Written by: Christopher Goes, Co-founder of Anoma; Compiled by: Tia, Techub News

"Trump's issuance of meme coins has enlarged the window for us to issue personal tokens, expand our imagination, and one person can What will the possible future heterotopia of human-issued tokens look like?"

Recently, I am reading something related to anthropology. Typically, some economic classics assume that the primitive economy was barter, and that money emerged to solve the double-coincidence-of-wants. This assumption is taken for granted in many places (as is the Anoma vision book), but if you look up history, as David Graeber did, you will find that this is obviously nonsense.

Early societies, and today's small societies, didn't trade cows for chickens (at least not most of the time), nor did they invent Coin to solve the double coincidence of needs because they didn't need to. Instead, they use credit. Credit resolves the coincidence of dual needs in a beautiful and elegant way, and further completes the integration over time.

If I were the butcher and you were the baker (I may not need bread now, but I definitely will in the future). If we live in the same town and you happen to be nearby for a while, we can simply keep track of who gave what to whom and settle the accounts on a regular basis. Of course, this requires enough repeated interactions and enough trust. But in small communities, both conditions can be met.

Nevertheless, products still need to be differentiated. As a result, communities often choose a specific commodity as the unit of account and measurement (but the actual exchange is not in that specific commodity). Arguably, the “store of value” function of money is mostly virtual rather than physical: while some farmers may own more cattle or grain than others, the most important asset held by residents is often the trust of the community, This allows them to get what they need when they need it so that supply shocks can be dealt with more easily. This trust is a form of credit that can be issued by anyone (but if they start asking for too much without offering something in return, their neighbors may no longer be willing to accept their credit). The accounting of this credit is virtual, tracked not precisely through spreadsheets and central banks but roughly through observation and gossip, and it is scale-free because no matter the size of the operation Anyone (individuals or institutions) can issue credit, so there is no monopoly.

Most of us no longer live in a world of free-scale credit money, for one simple reason: In a world where money is physical, this kind of trust accounting cannot scale. In broad economic networks, most interactions are with strangers whom people will never see again. So we are nowLiving in a world of fiat fiat currencies. In the world of fiat currencies, where money is issued by only a few (hopefully) trustworthy institutions, such as banks and banks, people trade not personal credit in their daily interactions, but debt issued to these institutions. This solves the trust accounting problem between strangers, because strangers only need to trust the accuracy of the same institution and accounting mechanism, and they do not need to trust each other.

But as a collaborative mechanism, legal currency has two fatal flaws.

First, fiat currencies centralize trust and thus lose fault tolerance. The issuance of currency is limited to a very small number due to the network effects of units of account, stores of value, and media of exchange, the difficulty of establishing appropriate accounting mechanisms, and the tendency to belligerently enact stupid laws. Control of these institutions became a primary point of contention. It is possible that a small number of people who put personal interests above public interests become controllers of the currency supply mechanism and use part of the currency for their own private purposes. Perhaps they fail to do so, and the negative externalities created by elites competing for control of the money supply also contaminate the discursive field with "alternative facts" to the point where the conventional mechanisms of social feedback and collaboration simply no longer work. Only decentralization of trust can achieve fault tolerance.

Secondly, fiat credit money currently relies on measurement. In order for us to make payments using a debt instrument without trusting each other, we must agree on a trusted third party and the exact payment amount so that we can feel comfortable walking away from each other once the deal is over and never expect to see each other again. compensate. If the main benefit of the good paid for is easily estimable, limited to the party purchasing it and its present self (e.g. a sandwich), no estimate of its future value is required, but if the benefit gained increases over time ( such as knowledge), which is an absolutely terrible way to measure it.

I believe that many of the dystopian elements of today’s world can be traced to these two fatal flaws. War, climate change, nuclear proliferation, lack of public education, pollution of information sharing, and similar phenomena have their roots largely in poor decisions made by elites competing for office or the resulting propaganda (such as persuading citizens to pay) . This is the result of this centralization.

