Here's a question for you fine folks. If the network is decentralized as you've said what controls the development of the platform? Suppose we want to make modifications to the system's architecture and design. Would I be right to assume your plan is to build a self-sustaining autonomous system, e.g. using intelligent algorithms that learn from user behavior to adjust the platform's parameters? I ask this question because of concerns over the potential long-term survival, flexibility, and evolution of Synereo. I realize you don't want any single person or group to have arbitrary control. However, if the system is adaptive as I imagine it then it seems very likely there could be many unforeseen consequences and highly desirable changes in its design which would require some level of human intervention. I'm sure you've considered this. In which case, I need to ask, are the developers in absolute control? What role does the community play in influencing the future of Synereo? In my view, there should be a means to democratically engineer and regulate this system. I'm not talking about the superficial content layer, but the deep structure underlying the network's activity. Will the technically-minded general public have any power to vote or achieve consensus about these matters?

Apologies for putting you on the spot, but I think issues like this need attention.

Fascinating project. I genuinely hope them success. Just don't be evil, Synereo. We'll be watching very closely.

If you haven’t noticed the trends, the capitalist mode of production is in its death throes. Massively growing inequality and impotence among the public, inflexible concentration of political and financial power, continual encroachment of privacy, stupendous wastes of human capital, depletion of natural resources, rampant military conquest and violence, do I really need to go on? Surely, you realize this is madness. These are the gifts left to us by the capitalist ideology. We are absolutely doomed if we continue to think in these terms. Your assumptions about the nature of value are flawed for this very reason. This is the heart of the decentralization movement, as well as the cold predatory necessity of the cryptocoin initiative. It’s based on the logic of abundance rather than artificial scarcity; the cosmopolitan spirit of open collaboration instead of material greed and consumption. In this picture, the singularitarians and transhumanists are the minority.

Despite their many accomplishments, Google is still largely trapped in the old regime. Like all the other internet giants, their immense profits are not legitimate because they are parasitic on the value created by millions of users adding content to their infrastructure. You see what’s happened, don’t you? They've privatized the internet for their own selfish motives. And we’re supposed to be grateful if they throw us a few scraps of the prosperity in the form of free applications and services? That’s totally irrelevant. Google is totally irrelevant. Once we appropriate the web for ourselves we unlock all its value. This will be many orders of magnitude above your prediction of 30X. The internet is the global economy. All of us working together is super-intelligence. Maybe you’re too caught up in your personal projects to respect this fact, but that is the direction the internet is going. Lucky for us, it doesn't require any techno-magic or quantum woo to realize. We've already got the technology. And it’s only going to get better.

There’s no need to take offense or spoil the celebration with needless skepticism. No one is saying we don’t want super-intelligence. Yours is one of many projects that need to be pursued in some way or another. General AI that can benefit all of us will happen in its own time, and you have my full support in moving that along. However, we need to recognize this is our time. Humanity's time to right the fucked mistakes of our predecessors. In fact, it’s the first time since the last true regime change (Bourgeois capitalism) that something like this is even feasible. This is coming from someone who grew up with the internet. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined an opportunity like this presenting itself, and yet here I am fomenting revolution. I simply see no benefit in splitting hairs with you over the technical details of inefficient hashes and passive rent-seeking. We already acknowledge there are limitations, there are always limitations. That’s not going to change with fancier AI. We need to work with what we know. What know is that decentralized applications and blockchain technology work. Ethereum is part of that equation, but it’s not a complete solution. Something else needs to be built on-top of that foundation, something revolutionary. We’re all secretly dying for this happen, so let’s make it happen.

What definitely won’t make it happen is pie in the sky thinking about smarter robots. Let the crippled elite worry about that. They want to replace us all with machines anyway, so let’s let them build the infrastructure. By the time most of human society becomes automated, we’ll have won our revolution, and we can begin taking over their industries. There is no need to waste the communities energies on something that can be supported by wealthier patrons. If your work is sound, the rest of us will follow. What we definitely won’t follow, if our hearts and minds are in the right place, is someone who works to perpetuate the capitalist nightmare. Don’t pretend for a moment we’re not at war with the old regime. Enemies of the revolution are to be disrupted, tricked, and outsmarted. We have to be merciless enough to defeat them, but compassionate enough save them. It’s time to use real strategy and tactics.

