Daily Balajisms - Cryptohistory
Daily Balajisms - Cryptohistory
A better history production and record-keeping.
Balaji Srinivasan has a concept of a cryptohistory – a cryptographically verifiable macrohistory. Books can be burned, online papers can be cancelled, photos can be airbrushed from history in a Stalinesque way.
But on-chain data are near impossible to doctor. With new techniques and crypto-oracles, the scope of cryptographical verification is expanding, to include proofs of location, proofs of identity, proofs of reserves and more.
Startup society founders will need to wrestle with history, and provide a much better and reliable record of it – a cryptohistory. They will need to create a detailed narrative of why their moral innovation matters, and how the current establishment got things wrong.
Bitcoin is digital gold, a digitally-native form of money backed by math. But less obviously, bitcoin is also the truth machine. Even sworn enemies rely on the bitcoin ledger to provide a truthful state and history of their asset holdings. Fiat money is backed by men with guns. And so is fiat history. Narratives change to serve people in power.
Balaji Srinivasan talks often about his concept of the ledger of record, an alternative to the paper of record (NYT) that served as the first draft of history, but often was the first rewrite of history with many missteps – as the book by Ashley Rindsberg, the Gray Lady Winked documents.
The argument from cryptography should replace the argument from authority – “BTC over NYT, paradigmatically”, says Balaji.
Currently blockchains are recording only cryptohistory of financial transactions that is very difficult to falsify. But with crypto oracles and decentralized social networks all kinds of data feeds will be put on chain.
Balaji uses the term downstream media to describe current media that are downstream of the internet, where the main action happens, and are mostly providing wrappers around tweets.
Tweets and accounts are being censored and deleted often nowadays, but with web3 and decentralized social media we will have a permanent record of who claimed what and when. The claims can still be false, but at least metadata will be permanent and hard to alter. These can include proof of location and proofs of various actions besides transactions.
Alexander Bard, a Swedish philosopher of the internet, asks a question if people living in the Bronze Age knew that they lived in one. In fact, the division into Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age is a very recent one, produced by historians celebrating factory owners, who were their sponsors two centuries ago.
People who control the present, control the past. And the one who controls the past, controls the future, says Orwell. Balaji has a twist on this – in the case of microhistory – like a trajectory of a rocket – this is true literally, in terms of control theory. A civilization that has a better control theory gets to Mars first.
There are political truths of who controls a border, and technical truths of what is a diameter of a virus, says Balaji. Crypto lies between these two and gives us a cryptographically verifiable macrohistory.