Outstanding piece by @js, one of the best I’ve read this year.

I work for Ethereum at the Ethereum Foundation.

Outstanding piece by @js, one of the best I’ve read this year. https://stark.mirror.xyz/n2UpRqwdf7yjuiPKVICPpGoUNeDhlWxGqjulrlpyYi0

However, “programmable hardness” may be a better phrase. It combines several concepts under one umbrella:

- financially hard, as in hard money 
- computationally hard, as in NP-hard
- legally hard, as in hard commitment 
- practically hard, as in hard to fake

And the visual is “physically hard” as in gold.

Programmable hardness is a generalization of the hard money that is Bitcoin. It pulls in many adjacent words:

- scarcity
- difficulty
- constraint 
- commitment
- immutable
- uncensorable
- fixed
- permanent
- archival
- reliable
- constant
- dependable
- trustworthy
- transparent
- provable
- verifiable

His word “cast” is also well chosen, as it relates the physical aspect of hardness to the temporal aspect of future reliability.

- trust the forecast
- cast it in stone
- and cast that stone into the future 

Also, cast as in “cast a vote” (a binding commitment) and “cast a shadow” (a line extending out).

Lol, and also “cast” as in Farcaster!! 🤪

I didn’t even realize that till just now. @dwr.eth did you pick the name with that connotation?

Farcaster: cast a commitment far into the future, like the blockchain.

His analogy between information theory and cryptographic hardness is also excellent.

Of course many have written on this topic, but quantifying the computational *and* financial cost of falsifying something may become as important as calculating how many bits it has.

“Hards” as the new bits?

Finally, the relationship between physical hardness (atoms), social hardness (institutions), and digital hardness (blockchains) is something I’ve also thought about.

Technology reduces scarcity, which means more food. But in doing so it also often erodes institutional certainty, which means more fights.

One answer is to use the hardness of math (cryptography) to restore the hardness of social institutions with blockchains.

I talked about this in the network state book from a different angle, in terms of technical vs political truths.

One answer is to use the hardness of math (cryptography) to restore the hardness of social institutions with blockchains.

I talked about this in the network state book from a different angle, in terms of technical vs political truths.
https://thenetworkstate.com/political-power-and-technological-truth

Bitcoin difficulty is measured by how many hashes you need to solve the next block.

Hashes may be the units of hardness, like bits are the units of information.

Hashes also have a market rate, which can be expressed in USD…or in ounces of gold or BTC itself.

So: hashes measure computational + financial hardness.

A related concept is 33 bits for measuring privacy and anonymity.

2^33 = 8 billion 
And there are about 7 billion humans.
So with 33 bits of information you can figure out which human it is.

Anyway, with information we are now accustomed to talking about it. How many gigabytes is that file? All information is measured in bits.

Can we measure everything in crypto in hashes? Like: how many hashes would it take to falsify that? What’s it’s hardness? Perhaps this is too simple.

Some thoughts.

First, what he calls “programmable hardness” I’ve called “programmable scarcity”, as distinct from “programmable information.”

That is, the internet lets you *copy* digital objects easily, but blockchains let you also *transfer* them — by using cryptography to create digital scarcity.

Yep I’ve said this many many times. But THIS is the greatest piece written on blockchains that I’ve ever read. 

Thank you @js

This is how I used to explain PoW: Have you noticed how much work goes into printing a dollar bill? Special paper, spacial inks, hidden codes, etc. All this work proves to you that this is a genuine bill. It's the proof of work put into it, that builds trust. I wish I knew about hardness :-)

Fantastic piece @js - extremely well written and the first thing I would share with anyone asking me why I am excited about- & building in the space!

wow great article @js! thanks for sharing Balaji

One of the best ones for me, too.

PS: Finally @kiwi hivemind has found a top essay faster than Balaji.

Highly curated news & content for web3 builders. New link every 4 hours. All links handpicked by the Kiwi community.

https://kiwinews.xyz/

One of the best ones for me, too.

PS: Finally @kiwi hivemind has found a top essay faster than Balaji.

https://warpcast.com/macbudkowski/0x010168

Everything is built on expectedness. 

The more hardness or higher degree of expectedness, the stronger the system. 

In search of negentropy…

Definitely a thought-provoking and intriguing read. That said, I'll still take "trustworthiness" over "hardness" and (variants of) "predictability" over "cast" any day, conceptual baggage and all.

It is striking to me to see hardness and immediately have the thought that “softness” is what I wrote Formal Dialectics to call attention to and indeed have been fairly well obsessed with since college. Godel showed that math can be in fact quite soft (perhaps has a soft belly) and extrapolating has yielded…

I haven’t always enjoyed your thinking but this ser has been an amazingly good read that works very well with my own concepts. Thank you for sharing!!