Blockchain Crypto Jamming: Subverting the Instrumental Economy The ultimate subversion is money, refusing the pecuniary resources of the state. This project applies a philosophical and critical theory lens to examine the use of nomenclature in one of the most radical longitudinal transformations in contemporary times, the shift away from state-run monetary resources towards cryptocurrencies and smart contracts in citizen-determined decentralized financial networks. A Cryptoeconomic Theory of Social Change is presented in which linguistic progression serves as a tracking mechanism. The steps to lasting change have their own vocabulary (Brandom). First, there is the social critique, the complaint about what is wrong, the negative side (Adorno and Horkheimer highlight instrumental reason and the empty culture industry). Second, there is the antidote, an alternative that can overcome the complaint, the positive side. Third, the solution becomes the new reality, and as a consequence, the whole of reality is now seen in this context, adopting its vocabulary (“fiat health” system for example, referring to the antiquated method). The social movement graduates from language game (Wittgenstein) to form of life (Jaeggi). Blockchains are Occupy with teeth, notable in the level of personal responsibility-taking by individuals to steward their own financial resources. The crypto citizen is not merely trading CryptoKitties and Bored Ape Yacht Club tokens, but getting blocktime loans through DeFi liquidity pools instead of fiat banks, earning labor income in crypto, and shifting all economic activity to blockchain networks. The artworld signals mainstream acceptance with Christie’s non-fungible token digital artwork auctioned from Beeple for $61 million. At the global level, coin communities constitute a new form of Kardashev-level (planetary-scale) democracy. Blockchains emerge as a robust smart network automation technology for super-class projects ranging from space-faring to quantum computing and thought-tokening. The further stakes of this work are having a language-based theory of social change with broad applicability to social transformation.

1. Blockchain Crypto Jamming
Economic Self-Determination and
Subverting the Instrumental Economy
California State University Long Beach
Los Angeles CA 14 Apr 2022
Slides: http://slideshare.net/LaBlogga
Melanie Swan, MBA, PhD
Quantum Technologies
Centre for Blockchain Technologies
University College London
Seven Joys of the Virgin, Memling, 1480

2. 14 Apr 2022
Crypto Jamming
internet transfer.
1
information.
email.
voice.
video.
money.
neural files. High Sensitivity
Low Sensitivity
Medium Sensitivity
Transfer various types of content via the internet, each traffic type has its own instructions or protocol
(webpages with http; mail with smtp; voice with voip; and blockchain is the protocol for transferring money)
The file header indicates the traffic type, software version, routing, etc.
Challenge: secure internet
transfer of increasingly
valuable files
There’s a protocol
for that~!

3. 14 Apr 2022
Crypto Jamming
Language as Intervention
2
Cryptoeconomic Language-based Theory of Social Change
Function Thinker
School
Description Examples
1. Contextualization
Language definition:
Vocabulary
Brandom
American
Pragmatism
A vocabulary is linguistic and social practices that
create new purposes
Critical discourses
Geopolitics of equity
2. Diagnosis (Dx)
(negative)
(critique)
Adorno &
Horkheimer
Critical Theory
Instrumental reason is the structure of reason as an
instrument or tool, without substantive content;
pervasive in modernity (science, morality, art)
Uncritical reasoning and consumption, directed by
mass-market culture industry, commodification
Instrumental reason
Instrumental economy
Banned books explodes
demand
3. Remedy (Rx)
(positive)
(constructive)
Wittgenstein
Analytic
Jaeggi
Frankfurt School
Language Games: meaning through use
Forms of Life: real-life social practices; language-
games as they are actually played; forms of life
constitute a specific field of practices and attitudes
Fiat bank/fiat health system
Coin communities, mainnet
There’s a protocol for that~!

4. 14 Apr 2022
Crypto Jamming
Vocabulary in the Crypto Citizen form of life
3
decentralization
economic civil resistance
mainnet
testnet
metamask
ERC-720 token
tokenized assets
blocktime
blockheight
quantum blockchains
minority chain
reward-halving
automated slashing
coin burning ceremony
coin joining
uniswap
dog coins
DogeCoin
ZK roll-ups
Zero-Knowledge Proofs
Bullet Proofs
Proof-of-time-and-space
Proof-of-Storage
payment channel
SHA-256
optimistic roll-ups
self-sovereignty
coin communities
fiat money
cryptokitties
MEV (miner extractable value)
crypto crash
mid-blocker
Bitcoin salaries
Proof-of-Work
Proof-of-Stake
entropy chains
consensus algorithm
stablecoins
protocol
gossiping protocol (broadcast)
smart contract
enterprise chain
provenance chain
NFT (non-fungible token)
NGT (non-fungible genome token)
burn address
Bitcoin
Litecoin
burn address
coin-mixing
state machine
global provisionless cryptocurrency
cold storage
hot wallet
core developers
BIP (Bitcoin improvement protocol)
quadratic funding
payment channel
national digital currency
post-debt capital
health chains
pharmaceutical chains
Bored Ape Yacht Club
DLT (distributed ledger technology)
hash-time-lock transaction
sidechains
off-chain rebalancing
El Too scaling
Byzantine General’s problem
cypherpunk
mining
quantum cryptography
contracts for difference
weather bet
self-executing agreement
public goods
DeFi (decentralized finance)
bored ape yacht club
lot serialization chain
supply chain blockchain
Hyperledger
network hash power
Metcalfe’s law
blocksize debate
big blocker
hashing algorithms
Filecoin
Ethereum virtual machine
payment channel
automatic rebalancing
sign a closing transaction
consensus layer
transaction layer
Satoshi Nakamoto
sharding
Ethereum ecosystem
yield farming
finance pools
ICO (initial coin offering)
coinbase
coindrop
Bitcoin ATM
satoshis

