Society Protocol: The Future of Human Coordination

Transcript

[applause] >> Hey everyone. My name is Ashton and um I'm excited to be here. I'm really excited to talk about society protocol uh which is um it's a the evolution of blockchain systems. It's the evolution of blockchain systems to fulfill the entire state structure within the blockchain system and it's a paradigm of synchronized states. Which is the future of human coordination. Our world is moving towards synchronized states.

So uh when we talk about coordination uh we have to start that like coordination is the superpower of humans. It we are the only species on the planet that coordinates our civilizations at planetary scale. What happens across the world affects me and if we increase coordination just even 0.001% for like society, that makes our lives better than anything that I could do that spend my whole life on whatever I could perfect. Uh it doesn't matter how like smart or strong each one of us is individually, it matters how well we coordinate. It That's what makes us live good or bad.

We're very fortunate to be here in this country to be able to live good. But like okay, so coordination isn't actually provided. Naturally, humanity has over time learned how to coordinate by using systems. We've developed systems that have improved our coordination basically. And uh we're not aligned. We're not naturally all aligned. So naturally, all humans have competing and cooperating interests and those overlap all at the same time. So if we naturally remove those systems, it would be chaos and conflict. Over time, we've become better at coordinating by using the underlying system. Some of them include like democracy, currencies, money um you know, individualism, and a whole

slew of other systems, religions, governance. They're all coordination mechanisms that allow us to coordinate better. The premier system in the past 2,000 Well, in the past centuries has been the nation-state. And the nation-state uh has been our system for the past um few three or so centuries. So, let's talk about the nation-state. Nation-state is a coordination uh system that we use uh at that top level, which is based on the double-entry accounting age, which is based on the concept of duplicated contracts. The entire nation-state structure is based on duplicate contracts, where uh we duplicate, you know, we have marriage certificates, we have um receipts, we have college graduation certificates, we have everything is stored as a duplicated contract. These

duplicated contracts are fragmented. They're each separate. So, when I sign a contract with somebody, it doesn't go it it's stored away between just the counterparties that are are involved. The entire um that's how it works. So, um nation-states and this double-entry accounting age have given us uh wonderful things like equality, the concept of equality, democracy, individualism, and capitalism. They've really allowed our societies to horizontally rebalance the societal pyramid, which wasn't possible before. When you add technology to that mix, what happens is centralization. Why does technology uh basically cause centralization in duplicate contracts? Because we want to aggregate the state of society into um like when we aggregate, we get really

powerful things like we can see what's going on. Whereas if we store the duplicate contracts separately, they're not that powerful. So, the more technology, the better speed, the more faster aggregation to a hub-and-spoke model, and that causes centralization. So, when I talk about the state structure, I'm not exactly talking about the government. The government is what we could call the brains of a state. The state structure that I'm talking about expands past the government. It it talks about uh these eight things. Uh these are the eight things that I identified as the state structure that that help us coordinate as a species basically. So, one is identity systems.

Right now, our identities are not stored by us and they're not controlled by us. What that means is that our identities are actually stored between corporate databases and government databases and we don't know even as much as they know about us. Like, I know less about myself than uh corporations do most likely. Our monetary systems are stored um in by gatekeepers in the banking system. Our societal state is stored in corporate databases. It's again not controlled by us. So, when we centralize all these things, uh there's two topics that come up over and over again in all eight of these pillars of coordination that we're currently living in. Um and that is that they are fragmented, they centralize into uh gatekeepers that control that entire pillar. And that those

gatekeepers do very bad things to other people because they grow very very powerful. Incredibly powerful. So, like, if you can see the whole state of society, uh most people are walking blind. They don't see that. There's people that see that. Uh the synchronization of time we use clocks for and then our shared reality of events, for example, goes through social media and media um platforms. And those media platforms, they warp our shared reality by using by controlling algorithms basically. So, the people that control that pillar, they can control our shared reality. So, our group decision-making, our governance structures, they uh use representative governance, which we um basically we're not able to make decisions directly.

