{"id":527,"date":"2019-02-13T17:50:59","date_gmt":"2019-02-13T17:50:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/?p=527"},"modified":"2019-02-16T09:57:44","modified_gmt":"2019-02-16T09:57:44","slug":"article-qa-on-reaching-everyone-the-political-and-humanitarian-potential-of-bitcoin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/article-qa-on-reaching-everyone-the-political-and-humanitarian-potential-of-bitcoin\/","title":{"rendered":"Q&A on Reaching Everyone: the Political and Humanitarian Potential of Bitcoin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This conversation with In The Mesh<\/a> was recently published on their website. Wassim Alsindi, director of research at Parallel Industries<\/a>,\n is currently co-writing a series of articles In The Mesh in which he\u2019s \ndeep-diving into bitcoin and the potential for cryptocurrency to be \nleveraged to assist those living under authoritarian rule. If you\u2019ve \nmissed them, be sure to check out parts I<\/a> and II<\/a>\n and come back soon for the last two installments. Wassim\u2019s take on \neverything \u201ccrypto\u201d is incisive, studied, and worth listening to, and he\n has an interesting background, ranging from academe to experimental \nmusic. So we chatted with him to learn more about his background and get\n his perspective on some current trends in the cryptosphere.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
Kevin Durkin for In The Mesh<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

When did you first hear about cryptocurrencies and what were your thoughts about it at that time?<\/strong>
My life before Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies was as an experimental musician and decentralised arts organisation<\/a> founder, manager of interesting creative technology projects<\/a> and festival curator<\/a>.\n Whilst on a music tour around the US West Coast in 2012 we went to a \nfriend-of-a-friend\u2019s place in Silicon Valley, he opened his closet and \nsaid \u201ccheck this out, I\u2019m doing this thing called mining Bitcoin\u201d. It \ntook a while to be convinced, the idea sounded great but everything I \ncould find online looked quite dubious\u200a\u2014\u200aMt. Gox, Bitcoinica, BitInstant\n and so on\u200a\u2014\u200aand as I wasn\u2019t a computer scientist or cryptographer the \ndetailed discussions were beyond me. It wasn\u2019t until 2014\/5 during what \nmay have been Bitcoin\u2019s darkest days that I started to get really \ninterested. The idea of natively digital money that isn\u2019t controlled by \nanyone has obvious appeal, but surviving the Gox incident showed me that\n the technology had some serious resilience and could be a long-lived \nproposition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
Wassim Alsindi<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Lately,\n Bitcoin and other coins have been losing financial value. How do you \nsee this turn of events and the claims that cryptocurrency is and always\n was a \u201cbubble\u201d?<\/strong>
Well, the facts don\u2019t lie, Bitcoin had a \ncycle bottom in 2015 at around $180 and two years later it was trading \nat a hundred times that price. As much as I favour Bitcoin\u2019s \ncharacteristics and qualities as the first natively digital commodity \nand (in time) money, we do have to ask ourselves if that kind of price \naction is really sustainable or desirable. Volatility is acceptable in a\n commodity or speculative vehicle, but if people around the world are \ngoing to adopt it for monetary use we need to see some more price \nstability, increased liquidity and less friction in the conversion of \nour existing state monies to cryptocurrency. Was it a bubble? Probably. \nBut not the first, and likely not the last either. So, are they bubbles \nor market cycles as a new asset is adopted, matures technically and \nbecomes monetised? That is in the eye of the beholder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your interest in cryptocurrency seems to peak at times of others\u2019 fear\/panic. Why is that?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
Wassim is in it for the tech.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s\n somewhat of a clich\u00e9 these days but I\u2019ve been a technology researcher \nmy whole adult life, so I really am here for the tech and the freedom. \nMy interest has been steadily building over the years and having wrapped\n up previous commitments I have nothing better to do now. I don\u2019t take \npleasure in the bear market, it\u2019s been very difficult for me and for \nParallel Industries too. We\u2019re operating on a shoestring, and the string\n keeps getting shorter every time the market takes a leg down. I had \nhoped to bootstrap the organisation on an open-source donations model \nbut this seems very difficult at the moment\u200a\u2014\u200aeven organisations and \ndevelopers who directly contribute to these protocols are struggling. \nAll the same, every day that Bitcoin survives in the wild it gets \nstronger and more widely known. These days you don\u2019t have to ask most \npeople in the developed world if they\u2019ve heard of it, they just want \nexplanations and\/or advice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019ve innovated a field of fork future studies, called forkonomy. How do you hope it will impact the crypto space?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The research area arose from a conversation with a Twitter friend<\/a>\n who was monitoring hashrate on various networks using the Equihash \nalgorithm. We noticed that a new coin (BTCP) had a much higher \u201cmarket \ncapitalisation\u201d but a fraction of the hashrate of the project it had \nbeen borne from (ZCL). Due to the novel \u201cfork-merge\u201d operation used to \ngenerate the new ledger, a coin with an effective age greater that \nBitcoin\u2019s was created.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

