New "trust technology" that promises to benefit the world, has to prove itself trust worthy, like anything else in society, and that is an ongoing process that will take a long time, it could take years, decades, and the reward if it works is that society can be more than it was.
I have suggested a next generation of the Nakamoto consensus, the eusocial protocol behind Ethereum and Bitcoin, I call it proof-of-power. This protocol is the logical conclusion of the Nakamoto consensus, it draws from hundreds of years of wisdom in how to organize society, and also from the past decade of innovation in "state technology". If you are interested, the protocol is described here, and if you like it, it is now yours since it is just a meme and inherently replicative.
In this post, I describe some of the back story to how proof-of-power and Pseudonym Pairs came to be.
The story of "XPAT", from a schelling point to a cult
The original idea of "bitnation" from 2014 was pretty good, to have a symbol as a schelling point, for a grass roots movement around the reformation into the networked society. Basically, a metaphor to meet around, since the world had not reached a point where those metaphors could be factual. I associated my work with "bitnation" in 2014 because that original vision was inspiring. What happened in 2016 and going forwards, is that Susanne and her husband took that symbol as a schelling point, and centralized it around a separate idea, an example of memetic hitchhiking, and "XPAT" was the result. It is not in my self-interest to associate with "bitnation" as a schelling point anymore, because it got corrupted and there is nothing left to associate with.
The tale of two token sales, from people at the frontier
The first "bitnation" token sale was in 2014, and when I discovered it, I found it to be highly inspiring, the vision was just right, it had packaged itself very nicely, and I told more or less all people I knew about it. That crowd sale then failed, and exactly why it failed is, possibly, an untold story. Dana Edwards connected me with Susanne just around the time the original token sale was collapsing, and Susanne and I connected creatively, based on mutual respect in many ways, so I may have a unique perspective on that.
Self-interest, genetic bias, and bias overall, lies and deceit and manipulation
Susanne told me that the reason the original "bitnation team" broke up in 2014, around the exact time I connected with her via Dana Edwards, was because Charles Hoskinson threatened that team that they would get arrested in a "crack down", and, that he did so because of personal bias. I know some people who follow me know Charles, and if that story is true, it is very immoral of him. The back story Susanne told me is that he and her had a personal sexual relationship, and that Charles cheated on the person he was together with at that time, that is possibly his partner at this time as well. That could be a lie as well, but I don't think so. It is wrong to single out people to protect yourself, and to make public statements that are false, like David Mondrus, Nathan Wosnack, Matt McKibbin, and Charles Hoskinson did (if that back story was true), and that was one reason I chose to defend Susanne even after last year.
I just don't like pecking orders. I do not appreciate being bit by Susanne, or "defamed" with lies because she is slightly psychopathic and prone to protect herself sort of, but I appreciate even less when people single others out without the other actually having been that horrible. People are fragile, if they get too much violence, they break, and Susanne is also a person.
Note, here is Charles with his narrative, in reply to me. If what Susanne told me is true, then he is very immoral here.
The period after the first token sale, 2014-2015
When the first token sale failed, Susanne went on to instead collaborate with the Horizon team, one of the most advanced blockchains at that time (before Ethereum), and built a proof-of-concept for a UI for "Pangea", mostly funded by that people worked on a voluntary basis, and that UI was pretty good and somewhat advanced in how it presented a few concepts.
Synapses
Bitnation Core Dev Team Resigns, Speak Out Before Crowdsale - cointelegraph.com
Blockchain Project Bitnation Marches Pangea Beta Forward - ccn.com
The rejection of the human condition as a bias, and lattices as information structures
The "Lucy" AI will magically give you a system the day the "technological singularity" comes, is a bit of a summary of the game theory of XPAT. When the human condition is rejected, anything becomes possible until reality catches up.
To understand the history behind XPAT, we have to look at the world in which it was conceived. The absence of governance systems for the digital age, meant that it was extremely stressful to work in sectors that had no way to integrate with the monopoly-on-violence (MoV) as a consensus mechanism, humans can be coerced but computers and information technology are impossible to regulate on top of MoV. The instinctive response to stressors, is the fight and flight response, and wide spread escapism is what led to mythologies like "transhumanism", propagated through organizations like Singularity University, part of Google.
The roots of "transhumanism" is the belief that neurons, which measure around 0.01 mm in size, are the transistors of the brain, and that the total capacity of the brain is that of 100 billion transistors with 1000 synapses each, and that idea has been promoted by people like Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google since 2015. George Gilder has followed all of that, and explains it very simple in this recent interview.
