The Seven Glitchiest Things of 2023
The Seven Glitchiest Things of 2023
All I want for Glitchmas is you.
On the first year of Glitchmas, my true love sent to me: five on-chain playtests, four AI agents, three iris scanners, two network states, and a partridge in a Merkle tree!
Merry Glitchmas! Thank you for joining us this year as we set off on our adventure into the rabbit hole of Glitchy new technologies, from zero-knowledge proofs to large language models. We hope you enjoy our year-in-review below. But first: if you love Glitch as much as we love producing it, please consider giving us a gift this holiday season! All of our content is still free and will continue to be for the time being, but by becoming a paid subscriber you can help us take this project to the next level in 2024.
From now until the end of January, you can become a paid subscriber for just $35/year. (As always, we also offer the “Founding Member” option, which lets you pledge whatever amount you want.)
To express our thanks, we’ll send you a limited edition “Glitch, please” sticker.
If you’d like one, send us your mailing address from the email you used to subscribe.
Happy Holidays!
—the Project Glitch team
The Seven Glitchiest Things of 2023
#7: “AI Agents”
What do you get when you give video game non-player characters (NPCs) “complex intellects” using a large language model? According to the researchers behind the “Stanford Smallville” project, the characters gained the ability to “remember” events and “reflect” on those experiences. One of them even threw a believably awkward Valentine’s Day party. The creators of these virtual people have open-sourced the underlying code. How might others try to use it? All we know is that video games are about to get really weird.
#6: Bluesky
RIP Twitter. (Long live X? How long will X live?) Here’s the question: do we really care enough about the clear downsides of centralized “Web 2.0” control over social media that a critical mass will adopt more decentralized models? At the moment, Bluesky—which amusingly was originated by Twitter—isn’t much more than a Twitter clone. But it has some cool blockchain-adjacent technology under the hood, and the developers of the so-called AT Protocol envision a brand new world of social media, in which users have enough control over their data that they can pack it up and leave a platform if they’ve had enough. When will that be possible? And where would they go, anyway? Perhaps 2024 will be the year that the hype for decentralized social media finally turns into some sort of substance. For now, for better or for worse, we’ll see you on X.
#5: The Ooki DAO case
Score one for the US government’s effort to wrangle crypto stuff into its existing legal structures. What does the Ooki DAO case imply for the future of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)? Ooki DAO had called itself a “protocol for tokenized margin trading, borrowing, and lending.” US regulators, on the other hand, argued it wasn’t anything new at all, just an “unincorporated association,” like a non-violent version of a mafia crime syndicate.
Back in August, Sam Venis dove deep into the legal showdown and what it might mean.
“In a bizarre episode of American jurisprudence (which involved the [Commodity Futures Trading Commission] serving Ooki DAO via the chatbot on its website only to find that nobody bothered to show up in court),” Sam wrote, a federal judge ruled that Ooki DAO “is really just a trading platform that’s been acting unlawfully since 2021.”
With the court victory, the CFTC accomplished two important things: establish how DAOs fit into existing law and open DAO members to legal liability. As Sam wrote, in light of the decision, “it’s not a huge stretch to imagine that (DAOs) might be dead, at least in their current form.” That explains why some crypto lawyers got busy this year cooking up new approaches to decentralized organizations.
#4: Primodium
Back in May, Mike Orcutt wrote for Wired about the concept of “autonomous worlds”— digital spaces whose rules and “physics” live entirely on the blockchain, free of the type of corporate control that limits what third parties can create inside the game. In fact, the idea was born years ago, thanks to the crypto cult classic game Dark Forest. But in 2023, “fully on-chain games” grew into a genuinely new genre, albeit comprised entirely of glitchy (as in literally full of glitches) “playtests.” Perhaps the most advanced of these projects is a factory-themed game called Primodium.
Relatively easy to access and play—as long as the testnet isn’t down—the game has been updated several times since the first playtest opened up last summer. At first, the gameplay was fairly crude and limited. Now, Primodium has all the look and feel of a traditional multiplayer online game. And if the Discord chatter is any indication, shit is starting to get real. People are excitedly forming alliances, Dark Forest-style, and the stakes don’t seem so imaginary anymore. All that said, is it an autonomous world? No, not yet. But something interesting is brewing.
#3: Worldcoin
Perhaps you’ve seen the orbs. But have you stared into one? No? Then how can we know you are a human?
According to Worldcoin, nearly 2.7 million people around the world have stared into one of Worldcoin’s chrome domes—in exchange for a cryptocurrency reward, of course—so it could scan their irises and collect biometric “proof-of-personhood” or PoP. We are told this is necessary because AI is taking over the internet (thanks in no small part to that other company headed by Worldcoin founder Sam Altman 🤔) and it’s getting harder by the day to distinguish between real people and fake ones online.
Despite the eerie vibes, it’s not entirely fair to write the project off as dystopian. If (...if!...) the system works like the company says it does, the privacy risks are limited because the orbs don’t publish the iris scans themselves, just cryptographically generated digital fingerprints of them. Zero-knowledge proofs are supposed to let Worldcoin users prove their identity without actually revealing it. That all may sound great, but the problem, as many crypto purists have pointed out, is that users will have to trust Worldcoin that it works and that nothing could go wrong that might compromise the sensitive data. Web 2.0 FTW!
