There's a battle underway for the future of computation.
On one side, Big Tech giants amass physical compute but lack direction and purpose, as we wrote about previously. On the other side, the human population has no shortage of needs, but it lacks control over physical compute.
Crypto—especially the concept of the protocol, and especially the proof-of-work protocol—represents a fundamentally novel, and antagonistic, way of organizing human values and physical compute.
As the SaaS bubble pops and Big Tech data centers scramble to build a "silicon God," it's important to understand why and how the protocol is a direct competitor.
The protocol essentially inverts the centralized AGI model, by starting with human values and only then incentivizing individuals to contribute physical compute to secure those values.
Bitcoin, the pioneer of this approach, has bootstrapped a global network of physical compute by offering the world a skillfully crafted game that generates sound money for its participants. But the potential for the proof-of-work protocol extends far beyond money. The same principles can and will be harnessed to generate new kinds of digital functionality, in addition to digital money.
In contrast to the AGI model, where capital and physical compute organize humans into a game designed to justify their infrastructure, the proof-of-work protocol reorganizes computers to bootstrap capital and physical compute around human values.
There's a cold war brewing between AGI and crypto—an arms race between two fundamentally different ways of organizing compute at the civilization level.
"It's still early," as they say.
