With an industry that has now gone through a few significant evolutions during its existence, we arrive at yet another important inflection point.. “Crypto”, as a whole, has made headway into legacy financial markets, become an important primitive in payment technologies, and has even found its importance and voice when engaging with and seeking to improve political landscapes and ideologies. Yet, fair or not, FTX, Binance and other recent major upheavals to this sector have precipitated a major credibility crisis. The industry finally needs to face its demons to move forward.

We’ve trudged through the underbelly of this dark forest, and through it have faced countless battles against greater industry greed manifesting as misaligned attempts to pair technological tools with human incentives and coordination. Though some of these battles have been won, more have been lost. Though the industry is flooded with intellectual talent from many disciplines, we’ve found ourselves time and time again looking at one another across the table asking “Where can we go from here?” and “Who can we really trust?”

Let’s begin by delving into the industry’s fundamental questions as we see them, and how Amentum thinks about them internally.

Crypto’s Confusing Promise

Crypto made a confusing promise since the advent of its early days. This promise was called “trustlessness”, and its meaning was always ambiguous. People took it to mean that, with crypto’s help, you wouldn’t need to trust anyone, so that you could interact confidently with everyone; i.e., that “trustless” systems would lead to more trust. But, as we’ve learned, it can just as easily lead to more distrust.

The original trustless technology is a lock. When you put a lock on your door, you are not “trusting” anyone not to break in. Instead, you’re assuming people will try to break in, and you choose to pre-emptively attempt to stop them from doing so. If trust is a relationship that runs between people, locks on doors are evidence of the opposite: distrustful relationships between people.

Now, if locks work really well in a distrustful community, something interesting happens: burglars stop trying the doors. It then becomes possible, perhaps even reasonable, to leave your door unlocked. This is good, of course. It’s great not to have any burglary, and it’s nice to be able to leave your door unlocked. But this is not the same as trusting that other people will not try to break in — it’s not real trust. A community with real trust would not only leave the doors unlocked, but enjoy many other benefits, such as easy collaboration and frictionless mutual support. If one burglar appeared, it would seem the exception not the rule, and doors would remain unlocked after the burglar was apprehended. By contrast, in a lock-based community, as soon as one burglar tried a door, all other doors would bolt back up and stay that way.

Crypto is built out of locks. It lets us lock information in place, so that we can be sure no one has altered it. This lets us collaborate in complex ways, all through this veil of locks. It lets us interact in spite of distrust, but does not thereby diminish distrust. Just as that would be asking too much of a mere lock, it’s also asking too much of mere crypto.

This limitation is well and good, no different from the limitation of any other technology. But it’s important for everyone to understand. Yet it’s so hard to understand — a problem compounded by the complexity of the technology — that informational asymmetry abounds. This creates easy opportunities for scammers, but perhaps even more worryingly, makes it easy even for extremely sophisticated and well-intentioned builders to “get it wrong” by building systems that won’t have the intended effect.

When we hold a hammer, we are at risk of imagining that every construction deficiency calls for more nails. When we hold cryptographic technology, we are at risk of hallucinating that every community weakness calls for more locks.

Nails and locks have their place; it’s not everywhere.

Can Trust Be Manufactured?

Large swathes of people in technology and elsewhere are interested in building or scaling trust, in the way that we’ve argued crypto cannot do. But what could do that? And would it be desirable?

Trust is a good thing. Societies that have a lot of it are better off and relationships that have it are much happier. The tricky question is whether it can be intentionally “manufactured” at scale. If it can, does the manufacturing process have dangerous by-products?

The most reliable trust-manufacturing methods we know of are dangerous. They include, for example, fomenting in-group fervors (religious, ethnic, nationalistic), and the various techniques of cult leaders and advertisers. These methods are unjustifiable absent exigent circumstances like war. Even fairly simple group bonding exercises put people at exceptional risk of manipulation, requiring the utmost ethical caution. Society-wide programs like childhood education would be completely undesirable without overwhelming social consensus.

“Trust is not an industrial product, nor is it the output of any new or old technology. It is a quality of how people see each other and, as such, can’t be forced.”

As with making truly great art, or delivering great education, there aren’t any safe or reliable shortcuts to it. It requires time, dedication, and great care.

Ethics in Investing

Amentum works from a commitment to see through technology’s various false promises, while also trying to bend the arc of technological development toward attractive outcomes for society. Sometimes these two goals can appear to be in tension, but navigating that borderland soberly is core to our approach.

We chart our path by focusing farther in the future and understanding technology earlier than others; motivated by a conservatively raised and managed AUM which keeps us committed to being strategic and agile. This (a) gives us a unique niche that suits our strengths, and (b) lets us stay out of the position that so many other crypto investors have found themselves in lately — the position of holding a hammer and having to argue that everything is a nail. This ultimately leads to firms doling out cash to teams and projects, simply for the sake of deploying capital to satisfy their large and diverse institutional LP base.

Here are a few of the guiding principles that have aided us in our pursuits:

1. Focus on promising new ecosystems.

As soon as new technological affordances are born, a period of large risks and rewards commences. This early phase in any technology’s arc also features high risks. Many projects never go anywhere. Hype and substance are indistinguishable to everyone except those willing to think from first principles and roll up their sleeves to understand new things . This is where we thrive. We have a culture of grasping cutting-edge ideas quickly and maintaining a mindset of openness to them.

There are also moral hazards in these early technology arcs. As ecosystems take shape, the risks of new technologies tend to be downplayed and poorly understood. Key actors in these uncertain and chaotic periods of technical development have an outsize impact — they can set a culture in which the risks of the technology are ignored and suppressed, or publicized and dealt with. We try to be the latter. It can feel like a buzzkill, but it’s a public good. The entire crypto sector is now feeling the hangover of a period in which the buzzkills weren’t loud enough. But we’ve been around since the early days, pointing out the difference between interesting (governance-related) and boring (speculation-related) uses of blockchain technology. We’re proud of this way of operating and plan to carry this methodology forward.

Once technologies reach a certain stage of maturity, a different sort of entrepreneurial mindset becomes predominant — a more extractive way of doing business, in which hype generated earlier is mined, often to the detriment of consumers and real innovators. It becomes a land grab. At this stage, our strategy is to take a step back and canvas the horizon for greener fields where our unique skills can be put to better use.

2. Learn from the past.

Lots of idealistic technology-related movements have lost their way during the past few decades. We’d be remiss as investors and citizens not to learn everything we can from that. Take the open source movement. Although enormously successful in many ways, it isn’t criticized seriously enough. Free software has a cost: the cost of knowing how to use it and coordinating the continual (safe) improvement of it. This means that it has always been more valuable to wealthier, bigger players, than to the little guy. In fact, every tech giant has built its house on the foundation of open source software. So from a certain angle, open source software has been a huge giveaway to venture capitalists and tech giants.

It’s time to be open about this, to air this kind of friendly criticism. Because it’s possible to do things differently. When open source software is made available with non-commercial licenses, it provides an advantage to publicly interested organizations like governments and nonprofits, without giving away power to venture capitalists whose businesses, more often than is convenient for anyone to admit, work against the public’s interests.

What other blind spots are technologists ignoring? Let’s find them and support the work that addresses them.

3. Lean into education and outreach.

Technology is complicated and people are busy. That’s why the public keeps failing to apprehend where the train of technology is bringing them. No one can close this legibility gap single-handedly, but everyone can help. We work to educate others about whatever issues we’re studying, and to inform society about the worries we’re mulling in private.

This approach consistently brings us into contact with the most thoughtful and honest technologists. And, we hope, it helps the non-technical public get keyed into important issues before it’s too late. Public conversations around internet privacy in 2010, and social media manipulation in 2018, missed the boat by about a decade. The whole world paid a price for that.

Ethics isn’t about making ourselves out to be saints. And it’s not about measuring the difference we think we’ve made. If you only do the good that can be measured, you’ll leave a lot of good on the table. Ethics is just about trying to get it right; navigating an often messy and unkempt world as well as we can. Here’s hoping (and praying) the entire technology culture can do better over the next decade.

Ethical Investing in the Crypto Industry was originally published in Amentum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Winter is coming, and as the season changes, so does the market. Before we cut on our auto-email replies and scurry away to family asking us a litany of questions once more, let’s not forget the basics. There are still many people unfamiliar about crypto; yet year-over-year, things continue to get more dramatic as the cast of crypto zeroes, hucksters and fraudsters grows — but that’s enough about the FTX team…

PBS just released a new documentary from NOVA in trying to demystify the crypto experience (including NFTs and Ethereum). Spanning their massive public access and viewer sponsored network, this documentary will reach more classrooms and educators than most in recent history across the U.S.

