Ethereum

> April 2026.
> I wake up in the morning and check Hacker News.
> "Hundreds of Starlink satellites burn up in the atmosphere."

In 2023, Dan Schwarz on the other site wrote a doomsday story on rapid AI advancement vs our wholly-unprepared society.

This is my tech-forward, crypto-enabled counterpart to it. ⤵️

If you haven't read Dan Schwarz's original tweet-thread-story, read it first here, then read on. ⤵️

Wannabe contributor for /walletbeat.

Censorship resistance requires privacy.

If you haven't read Dan Schwarz's original tweet-thread-story, read it first here, then read on. ⤵️

https://x.com/dschwarz26/status/1652373690095652866

I click the link to Wired. The article is clearly GPT-assisted, I don't trust it, so I click my browser's Ledger of Record extension. The article was written by a 50-something journalist hailing from a pre-Ledger-of-Record era, so there is no onchain link to verifiable information about this incident.

I grumble and open the local web interface to my Ledger node. Having purchased a Tesla before, my wallet already contains the Tesla certificate authority. I query my node — in natural language — to trace any recent information it can find about Starlink satellites rooted in the Tesla certificate. It comes up with a signed onchain statement from Starlink stating that the service is operating normally, and a record of every satellite's spatial coordinates in the last 24 hours, cross-referenced with spatial observation records signed by NASA.

⤵️

Satisfied, I ask my node to compress this information down to a zero-knowledge proof a few kilobytes in size, and ask my assistant to summarize these findings and include the proof in the summary, along with instructions on how to verify the proof for themselves. I sign this with my own key, and publish it both onchain and as a Hacker News comment.

"Hopefully this will save the next schmuck a few minutes of research before falling for this", I exhale.

I get an alert from my bank. I scroll through a dozen spoofed bank notifications that my on-phone assistant tells me are socially engineered.

The NYSE dropped 10% and trading was halted. This drop looks real. I look at the onchain synthetic for the NYSE index, which can’t be halted. It's certainly jumpy, but has barely moved 1.5% below the pre-halting price since. Looks like it was just panic-selling. I move on with my day.

⤵️

Slack chimes. My engineer in Chile tells me she can't work today due to mass protests.

𝐌𝐞: What are they protesting?
𝐇𝐞𝐫: I'm not sure. People are saying the hospital systems are down and I can't refill my meds.
𝐌𝐞: Did you check the medical supply chain records? You know, the one the Chilean government — after the Healthcare Sovereignty Act back in '25 — required all their pharmaceutical companies to record their logistic operations on and that enforces public transparency?
𝐇𝐞𝐫: Ah, right. (She asks her assistant to check.) Looks like the hospital an hour or two down from me has what I need, but how will I be able to convince them to give them to me? They claim the whole hospital system is down.

⤵️

𝐌𝐞: That's OK — the medication bottle will have a QR code on it with its contents and serial number. The hardware wallet in your phone will be able to sign and post an onchain statement that this medicine has been picked up. It’ll come along with a zero-knowledge proof that it was picked up by someone who has a prescription for it and hasn't picked them up since their last expected pickup. That message can be gossiped through any mesh network like Helium, so others will be able to verify the hospital stock regardless of the state of the hospital’s inventory system.
𝐇𝐞𝐫: Thanks!

⤵️

My phone buzzes. It's my dad. My phone shows that the call is cryptographically confirmed to come from my dad's device, which I verified the key personally when I set it up for him. He starts talking.

⤵️

𝐃𝐚𝐝: Dan, stay home. I'm seeing crazy things in the news about Teslas going haywire on the highway.
𝐌𝐞: Did your assistant verify the news?
𝐃𝐚𝐝: Some yes, some no. Just stay home to play it safe.
𝐌𝐞: Thanks for letting me know, dad. I'll be careful! By the way, remember what happened with that call from "me"? How you gave your Amazon password to "me" without checking?
𝐃𝐚𝐝: Yeah, t'was scary. I've gotten other calls that sound just like you since. I've also gotten panicked-sounding calls from someone who sounds exactly like your late mother.
𝐌𝐞: Oh no, what happened?
𝐃𝐚𝐝: It's OK! You set up my phone to warn me about calls that don't come from expected callers, remember? The phone told me this wasn't from a confirmed caller when I picked up the phone. When it detected that the voice print matched against your mother's voice, it hung up and told me why it had done so.
𝐌𝐞: Glad to know that's working. Stay safe out there.
𝐃𝐚𝐝: Ok. Bye.

⤵️

I get to work. My AI assistant is coding a new forecasting tool. I check every ~30 minutes and give it code reviews.

Analytics alerts are firing again. Some users are acting erratically. Their browser automation must be clicking random buttons. I add a temporary increase on the human score threshold on the anti-sybil auth flow, using Gitcoin Passport. Most of them drop off.

I keep checking the news. More claims about financial turmoil, SpaceX satellites down, Tesla draws driving off the road. I wonder if my friends if they've found out the truth yet. I could ask them, since our phones have end-to-end encrypted and verified messages, thanks to technology we've had since the 90s called cryptography. But our onchain attestations are automatically synced anyway, so I figure their assistant has probably already surfaced it to them. I move on.

⤵️

mirror

To be clear: This story is still a dystopia. I hope we don't get to this place.

But the point is this:

𝐈𝐟 𝐀𝐈 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐮𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐩𝐩𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐞, 𝐜𝐫𝐲𝐩𝐭𝐨 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐦𝐦𝐨𝐯𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐨𝐛𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭.

In other words, it's the only technology we know that may credibly fight back against the downsides of AI. In the wise words of @js, crypto is a source of hardness and of common ground truth. Yin and yang.

This isn't a foreign concept to crypto people, but I'm hoping the story above makes this abstract idea more concrete.

Thanks for reading! Read or mint this story on /mirror:

To be clear: This story is still a dystopia. I hope we don't get to this place.

But the point is this:

𝐈𝐟 𝐀𝐈 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐮𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐩𝐩𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐞, 𝐜𝐫𝐲𝐩𝐭𝐨 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐦𝐦𝐨𝐯𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐨𝐛𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭.

In other words, it's the only technology we know that may credibly fight back against the downsides of AI. In the wise words of @js, crypto is a source of hardness and of common ground truth. Yin and yang.

This isn't a foreign concept to crypto people, but I'm hoping the story above makes this abstract idea more concrete.

Thanks for reading! Read or mint this story on /mirror:
https://mirror.xyz/polymutex.eth/Xn5n00lkV54wTdD3rvfcrwtu3nEDIX2JeyYu5BhHyjU

The lights in my office go off. I check the circuit breaker - power is out. I turn on my mobile hotspot and tether my laptop. I check the PG&E outage page. It says everything is online. "Of course.", I sigh.

I turn to the chain once more. Plenty of attestations of power outage from my entreprising neighbors, and a bunch of automated attestations from the apartment building's backup generators and IoT sensors. I don't trust any of them much, but they do all come with ZK proofs of location thanks to Helium hotspots. I ask my assistant to gather up those attestations and render them as a heatmap overlaid on top of a map of my area. Sure enough, those areas line up with strangely-green zones on the PG&E map. Another grumble. I publish another onchain attestations of my findings to help the next person out.

I learn back in my chair. Being without power sucks, but at least I know the extent of the damage and I know not to panic. It's just another societal panic induction attempt. Psyops.

Another Tuesday. ⤵️