Hurn

Safety vs Privacy

2025-10-22T00:00:00+01:00

Safety vs Privacy

It is often argued that curtailing freedom of the individual is necessary to achieve effective public safety. Societies that emphasise personal freedoms, such as the United States, tend to experience high levels of crime, while law enforcement lacks the power to prevent it due to concerns about privacy. Most attempts to prevent crime are seen as infringement on civil liberties, leaving law enforcement impeded, unable to effectively police crime and act preemptively due to the legitimate concerns about surveillance.

Emerging cryptographic technologies such as Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) represent a profound shift; they enable enforcement of law and order without demanding the surrender of personal data. Compliance can be verified without the need to disclose personal information. The social benefits of highly effective law enforcement, exemplified by countries with low crime rates such as China, could be achieved without compromising on privacy or aggregating citizen data.

For example, a national ID system in the UK would help consistent compliance and enforcement, but it has been met with resistance due to privacy concerns. With Zero-Knowledge technology, citizens would be able to prove a certain attribute (eg. being over 18) without revealing any underlying identifying data. The user is the sole custodian of their data, and can choose to only reveal certain parts of it when necessary, for example when purchasing alcohol or applying for a job. If such a system was implemented, it would allow for much more effective enforcement of law and order, while preserving individual rights.

Zero-Knowledge Proofs are only the beginning; they barely scratch the surface of what privacy-enhancing technologies and cryptographic tools can achieve. Use of these emerging technologies in law enforcement would create opportunity for more rigorous and effective regulation, while simultaneously respecting the sovereignty of a citizen's private domain.

Many enthusiasts of privacy-preserving technologies tend to focus on a utopian, idealistic vision of society with absolute personal freedom and a minimal state. This philosophy likely stems from the "cypherpunk" movement of the 1990s, which heavily prompted absolutist libertarian ideals. But I believe that the real application of this technology is not to undermine the state, but rather to strengthen it's legitimacy by making it a trustworthy enforcer. Privacy-preserving tech can be integrated into existing institutions to enhance their effectiveness, while simultaneously advancing privacy and freedom. Once enforcement can be done in a truly private way, there is nothing to fear. Institutions no longer need to be trusted, as cryptography itself becomes the guarantor of privacy and freedom, not the state.

Safety and privacy are no longer mutually exclusive.

Subsidiary Governance

2025-10-04T00:00:00+01:00

Subsidiary Governance

Decision-making at the lowest possible level, involving all members of each community. Communities have almost complete autonomy and are not reliant on a state, but can choose to cooperate with other communities through federation to address shared interests.

Problems with Centralised Governance

Decisions are made at levels far removed from the places we actually live, leaving people disconnected from the governance process. Representative democracy ignores the demands of the minority, and is not flexible enough to allow communities to flourish independently.

Advantages of Subsidiary Governance

Every community is given complete autonomy and is free from external constraints, so each community can develop it's own approach to resource management, justice, and community life. Over time, people will move to the most successful communities with the best governance, and the less successful communities will naturally adopt the ideas of more successful ones. It allows for novel ideas for organising community life to be tested, refined, and allowed to compete.

A person's immediate surroundings, their community, are extremely malleable under subsidiary governance. Communities consist of a small group of individuals and families living in close proximity, so each person has much influence over how things are run.

People living in a small community are more charitable and altruistic, as the resources they donate are for local causes which they will directly witness the impact of.

Monolithic Societies

Most societies are becoming more individualistic and impersonal. The importance of immediate community is diminished by the idea of a monolithic society; one that is a single uniform entity. The inner structures of society are becoming less important as people are now only valued for their utility within a larger economic system. This way of living is antithetical to human nature, it ignores geography, identity and community in favour of treating every human being as a cog in a machine. In contrast, small scale community-based society is congruent with the human tenancy toward 'tribal' affiliation.

People don't see their impact on society, because 'society' has come to mean the nation state rather than a close-knit community. The impact of one's actions in society have become obscured by large-scale markets. For example; while a baker once used to bake bread to feed his community, he now works the machine which packs the bread, to be sold to an unknown customer in an unknown location, in order to earn money whose value is dictated by the state. Each person's impact is heavily abstracted by specialisation, and is transactional in nature, which causes alienation and lack of purpose.

