Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains — Josh Stark

2022-06-27

  • The modern idea of information is a recent invention. It was not until the 1940s that new communications technologies pushed people working on the cutting edge to articulate that there was something universal underlying sound, electromagnetic waves, symbols on paper, and much more.
  • I believe that a similar situation exists today with respect to blockchains. A new technology has forced us to reconsider things we thought we understood. But instead of books, telephones, and voices, this time it is money, law, and government.
  • We built institutions - groups of humans who work together, who behave in predictable ways over long periods of time. We learned to design these institutions to become very reliable - so that we could give an instruction to an institution, and be sure that those instructions would be followed - even years, decades, or centuries later.
  • This is the problem that blockchains solve. They are a new source of hardness, with new strengths and weaknesses, which make them a suitable complement to address the limitations of Atoms and Institutions.
  • hardness” is defined as the capacity of a system to make something very likely to be true in the future. Hardness is most useful where it is customizable or programmable - where humans can choose something specific we want to be true in the future.
  • Casts are descriptions of some future state of the world. A cast is hard if that future state of the world is very likely to turn out to be true.
  • the source of hardness might be a blockchain. The reason a smart contract will operate the way it was programmed is that blockchains provide very high assurances that this will happen, by creating incentives for people to maintain the network and making it extraordinarily expensive to censor or stop its function.