In which we are all faceless until we have faces (Part I)*
Ur of the Chaldees
I am the sole culprit behind the recent sagas surrounding “our” X account and the name of Kaspa’s atomic unit. It was my own doing; regrettably, I have no accomplices to share the credit with. I genuinely empathize with fellow Kaspers who felt confused, distressed, or deflated by my actions. Though I cannot offer a sincere apology, I can and should offer more context.
The reader should be warned in advance that my argument will be constructed rather ouroboros-ly, in a manner which makes it illogical to refute. The more the reader disagrees with it the more they are forced to recognize the validity and relevance of the argument. I learnt this little trick of constructing self-enforcing arguments from one old Chaldean family from the 19th century BC, whose story is not entirely irrelevant to ours.
Terah was a Mesopotamian idol manufacturer. The Midrash of Genesis (tales by Jewish sages) describes how one morning Terah left his son Abraham to watch the idol shop. Abraham seized the moment and took a stick and smashed all the idols, except the largest one. He then placed the stick in the hand of that remaining idol. When Terah returned and saw the destruction, he demanded, “What happened here?” Abraham replied, “The idols got into a quarrel, and the big one decided to smash the rest.” Terah exclaimed, “Do you think I’m a fool? These idols have no knowledge or power!” And Abraham replied, “Then let your ears hear what your mouth is saying.”
Some odd 48 hours ago someone left the largest idol alone with access to Kaspa’s official X account. I consulted no one before changing the account from “Kaspa” to “Kaspa (Unofficial)”, nor did I prepare any crisis management plan. Though, perhaps like Terah’s son, I have waited for the right moment for a long time.
The Bourne Identity
To the extent that this saga turns into an identity crisis for many Kaspa fans, it is a long-overdue one.
There is a choice to be made: Are we here for the cozy feeling of a cohesive community with a welcoming center of the hub, or are we committed to penetrating the crypto — thence the broader — market with a p2p electronic cash system and a trustworthy store of value?
In the past 18 months, the marketcap of bitcoin surpassed that of silver, twice. What would it take for us to be able to think of KAS in similar terms?
The technology of Kaspa is superior to Bitcoin’s many times over, largely due to elite architecture and execution by Crescendo devs. But why is Kaspa Crescendo celebrated? Because it achieves a 6000x improvement over Satoshi’s protocol whilst remaining in the confines of the same trust model — a center-less structure which delegates the control over the network to an anonymous set of miners. A set which, to be explicit, comprises egoistic entities that should never be trusted, and yet whose competing incentives align with that of securing the network.
There are dozens of crypto projects which offer much richer tech stacks, production live apps, and marketing budgets than kaspa or bitcoin. Kaspa’s value can be unlocked and recognized only only only if Kaspa is-looks-feels-smells culturally open-source, practically center-less, constitutionally principled.
The existence of an official social account simply fails the gut check.
A public mask of the project
The main social account, practically an official one, with announcements and press releases, is convenient and facilitative indeed, and could be argued to have been instrumental early on. It is nonetheless a headquarters of the brand, and those who populate the headquarters are inadvertently co-opting the identity of the network. The consolidation of influence becomes inevitable, whether or not the people controlling the socials would consciously choose such an outcome.
Despite the dogmatic sound of the argument, it is no less a pragmatic one; I became conscious of it through observation more than through first-principles thinking. Specifically, I observed that for a team building a product or layer atop Kaspa, the best approach at community engagement and capture is through the conviction, if not friendship, of the maintainers of the social accounts. Alignment with them is an asset, misalignment — a liability. Needless to spell out the consequences: Even if the main accounts are governed with virtue and kept far from corrupt, a hierarchy forms — one which is easily spotted by newcomers. Visitors and newcomers are the first to recognize the whos and whats of the in-group, and through their experiences I became increasingly aware how our community is increasingly losing its flat hierarchy, its mission, and its chances at fulfilling it.
To be maximally unambiguous about this — the individuals who maintained so far the socials would never opt to gain power or deliberate influence. When interacting with them, I was inspired by their firm belief and selfless devotion to Kaspa’s mission; they truly love Kaspa, resembling perhaps the love and devotion of the mother-GHOST, from CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce, to the spirit of her son Michael.
In particular, they have never undermined the authority of Kaspa Core; had they attempted to do so, that would be a breath of fresh air. The issue we are highlighting here, therefore, has to do with representation more than with alignment. Many Kaspa X’ers hold paradigms, mental models, or style that I — and other members of Core — object to. This is perfectly normal and nothing needs to be done about it. We are not, however, seen as represented by any of these accounts. In contrast, with the official X account, the interpretation is different: It is the most followed Kaspa account, it is named plainly “Kaspa”, it offers press releases and formally-styled updates, and it actively nurtures the brand. We, Kaspa members, and especially Kaspa Core, are practically represented by it; it is a forced mask on the face of the project and of Core, and no matter how good the maintainers are at their jobs, it is still a mask.
