Sublime
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The Bitcoin blockchain gives one answer. It is the most rigorous form of history yet known to man, a history that is technically and economically resistant to revision. Thanks to a combination of cryptographic primitives and financial incentives, it is very challenging to falsify the who, what, and when of transactions written to the Bitcoin blockc
... See moreBalaji Srinivasan • The Network State: How To Start a New Country
The answer to whether or not robots have DNA appears to be that they have something that accomplishes most, if not all, of the same function in the world. But it’s differently implemented. Their core, heritable information does not need to be held in individuals, or even within a given species. That information is dispersible, although often locali
... See moreCaleb Scharf • The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, and Life's Unending Algorithm
Atomized, bespoke digital realities
Brandon Marcus • 16 cards
A persuasive framework for the digital that has ontological implications is being developed by Benjamin Bratton in San Diego. Bratton’s (2014) concern with the geopolitics of planetary-scale computation leads him to posit the existence of an “accidental megastructure,” the Stack.
Arturo Escobar • Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century)
Robert B. Leighton • Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
Another issue to address in peer-to-peer, pseudonymous systems was Sybil attacks. Just as coins can be replicated in a digital world, so can identities. This is a problem in a network of equal peers because an attacker could create a large number of pseudonymous identities to gain a disproportionately large influence.
Camila Russo • The Infinite Machine
You can do this as a one-off for a single piece of data, or as a periodic backup for any non-Bitcoin chain. So you could, in theory, put a digital summary of many gigabytes of data from another chain on the Bitcoin blockchain every ten minutes for the price of a single BTC transaction, thereby proving it existed. This would effectively “back up” th
... See moreBalaji Srinivasan • The Network State: How To Start a New Country
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Vanessa Finzer • 1 card