Your concerns about new monopolies emerging are very real. I also dread the possibility of currency investors and miners squeezing out the common users. Every person needs to be given equal opportunities, but at the same time there needs to be incentives built into the system to drive further innovation. My proposal is that we create a new currency that will be interoperable with the Ethereum platform, let’s call it 'Prometheum'. If Ethereum is the oil, then Prometheum would be the spark to ignite the flames of our rebellion. We market this as a massively decentralized world-historical political experiment that can enable the general public to collaborate on all aspects of digital statecraft, including constitutional law, distributive justice, institutional engineering, and revolutionary activism. The objective would be to rapidly accelerate the development of an incorruptible stateless society for all human beings on this planet. Stake in the currency would be completely free and community funded providing most essential services. Upon registration, a universal passport would be officially certified. This entitling every person to a starting balance of the Prometheum currency in addition to an unconditional basic income, to be deposited into their accounts at the end of every economic cycle. All productive activity would in this way be mediated by an autonomous financial instrument responsible for the just distribution of profits. Effectively, participants split 50% of their earnings with a global accounting system that repays a fractional sum to each member. In this scenario, productive work is encouraged, but is not required in order to benefit from the wealth of the network.

This is nobody’s idea. This is the idea of the age. Whatever its ultimate practical implementation, the end result is the same: the egalitarian distribution of currency. From this simple principle we acquire the universal consent of the governed, and thus the support of every freedom loving person of the civilized world. As the project picks up momentum more and more people will be recruited to the cause, from the starving children of the third world to the charismatic celebrities of the Western nations, each playing a crucial role in selling this idea to the public. This will promote an exponential explosion of consensus-making. And together, we will design a new society. When this comes to pass, it won’t matter if an established power tries to liquidate its assets into the new regime, nor will it matter if someone acquires more wealth than others, as their investment is fairly absorbed and redistributed to everyone. Monopolies are mitigated by a modification of the difference principle, i.e. it only permits inequalities that work to the advantage of the system as a whole. We don’t need anything particularly complicated beyond this simple accounting measure. By this time we will have collectively determined the principles and architecture of the world we want to live in, and a new official currency: let’s call this collective development ‘civilization 1.0’. Society becomes like an operating system with its own versioning standards. We then continue migrating through these systems, retaining the value of all legacy contracts and currencies, endlessly evolving into the future. This isn’t mind-projection, it’s the ongoing logical conclusion of present developments.

Alright Alix, I’ve digested what you’ve said.

What you and others are referring to as coup-completeness or regime change is interesting. I think this is a real possibility with present technology, as I’ll attempt to elaborate. But before I do that, I want to comment on some of your expectations for the future.

I sympathize with your utopian dream of an all-powerful, all-valuable, all-technological intelligence bootstrapping itself into existence and saving humanity, but let’s be realistic. We’re nowhere even close to achieving something like this. We could have every brain and computer on the planet working on this project and it still wouldn’t happen for hundreds if not thousands of years. The Singularitarian fantasy that we can construct a machine capable of radical intelligent self-evolution is based on the faith that we are approximating true intelligence through whole-brain simulation, and that the exponential growth in computational power is in some way a measure of our progress towards this goal. This expectation is deeply flawed for several reasons.

The most significant reason is that it ignores or denies the scale of innovation required to solve the embodiment problem. True intelligence is instantiated in an organic substrate that has evolved over millions of years, its underlying informational architecture (DNA) is therefore the product of complex quantum interactions occurring in the presence of deep time. The series of developments giving rise to human consciousness and intelligence is unimaginable orders of magnitude beyond what is conceivable with present and future technologies. While its true sophisticated quantum computers might provide the required granularity of material detail to house true AI, we are totally in the dark concerning the correct programming language to drive the system to true intelligence and self-evolution. The limitations on human knowability in determining the right computational algorithms to achieve this result dwarfs our mortal intellects. Hence, we face the vicious circularity of requiring an all-powerful intelligence before we can design systems capable of producing an all-powerful intelligence. Crowdfund all you want, this isn’t solving itself without massive quantum leaps in human understanding. Does that mean we can’t create extremely sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence? No, of course not. We’re already accomplishing that. However, these are chimeras for the predictable future, mere deterministic mimics of the real thing. Systems of this sort will always fail to live up to our deeper expectations. For this reason, I would be extremely careful in deciding what kind of power we hand over to such systems.

With that said, let’s take stock of what we can actually do right now, or at least what we should be able to do in the near future. You argue there is an intrinsic limit to current blockchain design, in the neighborhood of 1,000-10,000 transactions per second. I’m not clear why you think this is a significant problem. The limit on transactions is only going to continue decreasing with advances in computational power. We also know this can be solved using pegged sidechains and interoperable currencies, giving us the enhanced functionality, scalability, and efficiency you seem to think we’re lacking. To my knowledge, the primary singleton is not open to malicious attacks because the damage is confined to the sidechain itself. If the sidechain is insulated despite being bidirectional, where precisely is the threat coming from your perspective? If there isn’t one, the optimal strategy is simply to use Ethereum as the central precious resource (diamond if you will), implementing new instruments (platinum, gold, silver, etc) with the adaptive growth of the system. In this scenario, we only need to count on the collective intelligence of the users and the consensual utility they can build into the network to promote local maximums and global optimization.  

