Time-As-Platform: Ether’s Phoenix & The Memorial Monument
Due to the ever-growing immutable history of blockchains, the longer they exist, the more possible it becomes to interact (and transact) with the future and the past. It brings about strange, emergent outcomes that include: hyperstructures (free, yet valuable infrastructure), abundant retroactive funding (Ether’s Phoenix), and re-animating the dead. After just over a decade of existence, time-as-platform is slowly emerging and could redefine all manner of new social structures, art, and philosophical questions.
It’s a hard topic to talk about because causality is kind of warped by the nature that hypothetical events in the future are impacting people’s choices today. And past events are influencing decisions today. Let’s try.
Cover, generated through https://www.conjure.art/
1 Interacting with the past: Retroactive Funding
A trend that emphasises time-as-platform is the retroactive airdrop: it rewards users that have already interacted with a protocol or product. A big example of this was Uniswap, a decentralized exchange protocol. Initially, people could use it as-is: exchange trades through an automated market maker. This meant that a collection of addresses showed commitment to the protocol. It was there, recorded in the immutable history of Ethereum.
Then, a token, $UNI, was created to continue governing the protocol. This token gives access over a community treasury. 15% of the supply was retroactively given to participants that interacted with the first and second version of Uniswap. It meant, at the time, that if you made at least one trade, you were given ~$400. This token is now valued >$3.6B.
This behaviour sparked a new tendency in users: a speculative incentive to just interact with stuff, in case there’s a future reward for doing so. It’s a unique bootstrapping mechanism, because even if the users aren’t eventually rewarded, they do the effort to engage with the technology.
This has interesting implications, especially when there’s compounding network effects: the more it happens, the more it will happen. The longer it goes, the more it will happen and the more opportunity there will be to reward past transactions. There’s a continuous reward system that incentivises more and more users to interact with protocols, not for a known speculative reward, but a hypothetical reward. It’s not akin to traditional speculation (buy something and hope it goes up), but rather a way to bet on any unknown futures. All becomes possible and to receive these future, hypothetical rewards, the sooner you interact, the better. The more traces you immutably record and leave behind, the more likely it could be that you could be rewarded.
There’s also another side to this coin (screw it, pun intended). What’s additionally valuable about this model: it’s easier to agree what was useful than will be useful. Retroactive rewards are a lot more efficient form of resource allocation than pre-determining hypothetical rewards. A protocol should serve the user, not the user serving the protocol. The latter occurs when the rules are transparent (such as in blockchains) and gaming the protocol occurs with programs + bots. Retroactive rewards broadly disincentivizes abusers because when the rules are unknown, people only really act in individually beneficial ways with the protocol. It’s useful to interact more with the protocol, but not to spam or abuse the protocol because you don’t know if it’s costly to do so. It’s simply more beneficial to use the protocol for your own individual needs and hope that will be sufficient for a future, retroactive airdrop.
A variant of this framing focuses on the value of producing public goods, dubbed, the Ether’s Phoenix.
The Ether’s Phoenix: rising from the ashes of failed coordination.
In short, it states that an abundant future of public goods will indefinitely and retroactively reward the contributors who helped create it. Its name is derived from the opposite conundrum: called the Roko’s Basilisk. A future AI will punish you forever if you don’t help to create it.
An example of the Ether’s Phoenix unfolding is with the Optimism network (a scaling solution to Ethereum): it is rewarding earlier contributors for helping to bring Optimism to fruition. 5% of the initial supply will be retroactively donated to the following categories: people already using Optimism, people repeatedly using Optimism, people that used a DAO (working together), used a multisig (working together), Gitcoin donors (donated to open source projects), and that have experimented with other scaling solutions (early adopters of new technology).
In the future, there will be more airdrops planned and as noted, it’s not shown yet what criteria will be rewarded. This is intentional.
Where does the value come from?
Ultimately, if actions today are to be rewarded by future protocols, where does the value actually come from? While this mechanism helps bootstrap future systems, it still needs to be valuable, or produce value. These three are primary ones, but there are smaller ones I won’t cover here, like inflation and social network coordination.
1) Actual Protocol Fees.
In Optimism, part of underlying scaling solution will send revenue to a collective which will govern how to issue retroactive airdrops.
2) The Threat of a Fee.