The solution is not collectivisation, inequality is not the driver of these issues. In fact, some inequalities and hierarchy can help people by providing clearer responsibilities and purpose. The issue is rather the structure of society and the overbearing state, which restricts people and communities and forces conformity.

Unity causes fragmentation. Fragmentation causes unity.

A society that is monolithic, with no inner structures other than the citizenry and the state, causes deep fragmentation as relationships become more transactional and impersonal.

A society which is fragmented, where people are concerned with affairs on a smaller scale in their local community, creates far greater unity within each community but sacrifices some national unity.

Modern society consists of nothing but the individual and the state. In other words, you are either a citizen or a politician. As a citizen, your role is to provide value to society, and in return you can earn a living. As a politician, a member of the state, you are able to refashion society with governance and decision-making. There is no in-between, other than local councils which have very limited power and are completely dependant on the state for funding. A citizen has very limited power to change their local community. His only option is to "enter" politics, which very few have the opportunity to do. In an ideal subsidiary governance model, all members of a community have already "entered politics" from the moment they are born, but on a much smaller scale. This model draws on collective intelligence, and entrusts ordinary citizens to take care of their community, providing the meaning and purpose that impersonal work (an abstract contribution to society) cannot.

In essence, subsidiary Governance has the strong community, belonging and accountability of conservative hierarchical society, but with the equality and freedom of liberal society.

Delayed Proof-of-Work

2025-06-02T00:00:00+01:00

Delayed Proof-of-Work (DPoW)

A theoretical consensus mechanism for energy-efficient, time-regulated mining.

Summary

Delayed Proof-of-Work (DPoW) is a novel consensus mechanism that aims to retain the security properties of PoW while drastically reducing energy consumption. Instead of continuous hashing, DPoW uses a Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) to enforce an idle period before a short burst mining period.

Protocol Overview

A new block is added to the chain.
A small group of specialized nodes, called "timekeepers", start computing the VDF using the latest block's hash as input.
The VDF is designed to take approximately 4 minutes to complete, enforcing a mandatory idle period.
Once a VDF solution is found, it is broadcast to the PoW miners. A ~1 minute mining period begins.
Miners compete to find a valid PoW for a new block, which includes the VDF output in the header.
The first miner to find a valid hash broadcasts the new block to the network.
Nodes verify the block by checking that the VDF output is correct for the previous block hash and that the PoW is valid.
This cycle continues. The difficulty of the PoW and the VDF are adjusted frequently to maintain a 4-minute idle period and 1-minute mining period.

Role Separation: Timekeepers and Miners

The time required to compute a VDF varies greatly depending on the computer's clock speed. Miners with faster machines could complete the delay phase earlier and begin mining ahead of others, gaining an unfair advantage and increasing overall energy consumption. Therefore, dedicated "timekeepers" handle VDF calculation using the most optimized hardware available. Due to a lower bound on VDF computation time with current hardware, timekeepers would complete the idle phase within a narrow window.

If a malicious timekeeper withholds the VDF output, other honest timekeepers (operating at or near the lower bound for computation time) will independently derive the same output and publish it themselves. This prevents any single timekeeper from monopolizing the timing advantage and ensures the network transitions to the mining phase in a globally synchronized manner.

Key Advantages

The idle-mine cycle allows the network to operate with ~1/5 of the hash power of a standard PoW blockchain while still benefiting from the security properties of PoW.
During the 4-minute idle period, the blockchain is guaranteed to be static. The predictable delay means blocks are propagated and confirmed more synchronously, potentially reducing synchronization issues and orphaned blocks.

Potential Issues

Although significantly less than PoW, VDF computation still consumes energy.
Miners might redirect their hash power to other cryptocurrencies during the delay period, undermining the goal of reducing energy consumption.
A malicious miner who obtains or predicts the next block could start precomputing the VDF early with a private timekeeper node, gaining an unfair advantage. Similarly, a miner who finds a valid PoW could withhold the block briefly to get a head start on computing the VDF.
Since miners only compete during a short mining window, they may concentrate more hardware into that window (overclocking or scaling horizontally), effectively increasing total energy usage.