So\n we have been afforded a glimpse into a possible future of Bitcoin, \nalbeit a nightmare scenario where the network has not achieved its goal \nof developing a transaction fee market before the mining subsidy \nattenuates. The goal is to find similar anomalies as they arise and \nrelate them to the possible futures of major networks. Having spent some\n time as an experimental astrophysicist, I like to compare this idea \nwith the stellar taxonomy of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram which \npredicts the likely fates of stars based on their temperature and \nluminosity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Still\n some way to go before we have a suite of robust and predictive \nanalytical tools, we are very much in the alchemical phase of \ncryptocurrency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How\n has your background has made you sensitive to the potential uses of \ncryptocurrencies by people living under oppressive regimes?<\/strong>
Without\n going into too much detail, the \u201cpolitical and humanitarian hacking\u201d \npotential of decentralised technologies in general and Bitcoin in \nparticular are very real for Iraqi diaspora such as myself. For those \nwho were able to leave the country under Saddam\u2019s rule as some of my \nfamily did, one of the hardest things was to move money or value from \nplace to place. Bank accounts had been frozen, confiscations of gold and\n cash were commonplace at airports, bandits would patrol the desert \nregions close to frontiers looking for easy pickings and scholars\u2019 \ninternational funding was withdrawn suddenly. Given the above, it is not\n hard to see promise in these nascent technologies to re-empower the \nindividual and community at the expense of tyrants, institutions and \nnation-states. The fact that we can engineer tools, solutions and \nstrategies for people living under oppression or conflict to have \ngovernment-hard, unconfiscatable pseudo-monetary assets completely \nchanges things for people in the most unfortunate and compromised \nsituations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
The \u201cByzantine Generals\u201d in Wassim\u2019s family.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

What kinds of uses of cryptocurrency do you envision that can do the most for people in those situations?<\/strong>
I would say that only a handful of cryptocurrencies truly show the resilience (today or as future potential) to withstand these sorts of situations. These are the ones with sufficiently mature and dispersed networks that have a defined focus on immutability, privacy and censorship-resistance that also lack central points of failure such as conspicuous leaders, companies or foundations. Bitcoin, Monero and Ethereum Classic are the examples I have identified having deeply studied the cryptocurrency space for the past six and a half years. (Happy to hear of any more\u200a\u2014\u200aplease hit me up on Twitter<\/a>, even if it is a smaller \/ newer network.) The uses are limited only by the ingenuity of the brilliant minds worldwide who do and will work on these issues, and that is what Reaching Everyone is really about\u200a\u2014\u200anothing more complicated than a non-profit, unorganised initiative to plant these seeds in curious minds: that we must not forget the rest of the planet as the fortunate ones create a new world of financial freedom<\/em>. But we don\u2019t have to get too hand-wringing about it\u200a\u2014\u200athis is not about \u201cWestern guilt\u201d. Incentives drive Bitcoin and everyone can act according to their own rational self-interests here. Furthermore, the less resources people have at hand, the more resourceful they tend to be. Anyone who has visited less wealthy countries can attest to this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
The experimental musician Goodiepal helped bring Wassim into his current exploration of the possibilities of cryptocurrency.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

How did Reaching Everyone come to be? <\/strong>
The idea came about quite unexpectedly, despite all the above. Just over a year ago (December 2017) I was in London for a meeting with UK financial regulators as I have another project TokenSpace<\/a> which has developed novel taxonomic frameworks to help see similarities and differences between cryptographic assets with the goal of preventing regulatory mis-steps. It just so happened that my much beloved Danish-Faroese friend and infamous<\/a> radical experimental musician Goodiepal<\/a> was performing with his band their annual Christmas show that evening. So I went along and found out that they had moved to Serbia and were raising funds for informal humanitarian work with refugees stuck in limbo there at the EU frontier. Among the biggest issues facing the people they had been helping were moving money internationally and exploitation \/ extortion by smugglers and mafia cartels. I simply put two and two together that cryptocurrency can provide at least a partial solution to these problems. I\u2019m sorry that we haven\u2019t been able to raise any money for the immediate cause but I hope we can still make a difference in the longer-term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your interests are wide-ranging and Parallel Industries seems to have a holistic view on the crypto world. What do you hope Parallel Industries will add most significantly in the near future to the crypto scene?<\/strong>
\u00a0Indeed things are moving forwards quickly on multiple fronts, and as well as pushing ahead as much as possible with Reaching Everyone, I am trying to take a wider view of what I consider the ontological meta-stack<\/a> as applied to radically decentralised technologies. The \u201cTokenSpace<\/a>\u201d supra-taxonomy research project is very close to outputting a manuscript after over a year of work and I recently revisited \u201cForkonomy<\/a>\u201d in early 2019 having learned some new skills at the command line for node operation, mining and directly harvesting blockchain data. There is another project entitled \u201cDAOs and Don\u2019ts<\/a>\u201d which investigates insider asymmetries in P2P networks, though it is a daunting prospect to comprehend the task at hand due to the sheer volume of cases encountered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This conversation with In The Mesh was recently published on their website. Wassim Alsindi, director of research