Eclipse 2017: Decentralization and Infrastructure Inversion
© 2017 Curtis Manwaring
In Eclipsis de Centralis
Several years ago, I wrote an article about the lunar nodes and how to interpret them based upon ideas propagated by Robert Schmidt. He said that when you see a statement such as was found in Rhetorius that is puzzling, it helps to study it in the context of the Thema Mundi. In it I explained that because of the angular triad esoteric order doctrine found in Hermes Trismegistus, that because the nodes fall in the 6th and 12th houses of the Thema Mundi, that they represent the entrance and exit points to this world. Eclipses function to set the stage between episodes of life. They represent a temporary closing of a scene on the world stage so that the prop specialists can rearrange the set to fit in with the next scene. During this intermission, some actors will exit the world and some new actors often emerge and any remaining actors will have dramatic changes that affect the unfolding of the scene to come.
(Google Images - public domain)
As such, eclipses really aren't about "events" but are about establishing the bounds of heimarmene (what is possible and what has the possibility of becoming) which is why it helps to look at what was happening during other eclipses earlier in the Saros series. Situations that were nascent at the time of the previous eclipse(s) will have further development of the same or similar theme(s) in later Saros cycles. Eclipses also share something in common with the 6th and 12th houses because they are times when the lights have been averted in their vision; the set is closed, and the curtain drawn, and what goes on behind the scenes is not easily seen.
(Google Images - public domain)
To analyze an eclipse is to peek at what's being set up behind the celestial curtains. The clues one needs to look at are where and how the lights are moving and in particular whether the Moon is rising or falling. Because the lights are said to represent everything ("Ones's all" in Valens) the eclipse is not pointing to any one event in itself because celestial events at this level represent the unfolding of archetypal ideas. The particulars are delegated to each existing nativity that spread out the general theme into various different manifestations.
The stage has been set at 28 Leo and those who have studied Horary astrology will note that this is within the last 3 degrees of a sign. In a different context, this is indicating an ending. In the sign of Leo it can indicate the end of a king's reign. Some have said that Trump will therefore somehow leave office in various ways. This is however only one possible signification of at least minimally thousands of possibilities. There's something far more important happening than such a limited result as Trump leaving office which would have minimal effect. Removing Trump would be like popping a zit on a cancer; not much help at this point. There are far worse problems and Trump is mostly a symptom and not a cause of what is really wrong.
Those obsessed with a singular figure are infected with the disease of centralization. They think that if just one thing changes, it changes everything. This eclipse is about decentralization and will eventually render such views irrelevant. Leo represents the centralization of power within the crown or a central authority. It says that the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many. But the power of the Dyad (the Moon in the Timaeus) says something contrarial and will rise above the centralization principle (the Sun) symbolizing fragmentation.
It symbolizes the principle of "the Many" overcoming "the One". It's a signal that the people and the network effect will begin to exert more power than central authority. It has in fact already started to happen but is as yet unrecognized; the power of elliptic curve cryptography distributed on public networks which has allowed information security to be turned inside out against concentric circles of access is about to hand out pink slips to many forms of authority. This process will not happen over night, but will take at least a generation to complete.
There will of course be an interregnum where people who have not understood the purpose of what is to come still bring irrelevant ideas to the table because their thinking is still affected by the old paradigms they haven't released. This will create confusion until suddenly the realization dawns that the underlying idea is no longer relevant. Andreas Antonopoulos mentioned as an example of this, what happened when the transportation industry went from using horses to using cars. They were building the first cars with horse straps for steering because they had in their mind one horse = one tire. Eventually a steering wheel replaced it. And soon, there will be no need for a steering wheel at all.
These changes are predicated by material causes that function as a catalyst and a filter that sorts the possible and impossible from potential; the possible is only possible if the predecessor condition(s) allow it. The first stage of decentralization occurred during the Uranus, Neptune conjunction in Capricorn in the early 90's and it affected the nature of news organizations with the emergence of the internet. This was a necessary precursor to what is to come and the main thing that will bring infrastructure inversion to centers of power and eventually decentralize authority itself.
Fictum Acta
The emergence of the internet created a very strange situation with the news media that at first was very subtle and over time undermined the nature of finding truth itself. Andreas Antonopoulos has an excellent video on this called Fake News, Fake Money. It used to be the case that we determined what was true from established sources or "centers" of information such as the New York Times.
They had investigative journalists fact checking so that mistakes were minimized and for the most part this worked. Before the internet, very few people questioned whether there was a Moon landing. Reality wasn't questioned as often. Then later on people were taking relative positions to what was true and saying such things as "my truth" or "your truth". Then some groups on Facebook put forth a diagram with a 3D cylinder with two different light projections; one showing a square and one showing a circle, to which I wrote the following response...