In contrast, free-scale credit money decentralizes trust and shifts measurement toward the future. My credit is of value to you if and only if you expect me to be able to repay you in some form, since I have nothing to offer you now. While the parties exchanging debt can walk away, the parties exchanging credit (which may be heterogeneous) have a common interest in each other's future success. If I teach you something and you owe me money, I don't care if what I teach you is right or wrong, I just want to convince you to pay me more money. If I teach you something and you pay me with credit, then I probably want to teach you something correct and useful so that your credit will be valuable to me in the future.

In usIn today’s world, fiat currency, trust and money are misaligned, so misaligned that they have become inverted. To readjust them, we must readjust control and trust over currency issuance and return to a world of free-scale credit money.

What would a world of free-scale credit money look like? In our world, the issuance of currency is tightly controlled, often only available to and to specific entities it authorizes (such as banks). If money is to be credit, re-integrated with trust, then these restrictions don't make sense because trust is distributed and credit is personal, so let's change some basic assumptions. Assume that everyone can print money whenever they want, as much as they want (although they can voluntarily limit their ability to do so), and send it to anyone they want. Suppose that individuals and institutions around the world are constantly creating new currency denominations now and in the future. We also assume that currency denominations are content-addressed: who (cryptographically) currently holds the currency, who (cryptographically) can issue it, and how much of the currency they can issue and under what conditions (in self-limiting). The local name system and consensus algorithm handle human-readable mapping and temporal continuity.

In this hypothetical world, currency is actually of little use for collaboration so far because everyone is using a different currency. How do these heterogeneous instruments serve as stores of value, units of account, or media of exchange?

Let’s think about this further. The agents who print money are not just individuals, they may also be institutions that want to provide their constituents with functions such as store of value, unit of account, and medium of exchange in some spatial realm (whether digital or physical). But in this world of free-scale credit currencies, competition for currencies is fierce because anyone can switch the currency they use at any time, so institutions wishing to issue currencies must have an initial distribution and issuance schedule for their potential users. use. In such areas, a currency chosen by a group of people can serve as a store of value, unit of account, and medium of exchange if the group can agree on the currency. But what if the agency starts sending money to places people don’t like? Because someone else can simply join in and issue another amount of money, copying (and possibly changing) the distribution and changing the recipients.

You might object because the switching costs are not zero. Imagine if all the items in the supermarket were repriced, the operating costs would be very high. In a world where money is primarily physical, conversion costs are high, but not in a world where money is primarily digital. In a world where money is digitized, stores of value, units of account, and media of exchange can be easily decomposed through automated price conversions and exchanges.

In this world of free-scale credit money, new money is constantly being created, and most potential money does not exist now, but in the future. The current competition for value is not based on scarcity, but on potential future retroactive funding allocations. Because funding is competitively selected, what is expected to be incorporated into future retroactive funding allocations is based on the value that future people and institutions believe contributors from the past (our present) ultimately provide to the present (our future).

Now, you might ask, how do we keep track of scarce physical goods in a world with unlimited money? Physical goods are expensive to produce and (at least compared to digital goods) tend to provide most of their value to private parties in the near future. The current payment accounting system does a decent job of organizing the production of physical goods, so making regular old payments on receipt seems like a reasonable solution to me. Individuals and organizations that produce physical goods can operate in the world as normal, simply accepting credit from parties they trust rather than sovereign debt.

Payments for physical goods also benefit from the stability of the unit of account. In this world of free-scale credit money, currency options with self-issuing controls can provide necessary stability. Institutions that issue currency can themselves impose limits on the issuance rate so that issuance cannot exceed a few percentage points per year (compared to the central bank's existing targets), thus keeping the unit of account reasonable.

Now, you may encounter a question: how to interact with untrusted parties? It’s great to travel, interact and trade with distant places – in a world like this, do we need to give that up?

