Cryptocurrencies, Geocentrism and Violence

The public opinion is slowly but finally coming around the pitfalls and shortcomings of the new economic craze, but I still feel like we can make a further step... by exploring a particular event of the past. I'm not talking about the South Sea Bubble or the Tulip Mania that took place in the 1700s, albeit it should be somewhat impressive that we're still falling for the same economic shenanigans that came up 300 years ago.

I'm talking about stars.

As everyone knows, for the longest times mathematicians and men of knowledge were not bothered with prices, values and stocks; economy itself didn't exist as a discipline until the early Enlightenment. Before that, scholars used to turn their stares to the sky, trying to figure out the movements of planets and stars. There were many attempts to explain singular phenomena, but the first to successfully craft a comprehensive system that could account for everything people needed to know about the heavens was Ptolemy.

The Roman-Egyptian mathematician had found a way to savantly weave together observed celestial motion and Aristothelic knowledge: it was a stunning feat, corroborated by advanced math and precise predictions. It was too good to be wrong, so it spread like wildfire among ancient astronomers. The Geocentric Model was born.

The Middle Ages were especially fond of preserving past knowledge from the political chaos that was ravaging Europe, and scholars of the time did everything they could to uphold this cosmological model, at times attempting to improve it. Among its most dedicated fans was the Catholic Church, who adopted it as the most adherent to biblical events. Other models in the making (mainly Heliocentrism) were refused not much because of their inability to explain observations but because they contradicted the Bible. Its charm was evident, even from a religious perspective: the Man, God's most perfect creature, was at the center, and the rest of the universe revolved around him.

But as science developed, astronomers and mathematicians were starting to see the cracks in Ptolemy's ceiling: calculations didn't match, calendars were skewed and the stars were drifting off. There was something more. And so they added it, or tried to. Phases, epicycles, deferents, equants, orbits on orbits: every creative tool was deployed to plaster Geocentrism's cracks. They somehow worked, but at times they were self-contradictory and spawned more issues than they solved. Deep down, astronomers started to suspect that the Geocentric Model was irreparably flawed.

By then, the Catholic Church and the Papal State had already expanded their authority to the whole Europe, and they understood they could not allow any other cosmic model to undermine their position. The Church couldn't allow itself to be wrong. If one is wrong about the universe, how can they be right about politics? How could they then justify God's will?

Then, revolution came. At the hands of Kopernik, Brahe, Bruno, Kepler and Galileo, a new model was born: Heliocentrism. The Sun was now at the center; Man, relegated to orbit around it.

The Church could not allow any of that, and since synods and councils were not enough to disprove the wealth of observations supporting Heliocentrism, they resorted to the one tool of every authoritarian institution: violence. The Pope started to condemn, ban, threaten, excommunicate, arrest and execute any proponents of the new model: anyone who went against the current worldview was going against the Church as well, and they were better armed.

By now you should've noticed the analogy I'm trying to paint with this scientific example. A set of beliefs upheld by any authority can delay the onset of a revolutionary (or dangerous) knowledge, but it can never completely stop it or erase it. As soon as the authority weakens, the knowledge leaks. And vice versa, in a vicious (or virtuous) cycle.

So what's with cryptos again?

As Thomas Khun suggested in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, most instances of “progress” work in that same way: after a period of smooth sailing, anomalies appear and only after they propagate and plague the whole system, revolutions happen. The paradigm shifts.

Capitalism is the Geocentric Model — It's been great for those in power so far (mainly North Atlantic countries), but cracks are starting to show and none of the most creative tools that economists are coming up with seems to work against these anomalies. Some of their most recent installations, specifically free-floating currencies and cryptocurrencies, are starting to introduce more issues than they were supposed to fix, at times with unpredictable threats for the system itself. The Covid Pandemic has shown that healthcare systems working under profit logics were a massive failure in containing the disease and preventing deaths. The recent Kazakh Crisis, where free-market policies were enforced on the country and attracted the same bitcoin miners that eventually depleted its energy production and caused its neoliberal government to fall, is the peak example of this critical mismatch between the problem and the attempted solution.

Cryptocurrencies, just like the latest patches to cosmic motion proposed by geocentrists, rely on a layer of violence, albeit less explicit and not necessarily enforced by a single authority. It relies on a single, wealthy owner of mining factories finding enough people that are desperate enough to gamble their savings in the hope to make it big, baiting them through celebrities announcing their support while at the same time hiding, restricting or punishing the alternatives (such as gift economies or anything open source). It's subtle, psychological economic violence, and this is without even mentioning currency manipulations and the dreaded rug pulls.

But if this analogy holds true, we're hopefully due for some sort of cultural revolution beyond geocentric capital. Something that, despite delays and pushback from authorities, cement itself as the new system. This seems to be quite widely accepted, but what we don't know yet is: what will the paradigm shift to? What's our heliocentric revolution going to be? Can we make that happen, somehow?