It’s a well made primer to share for the family this holiday while you choke back those hot toddys, holding back your grimace because your Uncle Vernon made the whole family laugh at you at the dinner table for buying Bitcoin, again. Oh well, maybe next year you’ll have the last laugh. Until then, you can distract them with this documentary.

PS: Amentum Capital GP and Managing Director, Steven McKie, makes a cameo! Just look for him and his signature beanie.

More ways to watch, “Crypto Decoded — Season 49, Episode 18”: https://www.pbs.org/video/crypto-decoded-eqvni3/

Watch: “Crypto Decoded”, New Documentary by PBS was originally published in Amentum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For academics and cryptoeconomic researchers, it’ll help if you’ve read our prior works leading up to this. This will ensure you’ve a full understanding of this holistic thinking approach:

Part 1: https://amentum.substack.com/p/permaculture-and-crypto-green-with
Part 2: https://amentum.substack.com/p/from-walled-gardens-to-community
Part 3: https://amentum.substack.com/p/the-case-for-non-universal-chains

Before the arrival of European and majority white influence, the greater Americas (North, Central and South) consisted of thriving Indigenous civil societies. These communities possessed their own unique governance structures, had their own property rights, spiritual sciences, and their flywheel of cross-community interactions enabled sustainable in-network incentives for large-scale productivity and trade. They were essentially some of the first “decentralized exchange grids” (dexgrids) of their time.

These tightly knit communities, which enabled food production to increase the diversity of macronutrients available to larger of swathes of people, also provided localized forms of supply chains for goods manufacturing. These bonds were also held together by centuries of spiritual beliefs derived from direct interactions with the local flora and fauna. Effectively, these were some of the most organically “biomimetic” systems in history. As these societies were so embedded with their environmental surroundings by the very nature of existing, there were sound best-practices for maintaining the local ecology, regional plant diversity, and the cleanliness of local fresh water supplies.

Through time, these locally created economies and traditional beliefs systems would be held in spiritual bondage, as new federal laws were enacted that slowly stripped these indigenous prosperous nations from the very land and customs they’d formulated their economies and belief systems upon.

Fast forward to the present moment, and we stand at an impasse globally thanks to these never-ending colonistic practices. Local ecologies burn, newfound transplants who’ve subsisted on these stolen indigenous lands left without a clue on how to care for them traditionally. Now, federal and local governments are forced to depend on laws and legislation to protect their crumbling natural resources with the help of scientists — instead of simply utilizing the assistance of local indigenous knowledge that’ve now been buried under bureaucracy and planned socio-economic entrapment.

Thankfully, cryptoeconomic systems provide us a way out. A means by which to stymie ecological and natural destruction, by replicating digital communities and tribes that can sustainably source and retain the environmental knowledge necessary to not have the world devolve into a complete anthropocene — leaving us a majority share of the biological perfection nature gifted us long ago. Enough to right our wrongs, and ensure the survival of our progeny for generations to come, at least.

Forward Cryptoeconomic Deployments

The creation of public blockchain systems and the deployment cryptoeconomic game mechanisms in the form of novel smart contracts has resulted in a massive explosion in economic experiments in coordinating humanity.

As we’ve naturally progressed in the evolution of our collective industry research on complex systems, we’ve *seemingly* collectively come to consensus that biomimicry is the right way forward. Life, as it turns out, has had an incredible head-start on getting the biological makeup and topologies of natural systems *just right*. So, to not pretend like we know better, we also have to give credit to the social engineers of our physical systems in the past, then we may more creatively blend these new technologies with cultures of old, creating something vastly more unique. And potentially even bring beauty back to our mechanistic ways, by embracing nature in its entirety.

Diego Saez Gil on Twitter: "Gaucho solarpunk pic.twitter.com/cIK5G2lIOV / Twitter"

Gaucho solarpunk pic.twitter.com/cIK5G2lIOV

Re-watering Our Roots

If you recall from our first essay at the intersection of permaculture, coordination and crypto, there is a mirror effect that can be found when comparing our need for natural sustainability processes and the financial primitives enabling programmable scarcity in crypto.

Our remaining challenge then is just identifying the opportunities amongst what we already have available in the industry, and intelligibly construct the right combinations of tools to deploy based on the governance and coordination needs of areas in need of “green impact engineering”.

High Availability and Fault Tolerance

Now, since we’re constructing and deploying these tools with the aid of digitally distributed systems of incentives (public blockchains and other derivative protocols), we’re aware of the need for fault tolerance.

A fault tolerant system and environment works to ensure no service interruptions, but has a higher cost of operation (i.e. PoW/PoS). Meanwhile, a highly available system would have minimal service interruption; essentially this is the “liveness” of the channels, ensuring they are being provisioned with valuable goods.

When we intermix the passive earnings that can be accrued from staking and bonding assets or digital resources to these systems with real-world participants, something very interesting happens. We find that we can create a feedback system wherein local participants are earning digital value for their contributions to public blockchain systems and adjacent crypto platforms, allowing for more home plant asset (hah) investment, which in-turn enables people to be more nutritionally self sufficient as they learn the best produce and soil management practices for their local region.

With the creative ability to digitize the rights to share-cropping, create call options for future produce production, the ideas are seemingly infinite on how to inject value && future value into more hard-to-reach areas of socioeconomic dismay.

As these newfound systems are established, labor overtime will be automated and more easily analyzable, now with the added benefits of locally available nutrients becoming self-sustaining — also naturally leading to the containment of pests and bacterial disease. By mobilizing and harnessing indigenous knowledge as well, cultural heritages can be sustained. From heirloom seeds, to proper irrigation and harvesting techniques that protect soil integrity, we can cherish this knowledge like never before.

The Non-Universal Cities of Tomorrow

Imagine, a future where all manufactured goods, local produce, and commodity value have digital twin representations on publicly verifiable cryptographic systems. At a glance, we can see where in the world action needs to be done to protect and maintain local sovereignty. Efforts such as Mattereum who are the leading the way for legally defendable non-fungible circular economies, and DexGrid doing the same for green energy production and micro-grids. There will not be one winner in this new economy, but many substitutable and complementary winners.

With the power of non-universal architectures that leverage many different fault tolerant digital and physical systems, we get:

• New public blockchains that have a richer set of potential expressions.
• Utility focused assets can bridge easily with other utility focused chains to create generalized use cases that are not asset dependent and allows substitute protocols (goods). Natural modularity emerging from technical interoperability is organically the best path forward.
• Liquidity routing and capital lockups aid in capital efficiency and enable more experimentation in the provisioning of value and aid in areas it may be needed the most (i.e. as with Connext).

When we apply the “whole systems” approach from permaculture at the intersection of indigenous knowledge, we formulate a holistic template for us to start utilizing today. We, as a society, will not have food security without addressing local water supply and quality. We will not have food democracy and the elimination of food deserts if we do not address the social injustice issues that strip people from the very land they’re most adept at maintaining.

The indigenous communities of yesterday and today (of which I am honored to be a part of) were all about the art of engineering beneficial cross-community relationships. Ironically, too, they adhered to the most utopian ideals currently discussed with supply chains when seeking a benchmark on modular and self-sustaining systems.

We know that incentives matter. Now we just need to do the work of weaving a basket of biology and nature loving protocols together. Composable becoming compostable, degenerate liquidity farmers becoming local irrigation experts of digital and physical value. This is the future we need for a proper regenerative resurgence, we just have to open our eyes.

Dexgrid Fault Tolerance and High Availability Permaculture was originally published in Amentum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By: Steven McKie (Amentum Capital) and Zach Brown (The Shake); this post was published on BlockChannel on May 6, 2022.

Enabling universal sign-ins and identity for crypto is a complex problem. We’ve seen over the last decade or so many various attempts, from Namecoin, to Ethereum’s ENS “domains”; and most recently and notably, the Handshake public blockchain, whose primary focus has been to co-opt and “softfork” ICANN’s traditional DNS root anchor into itself — thereby extending the existing internet into the decentralized web.

ICANN most recently made public a report published by their CTO, where he goes into decent depth to understand the emerging alternative namespace economy. You can see that report in its entirety here: https://t.co/LFYjy1KX3w.

