Zuzalu Travelogue, a Dream of a Digital Nation

Author: Sunny, Deep Tide

What is Zuzalu?

Zuzalu is a new term; if you enter Zuzalu into Google Maps, you will find nothing, but for some people, it genuinely points to the Chedi Hotel on the Luštica Peninsula in Montenegro.

The birth of Zuzalu is closely related to Ethereum founder Vitalik, and it is even referred to as Vitalik's second startup. On the official website, Vitalik describes it as an IRL town that integrates cryptocurrency, life sciences, and philosophy.

Ethereum is a virtual decentralized network, while Zuzalu is a real crypto city.

As early as 2021, Vitalik demonstrated deep insights into physical crypto cities. He eagerly followed blockchain city upgrades in places like Reno, Nevada, the innovative city governance economic model launched by CityCoins.co on the Bitcoin network ecosystem Stacks, and the new urban construction proposals based on blockchain technology by CityDAO. However, Vitalik found that past experiments with crypto cities, while interesting, were difficult to scale.

In his later writings, he proposed two ambitious hypotheses for applying blockchain technology to urban governance and operations, with Zuzalu being Vitalik's initial attempt to validate and practice the concept of physical crypto cities.

• Using blockchain technology to make existing processes more transparent, trustworthy, and verifiable, such as using stablecoins to track government internal financial management systems, on-chain records of government-issued certificates, on-chain asset registration, and the application of on-chain fair random number generators in lottery-style democracy;
• Utilizing blockchain to implement novel and experimental forms of ownership for land and other scarce assets, as well as innovative and experimental democratic governance methods, such as city tokens, quadratic voting, and fundraising;

In Zuzalu, residents can register for a "passport" generated using zero-knowledge proofs through ZuPass, enhancing the transparency, credibility, and verifiability of residents' identities; setting up a town hall is the practice of the second hypothesis, promoting the implementation of democratic governance.

During this two-month crypto city experiment (from March 25 to May 23), researchers, scholars, and founders gathered to delve into philosophical discussions on immortality, public goods, zero-knowledge proofs, artificial intelligence, and coordination and network states. This experiment was filled with an atmosphere of innovation and exploration, illuminating various possibilities for the real-world application of blockchain.

Philosophical Reflections on Coordination and Network States

Coordination and network states are high-level philosophical concepts of digital nationhood and are the core ideology that runs through Zuzalu.

What is a network state?

When discussing this term, most people think of the book "Network State" written by former Coinbase CTO Balaji, in which he describes: A network state is a network community with a high degree of collective action capability that raises funds to expand its territory worldwide and ultimately gains recognition as a political entity.

Coordination is somewhat more abstract; for Vitalik, coordination refers to the ability of large groups to cooperate for common interests, which is a crucial factor that enables companies, nations, and any social organization larger than a few people.

In a society, the coordination effects at the scale of nations or even the world can lead to significant negative consequences due to collusion. Vitalik also provided several concrete examples:

• At the economic level, sellers of all products in the market collude to raise prices simultaneously.
• At the national level, citizens who bravely sacrifice for their country's interests, such as in Germany or Japan during World War II.
• At the political level, a lobbyist bribes a politician in exchange for the politician adopting the lobbyist's preferred policies.

Blockchain can rebalance coordination through decentralized networks, forking mechanisms, and market mechanisms, to spread information faster, better regulate and identify cheating behaviors, and impose more effective penalties, thereby establishing stronger organizations and tools.

In Zuzalu, I met a Ukrainian guy named Vitaly, who has been forced to become a crypto digital nomad since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, moving to Thailand with his Russian wife.

He misses his time living in Ukraine, and ordinary Russians living abroad who are also sanctioned due to the war are similarly displaced, being innocently scorned for being labeled as part of the war. This made me begin to realize the negative effects of coordination and slowly appreciate the meaning of network states.

Zuzalu also had a discussion about network states and coordination, but most of it was about distinguishing the concepts of the two and envisioning their forms in reality through questioning.

That night, about 20 people gathered in the room, and coincidentally, Vitalik was there too, sitting next to us with a cup of hot tea, along with French blockchain scholar Primavera De Filippi.

When discussing the ideal form of a network state, participants proposed various utopian visions for network states, such as fairer resource distribution, more efficient use of social resources, and more transparent supply chain systems, while also addressing issues like personal safety and climate change prevention. The ideas and solutions generated during the discussion reflected the participants' optimistic attitudes toward the future development of society.

Whether Zuzalu will validate these concepts as a demonstration of a digital nation is undoubtedly something to look forward to.

Brainstorming Notes

Life Sciences Research on Immortality

Recently, immortality has become a hot topic. Amazon's Bezos is actively investing in human aging research, and OpenAI founder Altman has invested $180 million in the Silicon Valley anti-aging biotech startup Retro Biosciences.

It is said that Hal Finney, the first recipient of Bitcoin, was also a fervent fan and advocate of immortality during his lifetime.

In Zuzalu, immortality is also an important topic.

Even the elder in the field of longevity, Aubrey de Grey (Chief Scientific Officer of the SENS Research Foundation), is a permanent resident of Zuzalu. Additionally, Zuzalu invited Jason Kelly, CEO of the world-leading synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks.

