Source: Liu Jiaolian
The Federal Reserve's January interest rate meeting ended overnight, maintaining the interest rate level unchanged. After the certainty was implemented, although it was in line with expectations rather than an unexpected positive, the crypto market still felt the confidence in certainty, and BTC once rose to the 105k line.
The history of BTC's development, which has been born for 16 years and has risen to new heights, is also a history of being questioned, slandered, and despised all the way. Deepseek, which was born less than 3 years ago, has been shocked by the world and quickly suffered a lot of malicious denigration and suppression as it surfaced at the beginning of the year. Just as it is funny to use BTC as a conspiracy of the United States or the CIA as an argument to question BTC, the funniest argument to question deepseek is to claim that deepseek, which is open source and visible to COT Thinking Chain, has stolen chatgpt, which is not open source and invisible to COT Thinking Chain.
A strong attack cannot eliminate BTC and deepseek at all, and mindless questioning is of course even more impossible. The real power of open source is that even if you eliminate the original inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, you can't eliminate BTC; even if the United States kills DeepSeek, the code, model and knowledge that DeepSeek has open-sourced have been irreversibly gifted to the world, and are mastered by Chinese, Americans, Europeans and researchers from other places. No matter how powerful the power is, no matter how despicable the slander is, it is impossible to erase it from human civilization.
Satoshi Nakamoto has long disappeared. But after Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared, every BTC holder, participant, supporter and contributor is Satoshi Nakamoto. DeepSeek may fail and disappear as some people expect, but the low-cost, high-efficiency and more advanced large model knowledge that caused 10,000 points of damage to OpenAI and ChatGPT has been mastered by the world. The spark has set the prairie on fire, and countless DeepSeeks will emerge from all over the world. OpenAI's dream of establishing an AI monopoly with the help of closed source has been awakened, and AI investors in the US stock market can no longer pretend to sleep.
As cypherpunk Eric Hughes generously stated in The Cypherpunk Manifesto (1993): "We open source our code so that our cypherpunk comrades can practice and use it. Our code is free for everyone to use worldwide. If you don't accept the software we write, we don't care. We know that software can't be destroyed and that decentralized systems will never stop." - The History of Bitcoin, Chapter 20, Episode 100
Open source is nothing less than an unsolvable conspiracy and the sharpest "spear of civilization" in the history of science and technology. In the past, Western companies mastered this weapon and launched a dimensionality reduction attack on the world. Now, our science and technology workers are gradually beginning to master and pick up this sharp spear, seize the heights of civilization, and ruthlessly pierce the ignorant shield of closed, conservative, and backward thinking that engages in ideological confrontation.
In the technological jungle of the 21st century, the open source movement is like a double-edged sword: it can make technology giants willing to open their safes, and it can also allow start-ups to obtain weapons to fight against monopolies. From Linux to Android, from Bitcoin to LLaMA, this "open revolution" that has lasted for half a century is essentially a carefully designed conspiracy - it uses free sharing as the surface, technical power as the core, and uses transparent code to weave the most complex power network, which eventually becomes the underlying logic for shaping modern digital civilization.
1. The paradoxical nature of open source
In 2004, when IBM announced that it would invest $1 billion to support Linux development, Wall Street analysts regarded it as a "charitable act." But history has proved that this is a classic example of open source conspiracy: IBM successfully dismantled Microsoft Windows' monopoly on the server side by supporting open source systems, bringing itself more than $20 billion in service revenue each year. This nested structure of "open ecology-commercial realization" reveals the fundamental characteristics of the open source movement - using visible code to open up in exchange for invisible ecological control rights.
The open source release of the Bitcoin white paper in 2008 pushed this paradox to a new level. Satoshi Nakamoto built a decentralized currency system with completely open code, seemingly giving up all control, but in fact completing the redistribution of financial power through open source protocols. When developers around the world voluntarily become nodes of the Bitcoin network, they are also consolidating the immutability of this open source system - open code becomes the strongest trust shackle.
II. Strategic Depth of Open Source
There are some landmark events in the history of science and technology that perfectly illustrate the multi-dimensional value of open source conspiracy:
1. Android's Dimensionality Reduction Attack (2008)
When Google promoted the Android system with an open source strategy, Nokia executives mocked it as a "beggar's toy". But it was this open strategy that enabled Android to swallow up 68% of the smartphone market in three years. Google's conspiracy is that by giving up direct system charges, it has obtained the right to levy data taxes in the mobile Internet era - the Google Play store generates more than 40 billion US dollars in revenue each year, which is an ecological control power that any closed system cannot achieve.
