One Line Through 25 Years

The year 2002.

July 2002. In Minsk’s «Computer Newspaper», in a modest column labeled ”programming :: miscellaneous,” an article comes out under a boring title: «Distributed Computing at Minimal Cost». The byline — Sergey Ivancheglo. And an address: come-frombeyond@mail.ru. Already then. Already in two thousand two he was signing with the name under which he would enter history two decades later.

The article lays out a simple, audacious idea. There are problems that demand colossal computing power, and power costs money a lone individual doesn’t have. CfB proposes a way around it without a single cent: a small program loads when a person opens a web page and quietly puts their computer to work on a shared task. The more people visit, the more power is gathered. A supercomputer assembled from other people’s machines — no center, no owner, no cost.

Hold on to this thought: a hyper-efficient distributed network of miners will become the cornerstone of the future temple.

And now — the list of problems he proposes, right there in 2002, for such a system to solve. Weather prediction. The search for extraterrestrial civilizations. And — first on the list — cracking cryptographic algorithms.

Distributed power with no center, gathered from volunteers, aimed among other things at cryptography. This is 2002 — seven years before the world hears the word ”bitcoin.” From here on, his whole life is one and the same plant, which he keeps transplanting into ever larger pots, waits for it to outgrow each one, and transplants again. Twenty-five years of one and the same motion.

Let’s follow it.

NXT.

2013. Bitcoin already exists — four years old by now, and has already proven the main thing: money without a bank is possible. But Bitcoin has one trait CfB cannot accept. To keep the network running, millions of machines around the world burn electricity racing to be first to guess a meaningless number. This is called Proof-of-Work. The work is real, the electricity is real, the bill for it is real, and the output, apart from securing the network, is nothing. A gigantic bonfire that burns solely to prove somebody didn’t skimp on firewood. CfB asks a question that sounded like heresy at the time: why the bonfire? What if the right to decide the next block went not to whoever burned the most energy, but to whoever holds the largest stake in the system itself, to the one who cares about it because he owns a piece of it? Not work, but a stake. Not Proof-of-Work, but Proof-of-Stake.

Thus NXT is born — the world’s first full-fledged blockchain running on proof of stake. Few believed it could fly: how do you secure a network by burning nothing, on nothing but trust in those who hold a stake? It flew. For those who got in at the very start, NXT grew — sit with this number for a second — five hundred thousand seven hundred and eight percent. But it’s not the percentages that matter to us. It’s the move of thought. He took a working thing and removed the excess: an entire bonfire, an entire layer of pointless burning, until only the essence was left. A familiar pattern by now — see the commonly accepted, ask ”is this actually necessary?”, throw it out.

IOTA: Remove the Chain

2015. The next pot. And here he pulls the same trick, but goes after the sacred. A blockchain is literally a chain of blocks; the name gives it away. Transactions are gathered into a block, the block hooks onto the previous one, and so grows a single chain that everyone stores and everyone verifies. This was considered inseparable from the technology — its very definition. Arguing with it was like arguing that a wheel must have an axle. CfB asked: why the chain?

And he made IOTA — a system with no chain of blocks at all. In its place, a web, a ”tangle,” where every new transaction confirms two previous ones. Where a blockchain marches like a column, this thing spreads like mycelium, in every direction at once. The world’s first DAG, as it’s called technically. Again nobody believed. Again it flew: six hundred fourteen thousand nine hundred thirty-three percent for the early ones.

And the same motion as with NXT, only deeper: this time he threw out not the bonfire inside the technology, he threw out the technology itself, keeping only its purpose. He Loves Throwing Things Out.

Which raises a question: is this mere engineering taste, or is there something bigger behind the simplification?

There is. And he explained exactly what, with a pond.

«Imagine a pond with fish. The pond is our algorithm, the fish is vulnerabilities. Murky water wouldn’t allow seeing if there is any fish, clear water would. The core of my idea: create algorithms which are as transparent/simple as possible, if then you don’t see vulnerabilities then odds that an AI won’t see them too are much higher.» («Time For A Paradigm Shift Has Come», Medium, 2016)

There it is. He does not simplify for beauty. He simplifies because he is preparing for an adversary that does not yet exist. A complex system is murky water: vulnerabilities hide in it that even its creator cannot see. And a future artificial intelligence, he reasons, will hunt those vulnerabilities better than any human. The perfect detective. The only defense is to make the water transparent to the bottom. So there is nowhere left to hide. So that what you cannot see, it cannot see either.

An important detail: the hash function for IOTA, the heart of its cryptography, he named Curl. And here is what he said about it:

«Curl-P was created by following the idea of simplicity. While de-jure I can say that it was me who created Curl-P, de-facto it was created by a primitive AI created by me. That wasn’t AI of general purpose; an improved version of the AI is working on the final version of Curl now while I’m writing this post.» («Time For A Paradigm Shift Has Come», Medium, 2016)

Shocking. Already in 2015, defending his own network, he was using an AI of his own making, so that it would design protection against another AI. He wasn’t just building cryptocurrencies. From the very start he was building machines that make the next machines. One primitive AI designs a tool, the tool helps make a smarter AI, that one takes on the next task. A ladder, leading exactly where we will arrive at the end of this book.

Take his word for it or don’t — that’s your call; there is no way to verify it, and we hold it as his own claim, not as established fact. But one thing is beyond dispute: ten years ago he was not thinking about money. He was thinking about AI. The cryptocurrencies were pots. The plant was always artificial mind.

Qubic: Magnum Opus.

2021. He came back. Qubic. On the outside — once again a network, once again its own asset, once again miners. But inside — the thing all the previous gardens were fenced for. In Bitcoin, miners burn electricity for nothing. In Qubic, CfB performs his signature trick one last time (is it really the last?): he asks — what if we made that gigantic burned power do meaningful work?

And he harnesses the miners’ greed — their hunger to earn, to a single task: growing neural networks. The miners think they are earning coins. In reality they are forging construction material for an artificial mind. It’s called Useful Proof of Work. A bonfire that finally warms something.

The full picture: 2002 — the idea of distributed power without a center, gathered from volunteers. 2013 — NXT: remove the pointless burning, keep the stake. 2015 — IOTA: remove the chain itself, keep the network, and already then, an AI building AI. 2021 — Qubic: aim all that gathered power at growing a mind.

No crypto entrepreneur’s résumé looks like this. What you are looking at is one man who spent twenty-five years transplanting one and the same plant, knowing from the start what it would grow into. Every ”project” — just a bigger pot. Every ”simplification” — clearing ground for what was meant to sprout. He wasn’t looking for something to do. He spent his whole life doing one thing, and simply waited for the world and the technology to grow into a pot of the right size.

A man who, as we remember, has a special relationship with time can afford that kind of waiting.

One riddle remains in this line — the darkest one. Between the 2002 idea and his first project of his own, NXT in 2013, there is a gap. An entire decade. And exactly in the middle of that gap, in 2009, Bitcoin arrived in the world — distributed power without a center, gathered from volunteers, aimed at cryptography. Exactly what CfB had described in a Minsk newspaper in 2002. And in the autumn of 2012, a few months before NXT launched, a certain newcomer showed up on an old forum and began replying in threads where no one had written for years. Threads where a man named Satoshi once used to answer. Now let us walk to bitcoin’s graveyard.