Balaji, I want to be on board with this. Truly. But I have to be honest: I have some serious reservations.
There’s a clarity to your vision that’s undeniably compelling, but it also feels, at times, too neat. Too clean. It carries the scent of High Modernism, with its promise of total legibility and systemic elegance. And like all High Modernist architectures, it risks collapsing into a Ballardian dystopia (see Super-Cannes, one of his sharpest).
So yes: you’re right that cryptographic control of capital assets is coming. That part is nearly inevitable. But I’m worried you’re skipping over some deeper structural truths. I don’t raise these as gotchas. I’d genuinely welcome your perspective if I’m missing something.
Here are my core concerns:
1. Enforcement is not the same as legitimacy. The latter is messy, emergent, and computationally irreducible. It requires more than protocol adherence: it requires social trust, historical context, and moral weight.
2. Protocols don’t eliminate coercion, they obscure it. Code may execute deterministically, but the choice of what gets encoded is political. Who interprets edge cases? Who operates at the “sharp end” of protocol enforcement if not humans?
3. Coherence doesn’t emerge from code, it emerges from context. We live in a computationally irreducible universe (per Stephen Wolfram). You can’t shortcut your way to meaning by scaling enforcement. The more totalizing the system, the more brittle its failures.
In Decentralization and Its Discontents I explore how systems of control mutate as they decentralize. I suspect you’ll find the critique familiar, and perhaps worth wrestling with, especially if you’ve read Venkatesh Rao’s deep dives on decentralization as a metatribe. [If not, he’s on here and worth engaging with.]
I don’t need to be right for the sake of it. But I do think we need more debate at this level of depth: not just about what crypto can do, but about what it means.
(1) My immediate instinct is that your post feels somewhat AI-ish, I must say :)
(2) That said, engaging it at face value, I don't see anything specific to rebut. It's essentially saying that everything is complex and social and so on. OK, fine.
(3) The fact remains: we currently secure property with physical keys and key cards. Titles (like real estate deeds) are traded in a completely different system. We have a new tool, cryptography, that can unify both keys and title. That will be useful in at least some circumstances.
TLDR: one can't just invoke "high modernism" as a necessarily bad thing while posting on a blog from a computer. I like the book Seeing Like a State too, but obviously modernism is at times good. Any rebuttal needs to be specific.
Thanks for your reply. I appreciate you engaging, despite musing if my comments came from a robocomment-farm in Alexandria, Kazakhstan, or Sam Altman’s basement.
You asked me to be more specific so this is a long reply out of necessity. Typically when somebody says “that’s too vague to respond to” there are one of two things is going on: (A) there’s a lot of handwaving and no substance, or (B) there are specific points that need to be unpacked for clarity.
I’m going to attempt to show that it is (B).
A few (honest) reactions to your thoughts:
(1) On the Ballard reference
Citing Ballard was my mise-en-scene, not my punchline. I’m not saying “don’t use the tech”; I’m saying “don’t assume it resolves all the messy issues in the world.” In some situations, it might actually make those issues harder to resolve. I know you did not make that argument in your OP but I do think you make that argument more broadly in your work on this topic. More on that below.
I get that referencing fiction (Ballard, Super-Cannes) can be annoyingly vague in a debate like this, but I do think there’s a real point being made. Technocratic or totalizing systems have unintended consequences around the aspects of life they can’t measure or predict; that’s the essence of my narrower arguments that follow. If you think that’s “true but trivial” as you implied, then we have the crux of a disagreement to resolve, because I don’t think it’s trivial at all and that’s the core of my argument. If you STILL have the urge to dismiss it then maybe, just maybe, it’s your blind spot? (Or mine in that I’m overweighting trivia? But at least we’ve found something clear to disagree on and therefore debate).
The issue isn’t that uncertainty doesn’t predate such systems. It’s that when the system becomes confident it has resolved uncertainty (or worse, that uncertainty no longer matters) it creates its own blind spots. Suppression does not equal resolution.
TL;DR there’s a more sophisticated argument here than you’re giving me credit for, and I unpack it more fully in the essay I linked below.
(2) On specificity
If you didn’t see anything specific to rebut in the comment, fair enough. But I’d refer you to the full essay I linked as well as my clarifications later in this comment. Let me know if anything in there strikes you as worth pushing back on (or agreeing with). These are complex matters, and I’m open to being challenged. There’s a fame imbalance between you and me so you have the option of ignoring all of this (droit de seigneur), but I think there’s value to be mined here and I hope you see it too. We are not debating trivia IMHO.
