Infrastructure Inversion

Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ca70mCCf2M

When new infrastructure is laid on top of old infrastructure, it creates conflict. Infrastructure inversion means having a new infrastructure operating, while an old infrastructure move on top of the new infrastructure and operate on it, as a subset.

If you try to squeeze Bitcoin on the current infrastructure, it wouldn't work. "It's not working, it's slow". Of course, because the infrastructure is not right.

For any new disruptive technology, resistance is the first reaction. Only when crazy pioneers persisted, and show the world they're right, then it changes. And things doesn't show up as it should be in the first place. Only when infrastructure are laid out, they make sense.

Example: trying to replace horses with automobiles. Having an automobile on a muddy road, filled with lots of holes and horse poos, just aren't working. However, an asphalt road (new infrastructure) allows a car to ride on top of it. In addition, horses could also walk on top of asphalt road (if they want to, and take care of their poos).

Another is electricity. Without the infrastructure to deliver electricity to every housing, people can't see it working out. The infrastructure have to be there before it could be working.

Modem is another thing. Telephone lines are designed with short narrow ranges fits to human voices, not to transfer data. Trying to transfer data over telephone lines are crazy. However, due to very little users of internet, coaxial cable and fiber optics aren't built yet to transmit the signals. Internet was carried over the phone reluctantly.

Then, some phone providers later evolved to become ISP, upgrade their infrastructure to coaxial cables rather than telephone lines, and now internet thrives, as the infrastructure changes. What more, telephone calls could now run on top of coaxial cables, without the noisy signals that carried over telephone lines. In fact, there's the irony invention of "comfort noise generation" by telephone company: when you cannot hear noise, you don't know if the other side hung up, so this program pings the other side to see if it hungs up or not, by providing the white noise it generates, at the price of not hearing clearly the voices tranmistted over. They cannot accept a noiseless infrastructure.

(P.S. to hear more of the story, watch the video; )

Now, Bitcoin is running on mainframe-based banking. This is not true. Supposingly, an infrastructure inversion: to have Bitcoin as the dominant generic way of running things, while central banking migrate their service, building them on top of Bitcoin. Traditional banking as an application on top of a decentralized trusted ledger. This is trivial.

Question and answers

Don't apply policy based on whether criminal uses it. Look at the bigger picture: does it freeds everyone for financial freedom? If yes, then it's worth moving forward. Whatever drawbacks, certainly there'll be people who come in and solve it, or at least mitigate it to least risk.

We don't need others perception whether it work out or not. Until it work out, perception wouldn't be good. Based on past experience on disruptive inventions (airplanes, electricity, etc), history are rewritten to say how clever they was, but during the time of invention, they're not praised anyways: they're said to be "not going to work".

And Bitcoin needs many people to start using it: adoption. Usefulness will increase when everyone starts using it. Social and economic infrastructure is what needs to be built, not physical infrastructure. It runs on the internet, and the internet (physical infrastructure) is already doing great.

You know infrastructure inversion when people compared things to Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies) as a baseline, rather than USD as the baseline (or other money).

Bitcoin is interesting not in the recording of transaction of blocks, but the decentralization. Blockchain doesn't have direct control that conglomerate wants. No need for identity checks, no need for KYC, etc. These are restricting people from joining the system. Decentralization doesn't need those. Anonymity is fine, it's still working anyways.

Bitcoin is not a zero sum game. It doesn't need to dominate the market. Other cryptocurrencies are welcome to join the game.

The biggest challenge for adoption is letting normal people use it. It's clever people called "wallet" a wallet rather than a "keychain", although in fact, the wallet that stores your cryptocurrencies are really keychain. We need to have a language that people can understand.

Hence, how to make it easier to use and secure, for people whom are not developers, just normal people?

Own opinion

Example, staking. If one is a normal person, one wouldn't want to understand what it means by staking to use staking. One just want to stake and earn some money. And one don't want to need to choose which validators to stake to: that's absurd. So, for the design of people who understand these, these are fine. But for normal people, the UX designed should not need these. Clever people should build something that says, ok, these validators are trustworthy, and automatically stake their money for them without the user choosing which validator and do their own research. Someone do the research for them and make sure the user doesn't lose money. Or even, user doesn't feel like they migrate from a current bank system to Bitcoin: it just works like having 2 accounts: a normal and a saving. A normal that can transfer money in and out, and a saving that are staking, or perhaps, flexi saving that you can pull out your money anytime.