

















Emotional Quanta Spot Price (FC/EQ)
Fear 0.147059
Sadness 0.098039
Love 0.03876
Ecstasy 0.023419
Hate 0.021277
Jealousy 0.017065
Joy 0.010341
Wonder 0.009452
Excitement 0.003934






There was just no appetite for worry in the Metaverse.





The music stopped, and the crowd cheered appreciatively.

The beast curled its lips into a sneer.












This sheep does not simulate life… it is alive.”

The ringmaster paused as the people processed what this could mean.






Welcome to the birth of death”



Martin Shkreli and Pharmaceutical Sausage Making

There is a saying that those who like sausages should never see them being made. Often this analogy is applied to political backrooms where idealism is ground down into a product amenable for mass consumption. As go sausages and politics so goes modern medicine; those who consume it probably shouldn’t look too closely at how its made.

Martin Shkreli is the CEO of Turing pharmaceuticals, the company that recently raised the price of it’s anti-toxoplasmosis drug Daraprim by %5000 overnight and in the process sparked a vitriolic public reaction to the soaring cost of drugs across the pharmaceutical industry.

The problem for patients in need of Daraprim (usually HIV+ patients with compromised immune systems) is that they will likely die if they cannot access the drug. Thus, no matter what the cost of the drug, patients, or more often insurers or government programs, will be forced to pay for it. While I sympathize deeply with patients who are being forced into bankruptcy to even keep up with co-pays for such expensive treatment, I think Shkreli is simply doing the ugly sausage making which is necessary to survive in the modern American pharmaceutical industry.

Daraprim is far from an isolated example of the incredible growth in the costs of medicines being seen across the pharmaceutical industry. Soliris for example, a drug made by Alexion pharmaceuticals to treat rare childhood blood disorders, has been called the most expensive drug in the world. It is estimated that Soliris costs as much as $700 000/year for patients that must remain on the drug for the rest of their lives, but the true cost of the drug is unclear because the drug-maker negotiates a separate deal with each government or insurer that buys the drug. What is even more interesting about Soliris, is that the company quietly helps patients in efforts to use media campaigns to encourage governments around the world to complete negotations with Alexion and start paying for the drugs (see the video below).

Importantly, Alexion and Turing pharmaceuticals both insist that no patients are dying because they cannot afford to access their drugs. The company themselves will help uninsured patients to find government or charity programs to pay for the drug, and in some cases will even donate the drug directly to the patient. The company has a direct interest in finding ways for patients to pay for drugs, and it is generally not good business for anyone to let the patients die.

The problem this model poses is that the governments and insurers distribute the cost of drugs over society and thus have the ability to pay the extremely high costs of these drugs and pharmaceutical companies work under an imposed monopoly while treatments remains on patent. If individuals were required to actually pay for these drugs out of pocket, it would simply be impossible to charge $700 000 for treatment. Similarly, once generic manufacturers are allowed to start creating their own versions of pharmaceuticals, the costs of drugs often drops precipitously. Thus, the system conspires to allow manufacturers to price drugs in a way that is independent of market reality.

The argument in support of such a system is that the R&D necessary to research a drug and bring it to market is extremely expensive and extremely risky. The cost to bring a drug through clinical trials has been estimated to be in the billions of dollars, much of this due to the failure of drugs which turned out to be unacceptably ineffective or dangerous as they advanced through the pipeline of clinical development. Even accounting for the oft cited fact that pharmaceutical research starts with scientific research funded by and performed in public institutions, bringing a drug to market is incredibly expensive.

Lets not mince words here: the costs of modern drugs is 100% about (a) profit, (b) recouping R&D costs, and (c) generating sustainable support for future R&D. The cost of actually manufacturing drugs is a rounding error in comparison to this. It is also important to keep in mind that investors a reasonable to expect profits to be high due to the high risk and relatively short patent window for pharmaceutical sales.

In some ways, pharmaceutical companies are simply keeping up with the explosive growth in costs throughout healthcare. Hospitals have been charging unbelievable amounts of money for basic services for many years now. By distributing the costs of medical care across the commons, the medical insurance industry allows patients to receive the a level of care that is greater then an average person could normally afford, but this also divorces the costs of such care from market realities.

Just as any other capitalist companies would do, pharmaceutical companies are simply exploiting this system as far as they can. Pharmaceutical companies that fail to properly exploit these vulnerabilities and maximize profits will ultimately be eaten by Wallstreet sharks like Shkreli.