A very interesting concept that plays into the concept of time-as-platform, is that the the threat of a fee results in a protocol that is simultaneously free, yet valuable. It’s such a bizarre concept, but not entirely unfamiliar. For example, Amazon has never paid any dividends, but its stock is still valuable because it used to ‘govern’ the corporation. These protocols are classified as a hyperstructure. It’s protocols that are (quoted directly from the article):
Unstoppable: the protocol cannot be stopped by anyone. It runs for as long as the underlying blockchain exists.
Free: there is a 0% protocol wide fee and runs exactly at gas cost.
Valuable: accrues value which is accessible and exitable by the owners.
Expansive: there are built-in incentives for participants in the protocol.
Permissionless: universally accessible and censorship resistant. Builders and users cannot be deplatformed.
Positive sum: it creates a win-win environment for participants to utilize the same infrastrastructure.
Credibly neutral: the protocol is user-agnostic.
Value and transactions are flowing through the protocol, but there is a way to make ownership of it valuable without actually incurring any fees. In fact, it’s beneficial not to, as any fees would remove the network effect of the protocol.
3) The Future.
The concept of a hyperstructure itself is mind-blowing: a way to not extract rent, keep it cheap as necessary, yet still produce value. Now, the wildest part of this idea ties into the concept of retroactive funding: you can extrapolate this to anything and all behaviour captured on a blockchain. Although there isn’t explicit protocols to create a threat of a fee for all transactions, you can turn on a “fee switch” to anything that happened in the past. A lonesome NFT that had been forgotten could suddenly be the most valuable object in the entire network due to any unknown reason in the future. The possibility of that happening in itself brings forth another feedback loop to the retroactive airdrop thesis: everything is infinitely valuable on a blockchain on a long-enough timeframe. The only cost becomes opportunity cost. Not all parts will be equally valuable at all times.
2 The Far Future: Art, Fiction, and the Human Memorial Monument.
In 2015, I wrote a short story about a future where a sibling generates AI versions of his dead siblings in VR to talk to them again. They are generated from records that were immutably stored in a blockchain. A Letter to Pat & Ara at Block 6127192. In a meta way, this story was embedded in its entirety inside Ethereum, being populated across hundreds of thousands of Ethereum nodes across the world: forever logging my own history and story in it.
While this story takes place in the near future, it becomes even stranger to imagine extrapolating on this on much longer timescales. As this article starts: the longer this technology lasts, the longer we can think about its future (and thus, our own). It’s something that I haven’t stopped thinking about, aided in part by working with writer and art historian, Vanessa Rosa, on a new story through my business, Untitled Frontier. It’s called “Little Martians & The Human Memorial Monument” and asks us to imagine a memorial monument of humanity circulating a future Dyson sphere. Humanity has no planet anymore, but living in a simulated universe of their own making. An alien, knowing how to interact with it, simulates a human from our era.
It’s doubly poignant as the story touches upon Vanessa’s own sister, Diana, who passed away. By utilising this engine of the Ether’s Phoenix to bring forth an abundant future, we are also leaving ourselves behind. By immutable storing history, these shared blockchain engines are memetic gravity wells for many unknown futures. This is both powerful & frightening: the ability to enshrine ourselves and hold back against the eventual heat death of the universe also entails that our past is always with us. It might never be left alone.
A good example of this was during 2021 when many people become chain archeologists, digging up old NFT projects that never sold out when it was first announced. For you see, it didn’t necessarily matter what was being done, but rather when it was done. Time is so important that it overshadows everything else. For good, and bad. The past, the now, and the future all lose shape.
It’s not all super utopian or doom and gloom. I think that knowing this allows us to create new forms of stories, art, and reflections. One of my favourite examples of this is Folia + David Rudnick, called Exodus II. It immutably encodes releases of collectible haikus according to the fibonacci sequence. The last one, to become available in 40 years.
The longer this technology stays around, the more we can play with time.
Conclusion
While the specifics of retroactive funding are still being explored, we are continuously awakening the possibility of interacting with any and many futures and pasts. It’s a world where everything becomes valuable and the past isn’t left alone. Let’s take the time to build this collective future of abundance, while ensuring that we take stock of the importance of this collective memorial monument.
So, hi, future Simon. I hope the sunsets in Alpha Centauri within your ceramic shell is beautiful.
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PS Until 16th of May 2022, you can still mint Little Martians NFTs from the short story!
