Life After Google: 10 Laws of the Cryptocosm notes

In the Google era, the prime rule  of the Internet is “Communications first.” That means everything is free to be copied, moved, and mutated. While most of us welcome “free” on the understanding that it means “no charge,” what we really want is to get what we ordered rather than what the authority chooses to provide. In practice, “free” means insecure, amorphous, unmoored, and changeable from the top. This communications-first principle served us well for many years.

The Internet is a giant asynchronous replicator that communicates by copying. Regulating all property rights in the information economy are the copy-master kings, chiefly at Google.

In this system, security is a function of the network, applied from the top, rather than a property of the device and its owner. So everything rises to the top, the Googleplex, which achieves its speed and efficiency by treating its users as if they were making random choices. That’s the essence of the mathematical model behind their search engine. You are a random function of Google.

But you are not random; you are a unique genetic entity that can- not be factored back into an egg and a sperm. You are unbreakably encrypted by biology. These asymmetrical natural codes are the ruling model and metaphor for enduring security. You start by defining not the goal but the ground state. Before you build the function or the structure, you build the foundation. It is the ultimate non-random reality. The ground state is you.

1. Utterly different from Google’s rule of communications first is the law of the Cryptocosm. The first rule is the barn-door law: “Security first.” Security is not a procedure or a mechanism; it is an architecture. Its keys and doors, walls and channels, roofs and windows define property and privacy at the device-level. They determine who can go where and do what. Security cannot be retrofitted, patched, or improvised from above.

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2. The second rule of the cryptocosm derives from the first: “Centralization is not safe.” Secure positions are decentralized ones, as human minds and DNA code are decentralized. Darwin’s mistake, and Google’s today, is to imagine that identity is a blend rather than a code—that machines can be a singularity, but human beings are random outcomes.

Centralization tells thieves what digital assets are most valuable and where they are. It solves their most difficult problems. Unless power and information are distributed throughout the system peer to peer, they are vulnerable to manipulation and theft from the blenders at the top.

3. The third rule is “Safety last.”1 Unless the architecture achieves its desired goals, safety and security are irrelevant. Security is a crucial asset of a functional system. Requiring the system to be safe at every step of construction results in a kludge: a machine too complex to use. [read more]

Source: Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy (2018) by George Gilder.

The other laws are:

1. Nothing is free.
2. Time is the final measure of cost.
3. Stable money endows humans with dignity and control.
4. Asymmetry law
5. Private keys rule.
6. Private keys are held by individual human beings, not by governments or Google.
7. Behind every private key and its public key is the human interpreter.