The idea that biology would use a computer with transistors (neurons) 1000x the size of 14nm transistors that have been pretty common in human-built computers, is, well, how does that add up exactly? It doesn't. A single neuron contains billions of tubulin, 4.5 x 8 nano meter, similar to the size of human made transistors, and tubulins are organized into lattices in microtubules, and are the computer of the cell, as well as of neurons, and the brain is more similar to an internet of computers than a single computer.
The memes that are loudest in ordering genes to replicate them have a survival advantage, and similar to the Abrahamitic religions story of heaven and hell, eternal life and eternal damnation, "transhumanism" propagates via the limbic system, mostly subconscious processes, and followers see both immortality and omnipotent control as potential rewards from their belief. As Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof is quoted saying in an interview with "humanity plus",
"I got into Transhumanism through Biohacking. I operated in a magnet in one of my fingers, to see what it would be like. I posted the photos of the operation on Facebook which got me a lot of attention from the Transhumanist community, so I started to look deeper into all things connected with Transhumanism, and really fell in love with the field. I guess being able to to control your destiny, through cryonics, downloading brains, modifying the body, etc is the ultimate frontier for liberty, once the violent global oligopoly on governance is gone. Immortality! "
Synapses
Interview: Bitcoin Pioneer Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof on Bitnation and M+
The worlds first decentralized borderless virtual nation (DBVN)
I have been working on a new social contract, one that is similar to what has been used so far, but without coercion. It is possible that my work is the literalization of what Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof called a DBVN. The system is based on Pseudonym Pairs, a new global personhood system, that is similar to a "nation" in that it is a population that decides to come together, even without directly knowing one another. Pseudonym Pairs provides a a "passport to Pangea" which was the product that Susanne promised the world in the first token sale in 2014.
The proof-of-personhood from Pseudonym Pairs, is used to give explicit, opt-in, consent to a state, using proof-of-suffrage, as a way for the global population to select a single state to swarm around. These people-votes "power" validators (in proof-of-work "miners"), who authorize transactions based on authority delegated by the consensus mechanism, just like proof-of-work or proof-of-stake.
Pseudonym Pairs is borderless not by ideal, but by being the only way to operate that coordination system, it cannot be bordered, and that also means that this new generation of the Nakamoto consensus, the logical conclusion of what Craig Wright invented a decade ago, is inherently singular.
The proof-of-power system brings to the world a single, global, decentralized, borderless and voluntary "bitnation", not as a metaphor but as an actual swarm.
Read the "whitepaper" on https://panarchy.app/Proof-of-power.pdf
The breaking point, November 15, 2017
I met Susanne IRL on Bitnation Devcon2017, October 5th last year, three years after first connecting online, and decided to stay in Amsterdam for a few weeks because I thought it was good to get to know Susanne, and to be able to work face-to-face a bit, so I stayed with Susanne and her husband for a few weeks in what was described as a "bitnation hackerspace", to work. Florian, an employee who has since distanced himself from PAT because there is no product, was another person who stayed in the hackerspace, to work. Since the intent from myself was to meet for a few weeks, I planned to leave to Sofia after 2-3 weeks to meet Yanislav Malahov who was interested in proof-of-power and Pseudonym Pairs (at that time called Online Pseudonym Parties). Susanne and her husband then asked if I could prolong my stay, to look after their dogs while they went to Gibraltar for an event, since Florian was in Germany at the time, so I changed my plan. That was around the end of October.
The story told by Susanne, about those weeks, reflects that XPAT does not work and that she needs to project that onto someone. To be that person, it is not in my self-interest. Three days after I connected with Craig Wright on November 15, six weeks after arriving to the Devon event, Susanne trashed her own apartment, broke glass tables, the window to hers and her husbands room with a coffee maker, screamed "the person I married I don't love, and the person I love is obsessed with an abstract construct and incapable of love" to an "investor" over a video call, and then bit me till I bled.
That was in the evening/night, so I slept until the morning, while Susanne continued to trash her apartment, and Susanne's husband messaged me "are you ok? I took to a hotel, you can stay etc etc". Susanne and James dogs, terrified from the house being trashed, slept in my room.
I packed my bag in the morning, went out for breakfast-lunch with Florian, it was nice to hang out for an hour or two before leaving, and I then went back to Susanne's home to see if there was anything to say, and there wasn't so I left, and messaged Bryan Curtin who was staying in Amsterdam a few kilometers away, and stayed with him for a week before leaving to Berlin, where I presented some work I had been working on while staying at the "hackerspace" to a conference organized by Erik Vollstädt.
This was after being, literally, bit by Susanne until I bled, I thought it was easiest to just present my work in public based on what I had at that point.
Note that Susanne's story is that "you contributed nothing" which is also self-referential since she chose to promote my work by free will, no coercion.
