Subscribe to Nye's Digital Lab
>100 subscribers
Share Dialog
TLDR:: An essay analogizing the Mongol Horde of the Thirteenth Century, and the rise of protocol-driven blockchain networks.
Genghis Khan built the largest land empire in history, conquering more territory in 15 years than the Roman Empire did in 400.
How?
Were the Mongols better fighters?
Were they faster?
What made them run circles around the armies they fought?
After studying networks for the last several years, I've begun to consider that the same reasons Genghis Kahn was so effective as a conqueror, are the same reasons we should consider the exponential growth of blockchain-enabled protocol networks.
As a teacher, I’ve endeavored to teach 100’s of students about blockchain. Young eyes always seem to glaze over as I drone on about smart contracts and consensus.
This essay is an analogy to illustrate my awe of this technology.
I ask you to imagine the blockchain as a network, not of computers, but one where every node has autonomous actions. (For example, an army.) Like the big centralized corporate networks of today, blockchain networks can grow value exponentially as their size grows. Facebook gets bigger, it makes more money. Similarly, Ethereum gets bigger, its token becomes more valuable.
However, unlike centralized networks, blockchain systems can adapt and change fluidly. They are free from fiat money - and thus, the constraints of industrial capitalist structures.
At one time, all of Asia feared the coming of the Mongols. We should consider the coming of decentralized networks.
Below, I present five similarities between Genghis Kahn and The Blockchain.
In the 13th century, armies recruited soldiers based on family ties or social status. Nobility and royalty led the ranks. Things were pretty crony. Genghis Khan shattered convention by cherry-picking and empowering scrappy nomads and misfits based on pure skill. The fringe talent, cast out from imperial organizations, gravitated to the horde.
Kahn forged them into a tight-knit crew not through blood but through ceremonial rites that paired warriors as “blood brothers.” There was a lot of drinking and screaming by the bonfire. Loyalty was secured through profit-sharing instead of pedigree or titles. When a rider died in battle, Kahn compensated the widow. To be a Mongol warrior was to be in "the gang."
Without a centralized system to impose governance, decentralized networks similarly throw out the org chart, bonding skilled teams through common purpose rather than status. Token redistributions and bounty programs align incentives. No one cares who your dad was or what school you attended. Many are welcome from unconventional places, with unique motivations.
The best talent is currently at the fringes. The layoffs of late, however, have flooded our ecosystem with developers, artists, thinkers, and highly creative people. It is only a matter of time before the increased use of cryptocurrencies and decentralized applications, meet this wave of highly productive talent.
Unlike medieval armies obsessed with honor and glory, Genghis was all about the bottom line. Every strategic move maximized plunder. Conquering was orderly, focused, and more on securing treasure than stacking bodies (though both happened... a lot). This profit motive made the Mongols ruthlessly efficient. They were less an empire than a gang of elite talent.
While emperors rode in finely sewn silk and waved their flags over their slow-moving armies, Kahn hated fancy things. He never once made a portrait of himself or raised a statue in his honor. He reveled in secrecy and surprise. It was never about “the bling.” It was simply about getting all the money.
Decentralized networks are similarly libertarian – they don’t care about politics or philosophies. There is no bloated legal team or marketing head guiding decision-making. The participants of the system only care about aligning incentives around what makes the most currency - which can be tied to real-world money, yes, or … it can be tied to a token within a gamified system. The act of optimizing the reward function aligns incentives across the network. Glory doesn’t launch apps; making "the floor rise" does.
Many developers are motivated by money, but some are increasingly motivated to do something larger than themselves. The protocols and dApps that figure out how to securely tokenize their mission, will attract the best digital talent to develop for it.
Medieval armies conscripted peasants into ranks of thousands of infantry, highly rigid and hard to maneuver. They carried low-grade weaponry because their leaders refused to pay for the higher-caliber tools. Hundreds of men would be grouped in marching rows, waving flags and beating drums to align their massive movement.
Genghis Khan turned war into a real-time strategy game, organizing his cavalry-based army in units of ten men for ease of management. This modular "base 10" structure enabled the Mongols to separate and recombine with fluidity. They could surround and overwhelm enemies quickly, then vanish into the steppes.
