Here's an idea.
Bitcoins and unusual hats are changing currency.
[THEME MUSIC]
In the way the US has the buck, Brazil has the conto,
and Canada has the loonie, the internet has the bitcoin.
The bitcoin is a decentralized digital peer-to-peer
cryptocurrency.
It doesn't rely on any physical note.
And it isn't regulated, controlled,
or anythinged, really, by a central issuing
authority, like the Federal Reserve or Uncle Moneybags.
But because no one is in charge, that
doesn't mean you can just make infinite money.
Free money!
In order for a currency to have value, it has to be scarce.
You can only print, mine, or mint a certain amount.
Bitcoins are generated by networked computers
solving complex cryptographic puzzles.
It's sort of like you're asking your computer
to solve a Rubik's Cube with a side for every color
of the visual spectrum.
This hard work makes bitcoins and maintains not only
scarcity, but market stability.
I know, it's pretty cray, and a little hard to explain quickly.
So if you want to know more, we'll
put some links in the place where links go.
Now, state currencies, even Loonies,
can be exchanged for bitcoins and back again,
making it fully convertible.
So you can spend your bitcoins on all kinds of stuff.
I mean, mostly internet stuff, like hosting and backup
services, but also candy and cupcakes.
Who doesn't love cupcakes?
And you can do this even though they're
just ones and zeroes generated by a computer
on a network somewhere.
Bitcoins are traded by people who have all
agreed that they have a value.
And so-- ta-dah!
They do.
Which actually makes them a lot like hats.
Well, sort of.
Bear with me for a second.
About two years ago, an analyst estimated
that Valve's online first-person shooter "Team Fortress 2" was
worth about $22 million, not in revenue, not in terms of IP,
but in hats.
Digital tradable hats.
You see, in 2009, Valve introduced one hat for each
of the "TF2" player classes.
You know, spruce up your character, give him some style.
But since then, they've introduced over 250 more hat
types, ranging from pretty mundane hat-type hats
to some really weird-- and more importantly,
rare-- digital headgear.
The rarest of the rare head gear is called as unusual,
and as is normally the case with rare and unusual things,
people want them.
A lot.
And so where do they get them?
Good question.
They get them from crates.
Crates can only be opened if you have a key,
a key which you have to-- ready?-- pay real money for.
So about 1% of the time you use your it-costs-money key
to open your crate, you will get an unusual hat.
Now, if it wasn't already interesting and complicated,
here's where it gets really interesting and complicated.
Hey, hey, hey, hey!
What is going on here?
Players can trade hats, and all other items, for that matter.
But we're talking about rare and valuable hats
which no one's going to want to just give away.
It's gonna cost you.
Trades are paid for with PayPal and sometimes even Bitcoin,
but many trades are paid for with an in-game material called
refined metal.
Remember those crates?
The other 99% of the time that there
isn't an unusual hat in there, you get weapons, or a sandwich,
or socks.
This stuff can be scrapped and combined
to create refined metal.
But remember, you paid money to open your crate.
This gives refined metal a value.
And because it's tradable between players in game,
it becomes a peer-to-peer digital currency
for buying hats.
$22 million worth of hats.
Yeah, I found this backstage, a oversized hat.
Funny.
The really great part, though, is
that the source of that value, the crates,
are dropped at a rate determined by the amount of time
a player is in game.
Sounds a little familiar, doesn't it?
Add to this the fact that items, much like bitcoins,
can be tracked and timestamped, and that while they
are generated by a central network,
they are effectively traded freely between players,
and we've maybe made the case for a second hugely successful
alternate digital currency.
Now this whole thing really indicates
some mind-blowing stuff about money.
Let's not mince words.
Bitcoins and refined metal, and, I'm sorry,
hats, no matter how unusual, are worthless.
Don't get me wrong.
The dollar and the euro and the yen
might also be worthless, in that they have no intrinsic value,
like gold.
But they are the fuel for global exchanges
and markets and economies with widely traded and accepted
physical manifestations.
No one will refuse a dollar because it's
"not worth anything."
But really, weirdly, it's not.