2. Bitcoin’s Trust Revolution (2009)
Satoshi Nakamoto used open source code to create a value transfer protocol that does not require an intermediary. When traditional financial institutions ridiculed Bitcoin for having “no value support,” the open source community had built a complete moat for it: more than 20,000 nodes around the world jointly maintained the ledger, developers spontaneously optimized encryption algorithms, and miners competed to increase computing power. The network effect generated by this open collaboration has made Bitcoin’s market value exceed $1 trillion in 2021, making it the first financial system in human history to be realized through a pure open source protocol.
3. Tesla’s Patent Gamble (2014)
When Musk announced the opening of all electric vehicle patents, traditional car companies viewed it as a public relations gimmick. But this open source conspiracy completely changed the rules of the industry: when many upstream and downstream companies related to new energy vehicles refer to Tesla's technology to establish a supply chain, they are actually helping Tesla reduce battery costs. Tesla's battery costs in 2023 fell 89% from 2014, proving the terrifying efficiency of the open source strategy - let your competitors become your cost optimization tool.
4. ChatGPT and LLaMA's Offensive and Defensive Battle (2023)
When OpenAI used the closed-source GPT-4 to build a technical barrier, Meta open-sourced the LLaMA model. This duel exposed the strategic depth of open source: although LLaMA's initial performance lagged behind, global developers quickly added innovations such as multimodal support and quantization compression to it. As of June 2024, the open source community has launched more than 200 LLaMA derivative models, forming a siege against closed-source models. This confirms the modern version of Linus's Law: Enough developers can deconstruct any technological moat.
3. The underlying logic of the conspiracy
The irreversibility of open source stems from its implicit agreement with the fundamental law of technological evolution:
1. The violence against Moore's Law
Today, as chip manufacturing processes approach physical limits, open source is creating a new acceleration paradigm. The hash rate of the Bitcoin network increases 2,000 times every 18 months through the aggregation of computing power achieved through open source code; the PyTorch open source framework increases AI training efficiency by 230% per year, far exceeding the growth of hardware computing power. When technology iterations shift from the physical world to the code space, the open source collaborative network becomes the ultimate accelerator.
2. Redistribution of intellectual power
The “contagious” clause of the Apache license is essentially a legal innovation: it allows companies to privatize open source code, but requires derivative works to remain open. This design cleverly realizes the flow of intellectual power - just as the thousands of cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Litecoin that have been forked from Bitcoin have inherited the open source gene and created new value dimensions. Open protocols have become the "power copier" of the digital age.
3. The evolutionary field of technological Darwinism
The 48 million lines of code generated daily on GitHub constitute the gene library of the digital age. After 15 years and more than 50,000 submissions, the Bitcoin core code has evolved into innovations such as the Lightning Network and Taproot upgrade; the open source community is like the Cambrian explosion in biological evolution, screening out the best solution through massive trial and error. Countless successful cases have proved that: Technology that survives in the open source arena must have the strongest environmental adaptability.
Fourth, the future changes of the open conspiracy
When the open source movement enters the deep water, its internal tension becomes more and more prominent:
- Compliance trap: The regulatory crackdown faced by Bitcoin reveals the Achilles heel of open source projects - when code freedom touches real laws, it may cause systemic conflicts
- Business closed loop challenges: The Red Hat model (open source products + paid services) is being disintegrated by the "open source hijacking" strategy of cloud vendors such as AWS, just as the centralization of Bitcoin mining pools erodes the ideal of decentralization
- Geotech Competition: RISC-V open source architecture becomes a new battlefield in the Sino-US chip war, and the computing power competition of Bitcoin mining chips has evolved into an energy political game. But these challenges precisely demonstrate the vitality of open source conspiracy - it can always evolve in confrontation. Just as Bitcoin developers enhance privacy through Taproot upgrades, the Linux Foundation has established the "Open Source Security Alliance" to resist supply chain attacks. This reveals an ultimate truth: In the era of digital civilization, the strongest fortress is always built by open protocols.
In this open revolution with no end, enterprises, developers, and users are all woven into the same value network. When Bitcoin reconstructs financial power with open source code, and when LLaMA subverts AI monopoly with open models, what we see is not only technological iteration, but also a civilization-level power migration. Perhaps just as what Satoshi Nakamoto engraved in the Genesis Block: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks", this is not only a key milestone of the cypherpunk movement, but also its most profound metaphor - the future written in open code will eventually deconstruct all closed temples of power.