(2021-08-19) Gupta Can The World Computer Save The World?

Vinay Gupta: Can the World Computer Save the World? Part 1: Wicked Problems. We all know the world is burning (climate change).

The serious ecologists are all completely traumatized, watching the whole thing unfold. It is clear that things are just trashed and it’s getting worse year on year.

Also we are being profoundly ineffective on the solutions side. The solar panel conversion is fast. But it’s a quarter as fast as it would be if we redirected defense budgets to the actual threats we face, rather than being scared of other humans.

The system accounts for money down to the penny. The system can tell you the protein grams and calorific content of every piece of food in the store. But the system will not tell you how much your new car speeds up the death of the world.

The rise of bitcoin mining

I am not crypto rich, and am a fairly neutral observer

People completely forget the first iteration of bitcoin. In 2010, bitcoin was mined on laptops.

Very broad participation in economic production was possible, and the rewards were distributed evenly.

In the early phases of bitcoin, the workers owned the means of production.

After ASIC mining was invented there was a role for capital in the bitcoin ecosystem

Once that role for capital was established, bitcoin went from being libertarian socialist with workers entirely owning the means of production (because they owned their own laptops) to something else. Bitcoin became anarchocapitalist.

Gupta’s Libertarian Observation states: Free people create free markets. Free markets do not necessarily create free people.

there is a difference between a road and a toll road.

Since bitcoin was invented there have been several distinct stories about how bitcoin is going to change the world:

• making it impossible to tax the citizenry
• Banking the Unbanked
• providing a “store of value” which cannot be inflated out by governments.

Now pause for a moment here. Climate change is trashing the planet. Bitcoin is hugely CO2 intensive to produce.

The correct value of many of our most “valuable” financial assets is zero (stranded asset).

if we take out all the assets which are wiped out in a fully scale climate change scenario there is basically nothing left of the current economy: the oil companies are gone, coal, natural gas wiped out. Entire industries like almonds. Fishing. You can just go down the list: gone, gone, gone, wiped out, worthless, gone. Other industries rocket into existence: solar, wind, renewables, batteries, energy efficient construction, you name it. An entire universe goes, and a different one is created.

Can the World Computer Save the World? Part 2: World Models & Theories of Change. Here are some ideas about how we are going to change the world which intelligent people from different subcultures will try and sell you. Each one encompasses a theory of change.

Now clearly nobody could believe in all of these possible futures at the same time. You’d be mad. Not only do they contradict each other, they..
Contradict the laws of physics
Contradict all possible models of history and human nature

what models of the future we take seriously are tightly tied to two things:

The first piece of mental furniture is our world model: what we believe to be the facts of the situation.

No human mind can contain the entire global situation (all models are wrong)

So the world model system in our minds contains some sub-functions:

It’s clear in the era of covid misinformation that even relatively small points of scientific knowledge (“are vaccines safe?” “do cloth masks work?” “do FFP3 masks work?”) result in dramatically different management of this deadly disease

The second piece of mental furniture is our theory of change. Not everybody has a theory of change. Many people share a few basic (and wrong) theories of change based on history.

The big formulaic theories of change, mostly rooted in historical analysis, are given names like Marxism or Socialism or Capitalism. Each one of these political movements, and all the others like them, contain a historical analysis and a proposed set of actions

However, as people are increasingly self-educating on the internet our world models have become increasingly diverse and disassociated. It becomes harder and harder to synchronize world models with the people around us to participate in collective action.

Ethereum does not have a particularly strong theory of change.

Proposing an explicit theory of change for Ethereum

You could frame this as “the internet does not have a theory of change, so why should Ethereum?” But actually the internet does have a theory of change: “a little bit of everything, all of the time.”

So at the very least there are a handful of universals in the Ethereum theory of change, the implicit factors. The basic structures in the world model include:
Not your keys, not your crypto
Anyone can create a smart contract
Radical inclusion through open access to infrastructure
Anonymity and pseudonyms are absolutely recommended
Ethereum runs everywhere in the world

Usually the whole theory of change is summarized as “decentralization”.

I am very clear that “decentralization” needs a lot of unpacking and context to be a valid way of looking at what the blockchain does. Permissionless also needs serious unpacking in a situation where (for example) exchanges decide which tokens to list.

how do people know who to trust or who is being scammed by who? It is not like we have universally adopted Ethereum-wide public key infrastructure and identity infrastructure for projects.

Something as revolutionary as Ethereum should have a more clearly articulated theory of change, I think — and not one, but several! Ethereum’s theories of change may be plural, but we would be making a lot more impact if they were clear and explicit: how are we going to help save the world?

I was deeply grounded in the Ethereum project, but in no way foundational to it. I’m often confused as being one of the original Gang of 8, but I was something like employee 30. I wound up as the release coordinator for the Ethereum launch. Critically, I was managing community expectations about what would be released and when.

I viewed Ethereum as a chance to hang up my “end of the world” hat. I got to work with the direct challenges of getting the world the smart contract platform it so desperately needed. (Grand Challenge)

One of the phrases I’d picked up during my time in military academia was “unity of action without unity of command.” I picked it up from Lin Wells (famous for the Wells Memo on predicting the future among other things.) This was, to me, the goal of Ethereum: to coordinate the world so we could increase efficiency, reduce waste, and take care of all of humanity’s concerns more effectively.

I wanted an evolution in the culture and the machinery of the market, to produce a world with carbon accounting and an end to world hunger because crops no longer rotted in the fields.

