Hola tu!
(Music-matching!) TL;DR lol warning here.
Wake up! It is time to run your daily check routine, all navigation instruments' coordinates are dated, and you're already late. Your ship cannot be in auto-pilot forever.
"Welcome to reality, hope you got some rest" Can be read in a sticky note you wrote for yourself. Your brain is now starting to function, and you're wondering why you didn't take the blue pill.
Sliding through the universe in your ship. Listening to the intergalactic radio —some things don't change—. Exploring. You look down to your feet you only find tentacles, one on each pedal. 9 in total (you tend to forget about this, it always makes you jump a little from your seat. It is funny to see you from outside).
You look now at the radar and see that your teammate is just a few light-milliseconds from you. Your mission is to find new planets where your 9-tentacle-civilization can prospect —there is no post-it for this; just remember that.
All of a sudden, you come across a small rock —at least some hope after two years of wandering around. It is not big but enough to hold a little colony. Good atmosphere, good silicon proportion in the soil... Not a trace of harmful radiation in the last 1000 days. Everything looks good. There is only a tiny detail yet to confirm. You don’t know if it has already been conquered by the leading Universe Alliance —the most potent organization out there. Full of new tech and with no good soul.
Their imperialistic desires blind them from any other way of living. Joining them or being against them are the only options (or at least from their point of view).
You make contact with your partner. Both of you cautiously approach a gravitational pocket in the planet's orbit to save some energy and trace a plan. As it is not that big, you decided to split your forces and get closer from two sides to cover everything. You take the east side; your partner goes to the west side.
Apparently, there is no sign of any life form. Unfortunately, you cannot trust your tools as the Universe Alliance has enough resources and technology to defeat and hide against The Resistance. The only way to confirm it is by approaching the planet from both sides simultaneously. You and your partner have a clever gimmick that can fool the Universe Alliance’s tech in the short-range, but only if you sync and land at the same time.
So both of you are floating around the planet, waiting for a landing time to sync in, and you're the one that has to decide it —great! — Your experience and instruments tell you that you have a perfect opportunity in 1h 48m. There is a slight caveat. You cannot use your primary communication system as the Universe Alliance could hear it. The solution: a tiny drone with the message. It can be intercepted too, but the chances aren't that high.
You prepare the message and send it over with the drone. The drone only takes 2 minutes to complete the way to your partner's ship. In about 4 or 5 minutes, you will have your partner's confirmation, and you can proceed with the landing.
After 7 minutes, you are still without an answer. 10 and nothing. 15 and still no reply. You're just 2 minutes away from the landing time and without receiving an answer yet.
Suddenly, you detect an explosion on the surface. Your instruments have lost contact with your partner's ship. Now you're alone in the void.
Above is a pretty clunky (and loose) adaptation of one scenario of the 'Two generals problem' —I didn't want to use the war allegory proposed by the original problem. A problem that has been proven unsolvable as it throws the two explorers (or generals in the original version) in an infinite loop. Explorer A sends a message to Explorer B, and Explorer B has to confirm that has received the message and agrees with Explorer A. The problem is that both required messages can be intercepted and blocked by 'the enemy', and the sender will never know if their message was received. It was first published in 1975 by E. A. Akkoyunlu, K. Ekanadham, and R. V. Huber
You might be wondering why I'm telling you this. This is the beginning of a broader problem. Imagine that instead of you and your partner, there are a few more, and you're not the operation leader. Imagine also that the messages are shared from each individual to the rest, and not only the messages can be blocked by the enemy, but also some of your partners (even the leader) can be traitors. How would you all reach a consensus? This expanded problem is called 'The Byzantine Generals Problem' and it was described in 1982 by Lamport, Shostak and Pease.
The above was one of the sparks that triggered Bitcoin's algorithm development. Back then, in 2008, a hand full of cryptographers discussed how to solve it in a monetary field. As you can imagine, they made it. They came up with a network where it is no need to trust others to achieve consensus thanks to the intelligent use of standard asymmetrical cryptography and a work investment (Proof-of-Work) to avoid traitors —link here to read Satoshi Nakamoto’s solution in a mail to James A. Donald.
Behind an apparently simple concept is hidden a stunning mathematical layer. My personality forces me to understand the things I talk about, and the deeper I go along with this topic, the harder it gets, so I'm going to leave it here for now, but first, I want to share some thoughts that came up during this research:
It is so important to know the foundations —AKA the game's rules. I bet a good number of hacks and exploited errors are because of some random corner case that no one thought about it on time.
I could not stop thinking about my philosophy lessons when we discussed nature's mathematization. In the end, it is about looking for the mathematical way to model behavioral and ethical dilemmas —I guess it is because all can be reduced to humans playing with machines and not the opposite.
Related to the point above: it is not about the money. The beauty of all of this (at least to me) is breaking the status quo. Try to solve eternal dilemmas in a parallel universe yet when they've not been solved in the 'real' one, and all of that without knowing each other and without the need to trust each other.
“Money can emerge out of a database if enough people believe in it” —Vitalik Buterin.
Crypto universe and outer space travels and colonization: They're probably the two most trendy topics in the latest years, and for a good reason; I think in the bottom of our hearts (in the bottom of the heart of the people that are impulsing those two fields, better said) we see in them, the opportunity to start over and do it better. It is like starting a new game when the city becomes desolated in Sim City. They are challenging topics and bring hope —or at least entertainment.
If you've come this far, thank you. It’s been so hard to write this letter. More than a week ago, it all started chatting with a workmate about music and its relation with the decentralized economy and web3 —I leave you here and interesting case of use in this field (in Spanish tho. The singer is called Lyrah @lyrah)— I feel like I've just scratched the bare surface, but I'd be happy if the next time you talk or hear something related to crypto, you see it from another angle and with a broader mind.
You can always drop me a line by replying to this mail or leaving a comment on the web version.
I'll paste some additional links here for those who want to go further and keep exploring.
These two Vitalik Buterin interviews (one here and the other here) by Lex Fridman are gold.
Vitalik's Blog and a specific blog post that talks about a 99% Fault Tolerance in the consensus of a decentralized system
The first of a 3 posts serie talking about the problem and the foundations of Bitcoin, Proof of Work and Proof of Stake by Georgios Konstantopoulos.
Asymmetric cryptography and cryptographic hash functions. The two basic bricks.