I trust the reader to not be confused by my admission that these individuals understand brand-building at a deeply higher level than I do, and that they have been undoubtedly instrumental to the growth of Kaspa community and brand. If someone asked me in the future regarding the expertise of these individuals, I would unquestionably recommend them and vouch for their brand-building-and-nurturing expertise, my lack of experience in marketing being the only reservation to a warm recommendation and a big yes.
My argument notwithstanding.
Second things first
Reflecting on the media of exchange of ancient man, and of modern primitive societies, one can argue there exists a reverse correlation between the degree of cohesiveness of a society — which can be achieved at scale only through rigid hierarchies — and the moneyness qualities of its MoE. A strictly hierarchical society, the Andean Inca for instance, was able to thrive with barter and social obligations alone; their hierarchical structure replaced many functionalities that money serves in modern civilization, such as the allocation of resources and the flow of information. More heterogeneous civilizations had to adopt more scalable MoE — cowrie, to name one notable example — with barter frequently still coexisting, as in the city-states of Yoruba. Further along the spectrum (chronology aside), the merchant-oriented Mesopotamian civilizations utilized silver for payment and accounting — a yet more scalable and practical medium of exchange for urban, complex trade.
Is it a good thing then to describe Kaspa community as united and conflict-free? This community is one of the friendliest and welcoming communities in crypto. Compared to Bitcoin 2014–5 it is virtually toxic-free. The atmosphere, at least that projected by the brand’s headquarters, is almost too positive and worry-free.¹
Yet, getting too attached to the friendly vibes, or over-priding ourselves on that, would be “putting second things first”, to borrow CS Lewis’ phrase. We should prioritize debates, rebuts, arguments, disputes, concerns. There are serious challenges ahead of Kaspa — security budget, decentralized governance, monolithic vs modular architecture, HF policies, open-source funding, degen vs elitism, L2 fragmentation — and if we are not fighting over those issues we are probably doing something wrong. Probably, we are delusional about their seriousness, or worse yet delusional about Terah’s ability to solve them all through the genius of his idols.
First things first, for Kaspa to become a money, a globally trusted asset in the order of today’s trillions of US dollars, the community’s culture must be conducive to becoming the cradle of money. Some degree of tension and contention must linger in the air for the moneyness properties of a society’s collectible to emerge. Our rivals, our competitors and adversaries, must feel comfortable storing their wealth herein. High net worth individuals who distrust this author — hopefully the club has grown larger in the past 48 hours — must feel Kaspa is nonetheless an absolute safe haven for their wealth. It must pass the eye test of institutional investors. Kaspa must Bitcoinize.
Ethereum, North Korea, Vitalik
Ethereum is the most important crypto platform alongside Bitcoin.² No-one in Ethereum epicenter was seriously considering a rollback after the ByBit hack, the psyops notwithstanding. Ethereum is orders-of-magnitude more mature and distributed than it was in the DAO hack days. Nonetheless, the ByBit hack can be used as a thought experiment to reflect on hierarchies and their implication to moneyness.
In spring 2016 I was invited by Andrew Miller to Cornell, where he and Elaine and Emin Gun organized an Ethereum bootcamp. Around that time, Emin voiced the DAO vulnerabilities (eg https://x.com/el33th4xor/status/736266834073276416), and a few days later the vulnerabilities were exploited by an anonymous “code-is-law” hacker. It so happened that the bootcamp took place during the intervention — technically not a rollback but a manual HF to induce an irregular state transition. The Ethereum squad attended the bootcamp as well, and we all followed closely the community’s anticipation/support/outrage, the Classic split.
While Ethereum matured since — one year later, Vitalik didn’t initiate a reversal of the Parity hack and the wallet freeze — one can argue that the effects of the DAO intervention are lasting: The primary effect of the intervention was not the violation of code-is-law rather the cementing of Vitalik’s position as the ruling arbiter. The decision not to reverse Parity was still perceived as Vitalik’s call rather than an inevitable consequence.
Whether a code-is-law view should be adopted should be a discussion for another day. Suffice it to say that a puritan stance lacks completeness in that it does not address systemic collapses — a breaking of the hash function, to provide an extreme example — or a huge 51% attack — where the social consensus will anyways violate the code’s dictation this way or another (I will post later a seemingly conflicting post regarding a WWIII-resilient finality adjustment protocol).
Code-is-law being less relevant, the discussion or rather reflection should evolve around the structure of the social-political-economic graph which shapes the social consensus, at least post catastrophic failures. And in the case of Ethereum, the network exhibits a supernode, a brilliant, reasonable, and responsible one, a single point of pressure nonetheless.
