a decentralized way. It can help us return to the individual, rather than thinking about problems with social efficiency at the center. The essence of the assembly line is that people do not move; they must follow the machine’s rhythm. People become more like machines, machines more like people; machines run automatically, while people carry out mechanized operations. This model abstracts people away. A worker beside a machine is not a complete person, but a pair of hands tightening screws, a provider of labor power. On internet platforms it is the same: one is traffic, not a complete person, but a provider of click-through rates. People are not participating in this market as complete individuals, but as interchangeable outlets.
So the most important thing is that we must take back the right to define ourselves. If I am not tightening screws in a factory, then what am I doing? One always has to find some work to do, and once you look for work, you run into this problem. Only by obeying the great order can you find work; otherwise, what do you do? If the job is irreplaceable and highly individualized, then no one will hire you, because a recruitment machine cannot be designed according to your individuality; it must be universal. You say you are unique, and ask for a customized assembly line for you—it is impossible. The moment you get off work, the assembly line shuts down. How do you break out? First, the new forms of production on the internet provide new models. Digital nomads, in a sense, break out of traditional boundaries. In the traditional model, everyone has a fixed position; now individuals have greater power of control, and it looks like a return to gig work, but it is also a return to human nature. Even if, at the micro level, it is still relatively mechanized, you personally retain a relatively complete independence.
Digital nomadism is one model. Blockchain cannot be said to be completely tied to it, but it is a very strong support for it—first, it can help you receive money and wages across borders, breaking through traditional territorial constraints. Second, the personal identity of Web3 can be self-controlled. The reason traditional social media has a monopolistic position is, in part, that personal identity is attached to it; all accumulation is controlled by someone else. Personal accumulation is controlled by the platform, and the platform likes constant refreshing. That is a contradiction: it negates your individuality and treats you as traffic to be continuously extracted. The question is how to take accumulation back from the platform. Social platforms themselves still need to exist; they should be responsible for the space of immediate, present communication. But after online communication, those accumulations of ours need to be controllable by ourselves. Web3 may provide such technical conditions: the platform merely provides a space for immediate communication and massive information flow; the thing you follow on the platform is not the account but my identity on the blockchain. Even if you leave Twitter, the connection between you and me is not severed.
935:
So the ownership of your electronic relationships is yours.
Hu Yilin:
People can decide their own relationships with one another, rather than having the platform decide. If the platform bans your account, it is not only the banned person who is deprived; the followers are deprived too, because the platform has severed the connection. Why do we so rarely use some niche platforms? Because niche platforms may never get off the ground, and may shut down at any time. A lot of things from early BBS forums can no longer be found unless you carried them out yourself. Human relationships are also hard to migrate. If you can only hang yourself from one tree, then of course you still choose to hang yourself from the big platform. Right now individuals are fragmented, while platforms are unified. We need to reconstruct the relationships of online social interaction and, by reverse pressure, change the environment of the big platforms so that those diversified small platforms also have room to survive.
The third is the establishment of network states. Traditional states first have geographical separation, and second can rely on tariffs. Hong Kong and Macau are not that different geographically, but through the customs system they can achieve independence in the market. Why do even tiny countries need their own currency? Because they require economic independence. With their own currency, they can avoid being dragged around by others. It was impossible before, but after blockchain it becomes possible. Blockchain forms one small economy after another; if everyone issues a coin, it can constitute a relatively internally autonomous economic system, one that I can call the shots on. The influencer economy and fan economy each have their own economic logic. You always have to use some efficiency model to calculate gains and losses clearly. If you calculate with efficiency supremacy and instrumentalism, then everything will inevitably converge: whatever is more efficient will win, and that will lead to the loss of diversity. The drawback of platform economics lies in complete dependence on the big platform. Of the 80% of the rankings you cast for an influencer, most of it has to go into the platform, and it is not transparent. Every year talent shows generate controversy—whether the production team is manipulating things behind the scenes, whether there is a script—because it is not transparent, so it is suspected. But blockchain solves this problem: a small group of people, not operating according to efficiency logic, but according to emotion or fanaticism, can organize themselves, without depending on a big platform, creating an economic system of “we can play however we like,” and it is still open and transparent, while also carrying its own community culture.
935:
Returning to communities and communities of interest seems to be the consensus these past few years. More and more people emphasize going back to small communities, back to the local and the nearby, organizing into little circles of familiar people or people with similar ideas, in order to carry out attempts like gift economies, and to return within such collectives to a life with more everyday human warmth.
Hu Yilin:
This community trend is not a blockchain trend; rather, this trend already existed. In universalizing movements, people still have the desire to pursue uniqueness and individuality. This is a counterattack, and blockchain can consolidate it, at least extending this trend in the electronic world.
935:
Taking encryption as one possible solution to break market logic—what stage has this line of thought reached now? Are there mature conditions for implementing it?
