The Zen of Saito

Sometimes when people talk about Bitcoin or blockchains or Ethereum or whatever, they talk about micropayments or tokens or nfts, etc..

These are all fine, but these aren’t what matter.

What really matters is humans, and what matters about Bitcoin is that it changed the way humans behave.

Bitcoin let people who didn’t know each other and didn’t trust each other cooperate, despite people working against them.

Society is on under-architected infrastructure and the growing pains of a bootstrapping civilization is causing parts of it to buckle and collapse.

Bitcoin will solve this. It was supposed to. Except the world seems to be moving to a multi-chain future.

And Bitcoin itself is actually 3 versions, and they’re all trying to kill each other.

It wasn’t always supposed to be this way.

Satoshi invented a beautiful solution to a collective action problem (the byzantine general’s problem) — make it economic.

Suddenly it’s leaderless, open and balanced with incentives.

But there’s a problem, is it actually balanced?

It turns out not really. The reason Bitcoin had the UASF and 3 forks is because the stakeholders of the system were not properly incentivized.

So while Bitcoin did solve a complex collective action problem, it didn’t balance the incentives properly and the system is ripping itself apart.

Solving this isn’t easy, every blockchain has this problem.

Amazingly though, Saito found a solution.

They solved some complex collective action problems of their own: tragedy of the commons and free-riding.

This is really big, like Bitcoin 2009 big.

But what’s absolutely bonkers is how they did it, and what it changes about the way humans behave.

Its DAOs all the way down

Saito consensus works by paying people who create value in the network.

Read that a few times and tell me if your head doesn’t explode.

A lot of blockchains are doing tokens and NFTs to incentivize behavior: giving up some tokens/art/digital objects to help get people to contribute value — it’s pretty interesting but tricky to get right.

Saito got it right, so it doesn’t need higher-level incentives to get valuable behavior.

Saito is the first blockchain DAO.

Or more accurately, Saito is the first blockchain DAO that will actually work.

Every other chain has a broken layer-1, and no amount of higher layer incentives will fix it.

Additionally, Saito has a working layer-1, so most higher layer incentives will collapse to the base layer.

luminous’ wager: Saito layer-1 will capture more value than all other layers combined, on any other blockchain.

The Zen of Saito

The Zen of Bitcoin promised a world where we could be fully human, where we could seek the high-ground with people that we didn’t know and didn’t trust.

Unfortunately, the underlying economic problems in Bitcoin mean we can’t trust the system. Middlemen, saboteurs, cartels and traitors will undermine honest actors. Every single blockchain has this problem, except Saito.

Only Saito gives us a fair economic system that nobody can capture.

Only Saito gets us out of this mess.

The Zen of Saito is realizing you don’t have to worry about traitors anymore.

The Zen of Saito is when you can go as fast as you want, and so can everyone else.

The Zen of Saito is when you realize your biggest dreams are inevitable.

And if you pay attention, you’ll see it’s already happening.

Satoshi is dead. Long live Saitoshi.