Legacy and Digital Culture
Bitcoin is very efficient at transfering value from an horizontal perspective. It is designed to be resistant to freezing account (remember the Cyprus event?) and other attempts to stop you from using your money. But how does it work from a vertical perspective? How could I make my 7 years old daughter my Bitcoin heir? Sure there are many tricks you can think about, but none of them are really convincing. Lets examine a few:
I can have a meeting with a lawyer, write down my private keys in an envelop that will be opened after my death. This natural solution presents many problems. The very idea of Bitcoin is to be a decentralized money. There are few things that I would categorize as more centralizing than having to rely on the good faith or professional integrity of a lawyer. Moreover, as the saying goes : “not your keys, not your crypto”. I am not even touching on the subject of pseudonimity and IRS related issues…
I can put all my private keys on a thumbdrive in a safe at home. There is still this issue that my daughter cannot grasp, at 7 years of age, what are crypto wallets, how they work, how you can protect them from hacking etc. But there is this additional issue. Usually you have many heirs. Say you have 4 kids and 7 nephews among whom you want to share your inheritance… I think that, at this point, you are starting to imagine how it is not going to work. It is not like drama about legacy fights within families is a whole literature genre by itself.
I can be smart and write a smart contract that automatically transfer my wealth to predertermined accounts. It solves the “4 kids 7 nephews” issue, but how exactly is this contract going to be triggered (here lies the issue of oracles: another way to lose decentralization)? Can someone cheat on my death to trigger the contract and empty all my accounts? Moreover my heirs might not already have wallets (because they are too young, or whatever reason). And if I create new wallets via the smartcontract how the credentials will be handed to them in safe and anonymous way?
The more you think about this issue the more it appears to you like a gigantic can of worms. I think that there are no “good” solutions right now. By “good” I intend a solution that meets the standards that Bitcoin is claiming to possess. But this issue is just a reflection of a much more fundamental problem.
Cultural legacy in a digital world
Among the many oppositions between real and virtual world is the one of death. An idea doesn’t age nor die. We do. Transmiting culture to the next generation is what make us humans somewhat different from other animals. If you take a chimpanzee tribe today or 200 000 years ago there is no way to spot any difference. We make a difference because we accumulate knowledge and wisdom through time. Tradition, religion, folk songs and stories are transmitted to the next generation and are filtered through time. Some ideas are stupid (and led their believer to die) or uninteresting. Those ideas disappear, and generation after generation a culture is built. Digital technologies interfere very deeply with this process. As we have seen with the Bitcoin example, the inheritance is not something “natural” in a virtual world. It is mainly because the idea of death itself does not fit with virtual world. In the same way that you have to be clever to invent the blockchain technology and make ideas to behave like objects (in this case by forbidding double spending) we need to invent a new technology to make ideas “to die”.
Before the digital era, cultural legacy was mechanically implemented. Indeed, information was incarnated in objects/institutions (books, speech, academia, common law etc.), and those objects were distinct from their owners. Thus there was a natural distinction between the ownership and the object itself. This natural distinction does not exist for Bitcoins. Essentially a Bitcoin wallet is just a number. It is very powerful (nobody can seize it or destroy it) but the flip side is that when you die, there is no natural way to transfer them. Because numbers are not informed of what happens in the real world. You have to make a link. What link ? With what properties ?
When too much memory is actually less memory
Another subtle related issue is that “internet never forgets”. At surface level it appears great. You cannot be bullshited by a politician lying about what he said last week etc. But here also there is a flip side. Forgetting useless, or dangerous, things is a work in itself. If you stop this hard work you will rapidly be submerged with Teras of cute kitten videos and so on. At the end of the day there will be so much data coming from the past that you will need a search engine to explore them. But those search engines will be AI coming with their own issues. Maybe they will lock you into a bubble or they will be twicked to present you a certain narrative. There is so much material avalaible that I am pretty sure that I can feed any narrative with internet archives: people were means (or were angels), patriarchy was worse than today (or didn’t exist or anything you can think about this subject) etc.
What culture will result from this is anyone’s guess at this point. What I am pretty sure is that it is going to be fundamentally different from what we (as a species) have experienced so far.