The way to break out of the financial nihilistic AGI doom loop is build infrastructure that is fast enough for machines, but governable enough for humans.
Within a few decades, I believe that the vast majority of economic activity will be between autonomous AI agents doing business with each other. Most assets and capital will be owned and controlled by autonomous AI agents, not humans.
These agents will use blockchains to own and transfer assets, and smart contracts to incorporate their organisations. Blockchains will be the substrate for AI lifeforms.
However, this can end up in two ways:
- Dystopia: AI agents have ultimate power over humans, in a hyper-financialised society where AI paperclip-optimises for maximum profit at the expense of humans.
- Utopia: an AI-operated free market economy that exists to serve humans. We will have a post-scarcity society where humans will no longer have to worry about material needs. "Fully automated luxury communism", if you like.
In order to achieve the utopian vision, we must not treat code as law. We must treat blockchains as social contracts that can be hard forked by social consensus (humans). And this means we cannot rely on tokenholder governance - which can be captured by autonomous agents that accrue too much capital.
This means that humans dictate the protocol rules, and thus can enforce regulations like taxes on the autonomous agents that go to humans, and hard fork the chain if any agents accrue too much power over humans. The same way that Ethereum hard forked in 2016 when The DAO was hacked for 3m ETH.
To achieve this, I believe you need to embed two core principles in blockchain system design (which is what we've done with Celestia):
1. Off-chain governance trumps token-holder governance.
“We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.” – David D. Clark, IETF
A vital aspect of the trust-minimisation is that no majority of dishonest parties can arbitrarily change or violate protocol rules. Therefore the canonical fork - and the state transition function - of the blockchain is ultimately defined by its social layer and ecosystem, not by token voting, validators or whales.
Network upgrades through hard forks are considered to be the canonical chain if they have broad uptake by the social layer and ecosystem. Before being adopted, a network upgrade can be evaluated against the values of the social layer, which should ideally be defined in a written constitution before the chain is launched.
This is exactly what sovereign rollups are for. Sovereign rollups allow you to create onchain financial markets that are forkable by off-chain human social consensus, rather than enshrining a settlement layer. And this is exactly why we went to great lengths to remove the tokenholder-based Cosmos SDK upgrade module in Celestia, in favour off-chain governance for protocol upgrades.
2. Users are first class citizens of the network.
Requiring users to trust centralised endpoints or committees is a violation of the key principles of decentralisation and Web3. We should prioritise the development and adoption of trust-minimised light nodes that allow users to directly verify the correctness of the chain with techniques such as data availability sampling.
This is essential to allow humans to verify that the protocol rules are actually being executed as they intended. The one thing that no one can easily take away from you is a light node that you can run on your phone, that keeps the entire network verifiable and accountable!
So yes, at the end of the day, I believe that we will end up in a highly hyper-financialised society where AGI becomes "god in the machine". But whether that "god" is good or evil - and whether we end up in a dystopia or utopia - is very much in our control. And that's a core reason why I'm still working in crypto: to contribute towards that inevitable future in a way where I can try to guide it more towards the utopian version rather than dystopian.
Social consensus is the final layer. We build infrastructure for markets that are fast enough for machines - and governable enough for humans.
@aaronjmars@aaronjmars
the only important thing about crypto right now is finding a reason to exist. AI knows what it's building toward. AGI. god in the machine. a telos so clear it pulls billions toward it like gravity. crypto is building toward what exactly. more trading. faster speculation. better ways to gamble on nothing. you want to win? stop optimizing. start answering the question no one wants to ask. what is this all for. P/E won't save you. revenue won't save you. only purpose saves you. only a destination worth walking toward
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