Bitcoin Renaissance: Skeuomorphic Tendencies and Retroism in the Digital World

Original author: Tang Han

Original source: TH Travels to the Nations

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

The Bitcoin Renaissance is a topic that everyone is talking about. Many project parties have placed themselves under this banner to explain their current behavior. At present, this wave is more long about the convergence of funds, Consensus and developers to the Bitcoin ecosystem in a more long. But perhaps we can think more deeply about this wave: what exactly is it, and what does it leave behind?

I think the Bitcoin Renaissance is a revival of two fundamental value propositions, one POW and the other UTXO. The former is opposite to POS, the latter is opposed 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 are people tired of? How is a world that could be imagined different from Ethereum when people are returning like Bitcoin? (other than the fact that Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared and made Bitcoin a borderland). ）

I. Skeuomorphism and Retroism

If you look closely at the white paper of Bitcoin and Ethereum, you will be able to feel how different the two systems are. In the summary of Bitcoin’s White Paper, Satoshi Nakamoto defines Bitcoin as “a completely peer-to-peer electronic money.” We were able to find Bitcoin’s real-world reference: cash. The peculiarity 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 skeuomorphism. In Ethereum’s White Paper, there is no such reference. We’ll talk about that later in the article.

One of the reasons Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin is because this peer-to-peer electronic money does not exist in the digital world, but is needed. It was the 2008 financial crisis that swept the world, and many banks failed, leaving people unable to withdraw their money in the bank. So, while bank transfers provide a digital means of payment, relying on a third party makes everyone realize: it’s not actually my money, I’m just holding the state balance in the bank’s ledger. There is no such thing as real “e-cash”, let alone the fact that I have “e-cash”.

Satoshi Nakamoto did one thing: he succeeded in realizing a digital simulacrum of real cash. How does this skeuomorphism come about? He uses POW, or PoW, as the base to provide security support for electronic cash (in fact, POW may be much more than that). POW ultimately attributes the security of the system to real-world Computing Power and energy. He also used UTXO as a carrier to simulate the body of gold, and stored the money belonging to the user in the UTXO. The vesting relationship is solved through the “lock” of the private key.

Bitcoin’s simulacrum of electronic cash has been very successful. POWs unify the security foundations of the digital world and the security of the real world, both built on energy, while UTXOs provide independent and non-interfering digital bodies. Combined, the two create a deep skeuomorphic tendency to emulate reality in the digital world. If Ethereum is called radicalism, perhaps this digital world skeuomorphism can be called some kind of retroism.

Second, why retro to reality?

Implicit in this retroism is the insight that there is some deeper wisdom behind the real world that the digital world can learn from. This insight is often forgotten because the digital world was created to transcend reality. But we can understand this idea by a few examples:

· You hold an item in a game, such as a golden sword. However, due to a lack of funds for the game developers, they shut down the server a year later, and the golden sword disappeared as a result. Imagine that in life, the golden sword you hold may suddenly disappear?
· Vitalik used to love the Warlock character in Blizzard’s games. One day, Blizzard suddenly decides to cancel the Life Siphon skill, which causes him to cry bitterly and goes down the path of rebellion against centralized internet platforms. Imagine that in real life, a group of gifted people could suddenly be drained of skills by another company executive?
· A blog site you love has been ordered to close. Even the entire website can no longer find traces of him, and two years later there is not even a trace of this person on the Internet. In real life, does a book say that it can disappear if it disappears?..

We can imagine the kind of digital world that’s frantically moving away from skeuomorphic tendencies: news sites that can be 404 at any time. A water cup that cannot be held. A game character whose abilities can be revoked at any time. You feel like something isn’t right, but what’s wrong?

The answer is that it allows us to live in a fragile, flattering (a higher means of control) control system that is highly inconsistent with the ethics of reality. The digital objects in this kind of system have simulacrums but do not have a solid existence, or they cannot be comfortable, and must rely on a third-party platform to exist. Yet, we project a great deal of emotion, time, and trust onto these simulacrums. The emotions we project eventually become chips controlled by the platform.

People love out of instinct, including loving and trusting even uncomfortable, human-designed digital objects. When love is exploited and manipulated massively and systematically, we lose the reality of life.

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

III. Characterization of Bitcoin’s anthropomorphic tendencies

Let’s go back to Bitcoin. In the Bitcoin ecosystem, we can see a strong skeuomorphic tendency. Bitcoin is simulating electronic cash, and Bitcoin developers are simulating different items that inspire them in the real world. Here are some examples for your reference:

Bitcoin: Electronic cash

Lock: The lock, which extends to a disposable seal at the back of Peter Todd

RGB Protocol: Scottish Title Deed (Deposit Commitment Protocol on Bitcoin only)

Ordinals protocol: Stained Satoshi (Serial Number)

Atomical protocol: Digital Matter Theory

Runes: Think of Bitcoin as a slate

KeyChat: Stamps, envelopes

CKB that follows Bitcoin’s design ideas: cells (the basic unit of data that exists in CKB)

Spore Dob protocol: DNA and interpreter can be built into the cell

Each of these cases can be brought up for a long time, so I’m not going to expand on the details of each of them in this article. What I want to share is that although Bitcoin is very simple to construct, different developers seem to be able to find different perspectives in this simple construction to construct their world. Just like a tree, some people like the leaves of the tree and use it to weave garlands because of their soft properties, some people like the branches of the tree and use it to build houses, and some people like the bark and use it to make fires for warmth. Others were inspired by trees and planted a forest.

This is because once things appear, they must be understood in longest ways. Different people look at Bitcoin from different perspectives, and eventually get different Bitcoins, and different Bitcoins coincide on the on-chain called Bitcoin we see today, forming the world’s largest consensus.

