Game designer Mark Venturelli has come up with a somewhat interesting, on the surface, critique of crypto and the blockchain.
Speaking at Brazil’s International Games Festival, Venturelli argued that trust in others is good and is correlated to numerous good outcomes, while bitcoin is based on distrust.
As a non-native english speaker, it is easy to see why trustless might be conflated with distrust, but it means more that bitcoin upgrades trust to the point its design reaches levels where one can have 100% trust in the system.
Venturelli says ‘Higher Trust = Higher Development’ and a higher trust index is strongly positively related to higher education levels and less inequality.
Trust is good, in short, but “blockchain is tool for a world without trust,” he argues, rhetorically asking: “How could we be so WRONG?”
Well, by being slightly confused because bitcoin and the blockchain is an engine of trust, not distrust.
One can see how Venturelli may have gone from the obvious premise that adversaries or complete strangers naturally don’t necessarily trust each other, to the conclusion that bitcoin is somehow against trust.
When bitcoin is a design and an organizing system that provides the blueprint upon which complete strangers can fully trust each other.
The highest level of trust he provides is Sweden where more than 60% agree that “most people can be trusted.”
Even at this pinnacle of civilization, we’re still 40% short, or mostly half, and we’re at “most” people not ‘all’ people.
A bitcoin design changes it to 100% and all people. If thus trust is good, then bitcoin is the best, because participants can fully trust each other.
Venturelli instead argues that because of a lack of trust in others, bitcoin has to consume huge levels of energy as he says +trust is efficiency, while -trust is more energy spent.
If you don’t trust someone, you’ll keep a closer eyes, and so in the process use more energy. While cavemen evolved he said by deciding to not hit each other within their own group, and so they no longer had to be confrontational with each other.
This then develops into a complete political ideology with Venturelli stating:
“Believing Capitalism could exist without a central authority Is forgetting about the entire journey we went through as a society.”
Bitcoin is not necessarily capitalist and in many ways it has nothing to do with ‘society.’ Bitcoin is not a governance method, it is not a government, and it is not an ideology either.
Bitcoin in its purest form is code, not paper. That might look like little, but it is the first time in 500 years, since money upgraded to paper, that money takes a new form: code.
That code can be designed with a capitalist ideology as well as with a communist ideology and with a totalitarian ideology too like, arguably, China’s purported eCNY.
Confusing the code and the capabilities with narratives or ideological prisms is an easy mistake, and very expected, especially at the crypto development stage of Brazil which currently is probably in 2016, and at most in 2018, in a crypto USA timeline.
Yet it is a mistake, because if bitcoin has any real ideology, it is centrist. It is for globalization as it is a global network, it is for trade as money lubricates – and thus loves – trade, it is for efficiency in natively digitizing money, and one can go on with the proof being that bitcoin was adopted by those students who didn’t go to communism or nazism back in the early tens in the aftermath of the banking collapse. Didn’t go with the Occupy or Tea Party, but tried to see if bitcoin is a solution.
For some in the far left, it isn’t a solution because they seem to confuse bitcoin the network with the government itself, in part because plenty wondered in the early days whether this method of decentralizing a network can apply to running the society in a decentralized way, without a government.
As it happens, we do not quite have the capabilities to write a code based, universally accepted, national or international constitution, and our level of automation has reached no where near the capacity to self enforce, through code, such constitution.
Automating the government, therefore, is not something – at least this paper – concerns itself with. Automating finance is.
And automating finance or democratizing it by increasing access and our ability to directly manage it ourself, does not have an ideology at least as far as this paper is concerned.
In fact we may go as far as to say our grandfathers have designed a fine paper based financial system, considering the limitations of the tools that they had.
It just happens we have new tools, that give us new capabilities, and that can address some of those limitations, and so we’re slowly, consensually, upgrading the whole thing.
Much becomes simple from this perspective, and with this perspective, we can keep ignoring the communists and the nazis, just as we ignored them back when we first bitcoined.
