The Tower

The book of Genesis depicts in the story of Babel’s tower the reason for the existence of diverse languages in our civilization. We assume that the inhabitants of the Senar plains were blind to their own pride that they felt motivated to create a building that was able to “touch the clouds”, against their mystical belief system: skies belong to the Creator, and human beings were against His will by defying the domain.

If we investigate the Bible’s timeline for the foundational myth, this is relatively immediate to Noah’s Ark. We might guess the Universal Flooding experience was still fresh in the collective imagination during those times. In the construction of “The Tower” maybe there was certain will to emulate the practicality from “The Ark” on saving the chosen: Noah the patriarch, his family, and the animal couples. It is a possible logic conclusion that, in the event of a similar catastrophe, everyone will find refuge in the upper levels to scape certain doom. In our imagination Babel’s myth ends in tragedy: the building is destroyed by the Wrath of God for stand against His will and the workers condemned to speak different languages, unable to continue the construction. The repetitive story of a crusade to avoid catastrophe with the consequences of an auto fulfilled prophecy with its origins in the reasons to avoid it.

Back into our ages, there are few people who have been able to avoid the frenzy talk about Blockchain technology and all the associated terminology: Web 3.0, DAOs, DApps, DeFi, smart contracts, Crypto coins or Crypto assets, proof of work and proof of stake, stablecoins, and a long etcetera. All these concepts associated with a new economy with capacity to withstand financial crises and better distribution of our planet limited resources: the libertarian interpretation of technology use in the search for a better collective future. A positive conclusion that everybody can be sympathetic.

We must remember that creative use of software engineering for decentralized database systems, cryptography as a technical foundation to create trust, distributed computing power, electronic ledgers and digital coins are not only limited to the Crypto Bros. We have the current business ecosystem build on top of information technologies like DNS (decentralized database with the addresses for every cloud resource), digital signatures, compute loads distributed on different vendors (AWS, Azure & Google Cloud), enterprise applications that keep digital records & assists in the management of business enterprises (ERP, CRM, SCM), and basically all monetary transactions have digital integration.  

For what is worth to mention on this “alternative” ecosystem there is a long detractors list: from Billionaire investors like Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger that discriminate these instruments for their lack of considered “value”, passing through economists & scholars in charge of public finances that point the competitors to public fiat monetary system, academic experts on information systems that found multiple flaws in the design & use of vulnerable algorithms for the less adequate persistence life cycle implemented into the blocks, to the echo friendly organizations that severely critic the footprint created by the energy consumption and waste required for the whole operation and maintenance of the chain. And we cannot forget the video gaming sector which is affected on the GPU units’ market by the demand of the precious components to solve the cryptographic challenges required by the consensus algorithms.

There are calls like those from Financial Stability Board February 2022 report: Assessment of Risks to Financial Stability from Crypto-assets were the thinktank concluded there is a major risk to create similar conditions from the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis from balance sheet exposure from “traditional” financial sector to the unregulated crypto asset ecosystem. Losses in crypto-assets, where accompanied by leverage, liquidity mismatch and interconnections with the traditional financial system, may amplify systemic risk arising from wealth effects. Loss of confidence in stablecoins could also trigger sales of their reserve assets, potentially affecting the functioning of short-term funding markets.
 https://www.fsb.org/2022/02/fsb-warns-of-emerging-risks-from-crypto-assets-to-global-financial-stability/

 The archetypical comparisons between Blockchain and “the Tower” are interesting for the similarities we found from a construction perspective. It is possible that civil engineers concluded that the biblical ruin was an outcome on the lack of an adequate body of knowledge and engineering studies from their regular experience on building construction: soil mechanic evaluation is a basic requirement, wind speed and current direction, how earthquakes affect the foundations and the regular operation and maintenance factors from sunlight, water, erosion, and other conditions that are specific to the geographical location. Today we know that even with access to best quality information there are still buildings destroyed by “Acts of God”, to many times from developers’ greedy practices.