What we’re seeing here is the educational penetration of what Handshake and alternative naming systems can offer. The ICANN report is akin to early bank analysts of Bitcoin in the early 2010s that grasped the superficial understanding of what Bitcoin could do, long before they truly understood the societal and financial implications as its adoption matured.

Though their report is somewhat thorough, they missed a few crucial points that truly differentiate Handshake from the rest of the offerings detailed. We’ll elucidate further below, so you can, in combination with the ICANN report above, see the full picture of what’s to come.

What Identity Chains/Naming Solutions Exist?

The above graphic is a useful top-down way to understand what is being offered by each service. The goal is to create a universally extendible root anchor, where your naming proofs exist intelligently architected at the root of the chain/service which is being secured.

This is of course most naturally done using PoW; and with the unique Urkel Tree for naming proofs custom built for Handshake, name inclusion is hashed and verified in an efficient manner, while providing the same functionality and flexibility as DNS with the rest of the blockchain’s construction.

On top of being a canonical reference for naming proofs, Handshake’s extensibility as an alternative root anchor to DNS gives it direct access to the largest applicable market possible for naming related use cases: the internet’s top-level domain (TLD) and second-level domain (SLD) ecosystem.

For clarity, when architecting a universal naming or identity solution, we must remember that:

• Identity has value, and if architected correctly, can be money.
• Identity is created through a chain of trust (whether family or cryptographic hash).
• Identity is a canonical reference that is verifiable (i.e gov agency or cryptographic hash).
• Identity is an intrinsic and portable alias for the self.
• Identity is the version of self we put the most work & social capital behind.

Identity and Naming Solution Use Cases

Handshake is meant to assimilate to existing naming infrastructure as a DNS root anchor, rather than attempt migration to a new, untested system. Users can browse the internet like they always have, and resolvers can run the same software that they always have to follow the chain of domains and subdomains indicated by a URL.

The properties of a public blockchain extends the economic and social utility of a root anchor itself. With public wallet addresses, root names can directly hold and send coin balances — serving as both usernames and payment addresses, simultaneously. With public name records, root names can encode up to 512 bytes of social data directly in the Urkel tree. A block explorer or any system to query name records can display a chain of names as profiles with rich on-chain metadata (example: Niami.io).

“Crypto networks with hexadecimal addresses benefit from human readable names in the same way that computer networks with IP addresses do. “

Crypto networks, like computer networks, tend towards non-universality — or many networks. The chain-agnosticism of Handshake, as in-production bridges to Ethereum and Polygon highlight, is thus key to the scalability of crypto-based naming and identity.

A universal sign-in and identity system should be extensible in accounting for any on-chain and off-chain verification. Names in wallet addresses can use message signing to verify names on-chain, while names in DNS can use the well-established TXT-based standard for authenticating domains off-chain.

Identity and Naming System Design

Internet scale naming is complex and, practically speaking, must be able to run inside the average user’s mobile browser. To match the speed of DNS, and to do so in a trustless manner, requires SPV nodes. To do that, requires small proof sizes. Handshake’s unique design and applications calls for highly specific primitives, ones that are best implemented on a standalone chain.

Moreover, a single purpose blockchain avoids resource competition with non-naming applications vying for blockspace and social capital on a network. Ethereum is a notoriously hard to sync blockchain while a Handshake light client resolver can sync its chain of names in seconds. Handshake can grow and govern itself without interfering with the priorities of other applications running in parallel on the same network.

To accrue legitimacy as key internet infrastructure, the world has to trust that this naming system will exist in a stable state for a long time. Regulatory uncertainty of decentralized finance (DeFi) or social reception of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can hinder the perception of a naming root if commingled on the same network. Protocol neutrality is best achieved on its own.

This is ultimately why one modular solution built on-top of an existing chain isn’t long-term viable, and thus doesn’t solve anything. However, other similar attempts do assist in creating useful naming APIs for various types of developers, which can each anchor into the HNS root itself. This construction provides utmost flexibility in creating the most modular and substitutable set of dependencies in your “decentralized web stack” (example of this in practice is HandyHost).

Understanding the functional differences between “Web3”, and what is and will become the drop-in protocol replacements for compute/storage/bandwidth from the “dweb”, must be widely educated. We also published a more recent post on how those components are maturing you can refer to.

The Internet Archive is also supporting similar ideals for this shift into the newly decentralized and open internet, and have outlined a set of principles to uphold and aspire to, as we work collectively not to repeat similar mistakes that led to the centralization of the Internet before.

Moving Decentralization Forward

We have a unique opportunity to reign in more power from centralized states into decentralized network effects that now extend beyond just money printing. Together and remaining aware of what components are mature for use now will allow us not to falter in that goal as we create a new public good system centered around portable (and provable) digital identities.

As these different economic structures emerge as a new form of digital identity and public good, we continue to disintermediate power away from potentially tyrannical state powers. While creating new types of checks and balances, we also allow for scalable fraud proofs for decentralized digital infrastructure provisioning and routing (such as with Akash, Sia, or Filecoin). And from there, the emergence of decentralized physical infrastructure, which can now become digitally addressable and auditable as a public good.

The construction of Handshake enables distinctly modular ecosystems and economies of scale to arise on-top of the chain as the root anchor. Each is a new opportunity to garner developer interest, and investor/speculator buy-in, creating sustainable community-oriented systems of exchange and value creation.

What we can see now effectively is outside “competitors” to Handshake aren’t really competing at all; but rather they are building the case for future Handshake related protocols and use cases that are identity-focused. And as the generalizable root anchor which is also a backwards compatible alternative to DNS — the only system poised to make it real.

Additional Handshake Reads:

The Case for Handshake (McKie, Amentum): https://medium.com/amentum/the-case-for-handshake-9b0af0d989fe

When the Internet Becomes Money (Brown, BlockChannel): https://medium.com/blockchannel/on-the-namespace-economy-98b5a93c2d03

The Decentralized Web (McKie, Amentum): https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/08/18/why-the-decentralized-webs-development-is-unstoppable/

Towards a New Internet (Brown, BlockChannel): https://medium.com/blockchannel/towards-a-new-internet-a53bf9e98d8a

Everything You Didn’t Know About Handshake (Chjango, Hackernoon): https://hackernoon.com/everything-you-didnt-know-about-the-handshake-naming-system-how-this-blockchain-project-will-483464309f33

BlockChannel: Solving the “Crypto Identity Problem” was originally published in Amentum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Marc Andreessen said years ago that software is eating the world. The metaphor was perfect: flattening, crushing, and transforming social life into a uniform substance for investors to digest.

Today the world is fighting back under the banner of “plurality.” The world doesn’t want to be a uniform substance — it wants to be many things, many sites of power, many communities, many ways of thinking.

The push for plurality, however, is not “web3 versus the old world.” It’s more like an internal struggle for the soul of the new decentralized web, against the totalizing mentality that dominated web2.

In this piece, we explore the theme of money and power. How has money, in the past, tended to erode plurality and concentrate power? Blockchain technology gives us a rare opportunity to rethink all of this, so let’s get it right. If the new monetary institutions we’re building are to preserve and strengthen plurality and community, what will they need to look like?

We start by talking about money’s relationship to power and information. We move on to talk about what more pluralistic money might look like. Take note of where cryptocurrencies and blockchains currently stand in the process of dislocating old power structures, and offer some ideas for steering the space in an attractive direction.

1. Money as a share of the police power

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a parable about summoning uncontrolled power, is a nice lens through which to understand the wizardry of money.

In the beginning our young apprentice (Mickey Mouse) has a broom — an inert tool. But when he puts on the sorcerer’s hat, he transforms that broom into a sentient being. What was once a broom becomes something other than a broom.

Money too is a shapeshifter. Every textbook will tell you so: it’s a medium of exchange, but also a store of value, and a unit of account. Most people don’t quite grasp the strangeness of this. Money is not one thing with multiple uses, like a broom that doubles a toy horse. It really is several radically different things, depending on its context — more like Mickey’s broom and the living broom-creature.

In its medium-of-exchange form, money is simple, like Mickey’s inert broom. Basically anything can be a medium of exchange, which is why barter works. Yes, things that are light and divisible facilitate exchange better, just as objects with long handles and brushy heads sweep better. But exchange is a fairly prosaic function.

Transforming money into a store of value, however, requires sorcery. How else could worthless paper, or handfuls of seashells, store vast power?

