Impossible Problems
Three Things #86: September 24, 2023
“The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little bit longer.” - WWII Army slogan
I’ve always found hard questions are a great way to inspire thought and conversation. In Zero to One, Peter Thiel famously introduced the big question that he asks all potential new hires: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” Pondering that question over the years has been a source of a lot of inspiration for me.
At dinner a few nights ago a friend asked me something similar: “What’s your impossible problem?” In other words, what’s the seemingly impossible but important thing that motivates your work? It turned out to be an excellent conversation starter and ice breaker at a group dinner. (Questions are amazing things, aren’t they?)
Several of the attendees gave good answers: solving energy, equal access to opportunity, addressing inequality, helping people everywhere improve their diet. I actually didn’t have a great answer when put on the spot, but I’ve been pondering the question since then and I’d like to share three answers this week: three big, hairy, audacious problems that lie at the intersection of what’s important, what I’m personally interested in, and what, while seemingly impossible, I believe we could tackle during my lifetime if we put our minds to it.
Thing #1: Access to Opportunity 🕯️
“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.” - William Gibson
To paraphrase Stewart Brand, we now have the power of gods at our fingertips. When the consumer Internet first emerged a generation or two ago, there were utopian predictions that it would end inequality and lead to world peace. Fast forward a generation and not only are we obviously not there yet, what’s worse, these tools have so far served to exacerbate existing power divides and economic equality. But I don’t think it has to be that way forever.
The Internet and tools like email and instant messaging gave people everywhere the ability to communicate with one another instantly and more or less for free. It took a generation to permeate widely, but today 65% of people in the world have Internet access. Young people pretty much everywhere are tech savvy enough to use Internet-enabled devices like smartphones.
We took another giant leap forward with the invention of Bitcoin in 2008. Blockchain and cryptocurrency make it possible to send not only information but also value around the world, instantly and nearly for free, with no intermediaries. This is an extraordinarily powerful idea that, like the ability to communicate and share information instantly and for free, will totally change the world. But that change will take time and we’ve only scratched the surface of its ultimate impact so far because cryptocurrency has not yet been deeply integrated into the existing economy.
I began working in blockchain and cryptocurrency a few years ago when I first saw this potential. When I learned about blockchain, Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and smart contracts, I felt that it had incredible potential to democratize access to and participation in global, decentralized networks of value creation.
Value creation networks exist everywhere but most of them are small, regional, and centralized. A company is an example of such a network, but companies are centralized, joining them isn’t permissionless, and they tend to be small and regional. Economies are, of course, much larger, but historically it’s been difficult for most people to participate in them other than as consumers at the very end of the value chain. Partly this is because of the way that economies are captured and controlled by governments and big companies, i.e., large, privileged, centralized actors.
Platforms like Ebay and Etsy began to change this over the past 10-20 years, allowing everyday people to become service providers and create value for themselves, rather than just consume, by participating in those same networks. But those platforms are still centralized companies and, as such, can only scale so far and must inevitably put the interest of their shareholders over those of their users. More recently platforms like Onlyfans and Substack, and to some extent YouTube and X, have allowed content creators to monetize their followers, but, again, they’re still large, for profit companies that only operate in certain jurisdictions and that take a large cut for their managers and shareholders. What’s worse, they’re guilty of practices like arbitrarily censoring and deplatforming content creators with little to no accountability for these actions.
Blockchain, cryptocurrency, and smart contracts for the first time give us the tools we need to do better. Anyone, anywhere in the world can participate in Bitcoin and the Bitcoin economy. The network is totally open and permissionless and there’s no company that controls it. Any motivated person anywhere in the world with an ordinary computer, Internet access, and the wherewithal to read a book like Mastering Bitcoin has literally all the tools they need to set up a bank, a fund, or something far more sophisticated, and they can instantly tap into the global network of Bitcoiners, no license and no approval needed.
With smart contracts and platforms like Ethereum, we can go even further and create much more sophisticated applications, from stablecoins to DAOs to NFTs, that are totally unstoppable, permissionless, and censorship resistant.
This is all great in theory, but how does this tie into my own work? Our work at Spacemesh is downstream of both Bitcoin and Ethereum. We replace Bitcoin’s proof of work (secure, but energy intensive, and requiring specialized, expensive hardware) and Ethereum’s proof of stake (green, but requiring a stake that’s worth more than the average annual salary for most people in the world) with a bespoke protocol called proof of spacetime that anyone, anywhere can join without needing specialized hardware or an annual salary’s worth of stake, and immediately begin minting coins and creating value for themselves, their family, and their community. Granted, there isn’t a whole lot you can do with these coins yet other than hodl them or trade them, but the Spacemesh community and ecosystem are nascent and growing rapidly and I’m confident that plenty of use cases will emerge in due course.
My vision is that ordinary people around the world without much technical expertise can run our software on any device (today a laptop or desktop, and in the future even a smartphone), begin earning some coins permissionlessly, and invest them into something that will provide long term value such as educational materials or courses, or disinflationary assets like Bitcoin that’ll only grow in value over time. Increasingly people will opt out of the fundamentally broken traditional financial system and will instead build businesses and trade with one another using coins like SMH and BTC. These assets are disinflationary, censorship and seizure resistant, their issuance schedule is fixed and known, and they aren’t controlled by a centralized actor and should therefore hold their value over the very long term.
I’m not so naive as to believe that this is all that the world needs to increase equality of access to opportunity but money is important and broken money holds billions of people back from this opportunity today, so fixing it is a huge step in the right direction. Bitcoin has already done enormous good, and I think Spacemesh has the potential to do even more good over the long term by creating a more level economic playing field for everyday people.