Hu Yilin:
I often use the New World as a metaphor to explain it. The first stage was the emergence of the New World of the digital realm, roughly in the 1980s and 1990s, when, with the rise of the internet, humanity was quietly shaping an independent digital world. The second stage was the birth of blockchain, when Satoshi Nakamoto discovered the material reality of the New World—discovered that it was real money and real goods, that it was no longer a phantom conception or a story, but a place with genuine, independent wealth. After that came the gold rush: everyone ran to the New World to dig for resources, and then returned to the Old World to live. The rich wanted to go back to the Old World to consume, but they would also pan for gold in the New World and enjoy the wild, lawless thrill, because the New World has no order and is a very good place for speculators.
Now the second stage has passed, and we have entered the third stage—the colonial stage. One line is that people from the Old World send administrators over; another is that the liberalists of the New World gradually take root there. They begin to be dissatisfied with the old order and want to establish a new order. At this point, the New World is no longer in a complete state of anarchy. Both lines are about the establishment of a new order, except that there is struggle: one wants to extend the old order there, while the other wants to overthrow the old order and establish a new one. We are now in just such a period, when the struggle has only just begun to become visible. Some people hope to apply the old model to the blockchain world; others want to go their own way in the blockchain world. The next stage is the independence movement. The New World must break free from the control of the Old World and issue its own declaration of independence. We are between the gold rush stage and the declaration of independence, in an era when various orders are still in conflict and struggle.
Rather than saying it is rich in resources, it is more accurate to say that the New World is sought after because it is a no-man’s land. Because it belongs to no one, it can be newly enclosed and new orders can be established. The internet is also a no-man’s land; originally, it had no national borders. So here too there are two tendencies: one is to regulate it, to make the internet also have national borders, and more and more online stores have to undergo IP censorship. As someone who admires the old-school hacker culture of the internet, this is simply unacceptable. But it is also a way of managing the internet with the traditional tariff model. The other tendency, represented by blockchain, is to consolidate the freedom of the internet. The regulators say there must be tariffs, so I won’t use fiat currency; I’ll transact in the internet’s native currencies instead. Blockchain consolidates the no-man’s-land attribute of the internet.
935:
Has the chief helmsman guiding technological development now changed? It still seems to be basically liberalism that is in the lead.
Hu Yilin:
Of course there has been a change, because more and more people are flooding in. It is indeed liberalism that is dominant, but that is hindsight talking, because liberalism ultimately succeeded, so when we look back, it feels as if liberalism was dominant all along. In biology there is a phenomenon called genetic drift: in a relatively large ecological community, the direction of genetic variation is random and relatively stable. Only the fittest survive. If the new environment is relatively isolated and independent, and only a small group of populations enters that new environment, the variations it produces may not be more competitive or mainstream within the larger ecological community. But if it enters the new environment early, or has some sort of relative advantage, and reproduces successfully throughout the entire new environment, then it will expand that particular genetic information.
We think of the United States as a Puritan country, and the Mayflower can also be seen as a vessel symbolizing Puritanism. But Puritan culture’s predominance across the American continent was not entirely because so many people went there. Even on the Mayflower itself, nearly half the passengers were not Puritans, not to mention the large number of other people who came to the United States around that same period. So perhaps it was just an accident that drove the development of the culture; later that advantage was magnified and gradually solidified. Liberals may have entered at a rather favorable juncture. Bitcoin’s growth has basically been driven by liberals. Its underlying logic is relatively more in line with liberal imagination. That is an advantage, but it cannot once and for all become something decisive.
The final ideology is bound to be a new fusion, just as the United States, although dominated by Puritans, did not ultimately become Puritan culture but an independent, secularized American culture—a hybrid. In the end, the ideal of blockchain will also not be pure Austrian economics, or liberalism, or anarchism. They can only serve as early influences; once they get there first, they can preserve inertia and consolidate this direction, but in the end it will still be compromise and fusion.
Setting Things Right in an Era When Store of Value Is in Retreat
935:
I’ve read your early articles on Bitcoin, and I very much agree that money is instrumentalist and also realist. From an instrumentalist perspective, regardless of medium or substance, any form and medium that meets certain requirements can serve as a means of circulation (money); from a realist perspective, I also agree that deflationary currencies such as Bitcoin, with a limited supply, have a store-of-value function.
I’d like to look back at the earliest Bitcoin white paper and ask: what problems were fundamentally solved by the solution Satoshi Nakamoto proposed? Looking at this technology historically, returning to the moment when the white paper was released, Satoshi mocked the existing financial environment in the genesis block: fiat currency keeps depreciating, financial crises keep repeating. Of these two problems, the monetary-depreciation part is relatively easy to solve—you just create a deflationary currency like Bitcoin. But according to Marx, the root cause lies in the structural contradiction between production and consumption; cyclical economic crises may not actually have that much to do with what kind of thing you use as money.