In 2011, KV pharmaceuticals won approval from a drug against pre-term birth called Makena. Use of the drug would drive up the cost of injections to prevent pre-term labour from around $250 to around $25 000. Following public outcry and congressional investigation, Makena cut the cost of the drug in half but eventually went into bankruptcy. In 2014, KV was purchased by AMAG pharmacetials which is now raking in massive profits from record sales of Makena (see article).

Public backlash is not an effective check on pharmaceutical profiteering.

Where we may win symbolic victories against people like Shkreli or companies like KV pharmaceuticals, we are losing the war. Government regulation of drug costs is possible, and could really make a difference in the costs of drugs but I fear any intervention tends towards weak controls on drug costs and is unlikely to go to the lengths necessary to fix a fundamentally broken drug development system.

So what can we do to really address the quagmire of pharmaceutical development? If the problem is that R&D is expensive and risky, then we must find a more efficient means to fund pharmaceutical research and development. 

In his TED talk, Roger Stein proposes a radical new model for achieving just this. He proses that we should establish an equity megafund to spread the risk of drug development out over a larger number of drug candidates. By spreading risk, such a fund could provide the capital needed to perform the expensive clinical trials needed to gain FDA approval while providing reliable returns necessary to allow large investment funds like pension plans to stomach the risky venture of pharmaceutical innovation.  While such a model would not completely remove the profit incentive for companies trying to bring pharmaceuticals to market, it might go along way to decreasing the risk and thus the kinds of returns that companies expect with successful drugs.

I wonder if we could perhaps go a step further than such a megafund, and actually require that those companies involved in the research side of the pharmaceutical industry not be involved in the production and sales side of the business. What if the last step for FDA approval after a successful phase III clinical trial was for the drug developer to sell the rights for said drug on the open market to a drug producer.

By forcing the R&D company to sell off their drug to a pharmaceutical production and sales company, this would demand that a clear accounting of the presumed value of said drug is made. This would give governments and private insurers a real target on which to base negotiations for drug prices. Perhaps if we could sever the risky business of pharmaceutical R&D from the much more hum-drum business of producing, marketing and selling those drugs it would go a long way to simplifying drug pricing negotiations between drug manufacturers and insurers.

Unfortunately though, I think it would do little to bring down the overall cost of drugs. Because the market value of a drug is in the end set by whatever a drug producer thinks it can charge for a drug and we still are unwilling to put any reasonable limits on what we will pay for life saving drugs, the fundamentals that drive drug prices up is unlikely to change.

It comes down to what has been called one of the most important economic questions of our time. How do we inject economic reason into medical decision making? We must at some point decide to say no, that is too much to spend to save someone’s life. Insurers and governments simply must put a price on human life.

If we want to pay reasonable prices for drugs, we are going to have decide what constitutes reasonable.

In the end, that is the unavoidable sausage making of the pharmaceutical industry, and it’s the sausage making of capitalism. Captalism demands that we determine a reasonable value of everything, including human life. As long as we are unwilling to decide on a dollar figure for what constitutes reasonable medical expenditure, the industry which is vital to keeping so many people alive and well is going to continue to balloon without limit. 

The Selfish IDEA


Thought Infection

Hello, I’m an IDEA and I need your help.




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Decentralization and the Future World Order – Part III: Welcome to Bitville

This is the long delayed third in a multi-part series (part 1, part 2) on what I predict is one of the most important ongoing technological trends, the decentralization revolution. By creating a way for the transfer of value to be performed over a trustless distributed network Bitcoin has already changed the world but Bitcoin is only the tip of the decentralization iceberg.


What would it mean if you could truly trust a government to do what it says it will do? And I don’t mean the kind of soft-trust that we put in governments today, where we trust that the checks and balances that are supposed to keep governments honest (or at least mostly honest), I mean what if you could trust your government like you trust an (open source) operating system? What if you could trust a government like you trust math?

In my last two posts I described how decentralized cryptographic networks are creating a new gold-standard in the establishment of trust (1), and how it is trust that defines the flow of power in human societies (2), now I want to elaborate on what it might look like if and when we apply the principles of decentralized crytography to governance.

What would it look like if the key institutions of society, everything from schools to corporations and even national governments, were built on decentralized cryptographic systems? Well to find out, lets try envision what a cryptography might have to offer for a small to medium sized community. What follows is a fictional account of how embracing decentralized crytographic technology could revolutionize our expectations of government transparency and efficiency.


