Welcome to the future of

decentralization

Introduction

The fundamental human attribute is trust. It is what has made our civilisation dominate the planet: our inherent ability to trust others and to deliver for those who trust us. That attribute has allowed relationships to be forged between tribes, between empires, between civilisations. But, since the mid-1800s, humanity has faced an existential crisis of trust.

One of the fundamental properties of trust is that it takes time to forge. If we trusted everyone immediately, our species would have been eradicated very quickly indeed. But, with globalisation, with people traversing the globe at an ever-increasing rate, and now with communications occurring almost instantaneously between people who have never met, things have changed. It is said that only 7% of human communication is made up of words, the rest is body language, positioning, intonation, facial expressions. Yet not one of these can be conveyed through the media we have in this internet age. How many times has a text been misinterpreted, a video call frozen, or a phone call cut out?

If trust is the fundamental quality of humanity as a social species, then we have interrupted it. We have given rise to mass interactions over the internet where trust cannot be formed. Online games spend thousands on anti-hacking software, banks spend millions on server security, and companies the world over engage dubious firms that claim to provide anti-ransomware systems, all to try to mitigate the phenomenon that trust has been lost.

There is no doubt that modernity has brought things that would once have been considered miracles: penicillin has cured countless diseases, vaccination has wiped smallpox from the face of the Earth, and the internet has brought access to knowledge and information to billions. But it has also created this problem of trust. As with any problem brought about by the trajectory of modernity, there are two solutions: go forward, or go back. To go back is to give up the internet, to give up globalisation, to give up the means for protesters to organise across the globe in defiance of brutal authoritarian regimes. To go back is to destroy society as we know it.

To go forward is to brave the unknown. To dive into the depths of the future and say "we will make it". To have confidence, trust, in not one, but a billion. To trust the very human race itself, because, if there is one thing that we have always proven, time and time again, it is that human innovation is unstoppable. No problem is so insurmountable, so complex, or so nuanced that the human race, given time, cannot solve it.

So let us solve the problem of trust, together.

In 2009, when the Bitcoin paper was published, the human race was set on a course that very few could have predicted: one in which the internet would begin to solve the problem of trust with mathematics and cryptography. One in which that which had been removed from human interaction over networks could be brought back through code. It was called blockchain, and it has begun, slowly, to change the world.

Today, blockchain has become the subject of an unfortunate hype, with developers focused solely on building applications to take advantage of this technology, and consumers caught in the middle between thousands of so-called cryptocurrencies, very few of which seem to offer anything more than a quick buck, if that. Almost no-one has stopped to wonder: is this the best way to decentralise our society?

To understand this, we must return to the fundamental nature of decentralisation itself. To decentralise is to remove power from some central authority, and grant it entirely to the people. Democracy is not decentralisation, not in most countries, because the right to vote is controlled by central authorities. Because the courts can strike down the popular will at their discretion. Because a central government comprised principally of money-sucking, unelected bureaucrats has overtaken the principle of government for the people, and by the people. The very notion of 'state secrets' cannot exemplify this more: a government 'by the people' keeping secrets from the people. To have trust in decentralised systems is to somehow ensure that the participants in the system cannot thwart the system itself, to such an extent that anyone in the system can do business with any other, without knowing them in person at all. Perhaps this removes humanity from interactions, but trust takes time: cryptography does not. If we can provide trust at a mathematical level, should this not become the default in our globalised world? Already, the average person has more 'friends' on social media than they have in real life. In some ways, is this not already the default?

Blockchain provides cryptographic solutions to the problems of trust by having the subject of trust, a ledger, be stored by everyone, and this is its first problem: nothing of consequence can be stored on the ledger. Try to submit a photo archive to a blockchain, and you'd be bankrupted by the transaction fees. Everyone in the system would have to store your photos, whether they want to or not. A rather paradoxical definition of trust, don't you think? Further, a blockchain must have a proof mechanism behind it, by which trust is verified over time. In Bitcoin, this is called proof of work, an algorithm so energy-intensive that Bitcoin mining in 2019 used as much energy per annum as the entirety of Spain. In a world wracked by a rapidly warming climate, this version of trust is a highly short-term one --- although it may well become the only definition if we all end up in bunkers, sheltering from volcanic ash and rising seas. While other proof mechanisms have been proposed, such as proof of stake, questions have been raised consistently about their efficacy, and the extent to which they in fact re-centralise the systems they aim to decentralise.

Again, not once has anyone considered the logic of disruption, somewhat startlingly for a group of people so intent on changing the world: the ultimate form of disruption is to overturn and improve the most basic fundamental of the system you're looking at. Blockchain is broken, and it always will be. The fundamental compromises of the system render it infeasible to use it for meaningful decentralisation: look to the 'smart contracts' of Ethereum, and notice how their logic must be executed by every single participant in the network --- complex logic is impossible.