So even if we replace the means of circulation with Bitcoin, are we still unable to prevent economic crises from recurring?
Hu Yilin:
You say that financial crises have nothing to do with money, but that is precisely what traditional fiat-currency supporters disagree with. Keynesianism arose out of economic crises and has been respected as a means of solving them. Why do Keynesians count the resolution of financial crises as one of fiat money’s merits? Because fiat money allows regulation. When there is deflation, you can pump in liquidity; when there is inflation, you can tighten. The purpose of monetary policy is to regulate the market so that it tends toward stability and does not grow too fast and die too fast. Free-market proponents believe that in the long run the market will tend toward equilibrium, and that regulation is unnecessary. But how many years would you have to wait for the market to reach equilibrium on its own? It could be a very long time. One of Keynes’s replies was that if we wait until after we’re dead for the market to rebalance, it will be too late; we need to quickly give it a hand when the market is out of balance. So if we want to acknowledge the meaning of fiat money, we have to acknowledge that money has a role to play in regulating the economy. Monetary policy can influence the economic cycle—that is the theory of fiat money, not the theory of Bitcoin.
What Bitcoin, in a sense, wants to emphasize—or what we monetary libertarians want to emphasize—is precisely that financial crises have nothing to do with money. But Bitcoin is a return to simplicity and authenticity; its role is to set things right and restore order. Why does the Federal Reserve’s policy always have to look at the unemployment rate, look at the price index, and then make adjustments? Because policy allows money to become overly involved in the economy and in the free market as a whole, making the economy unhealthy. Now, by returning to a more standard and original form of money, we are detoxifying and scraping bone to heal the wound. Of course, this too changes the economic market, but because the market has already been poisoned, the process of detoxification is of course an intervention in the market—not a new kind of regulation after the poison has been removed, but rather making the market able to decouple from money.
935:
So Bitcoin doesn’t want to join financial regulation as a new kind of currency, but instead hopes to become a more effective store-of-value asset?
Hu Yilin:
That is not complete enough. Bitcoin respects the market. Money is a kind of commodity, and all commodities are intrinsic parts of the market. Its effect on the market is the same as that of pork, real estate, or any other commodity. OPEC’s control over oil production is also a form of market regulation; it can even influence the United States, or serve as a bargaining chip in games of strategy. It’s just that money as a commodity is very special, because it is the most neutral commodity, which is why it can serve as money. OPEC can basically control oil output, so although oil can also have monetary properties and can serve as a medium, it is not suitable to be the base money. Gold is a little better: it is distributed across countries all over the world, and gold produced in China is the same as gold produced in the United States. You can’t distinguish them, and there is no way to tell them apart; they are not affected by any one industrial sector or institution. Today fiat currency is more like a monopolized commodity, rather than a universal neutral money. Strictly speaking, what Bitcoin returns to is not only its place as part of the entire commodity market, but also its circulation as the most impartial and most neutral commodity. It is qualified to become better money.
935:
You mentioned that our current system is one of continuous population growth and continual monetary depreciation. As a currency that emphasizes store of value, Bitcoin can lead us into a mode of population decline and currency appreciation. How does that work?
Hu Yilin:
The fiat-money model is not suited to a future scenario of population decline, but that does not mean that an era of population growth must follow the fiat-money model. An era of population growth should also have a culture of store of value. Chinese people should understand this best: they like to save money, live frugally all their lives, in order that their children can live better lives, or in order to raise children for old age, so that when they are old they can enjoy the blood and sweat they saved when they were young. What distinguishes human beings from other animals is precisely this orientation toward the future; we know how to keep things in reserve and plan ahead. There must always be something to store value in: if not money, then grain—“store grain widely, and claim kingship slowly”; or hoard gold, like a miser hoarding gold; or stockpile some bows and arrows, in preparation for rebellion or for emergencies. After entering the industrial era, many commodities that could originally store value no longer have that function. In the past, intellectuals could pass down even a single book as a family heirloom and treat it as a form of wealth. With the development of modernity, the cost of preserving these things is no less than buying new ones. In the end, it seems only real estate is left, yet it is still very hard to store value through a relatively non-monopolized, non-regulated, free commodity from which one will not be deprived of the chance to purchase.
This is a problem of modern society. So the background is this: human nature requires the storage of value, but there is no suitable means of storing value—what should be used then? One way is to financialize the things that store value: real estate, stocks, securities—these things seem able to be passed down. Another way is to treat gold and money as things that can store value. So this is not a new model but a return. Bitcoin calls back human beings’ natural instinct to store value.