5. 14 Apr 2022
Crypto Jamming
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs)
 NFT: unique token registered to a blockchain
 CryptoKitties (early NFT)
 Ethereum smart contracts for breeding digital cats
 CryptoDragons game: own dragon NFT and feed it CryptoKitties
(send the dragon contract tokens from the kitties contract)
 NFT marketplaces
 Mint cryptoart: OpenSea, Rarible, Foundation
 NFT registries of physical-world assets
 Baseball cards (Candy Digital), Marvel comics
(VeVe), Hot Wheels cars (Wax)
 Owner/author rights
 SIAE Italy 4.5 mn author rights tokenized (Algorand)
 Genomics (Nebula Genomics) (Oasis)
 Pharmaceutical supply chain (MediLedger)
4
“Catribute” DNA

6. 14 Apr 2022
Crypto Jamming
Crypto Citizen Sensibility
5
Serving the republic
Civic Duty Civic Collaboration
Greek Senate Self-directed Crypto Citizen
Realizing meaningful projects
http://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Blueprint-New-World-Currency/dp/1491920491

7. Blockchain Crypto Jamming
Economic Self-Determination and
Subverting the Instrumental Economy
California State University Long Beach
Los Angeles CA 14 Apr 2022
Slides: http://slideshare.net/LaBlogga
Melanie Swan, MBA, PhD
Quantum Technologies
Centre for Blockchain Technologies
University College London
Seven Joys of the Virgin, Memling, 1480
Thank you!
Questions?

8. 14 Apr 2022
Crypto Jamming
Blockchain jokes
7
 How many miners does it take to change a lightbulb?
 1, but 99+ to compete for it and check the work
 Blockchain-registered digital images of Gandalf?
 Non-fungible Tolkiens
 Where do Eskimos keep their Bitcoin?
 In a cold wallet
 Why is the Bitcoin difficulty so high?
 Too much hash (power)
 What did the Valley Girl quantum crypto-trader say?
 “Like, I’m so Shor” (Shor’s algorithm breaks classical crypto)

9. 14 Apr 2022
Crypto Jamming
How does Bitcoin (any cryptocurrency) work?
Use Wallet app to submit transaction
8
Scan recipient address and submit transaction
Address: 32-character alphanumeric string
Coin appears in recipient wallet
(receive immediately, confirm later)
Wallet has keys not money
Creates PKI signature address pairs A unique PKI signature for each transaction
PKI: public-private key pair (cryptography standard )
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5JGQXCTe3c

10. 14 Apr 2022
Crypto Jamming
What happens in the background?
P2P network confirms & records transaction
9
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5JGQXCTe3c
Transaction computationally confirmed
and ledger account balances updated
Transactions submitted to a pool and miners assemble
new batch (block) of transactions each 10 min (btc)
Each block: transactions and a cryptographic hash of
the last block, chaining the blocks, hence “blockchain”
Wallet 1
Wallet 2
Peer network maintains the blockchain:
ledger nodes and mining nodes
Citizen Infrastructure
Github

11. 14 Apr 2022
Crypto Jamming
How robust is the network?
10
Source: https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/
 15,712 global nodes hosting Bitcoin ledger (Apr 2022)
 Historical context: 5,404 global nodes (Dec 2016)

12. 14 Apr 2022
Crypto Jamming
Source: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/bitcoin-miners-exit-china-beat-a-path-to-the-u-s-as-crypto-climate-shifts/
11
Source: https://www.illumina.com/science/technology/next-generation-sequencing.html
Mining shifting to US as China bans
cryptocurrency production (June 2021)
USD $45 million/day business:
block reward 6.25 btc/block ($312,500) x 6
blocks/hour x 24 hours/day ~= $45,000,000
(at Bitcoin = $50,000)
Mining. technical deep-dive.
 Miners calculate a hash value using the block header (constant for
a specific block) and a nonce (random string changed repeatedly)
to create a hash output that hopefully meets the block requirements

13. 14 Apr 2022
Crypto Jamming
PoW mining energy consumption
 Proof-of-work competition among miners ensures
security of blockchain ledger
 Critics argue “wasteful” use of resources but provides secure
computational system (730,000 btc blocks Jan 2009-Apr 2022)
 39 per cent of proof-of-work mining is powered by renewable
energy, primarily hydroelectric energy (Cambridge study, 2021)
 Alternatives: proof-of-stake, entropy
 Energy consumption
12
Sources: Statista. (2021). https://www.statista.com/chart/18632/estimated-annual-electricity-consumption-of-bitcoin/
Blandin, A. et al. (2021). 3rd Global Cryptographic Benchmarking Study. University of Cambridge.
 Less than all the world’s data centers
 Less than China, USA, Germany
 Less overhead than worldwide bank
branch infrastructure
 Resource substitution from
physical to digital domain

14. 14 Apr 2022
Crypto Jamming
Cryptoeconomics (digital economic system)
 Blockchain (distributed ledger technology): distributed
database of asset ownership
1.0 Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin)
2.0 Smart contracts (Ethereum)
 Automatically-executing blockchain contract
 DeFi (decentralized finance)
3.0 Beyond financial markets applications
 Problem: need for trustable information
 Cryptographically tamper-resistant
 Computational verification, zero-knowledge proofs
 Cryptographically-trustable space applications
 Time-keeping, secure comms, supply chain
 Transnational economic system, contracting
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Digital financial and legal
infrastructure
Digital institutions better
serving the public good
Blockchain 1.0: Currency
Blockchain 2.0: Contracts
Blockchain 3.0: Beyond
financial market applications:
space, genomics, supply chain
Blueprint for a New Economy