blockchains and the monopoly on truth
Historically, I think humans have had two sources of forming our understanding of “truth”:
Observation and logic: We think some things are true because we can verify them ourselves. We “know” that gravity exists because when we drop something we can watch it fall. We know that a mathematical theorem is true because we can verify a proof for it. For the most part, this approach to learning involves using our five senses and logic to verify some knowledge as true.
Language: There are some things that seem impossible to verify but we still think are true. I think language has been our best solution yet to convey and learn these “truths”. We can’t live through historical events again to verify them, for example, and so our knowledge of the “truth” of history is based on what we read in text, see in images, and hear from others. This is inherently trustful.
I don’t think language is necessarily bad; there are many things that are only true because most people believe it to be true, and language enables this. For example, money isn’t valuable in itself but we learn to believe that money is valuable by hearing everyone around us claim its value. Social consensus like this is very slow and has limited bandwidth though, and it’d be impractical to use this to establish all non-verifiable truth. Imagine if you had to wait for everyone around you to agree that you paid $6.50 to Starbucks for your coffee before you could start consuming it.
This is why we’ve seen the rise of trusted parties. We all decide to trust a single person or institution and begin to consider anything they say as true. And so, we’re able to get away with just one round of social consensus: as long as we all agree to trust the same person, they become the arbiter of truth and all knowledge distributed by them in the future is considered true by default.
This is dangerous because it leads to a monopoly on truth. A bank or government could simply reduce the amount of money in your account and you’d have no recourse. And this is why I think blockchains are long-term valuable: blockchains break the truth monopoly by replacing truth based on trusted local views with truth based on a global view reached through consensus. Blockchains allow us to continue getting away with a single round of slow social consensus: as long as we all agree to the same validity rules of the protocol, the chain becomes the arbiter of truth. Truth construction from that moment happens through speedy censorship-resistant blockchain consensus at a global scale (with the option of social consensus taking over if needed).
It’s interesting to look at blockchain design from the lens of shared truth construction. Validators on Ethereum get slashed for double signing because they’re claiming two different truths at the same time, which by definition is a violation of the truth. Validators are penalized for downtime because that delays the construction of truth. And by allowing anyone to verify that the chain follows the rules we agreed upon, blockchains remove the need for a trusted center.
Why does this matter? Relying on a trusted local view creates asymmetries in information, which creates asymmetries in power. We don’t even need to look at traditional institutions to understand this, we can just look at blockchains themselves. It’s no coincidence that the only part of leader-based blockchains which relies on a monopolized local view of truth – the proposer monopoly – is where most user value is extracted and timing games are played. A proposer can reorder and include transactions as they wish, because the “truth” of which transactions the proposer received and in which order is known only to the proposer. Now extend this to traditional institutions, who don't just control ordering and inclusion but control the actual truth itself.
An observer might question why we see so many rugs and insider pump-and-dumps in crypto despite the properties of blockchains we’ve talked about. The reality is that blockchains eliminate monopolies on truth but don’t eliminate monopolies on information, and so someone with insider information can still rug without violating any validity rules of the protocol. And if blockchains are really achieving their goal of constructing shared truth, I think they’re bound to get ugly because truth is ugly.
I’ve also heard questions raised about whether blockchains simply recreate truth monopolies but onchain. For one, is “truth” on Ethereum defined by Ethereum validators and social consensus, or by whichever fork Circle decides is the canonical one? I agree that things aren’t perfect today but I’m optimistic we can solve this.
Overall, I fundamentally believe that if we really care about increasing the value of blockspace, it really just comes down to increasing the value of the truth arbitrated by blockspace. Hopefully that is a truth we can all agree on.