Mr. Nakamoto, hash through this wall!
On this day in history…
November 9th, 1989 was one of the more exciting days in world history for freedom lovers. This was the day that the Mauerspechte (German for “wall woodpeckers”) could do their work without fear of getting shot.
The Berlin Wall was coming down! It is considered the unofficial end of the Soviet Union as a superpower, and after dealing with hyperinflation, followed by socialism/fascism, followed by communism, it marked the beginning of a long period of hope for the people of the Eastern Bloc. There are some parallels between the Mauerspechte and home miners, so…
Blockspecht
The “Blockspecht”, or block woodpecker, is the follow-up to my Guitaxe. If your desktop mining doesn’t also double as propaganda, what are you even doing with your life?
While the decisions on Nov 9, 1989 were accompanied by literal destruction of the wall that held so many in a hellish, deteriorating system, the network going live on Jan 9, 2009 marked the beginning of holes being poked through the walls that keep so many people out of the global financial system.
This is why my bitaxe has already hashed two breaches through the wall (the plastic wall, I haven’t actually found two blocks). It’s also why the graffiti artists have said, “this wall will fall,” “freedom,” and “Satoshi was here.” The tag, “Wir sind das Netzwerk” (we are the network), riffs on “Wir sind das Volk” (we are the people), the chant from the ’89 Leipzig protests.
Worth your time…
If you’re not that familiar with this era of history, it might be a good tangent for the day. The physical wall has been distributed all over the world at this point. Here are a few pics I’ve taken of pieces in various parts of Ohio, USA:
Iteration until disruption
Alas, we had a party the other day, and of sixty guests2, zero people asked about my Guitaxe, despite it being placed pretty prominently in the living room. I’m hoping by focusing more in the other direction politically, I can offend someone enough with my home mining to spark a conversation… Let me know if you’ve got any ideas.
https://stacker.news/items/1611215
Top to bottom: Mauerspechte at the Brandenburg Gate, Nov 1989–Jan 1990, by Jürgen Lottenburger; Mauerspechte near Checkpoint Charlie, May 1990, by Nicole Montéran; On the Wall, Brandenburg Gate, 10 November 1989, by Jürgen Lottenburger; At the chiseled Wall, Zimmerstraße, 4 June 1990, by Dagmar Lipper. All from Wir waren so frei / Deutsche Kinemathek, licensed CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 DE. ↩ ↩ ↩
Fortunately, I’ve had enough guests over for other reasons who were more inquisitive. Maybe it was just the setting of my wife’s “soup party” that didn’t really put people in the mood to talk about authoritarianism. ↩
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