Yes, the koicoin protocol was strong, and the incentives appeared to be well aligned, but the project didn’t really pass muster in terms of immutability, decentralization, and privacy. The breakfast attendant who had put out the pellets: he’d be our koicoin Satoshi-as in Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous and still unidentified creator of Bitcoin. Would the ducks then be currency miners? Every altcoin-the catchall for cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin, the majority of which are eventually classified as shitcoin-has its own community of enthusiasts and kvetchers, so perhaps the koi were this one’s. Let the pellets be a cryptocurrency-koicoin, say. So, Montreal bagel in hand, I considered the ducks and the carp. You’re always erasing, starting over, as analogies present themselves. You grasp, instead, for metaphors.īlockchain talk makes a whiteboard of the brain. If you’re not, say, a computer scientist or a mathematician, the deeper you get into the esoterica of distributed ledgers, consensus algorithms, hash functions, zero-knowledge proofs, byzantine-fault-tolerance theory, and so on-the farther you travel from the familiar terrain of “the legacy world,” where, one blockchain futurist told me, pityingly, I live-the better the chance you have of bumping up against the limits of your intelligence. Some of this stuff I understood much of it I still did not. A peer-to-peer money system that cut out banks and governments had made it possible, and fashionable, to get rich by sticking it to the Man. Bitcoin and, subsequently, a proliferation of other cryptocurrencies had become an object of global fascination, amid prophecies of societal upheaval and reform, but mainly on the promise of instant wealth. My mind had been marinating overnight-and for more than a year, really-in the abstrusities of cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology on which they are built. He smiled and said, “No, but it is what I tell the children.” Was such a thing possible? I asked the breakfast attendant, a ruddy Quebecer. The longer I watched, the more I wondered if the ducks were deliberately feeding the fish. A few koi idled there, poking at the surface for the scraps. Every few seconds, they dipped their beaks to drink, and, in the process, spilled undigested pellets into the water. One morning, as I had coffee and a bagel in this garden, I watched a pair of ducks feeding on a mound of pellets that someone had left for them at the pond’s edge. My hotel, on the top floor of a big building downtown, had a roof garden with a koi pond. Not long ago, I was in Montreal for a cryptocurrency conference. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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