The Cosmic AC surrounded them but not in space. Not a fragment of it was in space. It was in hyperspace and made of something that was neither matter nor energy. The question of its size and Nature no longer had meaning to any terms that Man could comprehend.
— Isaac Asimov, The Last Question
The above words were written by Isaac Asimov almost seventy years ago, describing what he imagined would be the supercomputer that will power all of humankind’s activities in the future, about a hundred billion years from now.
He got it completely right — except for his timeline.
For all his vision, Aasimov could never have predicted the invention of the blockchain.
We’ve heard it said that blockchain technology is still “embryonic”.
It’s true; at this stage, mass adoption is an uphill battle against the entrenched titans of industry and bureaucracy.
But even in this “embryonic” stage, blockchain is already being called the most disruptive invention in human history… Which begs the question: What can we expect once this technology has finally “matured”?
The answer might be even stranger, and more impressive, than even the most over-the-top science fiction: A massive network of servers, cellphones, and home computers coalescing together, and giving rise to the first true “cloud computer.”
Unfortunately, we’ve all heard the term “cloud computing” used before, to describe a specific type of service that is totally irrelevant to this discussion. Forget everything you’ve heard about it.
This is not about Dropbox, or Google Drive, or Amazon Web Services, or renting virtual storage space.
This is about a fully-fledged supercomputer — millions of times more powerful than any single computer on Earth — enabled by a strange quality most would’ve never thought possible: It is completely unconstrained by the physical world. It is beyond matter, and beyond time.
It is, quite literally, out of this world.
Everybody will use it for everything.
The entire global economy will come to rely on it, as it processes millions of transactions per second.
It will create new marketplaces for things that have never been quantified before — everything from environmentally conscious actions, to social/political activism, to likes on social media and yes, even memes, will have monetary rewards associated with them.
It will not let anyone’s data be used against them, or any data be created about them, without explicit consent. And it will be physically impossible to cheat, steal from, manipulate or break this computer in any way, as per its use of blockchain.
In order for you not to think I’ve lost my mind, I’m going to step back briefly and let this picture paint itself.
It might help to start by understanding a very primitive version of this computer that we’re already quite familiar with: Ethereum.
Ethereum works by taking the basic idea of a blockchain ledger — a database of ownership, with shared consensus — and incorporating the simplest line of code one could possibly write: “If A, then B”.
You know this as Ethereum’s Virtual Machine.
This simple line of code now processes thousands of smart contracts per day, all while existing solely as a function of consensus — that is, it because the computers that use it agree that it works.
What’s important to note here is this: No computer actually processes that particular line of code. Sure, Ethereum has miners that verify the inputs and outputs of the code, but the code itself is executed by… Well, by nothing. While the computation’s effects are real, the computer that performs them is completely virtual.
Make no mistake about it: This Virtual Machine, or VM, is still a machine in every sense of the word — a fully functioning computer, albeit a very simple one — but, again, one that somehow exists beyond the need for a physical body!
Actually, the famous mind-body problem makes the perfect analogy: Your mind, while clearly dependent on your body for its existence, is not limited to it. While your body is finite and simple, your mind is complex and infinite.
If Ethereum’s physical body is a network of computers, the VM is like a mind: While it can’t exist without the body, it has no inherent physical existence — and therefore, like thoughts, no physical constraints.
Why is this so important?
For starters, it completely breaks all the conventional beliefs about the physical limitations of computing power. Until now, it was thought that computers could only get faster when their chips become smaller, because you can fit more of them in one computer and they can run more calculations.
But a virtual machine doesn’t require any of its computers to actually perform any of the logic behind it, just like your mind doesn’t require your body to do any thinking. The VM only needs its computers to provide input — in just the same way that your mind uses your senses, which is far easier than doing formal logic about the world.
Since that part is all done virtually, every computation — like every thought — becomes perfectly instant, executed in zero time.
(“But aren’t we still talking about Ethereum’s VM? Ethereum’s not instant!” For clarity on this point, scroll to the last section of the article)*.
A perfectly instant VM can give the world’s most expensive supercomputers a run for their money.
So what if someone built something that worked like Ethereum’s VM, with hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of layers of logical complexity?
What if this “something” could leverage not just the computers running its own blockchain, but bring together other public blockchains, as well, putting virtually all of the world’s surplus computer power to work?
What if it could even learn?
How powerful could such a cloud computer become?
This Virtual Supercomputer would be so fast and use so much data that the operations it performs would seem like magic to us.
