This thread has been intentionally titled to raise some eyebrows but I shall explain the reasoning behind the statement and hope to convince you that what I say is in fact true. There is enough negative rubbish around here so I thought I would do something to redress the balance.

It was Margaret Thatcher that claimed that there is no such thing as Society and she was talking nonsense. We are all distinct but collectively we are more, much more. We have been able to collaborate and compete with one another through endless generations to elevate humanity beyond a mere collection of self serving individuals. The human brain is widely acknowledged to be the most complex structure in the known universe but it is small fry compared to billions of them all fizzing away on this little planet. 7 billion heads are better than one as they say.

All these brains have lots of individual challenges to overcome but in an overcrowded world it is the collective challenges that are increasingly urgent. Society is required to ensure that we can normalise with our fellow man, identify the biggest challenges and work on them together. It is not a dog eat dog world. Competition is not the rule as many would have you believe, cooperation is a much more powerful force by far. Dogs don't eat each other if they can help it, they evolve pack instincts and respect for the territory of others.

In the same way that dogs have evolved rules, so have we. Not all of us are nice but it is interesting to note that as a society we are bad enough to need rules but good enough to implment them. The diversity of our species ensures that there is plenty of room for conflict and general disagreement and to resolve this we need to apply rules. Religion offered guidance on the best practices to ensure a reasonably trouble free and painless life but things have got a little more comple that that. It seems as a species that we may in fact have gone a bit overboard with the rules, or at least it did when I came across the Korean directives on free trade of cabbages.

Money is what makes the world go round. Like it or not, it is the truth. Most of our trade is tightly controlled, groups of important men make decisions in our best interests. They make rules on how money should de distributed about, which country we should attack in defense of our interests, what level of rights to afford individuals and all of the other stuff that we need government to decide upon. The trouble is, the most valuable assets are the people who make the rules, they can punish their enemies, reward their friends and supress all challenges to their authority. The fact that a relatively small group of people can wield so much power represents a single point of failure. A system is only as strong as its weakest element and the greatest challenge to Society today is to find a way to eliminate weaknesses in our systems of governance and ensure a fairer deal for everyone.

The reason that I think Bitcoin may be bigger than the Bible is because it represents a shift in the way that we organise ourselves. It shows us what we can really do to leverage the power of the internet. Bitcoin has solved old riddles and will be ancestor to a thousand ideas in the future. It beautifully expresses the solution to a problem that has vexed mankind for as long as we can remember and gives us the confidence to ponder just how far we can go. Never before has it felt so possible that we can lift ourselves from servitude and assert our collective power. Bitcoin or one of its offspring will be the rules of exchange, encoded immutably into the fabric of our society, it will be the collective consciousness of the world, branching, merging, collaborating and competing to better itself, for us.

The genie is out of the bottle and I for one am more optimistic about our future than I ever have been.

Torminalis

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