Alright Alix, I’ve digested what you’ve said.

What you and others are referring to as coup-completeness or regime change is interesting. I think this is a real possibility with present technology, as I’ll attempt to elaborate. But before I do that, I want to comment on some of your expectations for the future.

I sympathize with your utopian dream of an all-powerful, all-valuable, all-technological intelligence bootstrapping itself into existence and saving humanity, but let’s be realistic. We’re nowhere even close to achieving something like this. We could have every brain and computer on the planet working on this project and it still wouldn’t happen for hundreds if not thousands of years. The Singularitarian fantasy that we can construct a machine capable of radical intelligent self-evolution is based on the faith that we are approximating true intelligence through whole-brain simulation, and that the exponential growth in computational power is in some way a measure of our progress towards this goal. This expectation is deeply flawed for several reasons.

The most significant reason is that it ignores or denies the scale of innovation required to solve the embodiment problem. True intelligence is instantiated in an organic substrate that has evolved over millions of years, its underlying informational architecture (DNA) is therefore the product of complex quantum interactions occurring in the presence of deep time. The series of developments giving rise to human consciousness and intelligence is unimaginable orders of magnitude beyond what is conceivable with present and future technologies. While its true sophisticated quantum computers might provide the required granularity of material detail to house true AI, we are totally in the dark concerning the correct programming language to drive the system to true intelligence and self-evolution. The limitations on human knowability in determining the right computational algorithms to achieve this result dwarfs our mortal intellects. Hence, we face the vicious circularity of requiring an all-powerful intelligence before we can design systems capable of producing an all-powerful intelligence. Crowdfund all you want, this isn’t solving itself without massive quantum leaps in human understanding. Does that mean we can’t create extremely sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence? No, of course not. We’re already accomplishing that. However, these are chimeras for the predictable future, mere deterministic mimics of the real thing. Systems of this sort will always fail to live up to our deeper expectations. For this reason, I would be extremely careful in deciding what kind of power we hand over to such systems.

With that said, let’s take stock of what we can actually do right now, or at least what we should be able to do in the near future. You argue there is an intrinsic limit to current blockchain design, in the neighborhood of 1,000-10,000 transactions per second. I’m not clear why you think this is a significant problem. The limit on transactions is only going to continue decreasing with advances in computational power. We also know this can be solved using pegged sidechains and interoperable currencies, giving us the enhanced functionality, scalability, and efficiency you seem to think we’re lacking. To my knowledge, the primary singleton is not open to malicious attacks because the damage is confined to the sidechain itself. If the sidechain is insulated despite being bidirectional, where precisely is the threat coming from your perspective? If there isn’t one, the optimal strategy is simply to use Ethereum as the central precious resource (diamond if you will), implementing new instruments (platinum, gold, silver, etc) with the adaptive growth of the system. In this scenario, we only need to count on the collective intelligence of the users and the consensual utility they can build into the network to promote local maximums and global optimization.  

Politically speaking, I think Ethereum is the beginning of a stateless open society. Essentially, we ignore world governments, corporations, and every other coercive entity. We take everything useful we’ve learned from previous social arrangements and crowdsource an inviolable (hardcoded) universal constitution, a set of basic rights, and essential institutions. This project is then backed by the Ethereum currency. From here we create a contract of citizenship and declare ourselves a digital commonwealth. Those interested in participating are registered and treated as anonymous members of a stateless society. At this point we start building decentralized foundations, organizations, and entrepreneurial innovations, replicating all the profit motivated platforms of the old web in a way that incentives common users to join in, effectively siphoning the enormous symbolic capital and market utility the internet makes possible. In this way, we capture the public imagination and everything starts going viral extremely quickly. No central government or corporation can exploit our cooperation. Out of the ashes of the old system we create a new one that is infinitely more valuable. Everyone will start using our applications and migrating to our systems, they will begin pouring their hopes and dreams into our righteous cause, establishing a new world social order founded on just principles, thus securing coup-completeness.

If this explodes to the level of intensity I think it’s capable, we will force the ruling powers into a bind they cannot overcome. Naturally, their mentality is motivated by possession of territory, physical property, military conquest, political engineering, media propaganda, and the means of productive industry; and through these goods they think they can own us too. This apparently impenetrable system of control is wrought from centuries of injustice, signed in the blood of age old contracts. Who are we to pry it from their fingers? What they’ve failed to recognize is the immense value of informational capital. Hence, we have something they desperately need to survive. If we appropriate the internet for ourselves and declare it a sovereign nation, they will not oppose us, in fact they will welcome us. This is the transvaluation of all value, the transmutation of material property into technological abundance and prosperity. Once that happens the scales will tip and they will be forced to undercut physical goods in exchange for virtual ones. Everyone on the planet will benefit from this development. And it all begins with something as silly as dumb nodes trading bits on a network.