The following is a counter-story meant to highlight the solutions for which technology exists today that may help fight against the downsides of AI. It was initially published to Twitter here, and this post is an onchain version of it with minor improvements. You can even mint it!

It's April 2026. I wake up in the morning and check Hacker News. "Hundreds of Starlink satellites burn up in the atmosphere."

I click the link to Wired. The article is clearly GPT-assisted, I don't trust it, so I click my browser's Ledger of Record extension. The article was written by a 50-something journalist hailing from a pre-Ledger-of-Record era, so there is no onchain link to verifiable information about this incident.

I grumble and open the local web interface to my Ledger node. Having purchased a Tesla before, my wallet already contains the Tesla certificate authority. I query my node — in natural language — to trace any recent information it can find about Starlink satellites rooted in the Tesla certificate. It comes up with a signed onchain statement from Starlink stating that the service is operating normally, and a record of every satellite's spatial coordinates in the last 24 hours, cross-referenced with spatial observation records signed by NASA.

Satisfied, I ask my node to compress this information down to a zero-knowledge proof a few kilobytes in size, and ask my assistant to summarize these findings and include the proof in the summary, along with instructions on how to verify the proof for themselves. I sign this with my own key, and publish it both onchain and as a Hacker News comment. "Hopefully this will save the next schmuck a few minutes of research before falling for this", I exhale.

I get an alert from my bank. I scroll through a dozen spoofed bank notifications that my on-phone assistant tells me are socially engineered.

The NYSE dropped 10% and trading was halted. This drop looks real. I look at the onchain synthetic for the NYSE index, which can’t be halted. It's certainly jumpy, but has barely moved 1.5% below the pre-halting price since. Looks like it was just panic-selling. I move on with my day.

Slack chimes. My engineer in Chile tells me she can't work today due to mass protests.

Me: What are they protesting? Her: I'm not sure. People are saying the hospital systems are down and I can't refill my meds. Me: Did you check the medical supply chain records? You know, the one the Chilean government — after the Healthcare Sovereignty Act back in '25 — required all their pharmaceutical companies to record their logistic operations on and that enforces public transparency? Her: Ah, right. (She asks her assistant to check.) Looks like the hospital an hour or two down from me has what I need, but how will I be able to convince them to give them to me? They claim the whole hospital system is down. Me: That's OK — the medication bottle will have a QR code on it with its contents and serial number. The hardware wallet in your phone will be able to sign and post an onchain statement that this medicine has been picked up. It’ll come along with a zero-knowledge proof that it was picked up by someone who has a prescription for it and hasn't picked them up since their last expected pickup. That message can be gossiped through any mesh network like Helium, so others will be able to verify the hospital stock regardless of the state of the hospital’s inventory system. Her: Thanks!

My phone buzzes. It's my Dad. My phone shows that the call is cryptographically confirmed to come from my dad's device, which I verified the key personally when I set it up for him. He starts talking.

Dad: Dan, stay home. I'm seeing crazy things in the news about Teslas going haywire on the highway. Me: Did your assistant verify the news? Dad: Some yes, some no. Just stay home to play it safe. Me: Thanks for letting me know, dad. I'll be careful! By the way, remember what happened with that call from "me"? How you gave your Amazon password to "me" without checking? Dad: Yeah, that was scary. I've gotten other calls that sound just like you since, too. I've also gotten panicked-sounding calls from someone who sounds exactly like your late mother. Me: Oh no, what happened? Dad: Nothing, son. You set up my phone to warn me about calls that don't come from expected callers, remember? The phone told me this wasn't from a confirmed caller when I picked up the phone. When it detected that the voice print matched against your mother's voice, it immediately hung up and told me why it had done so. Me: Oh, good! Glad to know that's working. Stay safe out there. Dad: Ok. Bye.

I get to work. My AI assistant is coding a new forecasting tool. I check every ~30 minutes and give it code reviews.

Analytics alerts are firing again. Some users are acting erratically. Their browser automation must be clicking random buttons. I add a temporary increase on the human score threshold on the anti-sybil ZK proof auth flow, powered by Gitcoin Passport. Most of them drop off.

I keep checking the news. More claims about financial turmoil, SpaceX satellites down, Tesla draws driving off the road. I wonder if my friends if they've found out the truth yet. I could ask them, since our phones have end-to-end encrypted and verified messages, thanks to technology we've had since the 90s called cryptography. But our onchain attestations are automatically synced anyway, so I figure their assistant has probably already surfaced it to them. I move on.

The lights in my office go off. I check the circuit breaker - power is out. I turn on my mobile hotspot and tether my laptop. I check the PG&E outage page. It says everything is online. "Of course.", I sigh.

I turn to the chain once more. Plenty of attestations of power outage from my entreprising neighbors, and a lot of automated attestations from the apartment building's backup generators and IoT sensors. I don't trust any of them much, but they do all come with ZK proofs of location thanks to Helium hotspots. I ask my assistant to gather up those attestations and render them as a heatmap overlaid on top of a map of my area. Sure enough, those areas line up with strangely-green zones on the PG&E map. Another grumble. I publish another onchain attestations of my findings to help the next person out.

I learn back in my chair. Being without power sucks, but at least I know the extent of the damage and I know not to panic. It's just another societal panic induction attempt. Psyops.

Another Tuesday.

To be clear: This story is still a dystopia. I hope we don't get to this place.

But the point is this: If AI is an unstoppable force, crypto is an immovable object.

