The Information Renaissance

Mankind is shifting into a new era I am calling The Information Renaissance.

The Renaissance was the period in Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries when there was a surge of interest in and production of art and literature. … In Old French renaissance means “rebirth.”

vocabulary.com

You can see the need for a rebirth of information all around us. Misinformatoin has been a weapon of armies, politicians and elites for hundreds of years. Propaganda flyers dumped from planes are now Twitter bots manipulating Twitter trending topics. News organizations are no longer impartial. Newspapers and networks are a means to spin the political agendas of their billionaire owners. Deep fake videos are now very difficult to spot and increasingly easy to create.

Information is power. Enron was able to fake the books, even as a public company, because they could manipulate information. Madoff kept investors in the dark for years while running a billion dollar ponzi scheme. Epstein was able to pretend to be a savvy investor while doing little more than buying index funds. The most powerful organization in the world, The Federal Reserve, operates in an information black hole. No one knows who owns the Federal Reserve!

Today, there is much debate about the veracity of the Corona Virus numbers in China and other countries. In all the cases above there is no way to verify the truth due to manipulation, censorship and misinformation. This misinformation is costing untold billions of dollars and many lives.

Those who control the information wars control the story. As they say, “history is written by the victors.”

How does society cope with this explosion of information both real and fake? If we can no longer trust what we see with our own eyes how do we operate safely and free from control?

What’s been missing is a single source of truth for humanity. A source that records the time information is created as well as the author. A global immutable ledger of transactions and events. Could bad actors still record false information? Yes, but it would not be profitable long term. Today, entire companies exist to spread misinformation because it is profitable. This is a worsening problem that must be stopped.

This single source of information is possible on Bitcoin SV. BSV is a truth machine. Here’s how this works.

How did Enron get away with so much fraud given they must disclose immutable financial records? Easy, they kept two copies and auditors only saw what Enron wanted them to see. According to financial regulations Enron’s financial records were permanently burned onto a CD that cannot be altered but there was no way to audit what they provided was true. Enron controlled the information from start to finish. It was trivial to manipulate.

This is the problem of double entry accounting. I can not verify that the information you provided is true.

As the fable Ring of Gyges illustrates absolute power corrupts absolutely. In this fable a man discovers a ring that grants invisibility and then succumbs to temptation eventually killing his King and marrying the Queen.

…asks whether any man can be so virtuous that he could resist the temptation of killing, robbing, raping or generally doing injustice to whomever he pleased if he could do so without having to fear detection.

wikipedia

In today’s world having power over information is a ring of invisibility. If a person can act immorally, illegally or unethically with no consequences then eventually they will abuse that power. The key to that power is control of information.

Enter BSV and the triple entry accounting ledger.

Triple-entry accounting can be thought of as a way of agreeing on objective economic reality…placed side by side, the bookkeeping entries of both parties to a given transaction are congruent. The third entry in the system, entered into the blockchain, is both a receipt and a transaction. It’s proof that something happened between two parties, which goes beyond the receipts that each party holds in double entry.

https://systemsinnovation.io/triple-entry-accounting-articles/

Think about all the scandals you hear about Government waste. If triple entry accounting were available for tax money the Government would be accountable for every penny they spend in real time. Imagine this for the Federal Reserve. Open books where Fed funding facilities could be audited at a moment’s notice. Where is 6.6 trillion in stimulus (tax dollars) going? We will likely never know.

If information is power then those who hold the information are powerful. In a triple entry accounting system the power is distributed. The “truth machine” cannot be fooled.

Now, here’s where things get really interesting. Google, Facebook, Apple and others are mass collectors of information. So much information they call it Big Data. I’m going to simplify this example for brevity’s sake.

An Artificial Intelligence is built on data. Processing speeds are so fast now that several months to you and me are a millisecond to a computer in computational power. Processors are not the bottleneck. What Google et al need to build an AI is data. Lots and lots of data. And we are giving it to them, for free.

Now imagine one of these companies has a breakthrough in AI. Overnight they could be the most powerful company that has ever existed. A functioning AI grants mind boggling power over information. Google protects their data so they can use it as a competitive advantage to build AI.

This is the next frontier in technological development. How do we counter a company from gaining AI capabilities and using it to further their own gains? The first company to develop a working AI would have the Ring of Gyges.

To counter this, we use an independent source of truth. We use Bitcoin SV. The blockchain as a single source of truth in a triple entry system that is immutable and uncensorable. The data it not owned by any company. It’s public.

All of the examples of fraud and abuse of power above cannot happen if BSV is used as a global ledger.

Truth wins and the Information Renaissance begins.