Book.io: Own No Books and Be Happy

2025-05-03T00:00:00+01:00

Book.io: Own No Books and Be Happy

Book.io is an online publishing platform that aims to revolutionise digital book ownership, offering authors more control and a larger share of profits. The eBook market is currently dominated by large companies monopolising the market and taking advantage of both authors and consumers. When you purchase an eBook from Amazon, you do not truly own the book as you would with physical books. Rather, you are granted a licence to access that book under specific conditions. For the majority of people, this is never considered, as most online bookstores are unlikely to revoke access arbitrarily, but as soon as you want to gift the book after reading it or resell it, you find that you can't. This is one example of the many problems with modern eBook platforms that book.io aims to solve, by leveraging decentralised encrypted assets (DEAs) to ensure true ownership of books. DEAs are essentially tokens that live on the Cardano blockchain that represent ownership of a certain book and can be transferred, bought and sold freely just like any other asset. This gives users total freedom to do as they please with their eBook once purchased, something that is rarely allowed with mainstream platforms. At surface level this seems a noble goal, and it is easy to get behind the mission of book.io. However, after digging deeper into the technicalities of how the platform operates, it becomes clear that the promise of decentralisation is more of a marketing strategy than a functional reality. The platform is totally reliant on centralised infrastructure, meaning that the entire premise of book.io, true ownership of eBooks, is a lie. You will own no books, and be happy.

DEAs

To understand the flaws of book.io, we need to understand Decentralised Encrypted Assets. DEAs are at the core of book.io’s platform, and the key to both its potential and its shortcomings. Everything on the blockchain is totally public and can be viewed by any blockchain explorer. It is a public ledger and must be public to allow nodes to reach consensus on the state of the chain. This means that any asset minted on the blockchain is also public, which poses a big problem for selling any kind of secret or copyrighted data, such as an eBook. If the eBook is publicly available on the blockchain, there is no incentive to purchase it as it is essentially free. This has long been a problem in the blockchain space, preventing NFTs from ever being a viable way of monetising intellectual property. Instead, they have become speculative assets and are only bought and sold for financial gain. This is the problem that book.io aims to solve with DEAs. A DEA is essentially an encrypted NFT - The NFT represents ownership of a certain book and contains instructions, references and metadata. The metadata contains information about the book such as an identifier, title and cover, and the references link to the encrypted book content on decentralised storage such as IPFS. This is how DEAs protect the content of the book from piracy - they are stored in an encrypted form on IPFS. Without the decryption key, the content is unreadable. The instructions fetch the encrypted key file, allowing access to the encrypted book content on IPFS. This is where the idea of DEAs starts to fall apart. The encrypted key file needs to be decrypted in order for the content of the book to become available, but there is no possible way of storing this on the blockchain or decentralised storage. Book.io are deliberately opaque about how the key management works, but it can only be assumed that the platform uses a centralised KMS to retrieve the decryption key. To read a book, the user connects their wallet, Book.io verifies NFT ownership, retrieves the encrypted data, and then Book.io's servers use the centrally-managed key to decrypt the book and display it. Access depends entirely on the Book.io platform being operational, trustworthy, and willing to grant access. If Book.io shuts down, changes terms, or restricts access, the user loses the ability to read their "owned" book. This defeats the purpose of Book.io entirely, as users are still reliant on a centralised entity to give them access to their book every time. While the underlying token representing ownership of a book is decentralised, that token is completely meaningless without Book.io’s centralised access control, negating any benefit of using blockchain technology. In many ways Book.io gives users even less control than mainstream eBook platforms.

Reselling Free Books

The shortcomings of DEAs are far from the only problems with Book.io. If you open the website, you will notice that a large amount of the books being sold are written by authors that died over 70 years ago and are therefore in the public domain. It's deeply unethical to profit from public domain works under the guise of offering "ownership" via NFTs. Book.io is essentially reselling free cultural heritage, potentially misleading some buyers into paying for something readily available at no cost. This is often justified by the fact that Book.io is still a small platform with a limited number of living authors willing to sell their books. It is understandable to use public domain books to kick-start the platform and demonstrate its utility, but now there are lots of authors publishing on Book.io, it seems redundant. Another justification I have heard many times is that Book.io is somehow protecting these books from censorship by preserving them on the blockchain. This is totally undermined by the centralised key management explained earlier - the content that is being “preserved” on the blockchain is meaningless without the keys. There is also no need to tokenise books on a blockchain in order to preserve them - a better approach would be to just upload them to decentralised storage such as IPFS unencrypted.

