Bitcoin is the First Human Hive-Mind Supercomputer

Both the nation-state and the traditional corporation are on extinction notice. If the developer community returns to its roots, it can usher in the hive-mind age.

Yulissa Tagle

by Justin Goro, with interstitial commentary by the Editor.

Justin Goro is the pseudonym of a brilliant friend. If he weren’t also an amazing developer, one hopes he would write more like this. Here, Goro shows how good protocol design helps humans become hive minds. If so much of the “crypto” shit show has gotten you down in recent years, remember where it all started. And think about where it could go. After all, there is an inevitability to the social singularity. Justin and I bonded over this insight. In any case, I have taken the liberty of editing these excerpts lightly. Otherwise, it remains as compelling as the day it was written.

In the early days of Bitcoin, it became clear that extending the blockchain to do general-purpose processing would enable developers to decentralize just about anything. We wouldn’t only take power back from state institutions, but smart contracts would replace entire corporations. An early example of this in action is Storj, an Ethereum-powered app that promises to completely decentralize and distribute the technology behind Dropbox. The motive to decentralize all the things has unified developers across multiple political ideologies to put aside their theoretical differences. What matters isn’t from whom we devolve power, it’s that we devolve power.

In the process, we seem to be opening up a Pandora’s Box of social re-organization that might leave the human race resembling something akin to a synchronized ant colony rather than a troop of monkeys with computers.

Goro’s writing already has a distinct ethos—a commitment beyond Bored Apes and other bullshit. Decentralization is meant to be for its own sake, which is to say, for the project of breaking up power centers that, if they are not already unjust, will soon devolve into something sinister. Have developers opened up “Pandora’s Box of social reorganization” since 2017? Or did too many get distracted by get-rich-quick schemes? In the short term, I’d say the latter. But by getting through the evolutionary bottleneck of scams, failed experiments, and regulatory zeal, a Cambrian explosion lies ahead of us.

The Unifying Theory of Decentralization

Most ideologies concerned with human welfare divide the population into 2 groups: the rich minority ruling class and the excluded masses. For Marxists, the ruling elite consists almost entirely of capitalists, whereas the masses are composed of workers. For libertarians, the ruling elite is a mixture of politicians and the businesses who support them, whereas the masses are the individuals excluded from this relationship. A great deal of friction between the broad church of the Left and the umbrella of libertarian factions has been over who in society belongs to the elite and who belongs to the exploited.

However, one unifying ideal shared by both is a desire to take power from the elite and distribute it to the broader population (I’ve covered this in more detail previously). Stated another way, most people across the ideological spectrum want to decentralize power from the powerful centers of society to the powerless masses.

In other words, decentralize the corporation and decentralize authority. Let people opt into those systems that comport with their conception of the good. Let people do business with those distributed systems of value creation that comport with their conceptions of the good. No need for ideological warfare in an age of experimentation.

One Type of Developer

Enter the blockchain. No center of power is safe from its decentralizing powers. Whether it’s the concentrations of data in large corporations like Facebook and Google or functions of the state such as ID issuing, public good provision, and welfare safety nets, blockchain startups are threatening to unwind all power structures in society. Both the nation-state and the corporation are on extinction notice. Developers in this space have come together to work on bringing the unifying human value of decentralization to life while shifting the traditional ideological battle lines out to the “broad discussion” slack channel periphery.

How prescient was this? If I’m not mistaken, Goro wrote this during the same year Presearch was founded—or close enough. Since its humble beginnings, the decentralized search firm has not yet toppled the giant, but it is on a fantastic growth trajectory. While many boomers, Xers, and even a handful of Gen Z use Facebook, people are quickly turning to decentralized social media like Nostr and Signal.

[…] One of the first rules of economics is that humans respond to incentives. Up until now, very few people have had the power to craft society-wide incentives without resorting to coercive force or setting up influential companies. Bitcoin ushered in an era of programmable incentives that everyone has access to.

Tokens are the glucose of the Human Hive Mind

Bitcoin requires a lot of human labour and electricity to keep it going. Miners often invest great resources and take great risks in digitally securing the network. In return, they’re rewarded with the Bitcoin token. This scarce token has been enough to make the Bitcoin blockchain the most powerful supercomputer in the world in terms of raw processing power.