You said my comment boiled down to “everything is complex and social,” and left it at that. But I think that undersells the stakes. My point is not that complexity exists: it’s that when you try to encode property, sovereignty, and coordination into a closed protocol, that complexity doesn’t go away. It moves. If you don’t model for it (if you don’t create pathways for context, interpretation, and contestation) you don’t eliminate failure. You just guarantee brittle collapse at the edges. That’s not a shrug at complexity. It’s a warning about how and where it reasserts itself. That’s what Ballard was saying in Super-Cannes and that’s why a work of fiction is an appropriate warm-up act for this argument.
(3) On the usefulness of the tech
I actually agree with you on this. My concerns are not that this is a useful tool in the narrow sense. My concerns are about the broader expected societal impact and the second, third, and nth-order effects of what you’re proposing: not just in your original post, which was fairly straightforward, but in the broader vision I’ve seen you outline elsewhere.
In case you didn’t make it to the core points in my original comment, let me restate them clearly:
1. Enforcement is not the same as legitimacy
Code can enforce who gets access to a house. But legitimacy decides whether that enforcement is accepted. If the social or political context changes (e.g. during a contested eviction, regime change, or civil dispute), the code may still function, but its authority no longer holds. Legitimacy is what allows enforcement to stick. Thomas Hobbes “Leviathan” has not been adequately debunked by your arguments yet and if you think it has then please give me something to read on that so I can get my head around it.
2. Protocols don’t eliminate coercion; they hide it.
Every protocol reflects choices about what to enforce. Those choices involve power. If we can’t see or challenge how those choices are made, we’re not avoiding coercion; we’re relocating it behind the interface. Opaque power is still power, and its opacity may make it less fair, not more. I go into this in the essay quite a bit.
3. Coherence doesn’t come from code; it comes from shared context.
Blockchains are great at storing facts. But meaning is not stored, it’s interpreted. In complex systems, interpretation depends on history, norms, and human judgment. Code can’t replace that IMO but I think this is the core point at which you and I disagree maybe? When systems try to run without shared understanding, they break under pressure. That’s not a bug; it’s a consequence of oversimplification. And (see Wolfram) oversimplification is guaranteed in a system as complex as human society. It is unavoidable at the level of Physics and all downstream effects of the physical universe.
You are advocating for a revolution in how society is organized and I’m trying to pressure test it, not because I think it’s bad but because I’m not fully convinced. That’s important work IMO and should not be deflected or dismissed as “noise”.
Hopefully you don’t feel like you are debating with a chat bot at this point? If you (still) do I strongly urge you to read my essays on the current crisis and I think you will see there’s real effort going on here and not just smoke and mirrors. I think this stuff matters and I think you do too. A lot of people are LARPing this stuff for attention. I’m not one of them.
There isn’t an argument in the original post that “all property moving to cryptographic security” is a good thing. I’m not sure if it is implied or if this is just a prediction. I think it’s very fair to say it is not net-net a good thing. And I also think it’s likely the correct prediction.
(2) More to the point, you can of course retain a normal offline key for your front door if you want. But the advantage of a crypto lock is that you can now get into *any* door that grants your crypto name permission to enter, without holding a big jangling keychain. Any club, any Airbnb, any car, any office, anything.
Interesting idea, makes sense in theory. But if everything valuable moves onchain, doesn’t that essentially shift leverage to whoever controls the dominant chain (or the infrastructure it ultimately depends on)? How viable is forking if the new chain can’t interface with systems people still rely on (e.g. housing, transit, income etc). At that point, isn’t forking more theoretical? I mean technically you’ve exited, but wouldn’t you also be locking yourself out of systems you need? or am I missing something?
There are quite a few different smart contract chains, and interop is a large area of research. I'm not that worried about lockin because exit is what blockchains are built to facilitate.
Appreciate the reply, Balaji. Yeah, I think I see your angle; if there are enough viable chains and interop improves/holds, then exit should act as a check on lock-in. What I’ve been thinking about and trying to get at is whether there’s another layer beyond technical migration, maybe call it embedded exit, meaning the ability to leave without cutting yourself off from essential systems. Do you see a role for interoperable commons and/or mutualist infrastructure (say, things like federated identity, local mesh networks, co-op cloud) as part of a viable exit architecture? Genuinely curious what you think.
I agree in concept, can see the vision and how more comes online as friction reduces.
