Highway to Hex

ACDC was named for versatile electricity - what was the signal they were spreading?

In the 1980s, the Australian rock band AC/DC was considered heavy metal. They were hard charging, rocking, and were mostly a band loved by disaffected male youths. This was prior to their eventual commercialization that domesticated them in the eyes of the broader public. They were once a scary group of men playing scary music and living a scary life of dirty deeds, and then one day they were selling Mitsubishis and Twisted Tea. We typically would look such a domestication as a disappointing watershed “selling out” line like we do with Metallica and the Black Album. But what if AC/DC had a message for the masses and needed the incentive of wealth in their old age to make that message available to everyone? What might have that message been? Didn’t AC/DC’s lead singer (Bon Scott) drink himself to death within a year of writing Highway to Hell? Did the band know what they wrote when they wrote it or was this all possibly the work of a greater power? The band’s name AC/DC, after all, was power - not just that, but an alternating and direct current to power any appliance - it is the delivery mechanism by which electricity advances humanity, whether it be the sewing machine that guitarist Angus Young first viewed the letters on, or airplanes, or machines that shelter premature babies in hospitals.

Their signature song, Highway to Hell, is an anthem of sovereign living. Supposedly inspired by a grueling tour schedule and contractual demands that was draining the life out of the band, it dug deep on a feeling that yearned for freedom. For them, it was freedom from the shackles of their exploitative record contract.

Protected by Cryptography

Livin easy, livin free Season ticket on a one-way ride

Livin easy is not exactly an aspiration of Bitcoiners, but livin free sure is. Bitcoin doesn’t promise any kind of ease but, relative to the impossible grind of swimming against the Cantillon Effect and the futility of fighting the power of the money printer, Bitcoin offers a way of life that seems easy by comparison. With Bitcoin, one can certainly live free from a tryannical government or a tyrannical employer.

The direct connection to Bitcoin is the 2nd line referring to the ticket to that freedom being a one-way ride. One-way rides are how “elliptic-curve cryptography” deliver the promise of freedom to a user of a money protected by it. The one-way ride of cryptography refers to the fact that one can easily determine the result of the mathematical function if they know the input (a secret), but the reverse is not true. One cannot guess the secret from knowing the result.

SHA256 (Secure Hash Algorithm) is the one-way algorithm that protects the secret that provides a person their access to their bitcoin. As a mathematical function, it takes in a hexadecimal string of any size and returns a 32-bit (256 byte) hexadecimal string. No matter how long the input string is, the output string is always 32 -bytes (64 characters). To demonstrate this relationship, I show a few examples:

'01': 4bf5122f344554c53bde2ebb8cd2b7e3d1600ad631c385a5d7cce23c7785459a
'02 : dbc1b4c900ffe48d575b5da5c638040125f65db0fe3e24494b76ea986457d986
'a0': c19a797fa1fd590cd2e5b42d1cf5f246e29b91684e2f87404b81dc345c7a56a0
'a1': 8a8950f7623663222542c9469c73be3c4c81bbdf019e2c577590a61f2ce9a157

'acdc': f72152c11634ea34a34ab31b21c5e55d4ff680994a35b93938dabe4ba374af61
'bcdc': 5430f1105cca9d5f42784cb8a9a864c069aed3b6422530d21e93b48041be91b9

'Im on a Highway to Hell': d4e40365ce2d37eb1b435a90e746115ab6ee8deb57bbcca0749679bf5daf41aa
'Im on the Highway to Hell': 4e12a9de5908c53091ba38e387bc8018871cd5e1d0921899e52060d65c5bb6f6
'Im on the Highway to Hex': 97cdbf86c2c725807315742096bb18df97609830705d7918a2d9a304767b747d

Its clear visually that there is no visible relationship between the input and the output. A change in one character fundamentally changes the output and there is no way to guess the input from the output. The one-way ride makes it very easy to verify that one knows the secret without having to make them reveal the secret.

Destination Hex

A Hexadecimal number is not too different from a Decimal number. Instead of being one of ten numbers from zero through nine (0-9), a Hexadecimal number is one of sixteen numbers where a through f represent the numbers ten through fifteen. The largest single digit number you can have in Hex is represented by the letter “f” as the number 15 (one less than 16). The largest two-digit number you can have in Hex is represented by the string “ff” as the number 255 (one less than 16^2 = 256). As a fun fact, the hexidecimal number 'acdc’ represents the decimal number 44,252 (10x16^3 + 12*16^2 + 13*16 + 12 = 40960 + 3072 + 208 + 12 = 44252). Hex is one of the ways in which data is used so efficiently in Bitcoin, enabling tens of thousands of people to keep local copies of every Bitcoin transaction ever made on their computers, thus enabling the very decentralization that makes Bitcoin everything that it is.

A Hex string is the standard input format of Bitcoin secrets (private keys). This alone makes Hex a worthy destination to travel the highway. Hex is also the standard input of all Bitcoin transactions. Hexadecimal numbers and strings are the amino acids that make the protein of Bitcoin. The Highway to Hex is the road to Bitcoin adoption. For billions of people in the world, it represents a road to salvation. For those who can’t or won’t imagine a world where markets can exist without the intervention of the state, it is the Highway to Hell.

I like to think that today’s version of Highway to Hell the way ACDC envisioned it, as a cry against the tyranny of being exploited in business, was actually imagining the road to salvation. A salvation that is now available through Bitcoin. Our friends are gonna be there too. I’m on the Highway to Hex.