Alignment
Three Things #98: December 17, 2023
An “alignment” meme has arisen lately in the Ethereum, Cosmos, and Solana communities. You’ll often see folks debating on Twitter whether a particular person or project is, e.g., “Ethereum aligned” or “Solana aligned.” I actually really like this meme because it gives a new, straightforward name to a very old phenomenon. Blockchains and their communities have always been about alignment—each is aligned around a different set of goals, principles, and priorities—and as a result the space is quite tribal. This is in no way unique to blockchain nor even to technology: there have been Microsoft, Apple, and Linux tribes almost as long as there have been desktop computers, and humans are fundamentally tribal creatures.
Alignment is something I think about a lot as I contemplate the path forward for Spacemesh. I have a pretty clear idea what attracted me to the project, what’s kept me here for so many years, and what I like about the community. I have a somewhat less clear idea what my colleagues value and even less of an idea what the community values, but I do have a sense that we’re aligned. What does it mean to be Spacemesh aligned? How do we encapsulate, articulate, and defend the things that Spacemesh stands for? These are some of the questions that keep me up at night—because while the technology of blockchain is important, the social side is even more important and it’s the thing that really differentiates each blockchain platform and community from the others.
Alignment matters because when you build something successful a thousand people try to pull you in a thousand different directions. Spacemesh hasn’t succeeded yet—we’re off to a good start for a very young project—but the tug of war has already begun (my Twitter and Telegram inboxes are evidence of this). If you aren’t clear about what you stand for you’ll chase shiny things, you’ll try to make everyone happy, and you’ll end up standing for exactly nothing—and ultimately making no one happy, least of all yourself. This is why it’s so important to think about, and to articulate, alignment.
Here’s how I’m thinking about alignment.
Thing #1: The Shoulders of Giants 🗿
Spacemesh truly stands on the shoulders of giants in so many ways. None of what we’ve designed or built would’ve been possible without the myriad pioneers that came before us, from the early computer scientists, Internet pioneers, and the open source wizards, to the cypherpunks and those who fought the first crypto wars, to Linux, to Bitcoin and Ethereum (to state just the most obvious ones). We stand on their shoulders technologically as well as socially. And in so many ways, their values are our values.
Bitcoin is the clearest and most obvious of these. To be Bitcoin aligned is to be a cypherpunk, since Bitcoin grew out of the cypherpunk movement: this means being skeptical of government and of authority more generally, valuing self-reliance and self-discipline, and believing in the power of technology specifically and of cryptography in particular to protect individual rights and privacy. Bitcoin alignment means sound monetary policy, and more importantly, monetary policy and governance in general that’s credibly neutral: it means minimizing the governance surface and minimizing the degree to which information asymmetries can arise and the degree to which influential actors can capture or disproportionately benefit from governance. I’d say that Bitcoin alignment also means a slow, steady, mature, responsible approach to development: the opposite of a move fast and break things methodology. Most of all Bitcoin stands for better money, money that’s outside the control of any nation state, any actor, or particular set of actors.
Ethereum is a bit more nebulous and a bit more nuanced. For better or for worse Ethereum’s values have been defined more in opposition to Bitcoin than they’ve ever been clearly articulated in their own right. This is probably because Ethereum arose out of the Bitcoin community and as a reaction to a perception of ossification on the part of Bitcoin. Whereas Bitcoin stands for simplicity and reliability—simple protocol, simple programs, simple governance—Ethereum is “crypto for developers” and has always leaned into innovation and been much more comfortable with complexity than Bitcoin. One need spend only five minutes browsing the list of EIPs or proposals on the various Ethereum forums to see what I mean. Ethereum folks love inventing new, complex-sounding words for old ideas and they’re constantly pushing the envelope on crazy research themes without much grounding in established fields like economics.
Recently of course the Ethereum community has also carved out a niche with several distinguishing characteristics including a democratized version of proof of stake with hundreds of thousands of participants (as opposed to the delegated proof of stake that basically every other protocol uses), a modular blockchain thesis (otherwise known as Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap) and an enormous, “big tent” ecosystem that includes dozens of adjacent projects and chains and hundreds of companies. In theory Ethereum alignment also includes ideas inherited from Bitcoin such as decentralization, permissionlessness, censorship resistance, and self-reliance (running your own node) but these have fallen in importance over time as the ecosystem has grown and it’s become inconvenient to maintain them (more on this in a moment).
