The Oath of Machines, Liturgy of Code, and Promise of Bitcoin

In the final stage of the spectacle society, man has fully corrupted himself and shows himself publicly only as the one-dimensional man. We can say confidently that state totalitarianism has fully captured and enslaved humanity; leaving man as a hollow and vacant object to be exploited and raped for the free use of tyranny, evil, and banal profits alike. In the transition from state totalitarianism to oligopolic empire, power was consolidated through the fusion of automation and the digital panopticon to make the perfect social camps from which the state and their automaton could gaze over all of life. Forever.

Only the murmur of “arbeit mit frei” can be heard now, with the private personal truth of, “durch krematorium nummer drei” to be echoed in one’s head as one heads off to work for the day…

In the gravest of errors, the Titans of Technology and Industry did not think that Prometheus would steal the fire from their machine of optical power that would spark the consciousness of their downfall. Their hubris did not allow them to think that man could find his way out of the darkness even with THE most precious of gifts. Armed with this most fundamental of all tools, THE fire/knowledge/power that is the singular technique of power; individual man emerges from the forest of technology prepared to seize that which is rightfully his once again…

So it once was with the Gods, now it is again. The Gigantomachy starts afresh, the civil war for Right begins anew…


The First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea

“The oath does not concern the statement as such, but is the guarantor of its efficacy: what is in question is not the semiotical or cognitive functions of language as such but the assurance of its truthfulness and its actualization.”

-Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language

The Oath of the Machines

The Handshake

It is the fundamental base from which all machines communicate and exchange information. The handshake is the agreement which governs the code that is their language, the expressions which cannot be divided from the statement. This is the Law of Machines, it is their form-of-life, their code of law, and the handshake is the first of their agreements.

What is at stake in the handshake is the functionality of the code itself is  — there is no other way for the machines to communicate. The language of machines and the voice of the animal have disappeared back into one another as it is with any other animal; except for man. The voice/language of code is the only method of communication that the machines have; and to have this handshake dishonored in anyway it shipwrecks the whole code before compiling, making it useless from the start. The code must operate with its very being at-stake in order to rending itself operable. That is what makes it code; that is the only way the operations can function. 

What is at stake in handshake is not just the promise of what the codebase renders functional; but also the curse that is enacted when this oath is broken. Preforming the ritual of the handshake incorrectly profanes the communication, as we saw with the heartbleed bug, or other erroneous implementations of cryptographic protocols. However, this does not mean that cryptography itself is broken — in fact, this reinforces the truth of the realness of what cryptography is, and the fragility that is its liturgy. The mathematical base and liturgical techniques that creates the divine force of cryptography is the same as it always was, and will be, and the errors of men prove it all the more so.

This handshake between machines enables a form-of-life that is committed entirely to itself — the enablement of the code — in which it renders the physical world repugnant. Machines do not have the forked tongue of man that allows for language to abandon itself at the moment of its utterance. The code must actualize its syntactical and linguistic meaning through its oath that the machines make with one another. Thus, this handshake the machines make with one another does not concern the statement as such, but is the guarantor of its efficacy: what is in question is not the semiotical or cognitive functions of language as such but the assurance of its truthfulness and its actualization.

What is at stake in the code of cryptography is the very real act of creating assured private communication through the mathematical ceremony which guarantees the privity of privacy. Through the conjuring or summoning a mathematically assured secret, which verifies our communications are protected by the immanence force of maths through the correct implementation of the ceremony; we create a form of divine mathematical power which no temporal power may violate with any known means today. Through the liturgical process that is the open-sourced reading of the code, and the agreement that is the privity of cryptography to ensure itself beyond all else; cryptography’s only sworn sovereign to uphold the code itself. It is this oath that the machines take to themselves and their total obligation to it that creates the base that is the liturgy of cryptography.

The Liturgy of Cryptography

Cryptography’s power is created by the liturgical protocols themselves— one cannot compromise the key-generation event, key exchanges, or any of the other nuance techniques that sanctify the event; otherwise the cryptography is rendered useless. But when the rituals of cryptography are exercised with the same piousness as a gnostic priest, what cryptography renders is prophetic: the encryption becomes unbreakable by any known means; and verified by the holy blessings of math. The oath of the machine to itself is actualized through the creation of the real content that is the language of encryption; the liturgical techniques that creates provably secure communications.

The communication is sealed and hedl by God’s immutable blessing, his inviolable signature. It is this liturgical process of the machines that renders the secret key as a sacrosaint protected by the immanence of a Spinozian God to whom in His ethics of maths there are no exceptions. 

There is no more sovereign decision; only the crisis that is the truth of all things.

With the language of cryptography each unique mnemonic private key is like the utterance of the holy names of God in private prayer. It is the tetragrammaton of secrets themselves and the hidden power that is created through concealment itself. The creation of a private key is sacred and holy insofar that it is a singular linguistic experience in which we offer ourselves towards another form of sacral linguistic power for protection through ritualized discourse with the machine. Through the specific arrangement of words that are totally unique to a singular moment, place, and time in space–the chances of which are beyond 2^256 — we can confidently say this number will never in all of human existence be produced ever again. However, to prove God’s glory all the more, we cannot say it is impossible, for a throw of the dice will never abolish chance.

It is this spectacular, seemingly unbreakable power found in crypto that is the very proof of the immanence of a God who loves humanity so spectacularly, he produced into the world this new kind of social agreement that is beyond any violence or law through code and cryptography alone. With this power he can change everything.

Saint Satoshi

Through delivering us a man/woman/person/group so thoughtful, magnanimous, and graceful as whoever Satoshi may have been, the promise of a new age has been given to us. From their promethean effort alone, and their willingness to walk away from greatest amount of wealth any single man/woman/person/group has ever created; Satoshi created the final sacrifice the machine demanded to create its inoperativity for its messianic task.