It might let you trade surplus power to one neighbor, in exchange for using another neighbor’s car for the week.
Or it could plant seeds in the Amazon for you, because you clicked a “Like” button on social media.
Or it could reward you for exercising through some kind of healthy-food cryptocurrency program, which it can always afford to buy back from the grocery store because it’s ridiculously good at administering everything else in the economy and we all got together and decided to do that because there was plenty of money lying around and we liked the idea. Or it could let you instantly sell your cool idea for a poolside-foldout-rocking-chair to a factory that’ll build it for you, sending you 100% of the profits.
Or it could automate food production for the entire world via vertical permaculture hydroponic greenhouses made of carbon nanotubes and recycled plastic and powered by nuclear fusion and feed the world with an army of solar-powered self-driving trucks, solving world hunger and giving us free renewable energy forever.
Kidding on that last one. (Or am I? We’ll see soon enough).
Okay, this all sounds far flung. Out of respect for how much I’ve just given you, I won’t bother trying to explain how close at hand it all really is.
… Okay, fine.
Here’s what it would take:
- A blockchain, or other Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), that connects all other public blockchains, collects encrypted data about all of their transactions, and feeds that data into a Virtual Machine that runs like a neural network. This Virtual Neural Net would be like an oracle, analyzing data from the blockchains that actually process transactions in the economy and comes up with ideas and suggested applications for making the economy more efficient for everyone as describe above. This blockchain-of-blockchains is exactly what AION just launched on April 25th, and the Virtual Neural Net is what they’re currently working on with their partners at SingularityNET.
- A cryptocurrency that can move through any blockchain and inflate or deflate the value of other cryptocurrencies, down to the most precise measure. This would allow the Virtual Neural Net to act as a kind of administrator, keeping the digital token economy away from bubbles and crashes or any artificial price movement.
- A governance structure for the entire blockchain economy. Whether it be democratic, technocratic, or a dictatorship, we would still surely rather a human being execute the decisions over a Virtual Machine whose “thoughts” far outpace our own.
- A financial liquidity currency, allowing value exchange with those parts of the real world economy that aren’t on the blockchain. This would be necessary for bringing new parts of the global economy online within the blockchain and growing the network. Note that this is really one and the same as having a universal cryptocurrency that can be automatically exchanged for any real world currency. Jibrel Network’s jCash and jBonds fit the bill quite nicely here.
By now I’ve definitely left you startled and confused, but I’ve also hopefully given you cause for thinking differently about the direction the world is heading in.
From news to politics to climate change, the vague feeling of impending Armageddon surrounds us. It’s important to realize that all of our fears and doubts stem from the impulse to project the past onto the future — and the future, clearly, looks nothing like the past.
As we evolved and competed for millennia within a hostile environment of scarce resources, centralized systems became a fact of our existence.
But our environment is no longer hostile, our resources no longer scarce. Competition as a philosophy has become outmoded, and centralized systems keep us anchored in the past.
Taken together, the human race represents unimaginable creative, intellectual, social and cultural potential, the vast majority of which emerges only in cooperation, and therefore will never be tapped in the centralized paradigm.
Decentralizing the world, sharing data in an encrypted and private way, and enabling that data to aggregate itself for our collective benefit would signal the beginning of a new chapter in human existence, one that no tradition, no folklore, no religion and no historical text could ever have prepared us for. Maybe this is a responsibility that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Maybe future generations will judge the manner in which we let this revolution come about.
Or maybe it doesn’t matter what we choose, because the decentralized sum of human activity, as interpreted through a Virtual Supercomputer, will act with far greater acuity and foresight than any single person or group ever could have. Maybe that, after all, is the future promise of the blockchain: Not to take hold of our own evolution, but at long last, to take our hands off the wheel, and live purely off of trust in one another.
*(Hang on. You started this by talking about Ethereum’s VM, but Ethereum isn’t instant at all!) That’s because the number of inputs on the Ethereum network outpaces the ability of its computer nodes to check them — an issue with the body, as opposed to the mind.
Moreover, since Ethereum runs on Proof-of-Work, all the input-checking-work happens only on a few people’s computers, which are the miners. This problem was best exemplified when Cryptokitties went live: While everyone was busy trading Cryptokitties, nobody felt like becoming a miner. Thus, the network slowed dramatically.
So long as the number of inputs and the number of processers doing work for the network are in agreement — so long as the body is in accord with itself — a Virtual Machine of any complexity could run infinitely complicated logic problems in zero time.
Mens sana in corpore sano.