Magic Blockchains, but for Time? Blocktime Arbitrage

There is no doubt that blockchains are a reality-making technology, a mode and means of implementing as many flavors of our own crypto-enlightenments as we can imagine! This includes newer, flatter, more autonomous economic, political, ethical, scientific, and community systems. But not just in the familiar human social constructs like economics and politics, possibly in physical realities too like time. Blocktime’s temporal multiplicity and malleability suggest a reality feature we have never had access to before – making more time.

Blocktime: A General Temporality of Blockchains
Blocktime as blockchains’ own temporality allows the tantalizing possibility of rejiggering time and making it a malleable property of blockchains. The in-built time clock in blockchains is blocktime, the chain of time by which a certain number of blocks will have been confirmed. Time is specified in units of transaction block confirmation times, not minutes or hours like in a human time system. Block confirmation times are convertible to minutes, but these conversion metrics might change over time.

Blocktime Arbitrage
One key point is that the notion of blocktime, as an extension of computing clocktime more generally, creates a differential. Blocktime and human time already exist as different time schemas. A differential suggests that the two different systems might be used to reinforce each other, or that the differential could be exploited, arbitraging the two time frameworks. Through the differential too is the way to ‘make more time,’ by accessing events in another time trajectory. The conceptualization of time in computer science is already different than human time. Computing clocktime has more dimensions (discrete time, no time, asynchronous time, etc.) than human physical and biological time, which is continuous. Clocktime has always been different than human time. What is different with blocktime is that it builds in even more variability, and the future assignability of time through dapps and smart contracts. For example, MTL (machine trust language) time primitives might be assigned to a micropayment channel dapp as a time arbiter.

Time has not been future-specifiable before, in the way that it can be assigned in blocktime smart contracts.

Temporality as a Smart Contract Feature
Time speed-ups, slow-downs, event-waiting, and event-positing (a true futures-class technology) could become de rigueur blocktime specifications. Even the blocktime regime itself could be a contract-specifiable parameter per drop-down menu, just like legal regime. Temporality becomes a feature as smart contracts are launched and await events or changes in conditions to update contract states. Time malleability could itself be a feature, arbitraging blocktime with real time. An example of a time schema differential arising could be for example, a decentralized peer-to-peer loan that is coming due in blocktime, but where there have not been enough physical-world time cycles available for generating the ‘fiat resources’ to repay the loan. 

Blocktime Standards
In blocktime, the time interval at which things are done is by block. This is the time that it takes blocks to confirm, so blockchain system processes like those involving smart contracts are ordered around the conception of blocktime quanta or units. This is a different temporal paradigm than human lived time (whether Bergsonian doubled duration (the internal sense of time passing) or external measurable clocktime). The human time paradigm is one that is more variable and contingent. Human time is divided and unitized by the vagaries of human experience, by parameters such as day and night; week, weekend, and holiday; seasons; and more contingently, crises, eras, and historical events.

Since blocktime is an inherent blockchain feature, one of the easiest ways to programmatically specify future time intervals for event conditions and state changes in blockchain-based events is via blocktime. Arguably, it is easier, and more congruent and efficient, to call a time measure from within a system rather than from outside. It could be prohibitively costly for example, to specify an external programmatic call to NIST or another time oracle. Possibly the emerging convention could be to call NIST, including as a backup, confirmation, or comparison for blocktime. Currently, blockchain systems do not necessarily synchronize their internal clocktime with NIST, but the possibility of a vast web of worldwide smart contracts suggests the value and necessity of external time oracles, and raises new issues about global time measurement more generally. Especially since each different blockchain might have its own blocktime, there could be some standard means of coordinating blocktime synchronizations for interoperability, maybe via a time sidechain for example.

Novel Temporalities of Computing (Discontinuous) and Big Data (Predictive)
First computing clocktime made time malleable through its different discontinuous forms. Then machine learning and big data facilitated a new temporality, one oriented to the present and future, instead of responding to just the past. There was a shift from only being able to react to events retrospectively after they had passed, to now being able to model, simulate, plan, and act in real-time as events occur, and proactively structure future events. The current change is that blockchains and particularly smart contracts add exponential power to this; they are in some sense a future reality-making technology on steroids. Whole classes of industries (like mortgage servicing) might be outsourced to the seamless orchestration of blockchain dapps and DACs in the next phases of the automation economy. While Bitcoin is the spot market for transactions in the present moment, smart contracts are a robust futures market for locking in the automated orchestration of vast areas of digital activity.

