DarkWeave: The Value Proposition
Token Science Founded in the Scientific Method
Previously the foundational principles for the DarkWeave value proposition were established TL;DR:
The Darfi Manifesto leads from the ‘going dark’ quote from James Comey. The content contained within Mike Gill evidence vault categorically proves that the risk of ‘going dark’ has never been the problem. Corruption and entrapment have always been the problem. The FBI are inherently institutionally blind when it comes to looking for themselves and their own facilitation of crime.
Because Mike Gill’s evidence is now 100% hosted and served via Arweave and Ardrive, it is now impossible to delete. This is very important because the evidence relates to at least $935 billion in Pandora Papers money, the sort of money that can buy an entire state government, let alone social engineers, private intelligence agents, hackers, lawyers and so forth to work full time on taking Mike’s content down.
Mike Gill’s evidence is now a public immutable digital asset for everyone, and an asset that proves the premise of the DarkFi Manifesto beyond doubt for the means of rational and reasonable pricing of material facts, particularly material facts pertaining to root causes of failure, such as the FBI’s and the IRS’ failures to investigate themselves in the case of Mike Gill.
Mike Gill’s evidence pertains to mortal risks at scale. The cost of life for infrastructure engineering at this scale is typically between $1 million and $20 million. Therefore the justifiable engineering expenditure according to norms to address this risk, which pertains directly to the biggest cause of death of under 40s in America today, is of the order of magnitude of between hundreds of $billions and tens of $trillions. The corruption described by Mike Gill sequesters this money, according to sequstration described by the Romeo-Juliet framework, from engineers, who innovate, to criminals to steal and kill. This sequestration of wealth is ongoing.
Because Mike Gill’s evidence is true in the home of ‘freedom and democracy’ that every other nation is encouraged to replicate at gunpoint by the Military Industrial Complex, we must assume, absent appropriate checks and balances to prove the counterfactual sufficiently, that it could be true anywhere else. Thus the order of magnitude of justified engineering spend could be assumed to increase a further order of magntitude to between one and one hundred $trillion globally.
The chicken and egg problem here, however, is that absent the material information to define the root cause, even if we have all the money set aside, there is no engineering justification to spend it.
Also, because the money itself does not measure innovation it only measures debt, which is the ability to confiscate by law enforcement and courts that Mike Gill has proven to be corrupt anyway, we do not have the means, currently, to measure the pile of money into existence either. Therefore we lack the ability to coordinate the value of the work of the engineers designing and building the solutions with wider society who are equally unable to measure it compared to, say, stacking supermarket shelves, making Power Point slides or convening management meetings to discuss the KPIs.
As a proxy for this value we can measure tokens into existence according to pre-defined rules, much like blockchains and cryptocurrency networks already do, and the tokens themselves can also be programmable such they also obey rules.
The memecoin market alone, while used primarily as a vehicle for fraud and money laundering, managed to reach a multi-$billion valuation first based upon the principle of Hyperstition, which is essentially, prima facie, a mass expectation of innovation reflecting a mass need for it, but then just devolved into overt corruption the more it became adopted by pre-existing structures of power and value measurement.
We have already explicated where innovation really comes from, which is teaching, learning, cooperation and engineering, and that in order to innovate engineers require material facts pertaining to root causes of failure in order to be able to formulate effective engineering problem statements, and therefore innovate.
The concepts outlined hence are, fundamentally, the same mechanisms by which Blackrock, Palantir and a wide variety of B2B SAAS companies generate value. The difference is that, with DarkFi and augmented DarkWeave technologies, the value proposition can be designed to be broadly symmetric between accounts and the value proposition and network effect force mulipliers can scale to the network edges. They are not just measured into existence in the middle for the benefit of the middle, they are measured into existence by anyone for everyone.
In order to reveal material facts pertaining to material root causes of failure, those sharing those facts require privacy not only to ensure that the information is shared appropriately with the relevant parties in their own interest, but also for their safety and well-being. They not only require outward privacy but also privacy of reciprocity in terms of how they are compensated and by whom. Thus economic privacy is proportional to innovation and therefore economic growth. This is the fundamental value case for both DarkFi and the proposed DarkWeave suite of augmented technologies.
Thus the DarkFi Manifesto, ecosystem, value proposition, memes and Hyperstition can merge seamlessly with existing systems of measurement, existing memecoins, existing vibes with one important difference: the ability to measure materiality and, therefore, innovation itself, given best available technology and understanding is explained and conceptualized from the outset.
