We all have dreams in which we believe we are awake. Even when inconsistencies are present, our semi-conscious minds either ignore or cannot detect such inconsistencies in the world presented by our subconscious minds, leading us to determine what we are experiencing is real as opposed to a dream. Putting aside psychedelic studies, Terrence McKenna, and clockwork/machine elves, for the sake of discussion, let’s just assume dreams are generated purely by a physical phenomenon going on in our heads, unique to our particular consciousness & subconsciousness.

Because our dreamtime perception uses the same interface software as our realtime perception, the key distinction between the two states is the source of the stream, i.e. the input. But how do we determine if the origin of the input is internal or external, if both internal & external phenomena are filtered through the same internal processes? This is why simulation theory is so intriguing: because external observation is made via the same method of internal projection as the subconscious generation of a dream, meaning that hypothetically an external source can intercept the hardware inputs of this stream and provide data of its own.

The main distinction between the unique "reality" of dreams & the shared "reality" of reality is the confirmation of this reality with others, who for whatever reason, we are able to recognize as autonomous entities in the shared reality, as opposed to being pseudo-autonomous entities generated within our own internal dream reality. We can abstract a recursive equation of reality R to: input phenomena P, times our senses'/hardware's fidelity of such phenomena/input F, times our conscious mind's understanding of the input C, times our subconscious mind's impression of both the input & our conscious understanding of it S, recursively times itself: R = PFCSR.

Since the recursion exists in both real & dream realities, and since the interface streaming the given input cannot meaningfully determine whether the phenomena is internal or external by itself--leading to the simulation question--our conscious & subconscious minds only truly have the faculties & the context to distinguish between a shared & unique reality, rather than a real & dream reality. And since both the conscious & subconscious minds can be tricked into believing a unique reality is the shared reality, how do we determine the proof of reality to distinguish between the waking state & the dream state?

At some point, our conscious & subconscious minds undergo a proof-of-reality, where based upon the consistency between input-interface-processing recursions, the input feeding into each recursion is shared rather than unique.

Pinch me, I'm forking.

Somehow, I may have come up with a description of reality even more convoluted & verbose than Hegel's, but to those who are familiar with how forking & consensus models work in relation to blockchains, the presented abstraction may not sound be so absurd. With a blockchain, all chains are traceable to their respective genesis block-- each successive block is validated via its particular consensus model to ensure that each node is operating the same instance of the chain of blocks, hence blockchain. Any deviation from a validated block can be considered a "fork". So in a sense, every transaction is potentially a fork until it is validated by enough nodes via whichever consensus model that specific blockchain uses, so that it becomes a transaction within a block on the main chain.

In terms of our perception of consciousness & "proof-of-reality", the forking & validation both occur at the rate of neural activity, creating the previously-described input-interface-processing recursion. To reduce this process to blockchain terms, reality is the 'mainnet' and we are each nodes. While we are awake, we validate & process the main chain of the shared reality, which would mean dreaming is a soft fork of the 'mainnet' beginning at the block at which we fell asleep. One could say that the relationship of these two perceived realities is akin to the relationship mainnet versus a local development network, but the unique reality we experience while dreaming can potentially impact our choices & behavior after we wake up. So to better fit the analogy, our unique realities are more similar to Layer 2's, since the output from the side-chains of our unique realities is then fed into the shared reality.

And in terms of the role they play in the blockchain ecosystem, what do Layer 2's solve? Simply put, Layer 2’s are scaling solutions. There are many types of L2's but for the most part they aggregate processing off-chain, which they then insert on-chain in a single transaction or a more efficient series of transactions.

So when we reexamine the dichotomy between shared & unique realities in blockchain terms, if our consciousnesses function as nodes running side-chains-- which each serve to validate the mainnet-- that would mean that our unique experiences within dreams are part of the process in which our collective consciousnesses work together as a network to validate the shared reality.

We can view actions & words spoken by individuals as Layer 1 transactions, with the underlying processes that influence them as Layer 2 processes, which thereby serve to validate those L1 transactions. If the shared reality had a block-scanner, it would be easy to analyze Layer 1, i.e. words and actions, but if we wanted to analyze intent & everything influencing an individual’s internal decision-making processes, we would need to know the validation process unique to their particular L2. And instead of only Polygon, zkSync, Arbitrum, Optimism, Loopring, and a handful of others, doing so would require auditing roughly 117 billion different methodologies & implementations.

This doesn't solve the question of whether or not our shared reality is real or simulated, but I nonetheless find solace in knowing that regardless of the source of the shared reality, that our unique realities--our dreams--play a role in validating our shared reality, which in turn contextualizes & seeds our unique realities.

In short, proof-of-reality is: "We think, therefore I am", as well as "I think, therefore we are".