Does end state require no incremental cost per signature? If there’s a financial cost to validate, imagine it has to be truly immaterial for use cases with high velocity
just one concern that i have is, in a future like this, if your private key gets accidentally stolen, your life gets stolen from you… you literally become identity-less
Thank you. I hope this all works out and spreads in practice, primarily for the political decentralization that a competitor to state-run security would offer.
The other major centralizing factor that needs an alternative is energy, but I have hopes that Dr. Harold White's Casimir Space Technologies experiments with harnessing the Casimir effect could provide some decentralizing technological aid in that vein and that we could get back to having a frontier again: https://grainofwheat.substack.com/p/the-quantum-powered-nomads-of-the
If it's legal, it's not secure. If "tainted" coins or tokens can be revoked or blacklisted, or if transactions require trusting an exchange that complies with any government's regulations, if it can't be used untracably for drugs, murder and plutonium-plated porn, then it isn't at all secure.
My instinct is that Identity and voting needs to become cryptography first before other things become cryptography (this would then inherently mean that a person's identity is their property by birthright, as is voting, a birthright that is a subset of their identity. Identity and voting rights would become inseparable, but also could expand to include other inalienable rights). We could have global, direct democracy on the blockchain, which would have a huge impact on the kind of policies that pass through.
This first step should then trigger discussion and consensus for the migration of physical property to the chain, because it would be governed and overseen by all of the people who would be impacted by said migration.
Balaji, I want to be on board with this. Truly. But I have to be honest: I have some serious reservations.
There’s a clarity to your vision that’s undeniably compelling, but it also feels, at times, too neat. Too clean. It carries the scent of High Modernism, with its promise of total legibility and systemic elegance. And like all High Modernist architectures, it risks collapsing into a Ballardian dystopia (see Super-Cannes, one of his sharpest).
So yes: you’re right that cryptographic control of capital assets is coming. That part is nearly inevitable. But I’m worried you’re skipping over some deeper structural truths. I don’t raise these as gotchas. I’d genuinely welcome your perspective if I’m missing something.
Here are my core concerns:
1. Enforcement is not the same as legitimacy. The latter is messy, emergent, and computationally irreducible. It requires more than protocol adherence: it requires social trust, historical context, and moral weight.
2. Protocols don’t eliminate coercion, they obscure it. Code may execute deterministically, but the choice of what gets encoded is political. Who interprets edge cases? Who operates at the “sharp end” of protocol enforcement if not humans?
3. Coherence doesn’t emerge from code, it emerges from context. We live in a computationally irreducible universe (per Stephen Wolfram). You can’t shortcut your way to meaning by scaling enforcement. The more totalizing the system, the more brittle its failures.
In Decentralization and Its Discontents I explore how systems of control mutate as they decentralize. I suspect you’ll find the critique familiar, and perhaps worth wrestling with, especially if you’ve read Venkatesh Rao’s deep dives on decentralization as a metatribe. [If not, he’s on here and worth engaging with.]
I don’t need to be right for the sake of it. But I do think we need more debate at this level of depth: not just about what crypto can do, but about what it means.
Looking forward to your thoughts.
https://open.substack.com/pub/theliminallens/p/crypto-decentralization-belief-engine?r=dvftt&utm_medium=ios
(1) My immediate instinct is that your post feels somewhat AI-ish, I must say :)
(2) That said, engaging it at face value, I don't see anything specific to rebut. It's essentially saying that everything is complex and social and so on. OK, fine.
(3) The fact remains: we currently secure property with physical keys and key cards. Titles (like real estate deeds) are traded in a completely different system. We have a new tool, cryptography, that can unify both keys and title. That will be useful in at least some circumstances.
TLDR: one can't just invoke "high modernism" as a necessarily bad thing while posting on a blog from a computer. I like the book Seeing Like a State too, but obviously modernism is at times good. Any rebuttal needs to be specific.
Thanks for your reply. I appreciate you engaging, despite musing if my comments came from a robocomment-farm in Alexandria, Kazakhstan, or Sam Altman’s basement.
You asked me to be more specific so this is a long reply out of necessity. Typically when somebody says “that’s too vague to respond to” there are one of two things is going on: (A) there’s a lot of handwaving and no substance, or (B) there are specific points that need to be unpacked for clarity.
I’m going to attempt to show that it is (B).
