People's Coin Progress Update Q4/24

“ What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it.
You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world.
You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. ”

― Morpheus, Matrix-Code.

Thank you, dear Spacemesh community, for caring and sticking around in these tough in-between days of our project. We are not blind to the pricing action, nor are we blind to distance between our lofty aspirations and current reality. We fully understand and share your frustration. To be frank, we too are saddened by the cold shoulder the market has given us, as we advance through the necessary changes to protocol, despite the early promise demonstrated.

Nevertheless, we seek to make the case why supporting Spacemesh is important, as we aim to align incentives with the common good. Spacemesh’s success will be a striking proof for our ability to take risks and win. The case for why supporting Spacemesh now is the right thing to do.

For background, Spacemesh’s aspiration since inception in 2018, was always to go “all in” on the quality axis. To earn our place as the protector of the interest of the commons, by talking with our actions and consistently choosing common good—with an eye to the long game and responsibility for the future. Driven by our mission of serving the interests of the common man, our road began with a commitment to one property above all: Permissionless. Commitment to always remain open to newcomers from the wild with the lowest possible barrier of entry. Everything we’ve built has this as its basis.

Since our inception, what we are after is simple in premise but very hard to actualize: ensure that home mining is permanently fair, accessible, and permissionless. This is the only way to avoid the fate of many other cryptocurrencies, where any powerful (perhaps adversarial) miners receive a disproportionately high proportion of the rewards. To always remain the most accessible cryptocurrency, open for participation by anyone with basic PC skills and basic equipment.

Spacemesh is an effort to rebuild a next generation cryptocurrency stack, with emphasis on openness, accessibility and fairness. Essential properties, we believe, for humanity’s adaptive fitness, for protecting us from capture and stagnation, aspiring to build the most decentralized consensus infrastructure yet—forever an open system.

To this day, no other cryptocurrency managed to combat economies of scale and preserve low barriers to entry. As both traditional PoW and obviously PoStake protocols, do not provide a “come as you are” proposal to those with no means. (For more on why the Permissionless attribute matters most, check out this great video.)

State of the Premise

Spacemesh’s first year after genesis has seen tremendous growth in demand for smeshing, and over 6EiB of space already committed to the Spacemesh network. However, as it turned out the majority of this space arrived via aggregation by few specific, sophisticated pool providers. And thus during the past 6 months, we have been flying under the radar, as we work tirelessly to accommodate the few protocol changes required for the network to safely scale further. This time ensuring individuals with any amount of storage can choose to smesh independently without sacrificing their reward or ease of smeshing.

We recognize many of you would want to see us doing more marketing and growing the smesher base, pumping the price and getting more traction etc. We do not fail to see the web 3.0 game nor the necessity of playing. And likewise we’d expect you to consider our core team perspective here, that the technological pre-condition for seeking public-at-large attention has not fully matured yet. We therefore, by necessity, focus our efforts instead on an immediate remedy, and are pleased to be releasing Node Split. We think this new approach to our infrastructure will have an immediate impact on storage composition, as all size storage owners interested in smeshing, could find a comfortable solution to their needs without paying 3% to pool nor foregoing their security. And most importantly, it lowers the barrier for home smeshing once again.

We remain as excited as we have always been to contribute a forever open-system cryptocurrency infrastructure and have material impact on team human adaptive fitness, we view this as our calling and destiny and don’t plan on stopping for as long as enough people remain interested in seeing our project through to the other side, where we shine as highly resilient and secure PoST protocol, open and fully permissionless equipped with best in class programmability VM.

Why We’re Sticking It Out

The rapid breakdown of institutional trust in the liberal democracies of the West comes as no surprise to us. The Enlightenment Project, which was once a liberating and emancipating force, has begun its inevitable and painful process of decay. As with all closed systems, the establishment institutions and the elites who control them are trying with all their might to ossify society, due to both an altruistic fear of entropy and suffering, and a self-serving desire to maintain the present power structure which gives them prestige, wealth, and influence. Hence the desire to enforce ideological homogeneity and to fit messy, complex human beings into neat, predictable behavioral models.

We have learned together, at great expense and after numerous failed attempts, that you simply CANNOT automatically follow some arbitrary set of rules, no matter how brilliant. We have learned that being moral is exponentially more difficult than just signaling virtue and morality. We as flawed, messy humans simply can’t escape exercising human judgment, or making hard, highly context-dependent, specific and unconventional choices. Even if we pretend that the responsibility is not ours, the world will remind us by having us suffer the consequences.

One of those consequences is the devaluation of currency currently taking place in far too many nations, because of a stubborn and futile desire to paper over an inconvenient reality which demands difficult decisions. And while this is not the only problem facing us as the system decays, it’s a big damn problem. One that requires a revolutionary new approach like crypto to solve. A solution that remains frustratingly distant for the people who need it the most.

We’re committed to walking this path because crypto gives humanity an entirely new way of grappling with uncertainty and change, of facing down the reality around us without telling convenient lies that end up backfiring. But we can only reach these heights if it becomes accessible to the whole world. It is merely useful in its current form, falling short of its revolutionary and evolutionary potential.

This is the reason for our non-naive but sincere optimism. We believe that we have a practical path for forging our way towards higher form equilibriums, without sacrificing productivity, agility and sharpness. And we believe that the crypto industry is where it will all go down.

For now, the burden of proof remains on us. We will keep pushing forward to bring the network back to a happy path, and should the universe be on our side, add a brand new contender to this space: robust and secure, equipped with novel resilience. In the crypto jungle, we still hope to be one of the “fittest” that survives to face whatever the great unknown has in store for us all.