For all these reasons it’s hard to characterize Ethereum alignment succinctly. Doing it justice takes about 20 pages, which I’d argue is a bug, not a feature. Ethereum has gotten too big and too complex for its own good; it’s no longer a single project, a single ecosystem, or a single community. It’s more like a broad-based, big tent, progressive cultural movement that’s never been entirely sure what it stands for.
Based on my experience with Ethereum the technology and Ethereum the community over the years, if I had to boil it down to the bare essentials I’d say that Ethereum alignment is about pushing the envelope on both social and technological progress towards building novel socio-economic systems while also paying homage (some might say lip service) to the cypherpunks and what they stood for.
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Solana, especially since I learned about the concept of alignment in the Solana community. Anatoly put it very well in his keynote address at Breakpoint this year: “if it reduces latency and increases throughput, it’s Solana aligned.” Solana isn’t perfect but I give the community a lot of credit for clearly understanding and clearly articulating what they stand for, and for seriously working towards this goal. That’s more than 99% of blockchain and cryptocurrency projects (including Ethereum) have managed to do. And it’s led to a clever, straightforward, effective marketing campaign with a simple message: Only possible on Solana.
With that background in place, what does it mean to be Spacemesh aligned?
Thing #2: Spacemesh Alignment 🫥
One way to look at Spacemesh is as a blockchain that makes mining from home easy and accessible. That’s certainly the most important distinguishing characteristic of the project in its current form. So playing off Anatoly’s definition of Solana alignment, you might say that if it makes mining from home easier or more economically sustainable then it’s Spacemesh aligned.
That’s not a bad start. And it’s a fair description of everything that we’ve built so far in Spacemesh and the reason we’ve built it. The protocol is complex and has a lot of moving parts but it’s all geared towards allowing miners to mine profitably and sustainably from home without needing to join a pool. Of course, sustainably mining from home is only a means to an end. The end is building a better economy: one that’s more open, more participatory, and that offers a more level playing field for everyday participants.
What do I mean by a better economy? When describing the economy I’d like to see I tend to avoid terms like “fair” and “just” because they’re ill-defined, subjective (according to what belief system?), and they’ve been misused a lot lately. A better, more specific word, borrowed from Ethereum, is credibly neutral. We want to build an economy where the rules are known, where everyone is playing by the same rules, and where these facts are independently verifiable (i.e., without needing to trust an authority). Along these lines you might go a step further and say that if it makes the economic system more accessible and credibly neutral then it’s Spacemesh aligned.
To be honest, beyond Spacemesh mining and the Spacemesh coin we’re still figuring out exactly what this means in practice. My vision is that we can use the Spacemesh infrastructure to build open global marketplaces for creating and exchanging value that make it easy for people everywhere to transact permissionlessly and create value for themselves, their families, and their communities. I’ve previously shared a few preliminary ideas of what this might look like in practice.
Of course Spacemesh stands for other things as well. I don’t know that we have consensus on our values, goals, and principles beyond the ones I just mentioned but in my opinion these include transparency and accountability, decentralization, permissionlessness, censorship resistance, personal responsibility and self sovereignty, integrity, innovation, trust in one another, and autonomy. Many of these values and principles should sound familiar because they’re inherited directly from Bitcoin and the cypherpunks. And some of our values come from Ethereum too: while we share the cypherpunks’ frustration with the existing system, respect for privacy, and mistrust of government and authority, like Ethereans we’re more optimistic about the future and about the power of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and smart contracts to solve coordination problems and act as building blocks of a better society. In other words, less dystopian cyberpunk and more utopian solarpunk.
Putting all of this together, you could say that if it aligns with the cypherpunks and with Bitcoin but puts a bit more emphasis on innovation, tech-forward optimism, and decentralized tech as a tool for personal financial empowerment, then it’s Spacemesh aligned. This seems like a rare and interesting intersection since the cypherpunks were more interested in freedom, encryption, and personal responsibility than they were in financial empowerment, and most projects today that focus on financial empowerment have little to no overlap with those cypherpunk values.
But it’s also a mouthful. I think the first or second definitions are better!