A few (honest) reactions to your thoughts:
(1) On the Ballard reference
Citing Ballard was my mise-en-scene, not my punchline. I’m not saying “don’t use the tech”; I’m saying “don’t assume it resolves all the messy issues in the world.” In some situations, it might actually make those issues harder to resolve. I know you did not make that argument in your OP but I do think you make that argument more broadly in your work on this topic. More on that below.
I get that referencing fiction (Ballard, Super-Cannes) can be annoyingly vague in a debate like this, but I do think there’s a real point being made. Technocratic or totalizing systems have unintended consequences around the aspects of life they can’t measure or predict; that’s the essence of my narrower arguments that follow. If you think that’s “true but trivial” as you implied, then we have the crux of a disagreement to resolve, because I don’t think it’s trivial at all and that’s the core of my argument. If you STILL have the urge to dismiss it then maybe, just maybe, it’s your blind spot? (Or mine in that I’m overweighting trivia? But at least we’ve found something clear to disagree on and therefore debate).
The issue isn’t that uncertainty doesn’t predate such systems. It’s that when the system becomes confident it has resolved uncertainty (or worse, that uncertainty no longer matters) it creates its own blind spots. Suppression does not equal resolution.
TL;DR there’s a more sophisticated argument here than you’re giving me credit for, and I unpack it more fully in the essay I linked below.
(2) On specificity
If you didn’t see anything specific to rebut in the comment, fair enough. But I’d refer you to the full essay I linked as well as my clarifications later in this comment. Let me know if anything in there strikes you as worth pushing back on (or agreeing with). These are complex matters, and I’m open to being challenged. There’s a fame imbalance between you and me so you have the option of ignoring all of this (droit de seigneur), but I think there’s value to be mined here and I hope you see it too. We are not debating trivia IMHO.
👉 https://open.substack.com/pub/theliminallens/p/crypto-decentralization-belief-engine?r=dvftt&utm_medium=ios
You said my comment boiled down to “everything is complex and social,” and left it at that. But I think that undersells the stakes. My point is not that complexity exists: it’s that when you try to encode property, sovereignty, and coordination into a closed protocol, that complexity doesn’t go away. It moves. If you don’t model for it (if you don’t create pathways for context, interpretation, and contestation) you don’t eliminate failure. You just guarantee brittle collapse at the edges. That’s not a shrug at complexity. It’s a warning about how and where it reasserts itself. That’s what Ballard was saying in Super-Cannes and that’s why a work of fiction is an appropriate warm-up act for this argument.
(3) On the usefulness of the tech
I actually agree with you on this. My concerns are not that this is a useful tool in the narrow sense. My concerns are about the broader expected societal impact and the second, third, and nth-order effects of what you’re proposing: not just in your original post, which was fairly straightforward, but in the broader vision I’ve seen you outline elsewhere.
In case you didn’t make it to the core points in my original comment, let me restate them clearly:
1. Enforcement is not the same as legitimacy
Code can enforce who gets access to a house. But legitimacy decides whether that enforcement is accepted. If the social or political context changes (e.g. during a contested eviction, regime change, or civil dispute), the code may still function, but its authority no longer holds. Legitimacy is what allows enforcement to stick. Thomas Hobbes “Leviathan” has not been adequately debunked by your arguments yet and if you think it has then please give me something to read on that so I can get my head around it.
2. Protocols don’t eliminate coercion; they hide it.
Every protocol reflects choices about what to enforce. Those choices involve power. If we can’t see or challenge how those choices are made, we’re not avoiding coercion; we’re relocating it behind the interface. Opaque power is still power, and its opacity may make it less fair, not more. I go into this in the essay quite a bit.
3. Coherence doesn’t come from code; it comes from shared context.
Blockchains are great at storing facts. But meaning is not stored, it’s interpreted. In complex systems, interpretation depends on history, norms, and human judgment. Code can’t replace that IMO but I think this is the core point at which you and I disagree maybe? When systems try to run without shared understanding, they break under pressure. That’s not a bug; it’s a consequence of oversimplification. And (see Wolfram) oversimplification is guaranteed in a system as complex as human society. It is unavoidable at the level of Physics and all downstream effects of the physical universe.
See also: Everyday Freedom—worth a read. https://a.co/d/2f9q9WF
You are advocating for a revolution in how society is organized and I’m trying to pressure test it, not because I think it’s bad but because I’m not fully convinced. That’s important work IMO and should not be deflected or dismissed as “noise”.