Moreover, technological development has been too fast, and the whole world has been in the optimistic mood of progressivism, with the feeling that whatever happens, the future will only keep getting better, and the things we save for our descendants now may later seem worthless to them. Now the faith in, or illusion of, progressivism is beginning to be shaken. The future is not necessarily going to get better and better; the wealth gap is widening, and all kinds of crises keep emerging one after another. That is the feeling of the post-pandemic era. During the pandemic, many wealthy families were deeply hit; it wasn’t that they lacked money, but that they were unprepared. In ordinary times, they feel that if they have money they can always buy bread or rice, with home delivery the next day. In the past, when winter came and things were hard to buy, families would store a cellar full of napa cabbage. Now that the commodity economy is developed, people feel there’s no need to store anything. But when a crisis really comes, they discover that they still need to keep some reserves; if you store nothing at all, then a sudden few days of restrictions and you have nothing to eat. The increase in uncertainty has made people remember that we still need to plan ahead. Money is only a means of reserve; what changes is simply the human mindset, from not worrying about the future to needing to worry about it.
Flytofu:
But the crypto world, or Bitcoin’s ecosystem, is very unstable.
Hu Yilin:
Quite the opposite—Bitcoin is the most stable and conservative investment because it does not change. Powell opens and closes his mouth, and the total supply of dollars changes dramatically. Not to mention a hundred years: the dollars of ten years ago and the dollars of today are already no longer the same thing. But one Bitcoin is one Bitcoin; hold it in your hand through the end of time, and it is still one Bitcoin. In ontological terms, it is stable; it is a long-term expectation for the future. The growth of the total social and economic output comes from the continuous development of technology—of course, that too is a belief. In the long run, the only thing in the world that truly grows stably is technology; everything else is unstable. Politics repeatedly swings back and forth, culture changes. As long as technology rises, total social and economic output will rise, and a currency with a fixed supply will appreciate. If the future society were on a Bitcoin standard, it would keep rising in line with the growth of total economic output.
One major argument from fiat-money supporters now is that gold-standard money cannot keep up with the pace of social and economic growth or with transaction demand; if the quantity of money does not grow, there will be deflation, and to respond, the government must regulate fiat money downward to match the pace of economic growth. In the long run, fiat money is bound to depreciate, because it is designed precisely to depreciate. But Bitcoin supporters believe this regulatory way of thinking is wrong. If money appreciates, the economy will not collapse—that is the theory of liberalism and Austrian economics. The world has never truly experienced a Bitcoin standard, so this theory still lacks empirical proof. The idea that a world on a Bitcoin standard would be better is, for now, more of a faith.
Flytofu:
Compared with gold, what are Bitcoin’s advantages?
Hu Yilin:
First, gold is not a currency with a very predictable and stable total supply; changes in mining technology and mining speed are uncertain. Second, as money, gold is inefficient: it is inconvenient to carry, and verification and division are also limited. The theory of infinite divisibility is impossible in practice. If you take very thin gold leaf to the market to trade, others cannot accept it immediately; they have to take it for verification to know whether it is real or fake. The material properties of gold make it more suitable for centralized storage, which is why a gold standard must have paper money as a token. But exchanging the token for gold is very difficult. Germany wanted to redeem its gold back from the United States, and had to mobilize the entire country to send transport ships, carry out all sorts of diplomatic efforts, and even issue threats. This kind of centralized storage is very easy for trust to collapse.
Bitcoin is relatively flexible and can be infinitely divisible. Of course there are transaction costs, and division is still limited, so if it is widely adopted, then just like gold, it will also use token-like forms similar to fiat money, or L2, Lightning Network, and the like—ways of using it without transacting on the main chain. The difference between it and gold lies in the fact that the conversion in this kind of transaction method is simpler. You can do it in a decentralized, autonomous way. Bitcoin can have a relatively centralized medium or token form that helps accelerate circulation, to meet the needs of everyday transactions, but there will not be a situation where gold is stored in the U.S. central bank and then cannot be retrieved when needed.
Flytofu:
In your view, is the essence of Bitcoin value storage, a value benchmark, or a means of payment?
Hu Yilin:
The essence of money is both a store of value and a means of payment; there is no contradiction. Bitcoin is a kind of money. When money serves as a means of payment, there is a medium, and that causes many people to confuse the medium with what it carries. The value represented by a hundred-yuan banknote is borne by paper as the medium, but that value can also be borne by a paper check, a plastic bank card, or an entirely intangible Alipay account. To say that RMB is a means of payment means transmitting an RMB-denominated ledger through means such as Alipay and bank cards. Alipay, or that piece of paper, is the means of payment; RMB transcends any particular means of payment, and all of these are priced on an RMB standard.
When we talk about Bitcoin, it is easy to muddle the concepts. The word stands for many things: wallet software, the protocol, the blockchain, the currency unit, and even the ledger itself is also called Bitcoin. It also has all kinds of payment means, including the mainnet, the Lightning Network, sidechain L2s, centralized exchanges, anchored currencies to be issued in the future, and so on. Bitcoin is the pricing unit for these means of payment; it itself cannot serve as a means of payment. The mainnet’s throughput is very low, far too inefficient, so it cannot be the only means of payment. So the Bitcoin-standard world I look forward to is one in which the RMB-denominated units inside various means of payment are replaced with Bitcoin.