It’s time to put the magic of mechanics to work. Let us assume that there is some liquidity in the credit markets such that any currency issued is freely convertible with any other currency as long as someone wants to create some liquidity. Now, if I want to pay you but we don't trust each other, all I need to do is find a path in the liquidity graph between us. We no longer need to use the same unit of account, store of value, or payment method to interact with each other—all we need is a path to connectivity. Of course, not all paths are equal - if there is a lot of liquidity between us, I can pay you a lot without the price changing much, but if there is little liquidity, I can only pay you a little - but this is exactly what reflects the density (and directionality) of trust!

But the skeptics among you may object that this does sound like a mega-financialized world. Imagine that everyone's credit is being traded - shouldn't we be winning usage wars through an endless game of self-marketing? I believe that free-scale credit money significantly reduces the network effects of money compared to today because it removes the need for consensus on which specific currencies are used in any given interaction, but some network effects remain. Also, there are obviously a lot of new forms of money out there these days (just take a look at the list here ), and they do seem to take a lot of time, effort, and money (somewhere, here's onetrap...) compete with each other.

This is my last piece of mechanical magic: the promise of future airdrops. Airdrops are already a common mechanism in blockchain circles, and they are often used to try to spread a new form of currency, but as currently deployed, they have a fatal flaw: time centralization. Airdrops target a specific token snapshot at a specific point in time, which creates a discontinuity in the incentive space: a token is valuable to hold before the airdrop snapshot date, but suddenly becomes less valuable after the airdrop snapshot date . I suggest a slight modification: instead of taking snapshots in time, take snapshots over time.

Future retroactive funders, through points airdrops, encourage parties who want to receive airdrops to purchase relevant points as early as possible (and support relevant parties to do actual work), so even if prices fluctuate, the amount of points increases over time It will also be higher. Block airdrops can be safely committed in advance without creating strange discontinuities in the incentive space, and can even be repeated to continually adjust incentives. As expected, the complexity is greatly simplified because if you are right about something valuable, the best strategy is to buy and hold.

Currently, in today’s world, money and trust are inversely related, as control of currency issuance is controlled by actors that few people trust. I think it's for this reason that it took me a long time to understand the points made in this blog post, because I hate working with money so much that I'm very hesitant to design any system that uses money. (especially when it involves a lot of measurements) I initially tried to avoid it (bad idea, turns out it just leads to more measurement complexity...). But once you combine currency and trust, even just abstractly in the design of sociotechnical systems, the dominoes magically start to fall into place, as if it was all predestined.

A common problem in cryptocurrency systems is the problem of key recovery. Encryption keys are weird things, strings of nothing, and most people forget them or lose pieces of paper (I certainly did). The design of social key recovery systems suggests that we tag specific combinations of friends that allow recovery of our keys. While better than no key recovery at all, this solution requires a lot of awkward manual interaction to specify and update this trust graph, and regardless How, it's hard to know exactly how to choose the right people because who people trust changes over time.

However, if we combine keys, trust, and money, solutions emerge naturally. Key recovery requires trust, so we must choose one or more people to trust. Who better to help me get my keys back than someone who has my credit? Our incentives are very aligned - they want me to do well so that the credits they hold have value in the future if I can access my account (which holds many other credits and allows me to post more) ! All we need is a threshold, pulling 2/3 directly from the distributed system, which ensures that relevant parties can securely agree on my new public key, even if less than 1/3 is offline.

Another highly sought-after pair of hypothetical protocols are those that enable universal basic income and proof of humanity. I mention them in pairs because I think they all care about the same question: What does it mean to be human? It is impossible to design a test that can distinguish humans from other things, because humans have no essence: I am only human insofar as you think I am. At various points in history, laws classified certain groups of people as subhuman and even assigned them numerical scores, which seems abhorrent to us today. Accordingly, I argue that the idea of ​​a universal basic income is equality, and equality is in the eye of the beholder and requires both parties to agree.

These desires are two sides of the same coin, because there is no test, only equality, and equality based on human nature must be determined by people. We could each keep a list of everyone else's public keys and pay each other an equal amount of our own free-scale credit currency every second, but that would require too much interaction and wouldn't provide any future predictability (This is probably the main UBI benefit) and fails to take advantage of what we assume are attributes of humans: that they carry information, identities, and encryption keys in time.