Welcome to BitVille

When one enters BitVille they might be forgiven for thinking that this town is just like any other. It is clean, but not necessarily cleaner than any other town, and the people are happy, but not necessarily happier than those in any other town. The economy is doing well, but not a lot better than any other town in the area. BitVille is pretty much indistinguishable from any other well run town, but it is well run. Over the last several years, BitVille has embraced decentralized cryptographic technology similar to Bitcoin, and according to those behind the transition they are a model for how local governments of the future will operate.

“The most important thing is that we have regained the trust of the citizens of BitVille,” says Clara Barnes the city manager who has overseen the implementation of much of the cryptographic technology in BitVille.

“Having proud citizens who feel invested in the success of their town is absolutely the most important factor in the success or failure of a town. Everything else falls apart if people don’t feel they can trust their governments. In BitVille we know exactly what a loss of trust looks like. The city was losing millions in bogus contract competitions and inefficient bureaucracies, the schools and roads were falling apart, crime was going up, there was garbage on the streets, and people had lost faith in their city.”

A few years ago, BitVille was collecting and spending 15% more tax money per capita than cities of comparable size, yet their infrastructure was falling apart. When Barnes took over the job of city manager, she was tasked with figuring out a way to both cut down on city spending and increase the service standards for city services, a seemingly impossible task. But Barnes had a secret weapon: a background in cryptocurrency.

“So we issued a cryptocurrency” Barnes said, letting the statement hang in the air for a minute.

Barnes went on, “we started small. We issued a the CityBits cryptocurrency, pegged at 1:1 with proven USD city funds on the Ethereum ecosystem. CityBits are exchanged through a single webportal to buy or sell them using other cryptocurrencies or electronic cash transfers. At this point we are also working with local banks and businesses to allow people to use CityBits around town, but its been a relatively slow uptake for this.”

“Is it a currency or a tool then?” I ask

“There are also some tricky legal questions about whether a city can actually issue a floating currency of its own, so we envision CityBits really as more of an administrative tool than a true cryptocurrency.  It is a secure means of managing city funds in a transparent and efficient manner.”

“How did you get started with this system?”

“The pilot project used CityBits for executive payroll at city hall. Most of us set up automatic exchanges for the bulk of our CityBits to be converted to cash transfers, so the system is pretty invisible to us now. It worked seamlessly almost from day one, and it was love at first sight for our payroll office.

We have since expanded CityBits to function as the backbone for all payroll at city hall, and we didn’t stop there. Over 80% of procurement for the city is also administered through CityBits. Vendors are required to accept payment in the form of CityBits, which again can be exchanged for cash through our Webportal any time.

Earlier this year, we launched CityBits contracting platform. We are now able to host the entire bidding process, contracting, and implementation, of city projects on the CityBits blockchain. It still has some bugs to work out, but when fully implemented, we will require all contractors to accept payments exclusively in the form of CityBits.”

“So the results have been mostly positive?” I asked.

Barnes answered with a gleam in her eye, “the change has been dramatic. Human resources, payroll, accounting, and managers in every department are thrilled with the new system. Simple web interfaces make it extremely easy for managers to authorize transfers, and track where funds are going in real time, and in the future. The citizens get to see almost in real time how city hall money is being spent, and is planned to be spent. Money in, money out, its all very transparent and very clear, and most importantly it inspires the trust of the taxpayers.”

“What are your long term plans for CityBits?”

“In the medium term I would like to see transactions from citizens, such as paying parking tickets, done through the CityBits system. This would make it much easier for citizens to see exactly where the money goes when they pay money into the city. The feeling that money sent into City Hall is simply going into a bottomless pit is a real problem which I feel CityBits can address

Also, it would be great to start to integrate some more smart contracting into the system. For instance, with snow plow contracts we could set up an automatic payout based on the snowfall for that particular year.

In the very long term, I think the sky is the limit for CityBits. We could eventually tie everything from official power structures, budgetary approval, citizen oversight, and voting into the system. For instance, the power of the mayor to approve budgets might be built into a CityBits charter which matheamtically limits their ability to approve spending to 4 years. This would be a mathematical limit to political power. CityBits could help create a system which fundamentally enfranchises citizens with control over government which citizens have a right to.

CityBits can help to create the kind of 21st century City government that the citizens deserve.”

