Survival-Oriented Computing

Towards a new first-principles understanding of blockchain

Alex Gladstein 🌋 ⚡ @gladstein

Is Bitcoin the most powerful revolutionary political idea to emerge since Marxism?

Explaining blockchain to the uninitiated is good sport, but it’s also an exercise in inefficiency. Whenever I’m ‘explaining the chain’, somewhere in the “distributed spreadsheet” analogy I feel silly. I realize that this person either didn’t really want a blockchain explanation or the analogy doesn’t capture the significance of blockchain as an innovation. Usually it’s the latter. Even if the explanation lands, it still needs to be piecemeal assembled with other analogies to get the whole concept across.

But there’s a thrill in striving towards a haiku representation of a hyper-object. So maybe we’ll try again:

blockchain offers a new computing paradigm:
“survival-oriented computing”

Blockchain is a paradigm of computing where each node is programmed and operated towards a single goal: survive. Surviving for the node means justifying its existence to the node operator by creating some profit. To do this it has to make the operator’s account balance go up and then ensure that balance is worth enough in fiat.

What else? Nothing. That’s it. If the node persists, it persists. In the same way that we could define life as that which spites entropy, blockchains are those which spite the state of digital nature. Nobody is obligated to do (or not do) anything on the internet. Ultimately, the programs that exist in the sphere of global computing are those that make sense to exist, i.e. those that win out in the arena of digital reality.

Every other aspect of blockchain design emanates from this survival incentive. Nodes are programmed to work together because centralized systems are not as valuable as decentralized ones (centralized systems are vulnerable to attack). Nodes are programmed to stay in sync because forked systems are not as valuable as unified systems, especially if a given node sides with the smaller fork path. Nodes are programmed to try to use a few resources as possible because costs eats into survival. Nodes are programmed try to achieve consensus as fast as possible to avoid confusion or repeated work. Nodes are programmed to process as many transactions per second as possible without affecting decentralization, because this increases the value of the network.

By ascribing agency to nodes, we start to realize that node operators and nodes are symbiotic. Even if the nodes do not demonstrate any general intelligence, they are still as symbiotic with us as trees and plants providing us oxygen and energy.

Please understand, I’m not inventing this digital state of nature as a means of justifying morally reprehensible actions within it. The opposite. By acknowledging that blockchains rage against nature, we are provided with the perspective to understand the necessity for social infrastructure to conquer our lesser selves. More than just building technology, we must build community, justice and rule of law.

There is something that differentiates human motivations in this framework from those in crony capitalism. Corporations wield more power than governments in the incumbent system. They seek to grow indefinitely. They operate in a state of pure competition. The world of blockchains enjoys competition too, but it also sees new force: cooperation. In blockchain, decentralization is a strength, not a weakness. If any given player gets too big, they have a strong incentive to self-limit or watch their chain lose appeal for it’s centralization. This is an incredible thing. The new system values cooperation as well a competition. They hold in a balance together. The crypto movement will take over the world because it understands this.

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I’m excited for the future. If you are too, buy some crypto and stake it with Stakefish, where they pay my salary as a protocol specialist.