This is not to insinuate Vitalik has omnipotent power in the community; this is far from the reality of the community. Vitalik cannot pull off arbitrary code-change or impose protocol modification at his whim, he cannot act capriciously, his decisions face scrutiny, similarly to other leaders in structured organizations which are more often than not constrained by protocols and customary processes. It is not even to claim Ethereum is centralized — -this tired label is by now emptied from any tangible meaning by narrative grunts, and should be discarded. This is merely to say Ethereum is as robust as Vitalik is. It is far from being antifragile.
(Antifragility is a very useful adjective, coined by Taleb, and [GPT:] refers to a system or entity that not only withstands stress and shocks but actually benefits and grows stronger from them. Unlike robustness, which resists damage but does not improve, antifragile systems thrive in uncertainty and volatility.)
Again, this argument does not undermine Ethereum’s supremacy nor Vitalik’s leadership; the reader can acknowledge those and still comfortably remain an eth maxi. This is merely to point to the centrality of Ethereum’s social graph, to its single point of pressure, which is admittedly risky only in black swan events, but crypto is quite a hotbed for black swans:
Consider for instance a scenario where OFAC used the DAO precedent to force the hands of Vitalik and the EF to rollback the ByBit hack, lest they be deemed liable for being complicit in violating US sanctions. It is difficult to predict how would Vitalik and EF react in such a turn of events, and what would the community’s expectation and social consensus be in this scenario.
Conquest’s second law
Can Ethereum rearrange its social graph? I recollect Conquest’s second law of politics which states that an organization not constitutionally right-wing (or freedom maxi) will inevitably become left-wing (admin/intervention maxi), which should translate in crypto terms to: A project not constitutionally decentralized will inevitably centralize and ossify. In my head, I call this the reverse second law of cryptodynamics. (https://x.com/hashdag/status/1683507762204909568).
Vitalik has historically evaded the question of Ethereum’s “moneyness”. In discussions I had with him in the past he rather dismissed this value proposition, and his public stance too was and still is non-committal. To me, this vague stance suggested not a lack of rigor but a recognition of the elusiveness of money — one can argue money is more of an emergent property of a commodity or asset rather than a defined checklist that an asset must satisfy in order to deserve the money title. Ethereum’s mindset is by and large consistent with <Ethereum is tech; money is a rhetorical device; by adoption of the tech we achieve de facto a behaviour that is indistinguishable from money>:
This tech-oriented stance is quite reasonable and pragmatic, albeit shortsighted. Historically, widespread adoption has indeed upgraded many commodities into moneys, irrespective of their soundness traits (whatever exact criteria this entails). In the long term, however, these moneys were replaced by collectibles which were optimized for moneyness properties to begin with. Cf. Nick Szabo’s essay on the origin of money (not coincidentally, Nick was one of the biggest supporters of the code-is-law stance towards the DAO hack.)
To complete the context, the current argument in Bitcoin circles regarding an OP_CAT plugin pertains, on a deeper level, to the question whether Bitcoin’s path from collectible to money is secured by the mere demand for it as store of value/e-gold; or rather an additional demand as a utility, e.g. a defi rails, is needed to support its moneyness, and without such demand it will remain “a Rolex”.
Crescendo mainnet launch
Kaspa humbly suggests that a defi rails should satisfy the property of intra-round (simply: real-time) censorship resistant sequencing with subsecond confirmation (/inclusion) times, rather than inclusion times in the order of 10 minutes and censorship-resistance latency in the order of 1 hour.
There is a sense, therefore, that Crescendo feels like a second mainnet launch of Kaspa. For the reasons mentioned, a pure proof-of-work 10 BPS consensus constitutes a qualitative upgrade to Kaspa’s consensus engine, it ranks high in the ordered list of the value propositions of our money (refer further to Michael’s braindump, https://x.com/MichaelSuttonIL/status/1905387292853703157). Whether the timing of the trouble in Terah’s family has to do with this “mainnet launch” is left to the reader as an exercise.
Alongside Michael, (and the symbolically-pseudonymous @someone235), another magician, a truly pseudonymous contributor @coderofstuff_ took ownership, and I wish him or her to remain faceless throughout our adventurous journey to silverness.
Kaspa Terah
The mainstream libertarian vision of governments expects their intervention when the need to break monopolistic entities arises, particularly those whose existence hinges on uneven grounds and structured leverage. Drawing the relevance of this axiom to the context with which this blogpost started is, too, left to the reader’s imagination.
Trust me, don’t trust me. As promised, it is very difficult to save the ouroboros creature. If I have disappointed you, perhaps you shouldn’t have appointed me in the first place. If you wished for the masks to remain, I have merely pointed at the faces overseeing the masquerade.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1SeStQ1g4Y
[1.] I’m not hinting that this is not unrelated to the current maintainers being Canadian and Australian.
[2.] For now.