Instead, I propose a small modification based on this dual basis of a bilateral test of humanity and the continuation of humanity in the future: a heterogeneous UBI. We only need one ingredient: trust (and some cryptographic signatures). You and I meet in person, decide to trust each other, and cryptographically sign a commitment to the ongoing creation of one of our respective credit tokens per unit of time. These tokens can be sent to each other, but I think there is a better solution that creates some "trust liquidity" immediately and allows for future revocation: deposit both tokens into a multisig account, which in turn locks them xy=k (or similar) automated market maker curve. This allows others to transact through us and allows us to leverage human connections to balance other inequalities in the network.

Each party can unilaterally sign a message to a multi-signature account, which will cause it to withdraw liquidity and burn two credit tokens, so if you decide in the future that you no longer trust me, you can revoke That trust, but if others still trust me, I still have "trust fluidity" with them.

Of course, anyone can create a non-human crypto identity and start printing money with it, but unless they can convince other people to trust it, they won’t gain any additional liquidity because All paths in the liquidity graph must pass through them. No one wants to commit to a fake identity in exchange for their credit, because they have no reason to expect anyone else to want that! The attacker can bribe other people to trust it, but they have to bribe enough people to make it worthwhile (inflating the supply of the bribee's token), so they end up just paying U to the bribee themselvesBI.

From this monetary network, we can perform a human proof test for any two parties (since it is relative, of course) by proving that there are many different individually valid bilateral signature linked list paths on these commitments ( There is no overlap in member public keys except at the beginning and end), which does not exist for isolated network subgraphs (because, as mentioned above, they are expensive to create).

Free-scale credit currencies and heterogeneous UBI can be issued using existing protocol primitives, roughly as follows: smart contract accounts for each issuer (as they may still need to be on multiple devices with different spending limits keys, so key recovery is only invoked when absolutely necessary), smart contract accounts for bilateral human testing of liquidity-locked relationships, Uniswap-style AMMs for facilitating exchanges, use of credit liquidity graphs such as Circles UBI) multi-hop exchange routing for path-finding, a blockchain to order transactions and prevent double-spends, and recursive ZKP for retroactive point airdrops.

It is important to note that privacy is critical to free-scale credit currencies. If trust is not personal, then it is possible to threaten someone for trusting someone else. To provide the necessary privacy, all of this would have to be implemented on a fully private basis, possibly including ZKP for individual accounts and some threshold FHE for batch swaps, liquidity provision, and trust-minimized private cross-chains.

Making some misuse of Foucault, we could call this world of free-scale credit money a heterotopia. For Foucault, a heterotopia is a place outside all places, a real place, but a place where the normal functioning of society and culture is turned upside down - cemeteries, zoos and fairs are all heterotopias . What I mean by heterotopia is not exactly heterotopia, but conceptually precise demarcation of those places that offer a temporary break from the rules of everyday cultural places. Instead, what I feel is a heterotopia that is both complete and fragmented.

Brotherhouses and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia. If we think of a ship as a floating space, a place without a place, it exists independently, is closed to itself, and is endowed with infinity at the same time. of the sea, from port to port, from nail to nail, from Going from brothel to brothel, it goes all the way to the colonies, looking for their most precious treasures hidden in the gardens, and you will understand why, from the sixteenth century to the present day, ships were not only a great tool for the economic development of our civilization (I am today did not speak of this), and at the same time the greatest reserve of imagination. This ship is a heterotopia par excellence. In a civilization without ships, dreams dry up, espionage replaces adventure, and police replaces pirates.

