Bitcoin Renaissance: Skeuomorphism and Retroism in the Digital World
Original author: Tang Han
Original source: TH Travels of Various Countries
"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 owners place themselves under this banner to explain their current behavior. At present, this wave refers more to the gathering of funds, consensus and developers in 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? How is the world that might be envisioned when people come back to Bitcoin different from Ethereum? (Besides the fact that Satoshi disappeared and Bitcoin became a no-man’s land.)
1. Objectification and retroism
If you look through the white papers of Bitcoin and Ethereum carefully, you will be able to feel how different these two systems are. In the summary of Bitcoin's white paper, Satoshi Nakamoto defines Bitcoin as "a completely peer-to-peer electronic currency." We can find a reference to Bitcoin 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 white paper of Ethereum, 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, many banks closed down, 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. 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 simulation of real cash. How did this simulation come about? He used POW, or proof of work, as the basis to provide security support for electronic cash (in fact, the role played by POW may be far beyond this). POW ultimately attributes the security of the system to the computing power and energy of the real world. He also used UTXO as a carrier to simulate the body of cash and store the user's money in UTXO. The ownership relationship is resolved through the "lock" of the private key.
Bitcoin is a very successful imitation of electronic cash. 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 the real world in the digital world. If Ethereum is called radicalism, then perhaps this kind of digital world imitation can be called a kind of retroism.
2. Why go back to reality?
This retro-ism implies 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 people create digital worlds to transcend reality. But we can still understand this point through a few examples:
You have an item in a game, such as a golden sword. However, due to a lack of funds, the game developer 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 used to love the Warlock character in Blizzard games. One day, Blizzard suddenly decided to cancel the life siphon skill, which made him cry and embark on the road of resisting the centralized Internet platform. Imagine in real life, could a group of talented people suddenly have their skills drained by another company executive?
· A blog site you love is ordered to be closed. Even the entire site can no longer find any trace of him. 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 from skeuomorphism: 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?
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 simulacra but no solid existence, or cannot be free, 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 project eventually become bargaining chips controlled by the platform.
People love instinctively, including loving and trusting digital objects that are designed by people and even uncomfortable. When love is used and manipulated in a large-scale and systematic way, we lose the sense of reality of life.
Reality implies a certain solidity, which is the foundation for the birth of ethics and morality (privacy, human rights, freedom, responsibility, and nobility). This may be the reason why the digital world is returning to reality.
3. Representation of Bitcoin’s skeuomorphism tendency
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 disposable seal by Peter Todd
RGB Protocol: Scottish Title Deeds (Commitments stored only on Bitcoin)
Ordinals Protocol: Chromatic Satoshis (Serial Numbers)
Atomical Protocol: A Theory of Digital Matter
Runes: Bitcoin as a Slate
KeyChat: Stamps, Envelopes
CKB follows the design concept 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 don't 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 the leaves have soft properties, so they use them to weave wreaths; some people like the branches of the tree and use them to build houses; some people like the bark of the tree and use it to burn fires for warmth. Some people are inspired by the tree and plant a forest.
This is because once something appears, its understanding is bound to be diverse. Different people look at Bitcoin from different perspectives, and ultimately get different Bitcoins, and different Bitcoins overlap on the Bitcoin chain we see today, forming the world's largest consensus.
However, we hardly see this happening on Ethereum.
4. Ethereum is not skeuomorphic
If you look through the white paper of Ethereum, you won’t see the skeuomorphism tendency like Bitcoin. In 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 word “smart contract”.
But I want to say that in real life, entities can never be function-oriented. Entities must first exist, and then be understood and explored for different functions in practice. It's like a tree. A tree never exists to be burned as firewood for you, it just exists there quietly. As long as the energy is not exhausted and its life has no end, it can continue to exist. It's only in the process of your interaction with it that you discover that it can have various functions.
POS fails to give the assets on Ethereum an energy foundation that is isomorphic to reality. Although people have gone through countless debates on which is safer, POS or POW, and supporters of both sides have found their own angles that can make them feel at ease, in terms of simulacrum, POS and POW have already run into 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. Existence is constantly facing entropy. Think about it, if you don't clean your house for a week, it may be covered with dust. 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 cleaner. 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.
Energy is needed to support something in order to combat entropy increase. This 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 the 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 developing applications, however, this model naturally determines that Ethereum cannot be skeuomorphic. It is more like a relational existence, that is, the existence of all things is stateful, and they need to find their own status and position in the world state tree. It cannot achieve the solidity and stability of 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, nothing exists in Ethereum.
To some extent, the existence of nothing makes the innovation of the Ethereum ecosystem limited to the leadership's update of the narrative. If something exists, people can explore its functions from different perspectives based on their observations of the object and make it into different things. For example, Peter Todd found a disposable seal on Bitcoin; Casey found a slate inscribed 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 as a root sculpture...
Since nothing exists, the leadership of Ethereum must give a definition of what Ethereum is, especially to continuously give its functional direction. Since it is functional, it needs to be continuously optimized, which will lead to more and more radical parameter improvements and functional integration... But doing so will easily lead to a loss of direction.
5. Back to NFT: Can digital objects replace you?
Let’s answer the original question of this article: What will change when we return from Ethereum to Bitcoin? What will be left of the Bitcoin Renaissance?
A very natural trend is to build a truly full-chain digital world, or an autonomous world, based on POW and UTXO.
Although some people in the Ethereum community have discussed full-chain games, under two completely different world technology architectures, the worlds that full-chain games point to are different. The words that impressed me the most were said by Jan, the architect of CKB: "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 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 in terms of 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 only have a contract state on Ethereum that allows programming, not the object itself. Allowing developers to program as flexibly as possible was once a feature that Ethereum was very proud of. However, 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; idealistic developers 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 all over again in the Bitcoin ecosystem, but the path to implementation, people's understanding, and the temperament that will eventually be presented 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 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.