When the broom comes to life, an unseen power animates it. The same is true with money, but here the unseen forces are not magical. Peering behind the curtain, what animates money is power. In the world in which we find ourselves, not all but much of that power is police power.

Why is police power so important? Money is only as valuable as what it buys, and in a world without police power, there wouldn’t be as many powerful things to buy. You couldn’t buy land, you couldn’t buy contractual rights, and you couldn’t lend money at interest to people you didn’t trust. (The last two assume no smart contracts of course, which we’ll get to soon.)

So on this view, money-as-a-store-of-wealth is like mana directing the state’s police power. The wealthy purchase enforcement privileges, known as property rights, that the state has released onto the market. People’s net worth in money, minus a constant for universal rights, thus measures what their country is willing to do for them, relative to what it will do for other people.

Money has always been issued by coercers: kings, conquerors, and other warlords. Marco Polo introduced European readers to paper currency by describing how the iron-fisted Kublai Khan used it to extend his power. The Khan required merchants to use his paper in exchanges between themselves, and required would-be exporters to his kingdom to sell him goods in exchange for it, making him almost infinitely rich.

Warlords issue money to keep track of their transferable debts. Because the money comes from the warlord’s printing press, having a lot of it is evidence of having conveyed value to the warlord, directly or indirectly. And warlords repay their debts with physical protection and privileges. An economy structured around the pursuit of a particular currency is, in a way, structured around the pursuit of its issuing warlord’s good graces.

This is the spell by which money transforms from something inert, a medium of exchange, into something animated, a store of value. More than mere grease for transactions, money’s ability to buy a share in dominant coercive powers brings it, for better and worse, to life.

2. Money as a Universal Language

The sorcery of coercion stirs the broom to life. But money truly becomes a fearsome golem when it assumes the form of a unit of account — that is to say, a language in which all other things’ value is expressed.

We are so familiar with money playing this role that we hardly even notice it. But we don’t necessarily need any single money-like variable by which to measure everything’s value. Without one, people needing a house would think about value in terms of houses, people needing food would think about value in terms of food, and people needing social belonging would think about value in terms of belonging.

We already do this privately. We privately interpret the value of money in terms of how much of what we want it can buy us. But publicly, we use money to communicate about value, because we know that different people understand money’s value reasonably similarly, despite vastly different situations regarding particular goods like food, or houses, or social belonging.[1]

The fact that money’s value draws upon police power also explains why it is so effective as a universal language of value. Regardless of the huge differences in our needs for particular things, every human being in a tightly-policed society is in fairly dire need of the police being roughly on their side. And in societies like ours — racism notwithstanding — having wealth and purchasing property is the clearest route to achieving this. This is so obvious and visceral that it makes money a near-universal language of value: a common unit of account.

3. Breaking Down Money’s Problems

The question of how to improve money is complicated by the fact that it is three things, not one. But let’s break it down. We should question whether we truly want money to play the three roles it plays, and if so, how it could do those jobs better.

​​Money’s first face, as a medium of exchange, is its least troubling. After all, trust and friendship also facilitate transactions, to no one’s great alarm. Some may fret that money reduces the need for trust and friendship by letting commerce happen without it. But to the extent that trust and friendship depend on transactional imperatives, they probably don’t deserve to be called trust or friendship anyway. There’s more than nothing to worry about here, but even bigger difficulties arise with money’s other two guises.

Money’s second face, as a store of value, is worth questioning. Surely we want certain means of storing value across time so that we aren’t always rushing to offload it. And promises to coerce do store value efficiently, as long as someone stands willing to enforce them. But storing value is not an unvarnished good, because keeping value flowing is at least as important as storing it. When it is easier to warehouse value risklessly, the wealthy have less incentive to productively deploy their resources. There is a complex tradeoff here.

Money’s third face, as a unit of account, is even more dubious. There are obvious benefits to having a universal language of value: it widens the circle of people with whom we can trade, and so maximizes the potential for gains from trade. But this comes at a steep cost to community and plurality. It encourages everyone to think of their relationship with the power behind money — e.g., the police — as more important than their relationships with their communities. By extension, this causes people to consider what is valued by the vast, unwieldy set of people that use a particular kind of money — we might call this a currency community, although it doesn’t really have any features of a normal community — instead of considering what is valued by the people around them, their real and proximate community. Here is where money interferes with trust, solidarity, and human relationships.

This is more than just sad. It is also inefficient. Because everyone is in a better position to understand and serve the needs of their proximate community than the whole vast and global currency (non-)community. In short, universal units of account encourage us to transact (though not necessarily form real relationships) with people distant from us. And they distract us from people close to us.

Before moving on let me rebut an obvious objection: Isn’t it miraculous and good that money lets us collaborate with people distant from us? Yes! A world where impersonal, long-distance economic collaboration were impossible would be much worse than the world we have. The problem, however, is that conventional money makes it equally easy, or indeed even easier, to collaborate with people far from us, compared to people close to us. To the extent that we interact with members of our communities through the lens of such a tool — which, again, puts people outside our community on exactly equal-or-better footing — we actually don’t have a community anymore.[2] By contrast, you can imagine a world in which money preserved thoughtful gradients between communities, emerging along any many axes, so that impersonal and distant transactions, and/or removals of capital from communities, were comparatively costly. Picture a global economic network, but one richly textured with emergent structures, instead of a flat, unidimensional, faux-neutral one. This is the sort of thing I have in mind.

4. Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrencies and blockchains present us with an opportunity to put money, and the power it represents, on a different foundation. This could go well or poorly. Recall that we are only doing our best here to talk about something wildly complex. Many different futures are possible. But try carrying this lamp into the wilderness: the good futures for blockchains and money are less fundamentally univeralistic than the status quo, while the bad futures are more so.

Let’s begin by dismantling a major red herring: decentralized architecture cryptocurrencies’ value from the police power. Like any other money, decentralized cryptocurrencies’ value depends on from what it can buy, and their advent has not diminished the array of buyable property interests like land and legal contracts. These are still protected by ordinary governments with guns, cuffs, and jails. Kublai Khan is still Kublai Khan, and all petty lords remain dependent upon his might.

So how might these technologies actually put money on different foundations? Let’s consider a possible sequence of dislocations of power, and then imagine what might fill the voids left by these dislocations.

The first dislocation, which we’re already seeing, is simply that Kublai Khan (i.e., the state) is no longer the only money printer. It is now possible for anyone to generate tokens and use them in exchange. Thus, if you buy a property right with a cryptocurrency, you’re buying a share of the Khan’s police power, but not using the Khan’s currency. This does not by itself alter the state’s role as the dominant coercive force, but it does diminish its ability to multiply and extend that power by printing money.

The second dislocation, which has begun but is still very early, is where decentralized architectures offer alternatives high-level, state-like institutions and infrastructure. DeFi is in the early stages of mounting a challenge to capital allocation and banking (which are, of course, are extremely state-adjacent functions). Handshake (for internet domains), DexGrid (for electrical grids) and many other projects are providing state-like infrastructure, both digital and physical. In the future, we might also imagine decentralized dispute resolution becoming preferred to traditional courts, and decentralized certifying networks assuming the mantle of state regulators. This might sound dramatic but it would not be very shocking. After all, clunky institutions like the American Arbitration Association already manage huge swaths of commercial interactions in the United States; these could be outperformed by decentralized networks. And of course many politicians would jump at the chance to outsource regulatory apparatuses.

What about “sensemaking”? We might imagine decentralized verification networks attesting and certifying the authenticity of documentary evidence. If deepfakes become pervasive, and journalism becomes further politicized, you’ll need decentralized human attestation networks to be able to trust evidence you didn’t gather yourself.

The third dislocation, which has not yet begun, is where new systems begin assuming the most basic tasks of states: protecting the power of the rich and the health of the poor. Here, it’s helpful to think of decentralized architectures as simply facilitators of mutual aid. The rich will need state police less if they are able to use new networks to better secure their property. And decentralized mutual aid networks might in the not-too-distant future provide more meaningful assistance to the poor than state programs.[3] Private networks may also soon begin backing currency with state-like power over information.

In other words, decentralized networks are beginning by contesting state power’s most abstract functions, such as money printing, capital allocation, and digital infrastructure. But they are gradually pushing towards foundational, ground-level state services.