Modernity no longer has any ships - and not just because there are fewer treasures to plunder - those former "heterotopias par excellence" have been instrumentalized into cost per kilogram kilometers and transport APIs , and is organized and regulated in terms of U.S. dollars. ISaid heterotopia is a heterotopia of values, tracked and organized in a purely virtual space, itself fragmented into a fractal Venn diagram of partially overlapping subspaces. Foucault's heterotopia implies that there is a dominant set of cultural practices and a dominant set of spaces, which are semantically opposites, but the heterotopia of value assumes no specific spatial order, but only a variety of differences .

We don’t live in a dystopia now – we live in a world heading towards a dystopia. A heterotopia is not a utopia - people will still disagree, accidents will still happen, broken hearts will still ache - but I think it is better than this world because it changes the cultural and technological basis of money to conform to human future benefits. Heterotopias are not just a matter of monetary mechanisms - money should be a small and insignificant component of culture, society, activities and traditions - and our current form of money is not that, so I will focus here on the mechanisms of monetary transformation .

Some may be concerned because they have tightly controlled the issuance of currency (only) in recent history and may react strongly to the possibility of heterotopias. While I too have a fear of violence, I think this fear can easily be exaggerated. Although the monopoly of appears to be material, in fact it is purely conceptual: once we stop believing in it, it disappears. Heterotopias smash this monopoly into bits (nothing but bytes). What if there was an organization that rounded up people across the map and sent them to camps, hired an army of consultants to promote its so-called constituents, and kept the world under a nuclear threat for decades? Who will want funds handed out by an organization in the future? If they want to survive in their heterotopia, they'd better stop locking people up and start producing some public goods instead. Some might try to prevent heterotopias by exerting coercion, but in heterotopias money is just information, and information is always a moving target that no bureaucracy can keep up with.

I think heterotopias are possible. Information systems tend toward more stable states, and our world today is fundamentally unstable, largely because money and trust are so at odds. Those that work better together are likely to be more stable. But that doesn’t mean the transition won’t be turbulent. In particular, the existing communication infrastructure lacks a sound identity encryption foundation and trust relationship network, and is very susceptible to the influence of propaganda, and the constructed meaning may also be drowned by malicious noise. “Artificial intelligence” (fancy statistical models) may have excellent uses in artistic creation, but its role in propaganda is rapidly exacerbating the problem.

The rest of this article is a hypothesis about heterotopia—if it ever comes, what can institutions do to mitigate the turbulence of transition?

First, institutions must collaborate to create the necessary technical foundation—research, protocols, interfaces, open source software, and hardware—to make the heterotopic vision of free-scale credit money possible. nowThere are blockchain/cryptocurrency protocol designers and organizations that are well equipped (excellent examples of candidates include Aleo, Anoma, Celestia, Cosmos, Ethereum, Osmosis, Penumbra, etc.), but they need to collaborate and help achieve decentralization, e.g. Systems for end-to-end encrypted messaging, correctly distributed social media, local-first applications, and self-sovereign and privacy-preserving applications (excellent candidate examples include Ink & Switch, Mastodon, Scuttlebutt, Signal, Urbit, etc.). Open source and verifiable hardware is still a long way off, perhaps accelerated through strategic acquisitions and then applying free software principles similar to those articulated by the FSF for related hardware IP. Cryptocurrency funds tend to have large sums of capital that should be used to achieve this goal, rather than pouring money into Uniswap clone subsidy programs or sponsoring Formula 1 ads. Of course, hardware companies can also preemptively strike on their own and hope to receive retroactive funding in the future.

Second, but equally important, institutions must provide stability. Even in a better world, today's path to heterotopia will be accompanied by wild exchange rate swings, rapid currency changes, and the overreach of power. Institutions can mitigate the shock to their constituents by hedging these risks: holding multiple currencies, committing to inversely adjusting wage payments to the rate of inflation or adjusting wages to the actual cost of living, funding legal defense for individuals targeted, and so on. Institutions that successfully buffer against these shocks can expect retroactive allocations to include them in the future, so they have reason to try. In general, existing legal structures are already designed to allow institutions to assume risks ("limited liability") and hold assets, so existing institutions should be able to easily assume this role.