The power of the blockchain is only made possible by the humans who operate it, and in order to mobilize those humans, tokens coordinate the incentives through the price mechanism. Without tokens, the entire ecosystem would die, which is why statements by large corporate leaders that blockchains are more interesting than bitcoin are like saying that brains are more interesting than glucose. Sure, brains are where all the cool stuff happens in the human mind, but without glucose, a brain is a dead lump of jelly. Similarly, tokens are what keep the blockchain alive and humming.

The truth about decentralized applications is that they’re really a host of humans acting together to achieve a group goal. Instead of goodwill or trust, the coordinating mechanism is the glue of blockchain-secured tokens.

In the time since Goro dazzled readers with such ideas, none of the above has ceased to be true. It’s just gone underappreciated. Many Bitcoiners and OG crypto developers were motivated as much by mission and morality as by money. Ironically, more of those motivated by the former didn’t completely lose their asses, while those who just wanted to jump on the Bored-Ape bandwagon or get sucked into the worst actors in the DeFi craze, got rekt. I’m keen to re-expose readers to this idea because it can help more overcome The Leviathan Formulation.

I guess Satoshi Nakamoto knew. In the bitcoin example, the proof-of-work algorithm doesn’t take place on the blockchain. It happens off-chain on mining hardware, and only a proof of all the labour and coordination is recorded on-chain. Bitcoin and Ethereum miners have to provision their own hardware, calculate the profitability of electricity usage, install special-purpose software, account for accelerated hardware depreciation, and actually mine — all in service of tokens. Like little ants scurrying around to do the bidding of their token queen, human users assemble and distribute every blockchain without fail. Each successful token economy will create its own army of diligent ants. For now the majority of tokens are simply to secure blockchains, but as examples such as storj have demonstrated, the ants can be made to run Dropbox-like services. Perhaps soon, the ants will create social safety nets, organize efficient allocation of funding capital, and create trustworthy news sources.

The important insight to take away from this article is that blockchains won’t become the great processors at the center of humanity. Instead, they will act as the connective tissue between humans and machines, mediated by incentives. If humans are neurons in the great human hive mind, blockchain tokens act as the connective tissue and neurotransmitters.

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In parallel to distributed ledgers, some innovators have been working on Swarm Intelligence, which hearkens to this notion of a hivemind. Josh Ketry of The Rationalist makes the case that collective intelligence can improve collective decision-making at a societal scale.

Human Swarm Intelligence: The Most Powerful Tool For Humanity You Likely Never Heard Of

I remain hopeful but agnostic on this matter. Instead of enabling people to self-organize according to their various conceptions of the good, some forms of swarm intelligence seem to blur perspectives and preferences together. And there is undoubtedly value in this approach. But as I wrote in The Social Singularity, the great lateralization will need somehow to include the power of incentives, community self-organization, and increased self-sovereignty. Could it involve the merger of distributed ledgers, artificial intelligence, and swarm intelligence? Seems plausible. We shall see.

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The Mind of Earth

The evolution from nation-states and corporations to decentralized networks of smart contracts will transform the human race into a collective hive mind as we internalize the mechanisms of social coordination that once used to be the duty of the Crown.

But it won’t be one where the individual is squashed. In this post-collectivist future, the individual won’t be either supreme or irrelevant. Instead, the choices of individuals will be so strongly influenced by programmable incentives that distinctions between individual welfare and the greater good will lose meaning. Presently, groups of individuals can gather together and exploit other groups for differential gain. The net effect of such action always undermines the overall wealth of society. Once the Incentive Engine decentralizes everything, individual action that undermines the welfare of the broader human race will be rendered so expensive as to be impossible. Whenever a group conspires against the majority, it will automatically create a profitable incentive to have itself disrupted by better technology. The giant brain that is humanity will begin to act in its own interest, which will simultaneously be congruent with the welfare of the individual.

I hope you look forward to the coming hive mind as much as I do.

We are our own liberators. We are the blockchain.

Thanks to my old friend Justin Goro for keeping steadfast in his dedication to coding.