Bitcoin Renaissance: Skeuomorphism and Retroism in the Digital World

"With POW as time, UTXO/Cell as space, and energy as drive, we can get a world."

The Bitcoin Renaissance is a topic that everyone is talking about. Many project parties place themselves under this banner to explain their current behavior. At present, this wave refers more to the gathering of funds, consensus and developers to the Bitcoin ecosystem. But perhaps we can think more deeply about this wave: What exactly is it? What will it leave behind?

I think the Bitcoin Renaissance is the revival of two basic value propositions, one is POW and the other is UTXO. The former is opposite to POS, and the latter is opposite to the account model, and the representative of the POS+Account model is Ethereum. This Bitcoin Renaissance will mean that after fifteen years of development, the blockchain industry is returning from the POS+Account route led by Ethereum to the POW+UTXO route led by Bitcoin.

But why? What exactly are people tired of? When people return to Bitcoin, how is the world that may be conceived different from Ethereum? (Except that Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared and Bitcoin became a no-man's land.)

Skeuomorphism and Retroism

If you look carefully at the white papers of Bitcoin and Ethereum, you will be able to feel how different these two systems are.

 Image source: Bitcoin Whitepaper

In the summary of Bitcoin's white paper, Satoshi Nakamoto defined Bitcoin as "a completely peer-to-peer electronic currency." We can find Bitcoin's reference in the real world: cash. The characteristic of cash is that it allows online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. This constitutes a kind of simulacrum. In the Ethereum white paper, there is no such reference. We will talk about this later in the article.

One ​​of the reasons why Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin was because this peer-to-peer electronic currency did not exist in the digital world, but was needed. At that time, the 2008 financial crisis swept the world, and many banks collapsed, and people could not withdraw their money from the bank. Therefore, although bank transfers provide a way of digital payment, relying on a third party makes everyone realize that this is not actually my money, I just hold the status balance in the bank's ledger. The real "electronic cash" does not exist, let alone the fact that I hold "electronic cash".

Satoshi Nakamoto did one thing: he successfully realized the digital simulacrum of real cash. How is this simulacrum achieved? He used POW, that is, proof of work, as the basis to provide security support for electronic cash (in fact, the role played by POW may be far more than this). POW ultimately attributes the security of the system to the computing power and energy of the real world. He uses UTXO as a carrier to simulate the body of cash and store the money belonging to the user in UTXO. The ownership relationship is solved by the "lock" of the private key.

Bitcoin's imitation of electronic cash is very successful. POW unifies the security of the digital world and the security foundation of the real world, both of which are built on energy; while UTXO provides an independent and non-interfering digital body. The combination of the two has shaped a deep tendency to imitate reality in the digital world. If Ethereum is called radicalism, perhaps this kind of digital world imitation can be called a kind of retroism.

Why retro to reality?

This retroism implies such an insight: there is a deeper wisdom behind the real world that is worth learning from the digital world. This insight is often forgotten because people create the digital world just to transcend reality. But we can still understand this point through a few examples: · You hold an item in a game, such as a golden sword. However, due to a shortage of funds for the game developer, they shut down the server a year later, and the golden sword disappeared. Imagine that in real life, could the golden sword you hold suddenly disappear? · Vitalik once loved the warlock character in Blizzard's game. One day Blizzard suddenly decided to cancel the skill of life siphoning, so he cried and embarked on the road of resisting centralized Internet platforms. Imagine in real life, could a group of talented people suddenly have their skills drained by another company executive? · A blog site you love was ordered to close. Even the entire website can no longer find any trace of him, and two years later, even the trace of this person can no longer be found on the Internet. In real life, can a book disappear just by saying it disappears?

……

We can imagine a digital world that is crazy and far away from the tendency of simulacrum: a news website that can 404 at any time. A cup that cannot be held. A game character whose ability can be revoked at any time. You will feel that something is wrong, but what is wrong?