At every level of this contestation, there are opportunities and dangers. The opportunities are clear enough. We’d all like things to work better than they do; and the possibility of a more diverse and regenerative world is quite real. But we should also name the danger so that we can avert it. Let’s make damn sure that the new structures aren’t even more unidimensional and illegitimate than the flawed old ones.

5. Loose Ends

a. The Voids of Dislocated Power

In the book “The Dawn of Everything”, David Graeber and David Wengrow usefully put power in three categories: control of violence, control of information, and charismatic power. One way of thinking about new network technologies (including blockchains, but also other new structures like federated data networks) is that they create new amalgams of power that challenge older ones, including states and corporations.

These networks enable deeper forms of cooperation and information swapping, with less reliance on police assistance in the form of contract enforcement, etc. One of the reasons they work is that power within them can be linked to secret, private keys. Thus, pre-programmed arrangements can be carried forward without needing anyone to keep peace in the union hall, so to speak. A new degree of control over information enables new cooperative arrangements.

b. Whose Charisma?

As we’ve said, some of the value flowing through blockchains depends on violence. But some such value depends on shared belief in a story, which we might call charisma.

We think it is in this realm of charismatic power where the greatest opportunities and hazards lie. The fact that a system of secretive and diffuse charismatic power may soon outperform a system of coercive power in facilitating coordination gives us a chance to build something better. But whether it really is better depends on the character of the story we believe about where value comes from.

There are two charismatic stories we might accept going forward. One says that value is universal: that we can and should all embrace a common unit of account, so that our subjective valuation of everything should correspond to the globally highest bidder’s valuation of that thing. (The global economy already almost works this way, but cryptocurrencies could pave the way toward an intensification of that universality. See, e.g., Bitcoin maximalism.)

Another story says that this is nonsense. The global highest bidder for a thing, in dollar or Bitcoin terms, is likely to have no relationship to you. Selling by default to that bidder thus ignores the probable positive externalities of transacting within your community (geographic, familial, socio-cultural, or otherwise). These externalities are inherently hard to assess, but global units of account are essentially a set of blinders engineered precisely to ignore them.

What if we saw our communities as the true sources, guarantors, and yardsticks of value? With a greater diversity of currencies and a new perspective on what they mean, this is eminently possible.

c. And, Taking Property Off Of Its Coercive Foundations

The matter of violence still remains. Reexamining the nature of property itself, and making coercive property privileges non-buyable, is a related and complementary area of work in putting the economy on new foundations. Here too, we can imagine technology opening new vistas.

What if, for example, we bundled real-world property rights into NFTs governed by partial common ownership, that funneled rents back into community? But that’s for another piece.

d. Blockchain Non-Universalism

It seems clear enough that the kind of economic structures envisioned here — richly textured, community-oriented systems of exchange and value creation — will depend on communities’ ability to create quasi-distinct ecosystems that nonetheless talk to each other when appropriate. In other words, we believe in a world of many chains interacting in a structured way. Connext is a leader in building infrastructure with this shape, and it’s one of the reasons we’re so excited about it.

These distinctly modularly and separate layered ecosystems are providing utmost redundancy and resiliency as they continue to command developer recognition and liquidity. The architecture of systems, such as Connext Network, allow us to envision a more adept attempt at creating seamless cross-connectivity between these emerging ecosystems; while the inherent technical modularity creates a seamless feedback loop of incentives and community cross-pollination.

6. Conclusions

Money draws on power. And new networks are reconfiguring the pool of power from which money draws. To make the future better than the past, we’ll need to make sure that the new reservoirs of power are more, not less democratically accountable. There is no guarantee that this will happen — it’s a vision that needs to be fought for. But if it does, the economy will look more like biology: countless richly textured emergent economic substructures, blooming in a vast garden. It will look less like machinery or monoculture — it will not be a single currency, a single blockchain, a single regime — no single way of living “eating the world”. Let’s work toward that, together.

[1] Of course there are also some limits to how similarly we understand the value of money, illustrated by one of the better jokes in sitcom history, when an out-of-touch wealthy character in Arrested Development wonders dismissively: “What could a banana possibly cost? Ten dollars?”

[2] For a deeper dive on what I mean by “community” — a big topic necessarily elided here — see e.g. Ronald Dworkin on associative communities in Law’s Empire (1986). “If we felt nothing more for lovers or friends or colleagues than the most intense concern we could possibly feel for all fellow citizens, this would mean the extinction not the universality of love.”

[3] The fourth step in this sequence would involve the military, the state’s external power. We’re much farther from this, so let’s leave it aside for now.

The Case for Non-Universal Chains was originally published in Amentum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By: Divya Siddarth and Steven McKie

It can often seem like the crypto ecosystem is predicated upon an idea of infinite wealth through speculation. Real world resources, by contrast, seem like finite things connected to real needs. Neither is quite true. There are limits to speculation. And the limits that finite resources seem to place on meeting real needs can be overcome with an ethos of regeneration, rather than extraction.

Regeneration leaves resources intact, or replenishes them with use such that they do not deplete over time. Rather than externalizing its true costs, regeneration incorporates and overcomes the cost of resource use through resource generation. Regenerative approaches are based on cooperation, recognizing that zero sum games leave all worse-off. But they leave space for competition, when it allows for choice and does not involve the reproduction of unnecessary costs and can lead to the creation of shared benefit.

Extractive models use up and degrade resources, so that they cannot be re-used or replenished. Extractive systems often see resources being accrued by those who had resources to start with, because it is those people who have the ability to continuously extract. They consume a set of resources and then move on to extract from another space, leaving devastation in their wake, by centralizing power in an economy of scale.

The crypto ecosystem has a choice: the path of regeneration, or the path of extraction. Extraction can create infinite digital wealth for some, it’s true. But regeneration can create sustainable physical well-being and security for the many.

Choosing Regeneration

Taking the path of regeneration means learning from regenerative practices that already exist: Indigenous practices of land stewardship, community and commons-based governance, the principles of regenerative growth and agriculture.

For example, strategies like intercropping involve planting sets of crops that complement each other’s growth — a classic example being corn, beans, and squash, known as the Three Sisters. Beans add nitrogen to the soil and squash vines maintain soil moisture and prevent weeds, both aiding in the growth of corn stalks, which in turn can act as a natural trellis on which the beans and squash can grow. Similar approaches are used on a more macro scale, in the cultivation of trees, crops, and animals together in ways that benefit all three — enabling collective flourishing through complex interactions between the effect of each on soil, shade, habitat, water. And, zooming out even more, driven by an understanding that depleting the commons means depleting a valuable and shared asset that many benefit from, and will continue to benefit from into the future.

Meanwhile, the enclosure of the commons is a continuous process of extraction — and one that has reproduced itself in the digital sphere. Everything from publicly funded knowledge and innovation, to the public domain of creative works and digital art, have become commercialized and privatized, with ordinary citizens cut off from benefitting. The greatest strengths of the crypto ecosystem come from creating meaningfully different structures of voice and ownership; structures that allow for communities to participate in resource preservation and growth. It is possible to use new political and economic formulations to return to the intentional interdependence and collective governance that is required to build regenerative systems. The networked reality of our current world may seem far from the simple interdependence of growing the Three Sisters, but these fundamental principles can still hold.

Commons have been portrayed as antiquated and doomed to failure — many more people have heard the phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ than have been exposed to the successes of commons governance across use cases. However, in reality, We need approaches that are collective, regenerative, and commons-oriented. Instead of castles in the digital sky, we can plant roots in the multi-modal ground — and create a foundation for the castles to come.

The Energy Commons

Regeneration is a philosophical stance, certainly, but it is also a practical one. Choosing a regenerative ecosystem will require hundreds of thousands of choices, made by hundreds of thousands of individuals and communities. In the blockchain ecosystem, this means that projects will have to actively and broadly think about the resources that are being depleted, and then replenish and sustain them.

There are two important and overlapping ways to choose regeneration in the crypto ecosystem. The first is to look at the ecosystem itself, and ensure that projects within this ecosystem take a collective, regenerative, and commons-oriented approach to both the digital and physical resources that they use — internal public goods, as well as time, attention, financial resources, energy. And on a second order, that the systems they engender are themselves regenerative, moving from extractive, financialized and individual profit-focused models to collective and community-oriented models. The second is to use the affordances of crypto — ownership, voice, incentives — and try to build solutions using these systems to expand and deepen collective, regenerative, and commons-oriented approaches in currently extractive industries, or around currently fast-depleting resources. Many efforts that we find particularly inspiring — DisCO, the Commons Stack, the Regen Network, and others, combine these approaches; some, like Gitcoin, fall largely into the first, others, like recent DAO land trusts, fall largely into the second.