All safe in the knowledge that they can’t win any debate for they both failed so utterly miserably. While we have not failed yet, and as long as that remains the case, we may well decisively succeed.
Precisely for the reasons Venturelli points out. Trust is good, and so if you can increase the trust levels to 100% – though technically maybe 90% as you have to trust all nodes upgrade for example or don’t somehow all get hijacked or that devs would speedily react etc, – then that must be good.
A recent example was Celsius. Centralized, and therefore at that 60%, maybe 70% threshold of trust because they can just run with the money.
While something like Compound, which is purely code, courts a 100% trust level if we discount bugs or more esoteric aspects like eth nodes somehow colluding etcetera.
In addition something like the blockchain allows competing banks, or entities, as well as the regulator which is necessarily adversarial in policing, to play on the same ‘square.’
It allows enemy nations to nonetheless have complete confidence in the network. Making it an upgrade of trust as here there isn’t an agreement of ‘us buddies’ and ‘you non buddies,’ but all under the same rule.
Finally on energy, bitcoin doesn’t have a set energy requirement. It was just as safe and secure when its hashrate fell 70% last year after China kicked out its miners, as it is now.
Energy usage is more dependent on profitability and its high level is more due to high demand through a bootstraping halving process that eventually will stabilize by miners relying only on network fees for income.
Venturelli instead argues that it is a requirement due to this distrust, but that argument is completely invalidated by Proof of Stake.
Politicizing NFTs
In his presentation, which was meant to be about the future of gaming, Venturelli concludes that because trust is good, NFTs should not be used in gaming.
He criticizes play to earn for being just earn, speculative, and a zero sum game. He even calls the blockchain “a threat.”
How some piece of code can be a threat, is anyone’s guess, but as a game designer, he has a professional right to have an opinion on NFTs and whether or not they should be used in games.
This opinion however does not appear to derive from his skill, game design, but from his ideology which he appears to hold so strong to the point he has perverted complete trust into distrust.
That ideological capture does his profession a significant disservice because he is unduly limiting himself, without even experimenting first to see whether there might be some merit to this new invention.
Making him blind in effect as he does not see NFTs, he sees ideology, an ideology he has dreamed himself or mistakenly takes it as being that of the code when it is of some men.
Yet as convincing as the slides are on first look, they betray a man torn between what he says is the future, play to earn, and that it shouldn’t be. Between something that is new and cool and goes against his ideology, between complete trust that necessarily must give some mental dissonance when he sees it as distrust.
The man in short has fallen to propaganda, but if propaganda could prevail over objectivity, we would have not advanced.
Because as much as some might like to have total power, and total trust to abuse totally, there are plenty that would rather not be subject to the whims of abusers.
Abusers like Venturelli, who used his position to go into a biased polemic on a subject that he clearly does not understand.
But it is not that complicated, was his defense. Trust, power, money, is not complicated.
What is complicated then, if one hundred trillion and their many instruments, if the financing of music, film, and gaming, is not complicated?
Or is it more that he made it, and the centralized gatekeepers, including Steam with its cut, is fine.
Or rather is it more that he likes to have the power to change his game as he pleases, and each game to be a walled garden, and dislikes the limitations an immutable blockchain with cross gaming items can provide?
Because when he says trust is good, he does not quite answer the question as to why we should trust Venturelli specifically, or why the highest trust level is just 60% and with just trusting “most” people.
Ignoring in effect that the abuse of trust is far too real, far too common, and often very devastating. Sri Lanka being the latest tragic example.
While this was just a presentation therefore, Venturelli should have considered more the weight of the matter, rather than go heads on to potentially the disservice of the very society he speaks of.
A society that will throw him out just as easily as it rose him up if he fails to continue to satisfy it, or to adapt, by holding above objectivity the chains of ideology, or more correctly, by holding above objectivity as cover the chains of ideology to hide his pure selfish desires to have total control over the game.
Alas, if history tells anything is that the design of guilds is for them to eventually be broken. It won’t be different in gaming, with gamergate perhaps having the final say in the end.
