DarkWeave: The Introduction

The Technological and Economic Infrastructure Necessary to Support a Knowledge-Based Economy

Previously the DarkWeave problem statement was defined. TL;DR:

Mike Gill as a Case Study

• James Comey complains about the risks of going dark, but the FBI didn’t even open the door to receive Mike Gill’s evidence package until a Federal AG told them to. They never even wanted to look at evidence pertaining to the biggest cause of death of Americans under 40 to begin with. Someone turned up on their doorstep with everything they needed to know: organised into folders hundreds of pages thick, and they repeatedly turned him away. So really it’s the FBI’s own willful and corrupt blindness that is is the problem. It’s not that they cannot see, it’s that they would not see to begin with and it’s been going on since Ross Ulbricht.

• Mike Gill’s personal, financial and social situation demonstrate clearly that the disclosure of material information of benefit to everyone, literally everyone on Earth, has been extremely costly, life threateningly dangerous and crippling for him. It has certainly not, over the course of 19 years since Mike became the World Champion horse racing, been of any personal benefit to him thus far.

• For Mike’s evidence to now be sitting in the hands of A list podcasters such as Tucker Carlson, who is still CIA affiliated like all the ones before, Mike has had to endure the loss of his personal fortune due to forged legal documents recusing his witnesses in a defamation case, he has had to endure sickness with no medical care, poor living conditions, separation and alienation from his family, countless betrayals, and has had survive and grasp fleeting opportunities on his wits alone.

  • Mike Gill is an extremely high agency individual who exhibits extremely high disagree-ability, mild Aspergers Syndrome, mild Dark Triad traits that mainly exhibit tactically in a pro-social strategic way, noticeable dyslexia, and a mind that does not think in terms of words, which he often mixes up is mis-spells, but rather concepts, specifically game theoretic, network, signalling theory and logarithmic concepts, which are also well suited to the problem at hand.

  • It is not a reasonable expectation for anyone to be able to repeat Mike Gill’s Herculean feats, especially those who didn’t start out with a $300 million fortune and a platform on ESPN radio to begin with. Mike Gill is a very specific sort of personality, character and mind that synergized well with the problem at hand. The vast majority of people would be dead already attempting to replicate what Mike Gill has done and dead very quickly, within a year.

• Hundreds of millions of people have experienced the negative consequences of what Mike Gill has uncovered in various ways and millions have died. Mike’s lawyer Darla Sedgewick, for example, experienced horrifying malfeasance and abuse, Prisoner J who helped to save Mike’s life when Mike’s prison food was poisoned, and was beaten and raped for his troubles, is just one of many thousands of similar victims of the opioid epidemic, abused and taken advantage of by the system. Mike's story is not just about him, it’s about a reality, and a dark underbelly of society that is deliberately and meticulously hidden from us behind a wall of ignorance, censorship and Omerta.

• Before Mike Gill’s evidence was on Arweave it was prone to being deleted and there was always the sword of Damocles of possible future deletion hanging over it. Now that it’s on Arweave it cannot be deleted. It cost roughly $1000 in fees over 18 months to upload the 48 Gigabytes, the evidence itself pertains to at least $935 billion in Pandora Papers LLCs in the state of New Hampshire alone. That amount of money can conceivably purchase any and all means to delete any content from the Web2 internet, with Arweave that door is closed.

• Mike Gill’s journey is all textbook stuff from Lecture 1 of the Romeo-Juliet framework, but Mike Gill demonstrates the true scale of it, and that it is not just a Bitcoin problem, it’s an everything problem everywhere.

In General

• What is hidden cannot be measured, what cannot be measured cannot be priced. Internet censorship is first and foremost an economic problem and the economics of privacy are conceptually similar to those of censorship. Censorship takes away the ability to be seen, privacy also does, but the beneficiaries of each are primarily and fundamentally opposed according to Romeo-Juliet framework game theory.

• Web2 is a potentially life threatening risk to whistleblowers alone as killing the whistleblower or even just making them economically and socially excluded, can lead to them being unable to maintain and protect their own digital footprint.