Here, we will try to practically explore what the second approach could look like. And for good measure, we’ll focus on a resource that is relevant to the first approach as well, as it is one that the crypto ecosystem has been accused, and often rightly so, of squandering: energy.

The energy we use to power our lives is a fundamental physical resource: we all need it. It is also a technologically mediated one: a vast machinery exists to route energy from power plants to your outlets, with tens of intermediaries along the way. It necessarily involves public and state-funded infrastructure, as well as private infrastructure and local oversight, and it is likely to be significantly disrupted by climate change, which it also massively contributes to.

In short, it’s an incredibly complex system of production and provision, it is mediated in different ways by software, hardware, and institutions, and it’s central to almost everything we do (sounds like the financial system, right?). And while there’s broad agreement that something needs to change, between grid failures (Texas, California) and contributions to global warming (particularly in the Global North: 25% of US greenhouse gas emissions come from electricity production), both entrenched interests and meaningfully complex technical issues have stymied radical development. Neither of us are long-term experts in energy infrastructure. But I think we can all recognize that if there was ever a space that needed updated and technically-enabled accountability mechanisms, new incentive structures for both global coordination and local oversight and ownership, and a broader understanding of interdependence and collective flourishing, it’s energy. And if there’s a technology that at least promises to build the foundations of some of those mechanisms, it’s crypto.

First steps to approaching energy

There are clear steps towards building resilient energy infrastructure that can be tackled without needing to wade into finding the perfect, nation-specific and region-specific policy solutions for power generation. The first of these is: distribute the ability to produce, use, and transact renewable energy to more communities, and build local resilience in energy infrastructure.

The first challenge is, as often, is skewed financial incentives. The financial benefits of electricity generation tend to be centralized, concentrated in the hands of shareholders and executives. This is a complicated problem to solve. Multiple players need to be involved: public utilities, rural cooperatives, regulated monopolies, etc. There is no one-ownership-model-fits-all solution here: nationalized grids are the answer in some cases, community-owned utilities in others, and likely a layered system that allows for more distributed control will combine the two. For instance, region-specific needs rule the day — the grid ecosystem in India bears very little resemblance to the grid ecosystem in the US. Policymakers have much to consider here.

There is also a second set of problems. How much energy to produce, and how? Given the entrenched interests in the space, it is no surprise that energy companies often lobby directly against sustainable energy and less fossil fuel consumption — even while publicly supporting climate change resilience. Even without this lobbying, the political will to transition national energy grids to sustainable energy is lacking, due to a misalignment of incentives. Instead, corporations and captured government officials in the space pay lip service to individual habit changes and so-called environmentally friendly company practices (read about the scam of ESG metrics from this BlackRock investor) to put off the inevitable: our infrastructure is not ready for climate change, and it is the most vulnerable communities who will be hit first.

In short, this is a complex, regionally-driven space with entrenched interests and no clear answers. So…how will crypto solve energy?

The answer is: it won’t. Our hope in gesturing at the complex and emergent nature of this system is to complicate this picture. The careful balance necessary for regeneration is clearly not in play in this extractive industry. However, another shock is unlikely to create it. Instead, a successful collective, regenerative, and commons-based approach needs to start small — taking the breadth of this ecosystem into account and zooming in on where the affordances of crypto can really make an impact.

Sure, crypto-based approaches cannot solve the slow crumbling of our public infrastructure, or the major imbalances in power consumption between the Global North and the Global South. But they can do something better: plant the seeds of small-scale changes that can have significant ripple effects, pointing the way towards a more resilient ecosystem. This comes from focusing on specifics.

We can start by recognizing that two things need to happen. One, our energy generation systems need to become climate resilient and sustainable — and this needs to move far, far more quickly than it is today (partly due to investor-owned utility monopolies lobbying desperately against clean energy). And two, we want a “small-d” democratic system, that distributes economic and social power more broadly and allows for communities to access reasonably-priced electricity when they need it. Increasing the use of solar energy through local generation tackles the first need, distributing the ability to produce, use, and share power begins to outline a democratic way to do it.

Green Shoots

Now we’ve reached a specific need that cryptoeconomic affordances can support. And our evidence is that they already are — albeit in small, and still-nascent ways.

One such example is facilitating resilient community micro-grids, potentially building out a network of foundational infrastructure to power regenerative agriculture, seed-saving, and community food projects. In fact, it’s this solution that brought the authors together — one having explored decentralized solar grids in Bangladesh, and the other having just invested in DexGrid, a company that aims to use crypto to facilitate decentralized energy transactions in Puerto Rico.

The key is to start with communities that aren’t being served well by existing grid infrastructure. In a country wracked by hurricanes, where people have become accustomed to not being served by the central grid, there is a desire for control over one’s power source. Thus, many small businesses and family homes had already found ways to supplement or bypass the central energy infrastructure, cutting off the connective wires and instead installing roof solar panels or acquiring energy through other means. But while these individual solutions provided some relief, they came with a major cost: unreliable power.

DexGrid provides an intuitive solution: enabling communities to tie together their solar setups into community micro-grids, incentivizing those with greater energy needs (such as local manufacturers) to act as ‘anchors’, building additional collection and storage facilities to ensure that power needs are reliably met. Resilience in this model is inbuilt. Relying on local resources protects communities from major outages, and ties communities closer together. Cryptoeconomic incentives allow for families and small businesses to target their usage habits towards non-surge energy use, self-regulating the micro-grid away from surging prices. This interdependence is a useful technical redundancy, meaning that power can always be drawn from multiple sources with no single point of failure, and a move towards a more commons-based and regenerative approach to power generation.

It is important to note that it is not only natural disasters that create regions that don’t have control or access to grid resources. Simple distance from the grid can create inaccessibility, as was the case with the decentralized solar grids that one author studied in Bangladesh. So can public underinvestment and neglect, as was the case in New York’s Lower East Side in the 1960s and 1970s, which led to community-based movements converting abandoned lots and burned-out buildings into self-sustaining and food-producing community gardens — many of which still exist, and are now powered by small-scale solar grids. NYC has actually also been a pioneer of community-owned micro-grids, with Brooklyn Microgrid building an energy marketplace for locally-generated, solar energy. This is only a quick overview of one slice of regenerative technology, but as these small-scale projects spore outwards and proliferate, they can create new models of regenerative growth.

The Path Forward

Decentralized technology does not mean decentralized power.

This simple insight cuts through the promises of many a so-called decentralized protocol, platform, or project. Without directly addressing power concentration, the default is to reproduce imbalanced power structures.

In a prior essay, Steven McKie discussed a set of mechanisms through which crypto-economists can balance the creation of machine economies and natural conservation and growth. This method of green engineering can create regenerative feedback loops that allow self-sustaining flywheels to emerge, geared towards non-extractive modes of value generation. This essay begins to catalogue some of the efforts within crypto that are taking a regenerative approach.

We are laboring under an inability to imagine alternatives to our existing systems, but such alternatives are possible. The beauty of the crypto ecosystem at its best is that it gives us the space and the tools to imagine and build such alternatives. We cannot immediately build an end-to-end new world; nor should we.Such top-down experiments in utopia have a history of failure. Instead, what we can do is build more democratic, egalitarian, and participatory spaces and modes of interaction wherever there is open space, and then work to expand that space over time. This requires not only choosing regeneration, but also choosing the mechanisms to target within existing systems that can be made regenerative, expanding and building coalitions across these to eventually grow regenerative practices in both digital and physical space.

From Walled Gardens to Community Gardens was originally published in Amentum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On this episode of BlockChannel, Mckie and Dee return after almost an entire years hiatus. Life happens, but so does crypto. We return to our story with a hero and heroine by the names of Matthew Prewitt and Divya Siddarth, respectfully. They are policy and ethics researchers and practitioners working to implement democracy expanding technologies at scale with the help of crypto. Seemingly humanists at heart, these two explain their work at RadXChange, and some of their focuses while advising at Amentum Capital.

Show Link(s):
RadicalXChange: www.radicalxchange.org
Divya Siddarth’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/divyasiddarth
Matt Prewitt’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/m_t_prewitt

Intro/Outro Music “Ingenuity” by Brockbeats:
Brock1112 — Ingenuity

Show Supporters(s):
Amentum: Amentum.org

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice, it is an engaged discussion on new technology; BlockChannel reminds you to always do your own due diligence before investing in any crypto-related project in the industry.