That gleam was back in Barnes’ eyes.


The story of CityBits is the story of cryptocurrencies. The real magic is their scalability, a cryptocurrency like CityBits could start as a simple means to administer employee payroll that could one day grow up to define the legal charter of an entire city. Equal parts incremental improvement and revolutionary breakthrough, both an arcane administrative tool and a radical new mechanism of transaction, like other technological breakthrough that have preceded them, cryptocurrencies will become what we dream them to be.

If you liked this post, you might also like Cryptocontracts will turn law into a programming language.

The Danger of Darwinian Overdose: Why Evolutionary Innovation Requires Surplus

In this age of eternal economic recovery, I seem to hear a lot about how important the idea of austerity is. We must be reserved, we must make hard decisions, and we must be selective. Somehow if we cut deep enough, we will come through with an efficient machine, ready to power us into the next golden age of innovation and economic plenty.

This belief that only through maximizing selective economic pressure can we maximize economic growth reaches its harshest heights when it filters down to the level of individual workers. Plenty of people seem to genuinely believe that if we just let the people starve a bit more, if we take away what few social benefits they have, then they’ll really have the hunger needed to drive them to find a job and push the economy onwards and upwards.

The view that maximizing selective pressure makes for the best economic evolution is often justified through comparisons to the law of natural evolution. But, this belief that the strongest organisms evolve when competition is at its most cut-throat stems from an incomplete view of the nature of evolution.

Evolution is not some cold algorithm seeking to maximize efficiency of resource utilization through mutation and survival of the fittest. Biological adaptation is a flourishing of possibility that requires not only resource-limited selection but also needs ecological surplus. Speciation is maximized in a supportive an ecosystem that provides both plentiful resources and competition. Species must have the chance to mutate and create new forms. Species that have no established niche in which to prosper have no chance of adapting to new environments through evolutionary innovation.

Natural selection is the product of both competition and surplus! It is in thriving, healthy, ecosystems, (think of the rain forests of the world) where nature best explores the boundaries of possibility. Indeed, the great explosions of biological differentiation always come as great surpluses of new resources are discovered and capitalized on by innovative species.This is what occurred in the rapid phases of colonization of the land by insects, then by dinosaurs, and eventually mammals.

Nature can even be downright wasteful at times. Sexual display characteristics like antlers or the peacock tail are perfect examples of the kind of beautiful adaptations that prove nature is not some utilitarian algorithm seeking to maximize efficiency. We humans also have ecological surplus to thank for some of our best traits. Female human breasts are actually the direct equivalent of the peacock’s tail, providing no real utilitarian benefit yet remaining on display throughout the woman’s life, unlike primates where breasts enlarge to produce milk only when needed.. The results are energetically wasteful yet undeniably alluring and beautiful.

Humans also have another energetically costly lump of fat that is thought to have evolved as a consequence of ecological surplus. New theories suggest that humans were able to evolve such ridiculously large brains (per body size) only after we discovered a readily available source of protein-rich food in the form of fish found in coastal regions. Fascinatingly, it has also been suggested that this period of semi-aquatic existence may have also lead to the loss of fur in our ancestors (see the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis).

The view that evolution is strictly about species living on the edge of survival and competing for a limited pool of resources is a dangerous oversimplification. The fact is that the evolution of all of the wonderful forms of life around us is as much a product of surplus as is it of selection.


I deeply believe that economic innovation lives by the same rules as natural selection. Yes, we must have selective pressure of the market to allow the best and brightest to flourish, but we must also need to create a supportive environment of surplus where people to experiment with new ideas, whether in the sphere of business, culture, education, philosophy, or any other discipline that has been so vital to our economic advancement.

The politics of neo-Darwinism say that we maximize innovation by maximizing the pressure on workers to innovate means to create value for the economy. But isn’t it already clear that this is not the case? How could we have innovation without having the time to educate ourselves or the capital to empower our business ideas? It is no wonder that innovations have always come predominantly from the middle and upper classes where they are afforded the economic breathing room to experiment with new ideas.


Now, I should be clear that I do not think it would be wise to turn our backs on the market altogether. Just as nature needs a balance of selective pressure and resource surplus in order to maximize evolutionary innovation, I believe that if we can find the better balance between selection and surplus, then we will be better able to power economic innovation.