Blockchain Historicity: Computer Memory of Human Events
Blockchain logs are a human event memory server. Blockchains are already event history keepers, and now with blocktime have even more responsibility as the memory computer of human events. It is now possible to think in terms of blockchain time sequences, in the anticipation and scoping of future events and activities, as blockchain reality unfolds, as opposed to human time scales and events. For example, there are normal human time sequences, like a one-year lease agreement. Other sequentiality is based on human-experienced conditions like ‘the park is open until dark,’ which makes little sense in a blocktime schema. There are time guidelines that vary per lived experience in human realities. Likewise, there could be analogs in lived experience in blockchain realities. Different events could mark the historicity of blockchains, for example, the time elapsed since the genesis block, and other metrics regarding number, amount, and the speed of transactions. In cryptophilosophy, Hegel, Benjamin, Holderlin, and Heidegger’s conceptions of historicity and temporality might be instantiated in the blocktime paradigm, where, in ecstatic temporality, historicity is the event from the future reaching back to present now (Heidegger, Being and Time, 474).

Related Crypto-philosophy Talk: Swan, M. “Bergson’s Qualitative, Kant’s Time and Imagination, and Blocktime Smart Contracts.” Spatiality & Temporality Conference. 11-13 December 2015. Warsaw, Poland. 

DIYastronomy Drones and Vertical DAS (Distributed Autonomous Space)

The Planetary Science Institute has announced plans for the Atsa Suborbital Observatory. Suborbital observatories are a new category of infrastructure that fits into the overall landscape of astronomical observational infrastructure between sounding rockets (expensive with only a momentary window for observation) and higher-altitude space-based observatories (Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, Webb). Atsa is airborne-based, in this sense similar to SOFIA, though Atsa is able to access 3-5 minutes of zero-g, and is more modular, flying infrared, ultraviolet, and visible range observational equipment. For perhaps as low as $125,000, you might be able to specify your own commercial observing flight, possibly crowdfunded through Fiat Physica (‘kickstarter for physics’); in a sort of community supercomputing for astronomy.

DIYdrones and Vertical DAS (Distributed Autonomous Space)
The idea of on-demand modular observatories suggests the notion of "distributed autonomous space in space" more generally. Distributed autonomous space (self-delivering pod spaces, like mobile Airbnb for lodging, co-working, etc.) could be terrestrial, and also aerial. There is the idea of airsteading, the vertical analog to seasteading, maybe with self-flying dockable airpods; a potential feature of the future along with the road-steading one might do with self-driving vehicles. Short of funding one’s own concierge observations on Atsa, personalized drones might be employed for DIYastronomy (including via QS mind-controlled rigs). Personalized drone observatories might significantly expand the reach of both professional and amateur astronomers. There is also the possibility of adding astronomical observational nodes to space elevator stations. 3-5 minutes of zero-g time, even if expanded to 9-15 minutes by coordinated Atsa flights from Florida, Texas, and California; essentially a very-large array telescope in space, is still just a few minutes. Instead, modular, ubiquitous space elevator infrastructure might provide continual observational functionality, and other self-financing uses like solar power generation.

Cryptocitizen Decentralization Sensibility: Providing Peer Infrastructure
The emerging mindset of decentralization could include participating in networks by providing infrastructure. Citizen-supported infrastructure could supplement and eventually supplant government institution-provided infrastructure. Resilient community infrastructure and the idea of supplying peer node hosting for network resources was a hope of WiFi mesh networks. The concept of community-provided infrastructure did deploy in peer-to-peer file-sharing with Napster and BitTorrent, and community supercomputing projects like SETI@home and Protein Folding@home, and is now being considered for more kinds of infrastructure. Peer-hosted networks might be more resilient both technically and sociopolitically. Decentralized networks are more technologically sustainable and extensible. There is also a sense of self-empowerment and economic self-determination in peer-provided infrastructure, particularly as an important counterweight to corporate power in the developing blockchain industry.