• The interests of Siren Servers and podcasters are always, to a greater or lesser degree, mutually exclusive with respect to those of whistleblowers. The higher the stakes the more likely that this mutual exclusivity, as described in my Romeo-Juliet framework from 2020/21, will cause a schism in the relationship between the two

• The relationship between whistleblowers and podcasters is asymmetric. Whistleblowers are obligated to disclose first and disclose maximally, even past the point of mortal danger, podcasters are only obligated to disclose what their sponsors, their real customers, want them to disclose.

• Both transparency and privacy are necessary for professionals dealing in material risks, both have their own risk and reward profiles, both can be used appropriately or inappropriately, legally or illegally.

From an Engineering Perspective

• Whistleblowers are an important and vital source of material facts pertaining to material risks and most importantly material facts pertaining to systemic root causes of failure.

• Without properly explained and described systemic root causes of failure, we cannot write effective engineering problem statements.

• Without effective engineering problem statements engineers are unable to engineer a solution to the problem from concept.

• This, in turn, makes innovation, the source of 80% of real economic growth, almost impossible, it lowers productivity and the ability of society to adapt to complexity and the new challenges that the future inevitably presents us with.

• This can then help us to reframe Mark Fisher’s writings regarding Capitalist Realism as an incumbent economic force profiting, via monopoly rents, from the destruction of engineering agency, the information, capability and authority that engineers must have in order to be able to perform their essential and fundamentally public service, which underpins all real and measureable economic growth

• Thus by confronting capital with engineering, we are fundamentally confronting it with the maximum capability and agency conceivably available to us as well as ‘the real’ which is the problem statement itself. We need both. Engineering is not political, it’s existential and ordained by the Crown by divine right.

• Thus when Mike Gill states, as a former mortgage broker not an engineer, that the signs are pointing towards a systemic collapse, this is no exaggeration. According to Joseph Tainter this is exactly how societal collapses happen. But we still have it within our grasp to avoid catastrophe, because all the fundamental components are present.

Revisiting the Value Proposition

Value stored in infrastructure is a function of both our collective ability to manage variance and the network effects that the infrastructure creates. We can only measure this value into existence properly if it is safe to do so and if the incentives to do so are sufficiently aligned. The fundamental basis of Dan’s concept of value creation is sound, but the digital infrastructure must be able to support the users, and especially the engineers, to perform their role both safely and effectively. Expecting people to risk their life and livelihood to report the line walk as walked and not as management said is an unreasonable expectation.

DarkFi

The modern digital economy is an economy of narratives primarily because it is an economy of large intangibles, greater than human scale, network scale, whereas the the 20th century economy was an economy of human scale tangibles. Absent privacy in a desertified social and political structure, our interactions with social media have been equally intangible to us. This is, in turn, used against us by Siren Servers.

In order to tangibly define our interactions in an economy of large intangibles, privacy is essential, and a necessary engineering feature for Dan Robles’ original vision to be realized. Private interactions via DarkFi are tangible and clearly defined for the user. There are no external hidden costs, there is no pollution, no digital twin nor digital footprint. Privacy itself is necessary to create a measurable and tangible risk profile against which it is then possible for individuals to measure the risk of public transactions and interactions against. Privacy represents purity for users. Without privacy users do not know whether it is better to transact $10 in private or $1000 in public, there is no relative risk profile to measure against. With privacy it is possible to articulate the real risk of choosing to be an engineer vs choosing to be a Youtube influencer, for example. Without it, it is not possible.

In this way Rachel-Rose O’Leary fully contextualizes the factors of production based upon systemic risks based on the reality now, for the young people who experience it. Modern day sufferings are still viewed by the older generations as something like dystopian science fiction, something abstract. What’s great about Rachel is that her exposition comes from the heart, that authenticity really comes through in an atmosphere where she is able to be herself, which would not be the case if she had decided to work for, for example, Exxon Mobile, Lockheed Martin, Bechtel or Equinor.

That authenticity of message combined with institutionally recognized theory is a powerful thing. We’ve forgetten the value that young engineers bring to the table completely in that way these days. They are not burdened by our baggage, and not phased by the limitations that we imposed upon ourselves. That’s how it needs to be for us to be able to start doing good engineering again, where the engineering itself comes first, not the old news.

