Two “big” things happened recently in the field of AI and Web3. Both events were of great significance, but their significance was buried in a lot of gossip details in the media.
In fact, there are two different perspectives when looking at any major event. The first is the entertainment perspective, finding fun in news events. If it is for this purpose, then you should bring a microscope and understand as many details as possible, because the more details, the higher the density, and the more gossip points, making it more interesting. The other perspective is macroscopic, mainly judging the trends in the industry and even the world based on events, and thinking about how these trends relate to you, mainly to guide decision-making. If this is the purpose, bring a good telescope and don’t choose the wrong lens. Only by omitting all kinds of trivial details can large-scale patterns emerge, and trends can be identified to help you make choices and decisions.
There is no difference between the two perspectives, and entertainment is also very important, especially in a bear market cycle. When you are unable to resist, there is nothing wrong with taking the initiative to enjoy it. But if your purpose is to make decisions, then the bigger the thing is, the more coarse it should be rather than fine. Don't always think about decrypting and hunting for novels. Those gossip details have nothing to do with you. You need to think about how high school history textbooks will write about today's events 100 years from now, and think about which historical passages these events rhyme with, so that you can discover trends.
It is a pity that many people in the real world do not understand this truth and blindly believe in "seeing the smallest details" and thinking that the more details they know, the better. In fact, they overestimate the ability of their brains to process information, and they are completely wrong.
I'm not an expert in AI, but take OpenAI's civil strife as an example. In fact, Ultraman's comings and goings and the palace fighting conspiracy behind it are exciting, but these details are just entertainment gossip for viewers and have no other value. . What is really important is the struggle between the "adventists" and the "salvationists" at the point where strong artificial intelligence is coming, as reflected in the civil strife. Similar struggles took place before and after the emergence of nuclear weapons, and were recently made famous by the release of the movie "Oppenheimer." But if you are obsessed with details, it will be difficult to see that these two things actually rhyme with each other, and it will be difficult to realize that the occurrence of such events shows that the singularity of strong artificial intelligence has arrived, and its ability Vastly exceeding the creator's own expectations, sparking fear, controversy and conflict. The result of the conflict is similar to that of the past, with the "e/acc advent faction" winning completely. This also indicates that the development of strong artificial intelligence has got rid of the last shackles of endogeneity and is rushing forward. In the future, humans will only be able to limit and control strong artificial intelligence through the formation of a balance of power with another strong artificial intelligence, or through external constraints such as cryptography and blockchain. Endogenous mechanisms will no longer be effective.
I have repeatedly expressed the view that AI and crypto are two sides of the same coin. Many people disagree with this and think that AI is a big deal and crypto is a farce. They feel that my statement is just helping to increase the popularity of crypto. In fact, they have not seen that cryptography is the only tool to build order in the digital space. However, the existing digital world is relatively simple and plain. It mainly deals with the relationship between people. It can be done with some basic cryptography tools. Generally cope with it. After the advent of AI, super-intelligent subjects have emerged in the digital world. At the same time, a large number of economic resources and economic activities have been digitized. The relationship between AI and people, and between AI and AI, has become more complex and decisive. The establishment of order in the digital space has become a matter of life and death. Naive cryptographic tools and protocols are no longer enough. The emergence of blockchain, smart contracts, autonomous identities, verifiable credentials, and the token economy, whether it is coincidence or destiny, in the final analysis is just some new cryptographic protocol components, which actually enriches our Toolbox helps us construct order in the digital world. I once made a statement before, "Blockchain must legislate for AI." Now it seems that only mentioning blockchain is too narrow. We should include all the tools mentioned above and treat them as a whole. It might be more appropriate to give it an overall name, such as crypto, and then say "Crypto wants to legislate AI."
The judicial settlement reached between Binance and the United States is actually very symbolic. The meaning of the indicator is that when you see this happening, you can tell which direction the trend is heading. For example, as mentioned earlier, when you see the civil strife in OpenAI, you know that the singularity of strong artificial intelligence is coming. Similarly, when we see the settlement reached by Binance, we can conclude that the entire Web3 has left the exploration era of barbaric growth and entered the colonial era of competition among heroes.
A brief explanation is as follows.
As early as the early days of blockchain development, many people described the crypto economy as a "parallel world", or a rich new continent. If this analogy is appropriate, then we naturally have to ask, how will people react when faced with the sudden emergence of new spaces that contain huge wealth and risks? This happened at least twice in history. One was when Homo sapiens left Africa, and the other was when Europe colonized the New World in America and Australia after 1500. The specific process of the previous time cannot be tested, but the information of the latter time is detailed and can be used as a reference. Five hundred years have passed, but human nature remains unchanged. When we try to grasp the general trend of the development of the Web3 industry, a historical template that can be used as a reference is the process of gradual colonization of the American continent after 1500.
The weekly colonial history of the two centuries following the discovery of the New World can be roughly divided into two phases. The first stage was in the 16th century. The first batch of immigrants were mainly adventurers and gold diggers from Spain and Portugal. They quickly occupied South America, which was rich in gold and silver, obtained a large amount of gold and silver, returned home in fine clothes, and returned to Europe. Master. For such purposes, they had no interest in institutional building in the New World. Instead, they did their best to plunder and exploit, shipping gold and silver back to Europe to be exchanged for tea, silk, porcelain, spices, and the Armada.
By the seventeenth century, late-developing countries such as the Netherlands, England and France saw the wealth potential of the New World and also colonized it. Because they arrived late, they could not capture Spain and Portugal for gold and silver, so they had to develop agriculture and agricultural product trade. The development of agriculture is more complicated than simple plunder. It requires establishing a cooperative order, building infrastructure, organizing division of labor and cooperative production, and improving the quality of workers through education. Therefore, the main colonial model at this stage was to export population, order, technology and culture as a complex to the New World through companies, thus starting a new stage of regional colonization. Most areas in North America began their colonial history at this stage. It was on this basis that in the late eighteenth century, the British colonies on the North American continent combined the original colonial system with local characteristics, and under the guidance of new ideas, created a country like the United States.