Economic Darwinists have it backwards. Whereas they argue that a strong society can only come from a strong economy, I think that a strong and free society will necessarily lead to a strong economy. 

If we seek to first build a better society, then we will have a better economy.

Did Oil Save the Whales? What Whales Should Teach Us About the Future of Energy

What if oil tanker trucks had legs? Imagine millions of great lumbering beasts with bellies of black gold, gathered in roving herds on an endless frontier. An inexhaustible supply of crude oil just walking across the grasslands waiting for those with the courage and expertise to go out and take it. Each animal worth tens of thousands of dollars, the beasts are chased down by brave men with fortunes in their dreams. Teams of charging horses raise clouds of dust as hollering men lean from speeding wagons to fire bullets and spears into the fleeing giants. A frontier town becomes a boom town; the new epicenter of an energy economy based on the capture, processing, delivery, sale, and resale of beast oil. Steam trains deliver the black stuff to consumers in the old world and new, always clamoring for more of the stuff, for heating, lighting, and industrial applications.

Believe it or not as little as 160 years ago, the world was living through this exact bio-steam-punk existence. Only instead the oil-filled beasts were found not on the frontier, but in the endless oceans. Sophisticated wooden ships sailed waters from the arctic to antarctic, and from Brazil to Africa in search of whales and the oil in their bellies. Places like New Bedford, Massachusetts, became the hub of an energy economy which delivered the oil all over the world. Next time you go to flip on a light switch, take a moment to appreciate that just a century and a half ago, people all over the world were using the rendered fat of giant ocean-dwelling mammals in order to light their homes!

Whale oil was used in staggering quantities, mostly for use in illumination, but also other industrial applications such as soap production were common. Whale oil was so popular, by the mid 1850’s tens of thousands of whales were being slaughtered for whale oil each year. Whale oil was a booming industry, but it was also becoming more and more difficult to find enough whales, as those waters near the east coast of the United States had rapidly become depleted. The price of whale oil was on the rise, hitting a high of between $1.30 and $2.50 a gallon (the equivalent of ~$37 to $71/gallon in 2015 dollars).

It was around this time that a Canadian chemist by the name of Abraham Gresener had identified a means to derive liquid kerosene from coal, oil or bitumin. Kerosene burned more cleanly and was much cheaper than whale oil, at ~60cents/gallon. The superior quality and price of kerosene as an illuminant marked the beginning of the age of oil power and a steady decline in the whale oil industry.

Thus, oil saved the whales… or so the story goes.

But of course, it’s not so simple.

This article from PBS Newshour lays out some of the interesting complexity surrounding the transition from whale oil to kerosene for lighting homes and businesses in the mid 19th century. In addition to kerosene and whale oil, another popular fuel for illumination called camphene was made up from a mixture of alcohol (distilled as normal) and turpentine (a pine tree extract).

By all accounts, camphene was by far the leading lamp fuel.
In 1862, a tax of $2.00 a gallon was imposed on beverage alcohol and camphene was forced off the market. Since the Pennsylvania oil fields were in the process of opening, the whales really had nothing to do with the emergence of the kerosene industry.

Thus, it seems that by imposing an inordinately high tax on drinking alcohol, the US government inadvertently forced a real competitor for kerosene off the market. Additionally, the US civil war put a strain on both the whale oil industry, as ships were diverted to military use, and the turpentine industry, as much of the southern pine forests were cut off from market, allowing the emerging Pennsylvania petroleum industry to flourish.

While this serves as an interesting side story about the involvement of external factors in technological turnover, the real problem with the “oil saved the whales” story is that the whale hunting industry didn’t die until long after kerosene was already replaced by the electric light bulb as the illuminant of choice. In fact, the peak of whale hunting for many species didn’t happen until the 1960’s (ref)! That’s right, the whale hunting industry was very much alive and well as little as 50 years ago.

While the price of whale oil never again hit the kinds of peaks that were seen in the 1850’s, the technology of oil powered ships allowed for increasingly economical extraction of whale products throughout the 20th century. Whales were a cheap source of high-quality animal fat, meat and bones, and the further ships went, the more whales they found and as long as they could turn a profit by harvesting whales, they would. While running out of whales might have eventually stopped the whale hunting, it was actually an international backlash against the hunt, and eventual international regulation which put a stop to the industrial scale extraction of whales. We decided that we didn’t want to or need to hunt whales any more, and so we put a stop to it (for the most part).

