Blockchain is the salvation of the value of human labor

The development of human society has twists and turns, but generally speaking, it follows the path of continuous increase in productivity.

Productivity, in an intuitive sense, is the power of human beings to produce something that meets their own needs.

Obviously, this definition itself is humanistic. If we produce something that we have neither direct nor indirect need for, it is questionable whether such production still meets the definition of productivity.

For example, if humans are enslaved by AI (artificial intelligence) in the future and do things that AI needs but not humans themselves, will that kind of activity still count? What about production activities?

So we divide human activities into two categories: productive activities and non-productive activities. We call productive activities labor.

Where does the value come from? Some say it comes from production. Some say it comes from interest. Where does the interest actually come from? Interest comes from growth in value. Why does value increase? The growth of value comes from production and therefore, fundamentally, from labor.

It should be noted that there is an unbreakable law at the bottom of the universe: the law of entropy increase. Without productive activities, entropy will destroy all value.

The elimination of value by entropy increase is the elimination of use value.

Just like production creates value by creating use value as a means.

Meeting human needs is the use value of products. While production creates such use value, it also creates value. Just like when a car factory creates a car that can meet transportation needs, it also creates the weight of the car.

Use value is to meet transportation needs, while value is like the weight of a car.

The direction of productivity development is to continuously increase the use value and reduce the value. Just like we are always pursuing lighter and more convenient cars to better meet our transportation needs.

The world's richest man, Buffett, realized this truth after he acquired Berkshire Textile Company and was brutally beaten. The more productivity advances, the less valuable Berkshire's textile business becomes. What a painful realization this is!

If Buffett had read "Das Kapital" before this, he would not have stepped into this sinkhole. Because this is one of the common sense mentioned in the book.

Buffett learned from the pain and finally decided to leave the market, liquidate Berkshire's textile business, and fully transform into a holding company focusing on capital operations.

Later, Buffett also famously said that the stock market is a voting machine in the short term and a weighing machine in the long term. Jiaolian feels that Buffett's "weighing machine" metaphor is quite consistent with Jiaolian's use of "weight" to compare value.

In this way, you will find an interesting paradox emerging here:

Generally, we believe that companies must continue to develop technology. Technology is productivity. Technology improves productivity. Increased productivity can increase the value of the company, thereby pushing up the stock price.

This is also the reason why many venture capital and technology enthusiasts like to pursue star technology companies.

However, unfortunately, this promotion of value and ultimately the value transmitted to the secondary market is short-lived, speculative, and gambling. Yes, short-lived.

Comprehensive progress in technology, when spread to the entire industry, will allow companies to create more advanced products, but the value will decline and the stock price will fall.

Because the stock market is a weighing machine. Technological progress allows companies to continuously produce better use values, but with lighter "weight" (value).

Those who pursue high technology and despise Coca-Cola and Moutai have essentially failed to understand the underlying logic of capital.

High technology will only kill value. Low technology is the gold content.

So we kind of understand Buffett. I understand why he is so stubborn, conservative, and so resistant to technology companies.

AI (artificial intelligence), especially the fantasy of AGI (artificial general intelligence) that completely replaces human labor, is a typical representative of high-tech "singularity" thinking.

The high-definition illustrations that human painters spend 10 hours "painting" can be painted by midjourney AI in just a few minutes. The latter may even be better than the former. Be beautiful!

AI has created higher use value (more beautiful, greater appreciation value), but at the same time, it must have reduced the work of "liver" illustrations Value - The direct proof is that when AI replaces human painters on a large scale, the market price of drawing such a high-level illustration will drop significantly, and even eventually become free!

Therefore, efficiency is the natural enemy of value. Inverse efficiency can bring high value.

Of course, there is a very fatal premise here, that is, no other producer can be more productive than you, so your reaction Efficiency always maintains competitiveness in the market, which will bring high value.

That is to say,If a job, no matter how slowly I do it, no one in the world can do it faster than me, Then the slower I do it, the higher the value I create.

The textile industry that Buffett entered by mistake is unable to do this. You don’t have to upgrade your textile machine, just try to do it as slowly as possible. But other factories have no choice but to upgrade high-speed textile machines one after another, using their low price advantage to squeeze you out of the market.

Yes, it is the free competition market that forces capital to compete in technological upgrading, thereby continuously producing more and better products for the whole society, while at the same time Let the price get lower and lower.

The purpose of capital movement is to pursue the production and acquisition of value, but its actual end point is to eliminate its own value.

Countless forms of movement in the universe all have such antinomies.

There is nothing to be happy or sad about in the movement of capital that ends with its own destruction. However, unfortunately, under capitalist production relations and labor relations with wage employment as the basic form, the value of workers as workers can only be shrouded in the value obtained from capital. That is, the value obtained by capital, after deducting profits and various material costs, will be paid to workers in the form of wages.

If technology advances and capital continues to eliminate the value it can obtain from the market, then the value of wages that can be paid to workers after deductions will inevitably increase. Come less and less.

This leads to a destined ending:The harder workers work to create value, the less value they can obtain from the market. Ultimately leading to massive unemployment and brain drain.

Programmers work hard for 996, which is the root cause of their retirement at the age of 35. The more overtime they work, the more fuel they add to the shortening of their careers.

To break this situation, we must liberate human value from the shadow of capital value and place it on a higher level, so that Everyone owns capital directly and inalienably, rather than being subordinate to capital. It is even more important to break the curse of efficiency and use technology to achieve counter-efficiency.

Again, inefficiency is gold content.

Does such technology exist? Jiaolian tells you that such technology has existed in this world for 15 years.

In 2009, a person named Satoshi Nakamoto launched a system called Bitcoin. This system has typical inefficiency characteristics, that is, no matter how hard everyone produces BTC (Bitcoin), also called a miner, no matter how hard he works to improve his machine and how much resources he invests, miners around the world will probably Only a fixed number of BTC can be produced every 10 minutes.

At the same time, no matter how hard miners try to upgrade their machines and make their computing power extremely powerful, they cannot significantly shorten the time it takes for the Bitcoin system to produce a block. time needed. The time required to produce a block (ledger) is probabilistically set at about 10 minutes.

The method is that if the total computing power of miners increases, then the difficulty of calculation will be increased accordingly, automatically, and in a consensus manner, so that miners can still If you cannot produce blocks faster, you cannot produce more BTC faster.

This is similar to the textile industry that Buffett has pitted, or any other industrial industry around us. With the upgrading of machines and the advancement of technology, there will always be You can produce more and more products in less and less time, which is exactly the opposite.

Therefore, in an anti-efficiency production system like Bitcoin, the continuous improvement of miners’ computing power and the continuous improvement of computing efficiency will not be the same as traditional industrial production. In this way, reducing the value of BTC will continue to increase the value of BTC with the high security provided at high cost.

Jiaolian has heard too many Internet people laugh at Bitcoin's low TPS or web3's low user experience, and they often suggest the introduction of a powerful Internet. Technology and UI design to improve the user experience of blockchain.

For this kind of person, we just smile and don’t even need to defend him. Because you know, he hasn't started yet.