Reforestation measured against Rachel-Rose’s empirical measures of desertification is a tangible factor of production too. This correlates with Dan Robles’ explications of network and hierarchy but in a much more tangible way that demonstrates the true costs and the true value of engineering much more tangibly again. Networks and AI are not a way for the government to offload and outsource their basic responsibilities to no one in particular, but that is how they are currently being used. We must choose to govern and lead ourselves, to show the sort of courage that others will follow.

The Ingredients

With all of that being said I have now set myself the task of writing an engineering concept document myself.

What We Want

• Privacy as a default setting for what absolutely must be private, DarkFi’s ZkVM just about covers that in terms of escrow and AnonDAO.

• If DarkFi is a computer and the ZkVM is the core CPU it needs a hard drive, so we use the Web3 equivalent of that which is Arweave and AR.IO network for storage and retrieval. We want to build the ZkVM around immutable and permanent data, not Web2 where all data has a 5 year average half life and the best data much less than that.

• GPU compute, AI, we want that augmentation because AI is important and incredibly useful, especially on the blockchain where it can be verified from end to end. GPUs also do games and VR and stuff, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

• We want Object Capability security patterns such that capability and authority can scale as well as the network scales, minimizing undue authority to any user or smart contract.

• We want to be able to price material facts, material risks properly using network effects to overcome the moral hazard of hierarchical systems which has become fatally corrupted.

• Therefore we want to maximize the sharing of material information and maximize price discovery of said material information: disintermediating the market and flipping it from an intelligence industry and military dominated hierarchy into a network model that is robust, scales to the edges and yields the network effect valuation force multipliers to everyone.

Incremental Infrastructure Build Out of DarkFi Augmented Functionality

• Ideally for privacy focused applications, the privacy should carry through to the back-end layer, the mining and validator nodes themselves

• Initially integrating Tor with browser-based applications would be sufficient for a number of applications

• DarkFi apps in the browser will probably happen anyway, whether it makes Amir Taaki sick in his mouth or not, but DarkFi’s relentless focus on end to end privacy should always be part of the engineering ethos.

• The more material the evidence that a whistleblower has, the greater the value it has, but also the greater the requirement that the whistleblower has for privacy with respect to their own safety and well-being. So the value case for privacy is the yield of better, higher quality information, more insight into root cause failure modes, which then gives rise to genuinely innovative engineering concept statements. Privacy and economic growth are therefore strongly correlated and strongly proportional.

• End to end privacy will not initially be feasible nor necessary in all cases, some sacrifice will lead to quicker turnarounds of products, and the general idea is to eat into the market incrementally from MVP to scale-able application.

• Everything should be built with the ultimate intention of becoming Assange proof, Snowden proof, Mike Gill proof, should be built with that level of resilience and necessary privacy in mind, even if the initial versions are far from that.

DarkWeave Service Nodes

• Initial build out can start by integrating native chain command line wallets, sdks and tools. Not everyone requires cross-chain transaction privacy, but those sharing information of the highest materality are most likely to.

• Nodes listen for signed messages requesting transactions via DARKIRC, respond with a payment request to be sent to the users’ wallet via DarkFi (plus appropriate user tooling)

• Nodes act as normal nodes for other blockchains, accepting and validating transactions but

• Nodes accept payment via DarkFi, not via their native token, so they act as network and liquidity bridges also

• This requires a wrapped DARK token-native token DEX contract on the service node native chain and likewise on the DarkFi chain

• Service nodes can be operated conceivably on any chain that supports wrapped DARK token and a bilateral DEX contract

• Payment held in escrow until trx reaches finality and is proven to have been carried out as contractually obliged. Otherwise funds are returned to the user and the Service node takes a loss.

DarkWeave Gateway Nodes

• Same as Service Nodes but work the other way

• When an external chain user wishes to interact with DarkFi via their native chain, they use a Gateway Node, pay in the external chain native token and perform actions on DarkFi.

• Address cycling will probably be necessary here to avoid doxx risk

• This can be particularly useful for Oracle services or when a public individual is vouching for an anonymous and private one.