Speculation and Gamification

The goals of the Book.io team are very clear: make maximum profit while giving users the false idea of ownership. This is very evident with the gamification and gambling elements of purchasing books on the platform. When a book is first purchased/minted, the customer receives a random variation of the AI-generated cover art. Some of these cover artworks are incredibly rare and sell for far more than the minting price. This adds no value to the experience as a reader, and the only purpose it serves is to drive up the price of these rare cover variations on secondary markets. Books have become speculative assets. This is fine for people looking to profit off the platform by speculating on prices but directly takes away from the experience of readers as it is likely to make book prices highly volatile. Many books on Book.io are in short supply and are seen as collector’s items, totally out of reach of the average reader. Many self-publishing platforms today have print-on-demand or unlimited copies of eBooks available, meaning that the book can always be purchased for a reasonable price. With Book.io’s fixed supply, the prices of books can skyrocket very quickly. It is clear that investment potential is frequently prioritised over utility.

Conclusion

Book.io presents a vision of decentralised digital book ownership, but a closer examination reveals a system that, in practice, offers no advantages over traditional, centralised platforms. The main issue is its reliance on centralised infrastructure for key management and book decryption. While the ownership token is on the blockchain, the actual access to the book content remains in the hands of Book.io. This negates the benefits of decentralisation, as users are still dependent on a central authority to access their books.

Furthermore, the platform's approach raises ethical concerns. The sale of public domain books, the encouragement of speculation through rare cover variations, and the creation of artificial scarcity all detract from the user experience.

In conclusion, while blockchain technology has potential for revolutionising digital content ownership, Book.io's solution is no better than centralised alternatives. Ultimately, Book.io offers a centralised platform with a decentralised facade, sacrificing genuine decentralisation for speculative hype and centralised control. It's a step backward, not a revolution, for digital book ownership.

Artificiality

2025-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

Artificiality

Human inventions are shaped by the natural world—technology must align with the forces and constraints of nature to harness its power. For example, boats are designed to minimise friction in water, their form directly influenced by natural principles. The same is true for many pre-industrial inventions, such as houses that harmonise with the local climate and materials, working with the elements to keep occupants warm and dry.

However, as society advances and refashions the natural world, dominating rather than coexisting with nature, our inventions increasingly reflect the artificial environments we create. They adapt to human-engineered systems rather than the natural world. Instead of developing technologies that integrate with nature, we now build technologies that integrate with other technologies, infrastructure, and societal frameworks. Their forms no longer bear the imprint of nature. Cars, for example, are now designed for roads rather than natural rough terrain. By contrast, an old sailboat is a near-symbiosis of human ingenuity and natural forces.

This growing distance from nature can be observed in many modern inventions; houses are now designed to fit into vast urban grids rather than blend with natural landscapes, their forms dictated by laws and regulations rather than the forces of nature. Technology of old was fundamentally grounded in nature, rooted in reality, while new technology strays away from it's roots and becomes alien to the natural world, including us. We are pieces of the natural world, placed into a new sphere of artificiality, and so the distance from the natural world is also a distance from humanity. The world is becoming less human.

Modern inventions prioritise efficiency within a constructed framework that often stands in opposition to nature. As this trend continues, our society’s development will grow increasingly detached from the natural world, becoming more abstract and artificial. The imprint of nature on our creations will fade as we diverge further from the environment that originally shaped us.

Reclaiming the Web

2025-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

Reclaiming the Web

In recent years, the web has become ever-more bloated with endless ads and invasive trackers. This results in many sites being excruciatingly slow, excluding users on poor internet connections or minimal hardware, and rendering some sites almost unusable. This stands in stark contrast to the original vision of the internet as an "information superhighway", a seamless platform for sharing knowledge and ideas, now overshadowed by cluttered interfaces and diluted content buried under layers of ads and distractions.

The root of this issue lies in monetisation: creators need ways to earn an income from their work, and the dominant strategy has been to overload sites with popup ads and referral links. As more people use ad-blockers and privacy tools, this monetisation method becomes less viable, and so more ad clutter is required to give the creator a decent payout. It's clear that this system is broken, failing both creators and consumers, and the web is getting worse by the day because of it. If we can fix the root of the issue, perhaps we can restore the internet to deliver on it's original promise of an open platform to share and gain knowledge.