Thing #3: Defending Your Values 🛡️
Bitcoin maximalism is a real phenomenon: one need only spend a few minutes on Crypto Twitter (Crypto X? 🤔) or attend a Bitcoin conference to witness this. And Bitcoin maximalism has a bad reputation for a reason: it’s toxic, close-minded, and unwelcoming. It was one of the reasons that when I joined the industry I was almost immediately turned off by Bitcoin and joined the Ethereum community instead (which today has its own strain of toxic maximalism but felt much more welcoming a few years ago). A charitable way to describe the phenomenon is as a collective immune response to people, ideas, and projects that violate norms or otherwise don’t fit into a conservative definition of Bitcoin (i.e., those that aren’t Bitcoin aligned).
It took me quite a while to understand this but over time I’ve come to see that maximalists have a role to play. For me the turning point was seeing censorship of non-OFAC compliant transactions in Ethereum reach around 80% in the wake of the Merge last year (the number subsequently came down but recently has begun to increase again).
As I tried to describe above Ethereum doesn’t have a culture or a set of values that’s as straightforward, as clearly defined, or as strongly defended as Bitcoin’s. And it’s paying the price. Censorship resistance is undeniably one of Bitcoin’s core values. Bitcoin has had its own issues with censorship but it hasn’t come close to the situation in Ethereum and, because of that clearly articulated, strongly defended core value, I don’t think it ever will.
Ethereum, by contrast, is trying to do a lot of things and it’s trying to please a lot of people. The most obvious of these is that it’s trying to scale: to increase the total transaction throughput in the ecosystem by orders of magnitude including all of the sidechains, rollups, etc.. It’s also trying to become more usable for everyday people. It’s trying to create “ultrasound money.” It’s trying to be green and reduce the cost of security, which were the two main drivers of the Merge and the transition to proof of stake. Unfortunately, through all of these changes, Ethereum has seriously begun to sacrifice some of the values it began with, such as decentralization and censorship resistance. Proof of stake has led to a massive amount of centralization, it turns out, and that centralization has driven censorship.
Censorship resistance is ostensibly one of the Ethereum community’s values but it’s clearly not valued as highly as other things. This is a good example of why simply having a set of values isn’t enough. In order to put those values into practice and turn them into something—a platform, a community, an ecosystem, a product, a company, whatever—one must install those values into a value system. After all, no matter what, no matter how nice sounding or universal your values, there will always, eventually, inevitably come a time when they come into conflict. In those moments you must make a decision that will favor one value over another. And all values are not created equal. While the Ethereum community has been focused on scalability and usability it’s taken its eyes off the balls that matter most, such as decentralization and censorship resistance. In the early days of Ethereum, the Ethereum I knew and loved, Ethereans wouldn’t compromise on those values and principles for anything. After all, without those things there was no point in trying to build Ethereum—why not just use a centralized database? Sadly, once the censorship toothpaste is out of the tube it’s nigh on impossible to put it back.
Which brings us back to Bitcoin maximalism. Say what you will about toxic maxis, they have an important role to play: that immune response serves a purpose! Once you’ve determined and articulated your core values, the things you won’t compromise on at any cost, your army of maxis will defend those values. If Bitcoin alignment means censorship resistance then anything that causes more censorship is by definition not Bitcoin aligned and should be expelled from the system. This is why the #No2x movement won and defeated the big blockers in the block size wars of 2017 via a user-activated soft fork (UASF): bigger blocks would lead to more centralization which could only lead to more censorship. This movement worked in the first place because Bitcoin is meaningfully decentralized and had (and indeed still has) a culture of people running their own nodes, so the network was able to reject this bad idea “from the edges”, i.e., ordinary Bitcoiners rejected the idea even when most influential mining companies and exchanges were in support of it. Sadly I don’t think the same thing could happen on Ethereum today. If Ethereum had clearly articulated its alignment and values then it might not be in this situation in the first place.
Spacemesh is too young to have maximalists, which for now is a good thing. And to be clear I don’t think Spacemesh is facing any existential threats other than keeping up with its own growth and developing the protocol to be more mature, more sustainable and more secure. But it’s absolutely essential that we reflect on what it means to be Spacemesh aligned, what our core values and our value system are, and how we’ll stand up for those values when the time comes that we must. We can learn from the successes and failures of the projects that came before, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, as we embark upon this journey.