Some examples of community-supported infrastructure could include self-hosted Bitcoin blockchain full transaction-history nodes (Bitcoind), datt.co (decentralized reddit), and personalized drone observation cams. DIYastronomy drones could give the world a mesh network architecture for asteroid watch and the monitoring of other space debris, and also the capture of terrestrial-based events and phenomena. Thus, the sensibility of the digital cryptocitizen could include participating in peer-supported network infrastructure for any variety of affinities; whether DIYastronomy drones for asteroid watch, blockchain ledger hosting, content hosting, decentralized Uber-Airbnb space providing, sustainable foodagtech microgreens hydroponic units, or other activities.

Integrated Information as a Measure of Consciousness

The fourth FQXi international conference was held in Vieques Puerto Rico January 6-10, 2014 on the Physics of Information.

The first and primary focus was on information in the quantitative physical sense, as opposed to the epistemic sense, particularly as information is used in quantum mechanics. There are several objective measurable definitions of information such as Shannon information. Objective information and other mathematical and physics theories were also used to formalize definitions and distinctions between determinism, free will, and predictability, and intelligence versus consciousness.

Many talks and debates helped to sharpen thinking regarding consciousness, where we have been stuck with crude explanatory heuristics like ‘consciousness may be an emergent property of any sufficiently complex system.’ Interesting and provocative research was presented by Giulio Tononi and Larissa Albantakis from the Center for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin. They have an objective measure called ‘integrated information’ which is meant as the compositional character of experience (including subjective experience), and represents the causality amongst macro-level elements within a system. There could be systems that are complex at the macro level but have low integrated information if there are not extensive mechanisms with causal relations within the system. In other words, complexity does not necessarily confer consciousness, and the relevant factors to look for could be causality and experience. 

Time malleability

There are differences between the conceptualization of time in computing systems and the human conceptualization of time. At the most basic level in computing, time is synonymous with performance and speed. At the next level in computing, there are “more kinds of time” than in the human and physics perspective where time is primarily continuous. In computing, time may be discrete, synchronous and asynchronous, absolute and relative, and not elapsing at all.

Concurrency trend in contemporary computing
Computing is now making time even more malleable as a side effect of the quest to develop concurrent systems (multi-cores and multi-processors, and cluster, grid, and cloud computing), in at least four ways. One technique is using functional languages such as Haskell, LISP, Scheme, Clojure, and F# where sets of items and processes may not need to be temporally ordered. A second method is enhancing existing computer languages with new commands like ‘happensbefore’ and concurrency control mechanisms like ‘lock free queues’ to manage multiple threads of code operating simultaneously. A third means is creating new models with less time dependency like MapReduce which automatically parallelizes large data problems into finding all possible answers (‘map’), and determining relevancy (‘reduce’). A fourth technique is extending alternative models such as clock free methods and asynchronous computing and restructuring problems to be distributed for more expedient resolution.

Building intelligent systems
The building of intelligent systems is a special problem in computing. There are many approaches ranging from attempts to model human thinking, including the conceptualization of time, to attempts to building intelligent systems from scratch. All models might benefit from incorporating biological time models such as temporal synchrony, the notion of a high-level background synchronization of processes.

Conclusion
Computers are already great time-savers. Computing approaches to contemporary problems like concurrency and building intelligent systems are increasing the ability to manipulate time. Ultimately, humans may be able to greatly extend the control of time, for all intents and purposes creating more time.

From “The conceptualization of time in computing”

How small is small? the pico, femto, atto world

Man continues to master the manipulation of matter and timescales further up and down the chain from observable quotidian life. Regarding time, ultrafast materials is the area of science that deals with phenomena occurring in picoseconds and faster.

The familiar time scale is one second, easily measurable with a stop watch. A picsecond is 10^-12 of a second or 0.000000000001 seconds, a timescale used in high speed electronics. A femtosecond is 10^-15 of a second, the timescale of molecular vibrations and carrier interactions in solids. An attosecond is 10^-18 of a second, the timescale of electron motion at atomic levels.

Scientists are now finding in nature that most energy transfer and charge transfer transactions are typically taking place at the vibrational range, at the femtosecond timescale. A prominent example is the rhodopsin photoreceptor for vision. Traditional models for describing these dynamics, e.g.; Bloch’s single-electron band structure model, work for condensed matter but not for regular matter.

New models are needed to understand the interplay between atomic structure and electronic structure. Atomic structural dynamics deal with ultrafast chemical reactions,
ultrafast phase transitions, and ultrafast biological processes. Electronic structural dynamics deal with bond dynamics, valence charge flow, charge transfer, and electronic phase transitions.

