So far, there are a cluster of topics that center around progressive, sustainable industrial development. The obvious and easily marketable trend is regenomics, which effectively is a financial interface for digital services that guarantee some sort of positive environmental impact or the incentives for such an enterprise. Now, we should examine the subtler, less sexy version of regenomics: industrial DAO circuitry.

One fascinating detail in the holy grail of blockchain ecosystems like Ethereum, zk-SNARKS, is that they can form circuits which can be stacked into a Turing-complete virtual machine. When we consider scientific discovery, like a new pharmaceutical, there are procedural circuits called trials to prove efficacy and safety. In nature, essential substances like water, nutrients, and minerals pass through circuits where they change molecular form and physical location.

Accordingly, when we design DAOs that manifest positive impact in the real world, one way to optimize for decentralization and autonomy is by designing reproducible & verifiable circuits. For the sake of simplicity and memetic power, this post will describe 3 atomic circuits: one by land, one by sea, and one by space; and 2 digital circuits, one in the metaverse, and one in the developer environment.

Recently, I made the suggestion that with the proliferation of many diverse web3 organizations pursuing IRL distributed citybuilding and other forms of nomadic living, there should be a physical Schelling point that they all recognize in aggregate:

https://twitter.com/m_j_rossman/status/1555981846835597312

One of the key qualities of this annual Schelling point is that it is not owned specifically by any group or individual, but is exclusively formed as a neutral crossroads for any loosely aligned entities. The goal of any individually involved DAO should be independent operational viability first, followed closely by an inclusive, agnostic code of conduct for “nonmembers”.

As far as parameters go, there’s a few points of success for this “circuit”:

• The place of gathering is desolate before and after the Schelling event (Leave No Trace)

• The participants bring their own resources and autonomously arbitrate how those resources are shared/consumed

• Structures are standardized before they’re fabricated, and methods of assembly should be openly and publicly documented

• While the layout of the entire “city” should be as standardized as possible, there should also be the possibility to adapt to change of environment from year to year.

The contemporary, non-crypto version of this circuit is Black Rock City, otherwise known as the venue of Burning Man.

The caveat for Burning Man is that it is ephemeral, so when examining their budget and the way they solve demands, it is important to consider that a long-term, self-sustaining flash city would require further flywheel design and more explicit economic feedback.

Of course, the other form that exists on the periphery of such settlements are the mobile vehicles that sustain the underlying logistics. How many semi-trailers would we need for industrial equipment? How many vanlife vehicles would we need as distributed participants?

It’s perhaps prudent to stop at this point and ask, to what end? Are circuits intended to raise further capital, are they meant to be the least wasteful, or is there another undescribed performance that this sort of amorphous citybuilding can exclusively pursue? Burning Man is a week of exploring the human act of expression. What if we consider what it takes to start a network state with a budget of $35 million?

Balaji Srinavasan, a well-recognized figure in the space, proposed a simple proof/experiment on land:

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1437172487524020226

Right now, there are 3 DAOs that can accomplish some version of this experiment: CityDAO and Cabin have land and the means to procure a robot and collectively instruct it, VanlifeDAO may have a chance of doing the same. The budget to do this on previously acquired land is, at most, $100k (actually $75k for the Boston Dynamics land robot, Spot, but probably best to account for overhead).

Based on this breakdown, the annual budget for 2 people to engage in vanlife is roughly $30k. With an annual budget of $35 million, this could be a caravan of hundreds of vehicles and hundreds of participants, with plenty to spare for plots of lands to serve as rest stops in a variety of places around the globe.

In my previous articles, I explored potential marinepunk frameworks for extending the web3 ecosystem.

https://mirror.xyz/m-j-r.eth/Z4C25GOK6fCR_NFhqlVfX1kyj4kvj2T4JacL5mHxTz0

https://mirror.xyz/m-j-r.eth/HlrUKtiFl7_LMDDIuJOrM_De0r7gNwn8jESlkm_7mzc

With respect to Balaji’s challenge on land, is there an analogue at sea? Additionally, are there different allowances for this challenge, namely whether there is consistent option to shelter on the coast against the harshest elements, or does the route traverse an ocean? One thing to note is that the ocean is a powerful & hostile environment that selects for optimal routes.

For the sake of argument, let’s say the circuit must involve a “bluewater boat” capable of crossing the ocean (here’s another source of criteria). On the pessimistic side, the standard craft might cost upwards of $500,000, though it may be possible on a case-by-case basis to afford a craft well under $100,000. For the sake of summarizing upkeep, food, equipment, internet, and various fees (this is one description), the oversimplified upper bound should be around $50,000 per year. If the cost of the sea circuit was limited to $350,000, we would be able to afford 100 repetitions (disclaimer: this is a heavily oversimplified view of the actual costs).

What would be the actual objective? Again, for the sake of simplicity, just traversing the ocean from coast to coast is a significant accomplishment. Assuming internet connectivity atleast once per day, one could effectively broadcast GPS position and timestamp such a voyage on a daily basis. Assuming 24/7 internet service, and sufficient balance of fuel and wind, perhaps it would be possible to run a node.

