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Bit & Coin

Merging Digitality and Physicality

 

 

Volume I

Digital Humanity’s Truth Layer Blockchain 

The New Internet, its Authenticity Layer, and Applications 

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Volume II

Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Beyond

Essays of Science, Economics, Law, Ethics, and Controversies 

 

ZeMing M. Gao

 

 

Introduction

This book is a diagnosis and prescription for the prevention and cure of the growing digital cancer that threatens humanity.

Humanity is already submerged in the digitalization of information. This massive change brings many conveniences, but also generates many significant problems, including:

(1) The management of digital information is increasingly under control by a strong aggregating force of the ‘centralized database gravitational field,’  leading to extreme centralization of information.  As a result, information becomes an object of exploitation and manipulation by oligarchs.  People are exploited and used without their knowledge, which is both sad and pitiful.

(2) The global economy has begun to gradually degenerate from a relatively free form of capitalism into a digital feudal system (typified by ‘digital landlords’ at the Valley), and may even further degenerate into an information slavery system.

(3) Although human cognition is becoming more and more closely connected with an increasingly large number of information sources, it is ironically becoming increasingly isolated from factual truth.  This has progressed so badly that it starts to create confusion, challenges, and destruction in people’s understanding of the most basic truth and facts. If one day all information can be falsified, the consequence will be that, even if only a minority of information is actually falsified, people lose confidence in all information because they are forced to assume that nothing can be trusted.  This is the outcome of digital cancer.

(4) The real blockchain technology is an epoch-making technology to solve these significant problems. Unfortunately, in the past decade or so, the world has suffered pervert developments in the disguise of a ‘courageous financial rebellion’.   The real blockchain technology has been overshadowed and replaced by a large-scale cryptocurrency speculation campaign.  This outright reversal brings almost entirely corruption: technological corruption, corruption of economic productivity, market corruption, political corruption, and corruption of public opinion and media.

The world needs to know the truth.

But even more, the world needs to see real solutions and hope.  The focus of the book is not just to diagnose digital humanity, but to propose technological and business model solutions.

Although not meant to be an academic publication, these two volumes of the book are rather technical, and dense in economics and legal concepts, and may not be an easy read.  Readers may need to have a certain foundation and a considerable willingness to explore.

At the same time, one of the goals of this book is to cast down the superstition and idolatry in the crypto circle, to persuade readers away from pure financial speculations, and to guide them towards ideas and development directions that have sound technological and economic foundations.

Reading this book may cause some readers displeasure or even antagonism.  I plead for a more open-minded reading without pre-existing vested interests.  But I am willing to pay a price.   For each informed reader, I reckon it is worth making a few enemies.