In Vitalik's view, immortality is a human rights issue that needs to be addressed.

"If we are more open to accepting novel ideas, may I propose research on anti-aging? Aging is a humanitarian disaster, claiming lives equivalent to World War II every two years, and before taking lives, aging also weakens people, placing a heavy burden on social systems and families. Let us end aging."

Why should a blockchain-based social experiment treat immortality/life sciences as a major topic?

Almost everyone would say this is a century for biotechnology, but in reality, there are many issues in the foundational research of life sciences. Blockchain technology has the potential to improve the efficiency of life sciences research through data standardization and operability.

Blockchain technology provides solutions for the life sciences industry chain, helping to address challenges in data management, intellectual property protection, trial transparency, inter-institutional collaboration, patient privacy, and fundraising, thereby enhancing the efficiency, reliability, and innovation of research.

The application of blockchain in scientific research is referred to as decentralized science. The decentralized science startup Molecule aims to solve the chaos caused by the lack of standardization through on-chain intellectual property (IP-NFT).

Thanks to the openness and transparency of blockchain, scientists can build a more efficient knowledge graph system for researchers to use. Similarly, VitaDAO, a decentralized aging research investment organization, also aims to address funding issues in this field.

If decentralized science can be considered a very compatible application of blockchain, then immortality is an excellent Go-To-Market for science in the crypto field.

How can blockchain address the extreme risks posed by superintelligent AI?

Since the beginning of the year when ChatGPT exploded online, the market's attention to Web3 seems to have diminished significantly, and recently, well-known crypto venture capital firm Paradigm has increased its investment intentions in artificial intelligence.

Blockchain and artificial intelligence belong to two different verticals of innovation, but many practitioners are exploring the intersection of the two, such as federated learning, zero-knowledge machine learning, and identity verification.

Just as blockchain faces numerous challenges in decentralized governance, artificial intelligence also faces extreme safety issues that impact human survival.

In blockchain, very complex and intelligent systems are decentralized themselves, so governance and regulatory compliance are major topics of research in the crypto economics community.

In the field of artificial intelligence, the level of intelligence that robots or superintelligent AI can achieve far exceeds human imagination. Once superintelligent AI is realized, humanity as a species will lose its uniqueness, and robots will become the very complex and intelligent self-evolving systems.

So what are the simple and foolish systems for controlling the two?

Blockchain achieves the replacement of intermediaries, delegating decision-making to a simple algorithmic agent, namely smart contracts. Superintelligent AI itself is also an algorithmic agent, but more complex, more intelligent, and even capable of escaping human control. So can immutable smart contracts on-chain be a simple and foolish system to help humanity address the extreme risks of superintelligent AI?

During the AI week in Zuzalu, residents and visitors discussed this topic, with speakers drawing analogies between coordinating AI through existing miner extractable value (MEV) in blockchain and attempting to think about AI coordination from a philosophical perspective, such as the veil of ignorance thought experiment, but ultimately leaving behind various questions:

• Will AI use cryptocurrencies to coordinate with each other to improve balanced returns? Does their coordination align with human social values (alignment)? Can cryptocurrencies, as a commitment tool, be used to keep AI aligned with humans? After all, some believe that AI has not yet gained agency and will remain "tools of humans" for a long time. If so, will AI coordination and alignment ultimately just be a shadow of human coordination and alignment? What are the unique properties of this shadow? If human alignment is ultimately achieved, can cryptocurrencies exert a coordinating "magic" on humanity to jointly build AI (for example, by solving data privacy training issues through some form of order flow auction)? Before the emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI), can cryptocurrencies be used to coordinate humans or make the online world safer in response to AGI? ------------Flashbots Team*

In fact, before the popularity of ChatGPT, the online AI community LessWrong had already enthusiastically discussed the possibilities of blockchain governance and countering superintelligent AI. In 2016, Vitalik proposed using simple blockchain agents to resist superintelligent AI. Time flies, and the pace of AI development has far exceeded the speed of chip development in Moore's Law.

The questions left about AI in Zuzalu will continue to be explored.

Deconstructing Zuzalu

Returning to the initial question, what is Zuzalu?

Zuzalu is a community grounded in the real world; it is a summer camp about crypto, immortality, and philosophy; it is a meticulously designed social experiment…

Zuzalu allows us to see more of what blockchain can do for the future through philosophical thinking, and it makes us deeply aware that the industry is still in a very primitive stage.

Where will the next Zuzalu be?

Some say it will be in Chiang Mai, Thailand; who knows if it's true, but I look forward to the next meeting, not saying goodbye.

I would like to especially thank philosopher Attila from Vienna, public health scholar Esha from Austin, digital nomad Vitaly from Ukraine, crypto entrepreneur Miracle from Shanghai, and bioinformatics scientist Anton from Russia for providing me with new insights and perspectives and highly creative ways to open up Zuzalu.

Finally, I would like to express my special gratitude to Ethereum Foundation founder Vitalik for turning Zuzalu from an idea into reality, opening the first door to "digital nations" in Luštica Bay, Montenegro.