Flytofu:
But some people also say that Bitcoin has a fixed total supply, so it is not suitable as money.
胡翌霖:
After the collapse of the gold standard, the United States shifted the blame and said that money creation was not due to greed, but because the market was advancing, gold supply was insufficient, and if monetary stability was to be maintained then more money had to be issued. But in essence that is just a breach of trust. If nobody were allowed to over-issue money, then those with money could beat down those without money, and the world would be peaceful.
Flytofu:
If there is no over-issuance, then wouldn’t the real-world value corresponding to one unit of Bitcoin keep rising? Isn’t that a kind of instability?
胡翌霖:
The development of technology itself is stable. People of our era feel this most keenly: the more technologically saturated a commodity is, the faster it depreciates; smartphones depreciate every year. By contrast, slower-moving things like real estate, energy, and land—the wealth containers of traditional vested interests—will appreciate. Technological products themselves are depreciating, and this won’t affect the free exchange of the market itself; it will only affect traditional resource-based products and commodities with relatively low technological content. Those are the things the old money cares about. In order to make you believe that currency depreciation is good for you, they design a lie. They often get rich by living on borrowed money, constantly rolling over old debts with new ones; the money of the future is cheaper than the money of the past, so the more they borrow, the richer they get. The pension system is about making the next generation work to repay the previous generation’s debts. That is unfair, because the poor cannot borrow money. The poor save every penny, and after a lifetime of saving, everything they have finally devalues, leaving nothing behind.
Now this model is running into the problem of population contraction, and the Ponzi scheme can’t keep going. It is an economic system built on the logic of currency depreciation and population appreciation: originally four young people supported one old person; now it becomes four old people relying on one young person. Before, the whole world was inflating while money was depreciating; now it has collapsed. Even without Bitcoin stirring things up, it would not be able to keep going on its own. Why were the real estate and Moutai that the old people speculated on in the past supposed to be taken over by the young? The new generation of young people does not want to take over the bag. You were able to sit on the mountain and never run it bare, endlessly enjoying the interest, while now we young people work our whole lives, and in the future there will be no descendants. So now it is the other way around: population contraction makes money appreciate, and that is the game of the future. Bitcoin can adapt to it.
Flytofu:
People also worry that Bitcoin now seems to have been somewhat absorbed by the United States. Things like ETFs have already had a very important impact on Bitcoin’s price.
胡翌霖:
It is Bitcoin that has absorbed the United States, not the United States that has absorbed Bitcoin, because Bitcoin has not changed; it is the United States that has changed. The United States would have to change its laws in order to absorb Bitcoin, but Bitcoin’s protocol and software have not issued a special update for Americans or for Trump. On the contrary, Bitcoin will increasingly affect the dollar. The United States is treating Bitcoin as a reservoir for the dollar, and we are moving toward a Bitcoin-standard direction.
And when it comes to buying coins, everyone is equal. Compared with ordinary people, the United States has only disadvantages, not advantages, in OTC trading, because the procedures are more complicated. Before Bitcoin, everyone is equal. The difficulty of buying one hundred yuan’s worth of coin and ten thousand yuan’s worth of coin is the same. The dollar exports money through lending, and for those closest to the top 1 percent of society, the difficulty of borrowing money is different from yours. The people closest to the faucet borrow money more easily, and are more easily able to see capital appreciate and earn the interest of money making money. But Bitcoin is equal; it has no interest, and everyone buys on the same terms. Individuals may even have an advantage.
Flytofu:
People also worry that central banks or big companies might hoard Bitcoin and not release it into trading, while each block reward keeps halving, so the transaction fees and rewards miners receive will keep decreasing. Later on, miners may no longer have an incentive to maintain the network. Do you have this concern?
胡翌霖:
If the Bitcoin standard does not succeed, then that danger will exist. If it does succeed, then there is no such problem. The settlement demand for a large amount of everyday transactions is provided through third-party centralized institutions such as Alipay. Those institutions themselves also need settlement; otherwise their money is not real. The Bitcoin standard will break this financial order, but there will still be hierarchy in the new financial order. It won’t be the central bank, but the mainnet that becomes the most reliable thing; beneath it there will still be branch platforms, the Lightning Network, transaction media, Alipay, centralized exchanges, and other third-party platforms, and a large amount of daily consumption will happen there. Even if ordinary people do not spend, they still need to withdraw Bitcoin from the platform, and there will be settlement needs between institutions. In 2017 the debate was that if Bitcoin kept going like this it would become too congested and had to be scaled up quickly; now the debate has become that Bitcoin is too quiet. Right now the whole Bitcoin market is immature and unstable, so of course it will fluctuate. Sometimes it is full, sometimes empty; a good market self-regulation mechanism has not yet formed, and the entire ecosystem is not sound enough. Those big institutions may hoard coins, but do the coins they hoard not count as having been traded? The same is true for ordinary people.
