One of the ways I am offering my brain to this space we call crypto is just sharing some of the topics I read about to see how work we do here is a computational legacy to be continued.

Polynya, whose thinking & writing I have greatly admired & pondered, recently published a piece on Crypto’s Broken Moral Compass, officially announcing they’re stepping away from crypto after months of quiet on socials. Ofc due to the prevalence of depraved degens sucking all the air in the room / liquidity in the pool, and absolute frustration the way people have been continuing to behave on public blockchains. I get it.

We need more thinkers with higher intentions in our industry if we are ever to move forward. Creating more of the same system is out of the question at this point; it can continue to exist, but longterm builders must expand applications. In an attempt to mitigate more good people ragequitting, I’m starting history class with a few early tech movements, the concepts that shaped them, and how they relate to what we’re fkn building actually.

High-Tech Hayekians & Decentralized Economies

Friedrich Hayek* was a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian economist and philosopher. He had crypto-relatable theories like government interference & centralized systems are inherently inefficient, causing economic boomz & bustz. He was instead a fan of decentralization & spontaneous order.

"High-Tech Hayekians: Some Possible Research Topics in the Economics of Computation" was an influential essay published in 1990 that delves into the intersection of Hayek’s concepts and computational application. It advocated for dispersed knowledge in economic systems, the application of computerized market processes, decentralized decision-making algos, & how this intersects with economic planning & expanded access to entrepreneurship.

The piece specifically mentions agoric open systems**, or a computational framework that combines market economics with decentralized computing. It mirrors Hayek's vision of how markets efficiently allocate resources based on dispersed knowledge, coordination of individual actions, and the understanding of the effectiveness of spontaneous order.

In this system, computational agents (such as software or [now] smart contracts) interact with each other in an open market-like environment, where they buy, sell, and trade resources, services, and information autonomously. These computational systems & agents mimic the dynamics of free markets, featuring open competition & p2p exchanges. This was an important primitive for crypto’s first application.
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*Fun fact: the term "agoric" is derived from the Greek word "agora," which refers to open market spaces in Ancient Greece where merchants, artisans, philosophers, athletes, politicians, priests, & everyone & ur mutha would assemble and exchange goods/services/information - thoughtful & smart system naming <333

*Interestingly as a social philosophy aside, Hayek also introduced the concept that legislation≠law, meaning that legislation, enforced by authorities, is distinctly different than true law. These laws, better characterized as "social norms," require no external enforcement but instead rely on a collective social consensus agreeing on what’s acceptable behavior. This concept conveys the importance of societal cohesion and shared values in shaping frameworks & governance, which I’ve heard defined by Bankless’s David Hoffman as the “layer zero” or human layer. And truthfully, this space could use more self-policing, so this concept is relevant on the heels of Polynya’s departure.

Cypherpunks: Cryptographic Privacy Activists

"We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do."

Eric Hughes 9 March 1993

Cypherpunks believe in users controlling our own data.

The principles of privacy championed in the 90s shaped the design and functionality for crypto today. In 1991, PGP encryption was published, much to the chagrin of the US government. Two years later, The Cypherpunk Manifesto was written & published by Eric Hughes while attending Berkeley, declaring the principles of this movement, advocating for the use of advanced cryptography as a means to enhance privacy & security in our new online world.

The manifesto stresses the importance of privacy to maintain individual freedom and autonomy, understanding that cryptography has the potential to protect individuals against state & corporate over-surveillance / control famously predicted in George Orwell’s 1984. It urges ongoing efforts to create tools & systems that empower individuals to reclaim their privacy and autonomy as we grow increasingly online.Other important ideas to come out of the cypherpunk era include hashcash and b-money, both born in the cypherpunk era & mentioned in the Bitcoin Whitepaper; and the p2p / digital cash ideas of David Chaum, who predicted our hyper-surveilled future, in “Security Without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete”.

Fast forward to today, and projects are leveraging these concepts alongside cutting-edge zero-knowledge technology to secure blockchains and expand our ability to privately transact.

Libre Software For the People

Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation & movement believes in the liberty of software users, rooted in the idea that software should be freely accessible, modifiable, and distributable as users see fit.

The movement advocates for privacy as a fundamental human right, decentralized p2p networks, and open source, free license code. Stallman often begins public lectures urging people to distribute the information freely, in formats that are not subject to proprietary restrictions (and to turn geolocation off, not to post on any social sites, and a long list of no-no’s that have definitely been broken :p).

This movement supports things we like to see in crypto: infrastructure resilience, censorship resistance, creating a sense of ownership among users, love of privacy, etc. By implementing these principles into what we build in emerging tech today, we can hope to activate the broader zeitgeist towards reclaiming control over our own lives, beginning with how we navigate our time online, on new terms.

At its core, the Libre Software Movement reinforces the understanding that technology should serve the people, not the other way around.

Collaboration & Security with Open Source

Unlike proprietary software where source code is guarded as intellectual property, open source invites anyone to view, fork, & distribute the code freely.

Stallman (yes, same one) was at MIT in 1983 when he first started opening his source code for the GNU operating system, in alignment with the ethos established in the Libre Software movement mentioned above. Under his own license, the Gnu Public Licenses for his idealogical principles, and in the hopes developers would deeply comprehend the inner workings by modding, later optimizing & improving security with open, collaborative contributions.

Harnessing the collective intelligence of developers globally, the idea of open source software is to democratize access to technology, support rapid iteration & optimizations, and unlock new creative coding (since devs aren’t starting at 0). Beloved operating system GNU/Linux (aka the missing kernel credited to Linus Torvalds) and web browser Mozilla Firefox are some of the most famous oss examples today.

The adoption of open source practices + blockchain tech is symbiotic and practical for decentralized infra & security. It’s often requested demanded by users for their projects to open source their codebases for scrutiny or contributions from the community. This transparency enhances trust in the projects, allows more robust security (even from wild back doors), and supports a collaborative sense of ownership.

At its essence, OSS embodies transparency, collaboration, and community-driven innovation & security.

*Libre Software & Open Source Software are often confused for one another (probably because they were both sprouted from Richard Stallman’s mind), but the main difference is that Libre Software is a idealogical movement that prioritizes access to source code, free distribution, and personal privacy; whereas I personally view Open Source Software as a function of the Libre Movement, primarily to execute transparency, distribution, decentralization, & collaboration.

build00rs, this is but a start

From protocol to dApp, the crypto projects that will remain highly-reputed cycle after cycle are the ones who are steadfast in their beliefs, and iterate for users’ shifting needs.

Part of my mission is reminding crypto ppl to give attention to what’s important in this space, while still balancing fun:) so my ask, my call, my beckon to all who build in this space is to never forget why we are here & build for the paradigm shift.

I’m not a hater, I just see the long play together is inevitable, so let’s each lay out what we want to see.

Computers are a mechanical revolution.

Inventors at every iteration of these machines understood & embraced its potential for impact on the world. The more accessible these principles are in practical applications, the better we are individually equipped to self-realize our existence online as a start.

We are not here to replicate extractive practices from the past. The zeitgeist is tired of that shit.

As a last word, I will say I came to Eth as an artist-first & always will. I believe in the tech because I DYOR’d, and I truly see this stuff as some practical way to recapture value on the creator’s terms, whatever iterations of that simple concept becomes. my crypto ppl will tell you that I get up every day to work in this industry because I can see a balance of life & work & fun in the future. where we can help re-program what’s hopeful in humans on the protocol level.

who wants to build the empathy layer of the new internet with me?