This is only negotiable in so much as it is further elucidated and expanded upon. No more brushing it under the rug. No more using privacy as an excuse to perpetuate bad habits. Privacy is a necessary tool for human coordination in the age of information and should be treated with the necessary deference and respect. Just as it is idiotic and counterproductive to blame the methamphetamine trade on the science of chemistry so it is counterproductive to blame financial crime or the leaking of state secrets on cryptography and cooperative game theory. Governments and authorities exist to support society’s ability to innovate, not to prevent it, which is to undermine society and the social fabric itself.
Token Science
I dislike the term ‘Token Science’ but I am going to start with it because that’s the term that DarkFi use. We have a good solid heuristic MCap order of magnitude target for DRK token following from the established facts and principles:
~$1 trillion in Pandora Papers money in New Hampshire, the home of Bitcoin, Porfest, Monerotopia, Ghislaine Maxwell’s chosen retreat, the home of much of early Bitcoin development and adoption and where FTX sent a sizeable chunk of its political donations as well.
At least ~$1 trillion justiable engineering budget to solve the problem based upon established engineering safety and loss prevention norms at scale to prevent substance abuse related deaths
~$2 trillion MCap of Bitcoin
~$3 trillion essential infrastructure maintenance deficit in the USA alone
There is a justifiable thirteen figure value case for DRK token if it learns from the failure of Monero to unseat Bitcoin as the primary value store in the blockchain and cyptocurrency network industry. This principle is the principle of Gresham’s law. Monero lacks for a positive value proposition, when people receive Monero they assume it is tainted and it is therefore spent. Because Bitcoin transactions are ultimately aggregated to trade large volumes on the L1 Bitcoin blockchain itself, they are all ‘cleared’ in plain sight at predictable regular intervals between ‘hubs’ as described in the Bitcoin Cash independence block ordinal. These hubs are the rentiers of the monopoly Bitcoin, and thus makes the rules for itself. Mike Gill describes clearly how and why the corrupt do not go looking for themselves, so instead devs, such as the Tornado Cash devs, are prosecuted as scapegoats by proxy.
Holders of Monero are similarly fearful of becoming scapegoats by proxy, as are exchanges which essentially have no place to ‘clear’ the risk. The variance for both criminal and law abiding users of Bitcoin is broadly similar, but weighted more negatively for criminals the further from the centre of corruption they are.
Bitcoin undoubtedly launders a larger proportion of the proceeds of crime and illegal tax avoidance than Monero does, but every time the Bitcoin hits the L1 base layer chain, the Bitcoin is transparently exchanged. Because the IRS and TIGTA themselves facilitate money laundering, as proven by Mike Gill, they are never going to go looking for themselves, and likewise Palantir or Chainalysis who are contracted to them, never will either.
Therefore, counter-intuitively for most Monero advocates, the risk profile for criminals further from the centre is narrower and more positive for Monero than it is for Bitcoin, but for law abiding users the variance is broader and more negatively weighted than it is for Bitcoin and is the same for all. Thus Monero primarily benefits independent black and grey market actors as a means of exchange. This is reflected in the price differential, ecosystem development and user adoption differentials between Monero and Bitcoin. Monero is far superior technology, is far more akin to what most people believe Bitcoin actually is than Bitcoin itself, and is far closer to the Austrian economic ideal of the fungible means of exchange of limited supply, but it is only via Dan Robles’ explain-ability criteria for value propositions that the relative pricing can be understood and properly described.
What makes DarkFi different is that its foundational ethos was formed via Amir Taaki’s development of AssangeDAO and the lessons learned from the experience. The DAO was a huge success in monetary terms, but the transparency on the Ethereum blockchain led to voters becoming hesitant to vote. In every respectable democracy ballots are cast anonymously into a box and no vote has anyone’s name on it. Also voters vote in private booths. People can choose to show who they voted for, but the default is private. With AssangeDAO on Ethereum privacy was not an available default option, thus governance broke down. In addition to this Ethereum DAOs are, by their nature, rudimentary, unable to support Object Capability security patterns, giving certain code and certain accounts undue authority over such a large and complex project as AssangeDAO turned out to be.