So, the social contract and the value systems, they all work in the same way where basically they require gatekeepers. Um the centralization speeds up over time. And so, the right now, the centralization has caused us a slew of problems which seem unsolvable. They seem They're They're all stacked on top of each other and they all complement each other to a puzzle that really looks like an unpredictable time coming, and I hope that everybody can see that. So, we have uh technocratic one world governments, and all these problems really uh the censorship, the economic There's really basically it looks like it almost can't get any

worse. We really Nobody has a solution to all these problems like the centralized AI, the CBDCs that are coming, the governance capture in the systems. So, what we know that many people aren't aware of is that there's double entry accounting age is actually coming to a close. So, the entire double entry accounting age that spanned for the past 2,000 years is right now nearing its final end basically, and that's why it looks like the apocalypse. It kind of is the apocalypse, but what that means is that we're entering a whole new age of civilization and society. It's a It's a giant transition that has only happened once in the last 2,000 years.

So, this transition really seemed to start in 2009 uh with Satoshi. When it seemed like we were heading in the right way when Bitcoin started to decentralize money, basically. And when Bitcoin started to decentralize money, it seemed like we were heading in the right way, and then in 2015 Vitalik introduced Ethereum, and that could decentralize assets also and all sorts of objects. And they have blockchain systems right now have uh a an issue. They have They have an a big issue that prevents them from doing everything else, basically. And that big issue is that they lack identity. They lack civil resistance. So, without identity, we don't have people, and when

we don't have people, we can't govern uh the the actual uh machines. And when uh So, we need a social layer underneath to uphold the machine and basically to control it. And that social layer is unevenly coordinated. It's not uncoordinated, it's unevenly coordinated, which forces blockchain into basically not being able to adjust easily. They're considered mutable, which forces them into pyramid structures, and blockchains currently cannot form the state structure. They can't form all eight pillars of coordination to actually form a state structure because they lack identity and governance permanently, but they also lack some of the other pillars.

Including the shared reality of events is very thin. It's only monetary events. They just don't have all the eight pillars. So, what we actually need to do is take one more giant leap forward. And what people blockchains are actually an evolution of clocks. People will recognize this very soon, but what Satoshi actually invented was a two-dimensional clock. And what blockchains are is that they're synchronized state machines that synchronize the state for a certain social layer, basically. That's all that they do. That's all they've ever done.

And so there's a social layer to each blockchain structure, and it wants to synchronize some sort of reality, whether that be money or reputations or identities. And they that social layer uses the blockchains to synchronize that state. So, we need to evolve the evolution from three-dimensional to four-dimensional state machines, synchronized state machines, lies in unlocking one simple quirk, which is that when Bitcoin and Ethereum were modeled, they're modeled after static objects. And the synchronized state machines are not static objects. None of them are static objects. They're The whole state of the machine is synchronized together into one thing. So, by unlocking that, we can unlock basically

everything else. And that unlocks the triple-entry accounting age, which is the age of synchronized states by unlocking those things. So, what is Society protocol? It's a four-dimensional synchronized state model. What it is is it's a model of world, and it synchronizes the state of that model world together for all of us in society that we can all carry around in our pockets basically, right? That we can uh use to coordinate and to uh keep the state of our reality basically. And it stores uh a live identities and how they interact rather than uh it also stores their property, their governance, you know, how they govern it, everything together. Ultimately, this unlocks civil resistance which unlocks identity which unlocks governance which unlocks everything

else. Now we have identities inside the synchronized state. We have people we can govern together using this model world basically. So, what this means is that it is a When we talk about synchronized state and capitals, what that means is that it has full state function. Everything that nation-states can do, society protocol and synchronized states do more effectively. So, what I mean by that is that they have all eight pillars of coordination. Well, I'll talk about that in a sec. What it does is that it's able to restructure the very bottom like the very baseline layer of our societies from the fragmented and duplicated contracts that we currently use to build uh basically into a unified synchronized state machine.