Image source: "On the Existence Mode of Technical Objects"

The answer is: it makes us live in a fragile, flattering (a high-level control method) control system that is highly inconsistent with real ethics. The digital objects in this system have simulacrum but no solid existence, or cannot be at ease, and must rely on a third-party platform to exist. However, we project a lot of emotions, time and trust on these simulacra. The emotions we projected eventually became bargaining chips controlled by the platform.

People love instinctively, including love and trust in digital objects that are designed by people and are not comfortable. When love is used and manipulated in batches and systematically, we lose the sense of reality of life.

Reality implies a certain solidity, which is the basis for the birth of ethics and morality (privacy, human rights, freedom, responsibility, and nobility). This may be the reason why the digital world is retro to reality.

The representation of Bitcoin's skeuomorphism tendency

Image source: Adobe Stock

Let's go back to Bitcoin. In the Bitcoin ecosystem, we can see a strong tendency towards skeuomorphism. Bitcoin is simulating electronic cash, and Bitcoin developers have also found different objects in the real world that inspired them to simulate it. Here are some examples for your reference:

Bitcoin: electronic cash

Lock: lock, later extended to a one-time seal by Peter Todd

RGB protocol: Scottish title deeds (commitments are only stored on Bitcoin)

Ordinals protocol: dyed satoshis (serial numbers)

Atomical protocol: digital material theory

Runes: Bitcoin as a slate

KeyChat: stamps, envelopes

CKB, which follows the design ideas of Bitcoin: cell (the basic unit of data in CKB)

Spore Dob protocol: DNA and interpreters can be built into cells

Each of these cases can be discussed for a long time, so I do not intend to expand on the details of these cases one by one in this article. What I want to share is that although the structure of Bitcoin is very simple, different developers seem to be able to find different perspectives in this simple structure to construct their world. Just like a tree, some people like the leaves of the tree because of its softness, so they use it to weave wreaths; some people like the branches of the tree and use it to build houses; some people like the bark and use it to burn fires for warmth. Some people are inspired by the tree and plant a forest.

This is because once things appear, understanding is bound to be diverse. Different people look at Bitcoin from different perspectives, and eventually get different Bitcoins, and different Bitcoins overlap on the chain called Bitcoin that we see today, forming the world's largest consensus.

However, it seems difficult for us to see this on Ethereum.

Ethereum is not skeuomorphic

If you look through the Ethereum white paper, you won't see the skeuomorphic tendency like Bitcoin. At the beginning, Ethereum was function-oriented. It had no objects to simulate in reality. It was created to facilitate developers to develop on-chain applications. Ethereum has always been tied to the four words "smart contract".

Image source: Ethereum Whitepaper

But I want to say that in real life, beings can never be function-oriented. Beings must exist first, and then be understood and explored in practice. It's like a tree. A tree never exists to be your firewood, it just exists there silently. As long as the energy is not exhausted and its life is not over, it can continue to exist. It is only in the process of your interaction with it that you find that it can have various functions.

POS fails to give the assets on Ethereum an energy basis that is isomorphic to reality. Although people have gone through countless debates on the issue of which is safer, POS or POW, and supporters of both sides have found their own angles that can make them feel at ease, in the matter of simulacrum, POS and POW have already run to two different worlds. The world of POS is a more human-ruled world; while the world of POW attempts to achieve a unified cost structure between the digital world and the real world, that is: in order for beings to exist, energy costs must be paid.

In reality, existence is never flattering or easy, but laborious. Beings are facing entropy increase all the time. Think about it, if you don't clean your home for a week, it may be covered with dust. Maybe you don't want to sweep the floor yourself, but use a sweeping robot to clean the room, then you have to charge the sweeping robot. Another example: If you don't take in energy and don't eat, you as a living being will die. This is all very basic common sense.

For something to exist, it needs energy support to fight against entropy increase. This point has been inherited in the world built by POW. In order for the on-chain world to exist, the POW chain must consume energy continuously. POS supporters believe that this is not environmentally friendly and unnecessary from a security perspective. However, energy consumption simulates a cost structure similar to reality, which forms the basis for people to extend ethics to digital space and confirm the reality of digital objects. I will discuss this in detail in another article.