This, in turn, led to much embezzlement, mis-allocation of funds and more than a hint of scandal. The ultimate goal of Assange’s freedom was, however, achieved and Assange managed to stuff enough of the funds into a duffel bag to spend the rest of his life in comfortable retirement. In that way 5-10 cents on the dollar was decent value, but also left much room for improvement, especially for whistleblowers who are not celebrities and where every penny can make the difference between wiping your ass with toilet paper and brushing your teeth with toothpaste or having to improvise on the fly.
And likewise from an engineering project management perspective 5-10 cents on the dollar is not an acceptable return. 50 cents on might be in some cases, but ideally the minimum accpetable threshold should be 80 cents minimum, a Pareto efficient threshold with some give and take for ‘shit happens’ over which there is little effort worth spending to prevent.
This is what, in my own opinion, should be primarily front and centre with respect to the DarkFi Book’s ‘Token Science’ section, still this ‘science’ is very Fintech biased and therefore Neoliberally ideologically biased. Neoliberalism doesn’t want AssangeDAO in the first place and it murdered Nikolai Mushegian after he tweeted that his life was in danger and then said it was an accident. It’s not possible to construct a value proposition regarding why a founder should construct something similar to MakerDAO without first describing how and why Nikolai was murdered for doing so and how and why the murderers got away with it. But that’s still where the conversation is broadly at, and that’s not good enough in my opinion.
It is not possible to construct a silk purse from a sow’s ear in this way, we have to go back a further step in the fundamental thinking to ask ‘what are we really measuring?’ because a token is a representation of something that has been measured or a promise that it will be measured in future. For something to be tokenized we are saying that it can be measured, but, as we’ve already described, there is a big multi-$trillion problem in the centre of this, at the centre of the DarkFi Manifesto itself, that is not being measured.
Token Engineering
So this segues neatly into my DarkFi Book PR request that I submitted at the beginning of the year. The content and intent of this PR request and the Mike Gill Evidence Vault that I was updating and managing at the time (which was in between Akord getting rugged and Ardrive adding their ‘import from manifest’ feature that facilitated the switch) was to clearly describe the fundamentals of the value measurement problem according to the best available descriptions of it.
This makes the synergy between the Monero-like and Ethereum-like functionality of DarkFi so powerful: it can create a defined low variance unit of account with respect to a lime problem at the core of the manifesto that is at least $10^12 in monetary scale according to engineering and societal norms.
None of this Neoliberal DeFi mumbo jumbo token science stands back to ask the fundamental question: what are we solving for here? Instead it is a hodge podge of examples of what the Patagonia vested pod people already did before but automated with cryptocurrency and blockchain networks.
We used to ask the question in the 2010s: will we even need money in future? Now we create more reasons for financial professionals to give themselves more money, disintermediating those pesky ‘middle class professionals’ and all their annoying questions about how they got it, where it came from and so forth, which are very often valid questions, especially somewhere like the Cayman Islands or New Hampshire.
Blockchains and cryptocurrency networks do a few specific things, they are tools that can be put to a wide variety of uses we haven’t even thought of yet, they allow us to measure and describe value in new ways, these technologies do not exist to shoehorn concepts into pre-existing dogmas.
What do Julian Assange, Amir Taaki and the Forest Rebels, Edward Snowden, Mike Gill, Kneecap, Bob Vylan, Ash Regan, Craig Murray, George Galloway, Kanye West, Nick Fuentes and the Groypers, MIA, myself, Zohran Mamdani, Jeremy Corbyn,disabled people, people on food stamps and welfare, all this convergance of high agency discontent in Western society have in common today? It is not necessarily that we are united in condemnation of Zionism, it’s that we’ve all bumped into the theater props in the Neoliberal Potemkin Village and all turned around and done something tangible, measurable and material to solve the problem, whether because we wanted to or because we were forced to existentially. We are all engineers in this way, engineering is just that sort of high agency, highly educated, highly experienced and highly disciplined action most fully understood in the material realm.
