# Hardness and Casts

**Published by:** [jer979](https://paragraph.com/@jer979-2/)
**Published on:** 2022-12-21
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@jer979-2/hardness-and-casts

## Content

Tl;dr Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains is a blog post that introduces two concepts: hardness and casts. Hardness refers to something you can rely on with certainty, such as atoms or institutions, while casts are the paradigms that rule our world for a time. Over time, new casts emerge. Recognizing them is the key. “The growth of a global digital civilization mediated via the internet has accelerated our reliance on institutions, stretching and testing them past their breaking point.” That’s the core thesis of Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains, a wonderful blog post that introduces two ideas, that of “hardness” and that of a “cast.”HardnessHardness is the the concept that you can rely on something with certainty. You can rely on atoms, as in, you are holding a thing in your hand and you know it’s not going to disappear. The house is there. The gold bar is as well. Institutions offer a type of hardness as well, particularly in countries where the institutions (such as courts) prove they can consistently deliver. But, over time, the “hardness” of those institutions becomes compromised as they are captured by special interests. Blockchains are the newest form of “hardness” in that you can trust with 100% certainty that the data is accurate and reliable.CastsMeanwhile a “cast” is a term the author introduces to help us think about the paradigms that rule our world, for a time. A good example is that:In the early 1800s in North America, there was a hard cast with the content “the fastest information can travel is roughly at the speed of a pigeon”. This cast was hard because the physical properties of our universe seemed to prevent, as far as we knew at the time, communication traveling any faster than this.40 years ago, there was a “cast” about how news and information traveled as well. Then, with the arrival of the Internet, that cast was blown up. The cast we have today about the financial system is that it relies on central banks and financial institutions. However, distributed ledgers and smart contracts change that and will eventually blow up that cast.Recognizing Hardness and New CastsThe takeaway? I think it’s that, over time, new forms of hardness arrive and, as they do, old casts are destroyed, replaced by new casts. If the only constant is change, then a key to success is recognizing how hardness changes over time and what casts (e.g. only people can write essays- ChatGPT) are being modified.

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