Okay, so what does that do? Um so, synchronized states actually end up being able to unify all eight pillars of coordination that um into one synchronized state machine where they are all synchronized together. And they um are it's a program into a program basically. We can run the state structure as a program. Uh by unifying them, they grow more powerful as you add them together. They like one builds on the other and the more that you can add, the more the powerful that coordination mechanism in society grows. So, they all actually complement each other.

So, what are the eight uh steps that we're talking about? The first one is the timeline. And that's uh it's a blockchain architecture, right? So, the timeline is our synchronization mechanism that synchronizes our society. It's a synchronization of time, and instead of synchronizing time and clocks like we use today to synchronize time, we can synchronize together the public state of society, which allows us to coordinate on many dimensions basically, not just the single digit that we use today as time. The second one is the state sphere. That's like the mutable state of blockchain. So, blockchain is storing a mutable state, which allows us to store our histories immutably forever. Which is kind of, you know, that's cool. Uh the third one is actors, which is identities. So, say we have now

identity inside of this synchronized state, and they're all different, they all have different lives, they do different things, and we can build trust and reputation through this immutable history. The fourth one is the monetary system, which is energy, which is theoretically perfect money. The fifth one is our events, where we can interact by using this uh model world. Basically, I can interact with people all across the world basically by using this duplicate computer program, which is synchronized together as one reality. The next one is governance, which unlocks direct governance of any type that we want. Since uh everything is programmable in the system, and we all interact directly without gatekeepers with the synchronized state, what that means is that it unlocks governance in any fashion that we want. If you want uh conviction voting, quadratic voting,

whatever we want, we can govern that synchronized state um and and when we do govern it, it basically um it updates the whole societal structure like the social contract instantly for everybody. So, if you want to increase taxes, for example, we can by changing a governance decision, it will implement it all across the entire state structure. The The next one is the social contract, which is made up of these things, and they're basically the protocol artifacts. So, every blockchain already has a social contract. And the last one is the value functions, which is determine what a society finds valuable.

So, we can incentivize things. Since every identity is programmable in the system, we can incentivize uh anything we want essentially throughout their entire synchronized state. So, the value functions are worth spending a tiny bit more time on. What they are is their value system of synchronized states. They determine what does the collective find valuable and that's where the money flows basically. The energy is a monetary system and that the the money is since it's all synchronized together and programmable, we can reward things that are valuable automatically which was never possible before in society. Right now, we're in the horizontal rebalancing where we rebalance basically manually by doing stuff like that. Value functions are modular, so different synchronized states will add them in different ways.

Um so, they coordinate society by collect aligning the interests of every individual actor together with the collective and it affects every single actor in the state structure which is very very powerful because we can actually incentivize everybody. Like, I wouldn't be able to do that today in a nation-state structure. I wouldn't be able to incentivize everybody even in this room. Here, we can incentivize this to everybody in the in the entire state structure. What does it all mean? It means that we can get instantaneous synchronized coordination worldwide for civil resistant identities with perfect money and immutable state history, equitable access directly to a synchronized social contracts, a shared reality of interactions worldwide synchronizing all of society, controlling AI, coordinating every individual actor to do what's best

for the collective of the synchronized state, returning ownership of identity assets and data to the edges, giving all citizens equal and instant access to the governance which uh structure, forming stronger trust bonds with transparent identities, removing the need to store duplicate contracts in multiple fragmented silos. Like, if you think about how much of our society stores duplicate contracts, it's uh half of the city. But, um and the world really. Uh sorry, I I can't stop this. I got to keep going. Uh decentralization of power structures, lowering and costs to the cost of running a duplicate computer program, making all actors property events and governance decisions and more in the system programmable and accountable with code. Wow. Wow. You

know, like this synchronized states are able to do all of this by unlocking identities, civil resistant identities inside of synchronized state machines. Synchronized states can fulfill every single function that nation states currently do and they can do it all 10 to 100 times better. What by synchronizing the state together. So, the transition from nation states to synchronized states. Uh the truth is that there's no way to reconcile the old structures. The The truth is that we're in a certain very unprecedented time in history where the old structures will only become worse.

