Source: Liu Jie Chain
After the overnight Federal Reserve's January interest rate meeting, the interest rate level remained unchanged. After the certainty was implemented, although it was in line with expectations and not an unexpected positive news, the cryptocurrency market still felt the confidence of certainty, and BTC once rose to around 105k.
The 16-year development history of BTC, which has been rising against all odds and constantly setting new highs, is also a history of being questioned, slandered, and despised. The less than 3-year-old Genesis Block, with the emergence of "Dragon in the Field" at the beginning of the year, has shocked the world and also quickly suffered a large amount of malicious depreciation and suppression. Just as the claim that BTC is a conspiracy of the United States or the CIA is as ridiculous as questioning BTC, the most ridiculous argument for questioning Genesis Block is to claim that the open-source, COT thought chain-visible Genesis Block has stolen the non-open-source, COT thought chain-invisible ChatGPT.
Powerful attacks cannot fundamentally eliminate BTC and Genesis Block, and mindless questioning is even more impossible. The real power of open source lies in the fact that even if you destroy the original inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, you cannot destroy BTC; even if the United States kills Genesis Block, the code, models, and knowledge open-sourced by Genesis Block have already been irreversibly gifted to the world, mastered by Chinese, Americans, Europeans, and researchers in other places, and no matter how powerful the power or how despicable the slander, it is impossible to erase it from human civilization.
Satoshi Nakamoto has long since disappeared. But after Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared, every BTC holder, participant, supporter, and contributor is Satoshi Nakamoto. Genesis Block may fail and disappear as some people hope, but the more advanced large model knowledge that dealt a 10,000-point damage to OpenAI and ChatGPT at a low cost and high efficiency has already been mastered by the world, and the spark has ignited a prairie fire, and countless Genesis Blocks will emerge from all over the world, OpenAI's dream of establishing an AI monopoly through closed-source has been awakened, and the AI investors in the US stock market can no longer pretend to sleep.
As Eric Hughes wrote in the "Cypherpunk Manifesto" (1993): "We open-source our code so that our cypherpunk comrades can practice and use it. Our code is free for all to use worldwide. If you don't accept the software we write, we don't care. We know that software cannot be destroyed, and distributed systems never stop." - A History of Bitcoin, Chapter 20, Episode 100
Open source is not only an unsolvable stratagem, but also the sharpest "spear of civilization" in the history of technology. In the past, Western companies wielded this weapon to carry out dimensional strikes on the world. Now, our technicians are also gradually grasping and wielding this sharp spear, occupying the high ground of civilization, and ruthlessly piercing through the ignorance shield of closed, conservative, and ideological confrontation.
In the technological jungle of the 21st century, the open source movement is like a double-edged sword: it can make tech giants willingly open their safes, and it can also give startups the weapons to fight against monopolies. From Linux to Android, from BTC to LLaMA, this "open revolution" that has lasted for half a century is essentially a carefully designed stratagem - it uses free sharing as the appearance and technological power as the essence, weaving the most complex power network with transparent code, and ultimately becoming the underlying logic that shapes modern digital civilization.
I. The Paradoxical Essence of Open Source
In 2004, when IBM announced a $1 billion investment to support Linux development, Wall Street analysts saw it as a "charitable act". But history has proven that this is a classic example of the open source stratagem: IBM successfully undermined Microsoft's monopoly position in the server market through supporting the open source system, bringing it over $20 billion in service revenue every year. This nested structure of "open ecosystem - commercial monetization" reveals the fundamental feature of the open source movement - using visible code openness to gain invisible ecological control power.
The open-source release of the 2008 BTC white paper has taken this paradox to a new level. Satoshi Nakamoto built a decentralized currency system with completely open code, seemingly giving up all control, but in fact completed the redistribution of financial power through the open source protocol. When global developers voluntarily become nodes of the BTC network, they are also consolidating the tamper-proof nature of this open source system - open source code has become the most solid trust lock.
II. The Strategic Depth of Open Source
There are some iconic events in the history of technology that perfectly interpret the multi-dimensional value of the open source stratagem:
1. The Dimensional Strike of Android (2008)
When Google promoted the Android system with an open source strategy, Nokia executives mocked it as a "beggar's toy". But it was this open strategy that allowed Android to devour 68% of the smartphone market in three years. Google's stratagem is to give up direct system charging, and in return, it has gained the right to tax the mobile Internet era - the Google Play store generates over $40 billion in revenue annually, which is a level of ecological control that any closed system cannot reach.