One new tool being applied is the femtosecond X-ray. Since femtosecond X-rays interact with atomic cores, they are useful for obtaining direct information about atomic positions as compared with traditional optical measurements which only provide indirect information. This has immediately transferable implications in electronics manufacturing and biological applications.

Moving beyond the femtosecond scale, a next-generation light source at the attosecond time scale is being planned for the 2020 timeframe at Lawrence Berkeley Lab.

Reality: analog, digital, or information compression continuum?

The Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) has a thought-provoking new essay challenge for seasoned physicists, cosmologists, and lay-persons to answer: “Is Reality is Digital or Analog?”

In one sense, analog and digital is not an either/or question but two points on a continuum. Analog and digital are different information compression algorithms, using frequency and amplitude as levers for modulating information onto electromagnetic spectrum. As analog has progressed to digital, so too could there be several subsequent phases of information compression algorithms that are denser than digital.

Along the electromagnetic spectrum (Figure 1), analog communication uses radio waves, analog and digital satellite communication uses microwave frequencies, and digital communication uses fiber optics in the visible spectrum. Next-gen terahertz communications systems are already under development.

Figure 1. Electromagnetic spectrum

Quantum computing modulates atoms with information. Eventually, maybe all atomic and energy quanta could be modulated with information (smart matter). In the farther future, modulating information onto the other three forces (strong, weak, and gravitational) could be explored, along with the modulation of dark energy and dark matter. Gadget of the future: dark energy multiplexer.

Figure 2. Harnessing gravity waves through muons despite their 1.56 microsecond half-lives?

Future of physics

The future of physics and cosmology was discussed at length at a recent conference held by the foundational physics research institute FQXi, particularly considering what may be ultimately possible and impossible for physics.

Theoretical physics has been progressing in many areas but there is still a strong need for observational evidence and/or alternative theories to support or disprove the existing ones. Luckily, much anticipated experimental evidence may be available in the next few years from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), Planck Satellite, Pierre Auger Observatory and other observational astrophysics projects. For example, the Planck Satellite aims to look farther back in time than has been seen so far with the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), earlier than the 400,000 year old universe. It is theorized that B-modes, primordial gravitational waves from inflation, may be visible in the very early universe, which would provide additional proof of the inflationary phase occurring directly after the big bang.

Composition of dark energy to be known soon?
Another specific example for which observational evidence may be obtained in the next few years is regarding the composition of dark energy, whether it is vacuum energy made up of axion particles as one multiverse theory predicts or quintessence made up of supersymmetric WIMPs.

Many outstanding physics questions
Some other key issues are how our universe was created in the first place (a quantum theory of creation), proof for multiverse theories and possibly detecting bubble universe collisions, more about post-big bang inflation, why there is so much more antimatter than matter (the antimatter problem), why the weak force is 10³² times stronger than gravity (vs. say a more acceptable 3-4 orders of magnitude; the hierarchy problem), the existence, size and parameters of any additional dimensions of space, not to mention the usual unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics in a quantum theory of gravity, and finally the vexing Boltzmann brain problem, that consciousness could potentially arise from nothing but quantum fluctuations.

Next-gen astrophysics tools critical
Much progress has been made with accelerators, space-based telescopes, terrestrial array telescopes, and adaptive optics but the next era of astrophysics tools could be even more revolutionary. Accelerators are an expensive $5 billion or more and take years if not decades for fundraising, permitting, building and rendering operational. One alternative could be different kinds of accelerators which are smaller, quicker and cheaper to build, notably plasma wakefield accelerators, laser accelerators, and benchtop accelerators. Another way for tools to evolve could be with computational astrophysics and simulations such as MICA's Newtonian N-body simulation (featured by UgoTrade). As computing power continues to grow, accelerator and telescope datasets could be the inputs to large-scale simulation, prediction and test. As nearly every other science has moved into informatics and rigorous math-based prediction, simulation and experimentation, so too could astrophysics, fostering much quicker cycles and a tighter linkage between theoretical and experimental physics.

The FQXi community
Curiosity-driven physics researchers, especially those investigating risky areas on the boundaries of institutional acceptance are encouraged to apply for FQXi grants, and those understanding the value of fundamental physics research funding are encouraged to participate as donors and in the FQXi website community.