“Bitcoin standard” is the most precise term. Under a Bitcoin standard, there may be many other powerful tokens, securities, or projects. They may be more eye-catching, but Bitcoin is their background; that is what is meant by a Bitcoin standard. The Bitcoin standard does not mean Bitcoin is the most supreme thing, but it is the most fundamental and the most stable.
The Many Faces of the Coin World: Memecoin, Trump Coin, AI
Flytofu:
When we talked last year, the Bitcoin ecosystem was still just emerging. A year has passed—do you feel a bit disappointed?
胡翌霖:
The whole circle needs a time of chaos. At the time, one big problem with Ethereum was that it was as if a revolutionary had just seized a place like Liangshan Marsh, and then immediately started thinking about carving out territories and crowning kings, rushing to do those things of long-term peace and stability, wanting to do environmental protection. Ethereum’s move to POS is the stupidest thing; it is as if it thinks it has already become the leader of this world and has begun to think about the future and environmental protection. Like Bitcoin itself forking, and in the end the factions fighting it out, everyone votes. In the end there is no leader who can hammer the matter home with one blow; it is all decided by the market. If the market really ends up needing POS, then you wait for the market to fork in the end. But V God seems to have this sense of responsibility—what is bad about him is that he is too good; what is bad about him is that he is a benevolent ruler, but a benevolent ruler is still a ruler. This circle is still in the era of Chen Sheng and Wu Guang; although Liu Bang and Xiang Yu have probably already emerged, it is still in chaotic warfare, and it has not yet reached the point where it is time to think about a hundred-year foundation. Matters of a true hundred-year foundation are also fought out by the market in the end, not decided by you now with a slap on the forehead from the top down. Looking at Ethereum’s moves just makes one feel that it definitely won’t work. The current logic of the coin circle, or rather the ecosystem and its way of playing as a whole, is not truly mature. It still needs chaos; the Bitcoin ecosystem is also part of that chaos.
But in terms of inevitability, Solana really does better fit the market’s enthusiasm for quick in-and-out moves. Recently I have actually been somewhat defending Solana’s ecosystem; its existence is reasonable, and we should have respect for the market. Although I think the Bitcoin ecosystem is good, if I made the wrong bet I still have to admit it. People’s needs and enthusiasm are still on these things. Meme coins also have meaning, in a sense.
Flytofu:
Where do you think the meaning of Meme coins lies, and where does their legitimacy lie?
胡翌霖:
Meme coins are cyber parades. The overall state of revolution is very chaotic and brutal. In revolutionary marches, many people are in an irrational state, randomly killing, beating, or smashing machines. In the whole of modern history, this kind of thing is especially common in the West. Modern capitalist systems that look very solid, such as democracy and the common law system, have already tended toward stability, but if we look back at periods of change, we can see that two forces were acting at the same time.
One is the force of elitism, including Rousseau, Hume, Montesquieu, and so on. They have utopian visions and practical suggestions, and also real efforts; they play the roles of idealists and builders. But there is also another force, the force of the masses, which is very irrational and rebellious. A new concept appears, and so they rise up in revolt, even to the point of smashing, looting, and seizing things. In fact they do not really understand what they want to pursue or how they should do it, and they have no thoughts of long-termism. It is only when this force acts together with the elitist force from above that the old world can be overthrown. Neither only the elites without grassroots movements, nor only the grassroots without elite guidance on direction, will work. Even if we do not speak of mutual respect, the two forces still have to acknowledge each other.
935:
This technology was originally supposed to be a tool facing the future, to resist the modern characteristics we suffered from in the past, such as being overly instrumental-rational, overly quantified, and exclusively technocentric or science-centric. But the underlying philosophical view we now use in applying this technology seems instead like a return to modernity, for example “Code is law,” entrusting all credit entirely to mathematics and code. If we say that everyone has a completely equal opportunity to buy Bitcoin, how can we ensure that in the future the social power system will not seep into the act of buying Bitcoin? Will systems of power and hierarchy seep in and change the protocol?
胡翌霖:
What is wrong with modernity? Making technology the sole criterion is problematic, but that does not mean that because technology is accurate, it is therefore wrong. The problem with technology is that it is too accurate, so accurate that it wipes out other less accurate values; that is the problem of modernity. But reflecting on modernity does not mean being anti-science; we still believe in technology. I often use the example of taking a photograph: I take a photo of you, and the photo is accurate; it can faithfully convey an impression of who you are, but it cannot be taken as you yourself. A photograph is a medium for depicting you; you contain information that is richer and more dynamic than a photograph. We believe technology is an accurate photograph, but we cannot regard technology as the only form of knowledge.
