GENESIS Block 1/1 with unlockable pixel res version of image, as good as a vector file.

Imagine you’re in the town square of ancient Babylonia, you see oh hey there’s the Hammurabi Code, this large stone tablet with law of the land posted right here.. for all to see. Ignorance of the law is no excuse amigo, eye for an eye type shit. Civilization baby! First truth, now justice, whaaat’s nexxxt? Laws are legit.. right.

But you look past the law of the land, you see another tablet.. Right on the main drag, but laid down, you make the corner and see there’s a bunch of tablets, one right after the other in sections, these blocks.. As far as the eye can see.

You can make out the numbers and letters but it looks pretty foreign unlike that rock full of laws back there. You’re intrigued so you walk.. And walk, you finally make it to the end and see some dudes, laying another, you catch one “bro whaaat’s going on here?” [impression] “Oh yeah, we just arbitrarily chisel these entries into these here tablets. Just a giant stone receipt really. Yup, we add one every 10 minutes once the entries are proofed and we agree, they’re permanently etched into stone.”

This you come to understand, is the Hammurabi Ledger. “Yup, it stores all the transactions from the Bazzar, really a humble T-Chart of debits and credits but it makes everyday commerce pretty smooth. Requires a lot of resources to maintain as you can see (PoW), but its a public good and we just blindly chisel away paying no heed to what, why or even whom (arbitrary/autonomous code execution) save for a pseudonymous identifying number representing the whom. Numbers! Aren’t they great! How did we live without them? Thanks Sumeria.’

That is blockchain. Basic ass accounting.. Yes your “IT guy” pal might chalk it up to a glorified database, but even that’s a shit take, and I’ll tell you why in a second.

IDK if you’ve ever heard of the innovation mnemonic SCAMPER, its from this book Thinkertoys, SCAMPER is: substitute, combine, adapt, modify/magnify, put to another use, eliminate or reverse.

Well, interestingly enough, the Combination of like 4 different technologies Satoshi employed in creating Bitcoin, actually Eliminates HALF the end functionality of traditional databases, totally rational IT guy’s like “How is that progress?” Databases do 4 things, CRUD = create, read, update and delete records (its debatable if traditional databases actually “delete” records but that’s the admin experience anyhow).

We went from CRUD to just CR. Now the inability to modify or delete is, jargon police, immutability. This is very much a landmark in human progress. We now have digital stone tablets, a source of truth where no person of institution can whitewash history. It has ramifications for journalism, money etc. And money is such a bedrock primitive of society it’s hard to even fathom the ramifications of private, stateless money.

Just to unpack one more technical note. So each block is a batch of transactions from the Bazaar, added in a sequence, each one interlocking, almost like a chain, oh hey let’s call it “blockchain”.. They link in such a way this daisy chain of transactions by “hashing a hash” or “encrypting an encryption” so that if one of these tablet layer people or “miners” as they’re called, IF someone changes one letter in one block anywhere along the line, the’re immediately known by the others its invalid. You’re not following the rules of the ledger, you can’t play our game, you ain’t getting no rewards, why are you wasting your time and resources.

The technology of interlocking these blocks is called a Merkle Tree. I’ve listened to this podcast featuring Ralph Merkle its inventor, who had no idea what his invention might actually be used for, describe Bitcoin almost as.. An organism.. Because there aren’t people laying these tablets, but machines, these miners, that arbitrarily execute the chains instructions “autonomously”, a word you will hear more of when James touches on DAOs, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, this is the year of the DAO after all.

So this “organism” – this genie Satoshi let out of the bottle in 2009 – as long as there’s participants, the internet is up and there’s electricity, it just runs, bout 10 minutes, a block is “mined” or placed on the Bitcoin blockchain, the OG.

It’s literally clockwork.. This process of laying bricks by miners or nodes, is called “proof of work.” Remember all those dude’s laying tablets aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their heart (well some are) but it takes work and paying for electricity, damn right they get paid, but in a sort of lottery that helps keep them honest.

Where the Hammurabi Ledger analogy breaks down is that there isn’t just one copy of the ledger, it’s simultaneously maintained by miners all around the world in a “decentralized” fashion, each of whom is on an even footing, competing for rewards in said lottery making it resilient to tampering.

Nevertheless, there you have it, the Hammurabi Ledger. A “public ledger.” Regular ledgers are typically under lock and key, kept by a central authority or “trusted third party.” OK, there’s no trusted third parties in crypto, it’s truly peer-to-peer and ANYONE can see it, it’s not anonymous money, it’s pseudonymous, where that identifying string of letters and numbers or “public address” represents one’s wallet.

Regular old ledgers, way back when, represented a major technological breakthrough. There’s this great episode on the podcast Bankless, their guest Josh Rosenthal describes the advent of double-entry book-keeping or ledgers converging with the printing press, playing a key role in the Renaissance.

And the echo from that parallel in history is striking as it is now being manifested not so much on canvas or the ceilings chapels, but in JPEGs and GIFs. This is the digital renaissance we’re seeing unfold in NFTs, non-fungible tokens. NFTs often take the form of all manners of digital products, but this one application, visual digital art or “crypto art” is the byproduct of blockchain combined with today’s printing press, the internet.