at Parallel Industries, is currently co-writing a series of articles In The Mesh in which he\u2019s deep-diving into bitcoin and the potential for cryptocurrency to be leveraged to assist those living under authoritarian rule. If you\u2019ve missed them, … Continue reading Q&A on Reaching Everyone: the Political and Humanitarian Potential of Bitcoin<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[17,14],"class_list":["post-527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-articles","tag-reachingeveryone","without-featured-image"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9ARiU-8v","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":444,"url":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/reaching-everyone-pt-i-the-need-for-sound-money-outside-of-the-wealthiest-territories-f9a27e1f6488\/","url_meta":{"origin":527,"position":0},"title":"Reaching Everyone, Pt. I: The Need For Sound Money Outside of the Wealthiest Territories","author":"pllel","date":"22\/01\/2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Reaching Everyone, Pt. I: The Need For Sound Money Outside of the Wealthiest Territories ICYMI on In The Mesh, read the next parts there first. This article is the first in a four-part series by\u00a0Matt \u0e3f\u00a0(MattoshiN) and\u00a0Wassim Alsindi\u00a0(@parallelind) on the use of Bitcoin and the technology stack built atop it\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Articles\"","block_context":{"text":"Articles","link":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/tag\/articles\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":505,"url":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/article-reaching-everyone-pt-ii-resilience-censorship-resistance-and-the-bitcoin-blockchain\/","url_meta":{"origin":527,"position":1},"title":"Reaching Everyone, Pt. II: Resilience, Censorship-Resistance and the Bitcoin Blockchain","author":"pllel","date":"31\/01\/2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Source: Kevin Durkin for In The\u00a0Mesh ICYMI on In The Mesh, read the next parts there first. This article is the second in a four-part series by Matt B (@MattoshiN) and Wassim Alsindi (@parallelind) on the use of Bitcoin and the technology stack built atop it to assist those living\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Articles\"","block_context":{"text":"Articles","link":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/tag\/articles\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":650,"url":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/reaching-everyone-pt-iii-why-bitcoin-matters%e2%80%8a-%e2%80%8aprivacy-freedom-and-authority\/","url_meta":{"origin":527,"position":2},"title":"Reaching Everyone, Pt III: Why Bitcoin Matters\u200a\u2014\u200aPrivacy, Freedom and Authority","author":"pllel","date":"19\/03\/2019","format":false,"excerpt":"ICYMI on In The Mesh, read the next parts there first. This article is the third in a four-part series by Matt \u0e3f (@MattoshiN) and Wassim Alsindi (@parallelind) on the use of Bitcoin and the technology stack built atop it to assist those living under oppressive regimes or in conflict\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Articles\"","block_context":{"text":"Articles","link":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/tag\/articles\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":87,"url":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/project-update-reaching-everyone\/","url_meta":{"origin":527,"position":3},"title":"Project Update: Reaching Everyone","author":"pllel","date":"07\/07\/2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Next actions: More script & tool PoCs, UX\/UI and HW research. Reaching Everyone Article Series (co-authors Matt B & Wassim Alsindi) Part 1: The Need for Sound Money Outside the Wealthiest Territories. Read at In The Mesh \/ Hacker Noon Part 2: Resilience, Censorship-resistance and the Bitcoin Blockchain. Read at\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Hacks and Hardware\"","block_context":{"text":"Hacks and Hardware","link":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/tag\/hackshardware\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":606,"url":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/reaching-everyone-are-stablecoins-the-answer-to-bitcoins-volatility\/","url_meta":{"origin":527,"position":4},"title":"Reaching Everyone: Are stablecoins the answer to Bitcoin\u2019s volatility?","author":"pllel","date":"23\/02\/2019","format":false,"excerpt":"It depends on the question. For those most in need of value preservation and freedom of transaction, the risks likely far outweigh the benefits. This is a brief aside from our \u201cReaching Everyone\u201d article series on In The Mesh, by Matt \u0e3f (@MattoshiN) and Wassim Alsindi (@parallelind) on the use\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Articles\"","block_context":{"text":"Articles","link":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/tag\/articles\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":755,"url":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/what-the-forkgov-does-staying-together-tear-you-apart-even-more\/","url_meta":{"origin":527,"position":5},"title":"What the ForkGov! Does staying together tear you apart even more?","author":"pllel","date":"19\/05\/2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Fork-governance of cryptocurrencies and decentralised networks examined [Note: This text written in January 2019 follows on from \u201cTowards an Analytical Discipline of Forkonomy\u201d and \u201cForkonomy Revisited\u201d and was first included in the Decentralised Thriving Anthology] Fork your mother if you want fork!\u2014 Jihan Who (@JihanWho) 19 January 2019 First, some\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Articles\"","block_context":{"text":"Articles","link":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/tag\/articles\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":538,"href":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527\/revisions\/538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pllel.com\/industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}