In Bitcoin, we need to trust technology and mathematics, but most important of all is people—the default stability of living together. The premise of opening a pork shop is believing that everyone will eat pork; you believe that there will not suddenly come a day when the whole world stops eating pork. This is neither mathematics nor science, but a default understanding of human society. Bitcoin also has such a mechanism of “people” built into it. Can Bitcoin raise its cap? Or can it be shut down? Yes. As long as everyone agrees on it, it can happen. When we say it is stable, we do not mean absolute stability in a purely mathematical sense. This stability comes partly from mathematics and partly from people’s faith in it, from a relatively expected future society.
Flytofu:
How do you understand Trump’s issuing a coin?
Hu Yilin:
Trump really knows how to play; indeed, he’s an old businessman, and an old rogue with nothing to fear anymore. For people who believe in libertarianism, this can also be a good thing. We all believe in Hayek’s “Denationalisation of Money,” advocating that private individuals and companies should also be able to issue coins; a market economy should have always worked this way. Money is only one kind of commodity, and the right to issue currency should not be monopolized exclusively by any person or institution. Since anyone is allowed to issue a coin, then of course that person can also be Trump. This demonstration effect tells everyone that anyone can issue one, returning us to this kind of libertarianism. In the short term it will affect this market; everyone comes to make a quick buck, and once the little bit of leeks has been harvested, the market really won’t improve. But in the long run it can count as progress for libertarianism. Issuing a coin in such a low-class way, and demystifying the very act of issuing coins, can also count as a kind of intellectual liberation.
935:
But only if these coins are really used as currency for equivalent circulation and exchange would they count as the kind of non-state money Hayek imagined, or something like the non-state currencies of the “free banking” era, right? Now these so-called “coins” look more like disposable consumer goods.
Hu Yilin:
Circulation can be large or small, and it also depends on the scope within which it circulates. It is similar to today’s influencer economy: a small crowd chases after one streamer to boost rankings, sending platform tokens, yet even if the ranking is very high, no money is earned. Money is also one kind of commodity; some commodities circulate widely, some narrowly; some are lively for only three to five days, some for three to five years. The gold standard and the dollar only caused a stir for three or five decades. These kinds of celebrity coins and influencer coins are all the fast-decaying influencer economy.
The imagination of the past was limited. Back then, money and tokens did not have so many flashy uses. Now coins are no longer issued by opening banks; being an influencer can mean issuing coins. The vouchers coffee shops usually issue, in a certain sense, are they not also tokens? It’s just that now they are issued through blockchain, making them more open and transparent. Their liquidity is also better. Originally you could only come back to drink coffee, but if there is a market, they can be traded at any time; then they are no longer money in the narrow original sense as the sole measure of value, but become tokens in a broader sense. This is in keeping with the tide of the times. Many people feel that the tide of the times itself is wrong, thoroughly rotten, but this is simply entertainment unto death; the internet is a non-rational world.
Today, finance has come down from the altar, and those who speculate in coins are no different from the Wall Street types who play finance. This is a decentralized, transparent finance, where everything can be traded and bought and sold. If you cannot dispose of something and cannot receive dividends from it, what does it have to do with you personally? Only things that can be financialized are truly things under your personal control. The influencer economy is an economy of emotion, but emotion is invisible, intangible, and impossible to locate. Now, through such tokens, emotion is turned into something tradable.
Flytofu:
What is the significance of crypto for AI, and of AI for crypto?
Hu Yilin:
Today’s AI is the kind of elitist discourse of the white left, saying AI is dangerous and cannot be made public. It is as if they want to cautiously control its values themselves, so that this AI won’t go astray. But that is wishful thinking; technological development itself is hard to control. On the other hand, this is also arrogant. Why should the values of that tiny group of yours represent the values of all humanity? Your own tiny group can’t even sort yourselves out. You say AI and humans must be aligned—have you yourselves been aligned? It is neither possible nor should it be. The future model will certainly be open, and it will require a financial model to support it. AI burns money, but it can also make money; the flow of funds itself needs management. We do not oppose having a relatively structured model of AI governance. There still need to be small groups, small communities, or states, communities, and institutions to train AI that belongs to us. When we have the right to train our AI, how to finance it, how to invest, and how to share dividends from AI’s benefits all become important. We should not use an excessively globalized, big-capital-oriented model. Otherwise, after all the competition, the strong only grow stronger, and it remains centralized.
What can truly resist large institutions is always decentralization and open source. But the problem with open source is that it does not make money. Like the open-source communities of the Linux era, they powered themselves for love and could not earn much money, but that felt fine; hacker spirit drove programmers to maintain it. But AI won’t work that way. Its energy input is huge, its output is huge, and it can bring rich social benefits and value. A decentralized financial system is needed to support an open-source AI ecosystem. The open contract system of blockchain can form a relatively independent governance model.