Thing #2: Knowledge Management 📰
“The day of combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return.” - John D. Rockefeller
The parents of many of us Millennials are obsessed with watching the evening news. It’s just what their generation always did. Boomers were the first generation that grew up in a time of true national unity, when nearly everyone, everywhere was consuming the same content. Before that there were no national networks so people consumed local news. Everyone you knew more or less read the same newspaper. Everyone watched the same TV channels and shows, and the same news, more or less.
That exceptional time—dubbed the Great Moderation—is quite obviously over. Whether that’s for the better or not is debatable but it’s not what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about what comes next: what it’s like finding and consuming content today, post-Refragmentation.
If you feel like you’re drinking from a firehose, trust me, you’re not alone. Today we’re totally inundated by articles, podcasts, book recommendations, and “must watch” TV shows. My “must read” book list has hundreds of titles on it, more than I’d get through in ten lifetimes, and my “must read” article list has thousands. It grows faster than I can possibly read things. And all of this is to say nothing of social media.
More than 500 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Pause and reflect on that number for a moment, and on what that means for the human race. On the one hand it’s an absolute triumph that there are enough humans alive today, educated enough and wealthy enough, and with the right tools to create and share content. At the same time it’s terrifying since at best 99.99% of that content is almost by definition garbage, at worst some is far more malevolent, and in any case the figure is so overwhelming that, like most people, your reaction is probably to give up and declare that content is dead.
It seems self evident that, amidst this flood, we’ve lost our ability to collectively agree on basic truth as a society, even on things as simple as whether sex has a biological basis or whether gender is a social construct. It undoubtedly has something to do with the fact that we’re all consuming different content and different knowledge from different sources these days. That’s why the way we create, curate, distribute, and store content and information is such an important issue to address—not just because, hey, it would be nice to feel less FOMO!
I won’t claim to know the solution to this very difficult problem, but I know that the things we’re doing today are absolutely not working and we need to try some very different models. Traditional sources of news and content (“mainstream media”), i.e., the traditional curators and gatekeepers, are in total meltdown. Viewership on traditional mainstream channels is rapidly plummeting and many of us don’t know where to look for the truth anymore. Social media is fine for sharing photos with your friends but it’s a disaster when people rely on it for news or science. As we all know by now the incentives are totally broken.
The status quo can’t continue for much longer. Wherever we end up once we get past this catastrophe, I’m certain it’ll be flexible and decentralized, and that it’ll have a very different set of incentives. The UX of future news and other media will look nothing like the way we consume news or other content today. There’s a heck of a lot of design space to explore.
It’s possible to build a healthier social network with better incentives around creating, curating, and sharing high quality content. I can sort of see the outlines but haven’t worked out the details yet. It’s an idea I keep coming back to. Expect to see more about the idea here.
Thing #3: Fixing Software 👨💻
“Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.” - Jaron Lanier
My own answer to Peter Thiel’s question is, “software is more broken than almost anyone thinks, and this is a bigger problem than almost anyone realizes.” If you agree with this statement, you may also agree that this has profound implications for how we design and write software, and for software business models.
Software is central to modern life for just about everybody. Most of us use software directly every day—social media, messaging apps, email, productivity tools, entertainment, navigation, word processing, you name it, not to mention websites and web apps. Even those rare people who don’t use much software still use it indirectly because it powers just about every interaction we have with any business, government, etc. In this respect software feels like the air we breathe: it’s all around us, it’s vital for our survival in the modern world, and yet we rarely notice it or think too much about it unless it disappears or stops working, in which case life gets difficult real fast. For the same reason, improving software feels almost like cleaning the air, and having good software thus feels almost as important as having clean air. Maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic, but not much, and not for long.
And software has become really, really broken. For one thing, it’s become nearly impossible to write and maintain. It costs way too much, takes way too much time, requires way too many people and way too much expertise, and most importantly building it just isn’t fun anymore. People don’t build toy apps and games for fun anymore; every app now needs to have a VC-backed business model behind it, which is tragic and totally unsustainable. But that’s how complex and expensive software has become. And it’s why there just isn’t much innovation happening in software these days, and why pretty much every app feels the same, and why most apps are crap.
As if all of that wasn’t bad enough, software has also been almost totally captured by those same VC funds and profit-hungry corporate business models. In this respect software is no longer humanistic the way it used to be. It doesn’t work for you, it works for the tech giants and their shareholders. (I wrote a more about this topic in Faster Horses, Better Software and Simple, Durable, Yours.)
I think people don’t really think much about this for a couple of reasons. One is that the surveillance capitalism model is so ubiquitous that people have largely given up hope that things can ever be different or better. Lots have resigned themselves to a dystopian future where their data never belongs to them, it only belongs to big corporations, and where they have zero privacy and zero control over their digital lives. Another reason is that people have never experienced anything better so they don’t believe it’s possible.
I haven’t given up hope. I know a thing or two about software and I know it’s possible to do better: to build software that’s designed and built around the user rather than around the tech company. It won’t be easy, and we have our work cut out for us—for one thing, people have gotten used to using software for “free” thanks to surveillance capitalism and other broken, pernicious business models. For another thing, in a sick twist of Conway’s law, the very architecture of the Internet itself has come to resemble the way those companies are run: it’s hierarchical and centralized, which makes it quite difficult to do anything peer to peer. But I haven’t given up on peer to peer networks and other forms of decentralization. That’s what we’re building at Spacemesh, it’s exciting, and thanks to this work and our community I can just about see a better future.
The problem does feel borderline impossible, but also exciting as hell, and I struggle to think of many more important things to work on. As I wrote before, projects like Urbit and more recently Nostr give me hope that the future will be less dystopian and less centralized. If this problem interests you, please let me know, because I consider this my life’s work and I’ll be working on solving this problem for a very long time.