#2: Zuzalu
Pronounced Zoo-ZAH-loo, apparently, this experimental “pop-up city” in Montenegro, the brainchild of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, housed 200 people for two months earlier this year in an attempt to, in Buterin’s words, take certain ideas about “crypto cities” and “network states” to “the next level.” A major focus at the gathering was longevity research, one of Buterin’s pet subjects—though according to him the group “did not quite reach the goal of developing a less costly and time-consuming version of (longevity influencer) Bryan Johnson’s extreme longevity lifestyle.”
Another emphasis was zero-knowledge cryptography: attendees used Zupass, a zero-knowledge proof-based identity system developed by 0xPARC, to prove they were residents without revealing anything else. The ID could be used both in person and online, for instance, to vote in online polls restricted to residents. “The idea of building and beta-testing a technology inside of a community of dedicated enthusiasts” proved successful, Buterin wrote in October for Palladium Magazine. “Zupass started off as essentially a clunky piece of hackathon software. But through real-time use and feedback from users, usability quickly and noticeably improved to the point where it became more usable than many multi-year-old blockchain applications.” Zupass even proved useful enough to transcend Zuzalu. In November, Lucy Harley-McKeown used the application to prove that she had registered for Ethereum Devconnect events in Istanbul.
Still, Buterin admits that Zuzalu left a fair amount for crypto enthusiasts to desire. People mostly paid for things with fiat money, and “no one even considered governing Zuzalu with a DAO,” he wrote, because the event “was either too short, too small, or both for such a thing to really make sense.” That’s not the only reason to think that Zuzalu was just the opening act for something much more grandiose—and don’t expect this crowd to wait around very long before it launches version 2.0.
#1: The Tornado Cash saga
The front line of the fight for privacy online is arguably the current debate in the US over the legality of cryptocurrency “mixers.” These come in various forms, but they all let users deposit crypto-coins into a pool filled with other people’s coins, and then later withdraw the same amount of money in a way that disconnects the withdrawal from the blockchain transaction record associated with the deposit. This effectively anonymizes the crypto-cash, since it is no longer associated with any information that may help a third party (say, an FBI investigator) trying to determine the holder’s identity.
Mixers are bad, mmmkay, says the “anti-crypto army” in DC, because, it says, the platforms facilitate illicit activity, including by America’s adversaries. Late in 2022, the Department of Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash on the grounds that it allegedly facilitated hundreds of millions of dollars worth of money laundering by the Lazarus Group, a North Korean state-sponsored hacking group. Then, last August, the US Department of Justice indicted two of Tornado Cash’s creators.
But Tornado Cash is a great example of how not all mixers are created equal. Unlike most mixers, it can operate without humans in the loop—all that’s required is the blockchain-based code. Thus far, federal courts have shut down arguments from crypto advocates that the Treasury doesn’t have the legal authority to sanction Tornado Cash’s smart contracts. But this fight, which has implications not just for crypto but for all of online privacy in the future, is far from over. Tornado Cash may be dead, but something else will sprout in its place. To borrow from the great Dr. Ian Malcom: crypto…finds a way.
ODDS/ENDS
Zooko Wilcox, who spearheaded the creation of the private cryptocurrency Zcash, is stepping down from his role as CEO at the Electric Coin Company, the firm that develops the crypto network, which uses zero-knowledge proofs to let users keep transaction data secret. Over the past eight years, “Zcash took over not only my life but also my identity. It was hard for others to see Zcash as something separate from me,” Wilcox wrote in a blog post. “In the long run, I don’t think this conflation of Zcash with me personally is healthy for me, and I don’t think it’s healthy for Zcash. Zcash’s role in human history is, and will be, much bigger than any individual.”
Worldcoin has introduced “World ID 2.0,” a supposedly private digital ID system that will feature its own app store as well as integrations with Reddit, Discord, Shopify, Minecraft, and Telegram.
After consulting the public on the idea of a digital dollar, the Bank of Canada has committed to “examine options” for a central bank digital currency that “would not require Canadians to have identification, a bank account or to disclose private information to anyone to perform basic financial transactions.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren sent letters to Coinbase and DC advocacy groups the Blockchain Association and Coin Center, “demanding details” on their employment of former defense, national security and law enforcement officials, reports Politico. “The abuse of the revolving door is appalling, revealing that the crypto industry is spending millions to give itself a veneer of legitimacy while fighting tooth and nail to stonewall common sense rules designed to restrict the use of crypto for terror financing,” Warren wrote.
Who would give this guy millions to build his own utopia? That’s the headline on a long, meandering New York Times piece focused on 27-year-old Dryden Brown, founder of Praxis, a company that aims to build a new “cryptostate” in the Mediterranean. Brown has raised $19.2 million for the project despite offering few details about when, how, or even where the idea might come to fruition. “Mr. Brown’s success attracting capital is in part a vestige of the crypto bubble, when easy cash and highfalutin mumbo jumbo often went hand in hand,” writes reporter Joseph Bernstein (nothing could be more New York Times than 1. covering crypto in the Style section and 2. printing “hifalutin mumbo jumbo” with a straight face). He also reports that despite the “widespread perception that Mr. Thiel is involved with the company,” Thiel has declined to invest. A source told Berstein that Thiel thinks the company is nothing but shenanigans, tomfoolery, and ballyhoo.