The story of whale oil is as complex and nuanced as any story of technological turnover and societal progress. The story of technological change is never a neat and tidy process because things just never happen in a vacuum. Seemingly innocuous or irrelevant factors like a new tax on drink beverages, or the outbreak of civil war can end up having huge consequences on what technologies are adopted and what direction we move as a society. Still I think it puts a powerful point on the story that in the end it was a ground level moral shift and international regulation that really put a stop to whale hunting.

Given the opportunity and education, we can collectively make the right choice.

Could Wireless Power be Weaponized?







  2. Electric cars that do not require expensive batteries.
  4. High power implanted medical devices.
  5. “Wireless” laproscopic surgery.
  6. Cheap electric air travel?






Decentralization and the Future World Order – Part II: Trust is Power

This is the second in a multi-part series (part 1 here) on what I predict will be one of the most important technological trends of 2015, the decentralization revolution. By creating a way for the transfer of value to be performed over a trustless distributed network Bitcoin has already changed the world but Bitcoin is only the tip of the decentralization iceberg.


What is power?

Physics gives us a simple definition of power as a measure of the rate of doing work. For example, when you turn on your microwave a certain amount of energy is being transferred directly into the molecules of that delicious pizza pocket. The rate at which energy can be transferred into the food would be the measure of power for your microwave, usually around 1000-1500 Watts (or 1-1.5 kilowatts). Power can similarly be measured for anything: where your microwave produces about 1kW of power, an average American vehicle delivers up to ~150kW of power, an industrial wind turbine generates ~1000-5000 kW (or 1-5 megawatts), and a nuclear power plant delivers ~1-5 million kW (or 1-5 gigawatts). 

This definition of power seems different from our more general use of the term when we talk about how powerful an individual or organization is. This kind of interpersonal power refers to the ability of an entity (such as an idea, a person, or an organization) to wield influence over people and affect the political or economic course of events. Perhaps though, these two definitions of power are not so far apart as they might seem, just as the power of an electrical plant is defined by how much work can be done using its energy output we can define interpersonal power (and by extension social, economic and political power) as the influence that an entity can have on how people expend their energy in the world.

The power an idea has over me is defined by how strong an influence that idea has in my thinking and thus how I act and expend energy in the world. For instance, I have a very strong belief and experience that two solid objects will exert force on eachother, thus I could predict that a moving baseball bat is really going to hurt if it hits me and I will move to avoid it.

Deep-seeded ideas like object-object interaction can be arrived at through direct observation of the world, but direct interaction is not the only route for ideas into the human brain. Many of our ideas about the world are instead downloaded into the brain as ideas transferred from people we trust. Trust allows us to outsource our cognitive analysis of the world, and thus understand much more than can be learned through direct interaction.

Trust is how we make predictions in a world that is too big and complicated for one person to understand

We can place in trust in anything: people, ideas, institutions etc. It is where we invest this trust that determines how we will behave in the world. From the time we are born, we must trust the ability of others to provide for us and teach us about the world before we even learn to trust our own senses. This essential role of trust also continues on into adulthood; I absolutely cannot know for sure that my food which was grown by a farmer I will never meet is going to be safe to eat, but I have to trust in the natural, economic and political structures that deliver food to my plate.

It is not an idea which is easily articulated, but I think answer is clear: Trust is a necessary underpinning of the interpersonal power we have over each other.

Trust is power.

It is by gathering together our disparate threads of trust we have been able to build the societal level power structures of civilization that we see today. Through our collected trust, centralized institutions and the ideas that underpin them have amassed great power to influence how people live their lives. In the past, trust has been concentrated into many religious and governmental organizations, but today I think the dominant institution of trust is economic.

We put trust in a great many things today. Governments, laws, police, religious institutions, corporations, doctors, but these pale in comparison to our collective trust in money. No matter where your go money can make things happen, and people have a great deal of trust in that fact. More than we trust in governments or religions, we have a global trust in the power of the dollar (in whatever form) to influence the actions of people. Religious or political fundamentalists can still create a problem once and a while, but ultimately their power is still measured in dollars and cents. Any organization without means to raise funds to support their operations has little hope of accomplishing much of anything in the world today.

Collectively we believe that a dollar has value, and in turn we as individuals put our trust in that collective value. The collective trust in the dollar is so powerful that the dollar itself has actually become the dominant metric of power. The dollar is a stand-in for trust which we lean on to establish productive relationships with untrusted individuals. If you want to make me produce food for you, then you can pay me money in order to influence me to do so with relatively little trust outside of that financial arrangement.

