History marches forward, and human cognition continues to evolve. Yet, in our pursuit of certainty and formalization, we often become trapped in rigid frameworks, overlooking the complexity and uncertainty of the real world. Pythagoras’ belief that “everything is a natural number,” Euclidean geometry, and Newtonian determinism were once groundbreaking theories—but each was eventually challenged by the inability to fully explain real-world phenomena. These historical lessons remind us that an overreliance on formalized models may hinder a deeper understanding of reality.
Today, computer science and blockchain technology face similar challenges. While the Turing machine simulates human computational abilities, it neglects more complex aspects of life—such as emotion and consciousness. Likewise, deterministic blockchain technology excels in handling static, closed systems but struggles with dynamic, open, and complex environments. In the crypto industry, our obsession with deterministic consensus has created a bottleneck, limiting the integration of blockchain with the real world.
To overcome these challenges, we must return to realist intuition and draw inspiration from Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin emphasizes adaptability and complexity in biological systems, offering a new lens through which we can understand and design complex systems. Bitcoin’s success exemplifies this “emergent individualism.” Its distributed, decentralized nature allows it to adapt to an ever-changing environment, giving rise to unexpected forms of order.
Achieving this shift requires mastering two key techniques and embracing one philosophical principle:
• Feedback-Controlled Systems: Inspired by Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, this approach emphasizes the importance of information feedback, enabling systems to self-regulate and self-adapt.
• Designing for Emergent Order: Learn from Bitcoin’s success to explore how interactions between individual entities can give rise to complex and organic order.
• Reflexive Competition: Encourage self-examination and self-improvement, fostering innovation and adaptability within the system.
In the crypto industry, we must move beyond our fixation on deterministic consensus and explore more resilient and adaptive mechanisms. Introducing greater randomness and uncertainty could foster stronger emergent effects. At the same time, we must deepen our exploration of how to integrate cryptocurrencies with the real world—transforming them from mere tools into organic systems that co-evolve with reality.
The real world is complex, dynamic, and unpredictable. Rather than reducing it through rigid, reductionist models of formalized certainty, we must embrace its complexity. By returning to realist intuition, we can create crypto-intuitive systems that align with existential reality—where humans and machines engage in meaningful competitive evolution—ultimately serving the real world in profound and lasting ways.