This here is also contradictory, as it is self-referential. Susanne dedicated years of her life to promoting my work, and invited me to talk at events, and so on. When proposing game theoretical systems to the world, the protocol you propose is really what has its own inherent reputation, not so much the person behind it, because the protocol does not rely on whoever created it. The theory behind a protocol can't be destroyed by ad hominem, personal attacks, because it is a-personal, the credibility isn't based on politics or Machiavellian intelligence but on that the theory behind the protocols is reproducible by anyone who tries to model it themselves, and if it is not, if the theory isn't accurate, the protocols are worthless to begin with. To threaten a person that they can be "destroyed in 5 seconds", a form of coercion, is also nonsensical, and just a reflection of that Susanne spent her life operating in the monopoly on violence, using manipulation and deceit, and is now promoting, fully in public, a nonsensical scam with "XPAT".
The protocol itself has to be "sane" in that is should operate as promised, and as for people overall, they have their own life, and integrity. I do not really know Susanne, and have no interested in being in-group in some cult of hers.
After last year, I tried to take the high road, taking the "trust the other person" position in the prisoner's dilemma, but since I after that time could see that Susanne was spreading lies around that, here via for example Richard Kastelein, from https://the-blockchain.com, I'll tell my story as well, people are pretty smart and can read others themselves.
The big picture is that Susanne invited me to work in a "hackerspace" based on personal bias, without being open about that. It is not in my self-interest to have that projected onto me, self-governance starts with the self, and people have to take personal responsibility.
So to be clear, to Richard Kastelein or anyone else who has followed Susanne's story about last year, and since there is a sort of word-against-word scenario (not really but in some ways), there were no cops in Amsterdam, Susanne trashed her own apartment, for hours straight, after screaming "the person I married I don't love and the person I love is obsessed with an abstract construct and incapable of love", and after biting me until I bled. I stayed the night because all that happened in the evening, and then packed my bags, had breakfast-lunch with Florian, went back to see if there was anything to say, there was not, so I left.
There is more to say about those days, but I tried to package it here so that I communicate the major events clearly.
The "it's on GitHub" story has been repeated by Susanne for four years because, yes, with open source software, code tends to be on GitHub or some public repository, and Susanne has made it her world that just because open source software is on GitHub, people people should "look at GitHub" to see that PAT, a nonsensical system, is an actual game theoretical system. And the ad hominem, if you will (fallacy in the context of having her token critiqued), against me here, is a reflection of that Susanne invited me to the "bitnation hackerspace" to work based on personal bias
Here, the "AI developer" Thiago Souza who took over after Kent Dahlgren, another employe, distanced himself from "XPAT", contradicts the "it's in the public domain" story, and does so because XPAT has no product, it is just a scam.
Thiago Souza took over after the previous employee Kent Dahlgren, and Kent Dahlgren was like Thiago, given "comartmentalized access" (absurd to organize a web3 project that way and it reflects that XPAT is not an actual governance system or dApp), and he wrote some pseudo-code for "lucy", then distanced himself from the project when it became apparent that there was no product, just like Florian did. The "code for Lucy" he wrote and that Thiago Souza mentions is just pseudo-code, "lucy" is just a story, not a game theoretical system.
Thiago Souza sees a promise of financial reward, and so he is "patient" that his employers will tell him how his system works,
Thiago is also stands out as one of the people who has been able to understand how "Lucy" works, a story that contradicts his previous story that he is "patient". XPAT has no product, the people who are employees are just caught up in the hype and promise of rewards that will not come.
Two years after the "whitepaper" was first conceptualized. PAT does not work, you will not find a single person who can explain it, just a hierarchy of people repeating what Susanne says, zealously (also note the "giving the enemy a face" comment. ) Mark Nuzz, a person who worked with Kent Dahlgren and Thiago Souza, says about XPAT that "There's nothing to be aware of. That's the essence of XPAT. ".
The "you lack the intelligence" argument is a fallacy, straight from the book. The scientific method, and any protocol, is based on reproducibility, forming a consensus over time because people, in general, are able to extract meaning from the theory. It also contradicts that Susanne, in public, spent 4 years promoting me because she saw me as intelligent, and that there was potential in some ideas I was working on.
The overall story, including the "it's on GitHub", is repeated by Susanne's husband as well, zealously, with one or two fallacies to anyone, ever, who has attempted to critique any of it (note that I followed Susanne for four years, have seen that repeated a lot..) Susanne's husband is also critiquing that I have "recently articulated views" just because it isn't my responsibility to put my foot down on other people's ideas, it's their own responsibility, that is what self-governance is about.
