Blockchain technology is the result of six decades of science, mostly in cryptography, asymmetric cryptography was hypothesized in the 60s, RSA invented twice, first classified and then re-discovered, then elliptic curve cryptography developed in the 90s, began to be used around 2005, and elliptic curve cryptography made it possible to build the first distributed ledger in 2008, Bitcoin, which introduced economic incentives as a way to store and validate the ledger in a distributed network.

Then, Ethereum in 2014. Gavin Wood who built Ethereum describes his vision as "building state into nature itself", a global all-encompassing medium where "trusting a third party will be as archaic as reckoning on an abacus is today".

Part of what the blockchain is built on is that you can read the history as it has been played out, and the use of elders and shamans has had similar roles. That’s possible because it has global consensus, the network as a whole has an incentive to store the history, as a collective, with miners being employed by the network similar to how a flower uses bees for pollination.

The "network-state" as a rule-space commons

The blockchain as an early version of its type of technology is a beautiful vision, Gavin Wood talks about it as a "rule space commons", a public utility, Jacque Fresco talked about a "global computer utility". It uses cryptography in a way where its trivial to support billions of users, all authenticated by mathematics, which is a form of organization that has not been possible before and that has roots that go back to John Nash and even further.

From national consensus with government to a technology-based global consensus with a free market for governance services

There is a trend towards large-scale consensus, the nation-state is a good example, and to go from a nation-state to a “global state” seems like a very continuous trend. Because transactions are authenticated with asymmetric cryptography, a science that has developed since the 60s, there is no need to have a mechanism of human oversight (like institutions within nation-states), there is instead a global authentication mechanism based on innovations from the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century.

That cryptography has certain properties that make it trivial to scale to billions of people all operating within a single state (voluntarily and opt-in), is one example of that blockchain technology is "trustless", as in, authentication is done with a "trust technology", asymmetric cryptography, rather than a human organ, acting as an extension of the species similar to a book or a telescope or the media and McLuhans' "prostheses of the mind".

These "network-states" differ from nation-states in that they allocate trust based on markets rather than government, that is made possible because the network comes to consensus without the need for ideology, and are an example of "swarm organization".^[1]

Is there a bias to think that a "technology of trust" would organize the way human brains do?

There is a common trend to approach blockchain technology as if it was meant to be organized based on how the human brain does trust (community, hierarchies, etc), as people apply the world they knows onto a new technology which they are not familiar with. ^{[2, 3]}

As Marshal McLuhan said, humans use technology to extend their capacity, and "technology organs" do not always look the same as the human equivalent, a wheel is not like a pair of legs, and one possibility is that a "technology for trust" will look nothing like previous social organization, and nothing like how we thought it would look. ^[4]

BitLattice (2018) as the third generation, after Bitcoin (2008) and Ethereum (2014)

BitLattice is probably the third generation, after Bitcoin in 2008 and Ethereum in 2014, it uses a new state data structure, a multi-dimensional lattice instead of a chain.

The blockchain is limited since it is a chain and transactions are in a sequence. The BitLattice project, which has been in development for a year and is now in internal test net phase, is using a lattice instead, and “proof-of-structure” to verify the integrity of the state across shards.

Pseudonym parties as an example of the value of global consensus

The idea of pseudonym parties was published by Bryan Ford under MIT in 2007, the year before Craig Wright published the Bitcoin whitepaper, and the two ideas are connected in the sense that pseudonym parties relies on the innovations that came with blockchain technology.

His pseudonym parties was the first personhood that could also be pseudo-anonymous, thereby encompassing all people, giving equal legal recognition to all genders, sexualities and races.

The idea for "online pseudonym parties"^[5] builds on Bryan Fords work, and places the pseudonym event in the digital space instead. The dApp will need a post-blockchain system like BitLattice, which is currently in internal test net with a public test net probably in a few months.

The nation-state as a computer

What a nation-state is, it is an information structure, a "computer" more or less, using rigid hierarchies to process information in a deterministic way. If you look at how the computer came into existence in the 30s, it replaced "human computers" that were used before that, a room full of people that sat with abacuses and calculated programs.

What blockchains are is just early versions of using a technology instead of human-based states, and since people are attached to their nation-state, it is a bit difficult to see that (a form of bias).

State becoming an information technology

Look at all data that exists for exponential trends, Ray Kurzweil is one of the biggest names in that field and accurately predicted trends in the 90s that many other failed to see, that the human genome project led by Craig Venter would be a success (many doubted that because they did not understand exponential trends. )

With blockchains, state is becoming an information technology, and when things become information technologies, they tend to go exponential.

References

1. The Swarm Computer - Dana Edwards

2. The blockchain paradox: Why distributed ledger technologies may do little to transform the economy

3. Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

4. Is the idea that trust could be offloaded from the human brain, one that is counter-intuitive?

5. Online Pseudonym Parties: A foundation for proof-of-personhood in the web 3.0 jurisdiction

6. The Network State - teleport.org (2015)

7. On mega-cities as literal motherboards for nation-states as computers, and the reformation to "network-states"

8. Rule of law 2.0 - Towards a definition

9. The demise of the nation state - The Guardian (2018)