The Mongols never traveled with battering rams or catapults. They rode for speed. They built things only as they needed, save for one thing -- bridges. The horde built bridges all across Asia, facilitating access points to guarantee they got there first, every time. Every man was well-rationed and given the finest blade. Kahn didn't skimp on the tools for his team.
Decentralized teams similarly take an agile, modular approach, spinning up small squads of elite talent to swarm opportunities. These networks reformat frequently, reorienting both tokenized and human capital towards the hottest leverage points. Networks also bridge their protocols to other networks, allowing tokens to be exchanged and shared. Hierarchical corporations can’t reshape on a dime like this.
The swarm is faster.
Unlike kings obsessed with ethnic purity, Genghis Khan was a meritocrat to the extreme. After annihilating an enemy's leaders, he'd offer ordinary enemy troops a chance to enlist as equals. New recruits were embedded within Mongol units to learn the ropes and bond. Soon, it didn't matter whether you were Chinese or Hindu. With enough goat milk and some screaming by the fire, you were crew.
Decentralized networks similarly absorb and integrate any external elements that improve system performance, heedless of origin. Most new recruits to networks are new to crypto protocols, so there is a sense of meritocracy and opportunity for all.
The concept of interoperable protocols allows for networks of open-source software to evolve constantly. Forking and recombining code repos creates powerful new tech stacks. Should the network protocols become open and standard, anyone who has the drive to participate can learn to contribute. They join the network to help create it, and the most passionate about the cause can derive value from it.
Genghis Khan carefully crafted a reputation for utter ruthlessness. Tales of village massacres terrified great-walled cities into surrendering to vastly smaller Mongol forces. Fear traveled faster than horses. No invading army has exploited the power of narrative and hype more effectively.
Today’s decentralized networks also focus intensely on narrative traction and perception. The legends, memes and viral hype surrounding networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana terrify legacy institutions. FOMO or the "Fear of Missing Out" is predicated solely on perception. It builds a sort of “psychological momentum” that attracts capital.
There is a reason that the communities of blockchain networks represent themselves as thumbnail jpeg characters like Apes and Degens. They are expressing themselves as part of a cult of personality.
Technology comes in waves.
There have been several times in human history when smaller units of highly productive teams, latch on to new technologies, and work outside of the established systems to gain phenomenal value. The ship and the pirate. The printing press and the revolutionary. The radio and the splinter cell. The networked computer and the hacker.
The United States is currently ramping up the regulation of cryptocurrencies, seeing it as an assault on the US Dollar. But it’s so much more. The viral spread of any one of the blockchain networks could radically rewrite our global economic system.
Huge amounts of capital could flow from one collective network to the next. It's an unsettling thought, but something that should be considered and understood, especially as we increasingly see our current system, namely "industrial capitalism," showing dangerous signs of collapse.
One Mongol with a lot of passion, and a genius sense of strategy, blitzed across Asia in less than two decades. An AI prophet, with the power to build a community of agents on the blockchain, could blitz across the networked world in a moment.
This essay was researched and first written with human labor. It was procedurally refactored with research from perplexity.ai, improvisational takes with Otter.ai, and iterative sessions using Claude 2 from Anthropic.
Images were created with Stable Diffusion and a variety of fine-tuned models from Leonardo.ai.
Nye Warburton is a creative technologist and educator. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.
Notes:
A potent exploration of the power of blockchains to reshape the future of the Internet-and how that affects us all-from highly influential entrepreneur and
The blockchain entered the world on January 3, 2009, introducing an innovative new trust architecture: an environment in which users trust a system-for exa...
Ethereum is a global, decentralized platform for money and new kinds of applications. On Ethereum, you can write code that controls money, and build applications accessible anywhere in the world.
Bitcoin is an innovative payment network and a new kind of money. Find all you need to know and get started with Bitcoin on bitcoin.org.
Journalist Talty (Mulatto America ) entertainingly chronicles the life of legendary privateer Capt. Henry Morgan and his ...
Nye
No comments yet