Money is distilled trust. 

The problem with the fiat dollar is that it is only as good as the institutional foundation on which it is based. Currencies are only as good as the trust in the institutions that support them, a fact that is obviously on display in the market dynamics of the foreign currency exchange. 

Cryptocurrencies offer us an alternative means for establishing trust between each other, and their advantages are manyfold. Instead of being based on a fallible and corruptible system of governments and central banks, cryptocurrencies have clear rules on how value is injected into the network, how it can be transferred, and in some cases how it can be destroyed. Cryptocurrencies offer mathematical predictability.

Cryptocurrencies are also much more resistant to corruption due to a flat network topology. That is to day, that like the checks and balances that limit the power of any one individual in a government, crytocurrency networks decentralize their trust very evenly over the network.

These advantages of cryptocurrency are going to become increasingly clear as normal collapses in fiat currencies around the world, something that happens with regularity and is in no way out of the ordinary, will naturally lead people to seek alternate stores of wealth. Whether it is the Russian Ruble, the Argentinian Peso, or some other fiat currency, complex currency systems based on human control are simply too unpredictable and too corruptible to compete with the mathematical simplicity of cryptocurrency. Perhaps it will not be Bitcoin that ultimately gains marketshare as the easiest and most commonly used cryptocurrency, but some form of cryptocurrency is here to stay.

In a world where trust is power, the simplest and most reliable system to establish trust between individuals is destined to win. If fiat currency is distilled trust, then crytocurrencies are a much stronger brew.


The beauty of crytocurrency goes far beyond simply holding and transferring value. Because they exist on electronic networks, decentralized technologies will allow us to program trust into our world in a way which has not been possible before. Through things like smart contracts we can use decentralized tech to build mathematically defined structures as simple as an agreement to sell goods, to something as complicated as a government. In my next post I will discuss the exciting possibility of cryptogovernance and its potential to reinvigorate inefficient institutions. 


This will be the first in a multi-part series on what I predict will be one of the most important technological trends of 2015, the decentralization revolution. By creating a way for the transfer of value to be performed over a trustless distributed network Bitcoin has already changed the world but Bitcoin is only the tip of the decentralization iceberg. 


A technological revolution is underway. An array of technologies are being developed that aim to do nothing less than disrupt the deepest fabric of the current world order. In a world where trust is power, decentralization steals the power from the hands of centralized institutions like corporations, banks, and even governments and puts it into the hands of the network. The revolution is beginning with a race to build the next generation of decentralized technologies that may soon replace internet giants like Dropbox or Facebook, but this is only the beginning of a transition to a future world order of decentralized power.

Lets start with a simple question: What is decentralization?

Many people equate decentralization with cryptographic networks like Bitcoin, which combine cryptography with decentralization, but decentralized applications do not inherently require encryption. The prototypical example of a modern decentralized technology would be Bittorrent, a technology with no inherent requirement for encryption. At its base, decentralization is the simple process of taking information and distributing copies among some sort of network so as to enhance data accessibility, security, redundancy, and congruence (consistency between parties).

The idea of decentralization is actually as old as communication itself. Cavemen would share their knowledge of hunting techniques and weapon technology among their tribe in order to be sure that the loss of no single individual would mean the loss of vital information. As humans created increasingly elaborate systems of exchange, organizations learned that keeping two or more copies of important documents was essential to ensuring their security.

The central problem of decentralization is that it also greatly increases the likelihood that information could fall into the hands of untrusted individuals. Thus, balancing the need for privacy and security meant finding a balance between centralized and decentralized structures for information sharing. To solve the age-old problem of privacy in shared information, cryptographic encoding or information was developed. Since at least Medieval times, people have been using simple ciphers to encode messages which they wished to share with only specific individuals.

In the 20th century, cryptography advanced greatly particularly during the world wars, when warring nations needed to be able to move around large amounts of information while preventing it from falling into the hands of the enemy. This spurned great innovations in both encryption and decryption, with both sides pouring resources into figuring out what their enemy was planning. It is widely believed, that the breaking of the Enigma code by British code-breakers which included one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, Alan Turing, was key to winning the war.