Such a description is not rough. If you study it carefully, you will definitely find a lot of evidence and details to refute this general "historical logic." However, only through the filtering of this broad line can we get rid of the interference of details and identify the "rhyme of history."
The more than ten years since the emergence of blockchain have been a "rhyme" of the colonial history of America in the sixteenth century, which can be called the "Age of Exploration."
There are a small number of idealists who enter the new world of Web3 in this era, but the vast majority are explorers and gold diggers. They don't care about the concepts, values and social goals of Web3 itself. The purpose of entering this new space is 100% to make money, make big money, and make quick money. For this purpose, the technologies, tools, and innovations of blockchain and Web3 are just means that can be replaced at any time. The purpose is and can only be to return home with gold and silver loaded with gold and silver. As for whether it will corrupt the order of Web3 and damage the ecology of the New World, they don't care.
This is a stage of barbaric growth and a stage full of innovation, adventure, speculation, hype, fraud and chaos. During this period, Binance, led by a realistic idealist, seized the historical opportunity, balanced a variety of complex factors, emerged from the chaos, and became the king of this stage. Binance's success is certainly due to luck, but more importantly, it is because Binance has always been able to use its power and influence in a controlled manner, and consciously provided the most scarce public good-order for the chaotic and disorderly market.
However, this new continent has not yet produced organizations and power forms that are strong enough to compete with the traditional world. Its original set of passive confrontation methods based on a thin anonymous mechanism is now in vain. Under such circumstances, when its scale grows larger and larger, and even begins to adversely affect the balance of power in the Old Continent, the Old Continent will definitely not be able to sit idly by and ignore it, and will inevitably use its existing strength and means to intervene in the New Continent. This will push the history of the New World into the second stage, which can be called the colonial era, corresponding to the colonial history of the North American continent in the seventeenth century.
In the colonial era, Web3 will enter an era of order construction, and the active promoters of order construction are actually those in power in the traditional world. They disdain the possible gains from plunder, but value the inherent technical advantages of Web3 more, hoping to create huge amounts of wealth by establishing a more complex production and transaction structure in Web3, thereby affecting the power distribution mechanism in the real world. Therefore, they will pay more attention to system construction than the previous group of people, and will be more inclined to use new corporate forms to promote the colonial process and build a new order.
Countries that saw this were advancing the colonial process in different ways. Some countries are more proactive and are willing to go deep into the hinterland, while some countries are more passive and only want to defend their borders. This is essentially what we saw in the Binance judicial settlement. This event marked a major acceleration of the United States' colonization process in the New World of Web3. Hong Kong, Singapore and other regions are also accelerating, but their respective strategies, rhythms and goals are not the same.
The order established during the colonial era was not the order that was most in line with the local characteristics of the New World. Instead, it was formed by the multiple metropolitan states in the Old World that, after competing for land in the New World, combined new technological features in their colonies and grafted onto the original systems of the metropolitan states. An order in which a variety of colonial systems with different characteristics coexisted and competed with each other. The colonial era is definitely not the end. The process of competition between multiple systems will eventually lead to the emergence of a new order. This new order is not only more in line with the characteristics of the new technology itself, but also has outstanding competitive advantages and the ability to compete with other systems, and can have a strong negative impact on the old continent. However, it may still take a long time before the new order is created, established and successful. For quite some time we will have to focus only on colonial-era strategies.
In the next ten years, the colonization of the Web3/Crypto world will be the main line of the industry's story. The industry narrative will undergo fundamental changes, and the most significant innovation and wealth creation opportunities will lie on this main line. We will soon see the following phenomena:
- Central banks, regulators and multinational organizations in some countries have successively published heavyweight reports on central bank digital currencies, programmable payments, decentralized identities, blockchain and other technical topics.
- The supervision of major countries has comprehensively strengthened the control of the Web3 world, and established their own colonies based on population and industry tracks. The order of the Adventure Age will still grow in the cracks, but regulatory agencies in various countries will become increasingly intolerant of behavior that crosses the line.
- Government agencies in some countries will take the initiative to support and support a group of companies, encourage them to enter Web3, and continuously develop and deploy new application cases.
- Some backward countries and regions will be more radical and innovative because they have no historical burden. On the contrary, some countries and regions that were leading in the digital economy in the previous stage will be hesitant to do so due to conservatism and hesitation. action.
- Because the natural advantage of the Web3 world is cross-border business, multinational institutions will take active actions, and some countries will take the initiative to establish collaborative relationships and enter Web3 in the form of alliances.
- Enterprises supported by different countries follow their own rules and systems, and compete in different fields of Web3 based on their own resources and strengths. They become the vanguard and coordinated force of the colonial action of the sovereign country before and after the national power personally comes to an end.
- Innovation is still the winner at this stage, but most innovations will no longer be imaginary, but will be carried out in the construction of order.
Only by looking at the Binance incident and Binance itself from such a position can we have a better understanding. Binance’s reconciliation may seem like a helpless move, but in the long run, it is actually a very positive event. As the king of the Age of Adventure, Binance will successfully survive and enter the colonial era without damaging its roots in terms of strength. It will have ample opportunities to negotiate or cooperate with major colonial countries and continue to play an important role in the new era. . Such good things are rare if you look through history books. And those who simply think that the Binance settlement has eliminated the last big thunder before the bull market, and therefore they are about to become rich, may continue to experience a life of great joy and sorrow again and again.