The Issue

You don't have to look for long to see how badly this issue is plaguing sites. Just look for any kind of informative content like a tutorial or guide, and you are guaranteed to have a hard time finding a useable site. What should be a concise and helpful resource has become diluted with redundant elements, auto playing ad videos and JavaScript slowing the site down. A simple html page containing a few paragraphs of text should only need a few hundred kilobytes of data to load. However, many modern sites use 10s of megabytes just to load a similar sized article. The content is no different, the only change is the addition of useless bloat that adds nothing to the user experience. You could argue that a lot of the extra data for for theming to make the site look a lot more visually appealing, however most sites actually look much better and are easier to navigate with a minimalist theme. Adding animations, blur, and fancy styles usually does a lot more to hinder usability and improve it, and often detracts from the actual content of the website.

The Cost of Creating Content

Content creation demands time and resources. Blogs need to be written, videos filmed, and games or tools developed, and many creators are not willing to work for free. Some have tried to monetise their content by asking for donations, but relying on the good will of others can only get you so far. The vast majority of people will not donate, largely due to the hassle of sending money, meaning the creator relies on the generous minority for income.

Why Donations Don't Work

The reason that the donation model does not usually work is not because people lack generosity; I'm sure many would happily pay creators directly in exchange for an ad-free experience. The issue is the ease of making a donation. Donating should be completely friction-less, and ideally automated. You should be able to browse the web, watching videos, reading articles and listening to music, and at the end of the week send out a few dollars to the authors of the content you consumed the most without having to think about it.

Micro-tipping

Most people would be happy to donate a small "micro-tip" for the content they consume in exchange for no ads, trackers or other privacy-invading monetisation strategies. But the main barrier to this is convenience. If you read a short blog post or watch a video, you don't have time to find the author's PayPal and send a small tip. It would feel very insignificant to donate a few cents to a creator, but a few cents is likely much more than they would have ever earned from ads, and these small donations add up. If every person that reads an article donates a few cents to the author, these donations would cost the reader almost nothing, but would totally replace and exceed any potential ad revenue. This way, everyone is happy: readers get a de-bloated ad-free experience of reading/watching content, the author gets a steady revenue from micro-tips, and there is no advertiser middleman taking a cut.

The Idea

I propose a solution to the shortcomings of advertisement-focused monetisation models: An application that records which web content you have consumed in a given month, and automatically allocated a set amount of money to creators, proportional to how long you have spent on their site. Content creators can sign up to this platform and receive donations for ad-free content, and users can donate to their favourite creators without thinking about it.

Incentivisation

You may be wondering why people would decide to tip creators if the content is free. While this is certainly an issue, I believe that even a small proportion of users tipping would surpass any potential ad revenue. The emphasis on micro-tips, donating a small amount of money if you enjoyed someone's article/video/music, is a lot more appealing due to the low barrier to entry. However, for creators that need a guaranteed source of revenue and don't want to rely on the generosity of users, the platform should offer ways of providing benefits or extra content to supporters. This would function similar to platforms like Patreon, but would be focused on smaller amounts of money. Supporters that donate over a certain amount of money would gain access to additional content, but the main content would remain free.

The Role of Cryptocurrency

For this kind of application, where creators are relying on the service for income, decentralisation is essential. If this service was run by a a single centralised entity, it would likely take advantage of the platform and charge an unfair cut on donations. Additionally, creators would have no say in the development of the application and how it operates behind the scenes. Ensuring auditability and transparency is essential to verify the funds are being distributed fairly to creators. Therefore, such a system would benefit greatly from permissionless technologies such as blockchain. All the transactions would be recorded on a ledger, ensuring fairness, and users can verify exactly where funds are going. Utilising blockchain technology would also vastly simplify the transfer of value, as cryptocurrencies allow for direct peer-to-peer transfers with no intermediary. Many of the transactions would be of very small amounts, due to the "micro-tipping" concept. Sending such small amounts of money, as little as a few cents, is not feasible with fiat money, but it can be easily achieved with layer 2 solutions such as Bitcoin's Lightning Network.

Summary

The deterioration of the modern web is caused by ad-based monetisation failing, leading to more intrusive ads and smaller payouts for creators. We need an alternative model that makes donating to creators easier and automated, replacing ads with seamless micro-tipping. This way, we can reclaim the web and restore it to what it should have always been: A streamlined, user-centric platform for sharing knowledge and entertainment, without the bloat.