Compared to previous technological innovations incubated in management-driven proposals, rarely escaping corporate utero-- with the viable few inevitably swallowed up by the Meta née Facebooks & Amazons of the world-- blockchain technology has manifested unprecedented autonomy in its decentralized ecosystems and presents an extraordinary opportunity to developers, communities, and entrepreneurs alike.

Self-sustainability is inherent to both the ethos & internal mechanisms which move Web3 forward. When TradFi or Web2 firms invest into blockchain tech, in most instances they will integrate into an existing system, rather than create a new system themselves. That being said, outside of the underlying infrastructure of a blockchain, much of what makes Web3 “autonomous” is an unspoken dependency upon Web2 tooling & infrastructure.

While immediately helpful, Web2 passes on dangerous externalities to Web3 systems that rely upon them.

You would be hard-pressed to find a person or firm related to cryptocurrency, NFTs, DAOs, dApps, or anything adjacent to blockchain technology who doesn’t utilize Discord for crucial infrastructural communication, and Twitter for outreach & engagement. This generates two fatal issues:

1. A single point of failure for time-sensitive internal communications by over-reliance on Discord

2. Psychological manipulation by attention-driven algorithms by Twitter’s AI

DAOs: Discord Autonomous Organizations.

Usually reliable and overflowing with open-sourced tooling & bots beneficial to fostering token-based communities, Discord recently suffered from a two-hour outage on January 26th as well as another thirty-minute outage on February 15th. They are generally rare, but they should be deeply concerning to anybody who uses Discord servers as primary points of communication within a DAO or token-based community. The value of such entities could hinge on time-sensitive decision-making only made possible through communication fostered by services like Discord. If a community is trying to coordinate a quorum vote or gather signatures on a Gnosis Safe, an outage could prevent it from executing within the necessary timeframe. Imagine a scenario where ConstitutionDAO had raised enough money to win the auction, but Discord was down the day of the auction.

Given current gas prices & transaction throughput, decentralized alternatives have not yet breached the centralized SaaS moat. For a networking or communication dApp to even come close to the server-side capabilities necessary to the speed, user-friendliness, and success of these services, Web3 projects competing with existing Web2 implementations must incentivize decentralized CPU-sharing within their ecosystems by building it out themselves or by utilizing protocols like TheGraph. But as of now, I’m not familiar with any CPU-sharing protocols primed for communications servers in the way that TheGraph is primed for blockchain data indexing.

A Faustian bargain yields Faustian results.

The disillusioning side-effects of Twitter’s algorithms became most apparent during the recent ENS/Brantly Millegan controversy. While my opinion on the matter is tangential to this article, we all saw CryptoTwitter devolve into Web2 tropes, where sides immediately formed along identitarian & ideological lines, predictably accusing the other side of being a mob, all while displaying every characteristic of a mob themselves. Most can agree that the situation wasn’t handled in an ideal fashion, and there is much to be learned from it-- but that discussion wasn’t being had by the vast majority of participants. Peoples’ opinions were more informed by the tribes closest to their pre-existing ideologies than the situation itself, which shaped the discourse into harassment-slinging & scapegoating.

While mob mentality has existed long before Twitter, one of the most noticeable effects of attention-driven algorithms is the prioritization of content that enrages us, thereby generating a disproportionate sense of the prevalence of such content to those it enrages. In rewarding divisiveness over consensus far beyond the natural limits, we see an exponential increase to the factor by which our collective IQ drops. What could have been a valuable discussion on decentralized governance, covalent powers within a DAO versus a centralized entity like True Names, Ltd., and responsibility & recourse for public representatives of these covalent entities, became the same infuriating & reductive discussion we’re all tired of repeating: mob v. mob, woke v. anti-woke, or anti-woke v. woke depending on your predilections.

Web3: of the user, by the user, for the user.

A certain amount of tribalism is inevitable when it comes to free discourse, but the communication breakdown we all saw was enflamed by a vestigial reward schema blind to its own externalities. This schema is not a bug, but a feature of the Twitter platform. With decentralized & self-governing alternatives, not beholden to blind profit-at-any-cost for external beneficiaries but rather towards generating the most value to the system for those who use it, by those who use it, Web3 has the potential to create a better replacement to Twitter that rewards contribution to the discourse, rather than rewarding distraction *from* the discourse.

For those of us in Web3 who want to simultaneously benefit from mass adoption & capital inflows from Web2 & TradFi while not repeating its mistakes, we must recognize the Faustian bargain we make while using its tooling & infrastructure. We must remain vigilant and continue to build at all costs. As long as these vestigial reward schemas pollute our collective psychologies, we will be trapped into our Web2 tropes, dooming Web3 towards its current trajectory: regressing into an aesthetically decentralized appendage of Web2 & TradFi.