Institutions that are able to convert future expected value into current value by issuing credit currency as described above can sell credit currency into existing currency (especially fiat currency) to fill institutional coffers and increase institutional buffers The ability to impact.

For heterotopic collaboration, institutions can establish bilateral trust relationships with other institutions. It is important that these trust relationships are publicly verifiable, as this enables parties operating within or otherwise aligned with these institutions to collaborate more effectively (e.g., deduplication efforts). This functions very similarly to the heterogeneous UBI proposal above, but instead of setting (not a natural consensus in this case) and committing to redefining future issuance schedules, institutions can periodically agree to mint some of each other's tokens and locks.

Institutions operating on the concept of heterotopias should also selectively transfer trust to existing legacy institutions. The conceptual framework and reputation of existing institutions are deeply embedded in existing society, and collaboration may dampen the turmoil of this shift. However, this trust (and currency) should not be extended unconditionally. Many existing institutions directly or indirectlyIndirect financing of weapons, propaganda and coercion. Existing institutions have issued a lot of currency but have lost a lot of trust and must win it back if they want their currency to be valuable in the future. This is consistent with incentives, since free-scale credit money is a win-win - it only has to go against those who go against everyone else. Existing institutions that cooperate can expect future retroactive funding, while existing institutions that do not cooperate cannot expect any funding.

Some existing institutions can easily restructure themselves to rapidly accelerate this transformation, as their skills and assets can act as force multipliers to incentivize transformation. Venture capitalists, hedge funds, and other private equity firms that retain direct decision-making power over the allocation of their capital need to optimize only the provision of public goods. Alternatively, they could issue their own funds in anticipation of future retroactive financing, but retroactive financing can also be issued to owners of existing stocks, equity, etc. through interface mechanisms, so it doesn't really matter.

For existing capital allocators, once they desire heterotopia, this is incentive compatible because optimizing private value capture is a Bad strategy. By definition, public goods are non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Existing solutions for converting public value into privately accessible value are the imposition of artificial exclusionary mechanisms, such as paywalls or intellectual property laws. This exclusion limits the potential future value and corresponding expected future retroactive funding, since few will be able to benefit from it, or be grateful for it in the future. Because every use must be tracked, the more users a good product has, the greater its potential future value, but the higher the cost of such tracking. Optimum capital efficiency in the provision of public goods is more likely to be achieved through infrequent measurements, measuring only the amounts required for strategic direction of demand and collaborative production, rather than for every interaction. Therefore, following the transition to heterotopia, capital allocators who change their decision calculations earlier are expected to do better (in terms of retroactive funding) than those who do not change their decisions because they will create more public resources.

Allow me to end on a more poetic note. Quote:

How to explain the word "soon" that the revolutionary climax is about to come? This is a common question shared by many comrades. Marxism is not a fortune teller. Future development and changes should and can only tell a general direction, and it should not be possible to mechanically determine the time. But when I say that the revolution is about to come, I am by no means like the "possibility that has already arrived" as some people say, which is completely meaningless and elusive. It is standing on the coast and looking into the sea. It is a ship on the tip of a maple pole. It is standing on the top of a mountain. Looking to the east from a distance, you can see the radiant sun that is about to burst out. It is a baby that is about to mature with flames in its mother's womb.

I won’t translate this (translator’s note, the original text is in Chinese and has not been translated into English), because it would not do justice to the text, but it will suffice to illustrate the brilliance of heterotopiaReality has begun to shine through the cracks in the surface of modernity. If you start looking, you'll find it popping up everywhere, from "Game B," to explanations of a social media dystopia that might have no basis in cryptography, to economics' category theory treatment of how to prevent "ceteris paribus" Arrogance in decision-making, to an overheard conversation in a Mexican restaurant in Kreuzberg about the dysfunction of the speculative real estate market. In fact, you have already encountered it, and it may even have appeared in your life. It was not invented by me, but by countless of you. All I did was give it a name. Even the name was not chosen by me.

But once we decide to do this, heterotopias are inevitable.