Can the World Computer Save the World? Part 3: Building an Economy with a Future. To be worth a damn in the grand scheme of things Ethereum has to meaningfully contribute to controlling climate change.

the World Computer is well positioned to be used to do computation which directly cuts our existential risks by crushing climate change.

Right here, right now: what is your carbon footprint? Your answer, I guarantee, is “I don’t know.”

You can get an approximation from a carbon footprint calculator, but it’s just an approximation. The well-meaning among us buy these offsets once a year to cover at least some of our damage. But until these systems are precise they cannot be automated.

Having to calculate our own CO2 footprint and accepting that the result is just a guess produces enough friction in the process that very few people in practice do CO2 offsetting. Even relatively well off green activists don’t do it, even though the cost is typically a hundred dollars a year or less.

Automated, we might all offset our emissions. It might even become mandatory, the cost of staying alive, the most basic act of personal self-responsibility. Because we have systems like zk-SNARKs on top of ERC20s, we could imagine a future with a mandatory carbon tax.

That seems like a fitting job for a World Computer: to run the global carbon accounting system which makes sure that trillions of dollars a year are spent planting trees and rewilding or grinding up olivine mountains to make sure that the earth does not dry out, burn up, and blow away.

Another grand challenge is global resource overconsumption. It is easiest to see when we think of deforestation.

We are simply using too much wood and land. The forests are getting cut down for other purposes. But a third of the food grown is wasted. If we could not waste that food there would be more than enough land for the forests to be left in peace. Rewilding at scale requires food efficiency.

corporation involved will want to keep its private data in a silo. They will want to hide evidence of their own waste, particularly in areas where waste equals profit.

We need to break open the silos to understand the performance of the system as a whole.

Systemic structural inefficiencies exist in every supply chain. The world is both cold, starving and homeless at one end, and packed with empty five bedroom houses and untouched boxes of cold pizza at the other

Efficient markets should provide for everybody.

But the efficient market cannot be efficient enough on the existing technical, social and legal infrastructure.

Every manufactured thing in the world eventually winds up in landfills or as scrap, with a few exceptions.

In almost no case is the true cost of disposing of things calculated

Similarly, when an old camera or an old phone breaks and cannot be repaired because it was designed not to be fixable, both its owner and the world get a little poorer

Imagine that all manufactured goods have digital twins on the blockchain. As the assets change hands and experience wear and tear every repair is logged. Soon we can see what is repairable and resellable

Mattereum has built this. Gold bullion, art and collectibles to start, but pretty soon we will present prototypes for real estate transactions and consumer goods. I believe this is the unstoppable adoption-driving blockchain use case everybody has been searching for: a better way to buy physical things than anything Web2 has offered.

My company Mattereum deeply reflects this theory of change: we are (in the long run) a carbon accounting and radical resource efficiency company.

Mattereum also sells half a million year old stone hand axes as NFTs. We believe that art and antiquities, luxuries and collectibles, are excellent initial markets for Mattereum.

There are many excellent here-and-now use for a system which binds objects to multi-faceted statements of truth about the objects

The way this system works is that for each individual NFT, such as this digital art piece backed by physical gold —

there is a Mattereum Asset Passport which gives a legally binding set of promises about the gold bar associated with the NFT.

You can check where the gold bar is vaulted and how it is insured. Pretty soon the Mattereum + Union partnership will produce a DeFi-based protection system for buyers. This is a perfect example of the modular and composable nature of services in the Ethereum defi ecosystem: Lohko handles the gold, NTFA handle the art, Mattereum handles the proofs and provenance, UNN provides additional risk handling, and an as-yet-unnamed lender will soon be lending money against these gold bullion NFTs

We started with gold in vaults because it is one of the highest value and best controlled global supply chains: a good fit for management by NFTs and smart contracts. Fine art is a close second, although it is much harder to prove art fraud than gold fraud. High end liquor is another great area, because so much of the product is stored in high security warehouses.

Things change in fundamental ways when they have names (or other unique identifiers). ISBN numbers empower libraries. ISIN numbers enable the global financial architecture to function. Namespaces rule everything.

An Ethereum address attached to every physical thing, and every asset, you own. Orthogonal legal operators for sale, rental, escrow, use as collateral on a loan, or fractionalization and equity release. Those legal operators are based on Ricardian contracts, so they look like legal contracts to a court. But to a smart contract, they look like another smart contract: a digital/legal bridge that creates property rights. Mattereum calls this the Smart Property Register.

Everything carbon calculated, and fully offset. There would be trillions of dollars a year of offsets going into planting forests and restoring wetlands and everything else.

In that world a huge number of humanity’s fundamental problems just evaporate

Mamading Ceesay coined the term “Economies of Omniscience” to describe the total economic transformation that such a world will bring. (ahem, Red Plenty?)

Better still, since the discovery of zkSNARKs and other zero knowledge methods, we can create “blind omniscience” where the coordination systems run perfectly but without any actor being able to see more than their part of the system. In short, the advantages of central planning, without a central planner.

Now imagine this operational paradigm applied across everything: when you fly, you borrow everything you need when you land. It’s all waiting for you at the airport.

Then we apply this to the industrial economy: no more shortfalls or warehouses of feedstocks which won’t be used for months. All the advantages of Just In Time, but coupled to the capability to buy and sell components directly to other companies, or your suppliers. Immediate configuration of capability by pre-designing systems using computers, and then provisioning the purchasing for all the necessary items using smart contracts.

perfect coordination frees up vast resources.