More ways to listen to BlockChannel 🎧:
⚡️Spotify: Subscribe on Spotify
⚡️Apple Podcasts: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts
⚡️Google Play: Subscribe on the Play Store

Episode 79: Democracy Through Ethical Technology & Communication was originally published in Amentum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Launch Season

It’s that time again, another opportunity to help push the industry forward with another lens to see the story of how, collectively, we as a community can move the world — with haste — towards censorship-resistant technologies. One’s that best serve a wide array of users, and don’t leave others behind based on their socioeconomic upbringing, or lack of technical mentorship.

Without going too much into the weeds for this announcement, in short we’ve been working on a project the last few months that we felt needed to exist. As we saw all of these Web3/DWeb protocols emerge, but each had a walled garden between them that was combination of technical UI/UX barriers that made them too cumbersome to use in tandem — especially for your average new entrant to crypto.

Reading and interpreting more API docs, launching another cloud instance to sync, dealing with installing VMs, etc — these are generally known IT/developer related skillsets many in the greater crypto community don’t possess (yet).

What I’ve learned, personally, is anytime I am scared to try something new, it’s because it seems too large of a task to undertake when you’ve a busy career to manage. We (HandyOSS and Amentum) sought to help change that; and in return, we could push the community towards being more self-empowered while holding more firms accountable for prioritizing UI/UX that aids a larger swathe of the general retail population.

Plus, with bridging HNS at the root of HandyHost, we can make new friends to help us empower the world to join our efforts, together.

Introducing “HandyHost” (The Gist)

What we’ve managed to construct is a simple browser-based application that merges Handshake/Akash/Sia and Sentinel DVPN into one cohesive platform. We’ve taken each of their unique attributes as functional public chain protocols with real utility, and assembled the lego pieces with UI/UX glue.

Each of these protocols serves a unique purpose in the greater crypto tech stack to provide the emerging new decentralized internet further redundancy and resilience. In this beta launch version, decentralized compute, storage, and privacy-centric VPN services are immediately at your fingertips without having to deal with dependencies and configure your nodes. Included is support for the Handshake chain whenever you run a DVPN Sentinel node, as it also launches a Handshake light client node beside it so you can resolve HNS names in your browser. It’s hidden and you never even know it’s there — you’re just on the DWeb/Web3 and ready to explore when your DVPN is running. You can toggle it on/off quickly on MacOS too from your menubar.

Effectively, this is a re-imagining of the incumbent tech stack of Web2, by slowing weaving complementary protocols together under on functional GUI interface.

And, with some of these protocols belonging to the Cosmos ecosystem (DVPN/AKASH) earnings can be easily sent to AMMs such as Sifchain/Emeris/Gravity Dex and Osmosis, and be liquidity pooled for other further passive earnings. We see a lot of cohesive interoperability being possible here with applications like HandyHost, and others that mimic it in the future to combine certain protocols together for brand new types of user experiences we haven’t thought of. We look forward to future updates and showing you what we mean.

Kavaskous on Twitter: "Even better. It means my GPU can keep mining on Nicehash, I can disable RandomX and enable this. DVPN AND AKT? I can reach my staking goals and have a way to become an LP whale on Osmosis. This needs to happen yesterday lol / Twitter"

Even better. It means my GPU can keep mining on Nicehash, I can disable RandomX and enable this. DVPN AND AKT? I can reach my staking goals and have a way to become an LP whale on Osmosis. This needs to happen yesterday lol

The Details

Here’s is what our team sought to accomplish as worked on this project collaboratively, and we believe we were successful (you’ll be the judge):

• Make passive-income generation simple through an easy to use GUI application.
• Enable income generation via public blockchains over a low-energy footprint that possess real utility.
• A single project that combines multiple projects with similar goals into one single hosting interface.
• Enable more users to experience the decentralized web without the headaches of running nodes and using a command line, but without giving up the power of running software locally (and important part of this whole decentralization thing).
• Dramatically increases the resources available on Akash, DVPN and Sia. It creates a healthy ecosystem for renters to scale into and builders to host their applications on.

That’s it. It’s time to go try it out and let us know what you think. Have any issues or find any bugs, leave an issue on the Github repo, and we’ll get back to you. Also send HandyOSS a ping on Twitter if you need some assistance or want to contact us about it directly.

Special thanks to the Sentinel Foundation, Greg Osuri and the Akash team for subsidizing the cost of development through their awarded grants. As well as Thomas Costanzo and others that contributed and assisted us with building, testing, and squashing bugs as we worked to integrate each separate protocol.

Enter the DWeb
Consumer Landing Page: http://HandyHost.computer
Github Hosted Site: https://handyoss.github.io/HandyHost_website/
HandyHost Github Repo: https://github.com/HandyOSS/HandyHost

Disclaimer: This is beta software, HandyOSS and Amentum Capital do not take responsibility for any funds loss under the operation of it. Use at your own risk, back up any keys, and do not keep a large sum of funds you don’t feel comfortable putting at risk into the application, until you’ve thoroughly tested it.

HandyHost: A New Way to Manage Dweb Assets and Protocols was originally published in Amentum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Read Now: https://medium.com/amentum/permaculture-and-crypto-green-with-no-envy-525af61ab884

New Essay: Permaculture and Crypto: Green with No Envy was originally published in Amentum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By: Steven McKie (Amentum Capital, CEO)

As we have endured this very tumultuous last year, we have all grown in our own ways more resilient as communities, individuals, and organizations purely from all having to face the same challenges globally. This network of agony and the aid of loving reciprocity that follows to pick up the pieces, is just another metaphor for the complex human condition and our small piece of the puzzle we control together as a species.

Humanity continues to progress itself technologically, spiritually, and financially, by working together through these enigmatic social metamorphoses — it is a tale as old as time itself. A fate that we cannot escape; so if that is the case then we had best learn to observe and adapt, naturally.

We as a collective, the planet, have to move from the internal combustion and focus on the sovereign individual, to understanding the importance of the “mycelic individual”. An evolved consciousness that exists externally from itself. That is the lesson that nature teaches us that we absentmindedly ignore repeatedly throughout history.

If you’ve been in crypto awhile, you’ve likely heard it or bitcoin compared to mycelium; which is a composition of grand fungal networks that exist underground and are the “internet of flora and fauna” and their internal communications and resource distribution networks. They have lasted the longest because they are the external combustion engine of nature itself. They outsource the digestion and gestation to a greater ecosystem that will compete for energy. The fungus does not belong in the plant or animal kingdom, it exists in its own unique category; for it completes the trinity of creation visible to the human eye, with protozoans and bacteria being invisible to the naked eye.

Figure 1: Kingdom diagram to understand where our greater human story stands amongst nature.

Cryptoeconomic Recomposition

Continuing this long extended metaphor, when we mix in crypto-based incentives, air (as life giving oxygen) becomes a liquid; in this case it becomes financial liquidity. The air becoming liquidity in this metaphor is simply the substrate that informational value exchange carries itself across, and it helps maintain the integrity of the network in doing so. Ultimately this breathes life into new economic experiments, empowering more classes and niche groups of people. So what we can begin to see here is the mirrored effects of systems in nature, and those we’ve created here natively online with open money systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

As humanity continually seeks to make itself more fault tolerant, we have to take the lessons learned here from the mycelium networks that came before us, and take those organic algorithms refined by nature to space, and back. But, we have to first understand at a high-level the mechanism and what it looks like. We have to understand the system of networks that make us who we are. We are humans of Earth, so we have to adopt that collective symbiosis with us everywhere we go; both digitally online in our major communications networks, and the physical in-person communities of every collective consciousness that plays their role in the story of what it ultimately means to be human.

In recent years a new approach has emerged that studies the interrelationship between ecological and biological systems — originally developed by R.W. Sterner, J.J. Elser and their collaborators. This is called “biological ecology”, because it focuses on the chemical requirements of each trophic level, in addition to its associated energy requirements. Essentially, this new type of science recognizes that organisms (and their survival) are outcomes of chemical reactions, and therefore organisms are constrained by supplies of key chemical elements, such as carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus.

The mirror here is that our cryptoeconomic systems are also constrained by their ability to access liquidity, as well as key physical custodians of the network itself which maintain its codebase and necessary infrastructure. Therefore, by mapping and mimicking these natural systems and understanding why they work well in nature, we can create the most resilient technologies possible, with the highest propensity for success.