Blockchain's time is up, because a solution to its problems exists. We have called it The Quantorium. This is a network comprised of three pieces: Lykros, a system that ensures the security of data mathematically, such that no-one can change content without permission, while allowing meaningful collaboration at the cryptographic level. Lykros is the first system in the world to provide cryptographic protection for a comprehensive suite of operations, including, as a world-first: sharing other permissions. The second piece is Kolaris, a decentralised network of nodes that can be added to or subtracted from automatically, that spans the entire planet. Anyone can run a node, and anyone can submit data to nodes, without needing to be part of the network themselves. These nodes store data, encrypted and controlled with Lykros, and replicate it among themselves to prevent both faults and lies --- combining the two pieces provides a system that can be trusted. Beyond storage, Kolaris also facilitates decentralised computation, allowing anyone to tap into the spare computing resources of the entire planet and compute what they wish, without needing to control expensive infrastructure themselves. These features not only decentralise power from existing companies that have ruled this space for decades, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, they empower individuals to earn money from these systems through a price mechanism that ensures both the stability and continuity of the network. Kolaris is most similar to the distributed hash tables of today, but it is designed from the ground up with dozens of innovative security mechanisms to protect both the security and integrity of data, and to allow entirely untrusted nodes to join the network in droves, without fear of attack.

Further, Kolaris enables verifiable computation, whereby an individual can submit a computation and prove its result to others, through replication, economic incentives, and cryptography. This, when combined with the correct system-specific incentives, can facilitate the development of decentralised oracles, a hypothetical 'holy grail' technology that would allow a decentralised system to glean information from entirely different systems, without any trusted intermediary.

Finally, there is Miriar, a true replacement to blockchain that provides a decentralised ledger replicated across all nodes, for certain tasks that Kolaris itself cannot perform on its own (such as single-hop, cryptographically verifiable, infallible routing), without needing any expensive proof mechanism. Through the ways Kolaris registers nodes in its own system, information can be propagated to update this ledger using Lykros' revolutionary patch-based versioning algorithm, which allows cryptographically verifiable additions to data at rates of thousands per minute, without sacrificing security. Put simply, the proof mechanisms of blockchains are rendered totally obsolete, while retaining the exact same level of security, if not a substantially greater one.

Together, these three systems form The Quantorium, a network of decentralised nodes that will be deployed across the planet to serve the entire human race. Cryptocurrencies could trivially run on this system, but they are an afterthought. The goal here is not to earn some worthless token that the founders use to get rich, the goal is the genuine, and absolute improvement of the human race, forever. Through this system, journalists can host materials on decentralised websites that cannot be censored by authoritarian governments, anonymity can be ensured for protesters, individuals can organise globally to form movements to take down the dictatorships of yesteryear, while companies can offload their infrastructure costs and usher in a new model of payment, in which users pay for the storage and computation they need, and the company bears no cost at all. This has been proposed before, but never with the decentralised technology to meaningfully back it in the long-term.

If this works, of course, there will be thousands of systems working on old blockchain technology that will be likely abandoned, and many more that will hopefully transition to this new network. Whether blockchain and the Quantorium will work side-by-side remains to be seen. But together, the three protocols that underlie the Quantorium can revolutionise human interaction over networks, by facilitating the practical verification of trust at all levels of engagement. A transaction can be ensured, a vote set in stone, a resource publicly administered. Transferring the revolutionary principles of decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) to this network provides all the benefits they did on the Ethereum blockchain, but with access to storage and computation systems that were previously unheard of.

To make this happen, there are four stages: the protocols must be written, implementations of them must be built, nodes must be run, and awareness must be raised. The first stage has already been completed: and the theoretical systems of these protocols have been set down, not in whitepapers intended to advertise them, but in honest papers of considerable length that examine in depth every aspect of these systems, with full mathematical backing. The second stage will take time, but it is already underway. At present, it is likely that the greatest efficiency will be achieved by a small team working on these in the open, before wider contribution is allowed back to the project, and that is what is happening now.

The final two stages are where we need your help: without you, this system cannot become a reality, because it is based on nodes, computers that people connect to the network to become part of it. If you have a device that has an uninterrupted internet connection, and if you have the internet bandwidth to have that device automatically engage with clients, and the storage for it to store encrypted data, or the computation power for it to form part of the computation grid, please connect it to the Quantorium. This is not a purely altruistic endeavour either, the Quantorium is built on an infallible payment mechanism that underlies Kolaris, and you will be compensated for your efforts: not in some wishy-washy new "altcoin", but in Monero, an untraceable cryptocurrency built on a proof of work blockchain. That will allow a cryptocurrency to be built simultaneously with the rest of the systems, while the final problems are ironed out there, before it eventually launches. We also do this to make one thing clear: we are not in this to get rich, we are in this to improve the world. If you expect to earn millions from running a node, you will be disappointed. There is no mining in this system, there is only the provision of storage and computation. And, if you provide too much, if your presence on the network becomes outsized, you will be removed from the network to ensure its ongoing stability and success: no one actor can ever control too much of the network, no matter their resources.

Finally, raising awareness. No matter how brilliant the technology, no system can ever become useful if people don't know it exists. So please, share this document, and share the ideas behind it. Tweet about it, message your friends, and join our mailing list for updates about the system itself (we will never, ever send you spam, and you can opt out at any time).

The future of trust is in going forward boldly into a brave new world, but it is our duty to ensure that in that world, we build a true democracy, a true rule of the people, in which governments, companies, and the powerful are not technically, but fundamentally beholden to the will of the people.

So let's create the future of decentralisation, and the future of trust, together. Join us.