Hopefully you don’t feel like you are debating with a chat bot at this point? If you (still) do I strongly urge you to read my essays on the current crisis and I think you will see there’s real effort going on here and not just smoke and mirrors. I think this stuff matters and I think you do too. A lot of people are LARPing this stuff for attention. I’m not one of them.
There isn’t an argument in the original post that “all property moving to cryptographic security” is a good thing. I’m not sure if it is implied or if this is just a prediction. I think it’s very fair to say it is not net-net a good thing. And I also think it’s likely the correct prediction.
What are the gas fees to open my front door...
(1) Fees are minimal nowadays:
https://solana.com/docs/core/fees
https://docs.base.org/base-chain/network-information/network-fees
(2) More to the point, you can of course retain a normal offline key for your front door if you want. But the advantage of a crypto lock is that you can now get into *any* door that grants your crypto name permission to enter, without holding a big jangling keychain. Any club, any Airbnb, any car, any office, anything.
Great articulation of what’s to come. Tokenization of everything will require a lot of semiconductors and a lot of electricity!
Hyperbitcoinization
Love this—Timothy C. May nailed it in The Cyphernomicon way back in the ’90s:
“Strong crypto as the ‘building material’ for cyberspace (making the walls, the support beams, the locks).”
https://cdn.nakamotoinstitute.org/docs/cyphernomicon.tx
How is my door going to open when there is a power cut?
Interesting idea, makes sense in theory. But if everything valuable moves onchain, doesn’t that essentially shift leverage to whoever controls the dominant chain (or the infrastructure it ultimately depends on)? How viable is forking if the new chain can’t interface with systems people still rely on (e.g. housing, transit, income etc). At that point, isn’t forking more theoretical? I mean technically you’ve exited, but wouldn’t you also be locking yourself out of systems you need? or am I missing something?
There are quite a few different smart contract chains, and interop is a large area of research. I'm not that worried about lockin because exit is what blockchains are built to facilitate.
Appreciate the reply, Balaji. Yeah, I think I see your angle; if there are enough viable chains and interop improves/holds, then exit should act as a check on lock-in. What I’ve been thinking about and trying to get at is whether there’s another layer beyond technical migration, maybe call it embedded exit, meaning the ability to leave without cutting yourself off from essential systems. Do you see a role for interoperable commons and/or mutualist infrastructure (say, things like federated identity, local mesh networks, co-op cloud) as part of a viable exit architecture? Genuinely curious what you think.
I agree in concept, can see the vision and how more comes online as friction reduces.
Does end state require no incremental cost per signature? If there’s a financial cost to validate, imagine it has to be truly immaterial for use cases with high velocity
Transaction costs keep coming down, way down. They'll be negligible as blockspace costs decline.
just one concern that i have is, in a future like this, if your private key gets accidentally stolen, your life gets stolen from you… you literally become identity-less
Compelling and ambitious thesis. I’m a fan and believe it can work. Am also caught by the solid questions.
Everything becomes cryptography.
AmqFrRtjffC4uPznCL9mgPPxSYUB1kREnCSYDiWJbonk
Thank you. I hope this all works out and spreads in practice, primarily for the political decentralization that a competitor to state-run security would offer.
The other major centralizing factor that needs an alternative is energy, but I have hopes that Dr. Harold White's Casimir Space Technologies experiments with harnessing the Casimir effect could provide some decentralizing technological aid in that vein and that we could get back to having a frontier again: https://grainofwheat.substack.com/p/the-quantum-powered-nomads-of-the
If it's legal, it's not secure. If "tainted" coins or tokens can be revoked or blacklisted, or if transactions require trusting an exchange that complies with any government's regulations, if it can't be used untracably for drugs, murder and plutonium-plated porn, then it isn't at all secure.
James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg would be happy to read this.
For my door I prefer a list of public keys on the lock and the people with the corresponding private keys can enter.
No need for a blockchain.
In the case of a car, it would be useful if the vendor can change the `owner` public key in the car in case the private key was compromised or lost.
I believe this to be necessary because of none-technical people and accidents.
My instinct is that Identity and voting needs to become cryptography first before other things become cryptography (this would then inherently mean that a person's identity is their property by birthright, as is voting, a birthright that is a subset of their identity. Identity and voting rights would become inseparable, but also could expand to include other inalienable rights). We could have global, direct democracy on the blockchain, which would have a huge impact on the kind of policies that pass through.
This first step should then trigger discussion and consensus for the migration of physical property to the chain, because it would be governed and overseen by all of the people who would be impacted by said migration.
Ideally.