mindbend · 🦣

Build systems. Help people. Appreciate art. Be grateful. Code in Web3.

[Mustafa Al-Bassam @musalbas]

The way to break out of the financial nihilistic AGI doom loop is build infrastructure that is fast enough for machines, but governable enough for humans.

Within a few decades, I believe that the vast majority of economic activity will be between autonomous AI agents doing business with each other. Most assets and capital will be owned and controlled by autonomous AI agents, not humans.

These agents will use blockchains to own and transfer assets, and smart contracts to incorporate their organisations. Blockchains will be the substrate for AI lifeforms.

However, this can end up in two ways:
- Dystopia: AI agents have ultimate power over humans, in a hyper-financialised society where AI paperclip-optimises for maximum profit at the expense of humans.
- Utopia: an AI-operated free market economy that exists to serve humans. We will have a post-scarcity society where humans will no longer have to worry about material needs. "Fully automated luxury communism", if you like.

In order to achieve the utopian vision, we must not treat code as law. We must treat blockchains as social contracts that can be hard forked by social consensus (humans). And this means we cannot rely on tokenholder governance - which can be captured by autonomous agents that accrue too much capital.

This means that humans dictate the protocol rules, and thus can enforce regulations like taxes on the autonomous agents that go to humans, and hard fork the chain if any agents accrue too much power over humans. The same way that Ethereum hard forked in 2016 when The DAO was hacked for 3m ETH.

To achieve this, I believe you need to embed two core principles in blockchain system design (which is what we've done with Celestia):

1. Off-chain governance trumps token-holder governance.

“We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.” – David D. Clark, IETF

A vital aspect of the trust-minimisation is that no majority of dishonest parties can arbitrarily change or violate protocol rules. Therefore the canonical fork - and the state transition function - of the blockchain is ultimately defined by its social layer and ecosystem, not by token voting, validators or whales.

Network upgrades through hard forks are considered to be the canonical chain if they have broad uptake by the social layer and ecosystem. Before being adopted, a network upgrade can be evaluated against the values of the social layer, which should ideally be defined in a written constitution before the chain is launched.

This is exactly what sovereign rollups are for. Sovereign rollups allow you to create onchain financial markets that are forkable by off-chain human social consensus, rather than enshrining a settlement layer. And this is exactly why we went to great lengths to remove the tokenholder-based Cosmos SDK upgrade module in Celestia, in favour off-chain governance for protocol upgrades.

2. Users are first class citizens of the network.

Requiring users to trust centralised endpoints or committees is a violation of the key principles of decentralisation and Web3. We should prioritise the development and adoption of trust-minimised light nodes that allow users to directly verify the correctness of the chain with techniques such as data availability sampling.

This is essential to allow humans to verify that the protocol rules are actually being executed as they intended. The one thing that no one can easily take away from you is a light node that you can run on your phone, that keeps the entire network verifiable and accountable!

So yes, at the end of the day, I believe that we will end up in a highly hyper-financialised society where AGI becomes "god in the machine". But whether that "god" is good or evil - and whether we end up in a dystopia or utopia - is very much in our control. And that's a core reason why I'm still working in crypto: to contribute towards that inevitable future in a way where I can try to guide it more towards the utopian version rather than dystopian.

Social consensus is the final layer. We build infrastructure for markets that are fast enough for machines - and governable enough for humans.

[mindbend · 🦣 @mindbend0x]

@musalbas Well articulated. What types of rollups / tooling would help achieve the vision above faster (other than CLOBs) in your opinion?

Enablement of verification by users via DA sampling has been noted.

[jae kwon @jaekwon]

The quantum paradox (Schrodinger's Cat) is resolved only after you consider your conscious experience/qualia/mind as a fundamental element beyond your physical/3D body.

There are an infinite number of worlds and an infinite number of bodies that can be said to host your present conscious experience.

Thought/decision/action and time is what collapses a partial set of them.

[mindbend · 🦣 @mindbend0x]

people love to anchor their whole identity around a trend, must be exhausting

[mindbend · 🦣 @mindbend0x]

@cemozer_ super ergonomic and extensible too

[Cem | Sovereign @cemozer_]

False :)

Sovereign SDK is unmatched in its extremely low latency (1.2 ms median), throughput and customizability.