They're irreparable and that's the more that centralizes the worse it gets. Uh Society protocol is a gateway to the next epoch of human civilization. It's um so the the longer that humanity inside of the old paradigm, the worse it will get. It's That's how it works. The The quicker that we transition, the better. It's uh it's the only way out of this situation, actually. Uh just a quick note, there's not going to be one Society protocol. We're really like the Linux Foundation building the code base for synchronized states. So, every instance of synchronized states is going to be a different um it's a modular system where every they will be different. They will reward

different things. They will have different value systems. They will have different governance all of it. Everything in synchronized states is different. Um so synchronized states are the only way forward for humanity. But actually, there's two paths forward here. So, actually, what people don't yet realize is that CBDCs are also synchronized states. And what's going to happen with CBDCs is that they will actually grow to compete with each other and upgrade. Uh so, once the CBDC has identity and money in the system, there's nothing to really prevents these systems from adding governance into a system. And we can vote directly into the CBDC.

People don't talk about that enough. We can add social media directly into that CBDC. But, the problem with CBDCs is that they're centralized at their core and they don't have really a path to decentralize. So, that will usher in a techno-feudal dark age that we will talk about for 10 generations. Like, very bad times, bad things, bad things happen. Um, so, we don't really have forever to wake up and build society protocol. And the only path forward is CBDCs and both parts make the nation-state obsolete. No matter which synchronized state you choose, one of them is happening. I'll promise you.

Um, so, society protocol is not a revolutionary movement. Society protocol is an evolution of the state structure. Um, it's not a bottom-up or top-down movement. It's both. Nation-states can use society protocol and they can use synchronized states. They can transition to synchronized states. So can little, uh, any group of people, any collective, as small as two people or as large as thousands or millions of people. Uh, it's both a top-down and a bottom-up movement. So, stablecoins, CBDCs, and Chinese, uh, the social credit system, they all are the same CBDC structure. They're three-dimensional blockchains that uh basically they uh, they store objects in a centralized kind of way.

So, we don't have forever to transition and if we wait too long, the choice will be gone. Because eventually, the control over society will grow very powerful and these 3D systems cannot decentralize power. We will remain in the double-entry accounting age for longer and that will usher in darker times. Really, some of the darkest times in history, uh, I would imagine, because all the technology is there and the truth is is that we're centralizing more every day and the more that you centralize, the more that the people that control the power do bad things to everybody else. That's That's how human That's how it goes.

So, what can you do to avoid a dark age? If this is something that interests you, if this talk has caught your attention, we seek people who are truly committed and want to build a better world, true believers, people that believe in this project. This project is not a job. It is a movement to bring the world into a different epoch of civilization. So, we need builders, investors, contributors advisors community partners. We know how to build this. We know exactly how to build this and there's really This project will create trillions of dollars. Like this Anyways, the It's It's not about the money.

It It really isn't. We are decentralized and distributed organization. So, people are welcome to show up as pseudonyms from all over the world. That's how our community is forming as a pseudonymous or you're welcome to show up as your legal name, but the triple entry accounting age does not need your double entry accounting age legal name to function. It's just not necessary. We're building on Ethereum, a web 3 outpost, which is a bridge from web 3 to web 4. So, on Ethereum, we can build an identity system which bridges from web 3 to web 4 and we can use that. Basically, that's how we are able to run a distributed organization from all around the world. We seek a few key roles right now. This is the very first talk that I do about the project, so I'm very excited to present it. And right now,

there's a few key roles and It's really a project for the people. We We will be raising later Right now is We're raising awareness for the project for people to realize that this is possible and how to do it. In about 6 months, we're going to be doing a public fund raise to fund the development of the project and it really should be the people that contribute. Not We're not really trying to sell it to venture capitalists. It's really a project for the people. Um So, that's it. That's Sharding Portal.