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

Fourth, Ethereum is not simulacrum

If you flip through Ethereum’s white paper, you won’t see Bitcoin’s skeuomorphic tendencies. In the beginning, Ethereum was function-oriented, it did not have items to be simulated in reality, and it appeared to facilitate developers to develop on-chain applications. Ethereum has always been tied to the word smart contracts.

But I would say that in real life, a being can never be functionally oriented. The being must first exist and then be understood and mined in practice for different functions. It’s like a tree. The tree never existed to be used as firewood for you, it just existed there silently. As long as the energy is not depleted and its life does not end, it can continue to exist. It’s only in the process of interacting with it that you discover that it can have a variety of functions.

POS fails to give assets on Ethereum an energy base that is isomorphic to reality. While there have been countless debates about who is safer, POS or POW, and proponents on both sides have found their own perspectives, POS and POW have gone two worlds when it comes to skeuomorphism. The world of POS is a more human-governed world, and the world of POW attempts to achieve a unified cost structure between the digital world and the real world, that is, in order for the existent to exist, the energy cost must be paid.

In reality, existence is never flattering or light-hearted, but laborious. Beings face an increase in entropy all the time. Think about it, if you don’t clean your home for a week, it could be dusty. Maybe you don’t want to sweep the floor yourself, but use a robot vacuum cleaner to clean the room, then you have to charge the robot vacuum. Another example: if you don’t consume energy and don’t eat, you will die as a living being. It’s all very basic common sense.

For something to exist, energy is needed to support it against increased entropy. This has been inherited in the world that POW has built. In order for the on-chain world to exist, the POW chain must continuously consume energy. Proponents of POS argue 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 extending ethics to digital shorts and confirming digital reality. I will elaborate on this in another article.

Ethereum’s account model is also beneficial for more long developers to develop applications, however, this model naturally determines that Ethereum can’t be skeuomorphic. It is more akin to a relational existence, that is, the existence of all things is state-based, and it needs to find its own state and position in the world state tree. It doesn’t have the solidity and solidity of a UTXO. It’s hard to imagine that an apple in the real world could be affected by a cup k miles away, but in the world of Ethereum, there are no separate apples and cups at all, there are just one state after another, but this state is not controlled by a third party. Contracts being attacked and assets stolen are common events on Ethereum.

In other words, there is nothing in Ethereum.

To some extent, the existence of nothing limits the innovation of the Ethereum ecosystem to the leadership’s updating of the narrative. If something exists, people can dig into its function from different perspectives based on the observation of the object, and make it into something different. For example, Peter Todd found a disposable seal on Bitcoin; Casey found a tablet on Bitcoin that inscribed history. Although Satoshi Nakamoto really just wanted to build electronic cash at first, you see, once something exists, different perspectives can create something different. A tree can be used to make a house, as firewood, as a root carving…

Because nothing exists, Ethereum’s leadership must give a definition of what Ethereum is, especially its functional direction. Since it is functional, it is necessary to continuously optimize this function, and with it comes more and more radical parameter improvement and function integration… But it’s easy to lose direction in doing so.

Back to NFTs: Can I Replace You with Digital Things?

Let’s answer the initial question of the article: What will change when we return from Ethereum to Bitcoin? What will the Bitcoin Renaissance leave behind?

**A natural trend is to build a truly full-chain digital world, or autonomous world, based on POW and UTXO. **

Although the Ethereum community also discusses omni-chain games, under two completely different world technical architectures, omni-chain games point to different worlds. Jan, the architect of CKB, said what stood out to me the most: “With POW as time, UTXO/Cell as shorts, and energy as the drive, we can get a world.” POW+UTXO itself constitutes a simulation of the real world, which has its own inner time and creates independent, independent bodies for the digital objects in the world. Through the “Ghost in the Shell” mode, people can build digital objects by writing content in the existing shorter body. On the other hand, the chain of POS does not have its own internal time, and there is no concept of independent things like UTXOs in the chain, and the “things” in it are more similar to a relational existence, which is essentially a state recorded on the global ledger.

On the POW+UTXO chain (not just Bitcoin), we can imagine a digital thing that needs the same energy and consumes the same energy in order to maintain its existence. It is also possible to conceive of such a relationship between the world and things: 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 break it, or change it. In this sense, the existence of digital things is equivalent to the existence of the Blockchain in terms of security and effectiveness.

We can’t imagine that the solidity of an NFT existence on Ethereum is equivalent to Ethereum itself. Under normal circumstances, NFT images exist off-chain, and there is only one contract state on Ethereum, and programming is allowed, not the thing itself. Allowing developers to be as flexible as possible in programming used to be a feature that Ethereum was very proud of. However, in the construction of autonomous worlds, this anthropocentric tendency makes the relational existence in the world fragile and unsolid.

NFT is the core of the last round of Bull Market Metaverse concept explosion, and it is also a key factor in the Ethereum ecological explosion, which runs through the entire Bull Market. Whether it is encryption art, PFP small pictures, or the Metaverse, GameFi, including the DAO and SBT behind, they are actually inseparable from NFTs. Unfortunately, developers on Ethereum tried to build chain games around NFTs, but in the end they could only converge on GameFi; developers with ideals tried to develop full-chain games, which eventually evolved into a design concept called AW, but it was difficult to land.

I believe that all of this will be done all over again in the Bitcoin ecosystem, but the path to implementation, people’s understanding, and the final presentation will be very different. Bitcoin’s skeuomorphic tendencies and retroism will accompany developers. Good developers should not think about how to quickly move the existing world on Ethereum, but how to build new rules and new worlds on this solid ground. This may be the biggest innovation of this Bull Market. **

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