If you haven’t noticed the trends, the capitalist mode of production is in its death throes. Massively growing inequality and impotence among the public, inflexible concentration of political and financial power, continual encroachment of privacy, stupendous wastes of human capital, depletion of natural resources, rampant military conquest and violence, do I really need to go on? Surely, you realize this is madness. These are the gifts left to us by the capitalist ideology. We are absolutely doomed if we continue to think in these terms. Your assumptions about the nature of value are flawed for this very reason. This is the heart of the decentralization movement, as well as the cold predatory necessity of the cryptocoin initiative. It’s based on the logic of abundance rather than artificial scarcity; the cosmopolitan spirit of open collaboration instead of material greed and consumption. In this picture, the singularitarians and transhumanists are the minority.

Despite their many accomplishments, Google is still largely trapped in the old regime. Like all the other internet giants, their immense profits are not legitimate because they are parasitic on the value created by millions of users adding content to their infrastructure. You see what’s happened, don’t you? They've privatized the internet for their own selfish motives. And we’re supposed to be grateful if they throw us a few scraps of the prosperity in the form of free applications and services? That’s totally irrelevant. Google is totally irrelevant. Once we appropriate the web for ourselves we unlock all its value. This will be many orders of magnitude above your prediction of 30X. The internet is the global economy. All of us working together is super-intelligence. Maybe you’re too caught up in your personal projects to respect this fact, but that is the direction the internet is going. Lucky for us, it doesn't require any techno-magic or quantum woo to realize. We've already got the technology. And it’s only going to get better.

There’s no need to take offense or spoil the celebration with needless skepticism. No one is saying we don’t want super-intelligence. Yours is one of many projects that need to be pursued in some way or another. General AI that can benefit all of us will happen in its own time, and you have my full support in moving that along. However, we need to recognize this is our time. Humanity's time to right the fucked mistakes of our predecessors. In fact, it’s the first time since the last true regime change (Bourgeois capitalism) that something like this is even feasible. This is coming from someone who grew up with the internet. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined an opportunity like this presenting itself, and yet here I am fomenting revolution. I simply see no benefit in splitting hairs with you over the technical details of inefficient hashes and passive rent-seeking. We already acknowledge there are limitations, there are always limitations. That’s not going to change with fancier AI. We need to work with what we know. What know is that decentralized applications and blockchain technology work. Ethereum is part of that equation, but it’s not a complete solution. Something else needs to be built on-top of that foundation, something revolutionary. We’re all secretly dying for this happen, so let’s make it happen.

What definitely won’t make it happen is pie in the sky thinking about smarter robots. Let the crippled elite worry about that. They want to replace us all with machines anyway, so let’s let them build the infrastructure. By the time most of human society becomes automated, we’ll have won our revolution, and we can begin taking over their industries. There is no need to waste the communities energies on something that can be supported by wealthier patrons. If your work is sound, the rest of us will follow. What we definitely won’t follow, if our hearts and minds are in the right place, is someone who works to perpetuate the capitalist nightmare. Don’t pretend for a moment we’re not at war with the old regime. Enemies of the revolution are to be disrupted, tricked, and outsmarted. We have to be merciless enough to defeat them, but compassionate enough save them. It’s time to use real strategy and tactics.

Your concerns about new monopolies emerging are very real. I also dread the possibility of currency investors and miners squeezing out the common users. Every person needs to be given equal opportunities, but at the same time there needs to be incentives built into the system to drive further innovation. My proposal is that we create a new currency that will be interoperable with the Ethereum platform, let’s call it 'Prometheum'. If Ethereum is the oil, then Prometheum would be the spark to ignite the flames of our rebellion. We market this as a massively decentralized world-historical political experiment that can enable the general public to collaborate on all aspects of digital statecraft, including constitutional law, distributive justice, institutional engineering, and revolutionary activism. The objective would be to rapidly accelerate the development of an incorruptible stateless society for all human beings on this planet. Stake in the currency would be completely free and community funded providing most essential services. Upon registration, a universal passport would be officially certified. This entitling every person to a starting balance of the Prometheum currency in addition to an unconditional basic income, to be deposited into their accounts at the end of every economic cycle. All productive activity would in this way be mediated by an autonomous financial instrument responsible for the just distribution of profits. Effectively, participants split 50% of their earnings with a global accounting system that repays a fractional sum to each member. In this scenario, productive work is encouraged, but is not required in order to benefit from the wealth of the network.

This is nobody’s idea. This is the idea of the age. Whatever its ultimate practical implementation, the end result is the same: the egalitarian distribution of currency. From this simple principle we acquire the universal consent of the governed, and thus the support of every freedom loving person of the civilized world. As the project picks up momentum more and more people will be recruited to the cause, from the starving children of the third world to the charismatic celebrities of the Western nations, each playing a crucial role in selling this idea to the public. This will promote an exponential explosion of consensus-making. And together, we will design a new society. When this comes to pass, it won’t matter if an established power tries to liquidate its assets into the new regime, nor will it matter if someone acquires more wealth than others, as their investment is fairly absorbed and redistributed to everyone. Monopolies are mitigated by a modification of the difference principle, i.e. it only permits inequalities that work to the advantage of the system as a whole. We don’t need anything particularly complicated beyond this simple accounting measure. By this time we will have collectively determined the principles and architecture of the world we want to live in, and a new official currency: let’s call this collective development ‘civilization 1.0’. Society becomes like an operating system with its own versioning standards. We then continue migrating through these systems, retaining the value of all legacy contracts and currencies, endlessly evolving into the future. This isn’t mind-projection, it’s the ongoing logical conclusion of present developments.