• For example if you want to be able to objectively verify the inputs and outputs to an on-chain artificial intelligence model or algorithm from end to end, then have that autonomously influence the decision of a DarkFi ZkVM smart contract, gateway nodes are the ideal way to implement that at network level.

DarkWeave Incorporated Functionality

Arweave/AO/AR.IO/Hyperbeam

• A general purpose ‘Vat Layer’ according to Mark Miller’s orchestration model

• On-chain immutable, permanent Github

• Immutable, decentralized and permanent file storage and subsequent service and hosting for $20 per GB

• TEE computation

• On-chain LLMs, generalized algorthmic AI

• Custom VM runtime

• Immutable decentralized domain name service

• Agent model computation, infinite scaling

• Low cost fast performant DEX able to trade complex financial products with on-chain trading bots of any conceivable level of complexity also (Botega & DEXI: The Blackrock Killer)

Alux Network

• The general purpose ‘Orchestration’ Layer according to Mark Miller’s orchestration model

• Computation model founded in the Rho-Calculus for explicit concurrency and asynchronicity

• Safe by Construction Object Capability Security Patterns for complex coordination and orchestration

• Extreme concurrency and fast cross-shard atomic transactions

• Complex multi-signature smart contracts with established OCap primitives such as boxes and purses and Matryoshka doll arrangements thereof that can be shared

• Also supports standard EVM runtime

DarkFi Escrow and Insurance Contracts

• DarkFi itself is only really a hard requirement for *insurance* related functionality.

• Escrow is the most basic form of insurance.

• The rules of DarkFi whistleblower insurance don’t need to be much more complex than escrow fundamentally in order to provide the necessary essential service.

• Making sure that whistleblowers are not pushed to desperation and that their basic needs are met while out of work, while being propositioned by podcasters and media, and that their source of funds is private and they cannot be de-banked either are primary concerns. Whistleblowers need to be in a position to negotiate. Starving people, people who are drowning are in no position to negotiate to begin with.

• A good first rule of thumb for negotiation with podcasters is that every podcaster uploads a CV to Arweave and agrees to save a copy of any podcast made with any whistleblower on Arweave in perpetuity, and that it is uploaded to Arweave first, before any other platform.

• The whistleblower can choose to compensate the podcaster in a native token with a value correlated to the outcome of their mission.

  • The token can be programmable, subject to lock up periods, use it or lose it clauses, third party and on-chain AI arbtiration and conflict resolution.

  • Main thing is that a lot of podcasters would prefer to get paid from the truth than get paid by promoting merch and sponsors. This enables that and it’s a huge untapped win-win-win scenario for whistleblowers, podcasters and their audiences.

DarkWeave User Interface

• Tor browser but it only runs the Jessie subset of Javascript, or perhaps very specific rust components compiled to WASM with very specific functionality aligning specifically with DarkWeave functionality.

• Upload to Arweave, display from Arweave, but Javascript is disabled aside from the Jessie subset

• DAO multisig, incorporating Alux for OCap functionality where necessary, especially for complex and large projects

• DarkFi transactions, particularly escrow, insurance and material information markets

• DarkIRC chat, customized according to defined listen criteria with a wider variety of options to encrypt and wider variety of message types for a wider variety of use cases.

What’s Already Available

• DarkIRC

• Ardrive and Ardrive SDK

• Protocol Land

• Tor + Codeberg

• Tor Browser

• Tau Task Manager

• AOS Shell and command line tools

• DarkIRC

• DarkFi Testnet

Where to Begin

Join the hackers channel on DarkIRC where I will be implementing a Curiosumé based teaching, learning and collaboration model in the coming days, weeks, months, years, however long it takes to learn the DarkFi Dev material. We’re probably going to begin with maths, but if you’d rather Rust or something else, jump in and LMK.

References:

The Ingenesist Project by Daniel Robles PE and Bradely Leighton PE

The Romeo Juliet Framework by me

Warwick CCRU Cybernetics and Philosophy Stuff by Mark Fisher and Nick Land

OCaps, Security and Risk from Mark Miller et al

The DarkFi Book by The Forest Rebels

Next Up: More Detail on the Dismal Science known as ‘Token Science’. TTFN.