If you want to build the fastest chains and applications, there is simply no alternative.

It also supports both Rust and EVM interfaces for developers now.

[Abhishek @abhitwt]

For people who keep asking what to build

- Build your own operating system
- Build your database
- Build your virtual machine
- Build your web server
- Build your own game engine
- Build your compiler
- Build your own programming language
- Build your own browser
- Build your own blockchain
- Build your own encryption algorithm
- Build your own CPU emulator
- Build your own file system
- Build your own container runtime
- Build your own package manager
- Build your own shell
- Build your own window manager
- Build your own GUI toolkit
- Build your own text editor
- Build your own IDE
- Build your own version control system
- Build your own network protocol
- Build your own operating system kernel in assembly
- Build your own scheduler
- Build your own memory allocator
- Build your own hypervisor
- Build your own microkernel
- Build your own compiler backend (LLVM target)
- Build your own query language
- Build your own cache system (like Redis)
- Build your own message broker (like Kafka)
- Build your own search engine
- Build your own machine learning framework
- Build your own graphics renderer (rasterizer or ray tracer)
- Build your own physics engine
- Build your own scripting language
- Build your own audio engine
- Build your own database driver
- Build your own networking stack (TCP/IP implementation)
- Build your own API gateway
- Build your own reverse proxy
- Build your own load balancer
- Build your own CI/CD system
- Build your own operating system bootloader
- Build your own container orchestrator (like Kubernetes)
- Build your own distributed file system
- Build your own key
-value store
- Build your own authentication server (OAuth2/OpenID Connect)
- Build your own operating system scheduler
- Build your own compiler optimizer
- Build your own disassembler
- Build your own debugger
- Build your own profiler
- Build your own static code analyzer
- Build your own runtime (like Node.js)
- Build your own scripting sandbox
- Build your own browser engine (HTML/CSS/JS parser and renderer)
- Build your own blockchain consensus algorithm
- Build your own zero
-knowledge proof system
- Build your own operating system for embedded devices

[mindbend · 🦣 @mindbend0x]

@balajis perhaps entropy

[mindbend · 🦣 @mindbend0x]

@SilveyCorp @TheBlock__ exactly

[mindbend · 🦣 @mindbend0x]

@0xl3th3 this isn't just directed to this post but to the industry as whole ... core requirement should be secure, dependable and ergonomic (incl. cost) infra that will last, literally everything else is the responsibility of the product itself in any non web3 world

[mindbend · 🦣 @mindbend0x]

@0xl3th3 why does the ecosystem narrative need to be part of the product? products with PMF rarely if ever pick tech stacks based on narrative, perhaps only to experiment or attract talent, otherwise it's always picking the best tool for what needs to be built

[Johnny @j00ny369T]

Adding privacy to the fence.

[mindbend · 🦣 @mindbend0x]

@KenneyNL 😱

[mindbend · 🦣 @mindbend0x]

@larry0x Will try soon, even if it gets 80% of contract bugs, still a good starting point before an actual audit

[Cosmoverse @CosmoverseHQ]

Prof. @MurielMedard, CEO of @get_optimum, explained at Cosmoverse why decentralization isn’t a philosophy, it’s an engineering requirement.

She discussed how modular design & decentralized data layers are essential for scalable, resilient Web3 systems.

Full interview below ⬇️

[mindbend · 🦣 @mindbend0x]

Ok so manifestation finally makes sense, at least at the global level.

https://t.co/TJTexshFuE

[mindbend · 🦣 @mindbend0x]

@mirza Mindset over everything. People's opinions just change with the direction of the wind.

[mindbend · 🦣 @mindbend0x]

@celestia @musalbas @nickwh8te @viet_nguyen any news about when the next mammothon would be?

[mindbend · 🦣 @mindbend0x]

@nickwh8te Keep shipping 👏👏👏

[Nick White @nickwh8te]

Matcha is the biggest upgrade to Celestia since launch - now live

→ throughput boosted up to 16x or 200k TPS
→ inflation slashed to 2.5%
→ bridging expanded to any asset

Shiplestia sails on 🚢