What our actions collectively reveal is a fundamental mis-pricing of material facts pertaining to root causes of failure, as we have each experienced them and are able to describe them according to our own understanding and competence. I myself am by no means fleet of foot in social situations nor particularly an expert in the English language nor literature. I created the Romeo Juliet framework mostly as a crutch for my own social dyslexia, to overcome my own shortcomings. While I breezed through the STEM subjects as a teenager I had to work very hard for my C in Higher English as a sixteen year old. So this writing thing, all this socially competitive power talk, subtleties of language, none of that ever came naturally to me. I am very proud of the fact that those with more natural talent and acumen appreciate that work and are running with it in their own way, that it has re-invigorated their own mission and helped them to capture value and trade value that they might have overlooked before. Likewise for the nerds who are often sheltered from and kept in the dark about a lot of this, so to speak, they have a telescope and a yardstick by which to see and measure the ‘management bullshit’ and the ‘fucking government’ and respond to pressures in a way that are more constructive and pro-active and founded in negotiation as opposed to hierarchy.
It was via admitting my own limitations, falses and pride that I was able to invent, innovate and unlock that value. That in itself runs contrary to the grain of Neoliberal measurement of value, which is founded in mimetic desire as opposed to interiority. Read the writings of all the great masters, the great inventors: Leonardo, Michaelangelo, Tesla, Buckminster Fuller: that interiority and wisdom that comes with unbridled curiosity, self doubt in terms of always questioning oneself, but also self confidence in terms of trusting in our native abilities to learn and overcome, that’s omnipresent in their content. In the realm of Neoliberal mimetic desire, in the Society of the Spectacle, it is almost entirely absent.
Lunarpunk Rising
Hyperstition can only be true in so much as someone has an engineering problem statement that is able to then frame an engineering conceptual intent regarding what the demand really is. Innovation has to come from someone, it cannot come from no one. Many people have espoused the idea of a ‘STEM Shortage’ with the best of intentions, but what we really suffer from is an artificial shortage of inventiveness because we’ve forgotten the value of interiority, which is analogous to privacy. The process of invention, which is a deeply personal journey that takes time, is completely antithetical to that of communicative capitalism, which is only interested in what’s immediately available, the spectacle, the here and now.
Given best available technology, the here and now is presenting us with a choice with respect to how and why we decide to give value to what in a way that has never existed before, and in stark contrast to a dystopian backdrop that would never have been thought possible twenty years ago also. We live in interesting times and now is the time to take the opportunity, I believe.
Redefining AnonDAO
Having been corrected by a technical expert in DarkIRC chat today I would like to clarify that LunarDAO is not the same of DarkFi’s DAO functionality. LunarDAO is the name of a separate group that intends to utilize DarkFi’s DAO functionality for their own DAO, that is a separate organisation. The proper working term for DarkFi’s DAO functionality is AnonDAO. Also the proper abbreviation of the Zero Knowledge Proof Virtual Machine is ZkVM, not ZKM. I have made edits in the previous post accordingly.
We can redfine AnonDAO functionality according to the actuarial pricing of an insurance product, and the premiums required to underwrite the risks. Proper pricing of premiums encourages better engineering, which lowers variance, which lowers the cost of premiums. AssangeDAO did something very important in this way: it measured the value of Julian Assange’s legal troubles into existence, where before they were unmeasured. Bullying is a core principle of the legal profession whether or not the courts themselves are corrupt. The game theory by which pleas and deals are made and struck is strongly influenced by whether, for example, a defendant has the means to pay for private defense or is appointed a public defender by the court. AssangeDAO recognized the value of leveling the playing field between the prosecution, which had the backing of all the dark machinations of Westminster and Whitehall, and Julian Assange himself, who was broke and both physically and mentally debilitated. While in practice nothing beyond that really worked as intended, it muddled along enough to prove the point: which is the power of socioeconomic solidarity in the face of tyranny.
Before AssangeDAO the prosecution thought they had an open goal, that the variance of outcome was broadly negligible for them. AssangeDAO increased the variance enough for them to back down in order to save face, it parked a big ugly bus in front of them, which was enough. AnonDAO takes the important learnings from that, massively reduces variance through privacy features in key areas, to deliver a product with much more clearly defined game theoretic principles and therefore much wider possible application.
Where Mike Gill adds an extra layer of complexity to the AssangeDAO problem is that Mike has no avenue through the courts, Mike’s evidence implicates them in the Pandora Papers money laundering network alongside the Congress and the Senate. In addition Mike Gill has experienced not only the failure modes of betrayal but failure modes of the basic GoFundMe type fund raising efforts that were hijacked by those who set them up and promoted them for his ostensible benefit. These hijacked fund raising efforts, for paltry sums in the scheme of Mike’s original $300 million fortune, were then used against him as an example of ‘grifting’ by multiple influencers and podcasters, most noteably Ariel but also Nick Alvear, David Snedeker, Aaron Day, Skriptkeeper and more in their environs. Mike Gill is both a highly reliable Schelling point of a principle at the core of the DarkFi value proposition but is also alienated by those even within the privacy tech space, which poses a question regarding what we value more highly: the principles themselves or the money?