In other words, it's the only technology we know that may credibly fight back against the downsides of AI. Crypto is source of hardness and a common ground truth.

Thanks for reading. If you liked this story, post an onchain attestation to prove it! This is how we can start to build a collective intelligence network from which the above technology becomes ubiquitous. Other than gas, it’s free.

If you’d like to support the development of this technology, I suggest contributing to the current Gitcoin Grants round. Even a small amount helps, as your selection helps inform the quadratic funding matching algorithm. It is onchain collective emergent intelligence for capital allocation. Contribute here.

As part of this series, players are prompted with the following: “Describe a dream that Mirai had, taking place in a bar”. This post is my answer to this prompt.

Fair warning: The following is fairly cringe; I am not a great storyteller. I am posting it here because the text field on the White Rabbit application itself is too small to post more than a few sentences. This post is meant to serve as something I can link to from my submission. My hope is that this story, as cringe as it is, contains elements that may be used for artistic inspiration beyond what I am able to express. Here goes.

Mirai walked down the street and approached a back-alley bar. “The Gwei Bar“, said a small purple-blue sign adorning the top of the unassuming door. Mirai shyly entered.

Immediately, a waft of the scent of speculation was in the air. It reeked of alcohol and amphetamines. Glowy neon signs promising insane APYs hovered over roulette tables set up on the tables all around the bar, with Aave-ghost-like shapes gathering around them, gambling their night away. Mirai did not enjoy this at all, but walked with resolve past these tables and sat down on a stool by the bar. She was not one to enjoy this atmosphere of noise and bustle.

The bartender perked up."Welcome to the Gwei Bar, traveler. You look weary. What can I get you?" "Something calming. I am feeling a bit disoriented.", Mirai responded. The bartender suggested: "Sounds like you could use a good steak. With gwei sauce drizzled on it. A solid option." "What's that?", she asked. "Gwei is the lifeblood of this world", the bartender answered. "It's the purest expression of value we have discovered. We brew it down into a fine, thick sauce in the barrels at the back of this shop." Mirai looked puzzled. "And what about the steak?" "Steaks are delicious!", exclaimed the bardender. "Putting gwei on a steak makes for a juicy treat. Steaking gwei stabilizes this world, and eating it stabilizes your soul. It'll help you find your way."

Many more questions were brewing in Mirai’s head, but the loud environment wasn’t conducive for further conversation. "I'll give it a shot", she decided.

A fabulous, juicy steak materialized in front of her. Despite — or perhaps because of — the lack of decent lighting in this place, she swore she could see glimpses of Ether-diamond-shaped glimmers floating within the thick, dark gwei sauce. Mirai inspected the dish with curiosity, smelling it and looking at it from all different angles.

Meanwhile, the bar was getting rowdy and louder. One of the ghosts must have gotten rugged. NFTs started being flung around the room, flying over Mirai’s head; clearly someone had started a gas war. Mirai wanted no part of that, and felt like a fish out of water. The bartender took notice. "Have a bite”, he suggested. “Chew it slowly and focus. It'll calm your nerves."

Mirai took a bite. And another. As she ate, the external bustle of the bar started fading away. She started feeling lighter and calmer. The former brouhaha of the bar had faded down to a vague hum, and progressively into a warm and soft chime melody. The world faded away. Even the bartender had disappeared. It was just her and the juicy steak.

Mirai felt at peace. She started seeing connections in the form of light streaks, emanating from herself and spreading into all directions. She looked around and saw plenty of others like herself, all organized in a vast interconnected network of value and information transfer. Value flowed throughout these connections in a rhythmic beat, pulsating with information as it flowed along the nodes. One heartbeat every 12 seconds. Though each heartbeat wasn’t exactly the same, they came in a steady, soothing rhythm. The world was in sync, and she was now felt that she was playing an active part in making it tick.

She had seen the beating heart of the system powering this world she had mysteriously landed inside of. She felt that this heart had been either ignored or persistently misunderstood by the wider public for a long time. Corruption was slowly seeping into it from the outside; she felt it creaking under the strain of people using it as a fraudulent casino. This heart was a fragile thing, and now it was hers to care for.

Seeing this symbol gave Mirai a new sense of connectedness with this strange world she had found herself in. She understood the importance of her new-found role within it, and started to worry about the responsibility she may have unwittingly just signed up for. She was now part of this network that — unbeknownst to most — supported the world. It was up to her to preserve and uphold its values.

Mirai woke up from her dream with a renewed sense of ambition and responsibility. It was a new dawn.

The crypto space is exciting to me because of its potential to rewrite and improve the ways in which (and the scale at which) humans coordinate. Look at the reason I’m writing this post: because a blockchain is rewarding me to do so. About 4,000 others have done the same before me in the last 48 hours. That’s coordination at scale.

Smart contracts enable ways to funnel value in a manner congruent with what its participants want it to. Retroactive public goods funding is an example of such a scheme. At scale, these structures can form online governments and nations that can direct their resources in ways that much more closely reflect their citizens’ values, relative to modern democracies where the only granularity of choice amounts to choosing one of a given set of options which are often not meaningfully different, nor aligned with the long-term benefit of their citizenry.

Digitization increases the clock speed of trade, business, finance, information exchange, science, education, journalism, social connection, cultural remixing, and everything else it touches. Governance has been a tougher nut to crack, because of the human coordination scale involved in moderating such a system, but crypto offers one of the most credible ways to get there.

For these reasons, I remain optimistic.