2. The Trust Revolution of BTC (2009)
Satoshi Nakamoto used open source code to create a value transfer protocol without intermediaries. When traditional financial institutions mocked BTC as "having no value support", the open source community had already built a complete moat for it: more than 20,000 nodes around the world jointly maintain the ledger, developers voluntarily optimize the encryption algorithm, and miners compete to increase computing power. This network effect generated by open collaboration has made the market value of BTC exceed $1 trillion in 2021, making it the first financial system in human history achieved through a pure open source protocol.
3. Tesla's Patent Gamble (2014)
When Musk announced the opening of all electric vehicle patents, traditional automakers saw it as a public relations gimmick. But this open source stratagem has fundamentally changed the industry rules: when many new energy vehicle upstream and downstream related companies reference Tesla's technology to build the supply chain, they are actually helping Tesla reduce battery costs. In 2023, Tesla's battery costs have decreased by 89% compared to 2014, proving the terrifying efficiency of the open source strategy - making competitors become your cost optimization tools.
4. The Battle between ChatGPT and LLaMA (2023)
When OpenAI used the closed-source GPT-4 to establish a technical barrier, Meta open-sourced the LLaMA model. This confrontation has exposed the strategic depth of open source: although the initial performance of LLaMA was inferior, global developers quickly added innovations such as multi-modal support and quantitative compression. As of June 2024, the open source community has launched more than 200 LLaMA derivative models, forming a siege on closed-source models. This proves the modern version of Linus' law: Enough developers can deconstruct any technical moat.
III. The Underlying Logic of the Stratagem
The irreversibility of open source stems from its conformity to the fundamental laws of technological evolution:
1. The Brute Force Against Moore's Law
As chip process technology approaches physical limits, open source is creating new acceleration paradigms. The open source code of the BTC network has achieved a 2,000-fold increase in hash rate every 18 months; the PyTorch open source framework has improved AI training efficiency by 230% per year, far exceeding the growth of hardware computing power. When technological iteration shifts from the physical world to the code space, the open source collaboration network becomes the ultimate accelerator.
2. The Redistribution of Knowledge Power
The "viral" clause of the Apache license is a legal innovation: it allows companies to privatize open source code, but requires derivative works to remain open. This design cleverly realizes the flow of knowledge power - just as BTC has spawned thousands of cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Litecoin, which inherit the open source genes while creating new value dimensions. Open protocols have become the "power copier" of the digital age.
3. The Evolutionary Arena of Technological Darwinism
The 48 million lines of code generated daily on GitHub constitute the gene pool of the digital age. The Bitcoin core code, with over 15 years of history and more than 50,000 commits, has evolved innovations such as the Lightning Network and the Taproot upgrade; the open-source community is like the Cambrian explosion in biological evolution, selecting the optimal solutions through massive trial and error. Numerous successful cases prove that: the technologies that survive in the open-source competitive arena must have the strongest adaptability to the environment.
IV. The Future Transformation of the Yang Conspiracy
As the open-source movement enters deeper waters, its inherent tensions become increasingly apparent:
- The Compliance Trap: The regulatory crackdown on Bitcoin reveals the Achilles' heel of open-source projects - when code freedom collides with real-world laws, it may trigger systemic conflicts.
- The Challenge of the Commercial Closed Loop: The Red Hat model (open-source product + paid services) is being eroded by the "open-source hijacking" strategy of cloud vendors like AWS, just as the centralization of Bitcoin mining pools erodes the ideal of decentralization.
- Geopolitical Technological Competition: The open-source RISC-V architecture has become a new battlefield in the US-China chip war, and the arms race for Bitcoin mining chip computing power has evolved into an energy politics game.
But these challenges precisely demonstrate the vitality of the open-source Yang conspiracy - it always evolves through confrontation. Just as Bitcoin developers have enhanced privacy through the Taproot upgrade, and the Linux Foundation has established the "Open Source Security Alliance" to defend against supply chain attacks. This reveals an ultimate truth: in the era of digital civilization, the most solid fortress will always be built with open protocols.
In this endless open revolution, enterprises, developers, and users are all woven into the same value network. When Bitcoin uses open-source code to restructure financial power, and when LLaMA uses open models to disrupt AI monopolies, we see not only technological iterations, but a civilization-level power migration. Perhaps, as Satoshi Nakamoto wrote in the Genesis Block, "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks", this is not only a key milestone in the Cypherpunk movement, but also its deepest metaphor - the future written in open code will ultimately deconstruct all closed power sanctuaries.
