Now that I’ve hopefully narrowed down our focus, I’m going to circle back to the tools of Blockchain and the promise they hold.
Having a money that the psychopaths can’t inflate would surely prevent or shorten wars, because if they must come get your approval for new taxes after you’re already lost a family member to the meat grinder, it’s obviously going to get more difficult.
Once the printing press is in motion, it usually stays in motion to ‘help alleviate’ the consequences of massive economic disruptions, most recently by giving you 6 cents out of every dollar printed to pay for the million dollar flying toys.
This is in part why Randolph Bourne famously wrote “War is the Health of the State”. The other reason is that it usually preys in people’s tribal instincts to rally around whoever is in charge, draw lines and demand more control.
A prime example of this is how the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has never caught a single terrorist in 25 years, despite a staggering $11.7 billion budget, yet few people would dare call it useless, with most signing up for the fast track electronic pass that gives them back their right to go through a door for a fee. Even admitting that airplane security is an important service that travelers would be willing to pay, certainly airlines would pay, it’s hard to imagine how a private enterprise could not get better results or perform the service with better quality and lower cost.
So, fixing the money would at least stop the bleeding.
But it wouldn’t stop the wars.
I spent quite some time thinking about this and trying to look at the three pillars of domination that were described in The Dawn of Everything.
Every single pillar depends on people’s innate vulnerabilities:
The secrecy pillar uses the impulse to seek acceptance in a group with a shared secret, whether it is a secret ritual, recipe, words.
The charisma pillar uses people’s fine tuned sense of discrimination, noticing what is different, and conception of courage, whether it is from adornment, clothing, oratory or athletic.
The violence pillar relies on (normal) people’s shock to gratuitous violence that isn’t just fear. The mirror neurons kick-in and cause a spike in empathy for the victim and a gap in understanding of the perpetrator: the sudden awareness that someone is so detached it cannot be understood causes this suspension of belief similar to reverence and often turns into worship.
I won’t elaborate more on this, my point is simply that we humans are flawed to think others are just like us, we like it when they stand out just a little, we like belonging to groups of people that are like us and when that becomes difficult we can invent reasons why others are different, even if it’s just because they don’t know the secret prayer, so that when someone stand out with gratuitous violence then our brains freeze and we worship them.
Psychopaths know this, perhaps not explicitly, but they use it.
Pick any well-known psychopath and you’ll have an easy time identifying how they’ve used these traits to their advantage.
Wikileaks tried to fix the secrecy problem by making it safe to leak government documents. IPFS has tried to make sure online graffiti cannot be promptly erase and blockchain in general has tried to make it difficult for those in government to chase down and pressure the people creating and maintaining these sorts of applications.
Nonetheless, any whistleblower takes an enormous risk, because there is no limit to the intensity the state will use to track you down and kill you or worse, to make an example of those who might dare follow in your steps. The recent wave of censorship during the COVID years and beyond made a lot of people realize their freedom of speech is precious, and it gave birth to many decentralized media platforms with various levels of success. Worse, a lot of this innovation resulted in fragmented communities, echo chambers in which the Overton window became self imposed. This is truly sad, because you must realize that tyrants don’t just rule by force, they must indoctrinate, and always make it a priority to silence dissent. Graffiti gets erased before too many people see them because it is the signal to those too afraid of speaking up that someone else shares their view. The fragmentation of social media is similar to never really venturing outside to new areas where you might see a graffiti, and utter isolation for those trying to warn others.
At the heart of our problem is an asymmetry:
psychopaths can kill without losing sleep over it, and it’s much harder for you.
In fact it’s so hard for normal people to kill someone intentionally that armies have fine tuned their training to de-sensitize soldiers to the act. Firing squads used to dispense blanks mixed with real bullets so the soldiers could walk away with the sense that perhaps they weren’t the one who killed. Soldiers of WWI made a truce during the first Christmas in which they got out of trenches and exchanged gifts, stories,
played soccer and drank alcohol with the ‘enemy’ and were reluctant to keep fighting, forcing their commanders to rotate them to other fronts where they didn’t know the other soldiers they faced.