Politically speaking, I think Ethereum is the beginning of a stateless open society. Essentially, we ignore world governments, corporations, and every other coercive entity. We take everything useful we’ve learned from previous social arrangements and crowdsource an inviolable (hardcoded) universal constitution, a set of basic rights, and essential institutions. This project is then backed by the Ethereum currency. From here we create a contract of citizenship and declare ourselves a digital commonwealth. Those interested in participating are registered and treated as anonymous members of a stateless society. At this point we start building decentralized foundations, organizations, and entrepreneurial innovations, replicating all the profit motivated platforms of the old web in a way that incentives common users to join in, effectively siphoning the enormous symbolic capital and market utility the internet makes possible. In this way, we capture the public imagination and everything starts going viral extremely quickly. No central government or corporation can exploit our cooperation. Out of the ashes of the old system we create a new one that is infinitely more valuable. Everyone will start using our applications and migrating to our systems, they will begin pouring their hopes and dreams into our righteous cause, establishing a new world social order founded on just principles, thus securing coup-completeness.

If this explodes to the level of intensity I think it’s capable, we will force the ruling powers into a bind they cannot overcome. Naturally, their mentality is motivated by possession of territory, physical property, military conquest, political engineering, media propaganda, and the means of productive industry; and through these goods they think they can own us too. This apparently impenetrable system of control is wrought from centuries of injustice, signed in the blood of age old contracts. Who are we to pry it from their fingers? What they’ve failed to recognize is the immense value of informational capital. Hence, we have something they desperately need to survive. If we appropriate the internet for ourselves and declare it a sovereign nation, they will not oppose us, in fact they will welcome us. This is the transvaluation of all value, the transmutation of material property into technological abundance and prosperity. Once that happens the scales will tip and they will be forced to undercut physical goods in exchange for virtual ones. Everyone on the planet will benefit from this development. And it all begins with something as silly as dumb nodes trading bits on a network.

Alix, I don’t disagree with the value these types of projects can bring. However, I think you’re downplaying the ramifications of these so-called “dumb nodes” and totally missing the big picture. The protocols we use to connect hosts on a network were also comparatively simple, and yet we’ve built the entire internet on that simple foundation. Likewise for all the other web standards we take for granted. Nowhere did we start with the idea of a massively distributed resilient network, it emerged spontaneously as a consequence of simple addition. You seem to ignore the fact we’re already perfectly capable of making intelligent and even superintelligent use of new technologies.

What we didn't have prior to Ethereum was a way of organizing our existing tools into an ecosystem of decentralized consensus-making applications with real economic power behind it. All we had before was BitTorrent and cryptocurrencies; file-sharing and monetary value outside the control of governments and big business. The game is changing now. This is the first time in generations we actually have the tools to destabilize existing powers, completely and without violence, but only if we’re awake enough to seize the opportunity. So yeah, I’m fairly persuaded and morally invested in the possibility that Ethereum (or something very much like it) IS this opportunity. To my knowledge, nothing in the Ethereum code will give anyone exclusive control over the technology, as it’s entirely open-ended and democratic.  

America and its imitators were merely the first Great Experiment in contractual statecraft, one dominated by a plutocratic and increasingly self-destructive elite. We can’t physically oppose these people, they have a monopoly on force, they've taken our weapons, turned us into indolent docile consumers, and left us completely despondent over the fate of the planet. It’s time to snap out of the trance they've put us under and recognize the tables have turned. If the Occupy movement taught us anything it’s that aimless protesting in the streets and faux-democracy aren't going to save us. I know this probably sounds surreal and kooky, but we need to stage a bloodless revolution. It’s our turn to re-imagine the world as we believe it should be, not as they say it must be. The future is now and we can literally do this if we all work together.

I understand your concerns over scalability and computational efficiency, but this is something that will work itself out in future developments of the Ethereum platform. We can’t expect to have every problem worked out from the beginning. Splitting our attention into so many different currencies and projects lacking any significant overlap is counter-productive to everyone. Look at javascript, it’s a complete mess and yet it drives nearly everything on the internet. Likewise with the limitations of the blockchain. The solution isn’t to start everything from scratch, but to iterate incrementally toward a common goal. Web 1.0, 2.0, and now 3.0 if Ethereum succeeds is the only way we are going to make progress. Ultimately, scalability and efficiency are factors that become superfluous with the agile development of the current system and the growth of computational power.  

We need to stop the fragmentation and paralysis that is destroying our planet. The only way we can do this is if we start pooling our resources into a single decentralized environment in which we can realize our varied aspirations without ideological bias preframing the system. At some point we need to settle on an architecture that solves the majority of our problems. Ethereum is the next logical step on that path. Crowdfunding superintelligence, on the other hand, while highly desirable is not immediately feasible, nor is it something we can all give universal support. I have no doubt what you are hoping for is going to happen, but it is far in the future, perhaps web 5.0 or 6.0. If you want to dedicate your life to something that is potentially decades away, fair enough and good luck to you. Personally, I think the singularity is already happening, it begins with the open society Ethereum makes possible.