That the man whose evidence categorically proves the premise of the DarkFi manifesto has no safe and trustworthy means to fund raise and underwrite his mission is a huge opportunity for this technology, and an ambitious problem statement to which I do not current have an answer, but I do believe there is one. In finding that answer we will, by way of secondary achievements, solve many problems that are real but have not been sufficiently described yet.
Fundamentally the addressable market here is huge with a fundamentally pro social and positive vision according to engineering value propositions and Ricardian Smart Contracts as described by Dan Robles and Ian Grigg.
This marks a clearly defined difference between DarkFi and both Monero and Ethereum, even though prima facie, DarkFi is a mixture of the functionality of the two. DarkFi is particularly effective medicine for an all-pervasive Lime problem. Mike Gill describes this problem succinctly: ‘The [corrupt] Department of Justice underwrites the insurance companies’. This means, fundamentally, that the system can steal your insurance premiums and your taxes and leave you hanging in the lurch when the insurable event, such as cancer or discovering that your local law enforcement are working in cahoots with a drug cartel, occurs. The rugging of welfare here in the UK is another symptom of this root cause failure: whereby the rich measure and enforce for themselves and the poor have no recourse to any other means of measurement much less enforcement.
DarkFi can be at the centre of a vision and a telos of a world of solidarity where nobody is excluded nor excommunicated for saying what they see, where nobody is alienated and made a pariah nor a leper for overcoming the habit of stupidity: doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. A world where materiality, invention, ingenuinity and the sacredness of human life some first, politics and business, the social competition for its own sake, second.
Also, following from the concept of risk as variance, the variance itself can further incorporate both the mitigation of loss and the attribution of reward. Someone who acts to reduce variance positively for the group, who lowers the premiums for the group, innovates for the group, can be commensurately rewarded by the group for doing so.
In these terms we can start to define the DarkFi concept of reforestation in a governance desert, define what ‘self governing’ means in terms of the complex society we live in, incorporating specialism, nuance, and the expertise necessary to support sustainable social reproduction in a peer to peer economy. We can move beyond the false narcissistic self of the libertarian Ubermensch: the cargo cults of personality of the Dread Pirate Roberts, the Bitcoin Jesus, the Vitalik, the Satoshi. Likewise we can move past the immediacy and fleeting ephemerality of memecoin Hyperstition to what the Hyperstitions might be in our neighbourhoods, our cities, our nations, or pan-national network states if you are so inclined. Nowhere does the rubbish not need to be collected, the water treated, the electricity and petrol not need to be produced and delivered to where they are needed. In order to govern ourselves we must be builders, maintainers and innovators of all this logistical infrastructure magic that we have been conditioned to be consumers of and depend upon without stake and largely without say.
Starter App Concepts
A Go Fund Me Application
Go Fund Me where the funds go directly to the account holder, there’s proper attestation of and to that, but the money in and out and the funds raised can all be private, protecting everyone involved from the Palantir kill drones
AnonDAO
AssangeDAO but anyone can make one, the votes are private, the money going in and out in private too
OCap considerations where projects get to a certain size, Alux Network can be augmented for complex coordination
State of Corruption 2.0
Mike Gill State of Corruption but it’s a social network primarily for whistleblowers to share material information
Stack is primarily Arweave, Arfleet and Odysee’s associated social stack development tools
Can be augmented with AnonDAO and other DarkFi functionality whereby whistleblowers can remain anonymous and receive funds and be underwritten anonymously also
Whistleblower and Group Coordination Escrow
like ‘skydiver parachute doesn’t open insurance’ but for skilled professionals who might have to do whistleblowing someeday, such as chemical process safety engineers, like I once was before I blew the whistle
Could also be used as a form of startup founder insurance whereby a group agree to split up to ‘go hunting’ exploring different value propositions in different ways, group can agree to underwrite those who don’t make it with the proceeds of those who do
Onwards into the Dark Forest!
TTFN.