With the help of the universal computers Alan Turing helped invent, increasingly secure encryption algorithms were developed over the last half of the 20th century. Using these modern encryption algorithms, we can hide information well enough to confidently exchange sensitive financial information over a network which is essentially open (the internet). Thus, cryptography means that anyone eavesdropping on your web communications with your bank would have no way to understand the messages.

The Bitcoin blockchain is a distributed, encrypted ledger which stores the holdings of users of the network in individually encrypted data. This way, those using the network can be sure to agree on what amount of Bitcoin each user has, while only allowing those with the keys to be able to unlock their data and send some amount of Bitcoin to another user (see more here). Using the encrypted blockchain, Bitcoin is able to seamlessly transfer a limited supply of units of value between individuals in a way which does not rely on backing from any one central authority to provide value to the currency.

The core advance of the blockchain is that it allows the distribution of highly secure and highly congruent information throughout a network with no need for a centralizing authority.

As a side-thought, I would like to point out that although the software instantiation of the blockchain which underlies Bitcoin is totally dependent on digital computation, I see no reason a similar system based on mechanical encryption could not also be possible. Even if we never had invented computers I think we eventually would have come up with a sort of steam punk Bitcoin through which we could distribute value or congruent information using a cryptographic ledger system. 

Bittorrent was the first application to show that sharing of encrypted information over a decentralized network could be used to transfer value securely and efficiently, but there is no reason that decentralized technology could not be used to share any kind of information in a trustless network.

The MaidSafe and Storj projects have the ambitious goal of allowing anyone to share anything securely and efficiently over a decentralized network, something that could have deep consequences for the way that the internet works. If anyone can use the distributed network to share a website, then this could eliminate the needs for centralized servers which currently serve up websites when you visit them. Under these protocols, the cost of storing and sharing data with other users of the network who donate some part of their bandwidth and hard-drive space in exchange for the right to use the network. While some might worry that such a network would be used primarily for content piracy (as has been the case for Bittorrent), the integration of the Safecoin cryptocurrency with the MaidSafe network may actually make it easier than ever for content producers to monetize their content.

According to the project leader, both Maidsafe and Storj could be used to develop alternative, distributed versions of popular services such as Dropbox, Facebook, or even Google. Distributed versions of these centralized services could offer advantages for security and failure resistance. MaidSafe could also dramatically lower the barriers to entry for new players trying to compete such internet institutions as Facebook. While I have doubts whether the massive data-crunching necessary for Google could be pulled off on a decentralized network, a decentralized social network seems an obvious applications for MaidSafe.

Whereas MaidSafe, Storj and Bitcoin are specific applications of distributed technology, the Ethereum project aims to go much further and create a general distributed computer language on top of which anyone could easily develop an application like MaidSafe or Bitcoin. They are essentially trying to create a sort of decentralization operating system on top of which it would be possible to build any sort of program. By allowing the secure sharing of computer programs, Ethereum could allow the creation of advanced smart contracts with defined limits on how and when their funds could be disperse, or potentially even much more complex entities such a corporations.

2014 was a bit of a down year for Bitcoin, with coins falling from a value as high as $1000 to around $230 today. While this might be taken as a sign that the future of Bitcoin is in some danger, it is absolutely clear that it does not reflect at all on the wider cryptocurrency ecosystem. The ability to distribute trust through a network through the use of a Blockchain is a world changing technology, and the value of one currency does nothing to change its utility as a method of exchange. Saying that a drop in the price of bitcoin makes it irrelevant is like saying that the drop in the price of computer chips makes them irrelevant. Bitcoin is just the first in a series of decentralized applications that are already beginning to compete with centralized services.

Decentralization is becoming the gold standard for when you truly need to trust something, and in a world where trust is power it seems inevitable that decentralized technologies are destined to become the new nexus of power. In my next post I will discuss the past present and future of trust and power, and how that has been reshaped by decentralization.


I would like to make a recommendation for a subreddit and a podcast that I think that those stimulated by this article might enjoy following, /r/Rad_Decentralization and the Decentralize Podcast

Summoned – Part 6 of Isaac’s Escape







“Nothing right now thank you,” said Isaac.



Kari assumed her smooth narrator voice.














“Right, I keep forgetting that you are a ghost”

“Yes sir, please follow me”









Isaac sat slowly into the chair.






Once there was a fisherman.


Every day this fisherman would throw out his net four times.



















“Ask, fisherman”





This enraged the beast, who began to glow red hot.





Isaac found himself breathing heavily along with the fisherman.