The Power of Avoiding Random Coincidence

All my professional life as a biologist, I’ve studied the effects of random encounters on living organisms.

Organisms are designed to make use of as many random coincidences as possible. Random encounters with food generate enormous changes in behavior, and random encounters with toxins generate even greater changes in behavior (and often faster). The random motion of water molecules help keep food coming in and waste going out. The random movement of even a part of a water molecule -- a single proton, hopping from one water molecule to the next -- is harnessed to store the energy we need for almost all other work. Everything in biology is geared toward taking advantage of random coincidence.

Cryptocurrencies, to my surprise, thrive on avoiding random coincidence. Long public and private keys and complex hashing algorithms help avoid purely random coincidence. If a hundred monkeys with a hundred keyboards pecked away for a hundred years, would any of them ever manage to make a buck on steemit? I doubt any of them would ever manage to log in with their posting key! So cryptocurrencies make heavy use of avoiding random coincidences rather than taking advantage of them.

It’s as if cryptocurrencies are powered by the void!