Coasian Cults
A theory of the cognitive firm
Blockchains have been touted as revolutionary technologies, promising to change the world, but so far? We're not impressed. Thanks to recent advances in the field of zero-knowledge research, we're building a blockchain specifically engineered to maximize personal sovereignty and enshrine the human spirit at scale. Leveraging the beautiful simplicity of Nock, we built the first combinator-based Virtual Machine that can be efficiently used with Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Nockchain is a proof-of-work blockchain that sits atop our novel ZKVM. The distributed ledger now matures from an exciting experiment to civilization-grade infrastructure. We're building the rails for a parallel world economy defined by provable security, understandable personal technologies, and computational freedom.
Permissionless understandable personal computer economy. World War III. An empty vessel, the Holy Spirit. Permissionless data storage, computational wet markets. Reterritorialize with our right hand what we deterritorialize with our left. Financialized tribes frolic in the sun. A Berlin Wall crumbling, mitochondrial annealing, Neo-Cicero on methylene blue. Responsibility takers and rentier disrespecters liquid-cooling Texan ranches, high-plain drifters of the post-steppe, number go up, the river of living water. We have the right to remain silent. We just have to prove it.
A blockchain is a truth machine. We already know that blockchains can restore truth to money, but why stop there? We're restoring truth to the personal computer so as to restore truth to human relationships—our transactions, yes, but also our jobs, our food systems, our social identities, and more. The original cypherpunks believed that blockchains would threaten all currently existing institutions. We agree, and we're launching with no pre-mine to lay the foundations for a new society.
We’re dead-focused on creating civilization-grade infrastructure that can power a new parallel world of freedom compute, all on top of Nock. We’re building Nockchain as a high-throughput chain that provides proofs of computation, storage, and a new namespace. We see a future of simple, understandable computation running on personal computers alongside a global, permissionless commodity marketplace for computational capacities.
Technologies of integrity require beauty and simplicity–convoluted systems discourage personal involvement. When individuals don’t take responsibility, corporations, bureaucracies, and crime syndicates take over. Human freedom in the digital era requires systems simple enough to be audited by individuals. Civilization-grade infrastructure cannot cheat without disastrous results. The ultimate substrate of any modern digital society will be elegant, or fail.
A theory of the cognitive firm
"WE ONLY WANT THE WORLD TO LIVE, and to feel it’s crude energy flowing through us." —Wyndham Lewis
On Plato's Thousand-Year Academy
"We shall go for Independence, and put our trust in our selves, our rifles, and——our god." —Stephen F. Austin
On permissionless and scalable kingmaking.
When Proof of Work is abolished at the anthropological layer, it reappears at the managerial layer: A theory of Higher Education and signaling games run amok.
On technology, the Übermensch, and "the relentless destruction of everything that was degenerating and parasitical... passing into the service of an excess of life." (Deleuze)
On power, value, and responsibility futurism.
"Now it is not the devil but DOS that sits on my belly." —Ivan Illich
"Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." ——Matthew 7:14
"Man is a rope, stretched between beast and Übermensch—a rope over an abyss..." —Nietzsche
"It is up to us to again become the nomads of this desert... a virgin, sacred space without pathways, continuous as Bataille wished it, where only the wind lifts the sand, where only the wind watches over the sand." —Baudrillard
"Nature loves to encrypt." —Heraclitus
We're currently working on a technical statement about our market thesis. In the meantime, we thought we'd publish a list of sources for the 14 essays we've published in the past few months. (We've always taken care to cite our sources, but
On silence, record-keeping, and the obscure geographical teleology of American freedom.
On Hernán Cortés and informal capital formation.
"May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: 'Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice, and looked on their adversity...'" —William Bradford
"The increasingly rigorous differentiation of marriage from trade, or politics from economics, finds its ultimate conceptual definition in the thought of a moral agency which is utterly impervious to learning, communication, or exchange." —Nick Land
"Sovereign is he who commands the compute." —James Poulos
"The festival... is an aspiration for destruction... but there is a conservative prudence that regulates and limits it." —Georges Bataille
Everyone talks about "freedom of speech," but we forget the freedom to say nothing.
"It is precisely in times of ‘laxness’ that tragedy runs through the houses and streets, that great love and great hatred are born and the flame of knowledge blazes up into the sky." —Nietzsche
Western civilization is an esoteric war of religion masked by an exoteric media history.
On Marx, Burnham, and the future of capitalism.