Existence requires some attributes to depart to make way for other attributes to come forward. The dynamic interaction of coming into being and passing away is responsible for the preception of fate and allows for a range of manifestation and conscious choice at the same time. Each posture, stance, attitude, maneuvers away from the neutral, the non-existent. The existence of light chases away darkness. The light forms a dyadic non-relationship with non-light. The republican with the not republican, the democrat with the not democrat, each chases away the other until they no longer exist together so that they can exist more absolutely.
(Google Images - public domain)In actuality what was seen at one position was really a "perception" and what was seen at the other position was also a "perception". One cannot claim to have grasped truth until you have eliminated perception. The reason is because truth belongs to the realm of the intelligibles and is seen with the "minds eye", but the realm of perception is a bending of hule (the material world) to personal will. In Greek, the word for truth ("aletheia") means "unconcealment". A noetic quickening is what renders the material world intelligible.
We live in a unique time of alt-facts masquerading as truth ...
I spent a considerable amount of time resisting the pressures to fall off one side or another of these debates and did so intentionally because I noticed that taking sides introduced a blind spot in those who succumbed to the pressure. So how did we get to this strange place where we no longer know what is true?
The internet.
The great irony is that the explosion of free information has changed the way news organizations behave and have effectively decentralized information. As Andreas Antonopoulos said, "the internet took the most profitable section of the New York Times and Craiglisted it for free". This meant firing all the fact checkers and investigative journalists in order to be able to stay in business and compete. So called "reality TV" seeks to hide the vacuume left behind while others in the old established organizations cry "fake news" and point to the internet as the cause. And of course, in many cases they're right. It used to be the few with an entire organization behind them that controlled the news and it was accepted as fact.
Mediolanum Quaestio Communia
There's an astonishing development in the tech world that is the result of about a half dozen different technologies combined that is about to give the pink slip to authority. They haven't gotten the message yet. It centers upon the Byzantine Generals problem and how to achieve consensus about what the truth of any situation is.
To summarize, this problem is about how to achieve consensus when one or more parties could be considered untrustworthy. Imagine that there are four commanders with four regiments on four sides of a city. They must either all attack or they must all retreat. If some attack and some retreat, the result is worse than if all retreat or all attack. If one commander is traitorous, how do you make sure that they all know which action was ordered by the general?
This situation applies to networking where computer nodes don't necessarily all have the same information on the web at the same time. So how to decide which version of history is the correct version? Satoshi Nakamoto solved this problem in 2008 and used these technologies strung together in such a way that makes completely unnecessary the assistance of a centralized trusted authority. It is the first time in the world that a cryptographic mathematical algorithm distributed on the internet with a decentralized trust model rendered authority by third parties obsolete. This happened interestingly enough just as the financial crisis was threatening the banking system with default (as Pluto entered Capricorn).
Fictus Pecunia
(Google Images - public domain)
Andreas Antonopoulos suggests that the same thing that happened to news organizations and the finding of truth when the internet emerged is about to happen to the banking and political system. In terms of what this new technology has done in relation to what the internet has done, the development of it is as if we're back in the early 1990's. Transactions aren't automatic and it's much like it was trying to connect to the internet using Windows for Workgroups 3.11 when we had to set up windows sockets and ports using TCP/IP. It's a painful process with 38 steps to get something very simple done.
Because of that most are not yet aware of what the potential of this technology is. Without getting too technical, the underlying technology behind bitcoin turns the security model of corporations inside out. Andreas Antonopoulos describes it as the difference between bubble boy vs sewer rat. Most of us who have Windows machines know how seriously flawed the security is on these systems and that is because it was built upon a security model of firewalls and using intranets to provide safe spaces for programs to run.
But what happens when you do this? The programs that run in these spaces never get stress tested. This includes most apps for banking institutions that run with access permissions. In these cases, the security holes don't get patched; in short they have no immune system and fall apart easily (aka bubble boy). Contrast that with open source decentralized public networks where viruses and trojans are everywhere; this is the space that bitcoin lives in (aka sewer rat). It has the most sophisticated hackers in the world attacking it day and night and is still going strong.
So far nobody has been able to break the cryptographic, decentralized network model that it is based upon, though some have violated the decentralization principles of bitcoin and got goxed because centralized exchanges create giant honeypots. Decentralization increases security by spreading information out so thin that hackers can't find access points fruitful enough to pay for the cost of their attacks.