On land, it would be possible to travel alone, and so the only acceptable proof of humanity would be something like a daily selfie. On a seacraft, however, it is much likelier to have a crew, and because of this, I believe the “proof of completed circuit” is more self-explanatory where there is a proof of assembly, i.e. several sybil-resistant entities vouching for each other over time. This potentially supports supports the formation of a network state, by providing a strictly defined forum for a network union. Maybe in the cases where it is less viable to deploy drones, there is more potential to provide the same burden of proof in a more enclosed space, and accomplish a different goal instead.

On the other hand, this cycle differs from the one on land because there is no prerequisite to own the space, especially in international waters. The further outside of saturated environments, like metropolises, that this “circuitry” operates, the more versatile the choice of subsequent requirements. At sea, it’s more possible to prove a rapid succession of maneuvers, and likewise, it is more possible to deploy flying robotics, albeit with more environmental risk. This is an important thing to note in the next circuit.

In space, taking care of humans is extremely difficult. The price tag for crewed missions in orbit is well above the allotted $35 million; the cheapest per-seat price, offered by SpaceX Dragon, is ~$55 million (though it should be noted that SpaceX believes the price is lower when accounting for the extra carried cargo). For obvious reasons, it would not be to our benefit to make a space “circuit” human-centric.

However, the challenge has more to do with a successful process of collective decision-making driving the shared operation of a craft, crewed or uncrewed. It should be within our ability as an ecosystem to collectively launch an uncrewed vehicle into orbit, and for that uncrewed vehicle to interact in some way with the underlying infrastructure on Earth. I posed the question in several subreddits what they would want to include in a satellite’s payload, and one user (/u/electric_ionland) gave a particularly insightful response:

My advice to students team who want to do their first cubesat is to keep to 3U or less in LEO and have one clear and simple mission objective. Keep it as simple as possible (no propulsion, no fancy gizmos with moving parts) and get the design as resilient as possible to reboots, lack of coms and lack of power.

My response: what if the satellite payload is not digitally or aeronautically complex, but our ability to process it in flight was? I looked around for satellite designs that revolved around retroreflectors, and one stuck out to me in particular. The idea is, this satellite is deployed into a temporary orbit, and ground stations around the world with the capability to track it with laser rangefinders can register their success, with metadata, on-chain. The collective governance applies to the deployment, and the collective validation applies to word-of-mouth, memetic consequence.

What would the cost be, and how many repetitions of this experiment can be afforded on a $35 million budget? Well, if we take one of the active examples in the paper above (24kg), and establish each standard unit (“U”) at 1.33kg, that would be an 18U payload. The price to launch a 12U (20kg) payload from this provider to Low Earth Orbit is ~$600k. If we extrapolate from this provider’s cost range, the cost of an 18U Cubesat is around $300-600k. It looks like the price is atleast $1.5 million. There might be 20 possible repetitions of the “space circuit” with the aforementioned budget.

Three physical domains have been covered, but what about the economy of bits? What is the definitive circuit of this trendy buzzword environment? Well, to start, most versions of the metaverse have some sort of interface. In his recent essay, Roon describes text as the “Universal Interface”. I would tend to agree, throughout my life I’ve found many virtual environments that were held together by the participants communicating via text. Lately, it has been more by emote and video, but nevertheless, text is still an available option because it is the underlying failsafe.

There has been a couple of genuine attempts to spontaneously manifest a text interface in web3: Lens, a social graph protocol on Polygon, has offered some early users the ability to “publish” asynchronous media on-chain, and other early users the ability to interact via “collecting” publications; on the other hand, Orbis is offering the public the ability to form an identity on a communication-specific network, and produce text as “streams” (and others can emote and respond in the same fashion).

The simplest circuit of the Metaverse is forming a text-based query to a known public address, and forming a secure channel of communication from the response. In more complex circuits, there is a state channel of multiple participants, and the collective action is forming this channel with continuous entrance and departure of individuals therein. Everything else, however exciting or intricate, is icing on the cake. I’ve been testing the new mobile app that the team from Orbis has been building, and luckily enough, it already has a circuit design in mind (proof of friendship). The truth is that the true metaverse, without the marketing fiction, is quite possible to define and articulate.

Digital economies are incredibly cheap, but because they tend to also be subsidized, the user’s perception is that they are virtually free. A budget of $35 million makes little sense here, and in all likelihood, such a budget would be capable of funding countless projects that perform such metaversal circuits.

Text as an interface has also been the de facto method of programming and its interactions with creators as much as consumers. The circuit is quite simple, an individual uses an IDE, writes code with natspec or markdown, and deploys the collection of that work to a repository. Because we’ve had tools like git for so long, we’ve taken the original circuit for granted. Most of everything in this piece is possible and can be coordinated as such, because there is underlying infrastructure borne from the deployment and maintenance of repositories.

It’s quite impressive, and honestly, is the most powerful circuit. Deploying code to a public repository is incredibly simple, yet elegant. It is also performative, unlike the metaverse, code can be collectively refined and deployed to act autonomously, validating itself over and over. Nothing more needs to be explained, as the code can be self-explanatory. With respect to “the network state”, what is a more powerful network state, if not the World Wide Web? What is a more simple, yet powerful, circuit if not the collective deployment of a full-stack website? There are billions of repetitions of this already, and countless more to come.

This is a living document, and much like the aforementioned circuits, I would love to edit this with further collective input. If you or people you know were mentioned in this, please reach out and I will most definitely thank you for doing so.

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