The Metacrisis and The Metasolution
2026-02-01T10:12:17.000Z
Summary
Blockchain and CryptographySubscribe here for more The Metacrisis and The Metasolution Blockchain and Cryptography Deca Feb 1 READ IN APP Ciao, GM, hello world. Pleased to meet you, I'm Deca.
Content
Blockchain and CryptographySubscribe here for more The Metacrisis and The Metasolution Blockchain and Cryptography Deca Feb 1 READ IN APP Ciao, GM, hello world. Pleased to meet you, I'm Deca. I've boarded the Agartha spaceship as CTO, strapped in for the journey of a lifetime and started building with Nico Shi and Jeremy Dela Rosa . Let me tell you why I care: Chapter 1 SAULT Album 1. The Timeline We Inherited I'll rip the band-aid: our current stats, not looking great. Our challenges are global but our systems adversarial and unaligned. Btw I should warn you, this article is not for the faint of heart, I will be harsh, but I am an Problem 1: The Balance of Mother Earth We inherited climate change, or to be more accurate, we inherited a global game-theoretic vicious spiral of energy expenditure and material consumption that we can't break free from. The incentives are backwards, because the consequences of people's lifestyles will be mostly incurred, not immediately, and not by those most responsible! We are faced with the burden of knowing just how much our lifestyles contribute to our collective ecological debt. Think of all the plastic bottles you ever chucked - congrats, they're in your balls reducing your fertility. Or all the flights or cars you've been on - congrats, Problem 2: The Algorithm What started as an innovative business model with strong network effects, has evolved into the literal Problem 3: The Race to AGI Well, this is the big one, for a few key reasons: First, AI (and especially broad-scoped LLM-type AI) is a universal catalyst for all other technologies. It's literally a genie in a bottle, with the ability to access and process the entire world's data, and whose intelligence grows by the month. Second, all technology can be used for good or for bad. Unfortunately, since our universe is governed by entropy, it's easier to break things than to fix them. Let's take the example of biotech - imagine Google Deepmind's Alphafold leads to the cures of a dozen deadly diseases. Every day, thousands of people are saved. Then, someone uses Alphafold to come up with a new disease with the virality of COVID and the lethality of EBOLA. What then? Third, AI can recursively self-improve, very soon without a human in the loop. This would be the ‘hockey stick' moment (a.k.a. the singularity), where we see an intelligence explosion (except it's not biological), and most likely lose sovereignty over our own destinies. So to recap, the genie is always getting smarter, including in the field of robotics, so the genie will soon be independently out of its bottle. The genie has already 2. D/ACC is the Way Vitalik's Nov 2023 essay describing his Posit 1: Blockchains have the power to align incentives and therefore improve the game theoretic equilibria of a group of individuals. Our three problems are best described in terms of game theory : Climate example: e.g. The UK has to build a new runway for Heathrow airport, or London will lose travel share to other global hub cities. Result, CO2 emissions all through the project's lifecycle (production of cement and steel, construction, operations, the flights themselves...). Social Media: e.g. Politicians and news outlets have to post clickbait on social media, or they will lose votes to other politicians who do. Result, the political landscape is a distraction act. Arms Race: AI labs have to sprint to AGI regardless of safety consideations, or their competitors will get there first and recursively self-improve to leave everyone else in the dust. These are all problems that can be boiled down to: The incentives of the individual are not aligned to the interests of the group - imagine if the Paris Climate Accords had been signed on-chain, locking 1% of each country's GDP in a smart contract. Rules are clear and simple: All nations must keep on track with their targets. Any nation can present to the others evidence that another nation is not on track. Then an on-chain vote occurs. If guilty, a nation gets part of their locked funds fined (in Web3 lingo, slashed) , which get streamed to the other countries. This is not science fiction. The very core of Ethereum is built on aligning the incentives of the individual to the interests of the group . Say you want to become a validator of the Ethereum blockchain. First you'd have to lock (in Web3 lingo, stake) 32 ETH in an escrow smart contract. Next you set up a piece of software called an Ethereum Client. The Ethereum Client runs non-stop, participating in a coordinated communication between millions of validators, which yields a new block every 12 seconds. Every 12 seconds that your Ethereum Client contributes to a new block, you get paid through the transaction fees (in Web3 lingo, gas fees) of everyone who transacted in those 12 seconds. If your Ethereum Client goes offline (perhaps you have a power outage) you get a small fine directly removed from your 32 ETH stake. If you try to hack your Ethereum Client to lie and tell the rest of the network that the block should include a fake transaction, then you get a big fine removed from your stake. The incentives of a validator are aligned to the incentives of all Ethereum validators and users. Good block, get paid. Try to lie, get fined. Posit 2: Privacy technology (ZK, TEE, MPC, FHE) is an indespensable requirement for Blockchains to align incentives and improve game theoretic equilibria. The And After: Conclusion I don't have the answers and I'm not pretending to - I can see that existing technologoical primitives have the potential to shift the incentives that govern our lives. Now for the hard part: getting the architectures right and battle-hardening the tech. If you're an optimist - a real optimist - then you'll feel a sense of responsibility - how can you be a net useful force to bring about the future we want? At Agartha, we're not domain experts in any of the deep frontier fields. Our goal is not to directly work on e.g. ZK technology. Instead, or goal is to create fertile soil for the D/ACC builders to do their best work. We do this by organising month-long containers - coliving and working residencies for you to come and be inspired, connected and nurtured. We are running two of these in the first half of 2026: If you have any insight to share, I want to hear from you, please message me... Message deca12x And if you want to join a future residency, I suggest to start by joining the The Mocking Stars LAUSSE THE CAT Album Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to receive new posts and support our work Upgrade to paid Agartha.One . For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. Upgrade to paid Like Comment Restack © 2026 Agartha 2171 2nd Street, Bombay Beach, California