Bitcoin Talk 017: All That Splendour of Bloom, Surrendered to a Nirvana Beyond Reach

The chance of cracking a Bitcoin private key is almost zero. If you had the ability to crack Bitcoin private keys, the big banks and confidential government and corporate data would be yours for the taking, as easy as reaching into a bag. Historically, exchange bitcoin thefts have always been due to poor wallet management, or insiders doing evil — guards stealing from their own vault.

Observations from the Spring Festival: one great use of cash is stuffing red envelopes, giving lucky money. Cash may in future become a national treasure, part of traditional culture, like sweeping graves at Qingming, worshipping ancestors, pasting couplets. Or it may become a bad old custom, like spitting and defecating in public, women binding their feet, eating bats.

In future, using cash will be like eating dumplings at the festival, or lifting the red veil at a wedding. Cash has another great use: games. Fight the Landlord, mahjong — cash is very convenient, and looking at the big pile of red and green notes you’ve won in front of you gives a real sense of achievement.

My family has a tradition of putting a stack of money under the pillow on New Year’s Eve for the year-crossing. Every year my mother goes to the bank in advance and exchanges a pile of brand-new notes with unbroken serial numbers; this year was no exception. Virtualisation will make parts of life less fun, but it will create other fun. Take bosses handing out red packets in the group chat, then watching line after line of kneeling gratitude scroll beneath — rather like an emperor bestowing grace upon the whole harem, a general amnesty under heaven. Of course, all fun ultimately returns to nothingness. The more fun, the more nothingness. The tighter you grip, the faster it scatters.

The fun of grabbing a red packet lies in the instant you open it — that action, that unknown, that anticipation. Grabbing red packets with a machine is something beasts do. That wherein man differs from the birds and beasts is small; the common people cast it away, the gentleman preserves it.

If you are truly short of money, you should steal, you should rob, be a bully, be a thug. Stealing and robbing — seizing by force — are of course even weaker performances, for they betray a cowardice about competing with others under the same rules; yet they are still better than the bestial users of red-packet software.

Is holding Bitcoin also a kind of evil?

If Bitcoin can persistently intensify its blood-sucking of those who do not yet hold it, is that not also a robbery of wealth?

Bitcoin’s issuance rules are fair, and its holding rules are fair; Bitcoin sets no threshold for entry.

All things are impermanent; such is the law of arising and passing away. When arising and passing have themselves passed away, nirvana is bliss.

The Tathagata has not yet come; Guanyin makes no sound.

All that splendour of bloom, purples and reds in full flower — surrendered, all of it, to a nirvana beyond reach.