NOTE: The author is an advisor to FQXi.

Alt approaches to AGI

50+ year old attempts at creating AGI have not been successful. It is possible that AGI cannot be generated from current methods and technologies; the wrong tool is being used, sort of like trying to build a 747 with a toothbrush. Electromagnetism, silicon and Von Neumann architectures may not ever have the capacity to achieve AGI even allowing for continued increases in processing, storage and memory and architectural shifts such as parallelism.

Other substrates might work
Getting around the rigidity of Von Neumann, mathematical, logic-based, computational approaches, symbolic approaches and traditional computers, other computational substrates like quantum computing, DNA computing, etc. might work and also those that humans have not yet invented, discovered or exploited for this purpose like light, air, memes and information. There must be other substrates, and other viable approaches that are not constrained by mathematics and logic.

Information as a substrate
Narrowly, the only existing example of general intelligence is the human brain and the basic requirements of AGI are self-replication and self-improvement. Considering self-replication, there are many examples of more effective self-replication than humans, for example, memes, disease and microbes. Considering self-improvement, memes also self-improve more effectively than humans as they are refined through repetition, and have the unbounded ceiling for improvement of true AGI.

Taking advantage of the self-reproducing and self-improving properties and using memes and information as a novel computing substrate might be one way of extending AGI progress.

Information as a substrate could be developed symbiotically with a very broadly applicable new understanding of the laws of physics based on information and entropy as opposed to mass and energy.

Postmodern Physics and Manifold Destiny

At present, humans remain baffled regarding the key aspects of physics that could if understood trigger a step function of manipulability of physical reality. In the Trouble with Physics, Lee Smolin notes a dearth of progress in physics over the last 30 years mainly due to an undiversified groupthink myopic focus on string theory which has yet to show any results or falsifiable constructs.

The physics progress juggernaut has triggered a surprising meta level of questioning including the invariability of the speed of light, quantum mechanics, general and special relativity and what is science. Smolin calls for a Leibnizian interpretation of time/space that is a dynamical network of shifting relationships rather than an assumed fixed background upon which most of physics reasoning has been done to date. If we were not relying on gravity and the speed of light, would it be easier to understand dark matter and dark energy?

We have no idea...

• Why there are so many elementary particles with different sizes and masses

• What and how the 96% of the universe that is dark matter and dark energy is and behaves

• How to describe in words and math where large and small scales intersect like black holes and the big bang

• How quantum mechanics really works
  

• What really happens at very small scales such as the Planck length

Luckily, there are some experiments on the way, most importantly the GLAST NASA satellite due to launch in August 2007 which will probe the Planck scale; also gamma ray projects at the Auger Observatory in Argentina and at other facilities and the building of quantum computers. The big hope of the Large Hadron Collider, the detection of the Higgs boson, would help confirm some long-held theories but probably not shift thinking as much as the Planck scale research could.

What - No Singularity?
Interestingly, some scientists' models including Smolin's are suggesting that time goes backwards from the big bang and in black holes, essentially meaning that there is no Singularity. No Singularity?! Technological Singularity paradigmers might have to rethink their metaphor.

Scale shift needed to understand physics

Even a cursory consideration of any sort of astronomical phenomenon immediately makes it clear that the scale of human life and the cosmos are completely different. The astronomical scale is dramatically more expansive, huge, some examples and comparisons are that winds from planetary nebulae can be 2,000-4,000 km/second vs. a bullet which travels at 1 km/second. The sun is many times larger than the earth but it is far more common to have suns that are significantly larger than our sun.

Not just the size or scale but the dramatic dynamism, for example, red dwarfs can lose weight at the rate of 600 trillion tons/second, suggests at phenomenon of which we have no understanding. The power and dynamism is extraordinary.

The astronomical scale is dramatically larger and probably exponential. (Is it just the large range of a scale that makes it logarithmic/exponential?)

The vastness of the astronomical scale suggests that the human scale, human experience and probably human thinking are too small and limited. How can we possibly discover the next laws of physics when we are thinking linearly and not exponentially?

Thinking must be at a larger scale and probably logarithmic or exponential. How can we adapt our thinking in this way? A. Naturally/forced thinking B. Via computer as external thinking enhancement, modeling/simulation tool C. Gene mod