Ethereum's account model is certainly conducive to more developers to develop applications, however, this model naturally determines that Ethereum cannot be quasi-objective. It is more like a relational existence, that is, the existence of all things is stateful and needs to find its own state and position in the world state tree. It cannot be as solid and stable as UTXO. It is difficult for us to imagine that an apple in the real world may be affected by a cup thousands of miles away, but this is the case in the world of Ethereum, because there are no independent apples and cups there, there are only one state after another, but this state is not controlled by a third party. Contract attacks and asset theft are common events on Ethereum.

In other words, there is nothing in Ethereum.

To a certain extent, the existence of nothing makes the innovation of the Ethereum ecosystem limited by the leadership's update of the narrative. If there is something, people can explore its functions from different perspectives based on the observation of the object and make it into different things. For example, Peter Todd found a one-time seal on Bitcoin; Casey found a slate engraved with history on Bitcoin. Although Satoshi Nakamoto really just wanted to build electronic cash at the beginning, you see, once the object exists, different perspectives can create it into different things. A tree can be used to build a house, as firewood, and for root carving...

Because nothing exists, the leadership of Ethereum must give a definition of what Ethereum is, especially to constantly give its functional direction. Since it is functional, it is necessary to continuously optimize this function, and what follows is more and more radical parameter improvements and functional integration... But doing so is easy to lose direction.

Back to NFT:

Can digital objects replace you?

Let's answer the original question of the article: What changes will happen when we return to Bitcoin from Ethereum? What will be left of the Bitcoin Renaissance?

A very natural trend is to build a real full-chain digital object world, or an autonomous world, based on POW and UTXO. Although some people in the Ethereum community have discussed full-chain games, the worlds that full-chain games point to are different under two completely different world technology architectures. The most impressive words that Jan, the architect of CKB, said are: "With POW as time, UTXO/Cell as space, and energy as drive, we can get a world." POW+UTXO itself constitutes a simulation of the real world. This world has its own internal time and creates independent and mutually independent bodies for digital objects in the world. People can write content into the existing space body through the "Ghost in the Shell" mode to build digital objects. The POS chain does not have its own internal time, and there is no concept of independent objects like UTXO in the chain. The "objects" in it are more like a relational existence, which is essentially a state recorded on the global ledger.

On the POW+UTXO chain (not just Bitcoin), we can imagine such a digital object: in order to maintain its existence, this object needs energy like real objects, and consumes the same energy. We can also imagine such a relationship between the world and the object: construct a digital object, and when the world (that is, the blockchain) exists, the digital object exists from the material structure. Its existence is not subject to anyone's will. No one can destroy or change it. In this sense, the existence of the digital object is equivalent to the existence of the blockchain in terms of security and effectiveness.

We cannot imagine that the solidity of an NFT on Ethereum is equivalent to Ethereum itself. Under normal circumstances, NFT images exist outside the chain, and there is only a contract state on Ethereum, which allows programming, not the object itself. Allowing developers to program as flexibly as possible was once a feature that Ethereum was very proud of. But when constructing an autonomous world, this human-centric tendency makes the relational existence in the world fragile and not solid.

NFT is the core of the explosion of the metaverse concept in the last bull market, and it is also the key factor in the explosion of the Ethereum ecosystem. It runs through the entire bull market. Whether it is crypto art, PFP small pictures, metaverse, GameFi, including the later DAO and SBT, they are actually inseparable from NFT. Unfortunately, developers on Ethereum tried to build chain games around NFT, but in the end they could only converge on GameFi; developers with ideals tried to develop full-chain games, and finally evolved into a set of design concepts called AW, but it was difficult to implement.

I believe that all this will start over in the Bitcoin ecosystem, but the path to realization, people's understanding, and the temperament presented in the end will be very different. Bitcoin's skeuomorphism and retroism will accompany developers. Good developers should not think about how to quickly move the existing world on Ethereum, but should think about how to build new rules and a new world on this solid land. This may be the biggest innovation in this round of bull market.