We have to remember, in crypto, that a lot of the hard work has already been done by those wiser and more experienced than us — in even more specialized fields. It’s up to us to find those intersections of science and nature, and blend them with what we’re building everyday in crypto.

Figure 2: This diagram shows the feedback loops present in crypto that maintain our collective incentives that make all of this work. However, we must mirror these systems with ecological considerations that create and sustain concurrently, while we scale this next generation financial/governance system.

The crypto-ecological system that can emerge from our awareness of these sub-systems will be one of our most substantial contributions to the planet. As others work to provide the capital, liquidity, infrastructure, and innovation, as will others in blending those rich resources with creating complementary systems that regenerate local ecosystems/communities and nature itself.

As we blend further, we will naturally trend towards balance, with less dependence on zero-sum economic activities that ignore their negative effects on our society, local wildlife and nature preservation.

Mirroring Natural Processes

To provide another series of examples, this one will illustrate the similarities between a concept in hydroponics called the “nutrient film technique” (NFT, sound familiar?) The nutrient film technique is a trough/nutrient mechanism that allows a shallow stream of water carrying dissolved nutrient loads that are required for plant growth, and recirculates it past the roots to sustain their life and growth.

This can be compared to the process by which NFT (non-fungible token) artists seek to find buyers and liquidity for themselves from a community of art collaborators, collectors, and fans. These NFTs are naturally also reliant on the underlying trough and nutrients that are the public blockchains they operate on (i.e. Ethereum), and their associated on-chain liquidity the nutrients by which can sustain the starving artist.

Figure 3: Showcases the NFT (Nutrient Film Technique) process borrowed from hydroponics, mirrored against cryptoeconomic value transfers with NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) that create artistic and financial value for growth.

What we should now be able to see further is that everything is a cycle, a mechanism derived from nature, mathematics, chemistry and physics (or best expressed as a duality: the physical/metaphysical). It requires energy to move objects through a system digital and physical, so when we continue to make these comparisons, we can be more confident in our mechanism design being optimized against its most pure benchmark, nature itself, and the sustained processes it needs to create life.

The Decentralized Exchange Grid (aka the ‘DexGrid’)

“Change the tools; change the rules; change the culture; change society”. This is a mental model, mindset and mantra I’ve developed to understand how to upgrade and swap out living, breathing, financial systems run by central governing bodies — and replacing them with drop-in protocols and primitives so they can be retrofitted to benefit the global collective.

Now before I move forward, I will assume that you’ve become aware of the benefits of public blockchains, and the economies of scale that are incentivized through Proof-of-Work mining and infrastructure deployment. If not, read here as well here to get up to speed (there’s a great video commissioned by Square and ArkInvest too, here).

The upcoming rise of the decentralized grid (DexGrid) can be best defined as the intersection of information/value/energy exchange, in one constant incentive creation mechanism that further blends ecological sustainability and human innovation.

Crypto + Permaculture

However, ultimately it will be up to states, cities, and federal governments to experiment with subsidies to promote an environment of experimentation, so legal regulators and software developers can work together more easily in tandem. A relevant quick example is the deployment of government subsidies to aid in the adoption of electric bicycles, like those recently in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Imagine if your local or federal government subsidized your Proof-of-Stake mesh hardware purchases, such as a Helium node, and enabled you a cheaper means of passive income while directly making local communications networks more fault tolerant.

You can even get more granular and subsidize the deployment of environmental sensors, such as the temperature and humidity in concrete, to create futures for new public infrastructure being built in real-time. The possibilities are endless, and I could go on for quite some time on merging P2P markets with just-in-time sensor data.

However, one of the fundamental issues with innovative concepts as described above, is the privacy and security of the information being pulled from these data sources. Democratically governed and controlled information infrastructure is a powerful idea, but they should not become monopoly toll roads that disempower the individual powers of a free populace.

Everything can be built safely on sound primitives that evolve in time. And, there’s the added benefit that these ideas/primitives can be reapplied in a myriad of ways. In fact, many successful experiments already being set in motion by existing companies operating in the “real-world”:

• Solar mining and green initiatives for deploying recirculative green houses using excess stored solar energy.
• Efforts such as DexGrid working to enable the deployment of clean energy microgrids that accelerate the development of green energy production for localities with unsustainable energy access — as we’ve seen with the U.S. territory Puerto Rico follow major hurricanes.
• Mattereum as an example of supply chain and provenance platforms that can enable us to track production, collectibles, and more unique assets like carbon credits with real-world legal accountability. All of this without losing capital efficiency by utilizing a series of legal underwriters providing value to the underlying non-fungible asset the legal instruments create.
• Connext Network with their ability to provide “just-in-time” on-chain agnostic capital through networks of decentralized liquidity routers in a hyper efficient manner, while enabling VISA-like monetization through fees for larger community hubs. This is horticulture for money essentially; allowing for expanded capital efficiency and the growth of new monetary experiments in an expedited manner.
• Crypto apps and services such as Namebase and Cent that allow users to extract non-fungible value from crypto protocols. This enables passive income from a self-manageable platform, creating sustainable income streams for individuals seamlessly provided by the decentralized web and the liquidity from decentralized finance.

Later at scale once we’ve refined systems as described above, we can utilize it all to enable agri-permaculture that focuses on getting capital into the hands of small farmers and growing co-ops that can make our food systems more resilient and efficient. I sought to find an example of someone already laying the foundation for such efforts, and I was introduced to Regen Network, which uses economics to drive regenerative land management. There are other similar efforts as well, but it is clear everyone seems to be on the same page as far as where all of this capital abundance and financial innovation should lead us prosperity wise.

To fully complete this system, you’ll need to enable localities the ability to create and access liquidity for their community derived currencies (without a centralized feudal lord providing subsidized liquidity, that would be a step back). Then, as we continually lift small and medium sized farmers out of poverty, globally, it’ll present more opportunities for economic expansion and growth for direct investment into their local citizens and ecological sustainability — without robbing them of equity and ownership of their plant infrastructure and production output.

The Top-Down Vision

Now that we understand what natural systems mirroring can look like, and how to shorten the cycle of scientific discovery and real-world innovative deployment — that is sustainable — we can focus on what that gives us.

Our more crucial human initiatives for the future:

• Deploy and improve technology so that it serves us, globally, always and forever by design.
• Improve Earth to achieve an agreed upon vision of real harmony.
• Advance knowledge by exploring science and the unknowns of space.
• Speculate on real-time data with futures to prevent dystopia.

To put it simply, the end game is community owned connected economies of scales. We have the ability now to build these visions first online, and allow them to slowly manifest into the real world thanks to their embedded in-network incentives. This is also how we slowly merge online governance, with federal governments, in a seamless and non-destructive manner. Which also allows for unbounded returns for those massive wealth incumbents to make the transition without much fuss, too; retaining a bit of their influence while still gaining wealth. This overtime creates emergent harmony, through pluralism and ever-present disagreement, which iteratively will get us to community owned economies of scale.

Figure 4: Combined, we can make crypto development sustainable by keeping an eye on how each of these different segments interface with one another. The intersection of these four quadrants is what human progress is made up of. Creating a ”cryptoeconomic flower of human progress”.

Inevitably though, all of that value will find its way back to the people, in time. It cannot be avoided as in the future the most valuable institutions will be community owned networks powered by cryptoeconomics. This is my firm belief that as you amass a certain amount of wealth and influence, the only remaining upside in this new digital/physical hybrid world of value will be to give it back to the public.

Our focus now should be on observing what powers have accumulated thus far, then work to redistribute them; instead of waiting for power to concentrate once more and creating that societal debt to rebalance later.

There is a theory I call the “theory of penultimate reach”, wherein you’ve accumulated so much centralized power and influence, it can only be monetized further by giving it back to the public. And, if these systems continue to mimic and mirror nature, then eventually everything (big or small) will die and be reabsorbed back into the system.

This is the natural balance of all things, organic or inorganic, and our human-made systems cannot avoid them either, in the end. Eventually everything returns to source, and economic systems run on energy created from the interactions of everyday people like you and I, plus nature itself.

[Thanks to Divya Siddarth and Matthew Prewitt here at Amentum for their assistance with edits and feedback.]

Permaculture and Crypto: Green with No Envy was originally published in Amentum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.