Probationem Operis
The "Proof of Work" algorithm combined with blockchain and elliptic curve cryptography form the main security structure for bitcoin that relies on the network effect to insure that all participants find it more profitable to play by the rules than against the rules. The proof of work algorithm uses SHA256 to reduce a signing signature to a string of characters that looks like a random alphanumeric output. It's a simple function that easily produces output, but is impossible to guess what that output is in one iteration. The result though is deterministic in that given an input, it will always generate the same output. This means that if one has the correct signing hash it is proof that you have the correct digital signature which forms the basis for proof of ownership.
Guessing SHA256 in reverse is very difficult; miners have to expend lots of electricity to find a given output that would work with a given public key. This means doing hundreds of thousands of calculations per second and it eats up electricity. What prevents a miner from just confirming a transaction for the block reward and moving on to the next one without doing the work and making a guess?
Competition.
These other miners are competing for the same block reward and if one miner signs falsely, it may get added momentairly to the chain until others in the network say that isn't correct. A couple of times a week the network forks temporarily because they don't agree about the truth of transaction history, but eventually the longer blockchain will cause the shorter history to be overwritten with the new blocks. This is the network effect. At this point because the entire history of the blockchain is over 8 years old, how powerful of a supercomputer would be required to rewrite the entire transaction history of 8 years and do it within 10 minutes before the next block is added to create a fake block?
This is how difficult it's become to attack or cheat this system. At the end, a miner doing this will end up with no block rewards and a high electricity bill. This insures that it's more profitable to work with the system than against it.
However, because this technology is seriously disruptive to business as usual banking, there will be attacks. The main one to worry about is substitution. First they will say that bitcoin is used by terrorists, drug dealers, and criminals, and say that so and so is undermining our democracy by using this "fake money" and avoiding taxes, etc... Then they will introduce such proposals as FedCoin that are not open source, have no fixed upper limit (allows counterfeiting and devaluation) and centralizes control with a few banking authorities.
The centralization of control in one place guarantees that the keys will get hacked which is a serious flaw in security. This has been done before and no matter what you do, it is always just a matter of time before those keys leak and the entire financial history is broadcast to Wikileaks or finds its way to the darknet where criminals will use that information to steal identities. In fact, this has already happened.
Bitcoin turns this entire system on its head because it's permissionless, borderless and has no nationality.
To paraphrase Andreas Antonopoulos:
It never asks for your personal information (unless you go to an exchange) so there's no identity to be stolen. It doesn't say that the transaction is legal or illegal, allowed or not allowed, but only asks whether it's a valid or invalid transaction. When they start saying that bitcoin is fake money how do you know which money is the fake money and which is the real money?
Well the market provides a heuristic for this and it's called value. If you take your national currency and your bitcoin to an establishment and ask how much can I get for X bitcoin and Y national currency, the market will tell you which one is the real money. If the premium on bitcoin is 20% above that of your national currency, the market is telling you that bitcoin is the real money. This has happened in a number of different countries lately, India, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Ukraine just to name a few. When the inflation rate for a national currency is approaching 50% annually, crazy bitcoin volatility starts to look like a solid investment.
The technology behind bitcoin provides a way to find truth without central authorities which means that widespread corruption for the first time in history might just become a thing of the past. It uses markets as a heuristic to determine the difference between truth and falsity. Ethereum takes the model of bitcoin to the next level by implementing smart contracts. On this platform a transaction is not a transfer of value necessarily, but an execution of an agreement; it can be a political arrangement between parties in a corporation.
I'm expecting this issue to come to a head when Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto conjoin in late Capricorn in November 2020. A likely outcome of this chaos is that a derivative of the ethereum network blockchain could become the foundation for future electoral systems. But eventually you have to ask the question, what are we electing? A person who can act as a centralized control? The whole point of decentralized networks is to make this whole process unnecessary. There's a name for this and it's called "infrastructure inversion".
As Pluto enters Aquarius, we may find that having a president is as unnecessary as the British Monarchy has become. Interestingly I just read a post from Donnah Carel Youngblood about a boy named Baron Trump who can time travel written by Ingersol Lockwood. His next book was called The Last President in which there was a cabinet member named Pence... What makes this astonishing is that these books were written around 1896! (unless Trump read the book and modeled his life after it).
To get a vision of what this future looks like, this link about the Cicada Direct Digital Democracy network that I just received from Ed Falis is a mind blowing example. According to this white paper, either PII (Personal Identifiable Information) will be in the hands of authority or it will be handed back to the individual. Authority of course means centralization which means that it becomes a giant honeypot to be attacked by hackers. However if PII is handed back to the individuals using biocryptics that will cause decentralization and create greater safety. That is the difference between a future that is like Panopticon, or one that is like Star Trek circa 2230.
