It's so easy to replicate cryptanalysis results and riff on them these days.

Went live today with Jonah talking about Proof-based Money and Useful AI work on @Nockchain. Thanks @JonahBlake for having me!

Moneyness is an emergent property. Money is a Schelling point for value storage, exchange, and accounting. A system of coinage may achieve Moneyness if a growing network of people use it to store, exchange, and account for a stable or increasing amount of value over time. Storing value requires credible security. Exchanging value benefits from speed, ease, and flexibility. Accounting benefits from neutral immutability and lindyness. Digital money has some key benefits: neutral security can be proven, transfer can occur globally and quickly, and smart contracts can provide flexible, programmable constructs for interacting with value. Digital coins aiming at achieving Moneyness have converged to two primary shapes: - PoW, hard-capped supply coins with no pre-mine - PoS, pre-mined coins with flexible supply, inflation with burn mechanics to offset Moneyness is built up over time by a network of people using a coin; it isn’t achieved overnight. I strongly believe that PoW-shaped networks are the best candidates for global acceptance as Money. I began working on $NOCK back in 2023. I modeled the @Nockchain design after my good friend (Akis Kattis)’s 2020 research paper called Proof of Necessary Work, which imagined a PoUW network built on top of Zero Knowledge Proofs. Our team launched @Nockchain with no pre-mine in May of 2025, and we quickly became the largest ZK-proving network in the world (though the proofs being generated are not yet used by the network). We’re moving quickly toward privacy and programmability, all built on the same Proofs that secure the network. This summer we launched our AI Compute Network, which has 25 ExaMAC/s of compute and is presently merge-mining ~55% of Pearl blocks. We’re continuing research on making the AI Compute Network into useful verifiable inference. I’m happy to see more teams joining the Proof of Useful Work space. It’s good for the future of crypto for attention to be moving toward this important area of research. The question of Moneyness is a long game and will play out over time. Really, these economic experiments will be proven out through distribution over the course of years and decades.

You’re welcome to your opinion, but our goals are pretty different. With $NOCK we’re betting on verifiability as a core primitive. It unlocks privacy, it unlocks verifiable compute workloads (including for AI). It unlocks smart contracts on a PoW chain without bloat.