Quiet Revolution Code

Government is a homeless tax junkie. Parliament, for most of them, is a temporary home. They can’t evidently do much, but to do even that, they need inexhaustible supplies of money. We (unlike them?) are law-abiding and give to them, because we have Stockholm Syndrome, and because we don’t enjoy jail. How many of us are truly getting close to what we want and need?

A businessman once said to me:

“If you are not getting what you need from someone, pass him by”.

So, when it comes to money, who am I to argue with a businessman? I am not getting what I need from the system, so I will bypass it. I will make my own money.

I like ‘Spek’ (Afrikaans: ‘fat’ or ’lard’) for a currency name. ‘Rand’ was never Nguni-friendly (many acquaintances pronounced it ’lant’), and anyway we (Maritz)burgers grew up thinking the Rand was a dark, polluted blot on the landscape.

I rolled ‘spek’ off the tongue. “Gimme a thousands speks” I said. I even cracked a pun: “Let’s spek-ulate on property”. There was more “I am fully spekked. I have loads of spek”.

Then I thought of our First People, why not use their word for the most special fat (also meaning ‘supernatural power’ or ’essence’)? According to google, it is !Gi, which may remind you of Indian ghee (clarified butter) but ghee is a gentler word. ***!Gi *** is spoken more as a light tom-tom beat. It is a voiced click, the same click we use for (used-to-be-Port Elizabeth)- Gqeberha. Non-Saffas who are reluctant to try the click can easily say Gi, as in ‘git’ without the ’t’. One !Gi is worth one thousand tjing. Everyone can pronounce ’tjing’: think of a nice Avedis Zildian choked hi-hat.

We all want to live on the ‘fat of the land’ - ‘fat’ is a nice notion for money, but !Gi wins.

All the Names

I loved reaing José Saramango’s “All the Names”, identifying with his main character, who unquestioningly spent his bureau days assembling a huge collection of names. Coding is rather like that. International currency naming standards require currencies to be identified with the first two letters indicating a country. SA already has ZAR, but we are making soemthing els. We choose ZAG. But, I am way ahead of myself. Now we have a name for it, let’s create the currency.

Fork it?

I have my eye on one already. The most intelligent crypto-coin implementation I know of is the Pascalcoin. Since I started out as a Turbo Pascal coder, I was always going to love that, right? Now, its clever makers developed a system that safely stores only the last 100 transactions, but still preserves a history of all transactions in the blockchain. How clever is that? There are surely other strategies, but they had me on Pascal and ‘hundred’.

Blockchains update every node in the chain with full history. To cut to the chase, if everyone in the world had smartphones carrying around a full history of all transactions in the world, well … I leave it to to work out how slow your phone will get. Clearly we can’t have that. The average Bitcoin transaction is around half a kilobyte, say 500 bytes. That means Pascalcoins contain about 50Kb, meaning 64 million SA smartphone owners would carry a coin history taking up 3Gb of their phone space. That’s not bad already, but the tech trend is always upward toward better, faster. It should be about smaller too, but two out of three is not bad.

Sitting on Defence?

Do not think I am facetious about ‘Comrade Government’. I am as socialist as they come. Education and health care in my mind fall under Defence. The best defence is to equip us with the skills to innovate and defend ourselves. Koos de la Rey implemented trench war and kicked the world’s most powerful army’s sorry butt.

These things are simple government duty. They are not options. It is not rocket science. We once outdid both Australia and New Zealand in GDP, and they got it right.

Of Codes and Comms