Jock and Awe
Monumental problems, opportunities, and sculptures.
Blockchains have been touted as revolutionary technologies, promising to change the world, but so far? We're not impressed. Thanks to recent advances in the field of zero-knowledge research, we're building a blockchain specifically engineered to maximize personal sovereignty and enshrine the human spirit at scale. Leveraging the beautiful simplicity of Nock, we built the first combinator-based Virtual Machine that can be efficiently used with Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Nockchain is a proof-of-work blockchain that sits atop our novel ZKVM. The distributed ledger now matures from an exciting experiment to civilization-grade infrastructure. We're building the rails for a parallel world economy defined by provable security, understandable personal technologies, and computational freedom.
Permissionless understandable personal computer economy. World War III. An empty vessel, the Holy Spirit. Permissionless data storage, computational wet markets. Reterritorialize with our right hand what we deterritorialize with our left. Financialized tribes frolic in the sun. A Berlin Wall crumbling, mitochondrial annealing, Neo-Cicero on methylene blue. Responsibility takers and rentier disrespecters liquid-cooling Texan ranches, high-plain drifters of the post-steppe, number go up, the river of living water. We have the right to remain silent. We just have to prove it.
A blockchain is a truth machine. We already know that blockchains can restore truth to money, but why stop there? We're restoring truth to the personal computer so as to restore truth to human relationships—our transactions, yes, but also our jobs, our food systems, our social identities, and more. The original cypherpunks believed that blockchains would threaten all currently existing institutions. We agree, and we're launching with no pre-mine to lay the foundations for a new society.
We’re dead-focused on creating civilization-grade infrastructure that can power a new parallel world of freedom compute, all on top of Nock. We’re building Nockchain as a high-throughput chain that provides proofs of computation, storage, and a new namespace. We see a future of simple, understandable computation running on personal computers alongside a global, permissionless commodity marketplace for computational capacities.
Technologies of integrity require beauty and simplicity–convoluted systems discourage personal involvement. When individuals don’t take responsibility, corporations, bureaucracies, and crime syndicates take over. Human freedom in the digital era requires systems simple enough to be audited by individuals. Civilization-grade infrastructure cannot cheat without disastrous results. The ultimate substrate of any modern digital society will be elegant, or fail.
Monumental problems, opportunities, and sculptures.
On the cold war brewing between Crypto and AI.
While Big Tech goes for the jugular, Proof-of-Stake declines.
They don't know what to do with the computers.
In April, we published a syllabus of sources for the 14 essays published at that point. In this post, we've compiled our sources for the 22 pieces we've published since. If a source already appears in Vol. 1, we do not repeat it here. Baudrillard, Jean.
"Squalid ruin and techno-intelligenic runaway accelerate in inversely-tangled tandem." —Nick Land