It would be a good idea

to build civilisations

Some years ago it occurred to me that there was a vitality to an activity that had long seemed incidental to me. When I began to be involved in the space launch industry, I made it a point to travel to events where the industry was being discussed by its participants. Doing so brought me into contact with people in the industry, both competitors and allies.

Later I began working in the digital gold industry. Again it was extremely useful to me and the organisations that I built to travel to various events in that industry. Doing so brought me into direct personal contact with many of the leaders of the industry, including the founders of e-gold, e-Bullion, GoldMoney, Loom, and an array of businesses that interacted with these currencies and financial systems.

As well, I made a frequent and sincere effort to connect online to people who shared my interest in these things. In the case of the space industry this aspect of connecting at first took the form of email, list services, and USEnet. Since the advent of the world wide web thirty years ago, the nature and scope of online connectivity has expanded and, more recently, fragmented in amazing ways.

It turns out that in early 1991, in the midst of the work I was doing to fundamentally change the way people think about space, the ground fell out from under me. What I had thought was a free country proved to be nothing of the sort. This led to a number of really interesting conversations with, for example, Jerry Pournelle. The exploration of the implications of these discussions led to my understanding that the building of a stairway to the stars would require a solid foundation on which to build. What had been done to me and what I saw done to many others before and since was evidence that people were trying to build on the shifting sands of expedience. Any stiff wind would blow over their constructions and leave them holding detritus.

Something happened in the digital gold industry that would take several books to fully explore. Briefly, e-gold was destroyed by the deep state; e-Bullion was destroyed by a murder partly motivated by the deep state; Pecunix was destroyed by an untrustworthy Swiss bullion banker; and the Liberty Dollar was also destroyed by the deep state. These events occurred in 2007 and 2008 at a time when the worldwide focus was on a financial crisis which revealed the deeply cynical and badly expedient nature of global currencies, financial enterprises, and national governments. Bad men had combined to make it impossible to build beautiful things, and there was a great deal of flotsam and jetsam to which a few of us clung for a short time.

One of the important outcomes, which I can testify of my own experience was organic, was the development of a decentralised solution to the “e-gold problem” as we then conceived it. These discussions led directly to the 2008 publication of the Bitcoin white paper.

Jim's Corollary

The seemingly-incidental activity discussed in my opening paragraph above was to make connexions with others in an industry. It turns out that, looking back on my first six decades, I’ve been guided into many great blessings. My career, as it were, has spanned education, banking, residential services, recycling, aerospace, publishing, finance, real estate development, healthcare, software development, private equity, research, and digital currencies, among others.

There is a concept in mathematics called Metcalfe’s law. It states that the impact of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes in the network. This can be understood by examining the number of possible connexions in a network of a given number of nodes. Let’s consider a very simple telecommunications device, such as the early telephone.

One telephone device not connected to any other is useless. Two such devices can only be connected to one another, so two nodes can form only one connexion. Five phones are able to make ten possible connexions. Twelve phones can make up to 66 connexions. You can see from these numbers that the addition of a small number of phones increases the possible number of connexions dramatically, which makes the impact of the slightly larger network much greater than merely additive expansion.

To quote from wikipedia, “Metcalfe's Law is related to the fact that the number of unique possible [connexions] in a network of n nodes can be expressed mathematically as the triangular number n ( n − 1 ) / 2 which is asymptotically proportional to [n squared]”. In other words, as the number nodes becomes very large, the number of possible connexions approaches n squared.

My corollary, as I’ve stated in various discussions, is that the value of a network to a given subset of nodes is increased exponentially by establishing or actualising connexions amongst those nodes. Metcalfe’s law speaks of the impact or potential value of a network in total, whether or not individual connexions actually exist between a given set of nodes. Metcalfe’s law looks at the network from the outside, as it were, from the perspective of those building the network and seeking to achieve break even financially from the initial and recurring costs of implementing and expanding the network.

My corollary examines the network from the perspective of someone within the network. In reality, my perspective would more accurately be described as occupying a set of nodes in related and disparate networks, since I am not merely the user of a single telephone, but of various devices such as laptops, email accounts, Twitter profiles, Freedom Cells, and financial accounts. I have at times in the past been operatively in control of Telex accounts, fax machines, printers, publications, web sites, blog spots, and video channels.

If we consider the 12 phones in the network that has 66 possible connexions, but we find that three of those phones are never actually used to interact with a fourth phone in that same network, then even though those connexions are possible, they are not realised. So the value of introducing the owner-operator of the fourth phone to the owner-operators of each of those other three would be significant. Doing so would evidently increase the value of the network not only for all four, but for all other nodes in the network.

Sandy Bottom

Long ago Edmund Burke wrote these words: "When bad men combine, the good must associate, or they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." For reasons that are not completely clear in the historical record, this actual quotation has been widely summarised as "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," which is certainly true but far less useful in terms of guidance.

Mankind have built many things, but have ignored the admonition by Jesus to build upon a solid foundation. What we see around us is the culmination of many people building on various densities of sand. If we do nothing, we will see a terrible dystopian future. If we associate and identify things worth doing and work together to be sure those things are done, we can build an actual civilisation worth living in, and bequeath it to our children and grandchildren.

Another person whose ideas resonate at times, Mohandas Gandhi, was supposedly asked by a British reporter, "What do you think of Western civilisation?"

His response was, "I think it would be a good idea." It would be. But it has not yet been, at least not entirely. Too much of what is wrong or even evil has been allowed to prosper, at first in secret and now quite openly.

It may seem like hubris to declare one's intention to build a civilisation, or, even, as I suspect we should, to encourage the building of many human civilisations, interacting but potentially decentralised and distributed to the point of being impervious to obliteration by evil. Yet, we live in spiritually significant times, so if not us, who? And if not now, when?

There is a related project now being undertaken by a group of Americans based in Texas. The project is to build a network and to encapsulate, somehow, the concept of trust in a gauge or meter. So persons in the network would be able to form connexions and also be able to understand the trustworthiness of the person on the other end of each connexion. Moreover, people in the network would be able to input information, such as “Person A told me they would do X things but only did X-3 of those things.”

This intention to add a “trust layer” to the Internet is the work of New Founding. The team is led by Nate Fischer and others. I think Nate Fischer is a very wise man. The work of not only establishing or actualising connexions (which suffices to prove my corollary) but also to measure trust and convey it into the network is vitally important. In the long run, building this trust layer and informing it thoroughly may be the most important work of our generation.

Similarly, there is a project I’ve been asked to participate in which I describe in my other free substack. I say similarly, because I believe there are many related ideas at the core of these intentions, and to understand New Founding it would be well to understand the Freedom Network.

The time to build a future for our children and grandchildren is always now. Necessarily, we must stop doing things that are detrimental to the future prosperity and spiritual progress of mankind. To understand how, we should, quite simply, turn to God.