Countless soldiers come back from the middle East with stories that haunt them and with a suicide rate that should be posted outside every recruitment office.
And remember, the State is the only way psychopaths can convince the rest of the world their abuse is legitimate. Even when the abuse couldn’t possibly be legitimate, as we saw with the Jeffrey Epstein files fiasco, other psychopaths, in government, step in to cover it up and threaten more abuse if you don’t like it.
Where Blockchain can help.
Blockchain was invented and understood by early adopters for its decentralization and the resilience of its design. There is nothing anyone can do to cheat the systems that are well designed to take advantage of it. Much has been written about the various mechanisms that prevent this and we may go into them at some point, but for the moment, just know that nation states cannot overturn the consensus reached by hundreds of unknown computers scattered around the world about the validity of a transaction. People will debate whether NSA can crack ECDSA, the signature algorithm used to sign transactions, but the bottom line is that so far this has never happened. Quantum Computing may at some point be able to be a problem for the cryptographic algorithms currently in use, but researchers are already working on solutions. Likewise, nation states cannot manufacture Zero-Knowledge Proofs that would validate illegitimate transactions.
Other types of algorithms were invented to decentralize decision making using incentives across a multitude of nodes. Participants in DAOs or in Conditional Decryption networks often have to stake a certain amount of their tokens in order to take actions, which they could lose if anyone was able to demonstrate to the blockchain contract holding their escrow that they provided false information.
Bearing false witness in that world is costly.
So if blockchain interactions are unstoppable, irreversible and sometimes private, surely there are other things it can do besides immortalizing cartoon pictures of bored apes, right ?
There are.
The first one that came on my radar several years ago, I can’t remember the exact details, was the concept of a dead man switch.
In 2019, John McAfee tweeted:
"Getting subtle messages from U.S. officials saying, in effect: 'We're coming for you McAfee! We're going to kill yourself'. I got a tattoo today just in case. If I suicide myself, I didn't. I was whackd [sic]. Check my right arm."
At around the same time, the company NuCypher offered a small reward at ETH Denver for someone to create a decentralized dead man switch using their technology.
I had just been introduced to Bitcoin and Ethereum, but I still didn’t see much of the potential but this caught my interest. I though their technology had great potential and it was an opportunity to learn this whole new technology stack.
I though about it, but couldn’t figure out how to make it truly decentralized. NuCypher only had Proxy-ReEncryption (PRE) as a technology and it wasn’t clear how this could be leveraged to create a dead man switch.
The PRE they offered allowed conditions to be evaluated before the re-encryption could be performed. In plain English, a set of staked, decentralized nodes would hold on to a special key and perform a translation from one encryption to another - without decrypting, if certain conditions were satisfied. The conditions could be encoded in the re-encryption policy, and could involve checking the state of a blockchain contract.
This puzzled me for about a year, until I realized the contract could hold the state of a check-in from the user as a form of proof of life. To secure the system against attacks on the decentralized nodes and to insulate it from the variability in mining speeds, I added a Time Lock Puzzle zero knowledge proof to the architecture.
I set out to write an early prototype of the technology in 2021.
John McAfee was found dead by hanging in his Spanish prison cell on June 23, 2021.
Later, when NuCypher retired their Proxy Re-Encryption offering in favor of their Decentralized Key Generation and Conditional Decryption, the system had to evolve to make use of this more robust technology. Finally the product launched in 2024 as a Decentralized Crypto Inheritance solution. If you’re interested in the technical details, feel free to consult the BqETH White Paper .
So, this was one thing that couldn’t be stopped by the tyrants which could - that was my hope - at least make sure that killing someone would no longer guarantee their silence.
The product failed to attract any interest in the field of crypto asset inheritance, and no venture capitalist firm paid it any attention. The company shut down in 2025.
It’s disappointing, because I tried reaching out to people who claim to care about truth, about the murder of journalists, about the corruption in government and about the overall degradation of the rule of law. Crickets. You could only hear clicks.
I mean this sarcastically, of course, but the real phenomenon at work is simple:
Nobody cares about your life more than you.
It turns out, that’s all we need.
In the next article, we’ll tie it all together with another blockchain solution.
