civ·i·li·za·tion – the stage of human social and cultural development and organization that is considered most advanced
Creating better ways for humans to organize themselves, to cooperate and work together in new ways make it possible to become more “civil.”
One pillar of my own personal philosophy came from the Cypherpunks in the 1990s, the insight that we could use cryptography to create technologies that offer a level playing field, to preserve freedom. The most important & ambitious goal of all is to create a decentralized computing platform, accessible to everyone. To make that possible, we needed a way to transact, to reward people for contributing resources to the system – hence Bitcoin. The noise and hype around cryptocurrency since has obfuscated the north star. Cryptocurrency is a milestone, not a destination. We’re not just going to the moon, we’re going to the stars.
Decentralized computing must solve for these important attributes
- Decentralized – No central point of control, anywhere.
- Scalable – Linear growth with low latency, low cost, low energy.
- Secure – Bitcoin is the benchmark to meet or beat.
- Private – Private by default.
- Programmable – Support modern programming languages.
- Accessible – Any modern computer can participate without permission from any authorities.
Bitcoin solves 1, 3 & 6.
Etherium solves 1, 3, 5 & 6 (but now compromising on 3).
Cardano, Solana, Algorand, etc. are attempts to solve 2 by compromising on 1 &/or 3.
Risc0 is a zero compromise blockchain that solves 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6. It addresses the systemic issues of current systems without tradeoffs.
I’ve known this team for over 20 years as they’ve worked on cryptographic protocols. They built & exited three companies together. Their new zero-knowledge powered blockchain is the first thing I’ve gotten excited about in crypto since beta testing Bitcoin and I’m proud to be among their investors.