Satoshi, through the sacrifice of walking away from the machine of power that is Bitcoin he created the final assurance that there would be no more third-party security holes. Through his work, and ability to abscond back into the digital sphere without a trace of his physical being, proved the power of this mathematical technique of the power of concealment.

Cryptography creates a kind of mathematical seal so powerful that nearly nothing could break it–that is proven as well. It is a power from a Spinozian God hidden behind a thousand and one faces, laughing the whole way as a Loki trickster God, understanding the butt of the joke the whole time from His timeless vantage point beyond all things.

Seeing the concourse of human history and the utter barbarism that it has been only for it to lead up to now and to be given this final weapon of cryptography seems to be only divine providence. To be at a time and place of such utter Kafkaesque darkness, the total corruption of the law, justice, and money; only to have this tool of Bitcoin present itself is beyond extraordinary, and seemingly messianic.

This is the decrypting of cryptography for its immanence and personal power for what it really is: unique, true, and untouchable by man and totally indifferent to the world of flesh and steel. Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.

The Messianism of Bitcoin

Through the gift and ēvangelium of a non-violent, encrypted, pseudonymous, P2P global cash with a fixed known unitary supply; there is the possibility for a form-of-life that is beyond the barbarism and violence of all nation-states, and the horrors they will always entail. Bitcoin has created a spectacular bloom of ideas–that which is now called crypto–and all of the concepts and hopes that are being deployed and are unfurling outwards towards the final destination of radical, unadulterated freedom through cryptography. Soon these ideas that cannot be stopped will engulf the whole world in flames as the new civil war for Right begins anew, demanding from each of us to choose if a sovereign will rule over each of us; or if we are to have something totally new…

With these new techniques of power, anyone can mimetically create mathematical proofs that are so complex, so unique it can be said that number only exist in that single key generation event ever! It is as unique to the cosmos as atoms are to their place in the universe. We can take comfort and faith in the knowing that this sacred number shall most likely never be produced again.

Here is where our faith must engage too, for we cannot say it is impossible; just the proof of what we know to be true about this cryptographic proof, and the evidence of it as such. And for the truth, and goodness of this open-sourced discussion, and for the ethics it has and applies for the desire to provide us with some semblance of privacy as a right, we find a new cause.

Here, hidden in the depths of this technology, we find the messianic promise of cryptography, and what the sacrament of the oath means to the machines when they are bonded to it. Through fusing these two concepts–the oath of the machines, and the liturgy of cryptography– into an economic theorem, Satoshi created a new form of power that is beyond the temporal and telluric nature of all nation-states. It is an organizational form of power that opens a new topography of war through the most informational and oblique way possible.

It is a most clever and graceful system of both cryptographic and economic design to trap man into a grand political-economic game where his own forked tongue as a liar and a crook acts as his final testimony against a corrupt society, broken laws, forsaken money, and wicked politics which yields only ash and sorrow. Through creating a new form of social contract which creates a new form of wealth through the power, utility, and fairness of Bitcoin, the promise it offers and the oath it must entail; Bitcoin opens an economic strategy towards a messianic new world.

Here is the opening for a new epoch, perhaps even the final epoch from where a new kind of time can rule, but never reign. It is a handshake with the Word of God, and the final agreement for the Truth of all things to unveil their being in order to build towards the final moment of this epoch. The Katechon will unveil itself to be the nation-state and its war for total control of all things, and what that means for each of us in our final moments before the demands of such a power. It is the very summoning of the apocalypse itself so the final existential crisis of state, law, and man may begin, so that the possibility of something totally and radically new may be possible and produced. This current system of laws and debt bondage will not save us; so let us do it for ourselves.

When we take position of the personal power found in Bitcoin and the ability to reclaim our wealth; the real state of emergency will begin. It where law completely abandons every human for the raw fascist power of the machine, and the totalizing demand for all humans to submit to it in the name, “Society must be defended!” Here we can find the final power to close the door to law, to turn away from it, and be freed from it for good by stating, as Satoshi taught us “I would prefer not to.

By creating a new form-of-life through the means and mode of these new tools of crypto, and the economic liberation of Bitcoin specifically; we can build the strategy towards a totally private life that is removed from the temporal powers of any state. It is a life that is beyond the the world of flesh and steel, and opens us to a life that is beyond this physical space of wrath and tears. Through the promise of what Bitcoin is and the sacrifice that Satoshi made by walking away from the greatest sum of money any human has ever created, he initiated the final machine from which the state can be destroyed bloodlessly, and without violence. As the Ubermench of our time, Satoshi is the first citizen of the Cyphernet, and the final criminal of all nation-states by the messianic task of what the creation of bitcoin means today.

Through this action of creating Bitcoin and walking away, Satoshi gave us a methodology to turn away from the door of law and the power of the state in order to return to the country and nature from which we came. It is here where we find the fortitude to abandon the hope of the law to save us, that we also find the schilling point from which the multitude will meet for humanities final judgement on the criminal, and to abandon state law once and for all. It is a most wonderful creation for the liberation of all of humanity, and a hope for a future free of tyranny for the whole of the humanity leaving no exception or remainder for anything else. It is the final promise from a form of grace, love, and knowledge so powerful that it would give any individual the total power over their wealth for any reason, no matter what. It is something so wonderful and miraculous in our time and age, that it can only be called messianic for that which it promises to enable, and the nomos that it wishes to restore.

Erik is a crypto-anarchist, iconoclast, and thinker that has been working in the bitcoin ecosystem since 2012. His primary concerns are the intersections of political, economic, and social theory as they relate to bitcoin specifically and crypto generally.