Flytofu:
This scenario is already close to science fiction.
Hu Yilin:
Something even more science-fictional would be, for example, if AI agents awakened—what currency would they use? AI needs energy, and the things it creates also need to be traded; so what currency would they use? Would they be under the jurisdiction of the Federal Reserve? So perhaps it would be crypto, especially Bitcoin and the like, as a very basic currency.
Closer to home, the real question is how to build diversity in AI training. In fact, both left and right support the idea that the world needs diversity; anti-globalization, anti-universalism, and a return to plurality are a trend. The problem of the internet age is how to maintain plurality in an environment where information flows too freely and too much. When McLuhan predicted in the 1970s that the earth in the electronic age would become a village, that was, in his view, a frightening concept: so many people crowding into one village would make it extremely cramped, noisy, and chaotic, and the boundaries between people would disappear. The original boundaries existed naturally and preserved cultural diversity. In the internet world, that geographical distance has disappeared. Industrialization and urbanization have made big cities look the same, regional characteristics have become increasingly diluted, and the dialects of one’s hometown are slowly being forgotten. The universalism that levels everything flat is wrong; we need to restore a world of pluralism. But on the other hand, a plural world is hard to fix in place, so Western white-left politics has moved toward using skin color to freeze diversity in place. The boundaries of region, culture, and ethnicity have all been broken through, and in the end they can only become boundaries of skin color. After all, you still can’t just dye people however you like, so it becomes a matter of emphasizing skin color and emphasizing sexuality in order to distinguish difference. But this method is narrow-minded; it distinguishes people as if they were animals.
Ultimately, we still need to return to the path of how small communities live together. In a big market, we need our own reserved ground, and the boundaries must have a degree of separation. Money and economic systems are also a kind of relative separation. Today we need some separation, so that a small community can maintain its independence. In the internet age, the narrative of the nation-state has become outdated; what will certainly replace it is a community narrative carrying a new kind of imagination, and its boundary-making tool may well be blockchain. At first I also found this objectionable: every time you set up a DAO or form a group, you have to issue a coin. But in a certain sense, only after issuing a coin can a buffer be established, giving you self-determination and a small ecosystem within yourself. The internet of the Web2 era was a completely flattened, boundaryless ecosystem; through this kind of approach, we return to a relatively bounded ecosystem.
There are many examples in the history of technology. If something circulates too quickly, it will be replaced by other similar things. For example, ancient Rome invented glass, and used glass for drinking and eating, whereas China mainly used pottery and porcelain. At first, these two cultures were relatively separated and did not quickly connect. Once they did connect, they discovered that glass could be replaced by porcelain, so they began using porcelain cups and bowls, and glass became unnecessary. If the two worlds had come into contact too closely from the very beginning, perhaps because porcelain was too advanced, glass would have disappeared before it even had much room to be used. With a relative separation, different places can develop their own technological paths, and only after these different paths have developed to a certain degree do they converge; that is diversity. If they had converged from the start, then perhaps the entire technological tree of glass would never have had a chance to be unlocked, and telescopes and microscopes would all have been lost. Conversely, if glass had swallowed up porcelain, then many beautiful cultural and artistic objects would also have disappeared. The development of AI is the same. If we understand AI through productivity-primacy, it will fall into the Matthew effect, where the strong only grow stronger, and AI development will also converge toward efficiency. But if we choose AI through community culture, training each community’s own AI according to its different preferences, things may well be much better.
Flytoufu：
In your book Introduction to Philosophy of Technology, you write: “We cannot expect to control the overall trend of technological development by individual power alone. But when an individual is always facing individual technologies, there is always room to have an impact.” From the perspective of the individual, how can each of us, as weak individuals, influence the direction in which crypto technology moves forward?
Hu Yilin：
Hoarding coins is the most direct influence. Whatever coin you hoard is what you support; I hoard Bitcoin, so I support Bitcoin; hoarding U.S. dollars means supporting the dollar. It has to be consistent with your ideals. The second thing is to try new technologies, experience plugin wallets, NFTs, experience the new social organizational forms built through blockchain, including becoming a digital nomad. Everything contains your political outlook; when a programmer develops some small, concrete technical function, it also contains your political outlook. Modern society produces a kind of numbness: everyone no longer pays attention to what effects what they do have; they simply obey orders from above, fulfill their duties, and even produce the rope to hang themselves. So if we want to step outside this modernity, the first thing is self-awakening—to reflect on the ideals and ideas behind every matter: what is it ultimately for? What does it provide? Whom does it benefit? What kind of impact might it have on society? Everyone deserves to think about this; that is freedom.
Flytoufu:
This book also says, “Human freedom is not only manifested in the ability to choose between rice and noodles, but in the capacity for reflection that can rise beyond them at any moment.” This passage is very inspiring to me.
Uncommons
Reporter: Flytofu＆935
Translator: 935
Edit:0614
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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