John Packel. Mint #tBTC: Threshold.network

Commanding Heights is either a fragmented thoughtful analysis or a hit piece on certain kinds of technological progress, or both. Commanding Heights views the current evolving societal paradigm shift through an outdated vertical lens. Decentralized protocols add horizontal organizing principles to top-down command and control creating a sturdier, smarter, wealthier and more real-time connected social fabric. The result isn't a few owned heights but omnidirectional, fractal expansion, with firms shrinking on average and every person a prime mover in their own contexts. "Own the rails or pay those who do" assumes the rails must be owned. We're adding horizontal organizing principles, via rigorously decentralized protocols, to the age-old top-down command and control architecture of the global economy and society. This Commanding Heights framing ends up serving the incumbent concentrations of wealth and power that have reasserted control with every past upgrade to the system of the world. It also assumes a bipolar US–China world and misses the internet nation, the network state and a possibly massively multipolar (read: more decentralized) future. Nation-states will use decentralized protocols and crypto, and some will craft their own permissioned DeFi. But global DeFi will move faster, with deeper liquidity and more powerful innovation. They cite Coase, and in this context Coase points the other way: the firm gets more granular. Large firms will fragment into spin-outs that serve their old parents or fill new niches. Firms will get smaller on average and far more plentiful. Many more people will become sense-making, prime-mover nodes, conducting their own team of agents, larger machine intelligences and other humans, on a credibly neutral trust layer like Ethereum that fosters real-time discovery, composability and frictionless coordinated collective actions. That's omnidirectional agile fractal expansion, not perpetual command and control with its inherent rigidities. We're becoming a hybrid human-machine cognitive apparatus for the planet, molting from poking at machine intelligence with our fingers into the hybrid organisms' next quasi-stable form. For a while, human needs/constraints, motivations and judgment will be a key rate limiter so while it will move fast it will remain manageable. Every human will be empowered to do what they want and build what they want. Every person will have access to world-class expertise in nearly every domain and to a credibly neutral, protocol-based decentralized trust machine: the modular Ethereum ecosystem. No one gets deplatformed or censored, everyone shares one source of economic truth about what happened and in what order, and everyone has unprecedented control over their financial life. And Web3 is under construction. It is the user-centric web, where properly privileged, often bespoke compute, crafted by machine intelligence, comes to our secure and private data, not the other way around.