This is just some cloth with ink on it.
And debit cards and credit cards are just further abstractions.
The gold standard was abandoned long ago,
replaced by an artificial scarcity maintained
by some very smart people in some very tall buildings
somewhere important.
But we have this weird ingrained cultural make-believe time
where we all pretend that this thing has some value.
Which it does, but it's because we pretend, not because it
has any intrinsic value.
Dollars are one kind of worthless.
Bitcoins and refined metal are a different kind of worthless.
They're like baseball cards, or the stuff
that they find on "Storage Wars."
They can only be converted into lunch money
after finding someone who agrees, yes, the Blizzardy
Stately Steel Toe is worth $30.
But that doesn't change the fact that two years
ago, the equivalent of 60% of Tuvalu's GDP
was wrapped up in America's number one war-themed hat
simulator, and that Bitcoin is the world's most popular
alternative currency, worth over $200 million US and growing.
But you're right.
No one is going to be buying dinner or a car with hats,
or even bitcoins, for that matter, any time soon.
But these currencies, especially bitcoins,
prove something, both about the growth
of Internet Culture with a capital C.
I mean, if Tuvalu gets a currency, why not the internet?
And also about our willingness to take matters
into our own hands.
The DIY mentality has gone from desks and cars
to computers, biology, chemistry, and now currency.
If our currency and our credit system
is already ones and zeroes, but unreliable and confusing ones
and zeroes after years of tinkering and turmoil,
why not design a new currency with all of the benefits
but none of the baggage?
And yeah, maybe this is just a flash-in-the-pan reaction
to the global economic sad party and a growing distrust
of government bodies to maintain a stable currency.
But even if it is, it seems to work.
And as Daniel Webster said, "A disorganized currency
is one of the greatest political evils."
Which means maybe this sound--
[CREAKING HINGES]
Is the sound of orderly progress.
What do you guys think?
Do alternative currencies have real world worth?
Or should they just stay in video games?
Let us know in the comments.
And if you subscribe, I might send you a Sandvich.
More good news, everyone.
Comments.
Let's see what you had to say about "Futurama"
and transhumanism.
So first and foremost, SuperheroEnthusiast, That One
Guy Named X, and a bunch of other people
pointed out that throughout the episode,
we sort of conflated abolitionism and transhumanism,
and we should have made it a lot clearer that not
all transhumanists are abolitionists,
and not all abolitionists are transhumanists,
and that like any label or belief system,
there are people within those groups that
differ from each other.
So thank you for correcting us.
Thanks for letting us know.
To hejcoze, no joke, I have been saving bottle caps
for the nuclear post-apocalypse.
So I think we're on the same page.
SonofSetholtae Dalton Loney, and a couple other people
point out that you can't really discount parts of transhumanism
for messing with human nature, because human nature
is such a weird fluid concept anyways,
and that if we are evolving, the thing that we turn into
might be so different that human nature isn't
even really a thing anymore.
Ethan Quinn makes the really solid point
that not all ambition is towards the goal of being happy,
and that the netural planet itself,
even as neutral as they are, still has goals and ambitions.
Kyle Munkittrick points out that "Futurama" and transhumanism
are not mutually exclusive, and that "Futurama" actually paints
a picture that most transhumanists would
be totally on-board with.
In response to WCPointy60's response to jayne deis,
this, I think, is a really interesting thing.
Because like if I have a headache, I'm in pain.
And then if I don't have a headache anymore,
I'm not experiencing pleasure.
I'm just in not-pain.
So pain and pleasure or pain and joy
are not necessarily opposites, in that sense.
But the way we think about pain and pleasure,
our emotional experience of it is usually we want pleasure
and we do not want pain, and so in some sense,
they are opposites of one another.
And maybe what we're running into
is a kind of cognitive difficulty related
to not being able to describe those feelings appropriately.
Elaine Scarry actually wrote a book
about this called "The Body in Pain."
It's about this whole phenomenon,
and it's really good.
You should check it out.
To ILIKECEREALX, I have not yet evolved past the point
of having human emotions.
So yes, it most certainly did.
[THEME MUSIC]