Serendipity is often referred to as a "Happy Accident".
It's when good favor comes our way completely randomly.
Many inventions throughout the ages were completely serendipitous.
- Pacemaker
- Slinky
- Post-it notes
- Play-Doh
- Chocolate Chip Cookies
- Velcro
- Popsicle
- Super Glue
- Penicillin
- Alcohol
All created completely from random chance.
Obviously some of these inventions may be a bit low on the priority list when it comes to importance, but others are extremely important. For example, think of how much different the world would be without popsicles or the Slinky. Probably not much, then again it's hard to say considering Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect. One small change in trajectory decades ago can make a big impact 30 years down the line.
Considering super glue was a military technology used by combat medics in the field, we know for a fact that its creation has changed the course of history. We'll never know how, because this experiment has no control group (an identical dimension who's only difference is that they didn't invent super glue) but we do know for a fact that these changes happened, even as they remain unknown. The same can likely be said for alcohol, Velcro, and especially Penicillin.
Of course, there was no way to avoid accidentally discovering alcohol.
Nobody knows exactly when humans began to create fermented beverages. The earliest known evidence comes from 7,000 BCE in China, where residue in clay pots has revealed that people were making an alcoholic beverage from fermented rice, millet, grapes, and honey.
So even though many things happen by random chance, they are still guaranteed to happen, sometimes quite quickly. In the case of alcohol, all it takes is food lying around to be fermented by yeast on accident... and then someone hungry enough to consume it even though they know it's already gone 'bad'. This happened so quickly in our history that we don't even know when or how it happened; only that it did.
But what would 'ironic' serendipity be?
I would define it as the silver lining of a problem becoming hugely beneficial in the long term. It's when you get unlucky but somehow everything turns out for the best despite appearing quite bad in the moment. This subset of serendipity occurs way less often than the other types of happy accidents we see.
Struggling to come up with an example...
- Imagine going to war and losing.
- The attackers take over the government and tax the citizens.
- Everything seems pretty bleak in the moment.
- But then five years down the line we realize that life is better after the hostile takeover than before.
An event like this is highly unlikely, yet it is exactly what happened during our own hostile takeover. Our governance structure was attacked in the most obvious way (money attack into a Sybil attack via sockpuppet witnesses), we lost, everything seemed like it was about to fall apart, and then it somehow all worked out for the best.
I often wonder what it would have been like if we had won the hostile takeover. Then what? We get to keep our branding (which I didn't particularly like anyway). We'd be forced to take the ninjamine away for obvious reasons, but it would have been much more difficult to justify than just creating a new coin with a new distribution.
Ironically, losing was the better option.
This is certainly true in the long term. We learned our lesson, and we learned it the hard way. Sometimes that's the only way a lesson can be learned. If we had won that fight, would that just have made us more cocky and overconfident than before? It is pretty weird when considering just how it all turned out.
Hard Lesson #1: Consensus is difficult.
The fact that we lost was just as important as how we lost. We had witnesses at the top of the top 20. That should have been it. Logic would dictate that the rest would shortly follow. They never did. Some voters were fine voting in the top 10 but the rest did not follow suit. That's pretty significant when the network itself is facing total obliteration. Some would rather see it all burn than give power to witnesses they don't approve of. Very significant situation and definitely worth exploration.
Was it justified not voting in the rest of the witnesses? Clearly it was self-justified on some level by those who performed their actions, and any criticisms against that action fizzle out so long after the fact. On a very real level some people in this community would have rather take a wait-and-see approach instead of put people in power that they didn't agree with. Desperate times apparently do not always call for desperate measures, it seems, and again we already know in retrospect that it likely worked out for the best exactly the way it went down; A surprising turn of events to be sure.
Hard Lesson #2: The value is in the community.
Our entire understanding of what "LAYER ZERO" even means stems from the hostile takeover. All of a sudden we collectively realized that code is not law. We create the code, we enforce the code, and we can change the code. Community is law. In theory perhaps we always knew this deep down, but it wasn't until the hostile takeover that this became blatantly obvious. Theory had become the reality.
As much as Bitcoin maximalists like to point out that their code is dependable and non-changing, that is just simply how they do business because that strategy is having great success and allows Bitcoin to dominate the security niche. But make no mistake, if this was no longer a tactic that actually worked, they would pivot. It will be curious to see what happens when Bitcoin gets flipped and the maximalists lose their minds. Will the community be more likely to accept changes to the code in this scenario? Time will tell. The point here is that the community is in charge, and nobody knows that better than a community that survived a hostile takeover.
Hard Lesson #3: DPOS actually works.
Many made claim that DPOS wasn't going to work because inevitably there would always be a money attack. The theory was sound, and it was a good argument. However, now we know for a fact that the theory and the reality of the situation are two different things. The theory was proved wrong in practice.
Not only did we survive the money attack, those that did not have their Steem tokens forked away were able to heavily profit from the situation. It doesn't even make logical sense that a platform would be able to profit from being attacked, but that is exactly what happened. Most everyone was able to power down their Steem and sell it into the attack, only to receive the same amount of tokens they had before on the new chain. In essence, when DPOS gets attacked it becomes acceptable practice to 'double spend' the tokens, dump the Steem while still maintaining the Hive airdrop. In fact the best course of action was to dump everything into Bitcoin and wait till the dust settled at 10 cent Hive, but it's a bit to speculative to assume it would work out that way in all cases.
Conclusion
When we tell a child not to touch a hot stovetop to avoid getting burned, some are bound to ignore that advice and do it anyway. Sometimes the best lessons to learn are the hard lessons. They are the ones that imprint on memory and allow us to rebuild our reality around avoiding such outcomes in the future.
No one would have ever guessed that losing the hostile takeover was a viable option for the longevity of this community, but that's exactly what happened. We learned the hard lessons, and now we are better for it.
Moving forward, another money attack against this community would enrich us exponentially more than even the last one, and now that we've been through the process we know much better how to handle it. A fork would happen much sooner than it did last time (assuming it even came to that). Of course the ultimate goal is to create a system that avoids this problem entirely. I'm convinced we have already reached that level, but even if I'm wrong the silver lining could become the most serendipitous outcome, just as it was the last time around the block.